The great literary experiment falls into a crevasse and dies

2014 is almost over, and I haven't written about my epic Books-I-Hated-in-High-School Literary Revisitation Experiment since April, when I discovered my affinity for literary characters who most other people think are evil. There the experiment ended. I left my hero, Madame Dufarge, in the middle of her revolutionary subterfuge; may she continue to knit secrets in perpetuity.

Was whatever spark I once had for reading permanently dimmed by the literary canon forced upon me in high school, when I was too young to appreciate it? Yeah, probably. Did I enjoy rereading any of it as an adult? Yeah, OK, some.

To cleanse myself after the year of dutiful experimenting, I turned to a genre I usually enjoy--Survival Literature--and reread Alive for the third time. If the High School Literary Canon Committee ever wants to drop Siddhhartha, they could surely pull some excellent replacements from Survival Literature, which offers real-life tales of self discovery to shock and awe any teen. Consider the following:

* Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read. A Uruguayan rugby team charters a plane that crashes in the snow-covered Andes in 1972. The narrative explores the emotional and physical endurance the survivors tap into to stay alive during their 10-week ordeal, including their difficult, respectful, and transformative decision to cannibalize frozen corpses. Although search efforts are launched by friends, families, and Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan government agencies, rescue comes only after two survivors trek 60 miles through the mountains to find help.

* Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Simpson and his mountaineering acquaintance Simon Yates pair up for an ill-fated climb up the north face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. When Simpson breaks his leg near the beginning of their descent, Yates rigs together a pair of ropes that he uses to lower Simpson down the mountain. At one point during the descent, Simpson unexpectedly slips over the edge of a cliff; dangling from a taut rope, can neither lower himself down nor climb back up. Yates, holding onto the other end of the rope a few hundred feet up the mountain, is unable to help without also sliding off the cliff. After a few hours, Yates cuts the rope. Simpson falls into a crevasse, but miraculously lands on an ice table; knowing he's presumed dead, he spends the next four days dragging himself physically (and mentally) back to the base camp, arriving just before Yates' departure.

* Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. The author does what parents always tell kids not to do: he goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back. While exploring a remote canyon in Utah, a boulder slips, crushing his arm against the canyon wall. The emotional drama isn't told with the same quality prose as Alive or Touching the Void, but the story is nonetheless riveting; near death after being trapped for several days with barely any food or water, Ralston amputates his own arm--and then manages to hike out of the canyon and several miles back to a trail for help.

* Into the Wild by master story-teller Jon Krakauer. This isn't really Survival Literature, since the protagonist doesn't survive, but Into the Wild would make a great replacement for Siddhartha, should the Canon Committee ever feel so moved. Christopher McCandless does what Aron Ralston did, to the nth degree: he not only goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back, but he does it for months at a time and on purpose, intentionally cutting himself off from family and friends to live an ascetic life in the wilderness. Whether he was seeking Nirvana or something else, no one will ever know, since he didn't have any maps with him when he died of starvation in Alaska in 1992.

A Tale of Six Books

Am I busy finishing A Tale of Two Cities? No--but I interrupt my literary slackitude to bring you a tale of six books. Seven books, actually, but only six of them mine, and none of them fiction, thank goodness. This is one of those rare stories in which real life imitates a novel.

Here goes:

During the Great Purge, I made a lot of choices, obviously, about what to pull from the shelves. Some choices were easy, some were hard, and some took serious nudging and emotional support from friends. In the end, multiple boxes of books and CDs went to the nonprofit "Friends of the Public Library," from where they will hopefully find their way into hands and hearts that will enjoy them anew.

One particular set of books was too special for such purging while simultaneously too good to simply gather dust on my shelf: Sir Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis--cloth-bound hard-cover printings from the mid-1940s, in excellent condition, all six volumes. Tovey was a musical jack-of-all-trades--musicologist, pianist, composer, conductor, analyst, and editor. The Essays in Musical Analysis were collected from his insightful program notes for the Reid Orchestra at the University of Edinburgh. They're classics.

I had coveted these books when I was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, but the copies I had seen in the local used books store was beyond my budget. I acquired my set when a fellow grad student bailed from the program; he sold me a ton of books, all of them highly desirable to music theory geeks, for a mere $200, including the Tovey set.

The books moved with me to my first teaching gig in Kansas, and then to my second gig at Duke in North Carolina. I followed my friend out of the discipline in 2003, and all of the other books eventually ended up in the hands of a later generation of grad students, but I kept the Tovey Essays through every baby-step purge. The Great Purge of 2014 was different: the books had to go, but were too special to just give away to strangers.

I offered to ship them to former classmates who had remained in academia. No one jumped at the offer; as one explained, "thanks Liz, but I don't need any more unread books on my shelf mocking me (as [our advisor] used to say)." Some voted for eBay, but I feared a buyer would split the set up. One friend agreed, urging "c'mon, Liz. Keep 'em. They're classics. Beautiful little time capsules (in more than one sense). Every time you sell a volume, a program annotator cries."

So I put the books aside on the roll-top desk in the living room. Two months later, I was cleaning off the desk (we clean in our house largely by moving piles of stuff from one location to another) and decided the time had finally come for them to move on.

I had heard about a relatively new used-books store downtown. I've never been there, because, as you know, either I dislike reading or I'm too busy slogging my way through A Tale of Two Cities to buy more books. Whatever. I went to the bookstore's website, saw that they were in a historic city-center building with pressed-tin ceilings, and thought that folks who appreciate old urban architecture and old books might understand the emotional investment I had in a Tovey set I had barely read but nonetheless still cherished; perhaps they would be interested in them.

I started drafting an angst-filled email inquiry and wanted to accurately describe the condition of the books. They were in excellent shape for 70-year-olds, but I recalled that they did have some markings inside the front covers. I opened one volume to confirm that, and saw the Ex Libris plate, dated 1948--itself an antique. All six books had the same plate and date. I didn't recognize the previous owner's name, but thought it might be of interest, so I googled it. The search engine returned a few links, with More Familiar Name often included. Additional googling followed, plus a closer inspection of the pencil scrawlings inside the covers, where I found More Familiar's name written in cursive.

More Familiar is a former colleague of mine at Duke.

The books had belonged to More Familiar's first wife, a scholar in the performance practice movement who died, too young, in 1974. She had been a teenager when she put her Ex Libris plates in the books. More Familiar had taught in Madison for a few years in the 1970s before coming to Duke.

I emailed More Familiar and asked if he'd like the books. He wrote back that he had consulted volume VII just the week before and was wishing he had kept the rest of the set. I hadn't even known there was a volume VII.

So there it ended: the Tovey collection that was too good to randomly give away, too good to split up, and too good to sit unread was happily reunited with More Familiar, 1000+ miles and 40 years after he and the books had parted ways.

What kind of person am I? A Tale of Two Cities update

Maybe my 6th-grade teacher was right, and I shouldn't have written quite so effusively about A Tale of Two Cities before finishing the book.

As my literary experiment limps on, I am coming to the conclusion that I just don't much like to read classic adult fiction. After my previous post on the book, I let A Tale of Two Cities sit in the trunk of my car for two months, then picked it up again during one of E's band practices.

Did I previously write that Lucie Manette is "a little too diminutive"? That was mighty generous of me. She's so sincere and delicate and at-the-service-of-others that she's hardly human. She's earnest and pretty and boring.

I had high hopes for this book, especially following The Scarlet Letter. Where Hawthorne is just mean, Dickens is amusingly snarky. For example, whereas Hawthorne repeatedly harps on his Custom-House colleagues for tipping their chairs backward and snoozing their mind-numbingly dull days away, Dickens more vividly and cheerfully compares bankers to cheese:

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment. (Dover Thrift Edition, 1999, p. 40).

When Dickens coined the adverb "adverbiously," I practically swooned:

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an indictment denoucing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. (pp. 46-47)

But somehow the excitement dropped off somewhere in France, especially as attention turned to the solemn and rather boring love between Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay. Thus I hid the book in the trunk.

Upon retrieving it, I wondered why on earth a teacher would offer this text to 11-yr-olds. The language is occasionally so oblique that even as a 46-yr-old skimmer, I'm not entirely certain I'm understanding it correctly. I picked up that Charles wanted to marry Lucie, and then that Charles was indeed going to marry Lucie, and then that they were married and off on their honeymoon; and then in the course of a page or so (pp. 161-162), I thought I read that Lucie maybe nearly died during pregnancy or childbirth, and they had a daughter, and then also a son, but the angelic boy died as a young child. What? Did I read that right? I re-skimmed the pages and still wasn't sure, so I tried googling for confirmation.

That was a mistake, because instead of finding confirmation, I found a SPOILER that indicates that the interesting, clever, revolutionary, strong female character--Madame Dufarge--is "the villainess in the novel," and as such, is going to get bumped off by Lucie Manette's proxy, Miss Pross. I haven't gotten far enough into the book to understand that Madame Dufarge is "a monster"--just far enough to admire her involvement in espionage and observant knitting. Dang.

This reminds me of another book I read (and actually enjoyed): Gregory Maguire's Lost (2001). I don't remember much about the book, other than that it had something to do with Dickens and Scrooge and ghosts or some such, but I do remember really liking the female protagonist, Winifred Rudge. The edition I owned had some questions for reading groups, and I recall one of the questions saying something along the lines of, "Many readers find Winifred Rudge to be extremely unlikable blah blah blah"--which made me wonder what kind of person I must be if I liked her. And here I am, enthusiastically preferring Madame Dufarge to the feminine ideal of Lucie Manette. Oh dear, oh dear, and I still have 130 pages to go.

Adverbiously excellent

When I was in 6th grade, I discovered The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and I swooned over sensitive Ponyboy Curtis. We had to write a book "report" for school every week--basically a formalized reading journal--and I thought The Outsiders was so fabulous that I asked my teacher if I could write a gushing letter to the author instead of writing my regular book report. She granted permission, then wrote critically on my letter, "You haven't finished the book yet?!" No, I thought, but who needs to actually finish this book to recognize it's GENIUS?

I'm only a third of the way into A Tale of Two Cities, and with my 6th-grade teacher's criticism still ringing in my ears, I won't write to Dickens yet--but I don't need to finish the book to recognize it's genius. Sure, it's a little melodramatic, and Lucie Manette is a little too diminutive, but it's so delightfully snarky, without being mean like Hawthorne, and so full of witty metaphors and imagery, and such a linguistically entertaining romp, that I'm ready to give it an A+. It still gets an F from 11-year-old me (the language was simply too challenging), but the experienced watcher of British period dramas, 46-year-old me, is already prepping the fancy gold-glitter-glue A+.

Sighddhartha

I've finished re-reading Siddhartha. Siddhartha fans all over the interwebs (and there are many--I know, because I have googled both "Siddhartha navel gazing" and "Siddhartha self absorbed" and have learned that while I am not alone, I'm part of a small minority: most folks love Siddhartha), yes, Siddhartha fans will call me unenlightened, but I'm giving it a D-.* I didn't care for it in high school (although caring for literature might not be the point of high school book selections), and I don't care for it now as an apparently jaded adult. Maybe I should have read it during that magical window of late-adolescent/young-adult questing and self discovery, only I'm not sure I ever experienced a window like that.

I'm impatient. It takes Siddhartha almost his entire life--71 out of 81 pages in the Dover Thrift Edition--to figure out that other people's feelings are as important to them as his own are to him, that his actions affect others, and that he just needs to, ya know, chill. Three years of asceticism here, 20 years of sinful high life there, and nearly an entire lifetime feeling superior to everyone else (save for a few days when he realizes the past few years have totally sucked and he wants to kill himself): well, those are long temporal investments for largely unsatisfying returns. Of course, Siddhartha enjoys a few rapturous epiphanies in between his career/quest-path changes, but oy. It's like a lifetime spent studying quantum mechanics, when your true love, fluid dynamics, is staring you in the face.

He saw: this water flowed and flowed, it kept on flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always and at all times the same and yet new every moment! Oh, if he could only grasp that, understand that! He did not understand or grasp it; he merely felt the stirrings of a premonition, a distant recollection, divine voices. (Siddhartha, 1922, Dover Thrift Edition, 1999, pp. 54-55). 

The river eventually reveals all. Hermann Hesse's first wife, by the way, was Maria Bernoulli, of the same family as Daniel Bernoulli, famous for "Bernoulli's principle" in fluid dynamics. So we see that it is just as Siddhartha explains to Govinda at the end of the book: everything in the world, past, present, and future, is connected, is one.

Women are scarce in Siddhartha, and they are represented by three main flavors: (1) mom, (2) voluptuous aroused seductress (a.k.a. "a female animal in heat," p. 28), and (3) sex teacher/courtesan (the only female important enough to get a name, Kamala). Kamala dies while on a trip to see the fading Siddhartha Gotama (the supreme Buddha), because a black snake bites her under her dress (p. 60). Is that retributive Freudian symbolism, or is an under-the-dress snake bite sometimes just an under-the-dress snake bite?

Reading to the end of Siddhartha's quest has brought me midway through my literary quest. My experiment--re-reading books I disliked in high school to determine whether they're why I don't much enjoy reading fiction as an adult--has brought me back to three books since April: The Scarlet Letter, The Odyssey, and Siddhartha (with a delightful David Sedaris detour and a whole lot of Ken-Ken and Sudoku mixed in). Next up: A Tale of Two Cities, which, based on other Dickens novels that I read during and after college, I entirely expect to enjoy this time around.

*56 words and a delayed verb! I clearly learned something from re-reading The Scarlet Letter.

Honey, I'm home!

I finally finished The Odyssey. After some slow spots midway through, the pace picked up again, but not without the occasional boring interjection.

An Example of a Boring Bit

My favorite example of a boring plot interruption comes in chapter XV (although I suppose if it's my "favorite," it isn't maximally boring). Here we meet a new minor character, the wanderer Theoclymenus. It takes one long paragraph and then some to introduce him before we finally learn his name, and the introduction goes something like this:

So as Telemachus and his crew are about to sail away, this guy comes up to the boat. His great great grandfather Mumblyjumblius lived on the island Whatchamacallit way back when, but for some crazy reason moved to Yaddayadda, where they held him hostage and took all his stuff, and he was harassed by the lordship's mean daughter, but he finally escaped, and to get revenge, he took the mean daughter home with him and made her marry his brother. Anyway, he eventually moved to Thatotherisland and got hitched and had a couple kids, and they also had kids, but the one kid's kids didn't live to adulthood, and one of the other kid's kids didn't either, but the surviving kid did; but oy, he argued with his dad too much and moved away. Anyway, it was that kid's kid's kid who comes up now to Telemachus's boat and says, "Friend, I entreat you! Tell me, and hold nothing back: who are you?" (Paraphrase of Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter XV, p. 147.)

The study group question for this chapter should be, "at what point in this paragraph did you fall asleep?" Of course, I suppose if Homer had been trying to score points by dropping my family's names, I would have hung on every word.

Blood and Gore

The later chapters include descriptive gore on par with the cyclops' eye-pokering. Highlights include Odysseus contemplating whether to punch someone hard enough to kill him or just hard enough to make a point; he decides on the latter, therefore,

he struck Irus on the neck below the ear and crushed the bones within. Forthwith from out his mouth the red blood ran, and down in the dust he fell with a moan, gnashing his teeth and kicking on the ground....Odysseus caught Irus by the foot and dragged him through the doorway... (Ch. XVIII, p. 176.)

All the suitors who are looking on think it is hilarious to see an old man beggar beat up an obnoxious young beggar. I'm not sure if the listener/reader is also supposed to think it's funny; after all, the suitors are boors, so they aren't great role models. Odysseus, however, seems pretty pleased with himself, since successfully beating up a beggar bodes well for eventually massacring 108 aristrocratic boors. So two points for the home team, rah rah!

Two more gory descriptions of mutilation and death stood out to me. First: need to teach a traitorous goatherd a lesson? Here's how!

...tie his feet and hands and drag him within the chamber; there fasten boards upon his back, and lashing a twisted rope around him hoist him aloft, up the tall pillar, and bring him to the beams, that he may keep alive there long and suffer grievous torment. (Ch. XXII, p. 215.)

It is worth noting that I read this chapter out of a different edition, since I was visiting my mom in Illinois and it was really cold outside and my Dover edition was locked in the car trunk, so I read from another prose translation that we had on a bookshelf in the study. That one said that the goatherd's hands and feet were to be tied behind his back, which makes things sound more uncomfortable; but it also said he was to be tied around the waist to the board, which makes it sound a little less uncomfortable.

Perhaps Homer was aware of the potential confusion, or at least aware that some of his listeners might not have caught the details the first time around, because he repeats the description a few 
paragraphs later, when two of Odysseus's loyal servants carry out the deed (although the boards are omitted):

...then on him sprang the two and dragged him by the hair within the door, threw him all horror-stricken to the ground, bound hands and feet together with a galling cord, which tight and fast they tied, as they were ordered by Laertes' son, long-tried royal Odysseus; then they lashed a twisted rope around and hoisted him aloft, up the tall pillar, and brought him to the beams [and mocked him...] (ibid.)

Poor Melanthius.

The second really notable description of vengeful execution pertains to the ladies. When you're as mighty as Odysseus, you have a houseful of servants; and as long as they are in your household's employ, they really shouldn't get cozy with your wife's boorish suitors. Out of the fifty women servants, Odysseus's dear nurse Eurycleia identifies "twelve in all [who] have gone the way of shame."

The way of shame! The way of shame! Odysseus punishes the women by making them clear away the dead bodies, sponge down the hall, and cart out the blood-soaked flooring. Then his son Telemachus locks them into a narrow, inescapable space while he rigs up their death machine:

He...tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a great pillar, then lashed it to the round-house, stretching it high across, too high for one to touch the feet upon the ground. And as the wide-winged thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the bushes; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed receives them; even so the women held their heads in line, and around every neck a noose was laid, that they might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a little, but not long. (p. 221)

Let that be a lesson, ladies, on going the way of shame. The men then bring out Melanthius, the goatherd who has been watching the slaughter from the rafters. They cut off his nose and ears, disembowel him, and let the dogs eat his still-warm guts, and--because they're still very very angry--they cut off his hands and feet. He presumably dies somewhere along the way, but Homer doesn't tell us when.

Apparently traitorous employees and women are worse than boorish suitors, since the suitors pretty much all enjoy clean, swift deaths.

Forgiveness and Love

But the end of The Odyssey is not all blood and gore, no no! Odysseus has a gentle side too. During the massacre, two people beg for mercy: the seer Leiodes and the bard Phemius. Odysseus feels that Leiodes should have known better, so he drives a sword through the seer's neck and cuts off his head; but Telemachus puts in a good word for the bard and another man, the page Medon. Generous Odysseus, smiling, spares them both. We love our bards.

Odysseus scores some points for realizing that brutally killing the best and the noblest youths of Ithaca is not going to go over so well with the neighbors. He and Telemachus hatch a plan appropriate to their nobility: they will get the servants to create a diversion and will sneak out of town the next morning to their well-wooded farm, where they can hide until the gods show them a way out of this mess (Ch. XXIII, p. 224). Fortunately, the gods decide they've had enough entertainment. Athene intervenes with an angry mob, calling, "Hold, men of Ithaca, from cruel combat, and without bloodshed straightway part!" This scares the bejeezus out of everyone and peace settles upon Ithaca.

Homer also tells us that Odysseus and Penelope, once reunited, "came gladly to their old bed's rites," where they "joyed in happy love" before joying in talking (p. 227). The lovey-dovey stuff is kept to a bare minimum, because mushy love stuff is harder to speak of than head-lopping bone-crushing liver-stabbing slaughtering.

The Final Grade

I give The Odyssey an A-. The A is for being the ur-roadtrip narrative; the - is for the boring bits and name dropping. Good job, Homer! Like The Scarlet Letter, I think high schoolers might appreciate this book more in a history class or a world literature class than in an English class. (When I was in high school, we read The Odyssey in an English class, even though The Odyssey has nothing to do with English per se. Today, such classes are called Language Arts, and The Odyssey would fit in just fine.)

Dragging my feet

OK, NO, I have NOT finished The Odyssey yet. I brought it with me to Germany thinking I might finish it there, but I also brought Siddhartha to read afterward, thinking it would be good to read a book by a German author in Germany. I found Siddhartha boring and puzzling in high school--really boring and really puzzling--and Siddarthaangst served as a deterrent to ever cracking open The Odyssey. I finally got back to the book last week, but got bogged down in the chapter about all the dead people Odysseus converses with. You'd think speaking with the dead would be pretty interesting, but Homer doesn't get into any zombie stuff, just tales of woe. There is a bit in there about the proper way to get the dead to provide the information you seek, but the methods don't always work (some dead people are pretty strong willed, plus there are certain Laws of Deadness they can't violate), and the whole chapter ends up being kind of list-y. In good faith, I took the book with me to a doctor's appointment for E, figuring I'd read in the waiting room--but I didn't read, and the book has been in the back seat of our car ever since. But I promise, PROMISE, I'll bring it inside one of these days and actually finish it.

Odyssey check point

The experiment continues.

After finishing The Scarlet Letter, I took a hard-earned romp through some creative nonfiction with David Sedaris' latest book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. It lasted but the blink of an eye, but what a good blink it was. I wonder what the world would be like if U.S. high schoolers had to read Sedaris instead of Hawthorne. Would today's teens relate any better to OCD and colonoscopies than they do to Puritanism and adultery?

And now, boldly forward to what the Muse spoke to Homer of the adventurous man Odysseus. I'm a little more than a third of the way into The Odyssey, having read 9 of the 24 chapters. I'm sure I failed to appreciate, the first time around, that The Odyssey is more than just a story: it's a fascinating guide to geography, family trees, hospitality, manners, recipes, entertainment, deities, monsters, marriage, honor, games, and supplication etiquette.

I started to notice this in chapter 3. Chapters 1 and 2 had been relatively breezy (at least in comparison to The Scarlet Letter), but 3 got bogged down with lineage and places--things like "royal Onomatopoeius, son of Anacoluthon, fleet-footed king of Litotes, set sail on the seventh morning, and spurred by fair winds, returned a victor from war only to be slayed by his plotting uncle Anastrophe of Chiasmus, Anacoluthon's brother, who had, after much effort and with supplications to the deity of extra-marital affairs, successfully seduced Ecphonesis's wife Homiologia," etc. Dear reader(s), if your eyes didn't glaze over and you actually read every word of that, may the deities bless you.

Mixed into this came an excellent lesson on how to properly sacrifice a young heifer to Athene--information that clearly begged to be written down some 2800 years ago because it's something that frankly everyone needs to know. I really related to this part of the book because its how-to-itiveness reminded me of another, more contemporary household companion. Compare the following texts, the ancient and the modern (pardon the genealogy in the former):

Ancient: So after they had prayed and strewn the barley-meal, forthwith the son of Nestor, ardent Thrasymedes, drew near and dealt the blow. The axe cut through the sinews of the neck and broke the heifer's power. A cry went up from the daughters of Nestor, the sons' wives, and his own honored wife, Eurydice, the eldest of the daughters of Clyenus. The sons then raised the beast up from the trodden earth and held her so, the while Peisistratus, ever the foremost, cut the throat. And after the black blood had flowed and life had left the carcase, they straightaway laid it open, quickly cut out the thighs, all in due order, wrapped them in fat in double layers and placed raw flesh thereon. On billets of wood the old man burned them, and poured upon them sparkling wine, while young men by his side held five-pronged forks. So after the thighs were burned and the inward parts were tasted, they sliced the rest, and stuck it on the forks, and roasted all, holding the pointed forks in hand. (Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter 3, p. 27.)

Modern: If possible, trap heifer 'possum and feed it on milk and barley cereals for 10 days before sacrificing to Athene killing. Gild horns Clean, but do not skin. Treat as for pig by immersing the unskinned heifer animal in sparkling wine water just below the boiling point. Test frequently with pointed five-pronged forks by plucking at the hair. When it slips out regularly, remove the heifer opossum from sparkling wine water and scrape. While scraping repeatedly, pour cool sparkling wine water over the surface of the heifer animal. Remove inward parts small red glands in small of the back and under each thigh foreleg between shoulder and ribs. Roast Parblanch about 20 minutes each, in two or three changes of sparkling wine water, then roast as for pork...Serve with turnip greens. (Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking, Bobbs-Merrill Company: 1975, rev. and exp. 1983, "Opossum," p. 515.)

Other how-to standouts in The Odyssey include:

How to select husband material for (a) yourself or (b) your daughter: 
(a) If Athene comes to you in a dream and reminds you that you're of marriageable age so wouldn't it be a good idea to go do laundry tomorrow morning lest your family's dirty clothes cause embarrassment, and a hungry naked guy washes up on the beach and you discover him in the shrubbery while you're playing catch while waiting for the laundry to dry, but it turns out he cleans up real nice, then declare admiringly, "Hearken, my white-armed women, while I speak. Not without purpose on the part of all the gods that hold Olympus is this man's meeting with the godlike Phaeacians. A while ago, he really seemed to me ill-looking, but now he is like the gods who hold the open sky. Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here, and content to stay!" (Chapter 6, p. 59)
(b) When you meet the shipwrecked stranger to whom your virtuous virgin daughter gave directions to your house, size up his noble dudeness, and then, even though you recognize it's a long shot, offer him your daughter and your wealth: "O father Zeus, Athene, and Apollo, that such a man as you, so like in mind to me, might take my child, be called my son-in-law, and here abide! For I would give you house and goods if you would like to stay." (Chapter 7, p. 68)

How to poke out the eye of a Cyclops with a stake: This is a real gross-out paragraph, not only for the graphic description of the deed itself, but also because the Cyclops, passed out drunk, vomits wine and bits of chewed up humans (whose brains, incidentally, had already been splattered on the cave floor once before, when Polyphemus slaughtered a pair of men for dinner the night before and another pair for breakfast. There's probably a rhetorical term for this sort of recapitulation, given that skull bashing and vomiting are both variations on the theme of How to Spread Human Brains on Cave Floors). I expect this level of goriness would appeal to pretty much any adolescent in any century; no wonder The Odyssey remains on high school reading lists. In the following excerpt, notice also the handy references to wooden ship building and tempering steel:

Out of his throat poured wine and scraps of human flesh; heavy with wine, he spewed it forth. And now it was I drove the stake under a heap of ashes, to bring it to a heat, and with my words emboldened all my men, that none might flinch through fear. Then when the olive stake, green though it was, was ready to take fire, and through and through was all aglow, I snatched it from the fire, while my men stood around and Heaven inspired us with great courage. Seizing the olive stake, sharp at the tip, they plunged it in his eye, and I, perched up above, whirled it around. As when a man bores ship-beams with a drill, and those below keep it in motion with a strap held by the ends, and steadily it runs; even so we seized the fire-pointed stake and whirled it in his eye. Blood bubbled round the heated thing. The vapor singed off all the lids around the eye, and even the brows, as the ball burned and its roots crackled in the flame. As when a smith dips a great axe or adze into cold water, hissing loud, to temper it, — for that is strength to steel,— so hissed his eye about the olive stake. A hideous roar he raised; the rock resounded; we hurried off in terror. He wrenched the stake from out his eye, all dabbled with the blood, and flung it from his hands in frenzy.(Chapter 9, p. 87)

And finally,

How to remind your audience to give you a big tip: Remember, you are da Bard. Whether the Muse motivates you to tell tangential tales about cuckolded deities or to provide brief recaps of the story so far, mention that there's nothing more satisfying than having a good bard around. Use adjectives like "sacred," "honored," "famous," "wondrous," and "noble" to describe folks in your profession, and have your hero compare you to deities thusly:

Then wise Odysseus answered him and said: "Mighty Alcinoüs, renowned of all, surely it is a pleasing thing to hear a bard like this, one who is even like the gods in voice. For more complete delight I think there cannot be than when good cheer possesses a whole people, and feasting through the houses they listen to a bard, seated in proper order, while beside them stand the tables supplied with bread and meat, and dipping wine from out the mixer the pourer bears it round and fills the cups. That is a sight most pleasing. (Chapter 9, p. 80)

The Scarlet Letter: B

I'm giving The Scarlet Letter a B--an embroidered B, gules, on a sable field.¹ I was sedulous² keeping to my commitment to re-read the book, though I wotted³ not whether I would find my adolescent animadversions⁴ justified. To my great joy, once I had slogged past the ponderous Introductory, I discovered the language to be readable and oftentimes even pleasant. Nonetheless, nugatory⁵ I now believe it is, to expect high schoolers to enjoy immersing themselves in Hawthorne's lucubrations⁶--though enjoyment be not necessarily the point. Of this book, perhaps in a U.S. History class, one wherein are studious youth needing to contemplate the strange and distant Puritanism of Old Boston, where arrived a crop of England's first Americans (their women less beautiful than would become subsequent generations of New Englanders, for not yet tempered were their visages by deprivation and rugged Atlantic weather,⁷ nor yet purged of joy through community shunning and self-denial)--or youth desiring, or merely instructed by pedagogical authority, to contemplate the sarcastic literary wanderings of the bored and apparently bitter descendants of those early settlers--yes, of this book in such a class (and not in freshman or sophomore English) perhaps more enjoyment and instructive use would be found.⁸

My recommendations: skip the Introductory (propose reading it as part of a possible book report project) and cut straight to the main story. Judge the Puritans harshly, forgive them if you will, and remind high schoolers to use protection when they engage in sexual intercourse if they want to avoid making babies.

=============================
¹"[A simple slab of slate] bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:— 'ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES'"
²" She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather."
³"Without taking overmuch upon myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."
⁴"[It] excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel."
⁵"According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness."
⁶"With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public."
⁷"Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone."
⁸This sentence is only 118 words long. I don't know that I could get it up to 139, but I think I did a decent job of delaying the verb until the very end.

The Downward-Pointing Thumb: Introductory to "The Custom-House: Introductory to 'The Scarlet Letter'"

Present-day me thinks 13-year-old me was onto something when she disliked The Scarlet Letter. I haven't made it to the main story yet, because it has taken me two weeks to slog through the 31-page opening, "The Custom-House: Introductory to 'The Scarlet Letter.'" (On the bright side, needing a break, I read the first two chapters of George Herbert Palmer's 1921 translation of The Odyssey out loud to E, and we both thought it was pretty engaging.)

About halfway through "The Custom-House," I googled "scarlet letter narrator patronizing jerk" but didn't get any useful hits. One enthusiastic video claims that contrary to initial appearances, the Introductory isn't actually boring--Really! It echoes the book, in miniature! Isn't that cool? Such forced enthusiasm suggests the Introductory is, in fact, boring to its present-day primary audience of distressed middle- and high-school readers. (One wonders how Hawthorne's depressed narrator would feel about that; he'd probably just nod his head, knowingly.)

I took notes in the margins while I read and have culled the following five themes, which I offer here to any student desperate for an essay topic:

1. You can't trust the Federal government. That vixenly American eagle looks protectively tender, but she'll claw your eyes out in a heartbeat. Customs officers rely too much on Uncle Sam.

2. Salem is drab and decaying, and the narrator would prefer to be pretty much anywhere else. He has lived in other places, but repeatedly returns to Salem, thanks in large part to the pull of the bones of his imposing Puritan ancestors, who were cruel bigwigs in Salem's early days, and compared to whom the narrator feels like an unremarkable loser. Eventually, the narrator will make a break for it, either in actuality, or through his literary imagination, or by dying. He pretends to be dead near the end of the Introductory so that he can feel like less of a jerk for having written it: "...the sketch which I am now bringing to a close [i.e. "The Custom-House"], if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!"

3. The men who work at the Custom House like to tip their chairs back against the wall, sometimes while they sleep on the job. The narrator offers this detail several times in the Introductory; perhaps he thought it was particularly funny, or so subtle that it bore repeating. To the forlorn high school student with an essay due tomorrow, I offer the following quotes and page numbers:
- p. 4, "[You would discern]...a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep."
- p. 9, "They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall..."
- p. 10, "...it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as usual..."
- p. 27, "[Might I not, like some of my loser colleagues, decide to make] the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade?" The astute reader should conclude that in Salem, old dogs slept in chairs tipped against the wall.

4. Happy people should be mocked (or, the narrator is a patronizing jerk):
- p. 10, "Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children...In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood."
- p. 12, "[The 80-year-old Head Inspector, despite outliving everyone else in his family, remained happy]....He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon: so perfect in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such a nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind...."
- p. 12, in which the happy Head Inspector is compared to a dog: "One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat."
- p. 14, regarding the Collector, "Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,--for, slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of his portrait." Note, incidentally, the use of litotes here!
- p. 15, suggesting the General is a wuss by comparing him to females: "A trait if native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one, who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe."
- p. 16, in which the narrator observes he's improving his own character by spending time with people he has criticized for being too happy, vapid, feminine, or sleepy: "It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."

5. The narrator is fascinated by how a wig that was buried for 80 years has managed to hold up.
- p. 20, on how the remains of Surveyor Jonathan Pue were "recently" dug up and moved: "Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation."
- p. 22: "It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor,...wearing his immortal wig—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave—had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House."
- p. 23: "'Do this,' said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig..."

One friend shared with me that she had also felt ambivalent about The Scarlet Letter in high school, but that when she re-read it a few years ago, Hawthorne struck her as a sort of punk rock feminist. I hope he will eventually strike me that way too, as I move into the main body of the book. In any case, given that the Introductory is supposed to encapsulate the story's central themes, I look forward to observing how the five themes described above unfold.

The experiment begins

This is how The Scarlet Letter begins:

It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.

Later in the paragraph, the narrator expands on the allure of his alien writerly impulse:

...[A]s thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.

When I read the opening paragraph yesterday, I thought: had he lived today, perhaps the narrator would have been a blogger--an introvert who, speaking to the ether through pixels rather than the printed page, imagines connecting to some reader who, out there in that vastness, actually understands him. A computer screen makes a great veil.

Encouraged to have found something to relate to in the very first paragraph, I boldly plowed through the second. Alas, I burst out laughing when I reached the first sentence of the third.

When I teach science writing workshops to engineers, we talk about how science writing differs from other genres of writing. I emphasize the importance, in science writing, of putting verbs near the beginnings of sentences, or at least near the beginnings of main clauses, since readers of English get antsy if they have to wait too long for verbs. I'm not suggesting Romantic novelists like Hawthorne shouldn't have put verbs wherever they wanted to. Popular authors and their publishers presumably knew what they were doing, and obviously The Scarlet Letter isn't a scientific journal article. But golly, putting the verb six words from the end of a 139-word sentence strikes me as a little late. The suspense in the first 133 words is palpable; with every parenthetical aside, with every interjection, the reader wonders: what will the exciting action-climax be?

I thought: A clue! Perhaps sentences like this turned me off when I was 13! Thankfully, I now have sufficient life experience and analytical skills that sentences like this only make me laugh out loud.

Here's the sentence (for the full effect, read it attentively; do not skim!):

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

A big brick building stands in Salem! What more excitement could a 13-year-old want?

Cultural literacy, take 2

A confession: I have never much enjoyed reading. As a graduate student, I once found some early elementary school report cards that my parents had saved. My teachers praised my interest in writing, and my general congeniality; they had no complaints about my math skills and were impressed by the maturity with which I used clinical terms in sex ed (it was the 1970s, after all, and my mom worked for Planned Parenthood); but they sure wished I would show more interest in reading.

Part of the problem, as I recall, was that I was supposed to have been smart, so I always ended up in school reading groups for which the books were consistently 6-12 months beyond my developmental ability to grasp. In 4th grade, for example, I was in the "advanced" reading group that was going to read Ramona. I was dismayed to discover that instead of reading Beverly Cleary's Ramona, we were reading a different Ramona. I could relate to Ramona Quimby--remember the time when she wanted to make sure that all the apples in the bushel basket in the basement were OK, so she took a bite out of every single one?--but I couldn't relate to the other Ramona, the "mixed-race Scots-Native American orphan girl, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship in Southern California after the Mexican-American War" (to quote Wikipedia).

The earliest of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books was about 12 years old when I was born. Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona was 83. When I read the latter in 4th grade, it was 92. Even Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books (my essential resource for understanding what it was really, truly like to be caught out on the prairie in a horse-drawn buggy with your suitor and his handsome horses when the weather turned wacky and funnel clouds appeared on the horizon)--even those books were far newer, with Little House in the Big Woods published a mere 36 years before my birth.

OK, so maybe I enjoyed reading some books as a kid. I don't read much fiction as an adult at all, maybe one to three novels a year, and I tend to favor children's and young adult literature (loved Harry Potter, loved Holes)--easy reads, I suppose. Given how little I enjoy reading, I'm amazed I managed to get a PhD.

So where did my reading go awry?

A few years ago, leading some writing tutoring outreach in one of Durham's public high schools, I learned that kids were reading--and disliking--many of the same novels that I had read and disliked in high school 25 years earlier. I was a too-young white female small-town/midwest-university-town reader at an academically privileged high school when I first encountered Lord of the Flies, a 1954 novel (25-29 years old when I read it) about a bunch of kids from a British boys' school trapped in circumstances that revealed the innate barbarism of humanity (yeah, middle schoolers are mean, so what else is new?). I had a hard enough time relating to the book; I could understand how, 25 years later, inner-city Durham kids might also have a hard time relating. And The Odyssey--which, as a too-young reader, I found to be quite the slog--was still part of the canon--but then, what's another 25 years for a story that's ~2.8K years old?

Maybe, I thought, I hadn't always disliked reading; maybe I learned to dislike reading thanks to a school system that, in its interest in keeping me challenged, ignored my immaturity.

Yeah. So last week, I was driving somewhere in my car, listening to the classical music radio station, when on came one of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. This immediately triggered memories of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Around the time I read the book in high school, I was in the habit of getting to know my parents' LP collection, and I would put records on the record player to help make reading more pleasurable. When an LP reached the end of the first side, instead of turning the record over, I'd simply lift the needle up and move it back to the beginning. I memorized a lot of great music this way (to this day, I can mimic much of the Four Seasons on the piano, without needing to look at a score), but I also indelibly printed The Scarlet Letter onto Autumn and Winter.

Listening to the radio last week, I wondered: what if I were to read The Scarlet Letter now, as a 46-year-old with some significant life experience behind me? Would I like the book any better than when I was a naive, too-young high schooler?

(I keep writing "too young"; I really was too young for much of what I read. I started elementary school early, and I was 11 when I started 7th grade. My secondary school was a 5-year high school that combined 7th and 8th grade into one year, so everyone there was younger than students in equivalent grades at other schools, but I was younger than most going back to Kindergarten. I graduated when I was 16, and started college when I was 16, and it really was way too young--not academically but emotionally--and I wouldn't recommend that sort of path to others.)

Anyway, listening to Vivaldi on the radio, I hatched a plan: I would choose 3-4 books I didn't enjoy the first time around, and reread them, to find out whether they might be more enjoyable 30 years later. Doesn't that sound like a fun experiment?

Knowing how slowly I read, I decided library copies weren't the best option, but I didn't want to invest a lot of money in books I'm not necessarily expecting to enjoy. Imagine my delight, then, when ordering some cheapo music scores from Dover, I discovered that Dover publishes super duper cheap reprints of The Canonical Classics--$2.00-$3.50 each!

Arriving soon at my door will be:
The Scarlet Letter (eek);
The Odyssey (a 1921 translation rather than the fabulous new translation recommended by a friend, the better to reproduce high school conditions);
A Tale of Two Cities (which, OK, I didn't read in high school: I read it in 6th grade, when I was 10. Way too young.).

Lord of the Flies isn't available through Dover, but guess what I found instead--Siddhartha! Friends tell me this is a good book. I totally didn't understand its point in high school, although I remember the vocabulary word ascetic being significant. When I found the title in Dover's listings, my gut reaction was "dang." I guess that means this experiment will be good for me in some way or another.

Finally, I decided to give myself a bit of a break with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read in high school but actually understood and enjoyed (so it only half qualifies).

E will likely encounter some of these texts at school himself in the next few years. Perhaps we can re-live one of the joys of his earlier youth by reading together out loud. Doesn't The Scarlet Letter sound like the perfect material for such mother-son bonding?

The Two Towers: a recitation on females therein

The dramatic midpoint have I reached: the end of Tolkien's The Two Towers; through the myriad preparations and battles of Book 3, wherein was saved Helm's Deep, and then southward through Book 4 to Minas Morgul. En route encountered I yet two more females with names, and learned much of race (the discussion of which must wait), and of the need for slow plebes to attach themselves to hereditary leaders of great strength, wisdom, and handsome boldness (which also must wait), and of the ancient linguistic origins of Yoda's subject-verb reversals. Now eagerly up stand I, clasping my hands behind my back (as is my charming rustic habit whenever I am about to "talk Tolkien"), and recite thus:

Ladies? Few. All pale, of course, in Galadriel's radiant light.
Up next we meet fair Éowyn, who trembles within sight
of virile Aragorn. Perhaps new sexual tension's nigh?
We'll have to wait until Book 5 to find out if, how, why.

She does not say much, Éowyn; grave, thoughtful is her glance;
Hair like gold, and dressed in white, she later puts on pants:
Fearless and high-hearted, she will lead in Théoden's lieu.
Alas, ten pages text, no more: her Book 3 role is through.

In Book 4 enters one more lass, less stunning than the rest;
and yet she stuns: her will's her own: to sunder is her quest.
Antithesis could be her name, for ('tis an ancient view)
a woman's either beautiful or evil through and through.

Bloated, fat, she feasts upon whatever happens by:
she spins her web, snares Men, Elves, Orcs in lair up near the sky.
Shelob would like to suck the blood of swooning Frodo too,
but Samwise stabs her underside, releasing yucky goo.

Victory is mine!

It's been a long slog, and I interrupted it to read Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams, but I am pleased to report that, only a few decades late, I have finally finished The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Fellowship of the Ring scores points for its contrasting heroic archetypes. First there's diminutive Frodo, a kind and good hobbit. When fate thrusts the terrifying role of Ring Bearer upon him, he finds solace in duty, friendship, and perseverance. He suffers without complaint both physically and emotionally, trudging on despite wounds or weather, although--because he's a tender, sensitive type--he is likely to swoon, shiver uncontrollably, sleep fitfully, or faint before the day or night is out.

Frodo's heroic foil is Aragorn. Aragorn has a lineal suffix surname ("son of Arathorn"), but he prefers to go by "Strider" and assorted other one-word nicknames when he is out and about because he finds the accompanying anonymity useful. He bathes in invigorating streams of testosterone every morning so that he always smells of virility even when he's travel worn. He is tall, handsome, wise, knowledgeable, trained in herbal healing arts, capable of carrying hobbits through head-high snow drifts, poetic, musical, contemplative, vigilant, efficient, and modest. He looks just as good in rustic earth tones as in shimmering green elvenwear. Protector and guide, he inspires trust and is (literally) a born leader. He doesn't faint.

There are three semi-prominent female characters in the book, and all of them have names, so that's some improvement over The Hobbit. The first is the river spirit Goldberry, wife of Tom Bombadil, whose job it is to look inspiringly pretty and to laugh with a sonorous tinkle. She and Tom appear early on in the book, when Tolkien was still writing a children's story instead of a profound fantasy epic for adults. The second female is the elf Arwen, whose job it is to sit still and quietly in Rivendell and be breathtakingly beautiful. As the only quiet, unmarried, breathtakingly beautiful female in the book, she is a suitable beloved for Aragorn, who is so strong and silent that he can mention her only obliquely and only to elves. The third female is the wise elf ruler, the Lady Galadriel. She's poised, elegant, wise, and magical, not to mention inspiringly beautiful.

As for the story's action, my favorite part of the book was when arrogant Boromir tried to persuade Frodo to yield the ring; the charged dialog and plot twist were very dramatic, and they occurred only a few pages from the end of the book, which made the reading all the more rewarding. Thereafter, I immediately commenced The Two Towers and was impressed with the speed with which Tolkien dispatched Boromir. Nowhere else, not even in tragic opera, has a character so promptly kicked the bucket in payment for his sins.

A new style for A Long-expected Party

Given that my childhood experience with Tolkien began with The Hobbit, I now understand, as an adult, why it also ended there. Nonetheless, tonight our quest for cultural literacy entered new territory as E and I commenced The Fellowship of the Rings. Happily, we can already tell this book differs considerably from its predecessor. Indeed, a mere five pages into the tale, we came upon this remarkable sentence:

"The flowers glowed red and golden: snap-dragons and sunflowers, and nasturtians* trailing all over the turf walls and peeping in at the round windows."

Yes folks, there's a colon in that sentence--the first of several in just the opening chapter alone! And semicolons abound in the book, not to mention commas and all other variety of punctuation. And there are italics and ALL CAPS to add emphasis and clarify meaning, and verbs and subjects enjoying intimate proximity, and pronouns pointing to clear antecedents. Just as Bilbo provides a rich abundance of foods for his birthday feast in Hobbiton, so Tolkien provides a rich abundance of linguistic cues in his prose, contributing greatly to the ease of reading out loud and, consequently, to our overall conviviality. Let the next adventure begin!

*According to the OED, "nasturtiums" predates "nasturtians," but it is nasturtians that grow in Middle Earth.

Grammar in Esgaroth

My friend Susan, who is well versed in religious and epic texts in assorted languages of old, insists I would appreciate Tolkien's prose more if I were better read in Middle English and Icelandic. Every sentence I threw at her, she read smoothly, without batting an eye or stumbling over a single missing comma.

So I decided to continue on with open mind after the death of Smaug in Esgaroth by Bard's last and best-aimed arrow [<--see what I in the narrative, that unfolds within the improvisational mind, have learned about strings of prepositional phrases!]. Full on the next paragraph I fell, and read aloud with epic voice these sentences: [<--apologies for the colon, I'm new at this]

"[The wind] twisted the white fog into bending pillars and hurrying clouds and drove it off to the West to scatter in tattered shreds over the marshes before Mirkwood. Then the many boats could be seen dotted dark on the surface of the lake, and down the wind came...No, dagnabbit. Wait a sec...and down the wind came...and down the...Ah, got it...and down the wind...came the voices of the people of Esgaroth lamenting their lost town and goods and ruined houses."

Reading with the epic voice helps.

Grammar at Bag-End

A geek's confession: I have never read The Lord of the Rings, and I only know The Hobbit because my fifth grade teacher read it out loud over several weeks of "quiet time" in 1977.

Recently, in post-Harry Potter and Percy Jackson 2010, the eight- and nine-year-old males in my son's peer group have started carrying around assorted Tolkien books. The paperback covers are worn and tattered, mainly from falling out of perpetually unzipped backpacks, but I suspect some of the boys are actually reading the books too.

So I decided it's time for some mother-son bonding: I would nip E's potential cultural illiteracy in the bud, and (long overdue) make up for my own, by reading the books out loud to him.

We are now nearing the end of The Hobbit, and I think I've discovered the reason I never felt any affinity for it. It isn't because most of the book is about a long arduous slog, nor because the peoples of Middle Earth somehow managed to procreate (as evidenced by the existence of characters) without there being any females around. No, even the book's admittedly good moments--like Bilbo's riddle duel with Gollum--aren't enough to make up for its thoroughly annoying grammar.

I've therefore taken it upon myself to decipher some of Tolkien's rules, so that the path might be easier for other wannabe LotR fans.

Rule 1: After introductory elements only weak minds need commas.

Exhibit A: "In spite of the dangers of this far land bold men had of late been making their way back into it from the South, cutting down trees, and building themselves places to live in among the more pleasant woods in the valleys and along the river-shores."

Exhibit B: "Following him they found themselves in a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle. Though it was summer there was a wood-fire burning and the smoke was rising to the blackened rafters in search of a way out through an opening in the roof."

I suppose it doesn't make sense to say it was summer in a wide hall with a fire-place in the middle. Still, I wouldn't have had to back track from "Though it was summer there" to "Though it was summer, there" had Tolkien included a comma.

Exhibit C: "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch glimpses of them whisking off the path and scuttling behind tree trunks."

Fun with back-tracking! Find your favorite introductory element:
a. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch glimpses of,"
b. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things he could catch,"
c. "As Bilbo's sharp inquisitive eyes got used to seeing things,"

Rule 2: Ambiguous pronoun references add depth to them.

Exhibit D: "Then at last they [Bilbo and the dwarves] said good-bye to their ponies and turned their heads for home. Off they trotted very gaily, seeming glad to put their tails towards the shadow of Mirkwood."

E and I suspected something was amiss when Bilbo's party headed in the wrong direction, and we confirmed it when the hobbits and dwarves sprouted tails.

Rule 3: Separating subjects and verbs over as vast a distance as possible, and recalling thus certain tape-worm-like sentence structures composed by authors in the German language and also sometimes apparently even in English, gets readers' attention.

Exhibit E: "Occasionally a slender beam of sun that had the luck to slip in through some opening in the leaves far above, and still more luck in not being caught in the tangled boughs and matted twigs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright before them."

Rule 4: Remember this, colons are bad.

Exhibit F: "All the time they ate, Beorn in his deep rolling voice told tales of the wild lands on this side of the mountains, and especially of the dark and dangerous wood, that lay outstretched far to the North and South a day's ride before them, barring their way to the East, the terrible forest of Mirkwood."

This is a nifty example because it deals with several of the rules and their exceptions: "All the time they ate, [surprise comma!] Beorn in his deep rolling voice [observe delay of verb] told tales of the wild lands on this side of the mountains, and especially of the dark and dangerous wood, [this unnecessary comma confounds the reader] that lay outstretched far to the North and South a day's ride before them, barring their way to the East, [colons are bad, but a colon would be helpful here] the terrible forest of Mirkwood."

Rule 5: Because an idle mind is the devil's workshop to figure out your meaning, make your readers struggle.

Exhibit G: "The barrels now all lashed together creaked and fretted."

You choose the error: is it (a) lack of commas separating items in a list ("The barrels now all lashed together, creaked, and fretted"), or (b) missing commas around a participial phrase ("The barrels, now all lashed together, creaked and fretted")? (Ooh, ooh, choose (b)!)

Exhibit G occurs about two thirds of the way through The Hobbit, by which point you are no longer likely to be surprised by such comma-less constructions.