Self on the Shelf, 2

Last week I started writing about this odd portion of one of my bookshelves, shelves that are everywhere else stuffed with (surprise!) books. Here's some more ...

Sitting in the back, in the middle, is a character jug from Royal Doulton. We actually have quite a collection of them, increasing over the years because for a long time they were anniversary gifts I gave to Joyce. (I think I'll do a post about them one of these days.) Anyway, this one is of Frankenstein's creature, and if you look at the head popping up out of it, you can see it's a little Frankenstein-creature puppet that now lives inside that jug. (The little thing that appears to be poking the puppet's eye is a tag attached to the creature, a tag explaining what it is.) If you visit this blog now and then, you know of my, uh, obsession with Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein, and with just about everything associated with her, that book, her life, her family, her friends, her ...

Immediately in front of the Royal Doulton piece is a little pin box that once belonged to my mother. It's made of myrtle wood--a favorite of my parents since it grows on the Oregon Coast, which they loved--and where they built a retirement home in Cannon Beach, followed by another one in Seaside when their bodies began to fail them. Mom and Dad had many myrtle wood pieces--from salad bowls to candlesticks to bookends to ... a pin box. I haven't opened it in ... forever. And so I'm going to do so right now ...

... PAUSE WHILE I GET AND OPEN THE BOX ...

And guess what was inside? A $100 bill? A treasure map? A rare postage stamp? Pins? An ancient coin worth a fortune? The missing link (cuff)? A photograph of me as a baby? My lost bowling ball?

Nah.

There was nothing inside. (Remember Geraldo Rivera opening the "vault" of Al Capone on national TV, April 21, 1986? Here's a YouTube link to that embarrassing moment witnessed by some 30,000,000 viewers!)

Fortunately, only Joyce and I are in the house right now, and she did not witness my Less-Than-Grand Opening.

So ... back it goes the myrtle wood pin box on the shelf.

In front of it is a ceramic piece--a little bug-eyed (exopthalmic!) boy kicking a soccer ball. I think this came from the eccentric collection of sundries that once belonged to my great-uncle Bill Lanterman, brother of my maternal grandmother, Alma Lanterman Osborn. His was the first funeral I ever attended (or, at least, the first I can recall). It was in Youngstown (where the Lantermans had lived and farmed on Four Mile Run Road for a long time). I was sitting near the front. July 1951. I was not five and a half years old. We had driven all the way from Enid, Oklahoma, to be there for the service.

And while I sat there, looking at the (open) coffin, I was positive I could see Uncle Bill breathing! I elbowed Mom, told her. She shushed me--as only Mom could do. But I was positive. I nudged again. Told her again: He's breathing! Got mega-shushed.

Later, she told me that it was my own breathing I was "seeing" in Uncle Bill--my own up and down, etc.

I'm still not sure.

Yes, I am, but the Kid-in-Me still says: He's alive! The Kid-in-Me crying out like Victor Frankenstein at the moment of creation.


To be continued ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 278

Well, what did Mary have to say about her father? 

Mary began by misspelling the town of her father’s birth, Wisbech (she wrote it as “Wisbeach”), a small farming community at the time—a little over a hundred miles north of London, in Cambridgeshire. She says very little about his family—then this, on the first page: Very early, even in childhood, he developed that love of acquirement and knowledge which stamped his future career.[1]  And so the praise and patent affection commence. Only a few lines later she writes, Reason and a love of investigation were the characteristics of Godwin, even in boyhood ….[2]

After sketching his early career, she arrives at Caleb Williams, which, she declares, is the best [novel] in our language.[3] She also praises Godwin for standing up to the government—and for standing up for his prosecuted friends—at a time of great censorship and harsh handling of those publishing anything that implied the government was going awry.

After some more summary of his career, Mary arrives at the account of his father’s marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Mary Shelley calls a woman with a lofty spirit. She adds: Even now, those who have survived her so many years never speak of her but with uncontrollable enthusiasm. Her unwearied exertions for the benefit of others, her rectitude, her independence, joined to a warm affectionate heart, and the most refined softness of manners, made her the idol of all who knew her.[4] There were many, of course, who would never agree with this assessment; for many conservatives, Mary Wollstonecraft represented the worst of liberal sentiment.

But in these words, we see the heart of Mary Shelley herself. She clearly adored the mother she’d never known—had read her works repeatedly since she was able to read—and saw her, throughout her own life, as the model for all.

Mary then continues her journey through Godwin’s publications and life—pages rich with praise for the father she loved. And her final passage could serve as a summary for all: As a moral character, his reputation is unblemished. He stands, in simplicity of wisdom, and consistency of principle, the monument of the last generation, extending into this the light of a long experience, and ornamenting our young and changeful literature with the profounder and loftier views of a more contemplative era.[5] Again—many would have disagreed.

Still, Mary’s memoir of her father is a valentine—a long letter of admiration, of gratitude, of love. In April 1831, when this memoir appeared with the re-issue of Caleb Williams, William Godwin had just turned seventy-five years of age.

---

[1] Novels and Selected Works, vol. 2, 245.

[2] Ibid., 245–46.

[3] Ibid., 247.

[4] Ibid., 249.

[5] Ibid., 252.

Sunday Sundries, 127

1. AOTW: It happened again. Yet another version of a previous AOTW saw as soon as he arrived that I was waiting for service at a counter, but when the clerk turned around to wait on us, he went first. I hope he has room on his mantel for all the awards he's going to accumulate in his life!

2. I finished three books this week ...

     - The Hatred of Poetry (2016) by Ben Lerner (novelist and poet) is basically a monograph--a bit over 80 pages long. In it, he traces the hatred of poetry back a long, long way--and also talks about the varieties of poetry-hating--from I hate all poetry to hating certain types of it. His final sentence kind of says it:

          All I ask of the haters--and I, too, am one--is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies) it might come to resemble love (85-6).

Lerner's text is clearly aimed at "literary" types--other writers, other poets--and has, when the last page lies before you, not much appeal for general readers, I don't think.

     - I also finished a collection of Richard Ford three short stories (well, novellas?), Women with Men (1997), I Ford book I had to read out of order because it was so slow arriving in the mail. (As some of you know, I'm reading all Ford's work, beginning to end, and, unfortunately, the end is now looming. This has been a most enjoyable and enlightening journey.)

As you can tell from the title, the stories have something in common--the relationships between women and men. The first tale ("The Womanizer") takes place in Paris, where an American salesman has gone on business. There, he meets a French woman ... and ... guess what? Things don't work out too well.

The second story, "Jealous," is a story dealing with places Ford used in his earlier work--places in the West. The narrator is telling us about his teenage years when Dad was messing around. The narrator goes with his aunt for Thanksgiving, and--let's say--some things go wrong on their trip back to her place.

The final story, "Occidentals," also takes place in Paris  where a guy who's just published his first novel (highly autobiographical) has come to meet with his French publisher--and his translator. Although he has brought along his current gf, things are not going well (she's ill). They do some sightseeing, have an awful dinner with some awful American tourists, and then ... Things don't work out too well.

Over and over again in his work, Ford shows the behavior (psychological and physical) of men who just seem incapable of committing to a woman--incapable of understanding them in any but the most superficial ways. As a result, the tales tumble into chaos, mirroring the lives of his principal male characters.

     - Finally, I read Robert Coover's new one, Huck Out West, reviewed in today's New York Times Book Review (link to review). I've read Coover's work for a long time (since the 1960s) and have always enjoyed it. As I look at his pub list on Wikipedia (I know, I know--link to the site), I realize I haven't read them all--but quite a few.

Here, Coover does what a number of other writers have done in recent years--come up with a sequel to (or another take on) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel I taught each spring the final ten years of my career (high school juniors at Western Reserve Academy). Coover's is much better than most of the others. (Some of those include My Jim, Finn, The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Becky, and even Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim.)

Huck is grown now and is out West (see title!), in the area of Deadwood, South Dakota, where the Custer massacre is about to happen--so we are in 1876. Along the way, Huck re-encounters Jim, Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Ben Rogers--and they have not all turned out especially well. Jim is still enduring the unspeakable horrors visited upon black men; Tom is a creep-o; Becky ... well, she's found the world's oldest profession. And so on.

Huck has also lived with the Lakota for a while and has befriended one of them--Eetah--to whom he shows the same loyalty and understanding that he had long ago developed for Jim. I'll confess that as I neared the end, I was thinking that I was going to get some kind of re-play of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man--that Huck was going to be at the Little Bighorn. And ... read it!

One Coover choice to think about: Huck seems sexless--almost genderless in the tale. Not really too interested in sex--though he has some opportunities.


3. I've realized that the TV detective series we're streaming/enjoying (via Acorn)--Brokenwood--is not in Australia (as I've said a couple of times here)--but New Zealand. Pay attention, Dyer! as some of my public-school teachers used to, uh, urge me.


4. On Saturday night Joyce and I went to Kent to see Hidden Figures, whose trailer I'd seen probably a half-dozen times. (Link to trailer.) The trailer had left me a little wary--it seemed a bit ... slick. And, in ways, it was. At times I felt it had too bright a look for the segregationist era that I grew up in (my Oklahoma and Texas boyhood--1944-1956). The whites, though crude and clueless in the film, were a bit too nice, if you can believe it. I loved some aspects of it--the sight of the poor mathematician who had to run (in high heels!) in the rain to get to a women's room for "colored" was a piercing mixture of comedy and tragedy, the women's strength in the face of appalling disregard, the tension with the Soviets (which I remember so well), and on and on.

There was a character who seemed based on Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist we swept up at the end of  World War II (the Soviets got some of these guys; we got some--immigration for them was not an issue!). I remember seeing von Braun on TV during some of those early rocket launches in America. A sort of American "hero." Back in Germany, though, von Braun had used slave labor--Holocaust Jews--as workers on the rocket-testing sites, but the guy based on him in Hidden Figures is, he tells us, a Pole whose parents were killed in the Holocaust. That seems to me like a grim, grim revision of the history.

I enjoyed the performances, though, as I said, it all seemed--in spite of some of the great indignities those women experienced--a bit ... sugar-coated.


5. Final Words--Some words I enjoyed this week from my various online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from wordsmith.org

camorra  (kuh-MOR-uh)

noun: A secret group united for unscrupulous purposes.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Camorra, a secret organization in Naples, Italy, engaged in criminal activities. From Italian, possibly from Spanish camorra (fight). Earliest documented use: 1865.

USAGE:

“Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Führer, a camorra of commissars?”

Albert Jay Nock; Memoirs of a Superfluous Man; Harper & Brothers; 1943.

     - from dictionary.com 

esperance \ES-per-uh ns\

noun

1. Obsolete. hope.

Quotes

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.

-- William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1608

Origin of esperance

Esperance offers a perfect example of the “prothetic” or “prosthetic” vowel e that appears before an s followed by a stop consonant such as p, t at the beginning of a word in some Romance languages. Latin sperāre “to hope” is esperar in Spanish and Portuguese and espérer in French, but sperare in Italian. The prothetic vowel has persisted in modern Spanish, e.g., estación, and in Portuguese, e.g., estação “(train, bus) station,” but not in modern French formations, e.g., station, or in borrowings, e.g., sport (from English). The word entered English in the 15th century.

     - from wordsmith.org

bobbery (BOB-uh-ree)

noun: Squabble; commotion; confusion.

A corruption of Hindi “bap re” (literally, oh father!), an exclamation of surprise, grief, etc., from bap (father) + re (oh). Earliest documented use: 1816.

USAGE: “The whole bobbery, which has simmered for years, will finally come to a boil on Tuesday.”

Peter Fimrite; Feng Shui a Sausalito Voter Issue; San Francisco Chronicle; Feb 27, 2002.

Self on the Shelf, 1

Almost all of our bookshelves are jammed with what they're supposed to be jammed with--books. But this one, in my study, right behind me where I now sit typing, contains as well as some books a variety of items (okay, clutter, flotsam and jetsam and lagan) from my life and career. Let's proceed from left to right and see how far we get today before you or I get bored.

To the far left you can see the spine of a paperback book--It's The American Short Story, Volume 2 (1980), a collection of stories which appeared as films on a PBS series (same name) that ran from 1974-80. The stories were generally American classics--this volume contains by, among others, Hawthorne, Twain, Cather. Joyce and I both used the stories and the videos from time to time in our careers. And--as I look in the book today--I see something I've forgotten: That after the text of the story is the screenplay based upon it.

Next is a bookend (one of a pair), showing an American Indian looking ahead--warily? (I'm not sure where the other bookend is?!) I think my older brother gave me this for a present once upon a time. But I can't be positive. It always reminds me of my Cowboy Phase that began as soon as I learned what a cowboy is and continued until ... well, now. (I still love Westerns. In ways, I remain The Oklahoma Kid)

Behind the bookend is a photograph of my father, Charles Edward Dyer (1913-1999). It's a photo, obviously, from later in his life, and I believe it was taken to be included in his church yearbook. At that time, they were living in Pittsfield, Mass., and attending St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, the same church that Melville had (rarely) attended, the same church where my mom met another member of the congregation, poet Richard Wilbur. And when I discovered that, I sent her some Wilbur books for him to sign--which he graciously did. I love Wilbur's work, have memorized a handful of his poems.

Lying right in front of the picture of my dad is a meerschaum pipe, an item they bought for me when they were in Greece during a visit in the early 1960s. Dad was a pipe-smoker--had a rack he'd acquired somewhere, a rack to hold probably twenty-five pipes or more. For years, I associated the smell of pipe smoke with him. I'm not sure when he quit, but it was quite a bit later in his life. Anyway, they gave me that pipe when I was in college, where, among other things (like literature and art and history and biology and drinking) I had learned to smoke. Cigarettes--Pall Malls my favorite. Dad and Mom thought cigarette-smoking was bad (perhaps even evil) and that pipe-smoking was a more--what? cultured? respectable?--habit. Thus, the pipe. So I became, for a bit, a pipe-smoker. There is even a photograph that has survived from my college years (see below) that shows me on my twenty-first birthday at Hiram College. Some friends have brought goodies to the Student Senate room, where I was "on duty" that night. I'm cutting cake with one hand, holding my pipe in the other, and I look so ... professorial? Right? (More like a pretentious jerk.)

I don't remember when I gave up pipe-smoking, but I'm pretty sure it was after less than a year. (Cigarettes took a few more years, I'm afraid.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 277

In April 1831 (not long after she shunned the apparent marriage offer from Trelawny), Mary became involved in the republication of a novel by her father, William Godwin. Caleb Williams, 1794, was one of his most successful novels—and deservedly so. It’s an exciting story about a young man who discovers a Dark Secret about his employer, who subsequently chases him all over the place. It’s one of the books I read very early in my Mary Shelley research. I see in my journal that I was reading it in mid-August, 1997, a time when Joyce and I were dealing with the sale of our Aurora house, the purchase of our (current) Hudson house, moving, and quite a few other things. But I loved this book that I finished on August 22.

In 1831, a publisher had decided it was time for a re-issue, and Mary would write a brief memoir of her father as part of the publication. Now included as part of The Novels and Collected Works of Mary Shelley, the “Memoirs of William Godwin” takes up about seven pages of text.[i] And as I sit here looking at it, I realize that I have notes on it elsewhere.

I just pulled the file from the drawer and see a note I’ve scrawled on the folder: Photocopied by Brian Brookhart, BGSU [Bowling Green State University] Library, fall 1998. I had taught Brian (eighth-grade English), one of my finest students, and when I learned that Mary’s memoir was available on microform at BGSU, and when I realized that Brian was a student there, I sent him an email, and he hurried over to the library and copied the item for me. (There were others, too, I think.) As I type this (January 20, 2017), Brian is now the assistant principal at Aurora High School, his alma mater.

Once again, of course, I’m reminded of the rapid changes that have occurred in research. Back in 1998, I had to coax a former student into going to a library, finding, threading, reading some microform for me. Now—I just looked—Godwin’s 1831 novel (and Mary’s memoir) are available from a number of sources online. Were I beginning my research today, I would not have to bother Brian—I’d just click and print and accomplish in moments what took him considerably more than that.[ii]

Well, what did Mary have to say about her father?

---

[i]Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces & Notes, vol. 2 of Novels and Selected Works, ed. Pamela Clemit, 245–52.

[ii] Here’s one link: https://archive.org/details/calebwilliams00godwuoft

Twenty Years Have Gone Since ...

Harmon (Middle) School
Aurora, Ohio

... I retired from public school teaching. (Plus three days.)

January 16, 1997, was my final day at Harmon (Middle) School in Aurora, Ohio, the small northeastern Ohio town where I'd begun my teaching career in the fall of 1966. In 1974 we moved out of the old "Aurora Middle School" (now the offices of the Board of Education) and into the new Harmon School, which had few interior walls--the "open-space" concept somewhat popular then. It didn't last long.

I had not taught there the entire time since 1966. In 1978-1979 I taught at Lake Forest College, north of Chicago. I thought I wanted to be a college teacher; it didn't take long to discover I didn't. I missed those frisky middle-schoolers.

But Aurora had no openings. So Joyce and I both took positions at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, not far from Aurora. Joyce would stay until 1990, when she took a position at Hiram College. She retired just last year after decades of spectacular service.

I stayed at the Academy two years (1979-81), then quit (in a salary snit) and taught part-time at Kent State and worked (part-time) at The Learned Owl, a local bookshop in Hudson.

Then--in the fall of 1982--I finally got back to Harmon, where I taught 8th graders until, well, until January 16, 1997.

(I also had a couple of leaves-of-absence and sabbaticals from Aurora.)

By the time 1996 rolled around, Proficiency Test Mania had hit Ohio--hard--and it was (in my view) devastating the curriculum, so I resolved to retire the first moment I was eligible. I checked with the retirement system folks in Columbus and saw that 120 school days (I think) counted as a full year on the retirement plan. I got out my calendar, counted days, informed the Superintendent that I would be retiring on January 16. (I actually miscounted--and worked one more day than I needed to!)

I had a student teacher that fall, and the school had also already hired my replacement, a young man who served in the fall as a kind of all-purpose sub around the building. (He's still there--and just messaged me the other day.) Our assistant principal liked to joke that fall that I had a "staff."

I told the 8th graders that fall that I was going to be retiring--but that I wasn't going to make a big deal of it. I was just going to "slip away" one day with no fanfare--and that's what I did. I told Len (who would take my place) that I would switch places with him after Thanksgiving break. Our principal agreed that would be fine.  Over the vacation, I went to school and began cleaning out my room, removing my things from the walls, etc.

And after break I began doing what Len did. Helping out for absent teachers, working with kids who needed some tutoring in writing, and the like.

That fall I had decided to fill in each day a 3x5 card telling what I had done my final 100 days. I still have that stack of 101 (!) cards.

Here's a period-by-period list of what I did my final day (taken from that card--lightly edited):

6:30: Met Denny Reiser [a long-time colleague] at McDonald's [in nearby Streetsboro] at 6:30 in the morning--talked about the old days--commented that there has been no better period of 30 years in the history of American education--talked about need for boards of education to accommodate senior faculty ...

7:30: kids [whom I was tutoring in writing] wrote weather composition; good vibes at the end--last class; said good-bye to kitchen workers, one of whom thanked me for the work I'd done with her children ...

1st period: long talk with principal Jerry Brodsky--look back at career--gifts & cards all over my desk ...

periods 2-3-4: helped out with a 6th grade class; kids were talking about the Guinness Book of World Records and Greek city-states ...

5th period: cleared/cleaned room; printed out final reports for tutoring kids

6th period: lunch--old-timers reminiscing about strike [spring 1978]

7th period: final class I helped out in; a young girl was in it, a girl whose father I'd taught the first year I'd been in Aurora

8th period: the superintendent came by, shook my hand, said it was "the end of the Dyer era" at Harmon ...

after school--said good-bye to the custodians who had been such a help to me with play productions and other things--tears in all our eyes--freezing cold day, snow in the air--people left early; I carried out to the car a load of things in a briefcase I had carried on the 1st day of my career--a briefcase my parents had given me (I hadn't used it in years) ...


And that was it.

We lived only about a half-mile from the school, so the trip home was a quick one. I unloaded the car. Sat in the house. Waited for Joyce to get home from Hiram College. Thought about the future unrolling before me. I had just turned 52 years of age.

**

It wasn't too long before I was missing the place--not all the work, of course, just the people who were in that building. I was jogging in those days, and I had a route that took me right past the school. It seemed odd, running along, not being inside, doing what I was supposed to be doing.

But I was already caught up in researching and writing about the life of Mary Shelley. It would be my next big project. (I had just published a couple of books about Jack London.) I didn't know then that it would consume ten years of my life--and, in a way, is still consuming me.

But I still missed teaching, missed the classroom ...

Then, a few years later, it seemed I might go back. Not to Harmon but to the high school (which needed an English teacher). But I'd let my certificate lapse, and Ohio's Department of Education told me I needed to take some courses to renew it. I was pissed. A Ph.D. with 30 years' experience--with publications--etc. And I'm not qualified to teach!?!?

The point became moot: The school hired someone else, someone who could fill an extra-curricular position that I couldn't.

Then here came Western Reserve Academy again. I thought I'd spend a year or two up there. I spent ten. And then retired--again!--in the spring of 2011. Health was one issue--one big issue--in my decision. I loved my years there, as well.

Since then, I've gone back to WRA a few times (speeches, some class visits), and I've done some presentations with kids for the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of their Big Read program. I've not been back to Harmon since I retired, but something may be rumbling in the works. I'll let you know.

Anyway, it seems impossible to me that twenty years have passed since I walked out that back door of Harmon School, loaded my car, drove home.

I am so profoundly grateful that I had a chance to work at that amazing school with so many gifted colleagues, so many wonderful students, many, many of whom are now my Facebook friends.

And this final daunting reminder: My first seventh graders from 1966 are now in their sixties. That is not funny!

Frankenstein Sundae, 276

Remember—earlier—that Mary had had a wee flirtation with Washington Irving. The author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—perhaps surprised at first, perhaps more?—soon learned that Mary was serious about him, and, as we’ve seen, galloped away from her with all the supernatural speed of his famous Horseman.

Since Bysshe had drowned in the summer of 1822, Mary had written often in her journal (and in letters) about her loneliness. She wrote that she threw herself into her studies—into her writing—and this seemed, at times, to work for her. But Loneliness is an insistent visitor. And in her letters to Trelawny, who had been a dear friend to Bysshe and her that dark summer of 1822 when Bysshe and the others drowned, Mary spoke lightly of marriage—well, of re-marriage.

In a letter to him in the summer of 1831, Mary wrote about her despair in some detail: My whole being is an aching void, she wrote, which refused to give forth any fruits, the fulness of sorrow is great, but much greater its emptiness. She wrote about this sea of misery and my shipwrecked life and the hurricane of dispair [sic]. She asked him: … when will the swell and storm die away and the dead calm of this great ocean come?[1] Of course, all these marine images—these allusions to storms—had a powerful resonance for her. And for us.

But she wrote that she would consider marriage—to anyone who will take me out of my present desolate & uncomfortable position. But then she writes a bit more that suggests she will not marry—Mary Shelley shall be written on my tomb—and why? I cannot tell—except that it is so pretty a name that tho’ I were to preach to myself for years, I never should have the heart to get rid of it—[2]

Words like these—and similar words in earlier letters to Trelawny—seem to have prompted a marriage proposal from him (though we have no direct confirmation of that). But Mary’s reply was not exactly, uh, encouraging.

The first part of her letter of July 26, 1831, dealt with the details of the publication of Trelawny’s memoir, Adventures of a Younger Son. But then came this: My name will never be Trelawny. I am not so young as I was when you first knew me—but I am as proud—I must have the entire affection, devotion & above all the solicitous protection of any one who would win me—You belong to womenkind in general—& so Mary Shelley will never be yours ….[3]

---

[1] Ibid., 140.

[2] Ibid., 139.

[3] Ibid., 143.