Frankenstein Sundae, 323

After a visit to Berlin, they move on to Dresden, where she revels in the loveliness of the city, the museums, the works of art. And then … on to Prague … and more visits to baths. But she tells us about an earlier experience at Töplitz (or Teplitz), where you go down a few marble steps into a basin of the same material, filled with water of delightful temperature and pellucid clearness. I never experienced a more agreeable bath.[1]

Volume II of Rambles continues her account of her stay in Prague, 1842, a volume she begins with some descriptions of the habits of Germans she has seen as she’s traveled. They have, she writes, a habit of staring … their eyes follow you with pertinacity, without any change of expression.[2] She complains as well about the quality of German bread, calling it a sour, black, damp, uneatable substance.[3]

Mary, in her youth, was a more amiable, generous traveler; now, as her ill health gains more and more control, she is more … grumpy, sounding at times almost like the cliché of the whimpering, spoiled American tourist.

But soon she is back in Italy—and much happier. She is wise and light-hearted enough to recognize as a tourist trap the so-called “tomb of the Capulets” in Verona. But in Venice, she is reminded of the horrors of her earlier stay in 1818 when she and Bysshe buried their daughter, Clara Everina Shelley, barely a year old. Death hovered over the scene, she writes. … I saw those before me long departed; and I was agitated again by emotions—by passions—and those the deepest a woman’s heart can harbour—a dread to see her child even at that instant expire ….[4] Little Clara’s gravesite remains unknown.

---

[1] Ibid., 278.

[2] Ibid., 11.

[3] Ibid., 17.

[4] Ibid., 78.

Loose Canon, Part 2

A couple of days ago I wrote here about how--when I was a young student--the literary canon (accepted standard works by accepted standard writers) was fairly fixed and fatuous: pretty much all works by dead white males.

I noted, too, that over the ensuing years, the canon has broadened, become far more inclusive and generous than it once was. And that is more than good; it's wonderful.

The last ten years of my teaching career (2001-2011) I taught college-prep high school juniors at Western Reserve Academy. The eleventh-grade curriculum then was American lit + Hamlet ("that great American hero," as I used to joke--oh, wag that I was!).

And I believed it was an important aspect of my job to have the kids read writers and works that they would hear about later on--writers and works that have been important in some way in American literature and culture.

And so--except for Hamlet, of course--I took them on a sequential (and obviously somewhat superficial) tour of the American literary landscape, beginning with the earliest of our writers (Phillis Wheatley, Philip Freneau, etc.) to some of the most recent. As the year ended, we often memorized a poem by the current American Poet Laureate--and we read something brand new by a contemporary American writer--some of whom we were able to lure to campus to spend the day with us: Tobias Wolff, Sharon Olds, Robert Sullivan, Matthew Pearl, Brock Clarke--these were some of those who sat in our classrooms and talked with us about the work(s) that we had read.

I had the kids keep a Timeline, as well--charting the births and deaths of the writers, the dates of publication of their key works, plus important events in American history and culture that appeared throughout the centuries. I wanted them to see the patterns, the coincidences.

This, I believed, was my job. And so I did it.

But now I wonder (and this is what Joyce and I were talking about the other evening): Is the whole idea of the canon corroding? Disappearing?  Or is the canon just changing so fast that--as I mentioned the other day--as the new writers come in the front door, the older ones, unable to compete, find themselves being forced out the back door?

How many high schools still teach novels by Charles Dickens?  (Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield used to be fairly standard. As did Eliot's Silas Marner.) Are the works by Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins and so many others of their ilk now taught only in college--and grad school to an ever-decreasing number of English majors? And how often are those works and writers taught there? I've read (and heard) that student patience for long novels with long sentences and long paragraphs is evaporating. I mean, many of us English majors in the 1960s were never exactly thrilled to see on the syllabus a fat novel by Thackeray. But it was unthinkable that the professors would not assign them.

The literary lions of my own youth have mostly died, and I wonder how many youngsters today read Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (he, I think, lingers on), William Styron, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, et al. Would many high school students today even recognize those names? And does it matter?

A glance at the table of contents of an old volume of the McGuffey Reader, a standard schoolbook in the era before my own, is both illuminating and alarming. My maternal grandparents had a set of the books, Grades One through Six, and I have somehow ended up with Five and Six. And here are a few writers included in Six: Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Charles Dickens, Ruskin, Scott, Bryant ... and on and on and on.

my grandparents' copy

Does this mean that kids once were more academic and fascinated with long sentences and sophisticated vocabulary? I seriously doubt it. But I think it does mean that we (we = those responsible for public education) once believed that it was our duty to make sure that our citizens knew these names--knew a bit of what those writers wrote. This knowledge was a form of common currency.

The advent of Young Adult literature has helped change the curricular landscape--and I am not complaining: I've written and published works for the YA audience. Middle grade (and even high school) teachers find that kids are drawn to YA works more than to canonical ones. Better they read something than nothing is the chorus, and I'm not saying I disagree.

Of course, there are--out there--all kinds of other social/cultural factors that have weakened the significance of the book in many kids' lives (the equivalents of the comic-book-TV-pinball machine villains of my own youth): Internet, social media, streaming video, etc.

I am certain that if I'd grown up in this world, I'd be right there, texting and snap-chatting and whatever. It's just too alluring and immediate--unlike, say, Great Expectations.

I don't blame young people at all for any of this. This is the world we gave them, not the world they created. Blaming them is like punishing a pet dog for eating the rich raw steak you left on the kitchen floor.

So what do we do about it? There's probably nothing we can do. People used to rage, rage against novels, against stage productions, against movies, against radio, against record-players, against TV, against rock-n-roll, against ... whatever was popular with the younger generation.

I think there will always be readers who will want to try Dickens, and Austen and Collins. I sometimes see them in the coffee shops where I hang out (maybe I should add "coffee shops" to my list of cultural distractions!). But there are fewer of them. And they will grow ever fewer. And the canon will totally dissolve--and something we cannot even imagine will appear in its place.

Frankenstein Sundae, 322

Part Two deals with events two years later—1842–43. And Mary is not feeling well. She notes that she has always suffered from seasickness (she was famously ill during her elopement with Bysshe when they crossed the Channel in 1814). I hate and dread the sea, she writes, having suffered—oh, what suffering it is!—how absorbing!—how degrading!—how without remedy![1]

But it’s not just the sea voyage. Her overall health has weakened—and she is only in her forties. She says she can no longer apply to my ordinary employments. But she trusts renewed health will be the result of change of place.[2]

She writes about her ignorance of the German language as they travel through the country and visit important sites. But she resolves she will try to learn the language this time. She has little luck. I make no progress in German, she confesses; my eyes and health have both held me back, and our master does not lead me on.[3]

She is also “taking the waters”—enjoying the many public baths they visit. Undergoing water treatments for her various maladies, she has different views of and experiences with them. Of the waters in Brocklet [sic; she means Bad Bocklet, in Bavaria, still noted for its spa], she writes, They [the waters] taste like ink, but I liked them much, and drank several glasses, with a great sense of deriving benefit from them.[4]

That’s quite an image, isn’t it? A writer loving water that tastes like ink!

They continue on through Germany, tasting the waters in each key spot, and she comments wryly about seeing enormously fat men trying to thin down ….[5]

After a visit to Berlin, they move on to Dresden, where she revels in the loveliness of the city, the museums, the works of art. And then … on to Prague … 

---

[1] Ibid, 156.

[2] Ibid., 157.

[3] Ibid., 194.

[4] Ibid., 196.

[5] Ibid., 198.

Loose Canon

No, I didn't misspell cannon. I was making a stupid pun. In this case I am using canon to mean literary canon--"an accepted or sanctioned list of books" (Merriam-Webster). Joyce and I were talking the other evening on a drive to get coffee, and it occurred to me (I'm slow sometimes) that the canon as I have known it in my lifetime is fading. And fast.

When I was a young student, the canon was fairly fixed and more than a bit fatuous: It comprised mostly Dead White Men (Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, etc.), and even my boyhood deck of cards--that Authors game--featured five men (Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Shakespeare) and but one woman (Louisa May Alcott).

In school we read very few women writers in class. Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrrett Browning, a few others--those were about it.

At Hiram College I read more by women--especially in the contemporary fiction course I took from Prof. Abe C. Ravitz (Shirley Ann Grau is one I remember). I did not take, then, much British lit. (I was into American), but I knew those classes read Austen, the Brontës,  Eliot, Mary Shelley, and many others.

But the canon then was not just male-dominated. Writers from other races and cultures and persuasions had yet to make their ways into CanonWorld.

So what I'm saying: The literary canon of my day needed some serious revision. And in the decades since I graduated from college, so much has happened to it. In American lit classes students now read Zora Neale Hurston and Kate Chopin and Richard Wright and Sharon Olds and ...

But what I was thinking about the other night is that this "looseness" in the canon has not only allowed deserving others in; it has allowed deserving others to fall out. For part (much?) of this I'll blame the public schools, in which I worked for thirty years. Well, only partially ... slightly?

When I was going through high school (here we go! an Old-Man cliche!), we pretty much read only those writers who were in the canon. Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, Shelley (Percy Bysshe), Byron, etc.

I have a copy of the anthology we used when I was in ninth grade (1958-59)--Adventures in Reading (Harcourt Brace 1958). It includes some writers I'd not heard of (and still have not heard of!), like Edward McCourt.  But it's chockablock with famous literary names: O. Henry, Selma Lagerlöf (who won a Nobel Prize), John Masefield, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Shakespeare, Scott, Longfellow, Poe, Kipling, Homer, and on and on ...

And at the end of the anthology is Dickens' Great Expectations (abridged, thank God, though I still couldn't make myself read the damn thing).

All of this was "normal" in my youth.

Of course, adults railed about how all of us were being corrupted by comic books and television and pinball machines--corruptions that seem quaint in these media-mad days. When I was was a teenager in Hiram, Ohio, we had three TV stations available to us--Cleveland stations affiliated with the three major networks (NBC, CBS, ABC). That's it. No video recording. No streaming (duh). No playback possibilities. If you wanted to watch Perry Mason, then you made sure you were in front of your TV set on Saturday night between 7:30-8:30 p.m. (its original broadcast slot, 1957-62--it would change). If you missed an episode, you could catch it in the summer when the re-runs were on.

Oh, and all the stations signed off after the late movie-about 1 a.m.

Years passed. Stuff happened--and that's what we'll get into next time!


To be continued ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 321

Mary finally headed for home from Milan—crossing the Alps once again, and she praised their majestic simplicity that inspired awe; the naked bones of a gigantic world were here; the elemental substance of that mother Earth ….[1]

In a letter dated October 4, 1840, she talked about her return to Lake Geneva—to the site where she’d given birth to Frankenstein in the summer of 1816. There … stood Diodati [Lord Byron’s villa]; and our humble dwelling, Maison Chapuis, nestled close to the lake below. … Was I the same person who had lived there, the companion of the dead? For all were gone: even my young child [William], whom I had looked upon as the joy of future years, had died in infancy …. While yet very young, she grieves, I had reached the position of an aged person ….[2]

William Shelley, who was not even a year old that Frankenstein summer in Geneva, died of malaria—recall—in Italy on June 17, 1819, in Rome, where he lies in the Protestant Cemetery; three years later his father would join him there.

It must have been wrenching for Mary to look on those sites—to recall those days from a quarter-century earlier—those days when she and Bysshe were fresh and hopeful, when her little boy, William, delighted her, when they were spending long hours with Lord Byron, when he proposed they all write a ghost story, the days when that stunning idea arrived, that idea about a man bringing life to a creature assembled from the parts of the dead, a creature that still walks among us two centuries later.

Mary didn’t stay long in Geneva but soon departed for Paris, where she reunited with her son, Percy, and his companions. And so ends Part One of her Rambles. 

---

[1] Ibid., 135.

[2] Ibid., 139–40.

Sunday Sundries, 148

1. AOTW: Well, we have several co-winners this week, all of whom did the same thing: cutting out in front of me, forcing me to brake (in some cases--hard), all in service of their compulsion to save seven seconds on their journey. May their roads lead straight to Hel--ena, Montana.

2. I finished three books this week.

    - The first, via Kindle, was another of Craig Johnson's novels about Walt Longmire (whose adventures as a contemporary Wyoming sheriff--very unlike those in the books--are on Netflix these days). This one was A Serpent's Tooth (2013). Johnson drew the title, of course, from that famous line in King Lear, as the devastated old king is cursing the betrayal of a child:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child! (1.4)

This one is a very complex--and highly implausible--story about a religious cult, about some secret oil drilling going on in remote Wyoming. But I've come not to worry too much about the plots in these books--or in the books of other fine mystery writers/TV writers: Instead, I gradually become drawn into the characters' lives and relationships, and those are what I find I care about the most. In the books, Walt's ongoing relationship with Vic(toria), his deputy, is much more, uh, carnal than in the TV show. And much more complicated (like most relationships between men and women).

So ... excessive plots be damned! Give me people!

     - I finished two by Michael Chabon, as well--and I have now read all of his books (and have become a major fan). The first took me about fifteen minutes to read. It's a children's book, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man (2011--wonderfully illustrated by Jake Parker).

The superhero himself narrates the story--tells us about his various powers ("I can shoot positronic rays out of my eyeballs.") and some adventures. I'll not tell you more--or about the "Awwwwww" ending. I'll say only that Chabon's a better writer for adults. Not that I didn't enjoy the story (I did); I just thought it needed another run by his editor--or by a professional writer of stories for children. His diction, in my view, is just a little ... off ... for early and/pre-readers.

     - The other Chabon book is a wonderful  2009 collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. One of Chabon's great appeals throughout these pieces is his modesty--his willingness (almost eagerness at times) to admit his failures in all three categories he identifies in the subtitle.

Most of the pieces are short, pithy, wry, self-deprecating (see above), humorous--and emotional. He writes about Legos and religion, about comic books and Captain Underpants, family and failure. In one essay about his former father-in-law (Chabon's been married twice), he comments about a photo from back during his first marriage--"looking as if I knew what I was doing" (94). I can relate to that--as most of us surely can.

And a sentence that really resonated with me: "What explains almost all the ills and wrongnesses of the world, cataclysmic and trivial, [is] the failure of imagination" (108).

I laughed in an essay about his deciding to carry a man-purse.

And I loved this, too: "... each of us serves as a constant source of embarrassment to his or her future self" (200). True for me, I will tell you that!


3. And then ... a pretty bad movie, The House (Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler), which we saw last night in Kent. I knew it probably wouldn't be much good--but I had a popcorn craving. So, you know, better to eat it in the dark where it didn't really happen, you know? I mean, when the lights came up, it was gone. Someone else (Joyce?) must have consumed it!

Anyway, it was a pretty grim story about a family suddenly in need of funds to send their daughter to Bucknell (she's lost a promised scholarship). So ... they join with a wacko buddy, recently separated from his wife, and open a casino in his house--illegal, of course.

The script was ultra-predictable--near the end, in fact, I was whispering characters' lines before they said them. (Joyce was both amused--and not.)

Film trailer..

Not a lot of others were there, confirming the appropriateness of my self-loathing.

4. Final Word--a word I liked this week from my various online word-of-the-day providers:

     - interdigitate verb [in-ter-dij-i-teyt]

1. to interlock, as or like the fingers of both hands.

QUOTES

Linguistic history is so much harder for two primary reasons. First, branches can reconnect, interweave, interdigitate, borrow from and filter through one another.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, "Talk Gets Around," New York Times, December 11, 1988

ORIGIN

Interdigitate is a derivative of the Latin noun digitus, most commonly meaning is “finger” and secondarily “toe” and finally, as a measure of length, “the breadth of a finger, inch.” The Latin noun derives from the Proto-Indo-European root (and its variants) deik-, doik-, dik- (also deig-, doig-, dig-) “to point, point out, show.” One of the Germanic derivatives of doik- is taih(wō), which in Old English develops into tahe and then tā, whence Modern English “toe,” except that human beings cannot interdigitate with their toes. Interdigitate entered English in the 19th century.

Yes, I'm still memorizing ...

Edward Estlin (E. E.) Cummings (1894-1962)
He died on September 3, my freshman year
at Hiram College

Yes, I'm still memorizing poems--and thanks for asking! When I reached 200 a few months ago, I thought, Well, that's enough.

And so it was.

Until it wasn't.

I learned a couple more because Joyce liked them--e.g., Housman's poem that begins "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough" (link to entire poem). Then I did a few short ones, you know, just to feel as if I were doing something. One of those is by William Stafford and begins, "Our father owned a star" (link to it).

And then there was that dark one by Edna St. Vincent Millay--"Spring"--which begins with this bright line: "To what purpose, April, do you return again?" (It gets much darker: link to poem.)

And it wasn't long before I reached 208. Which is where I now sit.

Sort of.

You see, on Father's Day this year, Joyce--without telling me! how could she do that!--posted on Facebook an E. E. Cummings poem ("my father moved through dooms of love"), a poem with seventeen quatrains, each of which is a bit ... puzzling--though Cummings' fans will smile: Since when isn't a Cummings poem puzzling?

I know a few of his already--"maggie and milly and molly and may" (which I used to have my WRA students read--link), "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (that took some doing to learn!--link), and "(love is more thicker than forget)" (link)--which has the virtue of brevity (four short stanzas!).

But then I read what Joyce posted--that seventeen-stanza celebration of a father--and I realized I had to memorize it. And I've been trying ... But it is so complex, so weird ... I'm not learning it very fast. As of right now, I have seven stanzas more or less in my head--and I will launch into another one this afternoon. It'll probably take me a few more weeks ... at which time you can endure another blog post about it!

It's the most difficult thing I've tried to memorize--and it has little to do with length. I mean, I know "To be or not to be"; I know "Kubla Khan"; I know long poems by Longfellow (get it? long fellow?), some other long speeches in Shakespeare. But they--all of them--make, you know, conventional sense. Cummings, on the other hand, requires something else of me: I have to construct the sense as I learn it, for the sense, you see, is not always apparent--or easily evident.

And Cummings makes it no easier by playing fast-and-loose with punctuation, with capitalization, with writing conventions of all sorts (as you can see below).

But I am damn well going to do it! And I'm going to recite it for Joyce, and I'm going to tell her, See what you made me do!

And then I'm going to thank her.


Here's the whole damn poem--I put it in red because the effort to learn it is making me bleed! (BTW: I own the single-volume complete poetical works of Cummings, and when I double-checked the online version with the printed version (as I always do before memorizing), I discovered the printed version had omitted a line!)

my father moved through dooms of love

through sames of am through haves of give,

singing each morning out of each night

my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where

turned at his glance to shining here;

that if (so timid air is firm)

under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which

floats the first who, his april touch

drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates

woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep

my father’s fingers brought her sleep:

vainly no smallest voice might cry

for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea

my father moved through griefs of joy;

praising a forehead called the moon

singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure

a heart of star by him could steer

and pure so now and now so yes

the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer’s keen beyond

conceiving mind of sun will stand,

so strictly (over utmost him

so hugely) stood my father’s dream    [THIS IS AS FAR AS I'VE GOTTEN]

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:

no hungry man but wished him food;

no cripple wouldn’t creep one mile

uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the Pomp of must and shall

my father moved through dooms of feel;

his anger was as right as rain

his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend

less humbly wealth to foe and friend

than he to foolish and to wise

offered immeasurable is

proudly and (by octobering flame

beckoned) as earth will downward climb,

so naked for immortal work

his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:

no liar looked him in the head;

if every friend became his foe

he’d laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,

singing each new leaf out of each tree

(and every child was sure that spring

danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,

let blood and flesh be mud and mire,

scheming imagine, passion willed,

freedom a drug that’s bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,

a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,

bitter all utterly things sweet,

maggoty minus and dumb death

all we inherit, all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth

—i say though hate were why men breathe—

because my Father lived his soul

love is the whole and more than all