2021 reads, #88. This really shouldn't have its own book page at Goodreads, because it's really only a short story; but since it does, I'm going to go2021 reads, #88. This really shouldn't have its own book page at Goodreads, because it's really only a short story; but since it does, I'm going to go ahead and log it so it'll count towards my year-long tally for my Reading Challenge! Known as one of the first great black-humor satirists in American history (don't forget, we didn't even have a "literary community" per se for the first time until the 1850s), this particular piece is a mainstay of high-school English classes, for being one of the first examples in American literary history of pulling the rug out from under the reader, first imagining the daring escape, detail by detail, of a proud Southern plantation owner who's about to be hung off a bridge for war crimes by Union soldiers, just to reveal in the last paragraph that (131-year-old spoiler alert) the whole thing was a last-second hallucinatory flash as the man's neck breaks in the now suspended noose. I mean, that's it -- it's not a particularly great story, but it's the very first example of something important, and for that reason it will live on forever no matter what the quality of the story itself. Certainly, though, it was a good reminder that I'd like to know more about this fascinating, deeply weird fellow. Maybe an extended reading project for next summer? Hmm!...more
2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of th2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of that poetry-slam nonsense either, but actual formal poetry based on actual classic poetry forms, things like sonnets and haikus and other thousand-year-old traditions. As part of my research into what the genre of poetry currently contains, this month I'm doing what I consider a really interesting reading of four anthologies in a row, all four of which have very different flavors:
--A collection of what's called "the American people's favorite poems," a project put together by Robert Pinsky back when he was the US Poet Laureate under the Clinton administration, in which over 18,000 random Americans made nominations for their favorite poem of all time, and Pinsky and others selected several hundred to include in the book;
--The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology, published by Scribner and with pieces hand-selected by a different famous guest editor each year, which ideally should give me an idea of what kind of work is appealing to people in the literary community at this exact moment in history;
--The 90th anniversary anthology of Poetry magazine, featuring several hundred pieces hand-selected by their editors as a good overview of the best the magazine has published over the last century (almost all of it modern free verse, which is what the magazine originally got famous for when first established in the Modernist 1920s);
--And today's anthology, the most traditional of the lot, which I thought would be a good one to start with, since it's an overview of what was generally considered the best poetry in existence up to the start of the Modernist era and the invention of free verse. Published by Columbia University, The Classic Hundred is actually an "anthology of anthologies," assembling over 400 other academic tomes and then aggregating all their tables of content in order to determine the hundred most frequently republished poems in these 400 anthologies. As such, then, it's largely a primer to history's most famous poetry, but by definition contains almost no modern work at all (only 17 pieces here are from the 20th century whatsoever, and I don't think there's a single poem from World War Two to the present day), and in uncharitable terms might also be defined as a primer to all the hoary old "thee" and "thou" crap you were forced to read in high school, and which turned you off poetry for good.
So does this make the book a valuable read or not? Good question! On the one hand, this book takes a lot of freaking patience to get through, and I had to limit myself to only five or ten per day so to not get burned out on all the flowery purple prose on display here, as good an example as any to why a disgusted literary community invented free verse modern poetry at the beginning of the 20th century to begin with. But on the other hand, this was my first chance to read what's widely considered many of the best poems ever written in human history, and gave me a gentle starting point for falling down the rabbit holes later this year of Early Romanticism, Shakespearean sonnets, the huge resurgence in popularity poetry went through during the Victorian Age, and a lot more. It was also this anthology that taught me that the famous phrase "season of mists" comes from John Keats, "miles to go before I sleep" from Robert Frost, "gather ye rose-buds while ye may" from Robert Herrick, "death be not proud" from John Donne, "slouching towards Bethlehem" and "no country for old men" from William Butler Yeats, "look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" from Percy Shelley, and "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" from William Shakespeare, as well as that Robert Oppenheimer gave the atomic bomb tests the codename "Trinity" after Donne's poem "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God;" and it could be argued that just this knowledge alone was worth the time to read this.
So all in all, a mixed bag; and unlike the novels I regularly review here at Goodreads, I suspect that whether or not you should read this anthology yourself depends a lot more on what you're looking to get out of poetry in the first place, and not so much on the objective quality of the manuscript itself. Since I must give it a score, I'm giving it 4 stars, to reflect the undeniable fact that many, many people consider these the best poems of all time; but be aware that that score quickly drops to zero stars if all you're interested in is modern verse, for example, or non-Western poetry forms like haiku (of which there isn't even a single one here). Keep it in mind when making your own decision about whether or not to pick it up; but as for me personally, I'm glad I did so, in that it gave me a strong sense of the formal fundamentals behind pre-Modernist poetry, which is what I'm most interested in writing myself. ...more
I find it fascinating that, when author Frances Hodgson Burnett was alive, her fans didn't have even the slightest doubt that 1886's now forgotten Little Lord Fauntleroy would go on to become the most famous work of her career, given that it was undoubtedly so at the time; while the one book of hers that has had a remarkably long shelf life, 1911's The Secret Garden, was considered a mediocre trifle among her original audience, even to the point where most obituaries written after her 1924 death didn't mention the book at all. That says a lot about the changing nature of children's literature; because Fauntleroy is about as perfect an example as you can find of what for a long time was held as the most noble paradigm of the genre, that the best kids' books are the ones that portray children who behave in the way their book-buying parents wished children did, and not necessarily the way children actually do, which has been the new norm in the industry since the rise of the "Young Adult" category in the early 1970s.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the book is freaking delightful, the main reason it's getting a high score from me. It's the tale of a minor noble in Victorian England, one so thoroughly unpleasant that it inspires one of his sons to literally move to America and turn his back on his family, devoting his life instead to social justice issues before tragically dying in middle-age; so when through a series of circumstances it's revealed that the late lord's own seven-year-old son is the next in line to inherit the grumpy old earl's titles and estate, it comes as a shock to everyone involved, not least of which is the chatty, bubbly, perennially optimistic little boy Cedric himself. And therein lies the rub; for as an adult, I was thoroughly charmed by Cedric's eternal enthusiasm for life, his precocious behavior, and his total, complete, 100 percent pollyannaish dedication to always look on the bright side of life, which needless to say melts the curmudgeonly old earl's heart and gives him a new enthusiasm for human existence. But sister, if I had read this in grade school when I actually was Fauntleroy's age, the amount of furious eye-rolling that would've occurred would've been strong enough to knock the Earth off its orbital axis and bring an end to the entire space-time continuum.
That's the problem in a nutshell with these kinds of centuries-old children's stories, that they're not designed for actual children at all; or I guess I should say that their adult authors mean for them to teach children how to be better people than they are, in fact to hold up a platonically ideal standard for "childhood" that no real child in existence could ever live up to, but in no way were designed to reflect the actual fears, hopes and joys of the actual child audience who were reading the books. So as a 51-year-old, I found the book hilarious and enchanting, precisely because Burnett was writing the book specifically to entertain me, the dude with the wallet who's actually in charge of buying the books my children will eventually read. And that's why children's literature remained a shrug-worthy anomaly for so long, and one of the big reasons it exploded in popularity a mere twenty years after the first attempts in the '70s by authors like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars to write realistic, naturalistic stories that mirrored the actual struggles and triumphs of the kids reading them, not the idealistic parents holding the pursestrings; and it's the exact reason that Burnett's own The Secret Garden (featuring a lot more self-sufficiency and self-motivated agency among the child characters) has in the 21st century become so profoundly more popular than Fauntleroy which, despite being as popular during its own times as the Harry Potter books are to ours (among other things, it's the book that gave us the Buster Brown suit, which forever changed the way society thinks about dressing toddlers), was mostly that way because of well-meaning parents who wished their kids were more like the little lord, not because of kids who saw themselves reflected in him. Although it was fun as a 21st century adult to read, in no way at all would I recommend this as a contemporary children's tale worthy of the time of most contemporary children. ...more
The first half of Herman Melville's long story/short novella Bartleby, the Scrivener is quite easy here in the 21st century to describe; it's simply his 1853 version of the hit TV show The Office, with our put-upon titular clerk being the Transcendental version of slacker hero Jim Halpert, clearly overqualified for his menial job of being essentially a human xerox machine (now an obsolete career, "scriveners" used to be in charge of handwriting copies of legal documents, where it was critical that every single word and piece of punctuation be copied exactly correctly without even a single mistake), and who responds to every request to expand his duties or make friends with his dull co-workers with a plaintive, "I would prefer not to."
I mean, sure, the story goes in a much more absurdist direction in the second half, in which his flustered boss attempts to rid himself of the relentlessly unnerving Bartleby by literally moving his office to another building, at which point he learns that the clerk has been arrested and sent to jail because he absolutely refused to leave his desk even when a new company moved into the space, and where he eventually dies because of "preferring not to" eat or drink once imprisoned. But certainly the story is one of the first examples of an American writer demonstrating the droll, winking humor that would come to virtually define the US arts, and along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and others is tragic evidence of how much sooner the American arts could've entered the world stage and held its own against Europeans, if not for the Civil War less than a decade later that virtually shut down culture in our country for an entire generation. Like many of the stories from this time period, it's better appreciated now for its historical qualities than enjoyed as a simple piece of entertainment (and, also like many other stories from the period, has been beaten to death by a century's worth of lazy high school American Lit teachers); but given that it can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg and then read in its entirety in a single day, it really wouldn't hurt you to check it out one day soon if you never have, a fine example of the strange directions American literature started going almost from the country's inception. It comes with a limited recommendation in this spirit, in reality a 3 1/2 star rating from me, rounded up simply for its historical importance. ...more
This was my latest read through the free service DailyLit.com, which takes public-domain books and chops them up into thousand-word chunks and emails This was my latest read through the free service DailyLit.com, which takes public-domain books and chops them up into thousand-word chunks and emails them once a day to you; but unlike what I normally do at DailyLit.com, this time I decided to just choose an unknown book at random that I had never heard of before, simply to see what kind of experience I would get out of it. And the answer is, "...Um, pretty much what you would expect when you pick a 123-year-old book from an obscure author that by now has been almost completely forgotten." Never a huge author to begin with, Jewett specialized in "American Regionalism" writing, specializing in genteel looks at her native Maine that, according to contemporaries at the time, read and sounded exactly like the local population actually did in those years; and she's also beloved among a certain wing of academic feminists for writing about the issues and travails of female characters at a point long before it became popular to do so. Both of these things are true, which explains why the book is still important enough to be found at a place like DailyLit.com; but it still results in a tale that's pretty slow, pretty dated, and with not much of a three-act storyline to speak of, but rather more a snapshot look at a no-stakes week in the life of a small fishing village in the upper northern corner of New England. It wasn't bad by any means, but certainly it's making me think twice about just picking unknown random books like this again, which should be kept in mind before deciding whether or not to pick it up yourself. ...more
This is one of the public domain books I read through DailyLit.com, a service that breaks famous novels up into thousand-word chunks and then emails yThis is one of the public domain books I read through DailyLit.com, a service that breaks famous novels up into thousand-word chunks and then emails you a chunk once every morning; and I frankly only took it on just to say that I had read this famous 1908 children's tale once before I died, but not really expecting too much out of it. So that's what made it such a surprise, then, to learn that this book is freaking hilarious, not in an asterisked "hilarious for little girls in 1908" way, but in an actual, modern, really-will-make-you-laugh-out-loud sense. The key of course, as anyone who's read the book can tell you, is in Montgomery's wily, complex heroine, an 11-year-old Canadian orphan who is mistakenly sent to an elderly couple's house after they instead requested a teenage boy to help them tend their farm, but whose crazily creative mind, loving earnestness, and cartoonishly self-righteous stubbornness ends up (eventually) winning over every person she meets.
This alone is interesting, but by itself wouldn't have made the book the treat it is; what really seals the deal is author Montgomery's natural understanding of witty, Simpsons-like humor, transforming Anne from what would've otherwise been just another bratty Edwardian-Age goody-good into a literal personification of the Imp of the Perverse, her clever mannerisms drawn by Montgomery in such sharp, clear detail that you can't help but burst into laughter at the visual image of this gangly redhead actually acting that way in the real world. (Just for one example, perhaps my favorite image in this entire novel is the Valentine's Day when a male classmate, trying to make up for an earlier slight, gives Anne a candy heart, which Anne then accepts while smiling, then while maintaining eye contact with the boy the entire time, drops on the floor and grinds into powder with the heel of her shoe.)
That's what makes this book such a charmer, that Montgomery had the skills as a writer to portray her protagonist's idiosyncrasies in such a concrete way as to make her feel completely real and like she's standing right in front of you, a feisty yet true-hearted girl who you can imagine in modern times growing up to be that hilariously cynical computer-coder or punk-bassist friend who always drinks too much at your parties and ends up trending on Twitter the next day. It's no wonder that generation after generation of young independent girls continue to see themselves reflected in our obstinate hero; and I have to say, I loved this so much that I'm seriously thinking of taking on some of the other eight books of the complete Anne series, a decades-long storyline that stretches all the way into the lives of Anne's eventual daughters. It comes strongly recommended for one and all, perhaps one of the few times in my life that I can say such a thing about a century-old children's book without needing to add air quotes....more
Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018.Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
For the first two-thirds of its running time, Robert Coover's new Huck Out West can only be called a perfect novel, which is why it came close to being the first book of the year to score a perfect 10 here at CCLaP. Or to be more specific, it succeeds perfectly at what it's aiming to do, which is to read and feel like a long-lost new chapter in the Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn saga by Mark Twain, which to remind you consists not only of the original two volumes of "Adventures" themselves, but also two largely forgotten sequels that Twain himself wrote in his elderly years, 1894's Tom Sawyer Abroad (a parody of Jules Verne's fantastical novels) and 1896's Tom Sawyer, Detective (in which Sawyer serves as a Matlock-style combination PI and lawyer, to both defend his uncle when unfairly accused of murder and to figure out who the real killer is).
It's surprisingly difficult to write a contemporary novel in the spirit of Twain's originals, as the hundreds of unread, mediocre attempts filling the dusty back shelves of your local library attest. (With these characters now being in the public domain, much like Sherlock Holmes, there is now a veritable cottage industry of "unauthorized Twain sequels" that now exist.) But if anyone can do it, it would be the now 85-year-old (!) Coover, an obscure but revered figure in the literary world; alum of the University of Chicago during its Mid-Century Modernist artistic height (the same years Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were there), former teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and famed contributor to such countercultural lit mags as The Evergreen Review, Coover has made a long career out of clever pastiches and boldly experimental works, along the way racking up everything from an NEA Grant to a Guggenheim Fellowship to a National Book Award nomination.
It's this pedigree that allows Coover to get Huck Out West so exactly right in tone for the vast majority of its length; not too treacly yet not too mean, funny and irreverent yet with a subtle political agenda running underneath it all, with a delightful relationship with wordplay but never letting that get in the way of telling the story itself. It's a subtle and difficult balance that even Twain himself didn't get right until his 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is why it wasn't until then that he started getting called the "first grand master of the true American literary arts." (His earlier Adventures of Tom Sawyer, from 1876 nearer the beginning of his career, is more a straightforward tale of childhood nostalgia for an idealized frontier that never actually existed, well-written but not containing that dark political edge that made his later work so admired and famous.) And Coover nails it perfectly for the first two-thirds of Huck Out West, setting his own book in the eventful years between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the US Centennial (1876), taking our now twentysomething heroes and depositing them in the middle of "The Territories" (present-day North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, etc); where Huck in particular becomes a sort of Victorian-Age Forrest Gump, in which among other things he serves as a rider for the Pony Express, becomes an honorary member of the Lakota tribe, almost joins up with the Jesse James gang, briefly acts as an Indian scout for a psychopathic George Custer, and is around to witness the gold rush that leads to the formation of the infamous "Wild West" town of Deadwood.
In a way, then, it's a real shame that Coover finally gets this balance wrong in the last third of the novel, and like many contemporary authors starts tilting too far into 1970s-Postmodernist-style politically-correct "shocking for shock's sake" historical revisionism: by the end of Huck Out West, (view spoiler)[Tom Sawyer has turned into a racist, wife-beating, crooked-sheriff villain, his estranged wife Becky Thatcher has become a mining-town prostitute to make ends meet, huge chunks of pages are devoted to Native American mythology tales, and the establishment of Deadwood becomes an unending daily horror show of torture and violence (hide spoiler)] worthy of a Cormac McCarthy tale. I mean, I like Cormac McCarthy, don't get me wrong, but I like him precisely because his revisionist Westerns are very explicitly meant to be revisionist, and not even for a moment are you expected to believe that a book like Blood Meridian had actually been written back in the 1800s; but with Cooper's goal here being to trick us into believing that this is a long-lost novel by Twain himself, and largely succeeding in that for the majority of the book's length, that makes it disappointing when he veers into Dances With Wolves territory at the very end.
In another way, though, it's pretty astonishing that the first two-thirds of Huck Out West came out as well as it did, especially considering that most people Coover's age now spend their time watching 16 hours a day of Fox News and screaming about how The Muslims Are Coming To Convert Your Children And Take Your Job. If this is the last book that Coover will ever write -- and let's face it, it might very well be -- then it's a fine capper to a long and fascinating career, with the remarkable thing being not that he got the tone a bit wrong at the end but that he got it so right during all the rest. Although not perfect, it still comes very strongly recommended today, a great example of an author getting the concept of "pastiche" exactly right, and a true reading delight for any fan of Twain's original books on the same subjects.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Most of us know Winston Churchill as the rotund, elderly leader of Great Britain during the tumultuous years of World War Two; but this remarkable man had a long and varied career before that, including being a war correspondent at the end of the Victorian Age who reported from such far-flung battlefields as Cuba, India, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Africa. As historian Simon Read points out in his new book Winston Churchill Reporting, there's never been a full-length book this entire time that's been devoted just to this part of Churchill's life alone; and that's too bad, because as Read's lively, action-packed account shows, the twenty-something Churchill led a life in the late 1800s worthy of an Indiana Jones adventure, getting into the kinds of scrapes and charging through the middle of the kinds of massive battles that would be scarcely believable if it all wasn't so heavily documented by multiple sources.
The son of an aristocrat, the young Churchill was actually in the British army himself in those years, although assigned to one of those largely ceremonial divisions like so many other members of the aristocracy were back then (his regiment was mostly only known for being international polo champions); but seeking fame, glory and adventure, he essentially (with the aid of his blue-blood mother) begged anyone who would listen to send him out where the actual action was, eventually realizing that he could put his writing skills from school to good use and become a free-floating war correspondent, able to be assigned willy-nilly to whatever British Empire hotspots happened to be seeing the most fighting on any given year, and happily joining in the fighting while there himself. This led Churchill through a whole series of adventures, not least of which was getting captured as a prisoner during the Second Boer War in South Africa, then actually escaping his POW camp by trekking across enemy territory for three days and eventually hiding in a mine, and somehow managing to telegraph updates on his own escape to the British newspapers in real time through the help of British sympathizers (a fact that blew me away when reading about it here), turning him instantly into a national celebrity back home and providing the kick that let him finally win his first election to public office, an event that he built and built upon until eventually becoming Prime Minister forty years later.
Read conveys it all through the unusual style of an action novel instead of the usual academic history book, a gutsy move that could've badly backfired on him; but in this case it works perfectly, in that there is just such an overwhelming amount of recorded evidence still around about Churchill's very personal thoughts and opinions about this period of his life, allowing Read to portray him like a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare precisely because Churchill actually was a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare. A lively and incredibly fast-paced book, this will be a revelation to people like me who only knew Churchill as the balding, stogie-chewing curmudgeon of 1940s fame, and it comes strongly recommended to the general public.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Earlier this fall, I ended up randomly stumbling across an intriguing-looking new novel at my neighborhood library, called Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis, which purports to be the "true story" behind the publishing of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers; but of course to appreciate such a novel to its fullest, I realized that I was going to have to read Dickens' original as well, so I picked that up on the same day and have been spending the last several months slowly making my way through the combined 1,600 pages of material. For those who don't know, The Pickwick Papers was Dickens' first book, after first making a splash in his early twenties with a series of short comical articles in the British penny dreadfuls. See, at the time, a hugely popular form of publishing consisted of stories mainly made up of funny illustrations, of which a writer of light verse would be hired to essentially make up lengthy captions afterwards describing what was going on, the series usually centered around a generalized concept that could be extended for as long as the pieces were popular; and this is exactly how Pickwick started out as well, originally the creation of the then-famous illustrator Robert Seymour, concerning the notes, travels and experiments of a "club" of pompous proto-scientists and wannabe-historians, with the 24-year-old Dickens originally hired simply to write a few lines of humorous prose to explain what exactly was going on in the etches, the main reason people were tuning in to begin with. But Dickens had a different idea in mind, writing lengthier and lengthier stories to go with each illustration, eagerly eaten up by what at the time was a population of rapidly rising literates, a sort of perfect storm of publishing innovations and reform in public schooling that created an insatiable public appetite for the first time for written fiction; and when Seymour ended up killing himself just a few chapters into the series, essentially the process of putting them together got reversed, with Dickens now writing the stories in advance and the hired illustrators now in charge of drawing what he was describing, not the other way around, which most historians consider a hugely positive watershed moment in the history of Victorian literature.
And Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick covers this same ground, only in the opposite direction -- in his equally delightful and equally overstuffed novel, Seymour is the hero, picture-stories are to be commended, while Dickens is portrayed as the evil villain who came along and ruined everything. Although if you're going to pick up Jarvis's contemporary novel, the first thing to know is that it's not just about this subject; in fact it is no less than a sweeping look at what daily life was like in London at the dawn of the Victorian Age, and as such gets into such minute detail about such things as British restaurants and Victorian entertainment options that you will undoubtedly go mad from it all, unless you steel yourself in advance for the idea that this is why the novel even exists, not necessarily to push along a fast-moving (or even normal-moving) plot. As such, then, it's a lot of fun to make your way through as long as you have the right attitude and lots of time; although just like with Dickens' original, if you're not prepared for a regular amount of rambling, off-kilter digressions happening literally every other chapter or so, both of these giant books are going to end up driving you really crazy. It gets a limited recommendation from me today for that reason, a fine read for people who are in the mood for it, but a book you should stay far away from if you're not.
Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of Victorian literature ...more
(In October 2015, my arts center had a chance to sell a first edition, first printing of Mark Twain's "Following the Equator." [Want to see if it's st(In October 2015, my arts center had a chance to sell a first edition, first printing of Mark Twain's "Following the Equator." [Want to see if it's still for sale? Visit http://www.ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter .] Below is the write-up I did of it for the eBay listing.)
By 1894 Mark Twain was already famous but was also almost completely broke, because of a bad series of investments in futuristic technology that would've never been able to work at the time they were being invented (he sunk what would now be eight million dollars alone into a machine that was designed to automatically set its own type like a computer); and so to get himself out of debt, he agreed to go on another of his famous worldwide tours, this time to far-flung locations all within the Victorian British Empire (including Australia, India, South Africa and more), not only to do a hugely profitable series of speaking engagements but then to write down his experiences into a third volume of darkly humorous foreign travelogues, after his insanely successful The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad. The aging Twain disliked the trip, lamenting that he couldn't just stay at home with his family; but the result is the exquisite 1897 Following the Equator, a grand return to his youthful irreverent form, after starting to get a little more high-falutin' in his themes and scope in his recent novels. (Huck Finn had been published less than a decade before, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a few years after that.)
For those who only know Twain through classroom assignments on these more famous novels, his travel writing is a real revelation, a series of grumpy and subversive dispatches on the idiocy of the human race no matter where they live, which essentially made him the Gilded Age's version of P.J. O'Rourke. Today's copy is an ultra-rare true first printing in great shape, commanding the premium price it deserves, and will automatically become one of the jewels in any Victoriana or American Humor collection that it's added to, appropriate even for acquisition by a historical society or small museum. Don't hesitate with your interest, for this is sure to sell before too long. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Many people of course know about Greenwich Village's reputation in the 20th century as a New York hotbed for the era's underground culture and subversive arts; but did you know that this neighborhood's history of doing so actually goes back to the Victorian Age and beyond? That's the subject of Justin Martin's delightful new book, Rebel Souls; or to be more precise, much like its inspiration The Devil in the White City, this actually combines two related stories at once, not just about the formation of America's very first generation of "bohemian" artists (an archetype that wasn't even invented until the mid-1800s; before then artists were thought of much more like carpenters or furniture makers), but also about one of the most famous of those bohemians, revered poet and "America's transgressive forefather" Walt Whitman, whose life intersected with the smoky basements of Greenwich Village for just a small but hugely pivotal time in his career, between his first edition of the seminal Leaves of Grass (largely panned and that sold less than 50 copies) and the third edition (a cult hit among college students which finally started the national conversation about Whitman and his work).
Martin takes us into the Village's Pfaff's Saloon in this engaging book, to show exactly how all these elements came together for the first time -- the European refugee who brought the very idea of "Bohemianism" to New York, the good-natured bar owner who let all the artists drink on enormous tabs just because he liked having them around, the journalists who eventually established the artists' and bar's reputation, and the tiny number of openly gay men in Victorian New York, who inspired people like Whitman to come around on a regular basis in the first place. In fact, that's pretty much the biggest revelation of this whole book, is just how wild and countercultural a small section of New York City was even back in the mid-1800s, a part of history that was squelched by the Modernists who came after them and that we've now largely lost to the ages; but it allowed gay artists like Whitman to essentially go cruising in a horse-and-buggy age, and created an atmosphere where poets like him could even write about the experiences (even if in a highly codified way, through such words as "comrade" when wanting to refer to a lover, and by titling an entire chapter of romantic poems after an obscure flower whose blooms just happen to look like erect penises).
It's fascinating to see how some of the brightest lights of that circle went on to become nationally famous (Artemus Ward was one of the biggest hits of his times, for example, and eventually brought the bohemian aesthetic to the west coast and the attention of a young Mark Twain), while others who were initially much more famous just literally disappeared from the national consciousness within a few years after their deaths; and it's also fascinating to see just how quickly that entire scene fell apart with the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the artists of Pfaff's dispersed to all kinds of far-flung locations and new activities, emerging on the other side to a national audience that no longer wanted the dark comedy and transgressive musings that the bohemians got famous for dishing out. Written at a brisk pace and with clean, plain language, this is an "NPR-worthy" nonfiction book if ever there was one, a strong recommendation to anyone who wants to know more about Whitman, Greenwich Village, the arts, Victoriana, or simply about the small hidden parts of American history that have been deliberately suppressed by the conservatives who are usually in charge of writing the history books.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Matthew Pearl has made an entire career out of fanciful, action-packed thrillers set within obscure historical corners of intellectualism (his most famous novel continues to be The Dante Club, concerning a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen supergroup of Victorian writers who band together to solve crimes); so it should come as no surprise that his latest, The Last Bookaneer, continues along this same vein, with its main framing device being the period in the 1800s after copyright laws had been invented in the US and England but before the countries had decided to honor the other's, leading to a shadowy profession of manuscript thieves whose job it was to whisk away famous authors' newest books while still in the production stage in one country, so to be legally ripped off and sold by unscrupulous publishers in the other.
But make no mistake, this is no genteel steampunk tale told in the back alleys of London or New York; in fact, the vast majority of the story takes place on the South Seas island of Samoa, after a rumor starts that self-exiled author Robert Louis Stevenson has recently completed what many consider the most important novel of his career, prompting a number of dueling bookaneers to make a trip to this far-flung location in order to attempt a series of con jobs for the purpose of securing said fabled manuscript. And this is just the tip of the iceburg of this cleverly metafictional "story within a story within a story," which very inventively layers surprise twist upon surprise twist even as the story itself is related to us through a narrator telling the story of a narrator telling the story of a narrator. A book that on top of everything else makes very astute comments about the state of publishing here in the 21st century, and why obsessive book lovers become obsessive in the first place, from a pure entertainment standpoint this is one of the most delightful reads I've had in the last year, a loving ode to the power of printed books that is a must-read to anyone who has ever turned their nose up at the very idea of Kindles. It comes with a huge recommendation to one and all, and will be quite easily making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year.
(As of August 2014, I am selling a first edition, first printing of this 1892 book through CCLaP's eBay account [see cclapcenter.com/rarebooks for mor(As of August 2014, I am selling a first edition, first printing of this 1892 book through CCLaP's eBay account [see cclapcenter.com/rarebooks for more]. Here below is the description I wrote of the book for the auction's listing.)
The Victorian Age is littered with fascinating people who have now been mostly forgotten by the public at large; take for a good example Richard Harding Davis, who had just as interesting a life as, say, his buddy Theodore Roosevelt, but is remembered by only a fraction of people who know the latter. A Philadelphia native who is credited with founding the football team at Lehigh University, Davis unfortunately didn't last there very long because of partying too much as an undergraduate; and when his dad finally pulled some strings and got him a job as a journalist, he used the opportunity to become one of the era's first sensationalist reporters, writing regularly about such subjects as abortion and suicide and becoming the first journalist to do a report about the first electrocution execution in history. This led to him becoming a managing editor at the influential Harper's Weekly, and it's there (along with his time at Scribner's Magazine as well) where he really had his most influence over the development of the new "periodicals" industry in the United States, becoming a widely admired war correspondent who traveled extensively through Africa, Japan, Central America, the Caribbean and more, and eventually being one of the "yellow journalists" who was accused by the public of fabricating the Spanish-American War on behalf of William Randolph Hearst (an accusation that Davis vehemently denied throughout his life, and frankly with there being a lot of evidence to support the theory that Davis and Hearst in fact hated each other). And in the meanwhile, Davis almost singlehandedly established the reputation of Roosevelt's "Rough Riders," was an accomplished novelist and playwright, was one of the first authors to have a successful adaptation career in the nascent Hollywood film industry, and was married to famed Vaudeville performer Bessie "Yama Yama Man" McCoy to boot.
Today's book being auctioned is a lesser-known one from Davis's career, and one of the first he ever published, a delightfully self-righteous collection of short stories concerning a haughty aristocrat named Van Bibber and all the moral pronouncements he makes concerning the ethically weak idiots he's surrounded by in a late-Victorian New York City. (For an amusingly dark example of the book's entire tone, see the story "The Hungry Man Was Fed," in which Van Bibber literally takes a homeless man to dinner with him at a fancy restaurant, to prove that the man doesn't really want food in the first place with the money he's been begging for, then forces the man to pay for the meal with the surprisingly large chunk of panhandling change that he kept insisting he didn't actually have.) Of much greater interest with this book than the actual stories, though, is that it contains four original (uncredited) illustrations by a young Charles Dana Gibson, a friend of Davis's who would eventually become the most famous illustrator of the early 20th century, whose archetypal "Gibson Girl" largely helped define the looser look and style of young proto-feminist "suffragettes" around the turn of the century. (And in fact, the artist's equally famous "Gibson Man," which helped usher in the national craze for clean-shaven gentlemen in these same years, was modeled directly after Davis himself, as can plainly be seen by comparing photos of the author at the time with the illustrations that Gibson was pumping out by the dozens in those days.) Being offered today at an affordable price in order to encourage an actual sale, this is a wonderfully odd artifact for any fan of Gibson, Davis, or just late Victorian literature in general, and one of those perfect holiday gifts that looks a lot more expensive than it actually is....more
Are you a fan of the hit HBO show "True Detective?" I sure am! And after finally checking out the realFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
Are you a fan of the hit HBO show "True Detective?" I sure am! And after finally checking out the real 1895 horror collection that this show's Satanic mythos is based around, Robert W. Chambers' 1895 "The King in Yellow," and especially after being disappointed at all the crappy, sloppily done editions currently for sale at Amazon, I decided that my arts center could do better; and thus volume one of our new "CCLaP Victoriana" series, in which we present gorgeously designed yet scholarly accurate editions of cult classics from the 1800s, along with brand-new introductions from yours truly that give you more of the book's historical background. You can of course download this book for free at places like Project Gutenberg; but for an extra-great reading experience, I encourage you to pick up this exquisitely done new paperback edition that was inspired directly by "True Detective," to help us fund future titles in this series....more
(As of October 2013, my arts center is selling a first-edition, first-printing copy of this book through reseller eBay.com. [See our entire rare book (As of October 2013, my arts center is selling a first-edition, first-printing copy of this book through reseller eBay.com. [See our entire rare book collection at (cclapcenter.com/rarebooks).] Below is what I wrote for the auction's description.)
Oh Lord, what an unending string of Very Strange Books got published during the Victorian Age! And here's one of them, a salacious look at a modern world under siege from sin, by a man who was once commonly known as the second most well-known religious figure in America (behind only Henry Ward Beecher, who was untouchable in popularity). A pastor in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Talmage's weekly sermons were reprinted in over 3,000 different local publications, reaching what was said to be a total audience of 25 million; and he was such a natural orator that his audiences kept outgrowing the churches he was assigned to, eventually landing in Brooklyn where the local church built a special multi-thousand-seat tabernacle just for him, with hundreds still having to be turned away every Sunday. (And in an interesting bit of trivia, all three tabernacles built for him in Brooklyn eventually burned down because of natural causes; Talmage was so frustrated by the third fire in 1894 that he gave up on the city altogether, moving to Washington DC for the last decade of his career, where he had a smaller, more conservative audience.)
Night Scenes of City Life is from the end years of Talmage's career, and he really doesn't seem to be messing around anymore: described even by his own words in the preface as "soul-stirring discourses on the temptations and vices of city life...as seen by him in his midnight explorations in the haunts of vice of New York City," this is modern link-bait in its oldest and purest form, with chapter titles such as "Satanic Agitation," "Among Thieves and Assassins," and "Poison in the Cauldron," a chance for the flock to be titillated while on their way to getting their dose of moral medicine. Delightfully overwrought, and a veritable checklist of Victorian vices (laudanum! bootjacking! rendezvous in shady alleys with women of loose morals!), admittedly a book like this is not worth very much money to a full-time collector, but is an amazing conversation piece for a snarky young urbanite's apartment. (And for locals, note that this was published by Chicago's Donohue, Henneberry & Co., and that this particular copy was literally printed and bound in the historic Printers Row neighborhood, quite literally at 407 S. Dearborn Street.)...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers will remember what an unexpected fan I became of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, back when I first read it a few years ago as part of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics; and with this being a Victorian-Age public-domain work, there are of course dozens of unofficial sequels floating around out there. One of those is called Jim Hawkins and the Curse of Treasure Island, an unusually faithful sequel that tries extra-hard to mimic the exact language and tone of the original, first put out about a decade ago by "Francis Bryan;" but as it's become clear because of a new reprinting last year, that's actually the pen-name of revered British man of letters Frank Delaney, a Booker judge and the literary director of the Edinburgh Festival who has produced a host of popular documentaries for the BBC over the decades, and who among other things is in the middle of doing a 25-YEAR PODCAST where he examines James Joyce's Ulysses one line at a time. So it makes sense that this homage to Stevenson would be unusually spot-on in its voice and subject matter, because this is what Delaney does, is treat classic literature very, very seriously; and I have to say, it was just as much a delight to read as the original, and feels very much like a lost sequel by Stevenson himself that maybe just happened to surface within the last few years. Granted, if you're not a natural fan of Victorian action tales, you can pretty safely skip this; but if you are, you should absolutely put this on your must-read list right away.
Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for fans of Victorian thrillers ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers will remember what an unexpected fan I became of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, back when I first read it a few years ago as part of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics; and with this being a Victorian-Age public-domain work, there are of course dozens of unofficial sequels floating around out there. One of those is called Jim Hawkins and the Curse of Treasure Island, an unusually faithful sequel that tries extra-hard to mimic the exact language and tone of the original, first put out about a decade ago by "Francis Bryan;" but as it's become clear because of a new reprinting last year, that's actually the pen-name of revered British man of letters Frank Delaney, a Booker judge and the literary director of the Edinburgh Festival who has produced a host of popular documentaries for the BBC over the decades, and who among other things is in the middle of doing a 25-YEAR PODCAST where he examines James Joyce's Ulysses one line at a time. So it makes sense that this homage to Stevenson would be unusually spot-on in its voice and subject matter, because this is what Delaney does, is treat classic literature very, very seriously; and I have to say, it was just as much a delight to read as the original, and feels very much like a lost sequel by Stevenson himself that maybe just happened to surface within the last few years. Granted, if you're not a natural fan of Victorian action tales, you can pretty safely skip this; but if you are, you should absolutely put this on your must-read list right away.
Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.5 for fans of Victorian thrillers ...more
(As of spring 2012, I have a first-edition copy of this book for sale at my arts center's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks], so I thought (As of spring 2012, I have a first-edition copy of this book for sale at my arts center's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks], so I thought I would repost here the description I came up with for it, part review and part historical overview.)
Although sadly now nearly forgotten, at one point Arthur Meeker Jr. (1902-1971) was one of the most successful authors Chicago ever produced, a co-founder of the local chapter of PEN who had two national bestsellers in his nine-book career. The son of an Armour executive who was raised among the high society of the Edwardian Age, even after becoming a journalist he remained a fixture among the elite, traveling Europe widely and becoming known for his witty, Ward-McAllisteresque reports. It's no surprise that this second-most popular book of his career would come just a few years after the death of his parents, because in many ways it seems to be an autobiographical roman-a-clef about the years as a child he spent with them: set in stages between the 1880s and World War One, it looks at the comings and goings in Chicago's infamous Prairie Avenue neighborhood where Meeker himself was raised, featuring a main protagonist who also travels Europe widely and eventually becomes a journalist as well. (In fact, the book itself is set at the very specific street address of 1817 S. Prairie Avenue, just across the street from the now historical Clarke and Glessner Houses, although I don't know if this matches up with Meeker's real-life address from those years; if anyone on the internet is coming across this in the future and knows, please drop me a line and let me know too!)
Just like the Indianapolis neighborhood featured in Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, the Prairie Avenue district of Chicago went through a fascinating transition between the Civil War and World War One, the progression of which is the main point of Meeker's own novel. The city's very first neighborhood for old-money blue bloods, and located just two miles south of the downtown Loop, the entire reason it was so important to be that close to downtown in the Victorian Age was precisely because it was so difficult to travel long distances then, making the sprawling estates immediately surrounding central cities extremely valuable, and turning this entire southside neighborhood into a wonderland of moody Gothic mansions, adjoining servant quarters, horse stables and fruit orchards; but as bridges and improved infrastructure started making the city's northside more and more popular in the following decades, and suburban trains drove more and more of the rich out into the wilderness altogether, neighborhoods like Prairie Avenue quickly became discarded slums, with no one left who wanted to buy the crumbling mansions and with more and more of them knocked down to make way for industrial factories and warehouses. Meeker follows both the highs and lows of this progression in his own book, delightfully dropping in literally hundreds of references along the way to long-closed Chicago institutions, famous real families, restaurants, pubs, gentlemen's clubs, local landmarks and a lot, lot more; and he really brings alive the sense of what it must've been like to stroll the sidewalks of this neighborhood in its turn-of-the-century height, a foggy gaslamp-lit amusement park of Victoriana as can only be seen through the wide eyes of an overly eager child, a virtual paen to a way of life that had already disappeared by the time this originally came out in the 1940s, and now of course the stuff only of fanciful dreams and a handful of federally protected landmarks. (For those who don't know, the fight in the 1950s to save the smattering of mansions left in this neighborhood virtually kickstarted the entire national architectural-preservation movement; so in that sense, you can see this popular novel and Book Of The Month Club selection as partly to thank for the US having historically preserved urban landmarks in the first place.)
Called a "light and colorful entertainment" by the New York Times upon its original release, this perhaps does not take into consideration the numerous dark corners contained in Prairie Avenue, including frank depictions of suicidal depression, drug addiction and infidelity among our very proper characters, the efforts to hide and corral these problems fueling much of the melodramatic plot; and indeed, it's widely believed that Meeker himself was gay (but see his Wikipedia page for more on that), so it's certainly possible to argue that this novel's various plot machinations were actually a clever pre-Stonewall way for Meeker to explore the entire issue of being The Other, in a society that doesn't tolerate Otherness. An author who deserves to be rediscovered, at least by a grateful local literary community here in Chicago, it's CCLaP's intention to attempt to put together an entire set of first-editions of all of Meeker's books over the years (including his apparently Max Beerbohm-like 1955 memoir Chicago, With Love: A Polite and Personal History), with Prairie Avenue serving as the perfect gift for anyone interested in Chicago history, the Victorian Age in general, or the various developments in urban living that took place here in the early 20th century....more
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