Old Library Books

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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  Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic this morning, but reading a withdrawn library book, with its soft pages and old book smell, is one of life’s great gifts.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.

Love’s Life

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Learning English

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English is a difficult language to learn.  Growing up monolingual, I was able to pick up German, Greek, and Hebrew (and other semitic languages) without too much trouble, through intensive schooling.  I have to wonder if those learning English as a foreign language don’t have a much more difficult task.  The other day I was looking at a document in Icelandic (don’t ask), and marveling how I simply couldn’t penetrate it, although it is Indo-European.  Then I sat down to read an article in English.  The topic was of interest to me but it was clear that the content wasn’t written by native speakers.  Indeed, it turns out the authors were from an Indonesia university.  The journal was published by an Indonesian press.  It’s peer reviewed, but those who run it aren’t native English speakers.

Interestingly enough, although the article wasn’t in the field in which I was technically trained, I was able to follow what the authors were saying.  Partially it was because of my familiarity with the topic, which I’d read about before, but partially it was that you can read English without the direct and indirect articles that are our usual guideposts, and with the wrong verb tenses and declensions.  It is possible.  You wouldn’t want this, I suspect, if you were building a rocket carrying people into space, but it isn’t that much different from trying to read the instructions that come with most devices that are manufactured in nations where English is a foreign—very foreign—form of communication.  I admire their pluck.  I still recall enough German that I can get through some documents without generating more gray hairs, but I wouldn’t dare try to write to someone in it.  Nein.

Languages are fascinating elements of human culture.  Although there was no literal tower of Babel to create them, our species, in isolated areas, learned a variety of different ways to communicate verbally.  It’s only with travel that these isolated groups met and generally they try to talk, unless they simply kill strangers on sight.  We want to understand one another.  We all know that our language learning skills are at their peak during our very youngest years.  Brains get ossified into using one language to think and as you age it’s harder to pick up new ones.  Still, we have that old isolationist tendency hardwired as well.  Us versus them.  And if we can’t understand we quickly distrust.  Language study is probably one of the best ways to ensure peace.  If we can’t do that, at least we can try to read our language through the eyes of someone who’s made the effort, even if it’s difficult for us.

More Scary Stories

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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

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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

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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.

Gothic Days

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The tradition of telling ghost stories during the months of long darkness has evolved over time.  Since the time seems right, I watched a movie for which I read the book some years ago.  I recall that The Woman in Black is moody, and gothic.  What I don’t remember is how it ends.  More than one source—at least one from someone I know and one from a book—suggested I should see this movie, and I’m glad I did.  It’s a haunted house movie, set in a haunted village and the production values (unlike some movies I’ve recently watched) are quite high.  This film was a reboot in a couple of ways; there was an earlier film version, and it was also a new Hammer production.  In the latter capacity it broke records for Hammer box office earnings.

You see, Hammer, in its first incarnation, struggled for any kind of respectability.  The company almost single-handedly kept horror movies alive while US studios moved more toward sci-fi-themed projects, before the rebirth of modern horror.  Fans knew to go to Hammer for their monsters, but society folks (and those who wish to be society folks) don’t find horror worth any attention.  From my amateur point-of-view, such movies give the viewer a lot to think about.  The problem, as with most underdogs, is that a few bad examples tend to get all the attention.  Life is scary.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to live it, but it does mean that we might learn something from other people’s mistakes.  Or we might find ourselves haunted.

The Woman in Black is set in Edwardian times.  (I often ponder why we still refer to historical eras by the British monarchs—Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward, etc.—in a world finally moving away from imperialism.  Still, it’s convenient.)  Perhaps not quite as evocative as the Victorian Era, but still moody enough.  Although there are some disturbing scenes, this is no slasher.  Like the novel it’s the tale of a vengeful ghost, wronged in life and out for revenge.  While the end of the movie isn’t the same as the novel (okay, so I looked it up!), it’s similar.  And perhaps it’s best considered a parable of parenting.  No amount of training can prepare you for it, and although it’s supremely rewarding, it’s also very scary.  Susan Hill, the novel’s author, lost a child and that sense of haunting pervades both book and movie.  Gothic is often about grieving, and perhaps about learning something from it.

The Romantics

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It takes one to know one—or so they used to say.  My current preoccupation has me learning about the Romantics.  This isn’t the same as “romance,” although both words derive from the Old French for “verse narrative.”  Novel, in German, is Roman.  In any case, Sir Walter Scott cordially embraced Washington Irving when the latter arrived unannounced at Abbotsford.  Reading the account in Irving’s own words, it sounds like a bromance, and some modern interpreters—inclined as they are to look for genital contact—have suggested Irving, a lifelong bachelor, might’ve been a homosexual.  Although there’s nothing wrong with that, I do wonder if it misunderstands the language of the Romantics.  To borrow a sentence from Andrew Burstein (more to come anon): “This had to do with intimacy, not sex as we understand it.”

I recently gave a talk about Herman Melville’s spiritual orientation.  I mentioned his close friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne.  During the discussion period the question of whether they might’ve been lovers was raised.  I’d read this before.  I don’t know what went on in Melville’s bedroom—it’s none of my business—but I think the Romantics were all about intimacy.  We’re now familiar with the genre of bromance.  Guys, usually two, pairing off for pursuits of significance to both of them.  Or two women. I think of all the great same-sex pairings throughout literary history and wonder where we’d be without them.  Since our culture has long demonized sex, our mind is constantly creeping between the sheets.  Who touched whom?  Where and when?  Isn’t intimacy enough any more?  Where’s the Romance?  I’m no prude, but I wonder if we misread sex and the Romantics.

Louis Janmot, Poem of the Soul – On the mountain, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

The Romantic Movement produced the culture I taught myself living in a run-down house with no spending money.  I borrowed recordings—actual records—of Beethoven symphonies from the library that I had to listen to with headphones because nobody else wanted to hear that kind of thing.  I read Poe.  I read about Poe.  Gothic, a subset of Romanticism, became my muse.  I had no intimate friends with which to share this.  Not until seminary—that place where such unusual, unspoken things occur.  Of course I was in Boston, the most Romantic of American cities with New Bedford to the south and Salem to the north.  To the east the boundless ocean.  We still read the Romantics.  We still read about them.  I can’t help but think we might misunderstand them.  Yes, Irving and Scott were together “from morning to night,” but thinking back to my own Romantic ideals as a teenager, I suspect they just talked.  Intimately.

Melvillian Thoughts

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I’ve posted about Moby-Dick a number of times on this blog.  I make no bones about the fact that it’s my favorite novel.  Still, I don’t know much about Herman Melville as I’d like.  Only what you can learn from reading his novel and a few other books.  The thing is, I’m really growing an interest in the literature of the American Renaissance.  While Washington Irving isn’t my favorite writer, he was perhaps the earliest of the Renaissance crowd.  Consider this, these writers all lived during Irving’s lifetime: James Fennimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, William Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.  Many others as well, but what heady times!  Can you imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing all the wonders on offer for the first time?

But back to Melville.  I was recently doing some further reading about him—I need a good biography, actually—and learned some things I didn’t know.  I knew he’d gone to sea, but I wasn’t aware that his mother raised him with a strict Calvinism (which explains much in Moby-Dick), but that he eventually returned to his father’s Unitarianism.  Indeed, Melville’s work displays many of the values of the Unitarian tradition.  Moby-Dick is largely his struggle with religion, laid out in terms of Ahab and the great white whale.  Melville spent a period of his life, before Moby-Dick, as a successful writer.  In a way that seems unimaginable to us today, that novel was a flop and he eventually had to take on a pedestrian job, although he kept on writing.  I have to admit that I’ve read none of his other novels.  I’m just blown away with his most famous work that I’m a little afraid of being disappointed in his other efforts.

I know a few novelists.  Of only one of them have I managed to read all their works, and that’s because this particular author only wrote one novel (which made a big enough splash to get reviewed in Time).  My dilettantism has been a characteristic of my life.  I’m too curious, perhaps, and there’s not enough time to read every work of every author I admire, even those I personally know.  I haven’t given up joining their ranks someday.  One of my novels is currently out for consideration, but I have no real expectation of success.  The best I can do in these circumstances is to read the work of those who managed to succeed, even if they didn’t live to see it.  And to wonder what it must’ve been like when so much talent appeared at the same time in a very young country.

Sleepy Unhallow

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The thing about classics is they’re open to interpretation.  And expansion.  Since taking an interest in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” I’ve been reading modern novels based on it.  Several of these are self-published and although they show the distinct signs of that, they are nevertheless creative.  Human beings are a creative lot.  And the basic idea of Sleepy Hollow gives us a lot of material to develop.  Well, not really, I guess.  It’s a rather simple story of a love triangle in a dreamy small town where there’s widespread belief about ghosts, particularly a headless horseman.  You can nevertheless go in a lot of different directions from there.  Especially since we have two centuries since the story was published.

Filmmaker Jude S. Walko has written a horror treatment of the Sleepy Hollow tale in modern times.  The Unhallowed Horseman is graphic and violent and involves the gritty reality of being raised in a broken home.  This isn’t for the faint of heart.  One of the reasons, I expect, that Irving’s tale has survived is that he wrote it, according to the standards of the time, for a genteel readership.  There’s no sex and no violence.  It’s funny rather than really scary.  The characters are likable, if shallow.  There’s the frisson of a ghost but it’s never clear if he’s real or not.  In the end order is restored in the small village and the interloper is gone.  For these very reasons more recent readers are probably looking for something that fits more in our times.

Walko’s version has an emotionally scarred protagonist who is, according to modern practice, drugged into compliance.  He’s smitten by the cutest girl in the school, but the other guys try to take her at will.  The protagonist’s homelife is a shambles.  The sheriff is a descendent of Brom Bones, without any of his good qualities.  And due to a cosmic, astrological sort of event, the headless horseman rides again.  This horseman, however, is described as pure evil.  Almost in demonic terms.  On the night of the annual Halloween festivities this horseman gruesomely kills many of the characters off.  The high schoolers all drink, and the teenage boys have no morals.  At the end there’s a community left in mourning and no real future.  Nihilistic like some modern horror, this version won’t leave you smiling like Irving’s does.  Of course, if you write a classic it can be taken in new directions, and can be made to reflect the realities of new times.  Walko has his eyes open to the era in which we find ourselves.