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The epic *advice* of Gilgamesh.

My day is made, I have encountered the word excrementitious, which actually strikes me as one of those "probably a mellifluously beautiful word, if you don't know what it means" coinages ... Also: scatalogical archaeology! Always fun. Thanks, The History Blog.

Brace yourselves: this is me, not even trying to be clever. Just click. The world's most beautiful libraries. You're welcome. (The click beyond.)

Ahhh, the tedium of FASHION as opposed to style. We all know it's not just clothes, or at least in the form of textiles.

Remember when book covers were done by artists? Remember when all too many of them became photos of headless women? (Remember when we laughed at salads?) Apparently the current trend in cover design is flowers. This seems to surprise some people, but the development seems obvious to me, especially timed after November 2016, when stock photo libraries, advertising, entertainment, and so many visual aspects of the cultural landscape finally began to show women in active contexts, not strictly as pretty presentation objects. We were all sick of the ubiquity of book covers featuring decapitated women and sexualized women (the latter not being mutually exclusive of the former, which: ew). What's the next best sexual image? Flowers. Duh.

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Have you ever found yourself feeling a kind of ... distrust, when you find out someone isn't a reader? Or special admiration, even a crush, on a writer? Even the smallest phrases can be great storytelling; I am able to clearly remember some of the things that have swept my heart away: Beloved Ex's calling me a wonderful bag of things. Humorous, sure. But ... "telling" in a way that was important to me. A girl who once said to me, I have a voice like rain and brownies baking. The friend who called me a flower-eyed waterfall. And Mr. X ... that time he said to me, "You use your wit and intelligence as if your appearance had no power, and the effect is devastating."

Why the self-aggrandizing intro, today? Well, READ on, my friends. On the evolution of storytelling. It keeps humanity alive, literally. And the best storytellers get the greatest rewards, in egalitarian communities. Hmm.

And now, a little consumer culture ...

Of all the people I have known in the 25-year SUV trend, I am aware of ONE who ever used their winch, and none who ever went offroading, or even camping. (In the 1970s, my cousins did have a proto-SUV, but they skiied and camped and hunted and used its immense capacity in full, though not every single time they drove it.) SUVs looked to my contrarian eyes like a Baby Boomer/yuppie fad from the start, and what rugged behavior I ever *have* seen with them seems to be confined to drivers imagining that "SUV" confers upon them not merely invulnerability but also immunity to the existence of others on the roads when it is snowy and/or icy. (Strangely, this does not appy to rain; everyone in this whole town seems to just *crawl* when there is rain, mist, or drizzle anywhere in a 50-mile radius. No matter what they drive.) Anyway, to the link, Batman: on SUVs, and the developing social structure in America, over the past 30 years. As always, there is room for quibbling here. But it's an interesting wider look at "trends" ...

The older I get, the more I LOVE investigative journalism. Doesn't matter when it's a couple or few years old; the detective stories hold up, and truly good writing never goes out of date. Here's a great piece about discovering provenance, and for my writer friends, stay tuned to the end - the bit about publishing a book is priceless.

Here is a joyous(-ish ...) stocking stuffer for you all! More demented cover fails with the Caustic Cover Critic, guesting over at the Australian Book Designers Association. Featuring: Jane AusTIN and Slash. You know you wanna click!

"... and ALWAYS for something completely different"

It was about 1983 when Mark and I became best friends. I use his real name because enough time separates us, and the name was common enough around here then, that it's as anonymous as calling him any other name.

Fifteen to his fourteen, I was in high school, but he was the cool one. I came over one time, he turned on the party light he'd built and calibrated to respond to his stereo, and he plunged my brain into something incomprehensible.

It was the original radio recordings of Hitchhiker's Guide.

I had no understanding of what was coming out of his speakers, there was no reference point by which I could make sense of the chorus of Cyrius Cybernetics voices buzzing out their little piece of the universe being built out of sound effects and voice acting. It all made no sense to me, and as is still to some degree my wont, that which was unfamiliar made me resistant, because I hated the confusion.

It probably took half an hour at least for me to even get that there was a story being told.

For me, back then, "writing" meant books - I was scarcely aware that the fare on our TV set (we used to call them "TV sets" - now ask me about hifi) involved composing scripts - and books came in few genres. Lots of nonfiction, for which I hadn't yet gotten the hang of caring. 19th century lit of various stripes, owned by us but belonging to nobody in particular. Mom's romantic novels. Dad's joke books; nothing else he might read could possibly have interested me.

So I "got" Bennet Cerf and even Art Buchwald, and novels by Poe and the like. But comedic science fiction? In radio format? I only understood radio drama as something that had gone the way of the dodo shortly after Baby Snooks cut her teeth.

Douglas Adams bent my brain.


***


Then I got to college and read Richard Brautigan. It is more than my eloquence can even attempt, explaining this lit, but Trout Fishing in America meant a lot to me once. Thirty years on, I'm not sure my geriatric behind could make head nor tail of it anymore.


***


Then I discovered Donald Harington. The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, only one of the Stay Moronian novels he penned, layered in ways even by then I couldn't intellectually cope with. Historical fiction? Yes. Picaresque? Yes. Folk tales? Yes. Family epic? Yes. Fantasy? Yes. All of, and so much more than, the above.

And it was Harington who put it best: we must write neckties.

Write things that are impractical and colorful. Write neckties.



***


Recently, I have picked up my late and beloved Aunt L's copy of The Known World.  I was fortunate to meet Edward Jones at a conference years ago, and yet somehow in the vagaries of the TBR pile, this has never quite hit the top at a time when I ended up finishing it. This week is different.

The novel is a quilt; not merely featuring a wide cast, but it is in itself a wide cast of a large net. There is factual history to be found here, and some detail so vivid it feels like documentation, or memory, or The Sight. Scenes are discussed as if by a storyteller - BY a storyteller, of course - but the "there-ness" is complete, the characters breathe and move in life not because of our intimacy with their imagined thoughts, but because they are viewed with respect - both literal and in the perspective sense - to their humanity. Human action, nuance by nuance. And so the omniscient document becomes the novel, and draws us into the curious world of freed men who owned slaves, in American history.

Having not so long ago finished reading Gigi Amateau's Come August, Come Freedom, there is a resonance, though her style is more what my brain would have called "traditional" as I grappled with all of the experimental and unexpected and creative work mentioned.


***


My own work is "traditional" in the extreme, of course. I don't color outside the lines; it took me too long to learn how to stay *in* them. But the obvious truism to (neck)tie up this post is this: without listening to, reading, learning from those who don't need the lines at all, I would not be able to color at all.

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At NPR online, Margaret Atwood discusses the next big form. I know from the moment the election was decided, MANY writers were vocal online and everywhere else about how they were already inspired to new dystopian work. To look at the form those works may take is a great exercise; and I think she may be right. The pace of traditional fiction cannot do justice to the creative juices flowing right now.

The evidence from Pech IV and Roc de Marsal clearly shows that the Neanderthals at these sites lived without fire not only for long periods but also during the coldest periods.

The Atlantic has a cool look at fire (hah). I've always been fascinated by the concept of the human hearth; hearth rights, the earliest human domesticity, the social contracts born of our control of and sharing of flame for warmth, protection, and cooking.

When a question is asked perfectly, it doesn’t need a tidy answer.

TA also has a wonderful link for writers (and readers!), just with its opener (well, or Faulkner's) on this article about asking the right questions. I have talked about the problems I have with creating tension on the page; as a writer of historicals set in known events and amongst characters who actually lived, it's too easy for me to think the (hi)story itself is enough. But it's necessary to know both WHY anyone else would find that enough, and to entice them to want to know. What gifts do we as authors bring to our characters ... ?

Which gets me thinking about my WIP's first line ...

The heat had begun to feed upon the red tile roofs of Ravenna, as if with a hostile will, when Amalasuntha was born more than eight days late.

Now, the CLOSING sentence (currently) is a literary in-joke. I love it, though it may not survive. It's worth reading the whole to get to it. Let's hope I'm getting the hang of this tension thing ...

(Confidential to my nerd readers: anyone else watch Caprica?)

Yeah, and it's a lot from The Atlantic today, but bear with me; they have some excellent writing!

Who else recalls Mike Mulligan and The Little House? Staples of my own childhood, I was thinking of the beautiful art for The Little House just a couple of days ago; the way it depicted time, especially; the way the house had a face, filled with emotion. This essay picks up those memories, and finds the relevance right now, with a powerful punch at the whole idea that innovation was invented recently. Y'all know how I love a good recency illusion and a The Dirty, Stupid Past refutation! (Want to get away from The Atlantic? Worth a click is the New Yorker story about Virginia Lee Burton.)

(S)uccessful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death.
Hoo baby!

Okay, back to The Atlantic, for another of my obsessions, hygeine! On the industry, social and cultural implications, and pain of feminine hair removal. Evolutionary racism, and Darwin's culpability. Ow.

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It is rare, if not unprecedented, for me to contemplate the phrase "everybody's talking about it!" without scoffing, pinching salt, or otherwise having no patience with the entire concept. But Harper Lee has brought us as close as I've ever seen, with the Go Set a Watchman epochal event publication. Mostly discussion seems to center on the disconcerting combination of darn-near-prurient curiosity about the manipulations involved in making public a draft work, and a general condemnation of the work as "should've been only a scholarly curiosity, really isn't a saleable novel, hey I'm only reporting the facts, and isn't it terrible they've done this (so I can buy in and then blog about it)?" There is a lot that's ghastly. So it was even more quease-inducing to read this. Apparently, Atticus - the great American symbol of moral rectitude and crusadership - turns out to be a big old bigot.

Sigh.

So let's look at racism in a different way. Nyki Blatchley provides a truly EXCELLENT post on the Aryan fallacy and all its little malformed fallacious babies. A linguistic/historical/cultural must-read, because it's incisive and important on multiple levels. It's good storytelling, it's good teaching, it touches on varied aspects of those ways we seem to love to come to wrong-thinking, and it's *sourced*, which is more than I ever do for y'all. So go. Now.

Dirty, Dirty Bidniss

I’ve been reading Janet Reid’s archives – less for education at this point than for sheer entertainment, to be honest. But this post got me thinking. (It is very short, and yes, you have to read it for the post you’re now looking at to make worthwhile sense.)

I’ve encountered agents and editors online and IRL who struck me as … let us say, not self aware. It is not the world’s deepest challenge to find publishing professionals saying things with all the facile and vacuous brightness (and, indeed, the very words) of a stock character in a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Discussing art and creativity as business translates, and agents have become a trope, be they authors’ or actors’ pit-bull/chihuahua advocates.

More often than evil, the implications tend to go for comedy. Nakedly driven by business concerns, or sometimes almost (… almost …) adorably by dreams, real life Tweets and interviews and so on make clear the expectations and motivations behind “I’m looking for THE NEXT SUCH-AND-SUCH BESTSELLER” or (cringe) the old “this-meets-that” uber-shallow Hollywood pitchery. Expectations and motivations that other stock character, the long-suffering writer, endures to their emotional travail.

It is to sigh.

The point relating to Janet’s post is: I can comprehend the idea of someone who has long worked in publishing getting sneery about the industry and the people in it. Exposed, more than I ever have been, to these dynamics, sooner or later those enamored of their own integrity may feel themselves in need of feeling “better than that.”

Authors, by the way, do this too. Some of them out loud, or in print. Some of them do it in query letters; why else would so many agents have to explain on blogs and in interviews, “When you say ‘all the books being published now are trash’, THAT IS INSULTING” … ? We think my genre is better than your genre – or, more tellingly, my genre is more IMPORTANT than yours is – or reader categories – or other particular writers. And I don’t pretend I haven’t don this, though I have tried to be nonspecific when moaning about querying or reading or what have you.

But most of us learn to keep certain thoughts to ourselves, or at least not to name names – and we all move along.



Which is where Janet’s old post above comes in.

The thing about moving along is, in publishing and in life and in Hollywood and at any job in the world, what it usually means is, dealing with the people we find annoying or inferior, getting it over with, and then dealing with OTHER people.

Because: there are other people in publishing. There are always other people than the annoying ones. Always.

It is no more reasonable to consider “all agents” as possessing any one property than it is to paint every member of any particular gender, race, political party, or age group as a single, monolithic whole – homogeneous, and uniformly good or bad, or rich with nougaty goodness, or perhaps a little too salty with my high blood pressure, so I’d better hold off.

When I was actively querying (and I am still toying with research here and there, though nothing’s been sent of late), I queried GOOD agents. People for whom I have respect.

If I want to participate in this industry, I *need* to respect it.

The idea of considering it a dirty thing on the face of it, but “a necessary evil” is not merely bewildering to me, it’s confounding. To consider my work as product in no way demeans it, to me – if selling art was good enough for Michelangelo, it's good enough for me. As hellaciously painful as it’s been to watch my first borne (I’ll spell it that way rather than literally indicating labor and delivery in the biological sense) possibly fail, it doesn’t tell me I’ve written a bad novel nor that those who recognize they can’t sell it are the bottom-feeding minions of Be’elzebub. It tells me they’re being realistic about business.

It also tells me about the importance of how I populate my stories, and a whole raft of other privilege- and diversity-centric stuff I’ve blogged about already, but those are other posts.

Not one single agent in the world has done one thing to stand in my way. None could nor would stop me if I chose to get The Ax and the Vase out into the world; self-publishing is a perfectly cromulent piece of this business. I feel that *I* do not make a good prospective self-publisher, because the kind of sweat equity I long to invest in this work is different, and I frankly fear my competence to serve my novels without the partnership and network of traditional publishing.

But that doesn’t make traditional publishing my obstacle.

Only I can be that, for myself, and … I kind of prefer not to do that.

My faith in magic ain’t what it used to be (if it ever was), and my expectations have never been that Hilary Mantel oughtta WORRY when I hit the market. But nothing in the years I’ve been learning, and writing, and continually working on all the fronts necessary to my goals …

… nothing has ever persuaded me I don’t deserve this, nor that I won’t get it. It could have happened already, if my resources were greater than they are.

Just not if I had more Magical Literary Beans to get my creative beanstalk to the stratosphere.

Right now, I’m all I’ve got. I joke a lot about my wee and paltry little brain, but we all know I think plenty highly of myself.

I also know, perhaps the one magic I do have in my life, is the great good fortune to find people I respect and am grateful for to work with. Just yesterday, I was struck (hardly for the first time) by the realization that I have a job which is the envy of others doing similar work. Someone said to me, basically, I work with the best people because I am the best myself.

Not something I came by easily, nor early.


Even if I sign with someone unexpected, when it does come, or an agent I thought of as a long-shot/”eh, why not ping ‘em” prospect when I first researched them: when I do have one, my agent will be The Best.

Just as my Penelope is The Best Dog.

And just as there’s nothing OSUM-er than Gossamer.



If I have faith in myself, and in my work – how could I not have faith in the person who chooses (and whom I choose) to advocate it? The agent, the editor who snaps at it, and those who share acquisition decisions, and acquire it?

Yes, yes. It’s all business, and there is a part of the publishing business that concerns itself less with Literary Exquisiteness (or my personal, precious darlings) than with profit.

Hell, it ain’t insurance. And I worked in that industry for YEARS.



So tell me again how PUBLISHING is a bunch of awful little beasts … ?

Project Gutenberg Rocks, and Other Stories

Character is one of England's noblest and most deliberate products, but some Englishmen have it to excess.

My lunchtime reading of late has been H. G. Wells. We all know ABOUT his work – we all know about The Time Machine and Moreau and The Invisible Man, anyway – or we all know the movies – or know there *are* movies, but can’t remember whether we’ve seen them or not …

But how many of you have read H. G. Wells? Until this past couple of weeks or so, I can say, I had not.

I started with an anthology on Project Gutenberg – The Hidden Door and Other stories, and have come upon an unexpected gem in The Marriage. Hidden Door shows a wonderful range, and, unfortunately, not a tiny little tidbit of deeply hideous racism**, intentionally or not embedded in the most gruesome story of the bunch. Some of these pieces are on the pedestrian side, and some – from the vantage point of the twenty-first century – may feel been-there/done-that for some readers looking for adventure. The final one misses a truly intriguing opportunity, but is still interestingly conceived. The Star, I would say, is in many ways the star of the show – an asteroid-coming-at-Earth prototype, the journalistic remove of which ends up delivering rather a remarkable blow in the end.

The Marriage – which I haven’t finished reading yet, but is a GOOD enough read I feel the need to babble about it – is another example of the literature we now view as antique, which has a wonderful nimbleness of language and irresistible wit. It’s even funnier than the dog in Lady Audley’s Secret - and at greater length. Written in 1912, when the man and his career were seasoned and confident, the characterization of a twenty-year-old female character is remarkably good (less remarkable, perhaps, is how assured it is – but I’ve read male authors’ feminine voices before which, though clearly written with all the *assurance* in the world, were more difficult to believe), and the family dynamic is recognizeable and alive, not entirely the relic of a forgotten and dusty old fusty English age.

Wells at this point in his life was philosophical and experienced, and he brings that to bear in support of the humor and plot at work in Marriage. I am absorbed and cannot wait to see where Wells goes.

(S)he had over her large front teeth lips that closed quietly and with a slight effort after her speeches, as if the words she spoke tasted well and left a peaceful, secure sensation in the mouth.

**I also don’t want to give short shrift to the point above, about racism. It’s a trick of our culture, 100 or more years later, that a white woman with tons of privilege and a different point to make, can breeze by a point like that and get away with it – but even if I meant to make a different point, the world is still not one in which it’s reasonable to gloss over bigotry as if it were not there.

“The Cone” is the story in which That Word we all know too well is prominent. The description of a particular character of color, as well as the omniscient voice’s judgement of quite a number of races, detailed with highly squeamish results, is difficult to reconcile to the biographical facts of Wells’ stated outlook on prejudice and racial tyranny. Yet I can’t write this prose off, as a reader, with the old “It was the mindset” dismissal that lets me concentrate on something else in the face of virulent details. When people like me fail to observe things like this, we give ourselves the excuse not to see them in life, and … we don’t live in a world where that is a tenable position. There is no defense for dismissing the past, in a present in which the same problems exist; to answer #BlackLivesMatter with #AllLivesMatter as if that puts paid to the devaluation of an entire class within the “all” of our society.

The more I face the privilege I possess, even as the rarefied and perhaps irrelevant exercise in personal creativity that is writing a novel in which not everybody is white and well-fed and well-off and unthinkingly, unblinkingly secure … the more I understand that one facet of this blog – particularly if I gain any success – is to deal with the subtext and the offstage workings that I DON’T, perhaps, write about.

It is unfortunate that, in my recent attempts to deal with this issue, I’ve couched it entirely in the ME ME ME ME ME ME ME context of MY novel not selling, and hoping to do better with one that contains more diversity. I see the problems there. I see problems in myself I may never have the courage to write about publicly. But I also know that this blog is only one voice, and my voice in the world, the one I want to have heard, is that of an author. And so, knowingly – even if incorrectly – the content here is filtered that way. This may be detrimental. Maybe some day, I’ll have the courage to put down the mirror and stop making everything about my own reflection. In the meantime, I am learning.

Processs of Elimination

Unpublished authors, I think, often forget that there are two sides to every slush pile.  On the one hand, agents are out to eliminate queries so they can devote time to those magical manuscripts that will set them afire - and with which they can set the publishing world on fire in turn.

On the other hand, authors (lest we ever forget: the ones who create any and all possible product in the publishing market ... ALL. OF. IT.) have to remember we must eliminate agents, too.  We can't just query 'em all, it's no way to find the right one.

And research can be grueling.

Here's the thing, though.  Sometimes, we can make it easy on ourselves.

I just eliminated an agent from my list because, though they are listed as repping histfic, their own list of what they're looking for included "women's lit, chicklit, lady lit, and lad lit".

Nope.  Not my agent.  Ever.

Also:  gag.  Gag me with a spoon, even.  GAH!

I no more accept that literature needs a pink label on it so my soft little female brain will know I'm allowed to read it than I accept that razors and soaps and automotive accessories and anything sold in a hardware store (.... or, you know, anywhere at all) need to be pink so I'll know my soft little female hands are allowed to use them.

Ya gotta have limits.  When it's 74 degrees outside one day in December, 41 the next, and bouncing back up to 66 the NEXT, it may be said that limits can get as tight as your headbone.

Still, I don't think I'll run squealing back toward this one any time soon.  I'm on the lookout for the agent who reps my genre and maybe gushes about puddy lit too.

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For a pleasing Sunday interlude:  Mojourner has marmot fights!  There is a tale about marmots in The Ax and the Vase, but it is nowhere near so cool and cute.

Jeff Sypeck on Tolkien's Beowulf - "like no English ever before uttered or heard."

The British Museum shows us the Ur-Ur.

Finally, another amusing interlude (this time, vintage images with puns!) at The Passion of Former Days.

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Rare shillings and Evil Dead references?  Count me in, History Blog!

The History Blog is going to dominate today, I'm afraid.  They've also got a surprising piece on "new old stock" if you will - undiscovered Sappho poems.  Literature unearthed after long ages is irresistible.

THE archaeological story of the week - and as always, HB's coverage is a good read with good resources.  One of the oldest temples thus far ever found in Rome ...

Finally, a friend and a fine advice-giver.  These two posts were interesting to read within five minutes of each other.  I have writer friends who STILL talk about self-pubbing as (a) their "only" option and (b) something of a shamefaced admission.  Leila, of course, knows better than this.  And yet, as always, the Query Shark has the tough-love's-eye-view.  Publishing is in a fascinating place right now, and indie authorship is exciting IF you are the right author for it, and have the right project for it.  My going traditional (well, or trying to ...) has nothing to do with thinking it's better than doing it myself.  I'm not well educated in self pubbing and have not been drawn to it.

Kim Rendfield welcomes Maria Grace to talk about what little boys wore when they outgrew their dresses, in the Regency era.  I'm a sucker for historical costume posts.

Edited to add THIS:  The History Girls are running a nifty little musico-literary contest.  Have fun!

Kickstart Poe

It is not too late to save The Raven images.  I finally pledged ($45 - I'm intrigued by the book!).

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Tom Williams and Anthony Riches on writing, Tom following up on word count and then Anthony - talking about his word count!

American Duchess has a collection of lovely early 19th-century dresses with CRAZY GIGOT SLEEVES ... Two Nerdy History Girls get a rare peek at the truly exquisite archive at Colonial Williamsburg - oh the embroidery!  And here we have silly hats and a whimsical blogger at Historical Fiction Research.  Men really do seem drab today in comparison with some of these ...

A Brief History of Baking (brief because it begins in the Middle Ages and stays in Britain, perhaps thanks to a tie-in to a cooking competition show ...).  With recipes here - including icy cream!

Ancient Peruvian mummies, found in a remarkable state of preservation, to be studied for their lifestyle, health, and DNA.

Qing Dynasty art destroyed by "conservation" contractors.  Sadly, firing the officials in charge doesn't redeem the cultural losses.

Where there is no destruction at all, a nice wide stage for blog-lery purist outrage at the  "experiment" of rewriting Jane Austen.  Because nobody has ever riffed off an existing story in a newer piece of writing, ever.  Especially not a work by Austen.  I'm sure there will be howls (I never snark like that, of course...).  It's unlikely I'll make the time to post them ...

Jeff Sypeck on Becoming Charlemagne and that elegiac time before the bookstores died ...

Leila is giving the gifts for her birthday!  Free copies of Hot Flashes, today through the 28th!

Kristy tells us what caught her senses at the James River Writers conference (she's a smarticle particle herself).

Nancy Bilyeau captures the paranoia of Tudor England.  Read The Chalice - and watch your back!

Kim Rendfield discusses the way the Franks in her period used religion and magic to grapple with their world ... and the role of hostages in hedging your bets.  Or not.  Hostage-taking has in many periods of history (I know stories from Europe, but would be very interested to hear similar tales of negotiation in other cultures) turned into something far from the terrorist image the word brings to mind today.  Caratacus enjoyed rather a famous sojourn in Rome after his capture.  Theodoric the Great lived for years as a hostage in Constantinople, where he was "treated with favor" by emperors Leo I and Zeno.  Cour de Lion famously became a songwriter in his prison.  There was something of a code of peculiar guest status in the practice.

Finally, I want to get a taste of ancient Greek music when it comes out.  The way people research and recreate ancient tongues and music and art is endlessly interesting for me.

Penguin Pop

Morrisey has power - and not in his capacity as a lyricist.  I wouldn't have thought at this point in his career his clout was this heavy, but apparently he can DEBUT as a writer as a classic already, right out of the box.  Not so much as a single review to make the point, only Penguin Classics' imprint to prove it.

I agree with the columnist - the point is not that Morrisey could never earn the "classic" label.  It's a debatable point, but not one any reader has had the chance to judge in the first place.

So let's raise a pail of pink Cristal (is there such a thing as pink Cristal ... ?) in cheers to this literary classic.  Whatever it may be (because *nobody* has read this book yet, outside of Penguin).

Link thanks to Caustic Cover Critic's mention, which shows the "Classic" cover.

Quoth The Raven: Kickstart Me

The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia is housed, not in a home of Edgar Allen Poe, but in the oldest home remaining in the city where he did live.  It's a smallish place, whose pretty back garden is sometimes a venue for weddings and receptions, in a busy stretch on the side of a historic hill.  Someone once called me from that place, and I had "EDGAR ALLEN POE" on my caller ID, tenaciously loved and preserved, until the day I moved out of that home.

The Poe Museum is a place I have visited; not as immediately impressive a museum as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts perhaps, nor the Science Museum, the Children's Museum, nor even the Valentine Museum.  It is, however, one of many of Richmond's homages to its favorite son.

Image:  poemuseum.org

In the Poe Museum are to be found some of the most fantastical illustrations for The Raven.  It is a pleasure to see that these illustrations are subject to a Kickstarter fund for their preservation.  I've seen the state of preservation described in The History Blog's article, and to see them saved would be a pleasure.  I may have to learn how to contribute to a Kickstarter myself.

Caustic Cover Critic - Interview

The CCC has a very interesting interview, with a remarkable array of images, with editor John Betram.  Bertram discusses Lolita - the Story of a Cover Girl, which takes a look at the remarkable breadth of cover designs for this novel.

One of the remarkable things about the covers is the division between those which avoid exploitation and those which go for it with, quite literally, cartoonish gusto.  The interview discusses the character of Lolita, too, versus the popular image of "a Lolita" (not a Goth Lolita, but the more generalized cultural assumptions) - and thank goodness.  It's been so long since I read the novel that even I have forgotten what the girl herself was like.  The false image, instead, of the willing and precocious coquette has thoroughly papered over Nabakov's original writing, the character; it is an injustice almost as cruel as that described by the novel itself.

Much could be said about the culture which so reveres and obsesses over child rape.  I'll leave it to the interview, and the images, and for you to consider.

Louisa May Alcott's Lurid Side

Something on the order of thirty years ago, my brother gave me an anthology of Alcott focusing on her lesser known, darker writings.  Short stories and novellas of deceit, danger, seduction, and even drug use, I was fascinated by the revelation-to-me that Victorian literature contained anything but fainting, repressed heroines and priggish or brooding males.  Following on the heels of recent forays into The Mysteries of Udolpho (yet unfinished, so stay tuned in case I come back with a review or other response to that reading; though, so far, it is nothing but a sentimental and extraordinarily wordy - even to *me* - travelogue), Stoker, and The Monk, A Romance, Alcott's Behind a Mask is hardly the sternest stuff, but it has the charm of being, if formulaic, perfectly *believable* at least.  Melodramatic and probably over-familiar to a modern reader, but in strictest terms of human behavior, recognizable.

One of the nicer touches of Alcott's writing is to present a character who might appear shallow or undeveloped, and to endow them, if not with depth, at least with dimension.  The motivations are dynamic, even as the action may seem quaint or perhaps stagy (yes, that is spelled correctly without the E; I was a theater major and am a writer, trust yourself in my bloggerly hands).  The endings, even when it's possible they might not satisfy certain expectations or even preferences, are plastic, not predictable or boring.

Linguistically, Alcott's wit is energizing, and her language provides good momentum at times.  Her tendency to start in media res, particularly in dialogue, challenges but crackles, and the action, while slow to modern eyes, is loaded with tension.  The very deliberation of its unfolding can ratchet up the power.  Above all, most of the thrillers or darker stories as they're usually called, are not extremely long.  "Behind A Mask" can be read in two or three lunch hours, and some of the other stories are good for one sitting - so trying one or two doesn't rob much life away.  Give Alcott's ghastly side a try, and let me know what you think!

The Monk - A Romance

The habit of dipping into Project Gutenberg might seem to some a dry one - so many people have a tendency to think public domain books, being old, must be dusty.

Somehow or other - I think it may have been a few months back after a discussion of 19th century literature online, in which Louisa May Alcott's darker works came up, I found myself bumping around Wikipedia (this is not a pastime for which I feel the currently-vogue requisite shame to indulge; though I know Wiki drives some people to seething snobbery, I rather enjoy its brevity, and have MANY times found its links and resources to be extremely useful), and found something or other about a 1790 novel called The Monk.

Having finished it a few days ago, I'm still doing a bit of gobsmacked blinking.  And not just because it revealed to me the shocker that my generation didn't invent sex, perversion, rape, nor even naughty priests.  No, the thing that strikes me most about this Guignol of sensationalistic plot and pretty stunningly explicit voyeurism is its psychology.

The female characters are, of course, by and large ignored except as vessels to catch and, indeed, runneth over with The Male Gaze.  Toward the end we see a nice bit of exception to this, where a passage is dedicated entirely to a woman's plight - but, of course, even 222 years ago, only in a plight is a female character of interest.  So we have The Woman In Peril to go with that Gaze business - but feminist diatribe is not the point of this post.  The thing was written by a twenty year old man in 1790:  of COURSE he was interested in fantasizing about girls.

Looking, though, at the minds of the men in The Monk, the acuteness of the author's observation is deep and seriously considered.  Flashy as this thing gets - and it gets astoundingly sensational - when the author delves into the mind, the result is very persuasive.  This is exceptionally so in the case of the title character, Ambrosio, whom it's no spoiler really to reveal as the villain of the piece.

What rings truest, and most frightening, in these passages - the thoughts of, the reactions of, this monk - is the combination of perfect self-awareness and utter heedlessness.  Ambrosio moves from a position of purity by default - he is sinless because he has been hermetically sealed off from "The World" - the source of temptations - into willful debauchery at top speed.  The voluptuousness both of his seduction AND of his guilt are starkly, clearly delineated.  His awareness of his guilt never flags, never interferes with his desire, even as the remainder of religion in his faith still fights to squeeze through loopholes and avoid reckoning and punishment.

In the world of 2012, of course, these things read with almost excessive identifiability.  This was my reading at a time when Sandusky was found guilty of his crimes, and the political undertones in a novel condemning, not faith, but many aspects (not, oddly enough perhaps, all) of the Catholic religion might have unsubtle resonance for many of us reading today.  Even a scene of almost-justice become street riot contains such modernity it's sickeningly recognizable.

Reading The Monk was a moment's lark turned into a bit of exploration, some admitted prurience, and finally a page-turning quest to see what this author would do next.  I have to say, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for their next open-minded read.  But be warned - the view inside the mind of a determined rapist doesn't lack for giddy shock.