A Futile Attempt at Comparative Literature

In a later Simpsons episode, Lisa says, "My interests include music, science, justice, animals, shapes, feelings," and the teacher who wants her to choose a passion and specialize says, "You see yourself more as a buffet-style intellectual. Picking and nibbling until one day you're 38 and managing a Barnes & Noble." Since this is clearly what I've done wrong with my life, today is about consolidating four seemingly different books into a useful whole: Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door by Hilary McKay, Medieval Children by Nicholas Orme, The Lovells of Arden by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care by John McWhorter.

How are these books similar? Which one is the longest? Why doesn't The Lovells of Arden have pictures like the rest of them? Which book is sexiest? Clearly, Doing Our Own Thing by John McWhorter is because I have an academic crush on him. The only other contender is The Lovells of Arden. Is The Lovells of Arden sexy? No, it's as unsexy as Fifty Shades of Chicken. Issues of consent mar its whisper of romance.

Culled for musical theater anecdotes, Doing Our Own Thing could be a sizable essay on one heterosexual man's love of show tunes. In intention and result, it's a discussion of American English's transition from a written to an oral language, a change that's been happening gradually from the early part of the last century. It's an upsetting book, actually. John (we've left off formal titles) quotes a sixth grade textbook dating up to the 1920s, "When I am in a serious humor, I often walk by myself in WestminsterAbbey," from 1960, "I decided, after my first voyage, to spend the rest of my days at Bagdad," and 1996, "Tachawin had packed the parfleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois." John says, "We read it thankful that we are too old to bother with a text so dingdong dull," and then he translates the passage without the vocabulary words, "Justin had packed the leather cases with clothing and food and strapped them to two trailing poles with a skin stretched between them." Dingdong dull is an awesome and apt description of a passive construction written for diversity not content. That is the thesis of Doing Our Own Thing, that American English (and British) is being written in less elegant, less complex ways; that people no longer care for (or acknowledge) rhetoric; that they do not use formal English in, for example, letters (which they don't write anymore) or books (which would never sell) or schools (where English is suspect as a tool of oppression); that adults today (including me) have never known a world where a command of English was explicitly valued (blame the Baby Boomers); and that formal, written English will continue to be replaced by an informal, oral idiom. And English will not be valued for its own beauty and craft. Terrible, right? In a long chapter on the death of poetry, John points out that no culture has ever had less national poetry than the US today, and that people eat up, say, Annie Proulx's prose poetics because they are so starved of poetry in its own terms; poetry today has thrown off its suspectly artful language to become that arrhythmic, clunky, difficult to digest prose we all make fun of. Reading to the end, I felt like I was standing at Fort Snelling looking over the Minnesota River, with the man dressed as Josiah Snelling saying, "Everything from here west to the Rockies was prairie," and you look out past the freeway and know that no matter what happens, that prairie will never come back. Doing Our Own Thing, bleak as it can be, is fun. John's a polyglot, and the area he covers is vast and comic. Read this book.

But you're asking, "Why isn't The Lovells of Arden sexy? It's a romantic Victorian novel, isn't it?" Well, yes, but when were the Victorians sexy? In brothels and back alleys and India, for the men, and never for the women. So a Victorian romance is as a sexy as Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door, except Lulu ends with genuine love between a boy and his rabbit, and Clarissa Lovell just Gets Used to It. Poor young girl. She thinks she has a choice, and she double regrets choosing wrong. Clarissa's profligate father, Lord Lovell, sold the ancient family estate of Arden to Mr. Granger, a wealthy, fifty-year-old industrialist and Hermione's great-great grandfather. Lord Lovell says something to Clarissa like, "I won't pressure you to marry Mr. Granger, I'll just die penniless somewhere unfashionable in Belgium to avoid disgracing our ancient name," which causes Mr. Granger, comfortably ensconced in Arden, to say to his daughter, "Surprise! Your step-mother will be two years younger than you! Won't that be fun?" Clarissa, meanwhile, is beating herself up for the love of George Fairfax, the only man who's ever paid attention to her. When George Fairfax helps Clarissa find her disinherited brother, can she be forgiven for talking to Mr. Fairfax occasionally in well-supervised social situations? Um... yes, but barely, and she almost dies. It's good to know there's a floor on death by indiscretion. As we know, the consequence of adultery is death. The consequence of fornication is death. The consequence of light socializing is six weeks of hysteria and brain fever. The internet says The Lovells of Arden is like East Lynne, but East Lynne has higher drama and funny bits. Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote thirty-some novels, so The Lovells might be one of her also-rans.

In a broader definition of sexy, one that awkwardly squashes in two books about children, which is sexier, Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door or Medieval Children? Well, Medieval Children. Beautiful reproductions of illustrations, paintings and manuscripts make Medieval Children a treasure of a reference book, which is why I shouldn't have read it straight through. Generally interesting, but looooong and so carefully chronicled that Mr. Orme needs to explain that medieval mothers probably used baby talk when speaking to their medieval infants, as it's a general human trait, but he cannot prove this due to lack of documentation. More interesting is the chapter on baptism and the benefits of nominal kinship between children and their three godparents, or the discussion of literacy explaining that, while most people could not read, all communities had literate members and relied on writing for religious and legal reasons. I picked up Medieval Children because I read Growing Up in Medieval London by Barbara Hanawalt several years ago and remember it fondly.

So we've established that comparatively, Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door, is the least sexy book I've read lately, but is it the best? Yes. And does it have the most rabbits? Yes. Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door wins the rabbit-having competition, which, at the end of the day, is more important in a book than sexy. I've been really excited about Lulu and the Rabbit Next Door for a long time, and could've ordered it from the UK last year, but that's expensive for a book one can read in forty five minutes. As we all know, Lulu has five rabbits of her own (like me, almost), and one of them doesn't get along with the other four, because rabbits can be jerks. Lulu houses her rabbits outdoors and feeds them sweet potato, so she's not a champ on following House Rabbit Association recommendations, but she does what British rabbit owners do and we can't all be perfect.

A little boy, Arthur, moves in next door to Lulu and he has a rabbit in a hutch. Arthur feeds George the rabbit and waters him everyday, but never gives him any fun or exercise and when Lulu comes over to talk bunny rabbits, Arthur says he's only keeping the rabbit because it was a gift from his grandpa, but he's boring. Lulu's says of course George is boring if you leave him in a rabbit cage that's like jail all the time, but Arthur ignores her until he goes on holiday and has to ask Lulu to mind George. Lulu introduces George to her loner bun, Thumper, and they hit it off, which is not unrealistic in the world of bunny rabbits, and frolic and play and do mutual grooming all week until Arthur comes back from holiday and puts George back in bunny jail. Then Lulu hits on an idea: she and Mellie will write fake letters from Thumper to George and send activity presents. They send a crinkly paper package and a carrot mobile and pile of dandelions and Arthur sees George playing with these things and getting excited and learns that George is not boring when he isn't forced to stare at a wall all day. Then Lulu holds a rabbit party, but not the kind of party where you don't bring presents. Flapping fantastic.

To conclude my foray into comparative literature: synthesizing these books in terms of sexy and rabbit value does not lead me to a honing of interests suitable for reemployment.  Pity.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Other Symbols of Power

Thank you, Adrian Wilson, thank you. This historian of early modern England and New England Patriots linebacker has written a book just for me. Because I have always wondered, "How did male obstetric practice eclipse female midwifery?" and then, there, on the (clearance) shelf, I saw it: The Making of Man-midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770. "Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control became instead a region of male medical practice? Why did a torrent of criticisms directed against 'men-midwives- fall upon deaf ears?" Why? Spoiler: Adrian Wilson posits that the move towards women employing man-midwives came from a split in the collective female culture. As women's literacy doubled and doubled again between 1680 and 1750, and England, London especially became richer and labor more specialized, the new, educated gentlewoman had time for leisure and keeping up the Joneses. Previously, midwives had been the educated leaders in the female community, but with the change in the female upper-class, hiring a man-midwife held a certain cache.

The other part of the story, the one that takes up ninety percent of The Making of Man-midwifery is that professional men of a physic or surgical persuasion became skilled enough at midwifery to attend normal births. Before about 1720, midwives attended nearly all births, and male surgeons were summoned only to emergencies, usually after labor had progressed for four days or so, and craniotomy was needed to save the mother. So men were only called in the direst of emergencies and only delivered a dead child.

This changed with four generations of a family called Chamberlen who possessed secret instruments to effect the delivery of a live child in a difficult birth. Hugh Chamberlen II, the last of his line, sold one of the rumored Chamberlen instruments, the forceps, to a few Tory colleagues. Meanwhile, Dutch physician Hendrik van Deventer developed a theory of midwifery involving pressure on the coccyx and uterine obliquity. In England, Deventerian man-midwives were mostly associated with the Court Whigs. The early man-midwives William Giffard, Sir Richard Manningham, William Smellie, William Hunter: their careers have been plucked out of obscurity and will return there. In three hundred years, if someone mentions in a book that Dr. Hinck practiced at the Minneapolis location of the Bloomington-Lake Clinic until it burned down and he transferred to Edina, will that be interesting? No. The only interesting thing is that two major buildings burned down within a block of each other in slightly over a year. What's going on with that? The Making of Man-Midwifery has filled my head with yet more obscure ideas and useless facts. I can only imagine they might come in handy if I were ever to win free tickets to a Vikings v. Patriots game at the new fucking stadium. I might wait at the exit where the Patriots load onto the team bus until I see Adrian Wilson, and I might say, "Adrian Wilson! Adrian Wilson! Do you think that the late publication of the vectis and its association with Country Whigs might have led to its relative obscurity in obstetric practice?" and Adrian Wilson might be so surprised that someone else was on his wavelength that he would look at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

A vectis is a shoehorn for baby heads.

In books that you might read, I strongly recommend A Mad,Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller because it is so flipping good. The audiobook performance is fantastic, and the book is deliciously good, even though the back cover makes it look preposterous. Vicky does pose nude for her art class, but it's because all her classmates already had their turn. A girl from her finishing school is sneaking and spying, however, and Vicky is sent back to England in disgrace. Her parents give her the choice between reputation repair or a lonely spinsterhood with Aunt Maud. Vicky's parents are nouveau riche, slightly gauche and insecure. Agreeing to as many tea parties and charitable works as needs be to undo her shame, while secretly working on an application to the Royal College of Arts, Vicky takes her sketchbook to Parliament to get in some life-drawing of the Suffragists protesting outside. She manages to sketch a bit while a young woman chained to the railings chides her for not being a Suffragist full stop, and not scarpering because the police are coming right now, seriously, right now! Go! Vicky is a naive, impetuous girl with a talent for drawing and a willingness to suffer for her art, but not much else at first. All the characters in A Mad, Wicked Folly are deeply drawn, even her rich fiancee Edmund; a lesser author would have made him Cal from Titanic, but he's presented as an interesting jock. All the Pankhursts make appearances, and I cried a little because of what the Suffragists endured in prison so that we could have rights. A Mad, Wicked Folly is like a grown-up version of my favorite book Wishing for Tomorrow, a sequel to The Little Princess. There's a part where Lavinia, the top pupil, tells Miss Minchin, the cruel schoolmistress, that the gentleman next door is very interested in the education of young women and Miss Minchin puts her hand to her temple and privately remembers growing up in a time when no one she knew was interested in the education of young women whatsoever.

I read I Am Half-Sick of Shadows because of the title, which it did not live up to. Alan Bradley is The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie guy, and I do talk smack about mystery novels, and cozies particularly, all the time, and I will continue to do so. Flavia de Luce is a precocious eleven-year-old with a flare for chemistry who lives in a crumbling manor house with her bratty sisters and her stamp-collecting father, very I Capture the Castle. It would all be well and good if Flavia got into some age-appropriate japes or pestered her siblings, but, no, there has to be a murder.

A feature film is to be shot at Buckshaw, and a film crew arrives, one of whom will be the murderer and one the murderee. Flavia finds the body and nearly solves the mystery by consulting a general-interest reference book and questioning her spinster aunt, who happened to be a spy during the war and knew the victim from spy club or whatever. Flavia puts the murder aside to work on her other project, trapping Father Christmas in sticky goo, but the murderer(s) solve the mystery for her by attacking her on an icy rooftop. Eh. The murdering characters were so inconsequential that I'd forgotten who they were when they turned up on that roof with some convoluted motive about whose lover got to star in which pre-war movie. Are they really murderers, or was it the little girl who pushed them off a roof? The one who's found four bodies in her recent past? The one who left a thimbleful of arsenic in the butter dish at the beginning of the book? Which is the more likely story?

In conclusion, The Kids of the Polk Street School: In the Dinosaur's Paw was a lovely break in the long history book I've been slogging through at work. Drake Evans, former classmate of the held-back-a-grade Richard Best (Beast), runs after Beast yelling, "I'm going to get you!" when they're walking to school, and ruins his snow fort. Before Christmas break, Ms. Rooney told everyone to bring rulers because they're "doing dinosaurs on the first day back," and Beast, whose study habits are such as to repeat second grade, forgets and marvels when a ruler appears in his desk, after which circumstances lead him to believe that he is in possession of a magic dinosaur ruler, which he uses to wish harm on Drake Evans. Another book from the fantastic series by Patricia Reilly Giff that reminds you of all the angst and pathos of childhood.

Ladies, Lawyers, and Literature

A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba, Flagrant Conduct and Literary Taste: How to Form It weren't anything one particularly needs to write home about, although A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba is a series of letters written home, and Literary Taste was the best for what it was. But I have not, these last days, been inspired to new heights of literary rapture. Not every book is another Lulu and the Dog by the Sea.

I read A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba by Mrs. Cecil Hall with my ears while I was walking to work and back last week. You can read a lot with your ears when you enforce a two-hour commute upon yourself for the purposes of ear-reading. A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba \would have been better titled A Lady's Extended Vacation on a Farm in Manitoba or A Lady Visits Manitoba and Thinks It's Great but Returns to London After a Few Months. This is one of the old-fashioned books where everyone's name is obscured by means of initials, so it is the collected letters of H- who goes with her sister E- to C- Farm to visit their brother A- who's immigrated to Manitoba and invested in some land together with Messrs. H- and L-. As someone with a train ticket back to London, the privations of life on the Northern prairie did not strike H- to the bone the way Ma Ingalls or Mrs. Woodlawn might have looked ahead to surviving winter and doing the whole thing over again next summer. H- and E- were friendly, roll-with-the punches, roll-up-their-sleeves women and I liked them a lot. They arrived in Winnipeg in May with snow still on the ground and A's farm sixteen miles from town. The supply steamer from Chicago had been delayed by an early winter and all of Winnipeg was doing without. The roads were ruts, and the ruts had massive potholes. This book drives home how late Canada was settled. Rupert's Land only changed hands from Hudson Bay Company to Canada in 1870; Winnipeg, neė Fort Garry, was incorporated in 1873; and H- travelled there in 1882. This was a land newly settled by agrarian white people. H- and E- get right into cleaning their brother's house and doing laundry that no one's touched since September. A late frost kills L-'s early cabbages, and H- tells him that he made a mistake of growing them outdoors instead of inside on the living room carpet. While in Manitoba, H- and E- try their hand at driving the plow, gathering eggs, making the weekly mail run, and camping out. Mosquitos eat them alive. The horse runs away with the carriage while H- is out visiting. But the sky is so clear it reflects Winnipeg's gaslights, the air is wild and healthy, and there is a nonstop stream of visitors. Mrs. Hall includes some figures, added later, on wages and profits to encourage immigration, as this book was published as a guide for immigrants, but, honestly, A Lady's Life makes Manitoba sound like a great place to visit but no place to stay.

Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas by Dale Carpenter, went a bit long. If you remember, Lawrence v. Texas is the 2003 Supreme Court decision declaring anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional. John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in Lawrence's apartment for having consensual sex with each other under the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law and their Class C misdemeanor with a maximum fine of $200 went all the way to the Supreme Court. (One of the shockers in Flagrant Conduct is that Lawrence and Garner were not having sex. They were not even canoodling. They may have been in different rooms when police burst into Lawrence's apartment.) Interestingly, Texas' laws proscribing fornication, adultery, and heterosexual sodomy were stricken from the books in 1973, leaving homosexual sodomy the only sexcrime in Texas. Queer activists argued that anti-sodomy laws led to a perception of all homosexuals as potential criminals. But to overturn a law you need a case to appeal and anti-sodomy laws were rarely enforced, so when Lawrence and Garner were arrested by a Harris County (Houston) officer who had a history of arresting people for minutiae, Lambda jumped and contacted Lawrence and Garner, who wonderfully agreed to let Lambda take their case through the appeals courts. At the first court date, at Lambda's request, the Justice of the Peace kindly raised the mens' fine from the $100 he had initially imposed to $125, allowing Lambda to appeal. Lawrence v. Texas becomes a courtroom drama, but not "I believe the murderer is in this very room" courtroom drama. There is interesting discussion of the legal arguments related to Lawrence v. Texas and Bowers v. Hardwick, the previous Supreme Court ruling upholding Georgia's anti-sodomy law. Texas put little work into the defense of its own law throughout and, in the end, made a hash of its Supreme Court defense. Lawrence won, but Flagrant Conduct could have been better edited. Not all non-fiction needs to run three hundred pages.

Literary Taste: How to Form It by Arnold Bennett is delightfully didactic for us smart people. "You occasionally buy classical works, and do not read them at all; you practically decide that it is enough to possess them, and that the mere possession of them gives you a *cachet*. The truth is, you are a sham." Yes, you are, you great goof, but Arnold Bennett has something of a programme to solve that, which is different to other programs, because Arnold Bennett knows that you said to yourself, "I am going to read ten pages of Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire every day" and you failed. Arnold Bennett's program is halfways to "...surround yourself with books, to create for yourself a bookish atmosphere. For the present, buy—buy whatever has received the *imprimatur* of critical authority. Buy without any immediate reference to what you will read. Buy! Surround yourself with volumes, as handsome as you can afford." Then you can begin to read the classics. "A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature." He presents a plan for reading enjoying, with Charles Lamb as a gateway drug and Wordsworth as a waystone. But: "You need to think about what you read and apply it, otherwise reading is just a useless past-time that will not transform you." Arnold Bennett ends his essay with a comprehensive list of classic books one can purchase for the total cost of £26 14s 7p and, "When you have read, wholly or in part, a majority of these three hundred and thirty-five 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."

I Only Listened to Audiobooks

I've only read three books since my last blog, and I didn't actually read any of them with my eyeballs, I listened to them with my ears, so opinions might be different, as audiobook performance can influence book enjoyment, especially with Life of Pi, which was bloody fantastic and needs no review, since everyone but me read it in 2002. The audiobook reader was Indian-Canadian, making Life of Pi on audio slightly better than the printed thing. I tried reading the paper book towards the middle because I was enjoying it so much I wanted to free my listening from the medium of my car, but I cannot do an Indian accent in my head, so I went back to the the audiobook. Flapping amazing. My only complaint is that the fictionalized author's note, the part in the movie where Yann Martel travels from Toronto to Pondicherry looking for inspiration and he meets Pi's uncle who says something like, "You're a Canadian who has travelled to India, but I know an Indian in Canada whose story will make you believe in God," was absent from the audiobook. My other comment is that dying on a raft so slowly that one ends up immigrating to Canada instead is much more upsetting in stark prose than in an American movie, and what of the two narratives? What of the end? What happened? Why parallel stories? Why the blind Frenchman?! The carnivorous island?! How?! Why?!!

In the public domain, The Palace in the Garden by Mary Louisa Molesworth is a minor children's book, enjoyable in every way, but I have no trouble understanding why it's been lost to history. Think The Secret Garden with less wonder or Mrs. Nesbits' without the magic. The Palace in the Garden has charm and voice and a really obvious mystery spearheaded by three upper-class Victorian orphans who live with their stern, old grandfather in his silent London house, but who doesn't? As the book opens, Gussie, Tib, and Gerald are summoned to grandfather's big, oaken study to be told that he is sending them to his country estate that they've never heard of: Rosebuds. It sounds romantic, doesn't it?, and they are meant never to talk to anyone in the neighborhood while they are there. The children go back to the nursery full of excitement and immediately sort out half the mystery: Rosebuds is written in grandfather's old book of fairy tales, which he wrote his name in as a boy, and another name, Regina, is crossed out under it. Tib's proper name is Mercedes Regina, so a person who's read Victorian novels can guess that someone named Regina has been cut out of the family and they're probably living near Rosebuds, but the fun is in the journey.

Rosebuds is all an English country house it should be, with a cheerful housekeeper and a big enough yard to do all sorts of playing, and a wood at the bottom of the garden near the stone wall, that has a secret door, Gerald finds the secret key, which leads into a secret conservatory, that connects to a secret house, with a secret room with a portrait of an old-fashioned lady who looks exactly like Tib. The kids' playing about was probably the best part of a solid story: "Let's play that I'm the princess and you're a baron and you lock me in the dungeon." "Why do I have to be the baron?"

Aunt Jane's Hero is a little bit nuts. The trouble with a good Christian novel, with good Christian characters who strive earnestly to do what's best in the eyes of an ever-loving and -providing God, is that, because God provides, none of the narrative tension lasts for more than a few chapters. Horace is worldly, then he becomes a better Christian. Horace thinks Maggie doesn't love him, but she does. Horace takes sick, but then he gets better. Maggie's sister Annie is too worldly, but she learns to be a better Christian. Maggie wants a child, and they have one. God provides. As well as God, Horace and Maggie experience the benificient influence of providence in Aunt Jane herself, a pious but pleasant elderly widow in the Protestant tradition, she is Horace's late mother's dearest friend and his advisor on things spiritual. Maggie meets Horace at Aunt Jane's knitting bee and asks him how he knows Aunt Jane, and Horace says, "Why, she's my Aunt Jane too!" Maggie says, "She's not actually my aunt, I just call her that because she is such a dear friend of my family." Horace says, "She's not my aunt either, so we must be cousins!" They joke about all evening but Horace is still too much of the world to realize what a catch Maggie is. Then the Civil War happens, mostly offscreen, and Horace loses a leg at Bull Run. After months in a field hospital and a wooden leg attached with some sort of elaborate leather strapping, Horace visits Aunt Jane again and falls madly in love with Maggie. He's prepared to love her forever in silence, but she loves him too so he need not be silent any longer. Horace doesn't believe he can afford to marry and set up a household on his meager lawyer's salary, but Aunt Jane convinces him that they can live in an unfashionable neighborhood, so Horace marries Maggie and they settle into the kind of genteel poverty that only employs one maid. For a few chapters Aunt Jane's Hero becomes a manual of domestic economy. Maggie scrimps and saves keeps the household budget down and Mrs. Prentiss emphasizes, chapter after chapter, the majesty of domestic economy as opposed to boarding. (If you want a novel of household management with humor and details, read Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper by T.S. Arthur, the real pseudonym of an editor for Godey's Lady Book.) Something besides a quiet married life needs to happen to a keep Aunt Jane's Hero going, so Horace comes down with typhoid fever, contracted from the Irish to whom Maggie charitably bestows soup. Maggie and Horace spend all their free time trying to convert the Irish. They lure Irish children to Bible Study with cookies. It's all very Protestant and sneaky, and Aunt Jane encourages them at it. Some trials and resolutions later, Aunt Jane says, "What if I told you I was going to Europe?" and means that she is going somewhere better than Europe: the loving embrace of our heavenly Father. Aunt Jane dies peacefully, explaining that, while she's looking forward to seeing her late husband and son, she is more excited to meet Jesus. Maggie has the long-awaited child around the time Aunt Jane dies, and Aunt Jane leaves Horace and Maggie enough money to afford a slightly larger house and a horse, the longest unresolved issue in Aunt Jane's Hero: Because Horace has a wooden leg, he cannot go on walks to cure his dyspepsia like other men, and the doctor recommends he ride, but he cannot afford a horse. Now he can. God provides. Like The Palace in the Garden, there is nothing wrong with Aunt Jane's Hero. It's simple, plodding, predictable, and sweet. Apparently Elizabeth Prentiss is enjoying a renaissance in Christian fiction circles, and it's well deserved. If anyone needs comfort from a Protestant God, Aunt Jane's Hero is written just for that. And Aunt Jane's Hero is ideal for anyone who needs to write an essay on "The Cult of Domesticity and the Early Victorian Novel."  

The woman questions

This blog's theme is women. Who are they? What do they need? What happens when they have what they need? These are all very important topics that society at large brought up during the last century but failed to answer thoroughly. One of those most important people to bring up the woman question, with a small 'w,' as I don't remember what the Woman Question is, was Margaret Sanger, and her answer was: family limitation. Hell yeah, Margaret Sanger! We all know who she is, or if we don't, we should pretend we do and discreetly google her before continuing, but have we gone to the source? Margaret Sanger wrote several books, stacks of lectures, and reams of pamphlets over her lifetime. I started her autobiography last year and took a break, so that's on the back burner, but I read and finished Woman and the New Race, which is available on Librivox and not excruciatingly long. Woman and the New Race is a summation of Mrs. Sanger's arguments for the legality of birth control and birth control information, and can be read by the 1920's lay person and policymaker alike. There are only two flaws in this book: One is that Mrs. Sanger's ideas have succeeded so well that you already know the facts Woman and the New Race presents from popular medical texts, gynecological advisings, and high school sex ed courses. The other flaw is that Woman and the New Race is a little bit racist. Mrs. Sanger begins the book with a chronicle of societys' use of abortion and infantacide, beginning with the savage races, moving up to the barbarians (who are better than savages), then the historical Europeans, and ending with the estimated million abortions in America today (i.e. 1920). Mr. Sanger considers this a travesty, which brings us to an interesting historical tidbit: Margaret Sanger was, by our definition, pro-life. Margaret Sanger was opposed to abortion. Her reasons, motives, social context, medical-historical context were different than our own. One of her formative experiences was helping a desperately poor mother of three through a painful stillbirth. The woman begged Margaret to tell her how to stop having babies, but Margaret couldn't legally, not in front of the doctor, and the doctor said, "Tell your husband to sleep on the roof. Ha ha ha." Some months later, Mrs. Sanger was present when that woman died after trying to abort herself. The abortion-performing underworld in 1920 would have been people by disreputable doctors and nurses, homeopaths and quacks, uncredentialed abortionists, friends with knitting needles, and pregnant women themselves, and Mrs. Sanger, I'm sure, could have written a book of abortion horror stories. She wanted contraceptive advice available to prevent women from seeking abortions and she succeeded. Abortions grew in the US from one million in 1920, peaked between 1966 and 1978 and have been steadily declining since the 1970's to 1.1 million abortions in 2013, with triple the population in the United States.

Margaret Sanger advocated family planning information for married women. Pregnant single women were a whole different kettle of fish. In reading one and a half books by her, I have not come across one line advocating the distribution of birth control information to single women, and in Woman and the New Race she takes pains to point out that her first birth control clinic, in the weeks before the police shut it down, did not serve a single single woman. Mrs. Sanger built her life helping the desperately poor married. Woman and the New Race has a whole chapter of letters from women begging Mrs. Sanger for birth control advice, women who could have managed two or three children nicely but ended up with eight, or ten, or more, not all living. Ms. Sanger breaks it down: a first child has a 25% mortality rate, the second and third around 20%, then the rate grows until the tenth child has a 60% chance of dying in its first year, unless all that childbearing has killed the mother first. Remeber in Betsy, Tacy when Tacy's littlest sister dies? Yeah. With birth control (and without the Catholic Church), Mrs. Kelly could have been saved that anguish. Margaret Sanger was not for the free and easy sexual mores that her work snowballed into over the subsequent century; she was for limiting families to a manageable number of children, to build up the health of the mother and the wanted children, and keep down the number of surplus workers who, in times of population stress, become soldiers in pointless and bloody wars, like the one which had just been fought in Europe. Woman and the New Race also includes medical information surrounding the reproductive process, but does not include her two infallible methods of birth control (what were they?), because if she had printed that, her books would have been seized and destroyed under Comstock.

Then I read Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell who wrote Fangirl, which I read in December, but I had Eleanor and Park on audio and I didn't want to wait more time to read it even though I don't much like reading books by the same author too close together. Suffice to say, Eleanor and Park is amazing and deserves all the awards it keeps winning. Eleanor is a girl from a large family with a terrible stepdad and Park is a boy from the sweetest family ever (his mom is Korean) and they love each other in 1986. I thought Park was going to get shot. The terrible stepdad has a gun in one scene early on and if a writer shows a gun, she's going to use it later on. I had to check around with people who'd read the book to make sure Park didn't get shot. If he had been shot, I couldn't have borne it. Eleanor and Park's frank pathos reminded me of a young adult novel I had in junior high called Sex Education that probably would have blown the teen literature genre wide open twenty years earlier if it hadn't been called Sex Education. In that book, something bad does happen. Eleanor and Park survive changed. To summarize: Rainbow Rowell is amazing and all her books are good.

Hilary McKay's new Lulu book is out in America and it's at the library! Lulu and the Cat in the Bag answers the 'what do women want' question with: a good cat. Lulu's and her cousin Mellie's parents win a grown-up vacation, so Lulu's grandmother is staying with Lulu and Mellie and Lulu's menagerie at Lulu's house, when some cat-abandoning jerk leaves a bag with a cat in it on Lulu's doorstep. In Lulu and the Dog by the Sea her family acquired a second dog, and along with the parrot, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc., Lulu's house is full of animals, none of whom grandma appreciates. Grandma loves gardening, and dogs dig up gardens, rabbits eat plants, guinea pigs are useless, etc. The titular cat in the bag loves flowers, and it biffs the dogs on the nose when they try to roll around in grandma's newly planted petunias. It doesn't take grandma long to amend her dislike of cats to exclude this cat and the denouement is, again, obvious. There are a few implausible happenings that strained Lulu's credibility to this thirty-two-year-old, but which would pass right by the second graders for whom this book is intended.

Then I reread Incurable, which is the second book in The Ellie Chronicles, making it more or less the ninth book in John Marsden's Tomorrow series. These books are so fucking good. In a ten book series, it's hard to sort out what happened in which book and which books are better than which when they're consistently amazing. I reread the Tomorrow series up to eight last year and then got sidetracked, so it's nice to read back on such an important book that I may have only read twice now. In Incurable, the war is over and Ellie crushing on Jeremy Finley, managing the farm, looking after Gavin, trying not to be a guerrilla fighter, and going to school some days. There are at least four blood-curdling, heart-pumping action scenes in this business of post-war life: the cattle stampede, the raid, the cliff, and the city. If anything, Incurable could have been longer. There are some places where it looks like Marsden sacrificed expository dialogue and inner ramblings for purposes of plot and pace. (In all fairness, the series was meant to end at book three and then he wrote the other seven.) Read Tomorrow, When the War Began, if you haven't yet. Go from there.

I end my list of books with Hyperbole and a Half, the book of new and collected funny from Allie Brosh's blog, of which there is a link to here. For some reason, most of the chapters included in the book regard Allie's mental functioning and her dogs, so you'll have to go and read all the blog posts about spiders and the alot and the pain scale after you're done with the book, but read the book.

I said in the beginning that we were going to answer the woman question. Here are the answers:

• Well-trained dogs (Lulu and the Cat in the Bag, Incurable, Hyperbole and a Half
• Universal good manners (Eleanor and Park, Lulu and the Cat in the Bag, Woman and the New Race)
• Birth control (Woman and the New Race, Eleanor and Park implied, Incurable implied)
• Sexy Asian boyfriends (Incurable, Eleanor and Park)
• An end to violence and/or war (Woman and the New Race, Eleanor and Park, Incurable, Lulu and the Cat in the Bag)
• Racial equality or some sort of super-race, which one hopes are the same thing (Eleanor and Park, Woman and the New Race, Lulu and the Cat in the Bag implied, Incurable)
• No more indoor rats and spiders (Hyperbole and a Half, Woman and the New Race, Incurable)

As you can see from my inferences based on a random sample of books, all women more or less want the same things. 

A Miscellany

Bad sex, Romans, fanfiction, Americans abroad, creepy dolls, rhetoric. I blog you it all.

I picked up Worst Laid Plans: When Bad Sex Happens to Good People while I was weeding clearance at work, and I opened it and read some and it was very funny, so I read more in the break room later on, and it was still very funny, so I took it home to avoid reading a sex book in front of all my co-workers. Worst Laid Plans is more consistently funny than any other book, and nearly all the contributors are hilarious. Unlike, say, a collection of a travel essayists, all the slutty New York and L.A. writer-comedian-actors who contributed to this book can write well and have loads of experience with the topic in question.

"Don't use butter as lube, guys."

"Instead of someone saying, 'Hello, Sailor," I'd rather he say, 'Hello, Michael Feldman wearing a sailor suit he bought on eBay.'"

"And then he went up on me."

That last is from a story about a man who finds a hookup on Craigslist and doesn't cancel when the man turns out to be a midget, because he doesn't want to discriminate like that. There is also a story about a man who thinks he is gay because he enjoys opera, wine, and such, and a high school student whose finger is severed under circumstances. Also, "That Time I Accidentally Molested a Girl with a Mustache," farting rapist, masochist ignored. Of course, frequent readers of my blog know what happens to people who have sex: Their relatives forgive them on their deathbeds and then they die.

Agricola by Tacitus was my first foray into the Classical authors, and I felt very smart all day because had I managed to read an ancient text while I was tidying up on Saturday morning. It was only one and a half hours on audio, and quite simple to understand. Agricola was Tacitus' father-in-law and the Roman governor who finally got a solid grip on the British Isles. Tacitus implies that previous Roman governors of the UK managed things poorly and only controlled the ports. Agricola, using moderation when prudent and brute force when necessary, subdued the Britons, and was moderate in his personal habits as befitting a Stoic. He never tooted his own horn. Tacitus says he was almost relieved that Agricola did not live to see the reign of Caligula. Aren't we all?

Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl has already been acclaimed by poodles of other people as one of the best new adult books of 2013 and she fucking deserves it. This book made me so happy and nostalgic for the heady pre-Deathly Hallows days of the 2000s when the internet was a lot more interesting. Cather is the internet-famous author of an alternate-ending tome of the Simon Snow series, which is not Harry Potter wink wink nudge nudge, and she manages to make no friends her first month as a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, until her roommate realizes that Cath's only been eating power bars for said month and takes her under a wing in conjunction with roommate's ex-boyfriend Levi, who has beautiful eyes. This book killed me, and I had it on audio so I had to walk around with my iPod on for several days to finish it. Brilliant voice performances, by the way.

The Daily Mail is gross and pervily misogynistic, from what I understand, and it was just as wretchedly scandalous in the hot summer weeks leading up to World War I in Earl Derr Biggers' The Agony Column, but instead of nip slips, the Daily Mail had a Missed Connections (or "agony column" in British): "I saw you, in white with a scarlet ribbon, alight from the omnibus at Piccadilly and glance playfully at me. Write if your heart went out to this gentleman in a pince-nez," and you could pay five pence a word to have this put in the newspaper and scandalize all of London with your boldness. The Agony Column is all about this shocking lack of introductions. I highly recommend it. The protagonist is a young man, an American in London on business, who is reading the agony column in the dining room at the Carleton one morning when a beautiful young woman and her father come in and sit down to breakfast. The young lady produces her Daily Mail and laughs at a puckish entry in the column of our discussion and her father wonders aloud why she reads that nonsense. Enchanted, the young man goes back to his lodgings and writes a notice to be placed in the agony column. And the woman responds! She writes, via the Mail, to say that she would not normally speak to a gentleman in this way but his note was so intriguing and she is a lover of intrigue. He has seven days to write seven letters proving his worth. He writes, from his lodgings on Adelphi Terrace with the magnificent garden, about his travel before he arrived in London, to Interlachen, where he had met an unusually gregarious young Englishman who insisted on writing a letter of introduction to his cousin, and how that cousin, a colonel in the Indian Army clomped about upstairs as our young man sits writing the letter to the mysterious young lady, when he hears voices and a struggle. He races upstairs to find the man murdered. This cousin is not what he seemed. Nothing is what it seems. Or is it? In seven days, in seven letters, he must tell the young lady about the web of suspicion, intrigue and international mischief that surrounds him as England descends into war. Stellar Librivox audio recording as well.

Doll Bones, by the author of the Spiderwick Chronicles who is Holly Black, is a good audiobook but a fantastic book. Doll Bones rocks a line on early puberty without getting too enthusiastic about the coming changes or promising that everything will stay the same forever. It has a male protagonist and manages to keep itself something that boys will read while not propounding a narrow definition of masculinity. And there's a china doll made of the bones of a murdered girl with the rest of the ashes tucked into a small sack in her innards. Plus some proper swashbuckling adventure. The kids even steal a sailboat. This is good stuff. Well done, Holly Black. Very creepy and very well told.

As I mentioned before, I listened to Agricola on audiobook in a morning and was very proud of myself because I can comprehend Ancient Roman Language once it's translated into modern English and read to me. So I downloaded Phaedrus, which seems to be one of Plato's less exciting dialogues. I asked Sammie about it and she said The Symposium was her favorite so I might try that next. Really, I'm working up the The Republic.

Phaedrus is a trip and a half. I plan on reading about it later because that will elucidate some points, but for now Phaedrus is three or four fairly disjointed segments read by an old man from Hazelmere, Surrey who can "aah" and chuckle just like Socrates. Worth listening to for that reason alone. The premise is that Socrates and Phaedrus go for a walk beyond the wall of Athens and Phaedrus brings an argument of Lycius' and reads allowed this text saying that the non-lover is better than the lover because the lover is irrational (to sum up forty five minutes in one word). Phaedrus wants Socrates to comment on this text and Socrates gives his own speech, stating that the lover is selfish and the non-lover superior. They discuss the relative merits of Lycius' written and Socrates' off-the cuff arguments, and then Socrates exclaims that he has sinned against the gods, Eros being the god of love, and gives a colorful defense of love, the thrust of which is that each soul looks on their lover as an image of their preferred god (e.g. Zeus, Hera, Dionysus) and that love is therefore a manifestation of a remembered communion with heaven. Socrates illustrates his points with souls as chariots, and horses of good and evil, and angels spinning, and six types of madness, and peoples' sojourns in heavens all through his speech. Then Socrates says, "Now why was Lycius' speech wrong?" and he goes through and explains where Lycius fails in his rhetoric, which is the highest of all arts and comprises the last bit of Phaedrus.

East Lynne, the Shocking Conclusion, and Another Terrible Place

The story comes back after Lady's Isabelle's bastard is born, but he doesn't come into the story much. Lady Isabelle is sitting miserably in rented rooms in France, her pale, sickly newborn in the cradle beside her, when Levison comes in. He abandoned her months before, but he's come to offer her money. She, retaining pride, refuses and swears that she knew not forty-five minutes of happiness with Levison before she wished she were back with Mr. Carlisle and her poor children. and she has rued leaving every moment since. Levison leaves, appreciating how easy getting it was to get rid of her, and Lady Isabelle thinks that she will look into that working-for-a-living-and-becoming-a-governess-thing finally. But on the way from one place in France to another, there is a train accident and her baby is killed. The newspapers says that she is killed, too, and when Mr. Carlisle reads that, he finally asks Barbara for her hand in marriage. You see. Years pass. Mr. Carlisle and Barbara make a baby. Lady Isabelle finds a position governessing under an assumed name. She is changed, no longer the beautiful, innocent flower who once was the light of her father's eye. Grey-haired, stooped, limping from the railway accident, with a scar on her lower face, old-fashioned colored glasses, always with a shawl and veil, she looks queer but not unemployable. In fact, when a lady from West Lynne comes to France on holidays and happens to tell Lady Isabelle's employer that the Carlisle family of East Lynne is looking for a governess, Lady Isabelle applies. And suddenly she is back at East Lynne. In shame. In disguise. With her husband married to the woman that he promised her he wouldn't marry. Rather than say, "I didn't really love you from the beginning, but I had to marry you because my relatives are abusive and I had no options. You were having an affair with Barbara Hare! Remember when I told you not to invite my second cousin to East Lynne?" Lady Isabelle takes every moment as a penance and beats herself up with it. One of her children dies, and she beats herself up with that too. She becomes weak and consumptive. She prays for forgiveness. She coughs blood. You can probably guess who reveals what and who forgives whom on whose death bed.

I won't spoil the murder bit for you, although I can say that a rake is a rake is a rake and it's really obvious who was courting Athie Hallijohn under the name of Thorne from about the middle of the book. Only one scoundrel per novel.

Mrs. Henry Wood did not write East Lynne to promote the emancipation of women, but she may as well have. Lady Isabelle's inability to control her own destiny by any means except marrying the first nice-ish person who came along is her real tragedy. Carlisle isn't a bad man. Mrs. Wood writes him as a kind gentleman, and he is, but he treats both his wives like they're the cutest kid in the whole kindergarten. As for Miss Carlisle, her role is superfluous and comic, but she was my favorite. All those brains and all that energy, and nothing to do with it. The poor woman. This book was written slightly after women gained the right to keep property brought to a marriage after its disolution by death in England, and that's mentioned briefly. One small step for women, but nothing like the rights that these women needed to avoid their tragic fates.

One last note on East Lynne: It's full of interesting details about early Victorian England. Lady Isabelle's disguise includes colored glasses. One day, when she is walking with Miss Carlisle and Isabelle Junior, Lady Isabelle in disguise breaks her glasses and they go into the spectacle shoppe to buy new ones. Miss Carlisle, who is too smart not to suspect Lady Isabelle, suggests she gets white glasses, which are the fashion, and Lady Isabelle says she is used to colored ones. White glasses? Now you know: white glasses. Also, when Miss Carlisle is meddling in her brother's business, she always says, "What's up?" 1862 usage of "What's up?" It's not just what teenagers say to each other. It's older than the abolition of slavery in America. Speaking of...

I saw Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze on a list of good books with bad covers, and it is, although the cover's okayish. The words inside it are bloody brilliant. I did say, however, that this pair of blogs is about terrible places to live, and the Fairchild Plantation is the worst. No one in East Lynne or Old Trail Town owns slaves.

The Freedom Maze has this interesting historical novel within a historical novel thing going on. Sophie Fairchild-Maxwell is being left with her aunt and grandmama for the summer while her mother, groundbreakingly divorced, it being 1960, goes back to school to become a CPA. Sophie has free run to explore the plantation, poke around in the crumbling slave quarters, swim in the bayou, and walk through the hedge maze, where a trickster spirit pops in and fools with her. Sophie, having grown up in the city away from legends, thinks this is jolly good fun and ends up telling the spirit that she wants lots of friends and an adventure. Bad choice. She foomps up in the big house in 1860, she knows it, with all the pretty dresses in the closet, the pitcher and basin on the table, the silver brush and comb. While she's inspecting those valuable items, her sixteen-year-old great-great-great aunt comes into the room and starts screaming. In front of her great-great-great-great grandpa, Sophie tries to explain what's happened and who she is, but it's already obvious to everyone in her family what's going on: a curly-haired, tan young girl who looks exactly like them in the face and is in possession of a distinctive Fairchild nose has to be the octaroon daughter of Uncle Robert in New Orleans and some slave woman. Sophie is put to training as a house slave or lady's maid.

All the slaves on Fairchild plantation are named after countries or continents. Sophie rooms with a woman called Africa, one of the strongest people in a place full of strong women, and her daughter Antigua, who's an older teenager, a younger daughter who befriends Sophie first (as per Sophie's wish), and a son who might be sweet on Sophie. Sophie is grateful for the kindness, after the pain of not going home right away wears off into a dull blur of work and vague memories. Delia Smith moves Sophie around the plantation and the life of slaves in touching in the humanity they can bring to such a barbaric system. When she's blamed for trying to steal the silver hairbrush, she gets put out to the sugarcane processing facility, which is nearly unbearable. Eventually, Sophie's sojourn in 1860 ends trying to help Antigua escape and she's left to face her life in 1960 and dig through the detritus of her slave-owning ancestors to try to find what happened to Antigua, Africa and everybody else. The Freedom Maze is fantastic. Fairchild Plantation is horrible place full of slave-owners.

Next up: a miscellany.