"Blackberry Winter" giveaway

An author friend of Nicole Baart's is hosting a giveaway of her novel, together with a blackberry-themed gift basket that includes such things as blackberry jam and a really delicious-looking blackberry tea. (Wow, now the word "blackberry" is beginning to sound foreign.)

I admit, my motivation for sharing this isn't entirely unselfish--a blog share counts as an extra entry! That delicious--ahem, elegant-looking novel will be mine.

"Tom!" No answer.

I like to read old-timey kid-and-teen books--or, as they were simply and sweetly known back in the day, "boys' books". They were, essentially, YA before YA was invented. The British ones were about how great boarding school is, and the American ones were about how great skipping class is. Which just goes to show you.

I've noticed that a lot of protagonists are named Tom. Between Tom Sawyer, Tom Brown, Tom Playfair, Tom Swift and Tom Denniston, it's all a little confusing.

Roller Rink

Today and Tomorrow: Therese Heckenkamp's "Past Suspicion", Melissa Wiley's "The Prairie Thief"

Happy Monday, readers! (And happy Feast of St. Monica.) If you're looking for a few good books to take you through your week, look no further. I have two to recommend right now.

Both today and tomorrow, Therese Heckenkamp's Past Suspicion is available as a free Kindle download. I reviewed it here a week or two ago, so give it a look and go get it while it's up for grabs.

And tomorrow is the launch date of Melissa Wiley's The Prairie Thief. You may know Melissa as the author of two series of novels about Laura Ingalls Wilder's grandmother and great-grandmother. The Martha Years and The Charlotte Years were the stuff of my childhood, and I even clearly remember liking Martha better than Laura, though in Charlotte's case it was more of a tie. What I loved about Martha was that she lived in the Highlands and got to listen in on all the legends about brownies and sprites and Tam O' Shanter--and there were times when Martha's active determination to meet the wee folk blurred the edges and you wondered if the series was about to go from Historical Fiction to Historical Fantasy. You knew, of course, that it could never be, this being a straightforward and factually-accurate series published by HarperCollins, but you still couldn't help but hope--was our heroine ever going to befriend a brownie?

Well, in The Prairie Thief, that's exactly what (finally!) happens. I feel as if I'm witnessing something that's been in the cards for a long, long time. Get this book as soon as it's out, because it's probably going to be unlike anything you've ever read before, and you'll want to be in on it first. I'm personally going to be the first in my family to snatch that preorder off the doorstep.

Congealment

Stories are sort of like sourdough. You aren't making each one from scratch; you're cultivating a bit of the old one, even if you don't know it, and it makes the new story better.

I hope I'm doing that successfully. I'm writing the current novel in scrappy little bits, all of which I need to connect. All these different files, it's like trying to create life by growing all the organs in different boxes. And since it's first-person I've got tricky things to worry about like keeping the voice consistent.

Whenever one of us is in a play and we come home from rehearsal, my dad says--always, no matter what--"Is the show gelling yet?" Really. And he never uses the word "gelling" in any other context, ever.

So I'll say this about this story of mine--I hope it gels.

Unconnected (but happy) thoughts

Fantastic night out roller-skating with the friends. Well, we were only out for about an hour, but it's worth it with these people. I love those square 60s skates that won't let you make sharp turns. I'm probably going to set a scene in my novel at a roller rink now.

Clair and I have been bonding over Adventure Time. You probably know the cartoon. It's a stream-of-consciousness surrealist show that's set in a sort of colorful, candy-coated Valhalla. I'm a little iffy about it--don't love it without reservations, the way I love, say, Phineas and Ferb. But even though it's mostly noted for its animation, it's the talking that's good; it utilizes this slangy dialogue ("Slamacow! That fool looks rumped!") that makes me smile hard.

Someone I didn't know IRL commented on this blog.

I won an essay contest. Maybe I'll go on a bit about that later, but suffice it that I am excited.

I'm rereading In the Woods. Obsessed = me. (Also, is it way too late in summer to start Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine? I had thought I'd start on the first day of summer and have it be all poetic and In Memory of Ray. He probably won't care.)

The younger sibs think I'm the coolest thing ever because I showed them what Bugs Bunny on YouTube was and then let them use my phone to watch it.

I waste so much time on the internet and I don't even work on my story. I should go back to diary-writing.

Review: "The Amateur Cracksman" hits a little too close to Holmes

After hearing a chap by the name of "Raffles" mentioned offhandedly in every other P.G. Wodehouse book, I had to hunt him up to see what made him such a vital part of the era's popular literature. Wodehouse's generation grew up on Sherlock Holmes stories in in much the way kids from the 90s onward grew up on Harry Potter--no doubt the reason so many of his writerly peers turned to crime (fiction). But the Sherlock Holmes generation read Raffles, too, which was close enough. I imagine it could be likened to Harry Potter fans getting into Percy Jackson as a substitute after they've read the former series to death.

The other reason I picked up Raffles was that I'd heard the concept was "Holmes and Watson as criminals". Who hasn't been tantalized by all those delicious little hints within the Holmes canon that the Great Detective would have made an excellent criminal? (And, by the way, who says he wasn't? He's got plenty of spare time between mysteries, and more than enough lockpicks lying around the place.) So I psyched myself for "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton: The Series". And I guess that's exactly what I got: no more, no less.

"Bunny" Manders, accomplice to Raffles and part-time publisher of his criminal escapades, isn't a Watson double in the way that, say, Agatha Christie's Hastings is; Bunny's on the wrong side of the law, after all. He's as loyal to Raffles as Watson is to Holmes, but whereas Watson's reliability stemmed from soldierly courage and manly feeling and all those other things that made England great, Bunny is reliable for the opposite reason--he's a wimp. Sniveling, needy and quite the nervous case altogether, he's pained that his best friend is robbing jewels left and right but just can't bring himself to put his foot down and stop assisting him. Besides, they could use the money. (The major characterization difference is solidified in the first story: Bunny finds himself in the same situation as Watson in A Study in Scarlet--bankrupt, friendless and badly in need of someone to share the rent--but instead of maintaining the stiff upper lip as Watson did, he shows up at Raffles' flat with a gun, threatening to blow out his brains.)

The divergence of character is overridden by the similarity of the writing style. Bunny may not have Watson's decency, but when it comes down to dialogue his rapport with Raffles is simply and solely Watson's with Holmes, down to the last "said I".

Similarly, Raffles is nothing like Holmes in theory. He's a star cricket player, full of a psychopathic charm dating back to his schoolboy days (Bunny was his starstruck sidekick even then--think Steerforth's manipulation of the young David Copperfield, complete with a cutesy nickname), and his cleverness doesn't amount to inhuman genius. But in practice, Raffles is still Holmes. He discusses crime from the opposite moral angle, but he scarcely phrases a thing differently. His wit is enjoyable, but that's because it's often Holmes' wit.

The episodes contained in this book are shorter than the Holmes adventures, more like newspaper columns than magazine serials. This is something of a necessity, since one key aspect of Holmes doesn't hold up to a criminal translation: the mystery-solving. There can be no mystery when you're following the thieves at their work. To fill the gap, Hornung usually provides a quick crisis at the eleventh hour--a few guards to be outwitted, for instance--but it can't replace a Holmes investigation.

There are cracks in Hornung's largely effective aping of Doyle's style, moments when one catches a glimpse of a different, but talented, writer before he retreats into his pastiche again. He's capable of turns of phrase that Doyle would never have attempted: a man on the black market is equipped with "the shiftiest old eyes that ever flew from rim to rim of a pair of spectacles", and a scarred opponent of Raffles has "a treble-seamed, hand-sewn head". I could read an entire book written exactly like this, but sadly, Hornung didn't quite trust himself to write one.

For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad

"For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry,

And all their songs are sad."

- G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

Wait a minute, Irish authors? I thought I was an English authors girl. Despite my Irish heritage, I'd never even thought twice about there being authors living in Ireland nowadays, and now I'm apparently gulping down their books at the rate of three a month.

I finished Tana French's In the Woods yesterday, and it was one of those books where I actually had to calm myself down and swear not to post about it until tomorrow, for fear of sounding like one of those chicks on Tumblr after seeing The Avengers ("dfslkjsdfjladfslhdsahjkldsf SO MANY FEELS"). I never would have read it if it hadn't been for this book club thing, the premise not being the type of thing I go for and the title being just about the least impressive thing about it. Now I want to gad around recommending it to people, but I probably can't because it's full of disturbing content. But it's Ray Bradbury meets BBC crime drama, and it couldn't have come at a better time in my life, when I was feeling down because my beloved August was starting to masquerade as Autumn and all I needed, though I didn't know it, was a cathartic summer-fall transition read.

I also had to promise myself I wouldn't plunge right into its sequel, The Likeness, until I had had some time to breathe.

Instead, Bernadette requested that I read her Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, which all the kids in her theater group have read. So far, it's not really my thing. There's a manic energy to it that I think would make for a great graphic novel, but the author is so absorbed in his world that he can't stop telling instead of showing. There are also steampunky versions of the Fair Folk that are low on ambiance and high on possibility as Lego sets.

(It's got its moments, though, not least of which is the revelation that the protagonist's dad and his manservant's uncle perished years ago aboard a ship full of exploding cola. That's a backstory.)

Gotta get off now. She's bugging me to read her Chapter Four, so I daresay the author's doing something right.

my own habitual heroine Renee Rant

In my recent review of Therese Heckenkamp's Past Suspicion, I included a throwaway line about "my own habitual heroine Renee Rant". Out of the context of my own fiction writing, that makes no sense, but I couldn't resist the alliteration. So I thought I'd do a quick post about young R.R. that I could link to in that review, so that anyone who reads it doesn't think I'm insane.

So who is Renee Rant? I live by the theory that every writer eventually gets a permission slip from the world at large, letting them know that it's okay to start the thing they've been building up inside.

Renee Rant is my permission slip.

As a writer, you'll sometimes have a couple of ideas come to you separately and stay with you, untouched, so long that they blend together and become the same idea. In my case:

- I had a dream about a magic bookmobile that sold jewelry and junk from other worlds. I ran in the house to get my money and when I came back, it was pulling away. Poignant, right?

- I saw a truck in traffic painted like a caravan. I tried to get a picture of it with my mom's phone, but only captured one of the corners. The license plate said Gua Gua.

- In the middle of a stolen spoonful of peach cobbler ice cream, it occurred to me that ice cream was nothing but nature preserved in a really weird way.

And somehow, I began thinking of that bookmobile of mine as an oddly-painted ice cream truck. Somehow its owners turned out to be a poet and a professional madman (although the latter shifted somewhere in the writing process and became an ordinary guy). Now we were getting somewhere.

My poet and his go-to guy needed a passenger, though. They needed someone who, unlike me, wouldn't miss the photo op, wouldn't turn her back and let the Gua Gua pull away. So I took some notes and absently played around with the idea of a female main character, but I never actually wrote a word. It was more of a thing that had dawned on me, which I meant to work on one day, than a straighforward writing plan at that point.

One day, the choir I was in at the time were waiting in a church basement for some kind of performance, and I found myself scanning the walls. The CCD kids had done self-portraits in crayon, and one of them caught my eye. A girl had drawn it--grayish hair, brown eyes, if I recall correctly, lips very red. Renee Rant, read the name.

Renee Rant? What kind of a name was that?

It sounded like a name for a main character, a name that would make me roll my eyes if I read it in a book and say, "No one would name their kid that." Yet here it was. Somebody had named their kid that, which meant it was realistic, which meant I had to use it.

I wrote it down. I kept in in mind. I'm not sure when I realized that Renee Rant was the main character for my ice cream truck story, but she fit it like a scoop fits a cone.

Can I rave about the Rant? She's selfish, she's adventurous, she's part poet and part cynic. She's a protagonist, she's a pair of eyes, she's lazy and innocent and jaded all at once. She's a habit of mine and, hopefully, she might be even a heroine.

But mostly, she's a permission slip.

Maybe some day, if I haven't jinxed her and her story by talking about it, I'll send her your way.

Love vs. Laughter

"He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love.

A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species."

- P.G. Wodehouse, Something New

One of the revelations I had while reading P.G. Wodehouse is this, and it's a surprising thing: I love romantic comedy. I'm one of these people who will read any genre, kind of like those people who listen to whatever's on the radio. But romantic comedy had never really showed up on my radar before, and suddenly I'm realizing that it's one of my favorite things. (It's actually kind of like a romantic comedy. "I loved you this whole time and I never knew!")

Maybe I never figured it out until now because romantic comedy is so rarely done right. Either it's romantic, but it isn't funny, or it's funny, but it isn't romantic, or neither. I don't blame the innocent genre, bless it; I blame its parents, Romance and Comedy. They used to be the happiest of couples, and now they've strayed so far from themselves and from one another that their poor child doesn't know where to turn.

This review of New Moon introduced me to one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes, a critique of the modern portrayal of romance: "the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety". The Twilight films are famous for featuring characters who a) epitomize love and b) don't ever crack a smile, as if their love is a thing too serious to be happy about. They'd sooner giggle in a Puritan church service than they would in the presence of their Adored Object.

The romantic comedies of old, meantime, saw love as inherently funny. Guys would make fools of themselves going after girls; girls would misunderstand guys and thus, more subtly, make fools of themselves right back. The idea was that it might have been a sort of beautiful game for the parties involved (or not), but for any third party, such as a reader, it could be severely amusing. At any rate, there's a touch of the ridiculous to any good romance, and once you drain it out, it runs the risk of becoming a staring contest.

So now we know what happens when you deprive romance of comedy (Twilight happens), but what about robbing comedy of romance?

Comedy these days is supposed to be just like Shakespeare's Benedick--loveless, mocking and mean. I guess comedy writers forget that we laugh at gallows humor because we're afraid of the gallows; they've gotten to think they have to string people up just to get some giggles going. And, though you have to look a bit closely for it, there really is a difference between laughing over a bruised shin and actively seeking other shins to bruise, that you may laugh. My point is that, in a modern romantic comedy, when a man starts delivering a sweet declaration of love, we're naturally expecting him to become the stooge of the movie, if he even exists past half a frame of a montage about bad dates. That's not funny. What's funny is when the guy gets made a fool of and somehow, after much trial and error (all of which is entertaining), gets the girl anyway.

You know, this whole thing makes me want to pull the Much Ado About Nothing plot on Comedy and Romance. The real reason they act so distant and treat each other with such disgust is that, deep down, they're nothing without each other.

Happy Birthday, Percy Jackson

Percy Jackson's birthday--August 18th

National Bad Poetry Day--August 18th

If I were one of those baking geeks
(I mean...one of those geeks who could bake),
I'd celebrate Percy's special day
And make him a bright blue cake.

But since it's also Bad Poetry Day
And bad poetry's more my speed,
I write him a terrible poem instead,
Which I hope he'll be able to read.*

*He being dyslexic and everything. Then again, since this is a bad poem, maybe not being able to read it will be the present.

I'm back

Houses are so fickle. You leave them for only a few days, and they give you up for dead and start smelling like paint and sawdust again, as if to give the impression that they've been unlived in for decades. It's like they suddenly get desperate and want someone, anyone, to come and fill the gap, so they put themselves back on the market. They can't help it, I guess. It's instinctive.

Now at the crack of dawn we got home from Delaware and since I couldn't really sleep when I was in the car, I fell gladly into the arms of my poor, deserted, still-unmade bed and started making up for lost time.

Couldn't be happier to be back. The house hasn't started smelling right again yet, but give it a day or two.

A few links and a word about ripped jeans

Sat up a bit last night finishing Bulldog Drummond. And now for my catchphrase (say it with me): I might write a review at some point. In the meantime, have someone else's. I especially like the observation about thrillers as daydreams.

When a friend of G.K. Chesterton asked him to edit a book called "Platitudes in the Making", the Apostle of Common Sense sat down with a green pencil and proceeded to utterly lay waste to it in the cheeriest way you can imagine. Oh, and draw pictures. I love that man!

I feel like I should include another link and make it an even three, but I can't come up with one, so allow me to ramble a bit. I am not now very well-dressed, being clad in a Perry the Platypus t-shirt and a pair of jeans with an unintentional hole in the knee. It took two cups of tea (made in a microwave and a saucepan respectively, because we don't have a kettle here) to resurrect me to my current state of consciousness. Bulldog Drummond, I blame you.

Cousins

My favorite thing about these vacations is getting to befriend the younger cousins all over again. We're staying in a house right now with my Dad's twin brother and his family (Aunt Nadine, Wynn, Simon, Ansel, Paul and Eddie), plus my Aunt Gretchen and her son Max. It's way too much fun already. Neil, Simon and Max were the three cousins who were baptized together, and at any given Gunther event they're guaranteed to be inseparable.

Clair, Bernadette, Mary and I have been sleeping in the basement. I woke up around nine this morning to a racket around the pool table. Aunt Nadine didn't understand how I had slept through it.

Ahh, I wish my diary was with me. You can't really write about day-to-day life and little conversations and things like that on a blog. Suffice it to say that breakfast this morning was a lot of fun.

Vacation Reading

If I had known this was the kind of vacation where you bring paper books, I would have brought paper books (to say nothing of my diary.) Clair knew. She, quite fortunately, had a couple John Greens and a collection of Robert Frost handy to line the shelves with. Even if you don't touch them, there's something sweet about knowing your books are around.

And I, never one to be taken unprepared, have my Kindle. This is the perfect place to polish off the last of Bulldog Drummond, and last night I scratched the surface of The Two Perfect Vacation Reads, which Fate clearly placed in my way for the purpose.

I'd been waiting for the day when Clair would request more Jeeves and Wooster and I'd had the feeling it would be on our August vacation (me having staved off them all summer), so when she looked at me sideways and said, "Do you have any more of those?" I had Right Ho, Jeeves ready for the purpose. We just read the first chapter, so hopefully it'll last us a bit, but I'm officially back in pre-series-finish mourning mode. (We still have a bunch of novels to go, but whaa, there'll never be enough books narrated by Bertie Wooster!) Since I'm told it's Shark Week, it's worth mentioning that apparently Bertie's cousin Angela nearly got eaten by a shark while they were all on a cruise together...and that's all we're going to hear about it. One of the many reasons I love this series, people. (I wish I had my copy of Thank You, Jeeves with me, too. It's partly about the potential perils of staying in a vacation home.)

That was directly after my friend Suzanne and I, who'd been excitedly texting each other about The Hunger Games, decided out of nowhere to start a cross-country book club. (Well, really it was her idea--I just texted her back in all-caps to display my enthusiasm.) For our first read she decided on Tana French's In the Woods, a mystery book no one's heard of, which she just happened to have on her shelf untouched. Thanks to the magic of Kindle, I was able to get myself a copy in seconds.

I've read less than one percent of it in solidarity with Suzanne, who can't start it until the weekend, but about the amount I have read, I can only say that it is nothing short of breathtaking. It's one of those books I wouldn't have discovered on my own in a million years, and it's got a Ray-Bradbury-meets-gritty-thriller thing going on that I never would have guessed at from the cover or the title. (Suzanne, by the way, only just read the first book in The Hunger Games, and she's craving Catching Fire. I feel her pain. I had to make a bookstore run while on vacation two summers ago just to buy it. She's making me want to read it yet again.)

I've also been checking out my cousins' book of Stan Lee Spider-Man comics, which is one of the most entertaining superhero things I've ever read.

And vacation's only just started.

Look, I can't explain why I'm so excited about reading books in a summer house. Call it one of those charming Allie things.

Moment

Books are everything. I don't know how I'd survive a long car ride if we didn't have books.

Right now Clair is reading John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (birthday present from our friend Timmy) and periodically doubling over and letting out a gasp of laughter, while I'm reading Bulldog Drummond on my Kindle. It's cozy.

Review: Past Suspicion by Therese Heckenkamp

"Almost instantly, I was pulled back into the story. The characters came alive in my mind, and I became the heroine. I felt her feelings, her desperation and terror, and for a little while, forgot my own problems."

- Robin Finley, the book's first-person narrator, explains why she reads suspense novels, while unfortunately inhabiting a suspense novel herself

"Christian Romantic Suspense". The words stopped me in my tracks as I gazed down the list of free Kindle books. There's always a fascination in a genre you've never heard of, especially when the author puts the genre in the title in parenthesis.

I'm not sure if this genre obsession ever existed in the pre-Internet era; as far as I can tell, there was science fiction, there was detective fiction, and then there was everything else. But once Google and Goodreads came into being, people started looking for a fix of whatever their last book was made of, and the next thing you knew we had Paranormal Romance and Dystopian Fiction and all those other things readers crave. And now, apparently, there was Christian Romantic Suspense. I tried to think of anything else that might fit that category and came up with Regina Doman's Fairy Tale Novels, which taught me, in my early teens, what suspense was in the first place.

Clicking over, I saw that Regina Doman herself had written the blurb on the front cover. That sealed the deal. If I was witnessing the dawn of a new genre, I wanted in on it.

I have every reason to envy author Therese Heckenkamp; it wasn't until I'd finished the book that I found out she wrote it the summer before she started college. (Darn it, that's what I wanted to do with this summer.) And what she tells is clearly a pre-college-summer kind of story. That's not to say it's juvenile, but there's a sweetness to it that reminds you of 80s photographs. A bookstore, a diary, the scent of lilacs and a long-abandoned house figure prominently into the plot. Oh, and boys. Two of them. They don't seem to like each other.

But look at me, I'm making this sound like Nancy Drew. The book wouldn't be any good if it didn't have that bit of edge, and heroine Robin Finley--who could be a sort of literary second-cousin of mine, so much she reminds me of my own habitual heroine Renee Rant--likes a bit of edge. She likes exactly the bit of edge that a girl raised, as she was, by an overprotective mother might appreciate--suspense novels. There's a touch of class to them and they won't put her in actual danger, but they'll keep her busy.

Because Robin's reading habits fascinate me, I here include the name of her author of choice: Victoria Holt. I'd never heard of Victoria Holt up until now (googled her name; she does exist), but how perfect a name is that? It reeks of musty attics and long forgotten perfume and just a touch of the ghostly. I now want to hunt up Victoria Holt and devour everything she ever wrote. It helps that all Robin's copies are used, somehow. (You'll never guess who used some of them.)

Unfortunately, it turns out that Robin's mother was overprotective for a reason--her own past was a sort of suspense novel in itself. She's dead now (last words: "Don't trust anyone"), and Robin is back in the town where her mother grew up--a town, in fact, that her mother never talked about. Now, of course, the Suspense Gods see Robin as a fair target for a sequel.

The result echoes Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as much as it echoes the summer of a normal eighteen-year-old girl. Whereas Rebecca was full of descriptions of towering rhododendron bushes and flowers dropping their petals every which way, Past Suspicion stops to let its heroine eat ice cream by a quiet campfire after a rain--something I know I've definitely done at some point, or close. ("There was something mesmerizing about the erratic, snapping fire. Warmth saturated my veins and soaked through my bones…Sighing, I thought of how no other flavor of ice cream was quite as enjoyable as vanilla.") She gets to watch a Memorial Day parade; she rambles around in a graveyard, another thing we romantic teenagers do (though not all of us witness dramatic confrontations in them, as Robin does); she listens to an old song with lyrics so dead-on Frank-Sinatra sounding that I googled them (they don't exist, though I wish they did); a modern girl would have this stuff all over her Instagram. Like any teenager who might be reading, she takes her breathers; then she goes and picks up the book again.

Why do we eighteen-year-old girls (or at any rate, Robin and myself) love our suspense novels? I think it's because we're too wrapped up in everything, so it's nice to get wrapped up in something else. We need to try on a few emotions that are almost our own, but aren't quite; at a time in our lives when everything is changing, we need to read something fast-paced just so we can learn to take it a bit slow. The story is somewhat predictable, but pleasantly so, and it's at its best when the heroine is taking time to breathe and sort things out.

The denouement seems a bit far-fetched after all these glimpses of reality, and once the story's over it seems to melt away like that ice cream so close to that campfire. Fortunately, thanks to its strong nostalgic feeling, it holds up well the second time around, and like any good novel in a teenage girl's life, it's always there to dip into again when you need it.

A Case of (Secret) Identity

I think I've figured out the fundamental difference between Marvel superheroes and DC superheroes. It's all about the secret identities.

DC characters are superheroes pretending to be ordinary people. You get the feeling, for instance, that Superman is really Superman and he's only pretending to be Clark Kent.

Marvel characters, on the other hand, are ordinary people pretending to be superheroes. Pete Parker really is Pete Parker; he just happens to go around pretending to be Spider-Man.

It all comes down to which life they'd chose if they had to just pick one. In my somewhat limited experience of Batman, whenever his secret identity gets threatened with exposure, he sets his jaw grimly (admittedly, that's his default expression) because he hates the idea of just being Bruce Wayne, stagnating in that fancy house and not getting to be Batman. Real life for him consists of outwitting madmen atop tall buildings and bombing around Gotham in the Batmobile. (Batman, by the way, is a direct offshoot of that character type from English literature who's brilliant and bored and needs to go on adventures to stay sane. No Sherlock Holmes, no Batman. And I don't think there'd even be a Holmes without Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, so the DC superhero strain goes way back.) Bruce Wayne is nothing but a role for Batman, and while he'll play it if he needs to, it isn't his reality. (Besides, when was the last time Bruce Wayne went to anything? I think the whole Batman thing started as an excuse to get out of all those bazillions of charity events he doesn't go to.)

Meanwhile, if a Marvel writer wants to give Peter Parker some drama, he has him quit being Spider-Man for a bit so he can live his life, only to realize that he can't do that no matter how much he wants to. Superheroing isn't a hobby for him, it's a job--a responsibility, we're told time and time again. He'd just as soon live without it. (The recent reboot of the movie franchise has him discover his new powers and instantly use them...to do skateboard tricks. That pretty much sums it up; he loves using his abilities for fun, but when it comes to the messier side of fighting villains he'd rather not be doing it.)

This theory is reaffirmed by the way both companies handle those few characters who chose to go without secret identities. The secret identity-less DC characters are the ones who don't feel the need to live as civilians; as far as I can tell they just wear those costumes all the time (except those aren't costumes, those are their clothes).

Iron Man doesn't have a secret identity either, but that doesn't mean there's no Tony Stark; it just means that Tony Stark has allowed everyone to know that if they see a guy soaring through the air in a metal suit, that's him. (No fear of anyone trying to hurt his loved ones, seeing as his company manufactures bombs.)

Wow, I'm more of a geek than I ever realized. But if you need any more proof of this theory, let me just say this: Superman is dating Lois Lane. Pete Parker is dating Mary Jane.

Over and out.

And God said "Let thar be Klar", and thar was Klar

Clair is philosophically opposed to birthdays. One of those "age is just a number" people, only she doesn't just say it, she believes it. Last night at the restaurant when the clock struck midnight and I started blasting The Beatles' "Birthday" on my phone, she told me to turn it off.

However, since this opinionated sister of mine does not read this blog, I can say whatever I want. Clair, you're one of the best people ever invented and I'm proud to have you as my sister. I can't say anything more or I'll get all sappy and start rhyming things with things.

Below: Clair yesterday in the parking lot at Children of Eden. (Actually, it looks like she may have found Eden. In a parking lot. Cue "Big Yellow Taxi".)

Coming Up Next

I just ventured to the cottage to get my long-forgotten copy of Perelandra, and I think my next two hours are booked. I must admit, the cover of Out of the Silent Planet isn't my favorite, but this one? Look at those colors. And the design. Just look at it.

Are those dragons? Are the forces of Satan about to close in on Malacandra? Wait, why am I typing? I should be reading.

Stay with me, folks.

"And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning..."

I've had the book of Genesis, specifically Eden, on the brain of late. My extremely talented sister Mary is currently playing Eve in Children of Eden, a musical so loosely based on Genesis it's maddening. I'd like to write a whole separate post dealing with that subject, but in the meantime, I'm really enjoying her run. She brings a wide-eyed childishness to Eve that's almost reminiscent of Wonderland's Alice, and, of course, her singing is beautiful.

It's funny how we, as a species, just can't seem to shake Eden. There's an aiming for Eden in everything we do, even in the books we write; fiction is overflowing with Edens. Who could forget Aslan singing Narnia into being in C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, or an entire celestial body in a state of grace in Out of the Silent Planet? But it's not only the religious authors--the more skeptical John Steinbeck moved the book of Genesis to the Salinas Valley in East of Eden, which he wholeheartedly regarded as the best of all his works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge set up his poem Kubla Khan as an intoxicating dream of a pleasure-garden, then snapped it forebodingly off just as the forbidden fruit is ingested: "For he on honeydew hath fed/And drunk the milk of paradise."

They're not all so serious. There are comedic Edens. Evelyn Waugh famously said of P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle series, "The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled." Every single book sees numerous impostors infiltrating its delectable grounds and, of course, getting likened to serpents. (Just to top it all off, the love interest in the second book is named Eve.)

And wait a second, this very blog owes its name to an amusing Eden--the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Ironically, the only way to get there is by being exiled. A famous speech in the middle of it runs, "Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,/The season’s difference, as the icy fang/And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind..." But oddly enough, the version in the folio ran, "Here feel we not the penalty of Adam." Most likely a typo, but you never know.

I leave you with Hans Christian Andersen's take, The Garden of Paradise, the tale of a young man whose obsession with finding Eden becomes quite literal.

[Edit: Was just reminded that Nicole Baart, one of my favorite authors, has a novel called Sleeping in Eden slated for publication in April 2013! We don't know a thing about it yet...but we can wait.]

Review: Something New by P.G. Wodehouse

1915 was a landmark year for P.G. Wodehouse. Already a experienced comedy writer for various magazines and journals, he published a short story called "Extricating Young Gussie" in the Saturday Evening Post, little knowing that its ditzy first-person narrator and his valet, Jeeves, would soon become his most recognizable characters. In a similarly unconscious way he let loose a serial called Something New; it wasn't until years later that he got the idea of giving it a sequel, and then another…and then another. In his own words, he developed a "Blandings Castle craving"; he was "down with a Saga, and no cure in sight."

Maybe it was Lord Emsworth that drew Wodehouse back to Blandings; he would later name Emsworth as his favorite among his own characters. Emsworth, it should be mentioned, is not a particularly funny character in and of himself; picture an elderly Bertie Wooster with Alzheimer's. He's out of touch with reality, utterly absorbed in a few quirky hobbies, and generally the subject of a string of gags about lethal forgetfulness. But if he doesn't have brains, he certainly has inner peace, and an author struggling to fill multiple deadlines might well find balm in writing about that amiable old homebody. (Although it was some time before Emsworth made another appearance, Wodehouse's fondness for him was evident in that he couldn't resist name-dropping him in a Jeeves and Wooster story one year later: "A most respectable old Johnnie, don't you know. Doesn't do a thing nowadays but dig in the garden with a spud.")

Or maybe the castle itself was attractive, for Emsworth is useful as a character precisely because he's useless as a landowner. He inhabits a gorgeous estate full of rambling gardens, weird nooks and priceless treasures, and though he loves it with all his soul and can't imagine being any place else, he's utterly unaware of what's happening in it at any given time. Thieves, detectives and (worse) young lovers are constantly snooping about the grounds in disguise, each with a complicated scheme in tow. Dumbledore always has an eagle-eyed watch over Hogwarts, but never acts on his knowledge because it would spoil the plot; Emsworth avoids plot holes by simply being as dense as a brick. His foil is The Efficient Baxter, the bespectacled and ever-suspicious secretary, who always gets hold of the truth but never succeeds in exposing it, nor in incriminating anyone involved.

Something New is a prototype in several senses. It's a prototype for the edited, "official" U.K. edition, Something Fresh, and it's a prototype for the Blandings series as a whole. Wodehouse wrote these things as serials for magazines and characters came second to plot; in his theatrical way he would map out a complicated comedy in his notebook, full of twists, coincidences and misunderstandings, referring to the protagonists simply as "hero" and "heroine". The only trait required for the roles is a breezy boldness; it's as if you could hold auditions and find someone to sing the parts.

In fact, this happens in-story when one Ashe Marson answers an irresistible advertisement: "WANTED: Young Man of good appearance, who is poor and reckless, to undertake a delicate and dangerous enterprise." That's really all that's wanted for a plot like this--good looks and recklessness. So Ashe, after a slapdash job interview, becomes the hero, the fellow to fill a hero's place in the plot from start to finish. The girl who goaded him to make "something new" of his life in the first place turns out to be on the same mission, and it's a mission of theft. Her name is technically Joan Valentine, but since she's blonde, blue-eyed and quite the feminist, she has "heroine" written all over her.

What follows might have been a blueprint for the more character-driven Leave it to Psmith. As "hero", Ashe isn't a distinctive comic creation, but in his music-hall manner he shows "some sparks that are like wit", and it's clear that he owes a bit to Psmith, who was already popular among English schoolboys. In the American edition an entire scene was stolen nearly word-for-word from a Psmith story with Ashe delivering his lines. It was edited out in the U.K. version because the English were already acquainted with Psmith, but although I wasn't familiar with Psmith myself when I read Something New, the scene felt wrong to me; it was out-of-character for Ashe to think so quickly (he being only the hero and not necessarily the invincible wonder; in this he perhaps owes more to Psmith's friend Mike Jackson).

What sort of stories Wodehouse served you depended on which side of the Atlantic you were on; the Psmith stories were for a British audience, and one novel even landed Psmith in America, proceeding to explain New York and its oddities for the benefit of the reader. Since Something New was written for an American audience, Ashe and Joan are American by birth, and the more-experienced Joan has to explain English etiquette to Ashe so he can survive below-stairs as he impersonates a valet. When the book was republished in England, Wodehouse made Ashe and Joan English and thus was able to cut several pages of dull exposition. He was a trans-atlantic interpreter of the most practical order.

Something New is far from a polished final product, but it marks an epoch in Wodehouse's career, and it also features one of his most beautifully-written romances. Ashe and Joan may not be distinctive as characters, but as vehicles for observations on love they manage, as per their intentions, to make something of themselves.

Graces

[Written last month, but never polished and never posted. The laptop is back now, although Clair is holding a monopoly on it, which is why I'm still using the Blogger iPhone app.]

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."
- G.K. Chesterton

This was going to be the summer I wrote a whole ton. (That matters little. Every summer was going to be the summer I wrote a whole ton. When will I learn that people simply don't write a whole ton in summer? That's the beauty of summer.)

The laptop broke in June, so I've got an excuse, anyway. Not sure when we'll be able to get it fixed. Everything's backed up, so that's okay, though. What I've mostly been doing is wandering in the yard, listening to music, reading books, and writing the occasional poem.

What I'm really doing is praying more. I'm always procrastinating when it comes to prayer. There's an odd tendency in me to put off the things I most need to do with the most vehemence--I feel guilty about putting them off, so I kind of just let them stew while I brood about not doing them. This isn't logical, but it's human. I do the same thing to my writing. Maybe I'm almost relieved to let the leaves grow over my laptop and swallow it up. (Figuratively, I mean. I keep it inside.)

Then I think of Chesterton's quote up there. It's one of my favorites, but I never remember it before I write. Saying a grace before writing might keep me on track. And now I think , maybe I should say a grace before prayers? A sort of grace before grace.

And if I said a grace before that, and a grace before that, and a grace before that...

And now I feel another quote coming on. The priest at my last confession said something that I think will always stick with me: "If you have gratitude, you have the spiritual life."

Life should be less about setting time aside to do things separately and more about a series of graces, one after the next.

Where's my Wimsey?

I ordered my used copy of Dorothy L. Sayer's Strong Poison in June, and it still hasn't come. Amazon says it should have come to me in July, which it didn't.

And to add insult to injury, all the Wimsey books are finally available as Kindle editions now. Every blessed one of them. So I could get Strong Poison right this second for ten dollars, but I already spent money on the other one.

Better, I guess, to sit around and sulk, and read alternative books about impossibly cool English gentleman to fill the gap. Right now I've got Bulldog Drummond, a thriller that was popular enough in its day to get parodied in P.G. Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith, and The Amateur Cracksman, a short story collection about master thief A.J. Raffles and his accomplice, going at once. It's not the same, but it's something.

Drummond is really entertaining in a fast-paced, humorous kind of way. Cracksman is well-written, but something of a disappointment thus far. I picked it up because I'd heard the concept was "Holmes and Watson robbing houses", and that's exactly what it is, but once you've said that about it you've said it all; it barely departs a single jot from that basic idea. It's also less intricate than Holmes out of necessity, because swiping things is simpler than figuring out how they were swiped, but I can see where the concept has potential. To quote G.K. Chesterton, "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

Remind me to make the acquaintance of one Artemis Fowl, too. All the kids in the Shakespeare group I direct are after me to read him.

The Sons of Such Tears

Several years ago I read St. Augustine's Confessions. It was a difficult book for me to read--not because it was badly-written or slow-paced, but because I honestly struggle with feeling guilty over the slightest things. St. Augustine was a philosopher as well as a penitent, and in Confessions he analyzes the specific wrongnesses of even his earliest sins, slight sins such as infantile jealousy and stealing apples from neighboring orchards. Suddenly every crime of mine seemed to loom large.

But I finished it and I'm glad I did, because the book was very well worth reading. It was only today that I realized just how worth reading it was. All apple orchards aside, what, exactly, where Augustine's sins? What were the things that kept his mother, St. Monica, awake at night?

In the modern eye, not much. He lived with a woman who wasn't his wife, but he was never unfaithful to her. He disbelieved the Bible and sought out strange superstitions, but nothing odder than your average horoscope. He stayed up nights carousing, but he wasn't a mindless drunk; he was a learned man, a teacher, soft and stern and (probably) clean-shaven. He goes on for page after wretched page about how much he regrets the nights he spent at the theater. The reader might scoff at this, until he catches the footnote explaining that theater in Augustine's time was often centered around onstage sex. And even then the reader might scoff. Okay, so St. Augustine watched pornography. Why not? Lots of young men watch pornography. They're even told, and constantly, that it's healthy. In fact, at this point Augustine's life is starting to look like the PC ideal. He's a boy scout.

What makes St. Augustine any different from the skeptical, intelligent, partygoing, cohabiting, occasionally pornography-watching nice guy of today?

There was one major difference. St. Augustine had a mother who didn't hold with all of that.

His father didn't mind it. He was open-minded. He was a pagan himself, and he was proud of his son. He couldn't wait to have grandchildren; he didn't care if the mother was married to his son or not. But to St. Monica, it mattered. She went around to all the churches; she prayed as hard as she could. She loved that son of hers, and not just because he had a nice smile or because everyone praised his writing; she loved him so much that she was willing to do anything to bring him back to God. One priest, wearying of her pleading and crying, told her, "Go away from me now. As you live, it is impossible that the son of such tears should perish." She took his words as a sign.

"As you live, it is impossible that the son of such tears should perish." There are boys today who go astray, good boys whose mothers care about them and love them. Are any of them the sons of tears?

We have hope, because I think that they are. If anything gets to Jesus--and everything gets to Jesus--it is the tears of a mother for her son. What mother ever shed more tears than Mary?

The fatherless boys, the motherless boys, the boys with no one to pray for them, have something on their side, even if they don't know it. As long as we have Mary, we have a mother who pleads relentlessly, unceasingly, for her sons to come home.

And as long as we have faith in God's infinite mercy and love, it is impossible that they should perish.

"Silent Planet" play-by-play: Chapters 18 through Postscript

Spoilers!

18: Ransom and I approached Oyarsa feeling a little trembly, as how could we not? There was a very Old Testament vibe about the whole thing. Hearing your name called in the night, like Samuel. Angels scaling Jacob's ladder. And of course, the angelic catchphrase: "Do not be afraid." Naturally it all makes Ransom, brave soul though he's becoming, crave a steaming cup of tea!

So now we're learning that Malacandra's former leader became "bent", that he's Satan, and that Heaven and the heavens are one and the same, the original celestial battleground. (Star Wars has nothing on this.)

I wonder if the name "Oyarsa" is possibly derived from ursa, or bear. It'd fit in nicely with the constellation Ursa Major, besides Oyarsa's assertion that he asked the sorn to treat the humans as "cubs".

Cross-cultural humor apparently exists on Malacandra--in fact, it's implied to be the planet's main source of comedy.

19. I'm getting that The Magician's Nephew vibe again; this chapter is seriously reminiscent of that scene where the animals in Narnia get ahold of Uncle Andrew and decide to plant him as a tree, except that instead of clown-like antics we get shakes of the head. Weston and Devine go in, like Ransom, assuming that their subjects are stupid, but unlike Ransom they have no hope of letting go of it. Reminds me of The Great Divorce; a few of Hell's denizens were materialistic philosophers who continued to disbelieve in the afterlife even as they inhabited it!

Another element similar to Divorce is the idea of the otherworldly hymn. Divorce had a stunning section in which a heavenly chorus sang the praises of a saved soul; here there's an alien funeral dirge, and it is beautiful.

20. This chapter is all about translation, and reading it made me guess that deception and showiness simply has no place in the Malacandrian tongue. Weston uses flowery language that seems to be more for himself than for Oyarsa, but when Ransom translates it its grimmer meaning comes out in full force. I think he tries to be unbiased--he's a sincere fellow who really wants to help Devine and Weston--but there's simply no other way of putting it; Weston thinks murder is a sign of progress. Scary thing to read about in any time, but especially today, with abortion being spoken of as an integral part of women's rights.

Malacandra's most notable tenet is, I think, a lack of self-deception. Self-deception is a major theme--maybe the major theme--of Lewis' work, and an entire planet without it is a paradise despite the constant threat of death.

21. But Ransom realizes he can't stay in Eden--he belongs to Earth, so they bundle him off and send him on his way. First, though, Oyarsa gives him a guarantee that Weston and Devine won't kill him.

At the moment my sister Mary's playing Eve in a musical called Children of Eden, and she's been complaining about the script's take on Cain and Abel; apparently they change the story so that Cain kills Abel by accident, and his subsequent banishment seems like an overreaction on the part of an unforgiving God. The "Mark of Cain" is referenced for the rest of the script as a kind of curse that Cain's innocent descendants don't deserve.

What the scriptwriter seems to forget--accidentally or deliberately--is that the Mark of Cain was a protection, not a malediction. It was better than what Cain deserved, not worse. And in this chapter, it's bestowed on Ransom in the most loving way you can imagine.

What follows is the tensest period of the entire book, and it almost brought me to tears. It's not a battle, just extended cabin fever, which is infinitely more nightmarish. But it all leads up to what I think is one of the best journey-ending lines since "'Thank goodness', said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar."

I've only got a little bit left to read, but still, the journey's clearly not over. Like Whose Body?, this book is an extended opening chapter. Ransom wishes he'd seen more of Malacandra, and besides, Oyarsa dropped an Aslan-like hint that they might meet again!

22. Well, that put a powerful spin on things. Lewis played a similar game with his note at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, but here it's all the more powerful because it comes last and takes the reader by surprise, with the chill of eternal consequences should we all become bent.

23. Wow--the postscript is the gutsiest and most human thing about this book. One of the writers of the Sherlock series had great things to say about Arthur Conan Doyle's audacity in having Holmes criticize Watson's writing (and therefore the novels he himself was in). Here Lewis does Doyle one better--he has the real "Ransom" write to Lewis, with barely-restrained snappiness, saying he understands and everything, but Lewis doesn't know the half of it!

There are just so many paradoxes here, where Lewis makes the entire book look even better by making it look worse. Ransom wants to know more about Malacandra, but he himself doesn't feel he fully understands the little that he does know. There are worlds within worlds, wheels within wheels. How creative and classic C.S. Lewis is this?

And--what's this--something about time travel?

Where's my copy of Perelanda?

Happy Birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I owe my half-humorous-yet-utterly-sincere fondness for the romantic era to a book my mom used to read to us, which had a sample poem by each poet it collected and a portrait to go with it. Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared with a little biography near his buddies Keats, Cooleridge and Byron. I never forgot that he was the one who died by drowning. It seemed hauntingly appropriate--his hair, in the portrait, floated as if he had fallen in the water, and, besides, his name sounded like a fancy seafood.

So when I heard that it was his birthday I felt the need to dredge up a few links:

Ozymandias, the poem from my childhood book. It's short, sweet and incredibly timed, and I used to recite it to myself walking around by the fountains in the walled garden at Old Westbury, as goofy as that sounds.

Mark Twain's brilliant and comprehensive In Defense of Harriet Shelley shows why we shouldn't trust idealistic biographers so easily, especially when they lay blame without proof. Twain wouldn't have called himself an idealist--he was a gritty, imperfect pessimist who mocked on principle--but he came down heavily on the side of the innocent and defenseless, and his righteous anger, combined with his wit, was a terrible thing to arouse.

And on a lighter note, Ogden Nash's poem You and Me and P.B. Shelley, though I wish it were set up on a nicer website. I first read it in a book illustrated by Quentin Blake, and it was full of hilarious illustrations of the events described--including one of a pop-eyed P.B., floating hair and all.

On First Looking into Mitchell's "Gilgamesh"

If the truth were known, I didn't really like Gilgamesh, or at least not this version, which is required reading in one of my college classes. With the poetic touch, it would have been lovely, and the blurbs on the back jacket promised a "eloquent and nuanced" version, even a definitive version. One professor of religion even went so far as to write, "Reading Stephen Mitchell's marvelously clear and vivid rendering makes me feel that I am encountering Gilgamesh for the first time", so unfortunately I came into it expecting some emotion akin to what Keats felt gazing into Chapman's Homer. This wasn't a fair thing to expect, since I wasn't familiar with Gilgamesh to begin with, but there you go.

As it was, I had psyched myself up to look at Mitchell's version with a wild surmise, and instead I found myself looking at a weird, clumsily-written myth, sort of the pre-Biblical equivalent of those 80s cartoons meant to market a toy line, or maybe one of those action flicks with barbarians and scantily-clad goddesses. My guess is that, as a girl, I just didn't get it. There's testosterone in every line of the tetrameter.

Gilgamesh is a warrior king whom no one dares oppose, and he's begun to abuse his power, treading on the lowly and taking what he pleases. The gods hear the cries of his people and, in the quaint manner of fictional immortals, rig up a solution which doesn't address the problem, but which is perfect for the necessary plot. We don't know why playing games with love potion will help Oberon steal the changeling boy from Titania, and we don't know why creating a man with identical strength to Gilgamesh to be his best friend will make him less of a tyrant. (Wouldn't you think they'd just team up and conquer the rest of the known world?) But the gods are clearly above our mortal mindset, because it works in both cases.

Even though I'm not a fan of Mitchell's brand of poetry--deliberately unrhythmic, with a bland Good News Bible-esque sense of paraphrase--I do appreciate the grasp of myth I'm getting. For instance, the rule of mythology seems to be that once you've duked it out with a man of equal or lesser strength, you must become his ally. It happens again with Robin Hood and Little John. There's even a parodic echo of it in P.G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith, in which the animosity between two schoolboys turns to friendship after it finally comes to blows. (Wodehouse, like many humorists, loved to draw the little spats and skirmishes of daily life along legendary lines.)

Mitchell's notes and analysis run to more pages than the poem itself; the book as a whole is basically a fat volume of synopsis on one side and a slim volume of sources on the other, with the poem pressed like a pamphlet in the middle. This is probably just as well, since Mitchell's analysis is superior to his poetics; he gives his breathless take on scene after scene, and it's hard not to get swept away by his enthusiasm, even when he brings in wrongheaded Biblical comparisons. (One famous portion of the book covers the Deluge, with animals, an ark and the last good man on earth, but nothing else in the text seems to bear relation to Genesis.) Mitchell believes that Gilgamesh, considered purely as a story, is superior to the Bible because of its lack of clearly drawn good vs. evil. Having read both, I believe that this is exactly what makes Gilgamesh inferior; with no sense of morality to color anyone's actions, there's little complexity and no real conflict other than monster-bashing. Beowulf was full of that kind of thing, and yet I love Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. I guess the lesson here is that story matters little; it's all about the wording.