Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 70: Lew Wallace, Attack on Fort Donelson (#110)

Lew Wallace, "Attack on Fort Donelson" (1827–1905) from The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It:

Before he wrote Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace was a union officer during the Civil War whose shining moment of glory was probably in the attack on Forts Henry and Donelson. In the attack on Fort Donelson, Wallace used his soldiers--specially trained in Zouave tactics (about which, read here)--and took his own initiative to help stabilize Federal forces and retake a road leading to Fort Donelson.

(His most controversial moment during the Civil War was probably at Shiloh, where again, he took some initiative of his own, which turned out less well for his men. That story is not told here, but I can't be the only one interested in that.)

In his Autobiography, Wallace explains that Attack on Fort Donelson with equal parts military fact (who was in charge and where they moved) and anecdote. I'm especially fond of Wallace's pep-talk to his men:

Halting in front of the Eleventh, I said: “You fellows have been swearing for a long time that I would never get you into a fight. It’s here now. What have you to say?”
A spokesman answered: “We’re ready. Let her rip!”
Very un-Napoleonic, but very American.

And even though Wallace got through the attack unharmed physically, he's still struck by the vividness of his memories of the dead men, bleeding out into the snow. So while he still retains the big-picture (units moving on the map) view of the war, he has these moments in his autobiography that don't build to anything; they simply record that men very much like him died.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 69: Eugene O’Neill, Tomorrow (#93)

Eugene O’Neill, "Tomorrow" (1917) from Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943:

Like a character from a Shaw play, I really love to confess my sins. For all that one teacher at grad school told us to never admit to not having read a book, I left grad school very comfortable admitting that I didn't read or know something. So: I've never read O'Neill, or not much of him. So I appreciate it when the LoA page notes how this piece is his only published short story and how this short story sets out certain elements that reappear in O'Neill's later, more famous plays.

The main-line of the story can be told pretty quickly: from the POV of a sometimes-sailor, oftentimes drunk, we hear how his friend tries to get back to respectable writing work; after this friend fails, he breaks his prized geranium, and then commits suicide. But that main line is only a small part of this 21-page story. We also get the relationship between the drunk narrator and the sober friend, which is at times tense, cynical, warm, or supportive; there's the relationship with the other drinkers at this bar, Tommy the Priest's; there's the little stories that fill in the people's pasts.

And yet, for all that, we're still given the main-line story as if that should be enough to drag us through the story and the side issues. It is an interesting view of a non-mainstream human ecosystem--and it's very interesting to hear how so much of this was taken from O'Neill's own experience. As O'Neill noted of his time at the bar which in reality was called Jimmy the Priest's, “I learned at Jimmy the Priest’s not to sit on judgment on people."

But I'm not sure how far that non-judgmental tone goes in this story. The now-sober friend Jimmy does seem both celebrated for his sobriety and somewhat condoned for his fall into drunkenness when he realizes he's lost his gift. Some other aspects of the story are less well-done, however, like the whole geranium. Sure, there's something nice about a guy caring for this plant that never blossoms, which is a fine metaphor for Jimmy's life. But it's so pat that it doesn't really catch any emotion. It's going through the motions.

Laughing at death: Scoop (2006) and ParaNorman (2012)

Woody Allen's Scoop starts with a funeral where we're introduced to the departed as a great journalist; and then we see what a great dedicated journalist he is: on the boat to the underworld, he gets a scoop from another dead person--and to make sure that the story gets out, he escapes from death multiple times, just as he previously escaped from other tight situations (according to the funeral-goers who toast him). It just so happens that, for no real good reason, he appears to student journalist Sondra Pransky in a magic trick performed by Sid Waterman (and later to Pransky elsewhere and later to Sid both in the magic trick and outside it). That's the whole gimme of the situation: ghost with scoop gives it to amateurs who don't really belong in the sleuthing or journalism business.

Most of the film is classic Woody Allen "fish out of water" comedy (which really began with his stand-up jokes, like the one where he tries to blend in at a KKK rally and gives himself away by pledging money). Sondra and Sid schmooze with the British elite, pretending to be rich Americans. (Usually you would want to avoid giving two characters names with the same initial, but since Sondra goes undercover as "Jade" and since one of them is Scarlett Johansson, it's easy to tell them apart.) Only Sid is terrible at blending in since he falls back all the time on his magic and his patter.

So when (spoiler) Sid dies, he appears on the same boat that we saw at the beginning. And where the journalist kept doing journalism after his death, Sid continues to do his magic and his patter. Death may be a dark boat ride through an unknown sea, but it's also just the same-old-same-old. You do in death what you loved doing in life.

Which is a funny take for a murder mystery: death isn't all that big a deal.

ParaNorman takes a similar position on death in some regards, by flipping some of what we expect. That is, Norman is given the task of performing a ritual to keep some terrible horror from occurring--and when he falls, seven Puritan zombies rise from the dead. Pretty bad, right?

Well, actually, that's pretty bad news for the zombies. The curse is less on the living people than on the undead people: their rising from the dead is a big problem for them, since they just want to rest. And also, because when they show up in town, they are quickly set on by the humans. This is one of those movies where the end seems to be "the monsters were humans all along."

But that's cliche irony at this point. Let's instead say that, as a movie with a direct moral for kids (be tolerant of difference, both in others and in yourself), there's a subtheme here about adapting to strange circumstances. The zombies are stuck in a loop and out of their own time--bonus points for their recoiling in horror at the permissiveness of current society. But the living can adapt and change and find new solutions to old problems.

The main problem with death is that you end up stuck, like the aviatrix pierced by the tree or the gangster with the cement overshoes.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 68: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Porcelain and Pink (#90)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Porcelain and Pink" (1920) from F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels & Stories 1920–1922:

As a devoted 30 Rock fan, I sometimes wonder how well certain fits of timeliness will date. When Liz Lemon references the balloon boy hoax of 2009 or when Paul proposes to Jenna by singing "Zou Bisou Bisou," a la Mad Men season five, it's worth wondering how well those jokes will play in a few years. (I barely remember the balloon boy hoax, though I did just start watching season five of Mad Men.)

So there's a point in this one-act, one-scene playlet where one character in a bathtub starts referencing everything from Bergson (who I've heard of) to Gaby Deslys (who I haven't). The LoA headnote is pretty good about explaining certain references, though I also like to imagine that section growing as time goes on. (At what point in time will "bathtub" have to be explained?) Also, I'm glad the LoA page notes how reaction to this was mixed, particularly around the idea of a naked woman in a bathtub--funny, prurient, or stupid bathroom humor? Story of your life, right?

The piece itself could be performed, but it's clearly written as a closet drama. The stage directions especially come from an opinionated narrator. It's the kind of voice that's free to inform us that "beautiful girls have throats instead of necks." And the rest of the piece is occasionally fun, as when the literature-minded boy of the older sister and the irreverent younger sister try to communicate about lit. At the end of the day--that is, the day today--it's a puff piece; in 1920, it probably marked Fitzgerald as a man who would investigate any topic or bathtub.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 67: Anonymous, A Dream (#155)

Anonymous, "A Dream" (1831) from American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation:

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of my favorite books: it's deeply humane, while retaining some sense of humor, and it rightly criticizes Southerners and Northerners for their attitudes toward blacks, while simultaneously noting that it is not always easy to find a moral guide. It is also, from our vantage point, a very troubled book, especially from the vantage of someone who wants a truly multicultural basis: "We are all equal," says Harriet Beecher, "after all, aren't we all Christians?" Er, well, not so much, says this atheist Jew.

And for all that some of the black characters are as intelligent and sensitive as any of the white characters (and yes, for all that there is variation in the whites), from our vantage, some of Stowe's characters seem like they'd be at home in any of the pro-slavery literature of the period. After all, it doesn't matter to Stowe if blacks are childlike innocents who love bright colors and to dance--what's important is their Christian souls. But to us, those stereotypes aren't helping anymore. There's a reason that "Uncle Tom" transforms from a saintly do-gooder of the 19th century to the 20th century meaning of collaborator.

Similarly, this anonymous (signed "T.T.") essay-story from the abolitionist Liberator magazine may have a great vision of an America where black and white (and Native Indian, in an aside) are all equal and intermingled. (Oh, Cheerios interracial ad, you're too good for us now.) T.T. writes pretty strongly and with some humor, as when he notes that this future utopia came about after "some bright geniuses made the discovery that black men have rights as well as whites." Also, the frame is an oldie but a goodie, with a powerful end: after thinking about different scales of time, the narrator "visits" the future, finds that it's awesome, and then gets woken up--all of the beautiful sounds of the future turned into the horrible sounds of the slave-trading present.

At the same time, I can't help but cringe when the races get assigned their particular strengths, as if this were a roleplaying handbook where elves can see in the dark: black people have grace, white people have industry, etc. For all that "A Dream" is on the right side of history, its reliance on a certain view of race clearly marks it as part of its time.

(That said, I want to address the "well, everyone was racist back then" argument that I usually hear when discussing older science fiction/fantasy works. First, no, not everyone was racist back then, no matter when "then" was. We have so many stories of people crossing color lines and mingling, so there were some people who weren't all that racist.

(Second, the "everyone was racist back then" argument fails to take into account the different types of racism and the different racial arguments. "T.T." here happens to fall into the "races have particular strengths and weaknesses" argument, but he clearly misses the other types of racism that condone slavery--and even skewers them. In other words, "everyone was racist back then" stops the conversation, when we should start the conversation by asking, "what are the different ways people were racist?" As we can see in "A Dream" and Uncle Tom's Cabin, people who thought the races could mingle also felt that there was some innate distinction between them.)

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 66: Theodore Dreiser, The Country Doctor (#159)

Theodore Dreiser, "The Country Doctor" (1918) from Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men:

In typical Dreiserian fashion, "The Country Doctor" is one long sketch of a semi-fictitious character; as the LoA note remarks, the doctor here is a combination of two rural doctors, only one of whom Dreiser actually knew. I say that this is typical Dreiser because, for a fiction writer, Dreiser sure did like to stick to the facts. (Which is one reason why Dreiser gets a certain amount of love in historical circles. We might want to say that this interest in the truth comes from his time as a journalist, but journalists back then weren't always interested in the truth. High school tends to focus on the idea of Hearst and "Yellow Journalism," but really the idea of "journalistic ethics" barely exists in any time before 1920.)

The anecdotes that make up "The Country Doctor" are pretty standard "good doctor to poor region" stories: he didn't always collect on his debts, he had a nagging wife about that; he went anywhere at any time of day to help a sick person; he used any trick he could to help people, including folk remedies or getting them mad, if that's what it took; he was somber but humorous; etc. There are some anecdotes that are atypical for this sort of character, such as that he loved spring and birds, going so far as to keep some pet crows who kept stealing from him and his family.

But after 20 pages of anecdotes, all we really have is a distant sketch about a particular person. It's almost more interesting to try to read into it and see what's missing. For instance, we hear how the doctor never collects debts and could be off to a big city where he would be rich and famous--and then we're also told that he's got a black manservant around the house. If nothing else, that's a reminder that a certain class of labor was cheap enough for even a poor country doctor.

As for structure, Dreiser starts with two longish personal anecdotes--how the doctor prescribed a folk remedy for his dad, which little Dreiser had to gather; and how he woke the doctor in the middle of the night to come look in on his sister, which resulted in a scary walk back for little Dreiser--and only after establishing his personal connection to the doctor does he branch out and start giving anecdotes from other people.

Short story read-aloud, week 15 and 16

Escape Artists (Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod)

Leonid Andreyev, "The Abyss": An older and very lyrical/metaphorical story about a pair of young lovers wandering through a wood, until some men attack (and rape?) the woman. Somewhat shocking to think of this being printed in 1902 Russia. More of a tone story than character/plot story.

Rudyard Kipling, "At the End of the Passage": A bunch of Englishmen in India get together for a game of cards, one of them dies later of terror of the country--which may be curse-related. For Kipling, I thought this was somewhat less structured and interesting than his usual--fun to hear the language of the Englishman ("bumblepuppy" and "punka-wallah"), but not enough arc to the story.

Dixon Chance, "Beware the Jabberwock, My Son": A dad watching his son discovers this old mirror (his wife wanted) gives access to some horrible monster. Fine, but nothing really memorable.

Scott M. Roberts, "The End-Of-The-World Pool": Two boys discover this decrepit pool (attached to the house their dads are rehabbing) has some monster/lure; the focus on this is all about the boys' relationship--their fighting and their making up. Which gives it a nice grounded topic when the language sometimes gets away.

Nathaniel Katz, "Beyond the Shrinking World": When the world is being pulled apart, some magic knight has to go kill the source (or rather the demigod who is using the world-pulling-apart power). Started out interesting, but lost steam for me as it settled into that epic quest groove.

Liz Argall, "Mermaid's Hook": A fun inversion of mermaid tales as a mermaid rescues a slave who gets tossed off a slave-ship. That inversion was just about all I got from this. It's possible I'm just not listening closely this week.

Megan Arkenberg, "The Copperroof War": A house that is also a city that is also a kingdom starts to get into a strange new war with itself--and the protagonist has to track down the culprit and all of the various love triangles. Fun but also serious with an inventive setting.

Arthur C. Clarke, "Rescue Party": Aliens come to earth just before the supernova to see what they can rescue. A very old story with some issues and some interesting out-there aliens. Not the mundane sf we've got a lot of now.

Claudine Griggs, "Growing Up Human": Robots study human info to become more human. Funny, as they don't really understand what's going on; and only a little tragic, with none of the melodrama of "Now I understand your tears," etc.

Cast of Wonders (Protecting Project Pulp, Tales to Terrify, Starship Sofa, Crime City Central)

Cordwainer Smith, "The Game of Rat and Dragon": A fine audio version of story that I'll cover in my Cordwainer Smith reread next monday.

Ben Ames Williams, "A Voice From the Fog": A man defends his no-swimming opinion by telling a classy little ghost story. In some ways, this 1917 story fits very well with the "club story" tradition: a bunch of dudes sit around and one tells a story. Only, rather than being in a club, these dudes are camping out. The ghost story is pretty predictable--businessman kills his partner and is drawn back to scene of the crime where he is himself killed by drowning--but since this story is narrated by a character within the story, he can give some deft characterizations without raising too many objections. So when the narrator says that there's nothing sadder than a man who smiles all the time, we don't want to argue, as we might if it was an omniscient narrator telling us the way it is--this is just one guy's opinion.

Christopher Fowler, "The 11th Day": A truly horrific and wonderful story: a woman without many connections in the world gets stuck in an elevator with a man who doesn't have many connections. I actually couldn't listen to this when I was falling asleep because I could take the dread engendered by the day-by-day countdown of how they're stuck and no one's coming to rescue them--especially with the title which gives away how long they'll be stuck. Here's a spoiler: At the end, the woman is dying and the two confess their love now that they are close, and I so wanted it to end there, with that beautiful and horrific moment... and then the man repairs the elevator and leaves, since it was all a scheme of his to create that beautiful shared moment. It doesn't ruin the story, it merely recasts the entire thing as horrific rather than just terrible.

Alastair Reynolds, "Sledge Maker's Daughter": Here's another story nominated for the BSFA 2007 best short story award and another story where I feel like shrugging. The opening is interesting, following a woman on her errands in some medievalish setting and her run-in with a powerful villager who wants to coerce her into sex. But then she goes to the old woman's house and the crone explains the whole world--the ice age they're coming out of is due to the space war sucking out energy from the sun and here's a technological marvel from some nice man in armor. So at the end, we have this woman who now has great tech to protect herself. But the entire second half of the story is info-dump from the old woman, with no conflict.

Jeff VanderMeer, "Shark God vs. Octopus God": A very silly name with some little silliness throughout--like the Shark God living in this mythic time and constantly cursing--but so well done, with a reader-satisfying comeuppance for the Shark God.

Elizabeth Bear, "And the Deep Blue Sea": In a post-apocalyptic landscape, a motorcycle courier debates giving up her cargo to a satanic figure, in payment for getting more years of life. I enjoy the mix of sf tropes and horror tropes--Satan transforms the landscape so that, instead of the fantastic apocalypse of the future, the motorcyclist travels through real environmental disasters of the past. I very much felt the burning heat of the southwest, but that might have more to do with my current location (the burning southwest) than with the writing. Also, the debate doesn't really have teeth for me since we don't really know the stakes.

Joe Haldeman, "Graves": A story I've read before, in which a Vietnam War forensic team goes to check out a weird corpse; they get fired on, killing a soldier; and then they go back to find the US soldier eviscerated and the weird corpse gone. There's no definite answer that, yes, this is a type of Vietnamese undead. And the story itself is so slight and prosaic in the Vietnam War genre: guy goes out, sees something horrific. But here's a story where the unglamorous details really sell it, from the guy smoking near the flame thrower to the transportation of beer as necessary rations.

Gwyneth Jones, "La Cenerentola": In the future, rich people will have new technologies to reproduce, which seem to go beyond simple genetic reconstructions to something more holographic; on vacation in Europe, an American couple meets up with a woman who has two perfect twins and one horrible little child, who may or may not be abused (as "la cenerentola"--Cinderella). There are a couple twists here that seem more confusing, including the narrator's wife's anger when the narrator discusses the twins one time too many.

Spider Robinson, "Distraction": A light tale with excellent voice: two criminals--one experienced, the other a novice--break into a house that weirdly fights back; but the wrap up is the silly "we broke into a writer's house," which deflates any actual feeling of story.

Kage Baker, "Likely Lad": A teen with a mutation that lets him control computers/electronics has normal teen urges, but can't act on them because of legal issues around teens; so his AI playfriend program, which (a) has the personality of a pirate and (b) has his moral restrictions removed by the teen, tries to get the teen into smuggling to distract him from sex. A light and fun story, featuring sugar smuggling and an over-zealous anti-smuggling patrol-captain. It's fun and low stakes, and it keeps our sympathy on the smugglers by representing the teen somewhat realistically--he's never had sex, all he knows is what he's seen on the holo-tv. There is one dangerous note in the fact that he's a mutant and the breadth of his abilities are as yet unknown.

Steve Aylett, "Gigantic": A strange story where a scientist-crackpot has visions of death and aliens; at the end, the aliens come and drop all the dead bodies that people are responsible for. Now, I might quibble with this notion of singular responsibility--all the Holocaust victims fall on Berlin, which seems to be forgetting all the help that came outside of the capital--but it is a striking image. Aylett reliably brings the weird.

Lawrence Block: "Keller the Dog-Killer": I have just subscribed to the Crime City Central podcast, which starts with a story about the hitman Keller: he gets hired to whack a dog by two women who turn out to have ulterior objects in mind. Block keeps Keller sympathetic by making his victims petty, back-stabbing, and/or monstrous (the original dog's owner gets off when her dog kills another); as well as presenting Keller as a man who is noble and tough enough to do the hard job (of killing the dog himself).

Marilyn Todd, "Something Rather Fishy": A Britain-set story about an ex-con-woman who realizes her con-woman friend is actually a black widow. There's a happy ending where the ex-con kills the black widow--whose first victim was a friend--and marries her old sweetheart. Todd does a fun thing to mark the long timespan by noting what bands were popular at the time; which more-or-less fits the narrator since she was friends with a band back in the day--and yet, the music angle is only tangential.

Chris F. Holm, "A Simple Kindness": A man sees a pretty woman on the subway leave a bag behind, so he grabs it, and finds himself caught up in a blackmail scheme (the bag is full of pictures). A very old-fashioned "the lady was trouble"/"I'm a sucker for a pretty face" story. A little too simple and old-fashioned for my taste.

Cheryl Wood Ruggiero, "Eleven Eleven": A homeless girl with a memory problem something something something. The POV/voice work here is fine, setting us within that girl's mind; the only problem is that she has a very limited view of the thing. At the end, when she has some memory of what happened, I got lost at the sudden revelation and confusion of the girl's POV.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 65: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Gray Champion (#65)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Gray Champion" (1835) from Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches:

Before discussing Nathaniel Hawthorne, I always like to gesture towards Jane Tompkins's great Sensational Designs, which nicely points out how our notion of Hawthorne's canon status has changed over time. And I like to point that out because I think too many people come out from high school having read (or, let's be honest, having pretended to read) The Scarlet Letter and being turned off to Hawthorne as a heavy, joyless writer. (And again, honestly: how many students get confused about whether Hawthorne was or was not writing in Puritan times? Because I totally did.) But Hawthorne can be joyous and fun; House of Seven Gables isn't just a meditation on time and justice but also a rom-com.

All that said, "The Gray Champion" fits pretty well with the notion of the joyless Hawthorne, as he here goes through a historical event with a bit of fantasy: during the (totally real) rule of Edmund Andros, Hawthorne imagines a near-violent crowd event that is disrupted by a ghostly figure that is the spirit of Puritan resistance. If you're not me, you're probably most interested in the vision of resistance and the issue of church vs. state. (In Hawthorne's retelling, the Puritans resist Andros because he serves the Catholic King James and the Puritans want to keep church and state separate.) This historical event allows Hawthorne to discuss his theory of government, where "any government that does not grow out of the nature of things and the character of the people" is deformed.

If you are me, which is unlikely but not impossible, the two most interesting things are (1) the way Hawthorne uses the "King in the Mountain" trope--e.g., King Arthur is sleeping and will return when we need him most, as is King Barbarossa, Charlemagne, and several others. Here, whenever things get bad for New Englanders, the spirit of the Gray Champion will show up: "I have heard, that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again." The crowd of resisters in some ways revives this spirit of resistance, which is marked as both metaphorical and literal, in that the spirit comes from the grave. (There's definitely a connection to be made here with Walt Whitman's "A Boston Ballad," where a parade of republicans calls forth the spirits of old rebellion against monarchy.)

And if you're me, you're also interested in (2) the way that Hawthorne represents a crowd. Almost all of Hawthorne's fictions revolve around or include some pivotal crowd scene. (Try me: name something by Hawthorne and I'll find you the crowd scene or scenes.) For instance, in "My Kinsman, Major Molyneux," a newcomer to town finds his relative being hoisted out by a monstrous and costumed crowd. So here, the crowd both has a single purpose and, sometimes, a single voice--

"Whence did he come? What is his purpose? Who can this old man be?" whispered the wondering crowd.

--but is also marked for its diversity, since it includes everyone. Now, Hawthorne isn't as interested in representing the variable crowd as Whitman is--he's usually more interested in the unity of the crowd. After all, they share one spirit in that Gray Champion. But crowds, we can find, are hard things to represent; and especially here where the crowd of Puritan-spirited resisters (with one voice) is opposed by a disunified crowd of the governor and his men, all of whom speak with their own voice. It's how Hawthorne gets to paint one crowd as organic and of the people; and the other crowd as artificial and fragmentary.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 64: Lafcadio Hearn, Some Strange Experience: The Reminiscences of a Ghost-Seer (#8)

Lafcadio Hearn, "Some Strange Experience: The Reminiscences of a Ghost-Seer" (1875) from Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings:

Lafcadio Hearn has the strangely unfortunate fate of having a great name and not much fame attached to it. He comes up sometimes in discussions of ghost stories; and film buffs may know that the movie Kwaidan was based on his collection of ghost stories (and some notes on insects) of the same name. All of which pales in comparison to how fun his name is to say: Lafcadio Hearn.

The LoA page for this story doesn't go too in-depth with Lafcadio's background, focusing mostly on the time he spent in Cincinnati (after Greece and Ireland, before New Orleans and Japan), working for one newspaper or another. Today's entry is an example of some of his journalism from that time, which showcases one of his interests in ghosts and spirits. (His other major vein seems to have been true crime, so there's some overlap there.)

As for the piece itself, it's ten pages of anecdotes from a "reluctant medium" who has worked in various houses as a domestic servant. If you like ghost stories and horror, you'll see several tropes here: headless riders, faceless ghosts, the ghost pulling the blankets off the bed, etc. If you like ghost stories (as I do), you'll also see some gaps here and there: wait, the headless rider is the ghost of a man who was stabbed in the heart--so why is he headless?

As a collection of anecdotes, there's no through-line or structure to the piece other than "Here's another story." Which is actually, I think, a benefit here: Lafcadio Hearn sets the scene in one paragraph, giving a description of the seer, and then he seems to mostly get out of the way. Except for one side-note, the rest of the piece is her telling stories (supposedly); and even if her anecdotes lead her to non-ghostly matters--like the scientific gentleman who was almost killed by a poisonous snake when he... cooked it and served it to a gun-toting neighbor--Hearn gives her free rein. By staying out of the way, Hearn makes it seem like we're just listening to this woman tell stories around a kitchen hearth.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 63: Rudyard Kipling, An Interview with Mark Twain (#16)

Rudyard Kipling, "An Interview with Mark Twain" (1890) from The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works:

Mark Twain is a fascinating figure who can be seen both as an exemplar and a radical of his time; and so my only hesitation with a collection like this one (or the collection on Lincoln that came up here) is that it may list to the side of our current understanding of Twain. That is, it's all well and good to read how Kipling loved Twain--but shouldn't we also hear how various others thought his works were juvenile, or cynical, or etc. Luckily, we have an interview with the editor, the great Shelley Fisher Fishkin, where she notes that she was most interested in how other writers felt about Twain.

However, although Rudyard Kipling had already published several books of short stories, his visit with Twain is less as a fellow writer and more like a worshipper meeting his idol. The opening is a pretty cute and somewhat Twainish recollection of how Kipling tried to track the man down throughout the northeast; but after that, we give the floor over to Twain and his feelings about writerly things.

Hilariously, at this moment, as in ours, one of the things that's on Twain's writerly brain is the businessy side of writing: copyright and the prospect of international copyright. I can't say that Twain's notion--copyright as real estate--bears much relevance to today's arguments, but it's a nice reminder that this argument has a long history.

Similarly, when they get to talking about a sequel to Tom Sawyer, Kipling may sound like a fan from today. The whole set-up of the question--will Tom marry Becky Thatcher?--is at the heart of many a fan-fic; and when Twain playfully suggests that he'll write two books, one where Tom triumphs and one where he fails, Kipling is aghast at Twain's playing with such a real person. Kipling's response is a direct attack on Twain's notion of copyright: "because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.” Can Stephen King's Misery be far behind. where Kipling kidnaps Twain and forces him to write the relationship that Kipling wants for the characters that are now his?

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 62: Mary Austin, The Scavengers (#92)

Mary Austin, "The Scavengers" (1903) from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

One reason why I'm doing this project is to read works that I might not otherwise read; and the Mary Austin's "The Scavengers" is a great example of that. It's a short piece, which I recommend, especially to people who live in the southwest. As much as I'm a believer in the role of imagination and sympathy in literature--as Richard Ford said to a writing class I was in, the foundation of literature is "you can know what I can imagine"--there's a certain extra thrill from recognition. As I see turkey vultures more often than I see rain, this piece resonated with my experience.

"The Scavengers" is Chapter Three in Mary Hunter Austin's 1903 The Land of Little Rain, a collection of observational essays about Owens Valley, CA, where Mary and her husband settled. There's a whole bunch of background here about Austin, which the headnote covers--move to the artists' colony at Carmel, divorce, strained relationship with Ambrose Bierce (which seems to be a rite of passage for California writers), collaboration with Ansel Adams, etc. The LoA headnote covers all of that.

What I find most interesting about "The Scavengers" is its variations in tone and subject, while still maintaining a coherent approach towards the natural world around her. Mary Austin sometimes humanizes the scavengers, such as the buzzards--

It is when the young go out of the nest on their first foraging that the parents, full of a crass and simple pride, make their indescribable chucklings of gobbling, gluttonous delight.

--and sometimes she seems more intent on naturalistic observation sans comment--

The young birds are easily distinguished by their size when feeding, and high up in air by the worn primaries of the older birds.

--and she'll slip between the two without any segue or hesitation: those two lines I just quoted are right next to each other. She also sometimes includes a bit of sentimentality, as when she notes,

It is seldom one finds a buzzard’s nest, seldom that grown-ups find a nest of any sort; it is only children to whom these things happen by right.

That seems like a scarring childhood event, but you can see the connection between childhood innocence and natural wonder, a well-worn sentimental vein, which was as strong at the turn of the century as it is today. (See Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace, which would itself be a pretty good title for this sort of desert landscape essay.)

What's curious and notable about Austin's essay, beyond the style, is how wide the subject matter is, taking in coyotes, cattle dying by starvation, crows, buzzards, lack of water, and sheep herds. While her title tells us she's going to focus on one particular aspect of the environment, she recognizes how that one aspect relates to the entire natural landscape. So we can see how she comes to the end of this chapter, where she notes that man fits in "the economy of nature," but that still, "there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man." This is a definite well-spring of amateur naturalism and conservationism.

"The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955) (Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith #4)

In my post on "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," I argue--well, more like assert without argument--that Cordwainer Smith invents the sexy cat-girl trope and subverts it by pointing out how C'Mell status as a sexy cat-girl is intertwined with her status as a slave/underperson. But when you read "The Game of Rat and Dragon," you might lean towards the interpretation that Cordwainer Smith really liked cats.

The plot here is practically non-existent, since the only things that happen are that (1) a bunch of human telepaths get ready for a space flight with their cat-derived partners, (2) the space flight is attacked by the mysterious anti-life dragons, and (3) the main human recuperates in a hospital and feels more love for his cat-derived partner than for the human nurse. If that's too much plot for a haiku, it's not too much for a sonnet.

In fact, most of the story is setting description, with a sideline in character description that further does work as setting. So we learn about the telepaths and their pin-sets (amplifiers) and the cat-derived partners who see the space monsters as rats and attack by launching light bombs. If there's a lesson here for aspiring sf writers, I would say that you shouldn't be afraid of making the science weird and metaphorical. I mean, the "dragons" here could pretty easily fit in with some trans-dimensional Cthulhoid horror and the idea of driving off monster with light has a childish simplicity that never seems silly when you're reading this story. (Afterwards, however, you might wonder if hiding under a blanket would be equally effective in driving off the dragons.)

As usual, Cordwainer Smith makes some connections in these stories (the plano-forming ships are piloted by scanners and that sort of travel makes the Instrumentality possible); and as usual, there are many nice little details, like the fact that the cats don't think in words and are disappointed when the "rats" they kill disappear.

But that all gets us to the weird part of this. There's nothing wrong with forbidden love stories. I'm not even sure there's anything wrong with love that's forbidden because of species-difference. But as another story where a man loves a cat-creature, I think we're within our rights to ask Cordwainer Smith, "why cats?"

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 61: Susan Glaspell, The Hossack Murder (#72)

Susan Glaspell, "The Hossack Murder" (1900-1) from True Crime: An American Anthology:

At a University of Chicago workshop, Debby Applegate described how she fixed her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher by reconsidering it as a mystery story: the facts needed to be embedded in the narrative. I thought of this while reading the eight dispatches that make up Susan Glaspell's reporting on the still-unsolved Hossack murder because of the tension between facts and story here.

While the earlier articles stick to a no-nonsense, just the facts tone--the first is only 85 words!--Glaspell shifts gears into a more colorful, emotional, sentimental tone later, which is less journalistic and more personal. We get drops of this personal tone in some of the earlier pieces, as when we hear murder suspect Mrs. Hossack "looks like she would be dangerous if aroused to a point of hatred"; or when we hear that "Slowly but surely the prosecution in the Hossack murder case is weaving a web of circumstantial evidence about the defendant that will be hard to counteract."

But this personal tone comes out especially--and a little too much for my taste--in the Easter dispatch that begins, "Seldom, if ever, have the people of Indianola seen such an Easter sabbath as Sunday." Glaspell isn't clumsy--she uses the repetition of the question "Is she guilty?" and "Will they convict her?" to some effect. That first effect is actually to drive home the distance between guilt and conviction for a crime.

And yet, what strikes me most about this collection is how so much seems to be left out. Glaspell reports that the case against Mrs. Hossack weights heavily on the affair of the dog in the nighttime--but that's the first time we ever hear about the dog. (A little googling around will find some very interesting use of the dog Shep for both prosecution and defense.) Then there's the issue of the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Hossack, which is never really described--possibly because Glaspell is keeping to the court facts. (Though I really think the court case would look into the possibility of abuse as a motive for murder.) Finally, at the very end of this collection, we get this bomb-shell:

It is universally believed at Indianola that if Mrs. Hossack did not murder her husband she knows who did.

Wait, what? If this opinion was so wide-spread, why are we only hearing about it now in this abrupt fashion? Here's a moment where I feel that Glaspell is trying to walk a careful tightrope between telling an interesting story and sticking to the facts, and doesn't quite pull it off.