Dreaming of WordPerfect

Just before I woke up this morning, I was inhabiting a dream about WordPerfect, the first word-processing program I really ever used. I have no idea where this particular dream came from, and as I type right now, the details of the dream are fleeing my memory (as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote in a very different context) "like bandits from a burglar alarm" ("Harrison Bergeron").

But I remember one thing clearly: the centrality of WordPerfect.

I learned the program well, used it throughout most of my teaching career until the ubiquity of MS-Word eventually forced me to change.

WordPerfect--like Microsoft Office--has a variety of supplemental programs, including a PowerPoint-like presentation program and a database program like Excel. I remember using the presentation one as I was converting from 35mm slide shows to digital ones. (Later, I had to convert those files I'd done to PowerPoint.)

There are a couple of things I really appreciated about WordPerfect: (1) it had a "reveal codes" command that could show you what was causing something you didn't want in your document (e.g., some odd indentation, some other unwelcome formatting issue); (2) it had some keystroke commands I really liked and used a lot--especially the one that allowed me to swoop the cursor to the end of the line (not the end of the paragraph or page--but the very line I was working with); I used that one repeatedly--and miss it greatly with Word.

I had actually thought--before my dream--that WordPerfect was now gone--like another program I used a lot, especially in the 1990s at Harmon Middle School: ClarisWorks, a version (a better one) of that old MS-Works program. The Aurora City Schools used it throughout the district--I even attended a workshop on its use up in Cleveland somewhere back in the early 1990s.

I still have some ClarisWorks files, files that I can't really open, I don't think, unless ...

... I just checked: I can open them with the Notepad or Wordpad programs (or I can go get some software--but I didn't). I'm going to open one right now with Wordpad and see what happens ... here's a screenshot ...

This shows an old coversheet I would staple onto my students' book reports (written ones); I see that I had recently taught some things about verbals and was requiring students to use an infinitive, a participle at the beginning of a sentence. (Oh, what a taskmaster! Dickens could have written a novel about me and my classroom cruelties!)

Anyway, there's a lot of junk at the top--probably old ClarisWorks code that Wordpad doesn't know what to do with. Still, I'm happy that I can (sort of) open these old files and see what I used to do--though discovering what I used to do in class is not invariably a pleasant experience!

Anyway, re: WordPerfect. It's not gone. Far from it. I see they have a vigorous website (link to it), a plethora of programs.

But I'm so firmly involved with Word now that I'm not sure I could endure a divorce. Still, my heart remains with my First Love. (Pitter-patter.)

Frankenstein Sundae, 234

Mary Shelley meets some other famous women in the late 1820s.

Frances (Fanny) Trollope

The Trollope name surely rings some of recognition’s bells. Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) was one of the Victorian era’s most prolific and popular novelists—he lived to see the publication of forty-five of his forty-seven novels (the first, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1847; the last—his unfinished The Landleaguers, published posthumously, incomplete). He also wrote numerous works of nonfiction. I have written elsewhere about my obsession with Anthony Trollope, about reading all forty-seven of his novels over a period of about a decade, about weeping when I read the final words of his final sentence (in dialect) of his final, unfinished novel (“they don't lave a por boy any pace.”).

But it was his mother, Frances “Fanny” Trollope (1779–1863), who had a connection with Mary Shelley and who tried to enlist Mary for a project proposed by Frances “Fanny” Wright, whose story I’ll deal with in a little bit. (Mary actually met this second Fanny first.)

Fanny Trollope, the mother of seven, took to writing later in her life when her husband just couldn’t make a go of his business ventures. And she discovered that she had the gift—she could write quickly; she could write for a popular audience—and it would be her writing that would support her family, including, of course, young Anthony.

When Mary met the two Fannys in the fall of 1828, Anthony Trollope was thirteen years old and had attended, a few years earlier, Harrow School (and would return in January 1831). Mary’s surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, began attending Harrow in September 1832, so he and Trollope were schoolmates for a bit, though Percy, born on November 12, 1819, was some four and a half years younger than the future novelist. Still, they overlapped at school. And Harrow’s enrollment was not large. They would have crossed paths. And what I would give to know anything about those interactions.

Frances "Fanny" Trollope

Anthony Trollope

A Jack London Anniversary Is Approaching

Writer Jack London died on November 22, 1916--yes, it will be a hundred years ago--and already the tributes are appearing.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine from Jack LondonWorld posted a notice that a newspaper in Santa Rosa, Calif. (the Press Democrat), had published a special section devoted to London and to his presence in that region. London had bought and expanded a ranch near Glen Ellen (about 14 mi southeast of Santa Rosa) and had died there of kidney failure and related issues. (The suicide theory has been long debunked and discredited.) Anyway, here's a link to that newspaper section. Scroll down to the list of stories about London that appeared on May 27.

But online wasn't good enough for me! So I contacted the paper, and just the other day received a "hard" copy of the section (insofar as newsprint can be "hard"). Later today I'll try to find room in my Jack London file drawers to place this item. As many of you know, I do have a few (!!) London things in my collection.

But the newspaper supplement: Here's what's included in its sixteen pages ...

• "The Storyteller Jack London" (a history of his career--some commentary about his legacy)
• "London's Sonoma County" 
• "Inspiration from the Valley" (how it propelled some of his works)
• "Questions about Plants United London, Burbank" (London's association with the noted scientist form Santa Rosa)
• "Engrossing Spirit of Adventure" (a survey of his travels and adventures)
• "The Call of the Working Class" (London's interest in social issues and socialism--written by Susan Nuernberg, one of the current stellar London scholars)
• "His Lens on the World" (London's own photographs of his wide travels)
• "Follow Footsteps of Jack London" (sites to visit in the area)
• "100 Years Later, Author's Still Wowing Fans" (his enduring fan base)
• "Stories on the Silver Screen" (accounts of his tales that have appeared as movies)
• "One Mountain, Many Dreams" (the story of his ranch--"Beauty Ranch," he called it)
• "1400 Acres Ripe for Exploration" (what you can do/find on the ranch property--now Jack London State Historic Park)
• Many photographs of London and his world

London was only forty when he died--and it is stunning (for me) to realize that Robert Frost was actually two years older than the author of The Call of the Wild. Both were born in the Bay Area, as well, and I like to imagine them running around together on the streets of San Francisco and/or Oakland ... though there's not the slightest bit of evidence that this ever happened. Still ... I remember Frost being alive--a major cultural presence--the poet who stumbled a bit during his part in the JFK Inauguration (January 20, 1961). I was a freshman at Hiram College when Frost died on January 29, 1963. Jack London had always seemed to me of an entirely different generation. But he wasn't.

As the Santa Rosa newspaper pieces so well explain, London certainly packed his forty years with accomplishment and adventure. He went on the Klondike Gold Rush; he wrote fifty books in fifteen years--nearly three a year (I would wager most people don't even read that many); he attempted a sail around the world in his own yacht; he bought and greatly improved a ranch; he wrote about boxer Jack Johnson, viewed (and wrote about) the ruins of San Francisco in the 1906 earthquake; covered wars as a journalist; lived undercover among the homeless of London and wrote a prescient book about it--The People of the Abyss; and on and on and on and on.

And in the fall of 1982--back teaching English at Harmon Middle School after a four-year hiatus--I discovered that the new literature anthologies for the 8th graders included The Call of the Wild. Which I'd never read. And for the next decade or so I went on a grand Jack London adventure that took me twice to the Yukon (once, in 1986, with my 14-year-old son), to his ranch (numerous times), to libraries and archives all over the place.  On July 18, 1990, I got to meet his daughter Becky (who died in 1992). About a year ago, I did a series of blog posts about that meeting--here's a link to the first of them. 

By the time my London-mania was over (though it's not completely gone, even now) I'd published two annotated editions of The Call of the Wild (Univ. of Okla. Pr., 1995, 1997), a YA bio of London (Scholastic Press, 1997), and a number of articles.

I still buy key works about London and his world, still read most of them, still do occasional presentations about him (as I did a couple of months ago at a middle school in Michigan). But as some of you know, in 1997 I fell under the considerable spell of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein--and then Poe--and then others. So it goes in my peripatetic intellectual life.

But those years with Jack London--those years I chased him here and there--were among the most exciting of my life. So it was great to get that newspaper the other day, great to read the articles, great to step back into that wondrous world, if only for a moment ...

Sunday Sundries, 106

1. AOTW: We're heading east on Rt. 82 in Aurora, getting ready to turn right into Mickey D's parking lot (Diet Coke Time!), when a woman in an SUV, approaching us, wheels/swerves sharply in front of us, turning left into the parking lot (and drive-thru), missing us just by feet--risking us, herself, our car, her car--all to get in front of us for 30 seconds at the drive-thru window.

2. I finished two books this week ...

• The first was by former Harmon Middle (and Aurora High) School student (whom, sadly, I did not get to teach) Cori McCarthy, You Were Here, her third YA novel, a novel very different from the prior two, both of which dealt with elements of sci-fi, adventure, the near future (all showing us both the dark and bright sides of human nature and society). Cori's new novel is a sometimes very painful account of a group of young people--just out of college--friends, in some cases, since childhood. The brother of one of them died in a playground accident, and his sister has been having a hard time dealing with it. (Gradually, the truth about that day emerges, but I'll let you discover that for yourself.) She shifts focus with each chapter (a different character gets the microscope--though all are in 3rd person), and there's a visual bonus, as well: A fine graphic artist has added pages of illustrations at key points. Those who live in northeastern Ohio will get a special buzz because there are important sections that occur at the ruins of Randall Park Mall--and at the remnants of Geauga Lake Park in Aurora. (The characters are sort of amateur urban explorers who take some risks moving about in dark, unreliable space.) Of course--the ruins (the decay and neglect) are key not just in the settings but in the characters' lives, as well. Relationships fracture, reassemble in different ways, haunt. There is a lot of pain in this dark novel--physical, psychological. And Cori, unblinking, paints it all.
• The second was Everybody's Fool (Richard Russo, 2016), the sequel to Nobody's Fool (1993), which I wrote about last Sunday. When I saw that Russo had written a sequel, I, guiltily, returned to read Nobody's--which I'd never read but which was the basis for one of my favorite films--same title--from 1994, a film starring Paul Newman (in one of his best performances, I think) as Donald "Sully" Sullivan, a handyman in a small New York community (Bath) where he stumbles around causing trouble--but also holding hands with those who need it. His landlady, played by Jessica Tandy (in her last screen appearance), was his former 8th grade English teacher (a stellar profession!) who tries to encourage him--and who sees much good in him. His sometime employer is Bruce Willis, a local contractor noted for not paying on time and for bedding young attractive women. Melanie Griffith plays his suffering (but strong) wife. The young Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a cop named Raymer who is young-and-dumb. And Pruitt Taylor Vince plays Newman's buddy Rub Squeers, very dim, very good-hearted.

• Everybody's Fool, the novel, takes up the story about a decade later. The landlady has died--but has left her house to Sully (Newman). And I laughed out loud when I read, early on, that Raymer is now chief of police. The marriage of Carl (Bruce Willis) and his wife has broken. And there are some other changes.
• Sully's health is not good. Heart. His time is limited. And Russo masterfully keeps multiple plots and points-of-view spinning throughout. I loved the wild, very dark comedy. (Raymer falls face-first into an open grave; a deadly cobra gets loose in the dilapidated apartment building where he lives--then returns at a key moment; a heavy rain causes some hillside graves to open and expel their caskets; and so on.)
• From time to time Russo revisits some important events from Nobody's--correctly assuming that most people have not read that novel in a long time (if they ever read it).
• Race emerges more strongly in the sequel. In Nobody's there was a black cook at the diner that Sully (and most of the other principals) frequented--that was about it. Here, Charice is the police dispatcher--and she has a troubled brother, too. She's an important character--in Raymer's life and in the texture of the novel.
• I (mildly) complained about Nobody's that everyone in town seemed to have the same wry, ironic sense of humor. Same thing here.
• Still, I loved these two books, got hooked on Russo's wit and have ordered, accordingly, a copy of his first novel, Mohawk, and will commence a romp through all his work ...

3. I there a TV series more ironically titled than Happy Valley? We just this week finished Season 2 (of 2) of this Netflix original, and it is dark, dark, dark, DARK. In fact, it was so intense, that Joyce and I simply could not watch an entire episode all the way through. Some took three or four sittings ... Still, we so much admire the leading performer, Sarah Lancashire, who plays a troubled but compassionate cop in Yorkshire. And we marvel at how she can play a totally different character in Last Tango in Halifax.

4. Final words ... from my various word-of-the-day online services ...

• terraqueous \ter-EY-kwee-uh s, -AK-wee-\adjective (from dictionary.com)
  1. consisting of land and water, as the earth.
  Quotes
  Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
  -- H. P. Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," Pine Cones, October 1919
• slyboots \SLAHY-boots\ (from dictionary.com)
  noun
  1. an engagingly sly or mischievous person.
  Quotes
  … even though he never said a word, he had more than one trick up his sleeve, the old slyboots.
  -- Emmanuel Carrère, translated by Linda Coverdale, A Russian Novel, 2010
• overslaugh \oh-ver-SLAW\ (from dictionary.com)
  verb
  1. to pass over or disregard (a person) by giving a promotion, position, etc., to another instead.
  Quotes
  … General Stark, a former British officer who had been overslaughed for promotion and now took handsome revenge …
  -- Robert Graves, Sergeant Lamb's America, 1940

Cicada Visit

cicada that wants inside

Last night--not long after Joyce and I got home from (another) visit to Szalay's farm market down in the Cuyahoga Valley--we heard the doorbell. I peeked outside. It was our son, Steve, and our grandsons, Logan and Carson, who live down in Green, Ohio, where, incredibly they have no cicada action.

The boys wanted to hear and see them.

And, oh, did they!

Our old trees are thick with the critters, and the noise was nearly deafening, even in the early evening. (Old Sol is the cicada conductor.) Some flew into us, and we adults pretended not to be startled while the boys manifested an array of responses, ranging from curiosity to "Isn't-it-time-to-go-to-A&W now?"

Logan (11) was feeling pretty good about the day: He'd shot a legit 80 for 18 holes (a better golfer now than I ever was). And Carson (7), inside, got curious about a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels that we have; he got even more interested when we told him about the Yahoos, those foul critters who liked to sit up in trees and fling foul things on whoever was passing by. (Sounds like a fairly appealing profession, as I think about it.)

All too soon they had to head out (A&W does have closing hours, you know?), now armed with several sorts of knowledge:

• cicadas are loud
• cicadas look creepier than they are
• cicadas emerge from the neatest holes in the ground you could ever imagine
• Grandma and Grandpa know some weird stuff
• their great-grandpa Dyer also loved root beer floats

And Joyce and I were so grateful for the visit--and were left yearning for another.

Remembering Paul Zindel

I don't remember reading about the death of Paul Zindel (1936-2003), a writer who--during the earlier years of my middle-school teaching career--was once ubiquitous. I can still see kids carrying around ragged copies of The Pigman and My Darling, My Hamburger and other titles he so artfully wrote for the YA audience. (Link to Zindel website for all books.)

So what got me thinking about him now?

Some of you know that we're cataloging and selling our library online (at ABE--we're D. J. Doodlebug Books, LLC), and the other day Joyce pulled off the shelf Zindel's 1970 play  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Paul Newman later directed a 1972 film of the play. The entire film is on YouTube now (link).

In my old copy (1973) my name is in the front, but it bears none of my usual marks--though I know I read it. But what fell out of the book when Joyce started to catalog it was a 3x5 card (see below), the sort of card I stuck in a lot of paperback books I kept in my classroom, books that kids could sign out. This one went to a student in March 1974.

I liked reading Zindel myself--I admired what he was doing: giving young readers various looks at how fiction can be done. In The Pigman, for example, he has two narrators, teens (a boy, a girl) who take turns telling the story--commenting on each other's version, eventually arriving at some kind of truth.

Each of his novels showed us something different--helping young readers see there are so many ways to tell a story. I think Zindel had a great influence on YA writers who followed him.

As I said, I'd not really noticed his obituary--here's the one from the New York Times (link). Cancer got him.

I just checked my file drawers and found only a thin folder devoted to Zindel. Inside: an overhead projector transparency I'd made of this drawing from The Pigman ...

Also--some handwritten notes on The Pigman, some photographs by Richard Adler (why?), a ditto master of some "Dear Abby" segments (??), a poster about loneliness, and an eight-page guide: The New Fiction: Teaching the Junior Novel--Unit IV: The Pigman, published by Scholastic Book Services. That's it. Oh well--I'm sure it's far thicker than the folder Zindel had on me.

I'm sorry he's gone. I don't know if kids read his books nowadays. I hope so. He had much to teach, and they have much to learn.

PS: I see our copy of Gamma Rays is going on ABE for $5. Better hurry! (Link to the book on ABE.)

Wordbirds

For Mitch Wilson, fellow doggerelist—

With gratitude for 8^th grade, for Grease, for countless Facebook “Likes,” for enduring friendship.

Foreword

Words rhymes with birds. I’ve always liked that. It seems so sensible: Both can soar when they’re healthy. (Both can also suddenly fall out of the sky.) And over the years I’ve found more than a few occasions to rhyme the two in the doggerel I’ve composed.

As for this current project? A journey through the dictionary? I don’t know where the idea came from. Which reminds me: Years ago I read a Stephen King interview somewhere, and, replying to the question Where do you get your ideas? King said something like this: I don’t know. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.

I always kind of liked that—though I definitely would not have liked it had I asked that question. King’s royal reply is more than a tad snarky. He seems to be saying If there were a place where I go to find ideas for my books, why on earth would I tell someone else where it is?

Well, I’m not Stephen King, nor was meant to be, but I really don’t know where the idea for this current volume came from. It just sort of flew into my life. (See title.)

Once I got the idea, I modified it, so it became something like this: In my Webster’s Third, which sits on a stand in my study [see cover image], I will go to the first page for each letter and find a word that looks interesting—and (this is significant) it must be a word I don’t already know.

Confession: I cheated once. Vespal (of or relating to wasps). I already knew it, but I liked it and had an idea for some lines and rhymes, so I used it. (Whew! The release and relief of confession.)

Well, once I got through to letter Z, I decided I’d then go backwards: I’d take a word from the final page for each letter. So off I went again—Z to A—twenty-six more little poems.

And then, having completed that, I decided on a third and final trip through the dictionary, this time picking a word from the middle of each letter’s pages.

While I was writing these little ditties each day, I was occasionally writing other sorts of doggerel—things I’d seen or experienced or  thought about. Silly things, mostly. Many of these I posted on Facebook for my friends to ignore. I’ve put some of them here in a subsection called “Desultory Doggerel.”

I also, from time to time, wrote some of what I’ve previously called wolferel—verse that’s a bit more serious than doggerel but does not rise to the level of “real” poetry. Most of these I also posted on Facebook, where they sometimes occasioned comment but, more frequently, caused only accelerated scrolling. They’re also here in “Wolferel.”

An editorial note: While re-reading these pieces, I decided that some of them did not rise even to the sad level of doggerel. (Maybe I need another name for them? Jackalerel? Hyenaerel?) So I’ve cut them. This will explain some of the missing days on the calendar dates I post above each piece. I’ve lightly revised some others. (Notice: I didn’t say “improved.”)

All of which reminds me: There are few horrors more horrible than re-reading (and recognizing as a horror) something you once thought was decent. As the ghost of King Hamlet wailed to his dazzled, indecisive son, “O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!”