Category: Literature

Salon: Abridged Too Far. Hilary Flower writes of her unsettling discovery of “abridged” children’s literature through reading the “Great Illustrated Classics” version of Wind in the Willows. Whenever a classic work of children’s literature credits an “adapter” and an editor, look out.

New today in the iTunes Music Store: Songs of the Pogo, a recording that Walt Kelly made in 1956 with the help of Norman Monath. You can bet that’s being downloaded right now. Alas, no Boston Charlie.

I got a postcard late last week from the good folks at Fantagraphics. Apparently the first volume of The Complete Peanuts has slipped its publication date by a month, to April 1 (no jokes please). But it’s not all bad news. They offered a bundle with a new, first-time-ever collection of all Charles Schulz’s pre-Peanuts work, including both the trailblazing “Li’l Folks” strip and his single panel work. Was I interested? Oh yeah. This is the good stuff, the ur-Peanuts, so to speak, before the characters evolved into their familiar (copiously merchandized) selves.

Side note: I have been consistently impressed with Fantagraphics, both as a publisher (the Krazy and Ignatz collections have been consistently excellent) and as a business with consistently excellent customer support and communication.

Dear Jack,

In your first book, After Lorca, you wrote a letter to Lorca saying you wanted to make a poem out of a real lemon, not the description of a lemon. Very good; Jenny Holzer has done stranger things. You also say

I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real.

Today we can do that, Jack, kind of. This letter is a poem that points to other poems, other poets. But links break and rot just like your lemon does, Jack, and I’m not sure that what’s left is still in correspondence (as you say with those sly italics) with the lemon.

There are search engines, Jack, whose job it is to help you find the real lemon. Unfortunately, some of them don’t understand me.

I am building a house on sand, Jack, and trying to build it high enough to touch the sky. But the sand keeps slipping out from under me. And my words turn into other languages and are lost.

What to do?

Love

Tim

Clancy Ratliff at CultureCat points to threats from the James Joyce estate to enforce copyright through lawsuits if there are public readings of Ulysses during the 100th anniversary Bloomsday festivals this June.

For the uninitiated, Bloomsday marks the anniversary of the events of Joyce’s brilliant novel, which all occur on the 16th of June in 1904. The occasion is typically marked by all day readings of the novel in pubs and other gathering places, a typically Irish homage to an otherwise monstrously forbidding work (at least by reputation). The threats have caused the 100th Anniversary celebration to cancel planned readings and performances of Joyce’s works. I can’t imagine that the estate thinks this will help appreciation of Joyce’s work. Maybe it’s time that someone introduced them to the economic concept of “growing the pie” by building demand for Joyce’s works, rather than crouching in the corner muttering “my preciousss” over royalties.

In the meantime, I’m marking my calendar to be violating some serious copyright law on the 16th of June. Care to join me?

I moved the New Oxford Annotated Bible off my Current Reading spot today. This doesn’t mean I’ve read the whole thing; in fact, I’m still working my way through the Apocrypha, which is where I started a month ago. But I was only able to get in a few pages of reading a night, and I was starting to despair of getting any farther.

Serendipitously, Dave pointed today to a site that lets you subscribe to the Bible via RSS. In particular, the site has three different “read the Bible in a year” feeds that give one entry a day with various combinations of Old and New Testament and Psalms.

Hey, if it works with Samuel Pepys, it’s gotta work for the Good Book, right?

Stanford has undertaken a project to digitize the original serialized version of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations—complete with illustrations, maps, illustrations, context, etc. (courtesy the Shifted Librarian).

The article I mentioned on Monday about the Sent cameraphone art exhibit has now been published on the Guardian’s web site. My photo isn’t shown and I’m not mentioned. Guess I’ll have to check out the print edition; knowing the publishing business, it’s entirely possible I got trimmed for lack of space. It was still cool to be contacted, though.

The New York Times reports on a new exhibit of letterpress books from the 1990s at the New York Public Library. Among the books listed is William Gibson’s legendary (to some, anyway) book-length poem, Agrippa (a Book of the Dead). This collaboration between Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh, produced in an extremely limited edition, featured photosensitive prints and the text of the poem on a self-encrypting floppy enclosed with the book; the poem could be read once, in theory, and then never read again.

I remember at the time Agrippa came out, when I was in undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a habitué of Usenet, that it was fairly shortly after the publication of the book that the text of the poem was available on Usenet; in fact, it’s still on my hard drive, three Macs later. Gibson himself isn’t complaining: “there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself. Meanwhile, though, the text escaped to cyberspace and a life of its own, which I found a pleasant enough outcome.” His official website has an official electronic text of the poem, including my favorite section of the poem, the transition between the first two stanzas:

“Papa’s mill 1919”, my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of cut lumber,
might as easily be the record
of some later demolition, and
His cotton sleeves are rolled
to but not past the elbow,
striped, with a white neckband
for the attachment of a collar.
Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
(How that feels to tumble down,
or smells when it is wet)

II.

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

Contrasting notes from my reading over the holiday. I found a passage in Peterson’s Jefferson that I think is pertinent to the current arguments about restrictions of liberty during wartime. Writing during his vice-presidency in the hostile Adams administration during a British war scare, concerning to the Alien and Sedition acts (which entrenched xenophobia in the law and criminalized criticism of the government), Jefferson feared that the intent of the law’s framers was to trick the people into surrendering their power to the government:

The system of alarm and jealousy which has been so powerfully played off in England, has been mimicked here, not entirely without success. The most long-sighted politician could not, seven years ago, have imagined that the people of this wide-extended country could have been enveloped in such delusion, and made so much afraid of themselves and their own power, as to surrender it spontaneously to those who are manœuvring them into a form of government, the principal branches of which may be beyond their control.

On an entirely different topic, Alan Bartram’s Five Hundred Years of Book Design is an ill-titled, delightfully snarky romp through the sacred cows of typographic fame. Slagging such luminaries as Aldus Manutius (“ham-fisted production”), Plantin (“awkwardly aligned spreads”), Franklin (“confusing reading”), Fournier (“a little boring”), Didot (“the well-leaded verse cannot quite decide whether or not to look centred”), William Morris (“ponderous and solemn…the vegetation is beginning to resemble the monstrous growths dreamt up by H G Wells in these same years”), and Bruce Rogers (“effectively incomprehensible…unconvincing pastiche”), as well as a rogue’s gallery of forgotten also-ran book designers, the book applies modern production standards to often lauded works of typography. Of the greats, only Bodoni, Baskerville, and Gill seem to receive consistent praise for their combination of aesthetic and practical concerns. At $35, the book is a bit steep; better reading from the library, I think.

One of the groups I sang with Saturday night was a country and bluegrass group whose leader jokingly told me, “You better speak Southern if you want to sing with us.” I told him, “I might could do that,” in my best Appalachian twang, and got in. Today my Tennessean officemate unconsciously used the same construction, so I started wondering where it came from.

I researched the usage and found the following great article by Tom King about might could:

The use of so-called “double modal” constructions is quite common in the
South and Southwest. I come from Dallas originally, and such
constructions as you have cited are common there in everyday speech, and
they serve a real linguistic purpose: modal forms such as ‘could’ and
‘should’ are ambiguous in Modern English, as they have both an
indicative and a subjunctive sense. For example, “I could come” can mean
either “I was able to come” (past indicative of ‘can’) or “I would be
able to come” (subjunctive). In German, the two forms are distinct:
“ich konnte kommen” vs. “ich koennte kommen”. The use of double modal
constructions with ‘may’ or ‘might’ serves to reintroduce this
distinction. Thus, for a Southerner, “I might could come” or “I may
could come” carry the subjunctive meaning, whereas “I could come” is
only indicative in meaning….

The use of double
modals in Southern American English fills a gap in Standard English
grammar, namely the loss of inflectional distinction in English between
indicative and subjunctive modals. Dialect or regional forms are often
more progressive in gap-filling than is a standard language. Consider
the sad case of ‘you’, which is ambiguous in Standard English between
singular and plural meanings. Here the regional forms have been quite
productive: “y’all” in the South (***only plural!!!!***) or similar
forms elsewhere.

In other words, twang loud and twang proud.

Local favorites Fantagraphics announced today that they will begin reprinting the complete Peanuts—all fifty years—with a collection from the first two years (1950 to 1952) to be published next April. The plan is to do 25 books, two a year. I’m most interested by the first book, which should shed some interesting light on the development of the characters in the strip—since Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and even Snoopy started out as babies. There were fascinating hints of those early characters in the Art of Peanuts collection that was published a few years back.

No way to pre-order, though ISBN (1-56097-589-X), price ($28.95), and cover are given.

I’m only part way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, despite having worked on it all the way back from Boston. So far, so good: fun, intelligent, and multilayered, with the science of Newton and Hooke present but taking a decided back seat to the intrigues of the royal court and the politics of the Royal Society.

One thing the book has done for me is to greatly increase my enjoyment of Samuel Pepys’s blog/diary. I almost laughed out loud reading the entry from October 7, 1660, in which Pepys relates the story of how the Duke of York initially refused to marry Anne Hyde, and concludes with the tongue in cheek proverb: “he that do get a wench with child and marry her afterwards is as if a man should sh*t in his hat and then clap it on his head.” Not exactly the cold dusty hand of history…

Update: I’m not the only one working through the book, it appears; Matthew Kirschenbaum points to this interview with Stephenson in which it is revealed that the whole book, all 900 pages, was written longhand with pen and paper. Kirschenbaum also rightly dings Stephenson for not pointing out that the preservation of paper documents from the 1600s has something to do with libraries.

Moving on to pleasanter topics: Nancy Pearl, one of my three favorite librarians, has an interview in the New York Times: A Librarian Is Making a Big Noise. Great bit at the end:

Confronted with a wealth of books, Ms. Pearl has invented a now-famous tool to cope with the onslaught: the Rule of 50.

“Nobody should ever have to finish a book they’re not thoroughly enjoying, but you need to give the book a chance,” she explained. “It seems to me that a good amount of pages would be 50. At the end of 50 pages, you ask, ‘Am I really liking this book, or am I just gutting it out?’ This rule worked well for me for many years, until I started to get closer to 50 years old myself. I realized that time was short, and that the world of books is larger than ever.”

So Ms. Pearl, who is now 58, came up with this ingenious calculus of reading: “Now I have an amended Rule of 50: If you’re 50 years of age and under, you follow the original rule. But if you’re over 50, you subtract your age from 100, and that number is the number of pages you have to read. A psychiatrist — not one I was seeing, a stranger — told me, with a straight face, that this is the greatest gift I have given to humanity.”

Of course, it helps that she has an action figure modeled after her, with a built in shushing action.

Thanks to Jake and Jessamyn, I was reminded that this is Banned Books Week. During this week the American Library Association publishes its list of the books to receive the most “challenges” (attempts to remove or restrict access to books in a library) in the previous year. So go out and read a challenged book. There’s quite a list to work from, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at #7 (if there is a Hall of Fame for challenged authors, Mark Twain is surely in it).