Old Library Books

Leave a comment

There’s a quiet joy to it.  Even if they have other people’s markings in them, books I obtain ex libris are among my personal treasures.  They bring back memories of reading library books—learning new things.  For a fleeting moment when reading my current used, ex-library book, I was taken back to a night long ago.  The youth group at my local United Methodist Church had occasional sleepovers in the church itself.  Despite being a small town, folks were okay with mixed genders (with chaperones, of course) doing this.  We were even allowed to go into the sanctuary at night.  Churches are scary places in the dark.  We would sit there and talk about nothing in particular, the way teens do.  And I always brought a book.

On one sleepover I was working on a term paper on—don’t laugh—vampires.  I’d been researching with the limited resources of Oil City High School’s library, supplemented by the Oil City Public Library.  I still remember the exact book I took along.  Although awaking ultra-early only developed with me during my commuting years, I’ve always been an early riser.  (The early teen, or tween, years excepted.)  I remember waking up before everybody else, returning to the sanctuary, sitting in our usual pew, and reading about vampires by the light of dawn coming through the windows (which were only modestly stained with off-whites and yellows).  And feeling profoundly happy.  Friends were asleep downstairs and I was curled up with a library book.  What more could you ask?

Many such memories linger as I age.  But my current reading of a marked-up library book brought something else to mind.  Many such books have marks near the beginning that quickly peter out.  As if most readers never made it past the introduction.  I’ve stopped reading a book or two in my time, but generally I need to get past page 10 or 20 before I’m willing to make that call.  I often find that a book’s introduction is one of the best parts—especially in academic books.  Authors try to draw you in with intriguing ideas and then, at least in my field, get technical once you reach chapter 1.  Honeymoon’s over.  The mind of the person, however, who marks up a library book and then suddenly stops intrigues me.  Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic this morning, but reading a withdrawn library book, with its soft pages and old book smell, is one of life’s great gifts.  Even if it’s not about vampires.

Content Creation

Leave a comment

Those who know me know my stand on books.  I’m pretty much defined by them.  I hope my blog makes that clear.  I’m always amazed, however, when someone happens across my little fissure in the internet and offers to send me a book, if I’ll mention it here.  That’s happened probably on an average of once a year over the past dozen or so that I’ve been doing whatever it is I do here.  It’s one of the perks of being a “content creator.”  I know it may sound odd, but being a content creator is a viable career these days.  Not for me—I don’t have nearly enough followers—but for the younger, prettier, or smarter, it is a way of virtually being in the world.  Or being in the virtual world.  I don’t think that means that books are passé.

In fact, I turn down offers to read free ebooks.  I spend all day at work on a computer and when I can finally turn it off, I generally pick up a book.  (Unless the lawn requires attention, or it’s garbage day, etc.)  The  thing about reading is that you have to make time for it.  For a “content creator” I’m not in love with spending all my time online.  I don’t use my phone much at all and I find a paper book in hand to be comforting.  I’m glad to write about those I’ve read in my little fissure here.  And since I sit on the editorial side of the desk, I think that increases my appreciation of books even more.  But honestly, I wouldn’t mind making a little income on what I spend so much time doing.  Maybe reading to keep out of trouble could be a job?

Content creation is like a sponge filter feeding.  You suck in the culture around you, drawing what’s useful into your brain.  Then you make it unique to your perspective and if enough people think it’s worth seeing/watching/listening to, advertisers will begin to swarm.  Or, in my case, they might send books with the hopes that someone will actually read this blog.  And the senders obviously have—at least a little bit—so does this make me an “influencer”?  Whether or not it does (or doesn’t) I do end up, when the day is through, one book up in the equation.  And that’s a good thing, given my stand on books.

Love’s Life

1 Comment

One of the things about literary classics is they open themselves to reinterpretation.  It’s often a lot of fun to trace these.  Andi Marquette is obviously an educated writer.  Her The Secret of Sleepy Hollow is one of those reinterpretations that has a unique take on the tale.  Set in modern times and featuring a member of the Crane family—Abby—as a graduate student, this story brings the tale into a contemporary context.  Abby meets another graduate student—Katie—in Sleepy Hollow and the two fall in love.  It turns out that Katie is a member of the Van Tassel family, thus bringing the two main families of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” together again.  There’s even a headless horseman.

Like the biblical book of Ruth, this is a gentle tale of women’s love.  There’s no overt violence, no heads get chopped, but two women love and care for one another.  Many of the more modern repackaged versions of Sleepy Hollow tend to go for the violent, sometimes drug-fueled tales of bored youth in a small town facing an angry ghost.  Here the interest is more literary, a gothic romance.  The fact that it’s a lesbian love story makes me wonder why so many people have trouble with others’ love lives.  People are prone to curiosity about sex—that’s a simple fact.  What isn’t so simple is that mores based on culturally specific ideas from millennia ago don’t stand the test of time and yet cause misery in modern lives because they can’t accept what we now know—sex and love are anything but simple.

Marquette’s book is marked by that anxiety.  When people discover a love that’s often misunderstood, they face ridicule or worse.  The book of Ruth provides a good guide here—the acceptance of a normally forbidden love can bring good and happiness to people in what is often a difficult world.  There’s trouble enough—there are headless horsemen out there—that we don’t need to be causing more by judging the loves of others.  Even a cisgender heterosexual can understand that.  Life is complicated and we all try to find our way through.  Love is one of those things that can help to make it more bearable.  I found The Secret of Sleepy Hollow compelling in that way.  It may not be a literary classic—few books are—but it takes on a complex topic intelligently and with heart.  It’s a new take on an old story that still fits the modern world.

Off with Their

Leave a comment

“Heads, I win,” is common enough as a call for flipping a coin.  That element of chance plays through Regina Janes’ Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture.  You see, John the Baptist has a lasting place among the beheaded—indeed he’s featured on the cover of the book.  And since Janes is looking at the topic in literature and culture, you can’t very well leave John out.  I wonder what it says about humanity that there are so many other possible examples to include that this book is a mere sampler.  Applying literary theory to the process, it becomes, well, theoretical at points, but still it’s an eye-opening book.  Even if not always comfortable to read.  The first few chapters, which cover the development of European beheadings, aren’t sweetness and light.  There’s more happening here than meets the eye.  These heinous acts set the stage for symbolism, however.

The material on John the Baptist is fascinating and insightful.  It’s ironic, in some ways, that Jesus’ cousin is perhaps most famous for being beheaded.  He also sheds light on his more famous family member through literary parallels.  And, of course, it doesn’t end there.  The idea gets picked up and explored by others in various art forms.  You don’t really want to look, but since they’re there in the illustrations, you do.  Then the book moves on to African stories.  Playing off Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Janes gives voice to African authors who explore beheading within their own cultural contexts.  All this goes back, historically, much further than John.  Indeed, beheading is part of very early myths as well.  It does make you stop and think.

I read books like this looking for clues.  There’s a larger object in mind.  And some of the insights I found were in examples afforded only a paragraph here or there.  I read this book because of a journey of which a colleague sent me through an innocent enough discussion.  There’s a reason we talk of excitement as “losing our heads,” and for some of us that excitement is research-laden.  Naturally squeamish, I’m an odd one for watching horror.  There’s something more to find here, however.  Although gruesome at points, you learn something from wandering through this museum of heads.  And when looked at through different lenses (of course, Freud is there) new perspectives emerge.  Beheading is violent and yet it’s been a part of human culture for a very long time.  There’s much to ponder here.

Recalling the Story

Leave a comment

Remembering how a story goes.  That’s one of a book’s functions, particularly if a tale’s complex.  Running a season behind, I was one of those enamored of Sleepy Hollow when it first aired from 2013 through 2017.  In fact, that was the first story that I tried to explore, somewhat academically, in the horror genre.  At the time I hadn’t realized how many spin-off media had come out, based on these new characters.  I recently read The Secret Journal of Ichabod Crane in which Alex Irvine provides the service of summarizing the first season through the conceit of the main character’s secret diary.  It has to be secret because in the series he’s never shown keeping a journal, and the title explains why we’re just finding out about this now.  (Or then, since it was published while the series was still on the air.)

Reading it reminded me of just how complex the plot was.  I suspect that’s one reason so many people were taken with it.  Week-to-week you weren’t sure where it was going.  And the plot integrated religious themes from the first episode on.  That’s what first drew me to my current research trajectory.  The show wasn’t perfect, and some plot elements grew tired after a while, but overall it was compelling.  Mixed with the natural comedy of someone from centuries past trying to learn how to get along in a rapidly technologizing world provided light moments amid the death and bloodshed.  And, of course, the pairing of the patrician but progressive white man with a young black professional in the fight against evil was novel and necessary.

Irvine’s book is rather like the novelization of a movie.  In terms of hours, however, a television series outstrips the maybe two hours of a typical film.  A lot has to be left out, including scenes in which Crane wasn’t present, although he was pretty steadily in the camera’s gaze.  Initially suspected as a criminal, he had to be kept under pretty close watch, so his was a good perspective for a journal.  Its secrecy continues the trope of hidden documents that ran throughout the series.  Another aspect was that it addressed the Hamilton era when that show was becoming immensely popular.  And Sleepy Hollow was quite literary, with references to books from early writers.  There was a lot to like about the show.  It burned itself out in four seasons, though, and after season two there would seem to be little need for any further secret journals as the story grew even more complex.  This one, however, is a good reminder of how the story goes.

More Dark Academia

Leave a comment

It could be that I’m not smart or sophisticated enough.  Or maybe I’ve just lived a sheltered existence, although I grew up with an alcoholic parent and among a blue-collar drug culture.  Despite this, I attended a “preppie” liberal arts college, but it wasn’t in Vermont.  All of which is to say I had a difficult time getting into Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  There may be spoilers here, so if it’s on your reading pile, maybe wait to read this.  Then tell me if you don’t agree.  So here goes.  The narrator, a perhaps unreliable Richard, is from a working-class dysfunctional family (check).  He attends a liberal arts college on scholarship (check).  It’s modeled on Bennington (the checks start stopping here).  There he works his way into an exclusive group of five highly intelligent students in a private study Greek curriculum (this is also a partial check).

The days are filled with intensive work in Greek and the nights with alcohol and drugs and cigarettes.  So many cigarettes.  I found myself wondering how such highly intelligent students accomplished so much when they were stoned all the time outside of class.  In any case, with two of the now six students not present—including Richard—they accidentally kill a man during a Bacchanal.  Their professor covers for them.  Then the other excluded student finds out and begins blackmailing the four.  Like the rest of them he’s fond of booze and he begins to let slip what he knows.  Spoiler alert: so they kill him.  This is followed by more drugs and alcohol and when the professor finds out he simply leaves his tenured post to do something else.  A rift develops in the remaining five that ends—another spoiler—the way dark academia often does, with a suicide.

Overall the story is captivating.  Overdone on the substance use and abuse, but it does keep you engaged, once you get through the first hundred pages or so.  I like dark academia, but I also like characters with whom I can sympathize.  Like Richard, I’d gone to what was at the time a selective college from a working class family.  There was drinking even at the notoriously dry Grove City College, and there were drugs.  Perhaps those from elite families indulged.  I hung out with scions of middle-class families (I didn’t know anyone else that was poor) and they didn’t spend their hazy nights under controlled substances.  Having been a professor at a gothic school, and having studied Classics-adjacent, though, I found much of this hard to believe.  It’s a book that becomes better upon reflection than in the actual reading.  Still, I’m sure that I didn’t get it because I’m not sophisticated enough.

What People Like

Leave a comment

It must be like showing up at a party wearing a flashy shirt that somebody else is also wearing.  Embarrassing, no?  A few years back I read Brian Jay Jones’ biography of Washington Irving.  As you may know, I recently finished Andrew Burstein’s.  The two were published within a year of each other, but both after a seven-decade gap in such biographies.  I suspect the renewed interest in Irving sprang up in the surge of public interest after Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow appeared.  Movies have power.  Books, especially big books, take a long time to write.  I don’t know if Jones and Burstein were aware of each other’s efforts or not.  Both are quite good, but they do stand as a testament to how fame can be fleeting.  Irving is infrequently taken as a genius writer today but he started more than one big thing.

What I’m particularly interested in is how Burton’s film seems to have kickstarted a new millennium interest in this old story.  I recently had a discussion with a couple of folks who felt that movies were too manipulative to be enjoyable.  Of course, nobody forces you to watch a movie, but I have found that they are powerful ways of influencing people.  And society.  Movies have been one of the more impactful forms of fiction media, spawning ideas that can change society.  Indeed, they may be modern mythology.  I wouldn’t yet make that exalted claim for Sleepy Hollow, but for those who follow such things, it has influenced the way we look at things.  And we can learn something from paying attention to them.

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane by John Quidor

I suspect that is one of the perennial mistakes of higher education.  Assuming that something is popular means that it shouldn’t be worthy of scholarly attention.  If we want to understand what it means to be human, rather than just raping and plundering our planet until we choke it to death, we need to consider what it is that appeals to people.  What are the Classics if not the popular literature of antiquity, dating back to the time before most people could read?  What do we lose by trying to understand what motivates others?  There are those who spend their money on such things, after all.  Consider game developers.  They rake in the money because that’s what people like to do.  We don’t mind being manipulated, as long as we do so voluntarily.  We’ve wandered away from Irving at this party, but it does seem that Burton’s movie kickstarted our interest in America’s early wit again.  We ignore what interests hoi polloi at our peril.

The Young and the Headless

Leave a comment

Young adult literature is sometimes fun to read as an adult.  In addition to going swiftly, compared to much “adult” literary literature, it has a way of evoking what life was like when we were younger.  Or at least it can.  Sticking with my Sleepy Hollow kick, I read the first volume of the series “The Hollow” (later “Sleepy Hollow High”) by Christoper Golden and Ford Lytle Gilmore.  This volume, Horseman, posits the return of the headless horseman to Sleepy Hollow in the modern day, triggered by the return of some of Ichabod Crane’s unknowing descendants.  The story follows brother and sister team Shane and Aimee Lancaster, who’ve just moved to Sleepy Hollow from Boston.  Although full of unexplained happenings, the book conjures the emotional turmoil of teenage years well.

While I normally try to read within my usual age level, the occasional foray into tween, young adult, and now, new adult lit is a fun escape.  One of the mysteries of aging—and I certainly didn’t think of this myself as a young person interacting with my elders—is that you remember what it was like to be at the various stages of life you’ve passed.  When you’re young you’re discovering things for the first time and there’s a revelatory aspect to them.  I can’t make universal claims, but in my experience life just gets more complicated the longer you live.  We yearn for the simplicity of younger times when, for example, you just paid the rent, went to work, fell in love, and did your own taxes.  As an adult you find all of these things hide complexities that often hide even more complexities within themselves.  Why not throw caution to the wind and spend a weekend reading a young adult novel?

I’m undecided about reading the rest of the series.  This story quickly drew me in, but the other volumes are now published only in ebook format.  And I suppose I should do some more serious adult reading as well.  Actually, I’ve been plugging away at a novel written for adults by an author my age, but it’s long and, well, involved.  Kinda like life itself, I suppose.  One of the things I’ve noticed about modern engagements with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is that they tend to skew towards a younger crowd.  Maybe I can recapture a bit of my own youth that way.  I’ve known the story since my youngest years but have only recently really began to pay attention to it as, well, I guess I have to admit, an adult.

Have a Little Hope

1 Comment

Optimism is a rare commodity these days.  Reading Scott Edwin Williams’ new book, Lightbulb Moments in Human History: From Cave to Colosseum, served to remind me of that.  The first of a projected three volumes, Williams’ book frames this rather like some of the other big picture attempts to summarize human history in a thousand pages or less, such as those of Yuval Noah Harari or Rutger Bregman.  In outlook he’s closer to Bregman, who unabashedly states that we have progressed—things are better than they used to be.  To explore this, in a (in his own words) smartass way, Williams has divided early human history into four main areas: STEM, religion, education, and culture.  This framing device isn’t heavy-handed, but it is interesting to see religion included, and not always negatively.

We live in an era when those I regularly talk to (admittedly a small group), generally feel pessimistic about where we are.  A good deal of that is because, as Williams rightly points out, we look at the small picture.  Yes, we have big problems such as Trump, Musk, Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine, and global warming.  Yes, people are suffering and dying needlessly.  If, however, we take a step back, things are far better for far more people now than they ever have been.  That doesn’t mean we don’t have big problems to solve—mostly spawned by capitalism and patriarchy—but if people follow historic trends, we may well end up in a better place.  Historians won’t take Williams’ book seriously—and indeed, he tries to inject quite a bit of humor along the way—but books that remind us to compare where we are with where we have been can provide much needed optimism.  Hope still huddles in Pandora’s box.

I was glad to see Williams including religion in his four keys areas to explore.  I am convinced that he doesn’t devalue any people in the world (the book covers prehistory, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Meso-America, Greece, and Rome) but his chapter on Christianity is a bit of an outlier.  Although it’s not intentional, his “God of the Old Testament” versus “God of the New Testament” paradigm could been seen as antisemitic.  Again, I’m sure Williams doesn’t intend it that way, but those of us who have studied, and continue to study the history of religions realize that that model has been used to justify nefarious plots in the past.  Throughout the whole, Williams pokes fun at Erich van Däniken who influenced a young Williams just like he influenced a young me.  And growing up requires leaving some things behind, while nevertheless learning something from them.

Local Haunts

Leave a comment

Local color.  It’s what makes travel so much fun, even if not to someplace exotic.  I’ve lived in five different states and two different countries and one thing each place had in common was local lore.  Since I’ve been a stranger in most places I’ve moved, I’ve picked the lore up primarily from books.  Fortunately there are as many people willing to write them for the also many people like me who are willing to read them.  S. E. Schlosser is a storyteller.  We have Rutgers University in common, but her book, Spooky New York, focuses on the state next door.  The book contains retold stories, or as the subtitle states Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore.  New York isn’t unique in having such stories, and some of them are clearly regional variants—I heard some of them set in Wisconsin, for instance—but there’s a guilty pleasure in reading such accounts.

Although most of us are raised being told “there’s no such thing as ghosts,” that “truth” doesn’t stick for all of us.  I don’t know if any of the ghosts in this collection are real; folklore deals with that—shall we say—twilight zone that lies between quotidian existence and the weird.  Strange things do happen, but not on any kind of scientific schedule so they can be anticipated and quantified.  And some of them have been seen and reported by many different people.  These stories include such tales.  While they range the length of the state they concentrate in the east.  I’m sure, however, that if you spent enough time talking to the locals you could scare up ghosts from across the Empire State.

Many of the tales are set in New York City.  Having commuted into New York for about seven years, one thing became clear to me.  Even with the tall, modern towers and sophisticated, wealthy trappings, it can be an eerie place.  Around this time of year I would arrive in Manhattan well before sunrise.  Walking the predawn streets to the office showed Gotham in a different light.  Even the few times I went for lunchtime strolls to clear my head, I sensed there were millions of untold stories here.  Some gothic, some haunted.  Schlosser tells several such New York tales.  She includes some from literature but most of those probably go back to stories told by the locals before having been fixed onto paper.  This book will help set the mood, even if you live in the next state over, or anywhere that ghosts roam.

In Praise of Cardboard

Leave a comment

There’s an irony to it.  Using single-use plastic bags to ship books.  Now I know better than to stereotype book lovers, but I suspect it’s safe to say that those of us who order books like paper.  And we are probably well aware that paper recycles more easily than single-use plastics with heavy, preternaturally sticky labels attached to them.  You see, much of the clutter about our house is our reluctance to just throw away things that can be recycled or reused.  There are rules for prep, however.  Labels are supposed to be removed from plastics and judging from my experience, I need to be doing more pushups to do so.  Some are stuck on so well that it stretches and distorts the plastic like the face of a movie monster, still without coming off.  What’s wrong with a box?

Books arriving, snug in a box

Apart from being easily recycled, boxes prevent books from getting banged up in transit.  I often receive books so tightly cased in plastic that removing them must be like pulling off snug leggings when it’s really humid out.  There’s an almost obscene quality to peeling off something that tight.  And getting the label off?  Forget it.  Boxes are better.  We tend to reuse many of them—they’re good for sending fragile gifts to others.  Or storing other single-use plastic pieces for use in art projects.  (Lids often can’t be recycled.)  As long as the paper’s responsibly sourced, cardboard has environmental benefits.  Besides, I suspect books prefer the feel of paper on their skins.

I’m not a very good consumer, but I do have a soft spot for books.  Even as reasonable grocery chains are phasing out single-use plastics, many book sellers are picking up the slack, it seems.  I know we have developed civilization to such a point that our lifestyle is impossible without plastic.  Indeed, the very keys on which I tap out these thoughts are made of plastic (at least Macs use metal casings for their laptops, or some of them, anyway.)  I have this nightmare that I’ll get something in the mail, or worse, a visitor at the door, telling me that they’ve pieced together, from all the fragments of labels still on plastic bags, that I’m the one who’s been turning them in for recycling without properly removing the sticky paper.  I know that I won’t have any viable defense—I don’t have the time, resources, or tensile strength to do the job properly—and all I’ll be able to say is, “I prefer boxes.”

More Scary Stories

Leave a comment

There might be a disconnect.  As a child the stories I had read to me were either Bible stories (Archway Books) or wholesome Easy Readers.  I think that was pretty typical in the sixties.  We didn’t have a lot of money but an abundance of respect for the Bible, so the former by far predominated in my literary experience.  As any kid will do, I thought this was normal.  There was a stir in the kids’ world two decades later, in the eighties, when Alvin Schwartz began compiling scary folklore and retelling it for children.  His Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series has been challenged or banned from the start.  Most parents don’t want to admit that their kids like scary tales.  We didn’t direct our daughter’s reading much when she was old enough to pick Scholastic Books, and one time she wanted Scary Stories.

We were a bit shocked, not by that, but when a relative got us started on Roald Dahl.  His somewhat macabre children’s books were fine.  One of them, however—and I can’t recall the title—it’s packed away in the attic—was stories for older kids and it was so gruesome that I had difficulty making it through.  Not for me, but thinking about it from the perspective of a young child.  I recently had cause to read In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, again by Schwartz.  The copy I read wasn’t an original edition, but had illustrations, in color, by Victor Rivas.  I tried to think how scary such tales must be for kids who don’t know them already.  These illustrations were humorous, which helps, and tended toward Victorian or Edwardian style. Encountering such ideas for the first time, however, could leave an impression.

We tend to find olden times scarier than our own, it seems.  Partially this is correct, I suppose.  Science has helped us delay the inevitable by ameliorating many things that were formerly deadly.  At the same time it has helped those interested in such things to develop even deadlier weapons.  Mass shootings have become more common, to be mingled with the quotidian horrors of daily life.  Ghost stories hardly seem to be the most scary thing anymore.  I don’t know the answer to when kids are psychologically ready for scary things.  I still recall our neighbor—she was a few years older than we were—telling my brothers and me scary “true” stories that happened in the woods just across the street.  Those were in the “innocent” days before printed ghost stories for kids, but they gave me nightmares even so.  It was, however, the machinations of “Bible believers” that led me back to horror as an adult.  It’s kind of a disconnect.

Irving the Writer

Leave a comment
From the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons

No writer is “on” all the time.  I often marvel that, with the busy lives they lead, they manage to finish any books at all.  Even so, not all are uniformly good.  Following up a biography of Washington Irving with a book by that eponymous title, this was my first foray into the Twayne’s United States Authors Series.  Written by Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, this volume (Washington Irving) seems fair-minded and honest about Irving and the irregularities of his writing.  My impression, not having read all his work, is that he started out great and became good further down the line.  Not that I’m in any position to judge.  We read and we like what we like.  Bowden pretty much goes through all of Irving’s writings—sometimes story by story—giving a sense of what they’re all about. (The book was released in cloth with no real cover image, so enjoy Irving’s smile instead.)

As famous and influential as Irving was, his reputation as a writer has been in decline for many decades.  One reason for this is that his first major twentieth-century biographer, Stanley T. Williams, apparently despised him.  So much so that he wrote a two-volume biography demonstrating his faults as a writer.  This demolition job meant that works like Bowden’s had to try to counter the prevailing opinion of Irving’s ability.  Bowden shows how carefully planned out many of his works were without denying that Irving had to try to make money from his writing.  The thought at the time seems to have been that literary pursuits were best left to the wealthy—those with leisure to indulge in letters.  Irving showed that it was possible to write your way to a reasonable living.

Of course, not all of his writing is that good.  And several volumes of it are “history.”  Today you have to earn an advanced degree, or at least a masters, before you can pass yourself off as a historian.  Irving did it the old fashioned way.  He read as much as he could get his hands on and synthesized it.  Today he’s not really remembered as an historian, or as a statesman.  He’s known as the author of a few, mostly brief, American classics.  Even though Bowden writes of Irving appreciatively, she doesn’t really inspire you to run out and read all his work.  He did have a tremendous output for the time and was an extremely influential author.  Nevertheless, others came and surpassed him, even as they were his contemporaries.  Still, it seems there ought to be some credit in being first, and some integrity in actually managing to live by the written word.  Irving is worth another look.

Knickerbocker

Leave a comment

Washington Irving is one of those people with an outsized influence on American history who nevertheless has become ignored.  He met nearly every US president from Jefferson through Franklin Pierce, and what’s more, most of them knew who he was.  Sometimes decried as a less-than-original writing talent, Irving nevertheless led a remarkable life and through it all, treated others with respect and gentility.  He’s also a bit of a mystery.  All of this is captured quite well in Andrew Burstein’s biography, The Original Knickerbocker.  Burstein does go off on some diversions from time to time, but most of them are quite interesting.  One of the facts that astounded me was just how many early American political leaders were writers.

I don’t mean wealthy individuals hiring ghost writers to praise them in their “autobiographies,” but actual writers.  Fiction and all.  These were, pardon the period phrase, “men of letters.”  Writing was a way of not only influencing people, but of improving one’s mind.  Some of these individuals became presidents, others cabinet ministers, or foreign diplomats.  Once his literary star ascended, Irving could get struggling writers a government post by a letter sent to the chief executive.  It was a different day than that in which we live.

In my mind, Irving also stands out in that his fame came early and his later writings, while perhaps selling better, never eclipsed his early fame.  And honestly, never reached his earlier shine.  It began with his satirical History of New York.  This book established him as a wit and a gifted writer.  Since his family ran a secure business, Irving was able to travel without working for several years and didn’t produce his next book for another decade.  The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. may not be known to many today, but two of its sketches are still told and retold.  One is “Rip Van Winkle” and the other is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  This book also helped to establish the American celebration of Christmas, something begun in his History.  Although he would write many more books, he’s still best remembered for two short stories from his second.

Burstein takes his cues in this biography from “Rip Van Winkle.”  This particular story is kind of a parable of Irving’s life.  Irving couldn’t know this, of course, having published the story when he was about 36.  His subsequent books sold well enough, and apart from a stint as American minister to Spain, he was able to make his living through his pen.  There’s quite a lot in Burstein’s treatment that I’ll come back to, I’m sure.  But for the moment, it left me feeling as if I’d met a great, if struggling, writer in person.

Library Respect

Leave a comment

I didn’t know what to do.  All my life I’d been told “library books aren’t your books—treat them like they belong to somebody else.”  And here I was with a checked-out library book with uncut pages.  This was in Edinburgh, and to make matters more interesting, it was an interlibrary loan book.  What was I supposed to do?  Finally I found the sharpest butter knife in the drawer and carefully cut the edges.  (This was before uneven pages became trendy again.)  Then, some time later I was reading another library book and I found writing in it.  Writing!  Who did this borrower think s/he was, writing in a book that belonged to someone else?  And what was more, the writing was done in ink.

Perhaps some readers get so caught up in a book that they forget it’s not theirs.  As for me, I’ve never been so bold as to think others would want my thoughts in a library book.  That’s what notebooks are for.  Of course, since that experience I’ve found many library books with writing in them.  These days when I have to buy books for research, not being affiliated any more, I tend to get them used.  From libraries often.  I look for the designation “very good” in the description since this specifies “clean” interiors, generally since they were library books.  I’m guessing that those who classify used books operate under the same delusion that I used to—people don’t write in library books.  The most recent three or four ex-library books I’ve ordered (all “very good”) have had ink writing and underlining in them.  You can see this at a glance.

The most recent one arrived the other day and on my initial thumb-through I found the now expected ink markings, but also two pages stuck together by a wad of gum.  This passes beyond the realm of unthinking behavior to criminal, at least in my mind.  Who sticks chewed gum between the pages of a book?  A book they don’t even own?   I did what anyone would do: I checked the book out on Internet Archive and wrote, in ink, the obliterated words in the margin.  I’m the first to admit I’m sensitive about books.  When I buy a new one I try to finish it with no sign that it’s even been opened.  No creases on the spine, no banged edges.  When I fail in this I feel badly, like I’ve hurt a friend.  At least I don’t have to worry about cutting the pages.  And even if I do, I know that it’s a trendy look these days.