Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 15: Robert Frost, The Original and Only (#160)

Robert Frost, "The Original and Only" (1903) from Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays:
In the common heroism that is my hallmark, I resist making jokes about poetry and poultry. But before he was a published poet, Robert Frost was a published author of poultry-stories. According to the page introducing this story, Frost wrote 10 stories for poultry newspapers between 1903-5. The story here is more a character sketch of a cautious but optimistic poultry-farmer. Once he bought a fancy hen, spending rather a lot considering his conservative nature; but that hen was not only physically remarkable, but laid eggs more frequently than other hens. This all gave the farmer the idea of gathering data on the egg-laying habits and breeding his chickens to produce more eggs.

That all might sound pretty ordinary and it is. But I didn't tell you the best part of this story: it's short. Well, that and the farmer's mix of feelings is interestingly shown in his monologue, as his excitement and optimism over maybe breeding a 300-egg hen mixes with his caution and close-mouthed nature.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 14: Mary Wilkins Freeman, Luella Miller (#2)

Mary Wilkins Freeman, "Luella Miller" (1902) from American Fantastic Tales:
So, who here loves the late 19th-century boom in American regionalism? Honestly, Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs has some of the craziest, most Lovecraftian-before-Lovecraft material in it and Charles Chesnutt's playing with Southern and black stereotypes in his stories is a master class in ironizing the whole regionalist interest.

Today's story certainly fits into the regionalist framework, making some hay out of its New England setting and the rugged self-reliance and gossipiness of the villagers there. (For some reason, "regionalism" basically just came to mean "hick towns presented for big city folks.) And it adds the ghost-scare story that often gets connected to regionalism: in the far off corners of the country, there still are witches--or at least belief in witches.

So Luella Miller is a woman who seems to suck the life out of people, both in a material sense--other people do all the work for her since she can't do anything at all--and in a more spiritual sense--as the people who do work for her end up dying. There's a little frame to set up the story, but most of the story is a tale told by a neighbor about what Luella Miller did. There's no real twists: the life-sucking woman turns out to be a life-sucking woman, and we get many (many) versions of her life-sucking--husbands, neighbors, friends, doctors, servants.

That straightforward structure makes it seem sort of old fashioned to me. But Freeman makes one alteration in making Luella an accidental killer: like a kid carrying scissors and cutting everyone without realizing it (says the narrator), Luella is kind of an innocent. And when her bad effect is eventually made clear to her, she functionally commits suicide (though it takes a while) and that change is sort of modern and not very Puritanical: sympathy for the monster.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 13: Morton Eustis, The Man Who Came to Dinner With George Kaufman Directing (#146)

Morton Eustis, The Man Who Came to DinnerWith George Kaufman Directing (1939) from The American Stage:
This article is basically a long paean to the comedy genius of George Kaufman, especially considering the difficulties of putting on a comedy. What's so strange about this piece is that it works. Sure, the depiction of Kaufman seems straight up a theatrical genius stereotype--gangly, always sitting with his legs dangling, his hair poofed up, constantly working. But Eustis mixes his "what a genius" lines with an examination of what sort of work Kaufman is doing as a writer-director, so we have some reason to believe his judgment.

This piece--and likely this whole collection--won't appeal to everyone. I was especially interested because of my experience, lo, these many years ago, writing a sketch revue at the Second City. As I blogged about then, writing funny for the stage is impossible in a vacuum: you've got to take into account the actors and even, damnit, the audience. Eustis hits this idea a lot, with Kaufman thinking over the rhythm of the lines, the heightening of comedic effect, and the necessity for laugh pauses. I also dig Kaufman's technique of running the play backwards to see if there's any dead space in each act by itself.

Travels with my Dog

This last weekend, Sarah and I went to Big Bend National Park, which is like the sun--large and hot and full of Texans. We camped out, which is inexpensive compared to cornering the oil market, but always seems to include some unexpected costs--propane, ice, meat, whistles, etc. The whistles are in case you run into trouble on the hiking trails, which we so far haven't done.

At least, not by Saturday, when I write the first draft of this while Sarah is hiking the Santa Elena Canyon Trail. See, we're not alone here and I'm not referring to the lurking mountain lions. (They say, "by the time you see a lion, the lion has already seen you.") We're here with our dog, Blackie, who isn't allowed on the trails because this national park is also something of a wildlife refuge. Considering that Blackie has already barked at deer, rabbits, and a horse, I have some sympathy for the idea that dogs bother the wildlife here too much for them to walk on the trails.

Besides that minor inconvenience/potential tragedy (hiking alone in bear country seems less than ideal), this trip has gone pretty well. And Big Bend is quite picturesque, from the emaciated Rio Grande (and the Mexican national who came over to check the donation jar and tchotchkes that are set out); to the Chisos Mountains (surprisingly cool because, duh, they're mountains, with some real hairpin curves in the road); to the canyons of the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive (just what it says on the tin).

Pictures to come.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 12: Edith Wharton, A Journey (#45)

Edith Wharton, A Journey (1899) from Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910:
I haven't read enough Wharton, but everything I've read of hers--or about her--I've liked. I feel like she often gets lumped in with her contemporary Henry James as beautiful prose-writers who are deeply interested in psychology, sometimes to the exclusion of event. (As a friend once memorably put the experience of reading a James book: "What's going to happen, what's going to happen? Oh my god, it happened! Wait, what happened?")

But I think we could also put Wharton with Poe as a writer of terrifying tales. (Just wait till we get to "Kerfol" if you don't believe me.) For instance, this story has a few pages about a young wife's mixed feelings over her invalid husband that are devastatingly concise about that mix of feelings:

Doubtless the fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies.

"Doubtless" is like "of course" later--a bit of indirect discourse from the wife's POV saying one thing and meaning quite the other. Sure, she's screwing up... except her husband isn't just sick, but maliciously sick towards her with those "helpless tyrannies." Like a Poe narrator, this wife will tell you how much she loves her husband and also that he's a terrible person. Here's my favorite sentence that undoes itself as it goes on:

She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself.

So this story could just be a psychological without a plot and it would be fascinating because we see the psychology move. But then after a few pages of set-up, we get the plot: he dies on the train and she doesn't want to tell anyone because she's afraid they'll get thrown off the train before they arrive home at New York from their unsuccessful rest cure in Colorado. Then we get the second element of Poe-ishness, when visions of her dead husband haunt her. There's a Gothicism to her domestic situation; it's like early Hitchcock, bringing murder into the home--where it belongs.

Rather than Hitchcock, this reminds me of many of the old time radio thrillers from the 30s-50s: someone does someone else wrong and keeps seeing the face until, at the end, they faint or die, usually in a way that confesses or unveils their crime. Which is exactly what happens here, when she hides her husband's death; is haunted by his face; and faints, hitting her head on his train berth.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 11: Edgar Allan Poe, The Domain of Arnheim (#70)

I forgot to mention what yesterday's headnote taught me, which is that the Story of the Week is open to suggestions. Wait, I'm reading a story picked by just some schmo on the street?

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Domain of Arnheim" (1847) from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales:
Today's reading is from that contemporary of Lincoln who I read yesterday: Edgar Allan Poe. Thanks, random number generator! First, I should confess that Poe was my first literary hero--clever riddles, hard language, trance-inducing rhymes, what's not to love?

I even loved the stories that don't get taught much in public school, like his comedy pieces and his landscape stories. That doesn't mean I think Poe should be represented primarily by this landscape story: it may be an exceptional story in more ways than we want it to be. (The LoA also has "Hop-Frog" up. Oh well, at least Eapoe.org has all his stuff up if you want more.) "The Domain of Arnheim" is a lot closer to his "Philosophy of Furniture" or his essays on Stonehenge and road-paving: a guy inherits a huge amount of money and decides to use it towards creating a perfect landscape--and the second half of the story is a description of that landscape that probably should be drawn.

Now, if you've read Poe's other works, "The Domain of Arnheim" can be very interesting and connected to his other works:

• he's got the same interest in rule-bound vs. situation-bound philosophy that go through his detective tales (and even there his interest in morality shades over into aesthetics); 
• there are a few drops of mass vs. individual stuff, which is always interesting in Poe--a mass/commercial writer who also felt he was a man of genius; 
• his interest in scale and perception comes out here as it does in "The Sphinx" and "The Spectacles";
• there's his interest in breaking down the world according to mathematical laws, such that we get to hear how much the rich inheritor makes per minute, or how artists understand beauty in the same way that mathematicians understand math; etc.

Taken as itself, though, this is a story that, as Poe would say, does not allow itself to be read. A large part of that is Poe's style, which is all interruption, equivocationary and explanatory sub-clauses, and delays. Poe will go on for paragraphs about what something isn't, before he remembers to tell us what something is. (Damn, so that's where I got that from!)

For instance, Ellison, that inheritor, has a poetic soul that gets expressed not in poetry or in music--though he loves poetry and music; and not in sculpture or painting, which if you think about it, might fit in well with Ellison's idea of beauty.... And then eventually we get told that he's a landscape gardener.

That's a little deflationary and it's even more so when Poe describes this experience of the landscape which is so carefully managed that you realize today's equivalent would be a theme park ride. Well, why not? Poe--always interested in how things affect the audience--could have been one of the best designers of theme park rides.

Curiously, in all his description of the landscape, Poe focuses on sight: we hear about color, shade, shape, form, illumination. We hear a little bit about the mysterious music, but nothing about what all those flowers smell like or how it feels.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 10: Abraham Lincoln, Autobiography Written for Campaign (#111)

Abraham Lincoln, Autobiography Written for Campaign from Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865:
The weird thing is, if you've read Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, then you already know just about everything he says in here. For all the faults of that book, it was pretty nicely researched.

Campaign literature is like protest literature: it wants you to do something. (Hawthorne didn't write a pamphlet for Pierce in order to not get Pierce elected--though it might've been better if he had.) And so newly-national Lincoln sounds unsurprisingly like a lot of politicians here: he came from such poor circumstances and he's a down home guy. Now, the anecdotes might change a bit--Lincoln knew how to handle an axe, didn't have enough schooling but borrowed books and bettered himself--but the intent is pretty much the same.

I recently watched Lincoln, which makes 1860s-era politics seem a lot like our own; Lincoln's campaign biography merely hammers that home, as when Lincoln tries to explain why he voted against the Mexican-American war (illegal war) but voted to supply the army (support the troops).

What's most interesting to me--besides that weird little dig about "the peculiar habits" of the "quakers," which is part of this 19th-century distrust over the Quakers--is how Lincoln refers to himself as "A." for the first 75% and then switches to "Mr. L." when he gets elected to Congress. Is that a conscious effort to make himself seem relatable when young and give him gravitas when older?

Short story read aloud, week 8

Escape Artists (Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod) 

Clark Ashton Smith, "The Ninth Skeleton": A man going to meet his beloved enters a strange part of the forest where he sees skeletons carrying baby skeletons; and one of them gestures towards him and a grave ready. Poetic, dreamy with a suggestive imagery--women, death. But it's pretty thin gruel as a story, a reminder that CAS often thought of himself as a poet first.

S. L. Gilbow, "Red Card": A dystopia where a lottery gives someone the right to murder anyone they want. The main character is a put-upon wife who starts out shooting her husband and ends up planning to shoot her husband's mistress. An interesting premise that plays with the "an armed society is a polite society idea" (since you never know who might have the right to kill you); but a rather bleak story with a strangely passive protagonist. A reminder: readers like active protagonists (and dislike having to ask questions like "why are these two together?")

Lightspeed and Nightmare 

Marc Laidlaw, "Bonfires": Turns out to be something like an after-life fantasy, with people on a beach building bonfires to greet the new-comers. The narrator meets a woman who seems to enjoy torturing the new-comers with the truth and they argue: she just told the new-comer what she wishes someone had told her. Like the Clark Ashton Smith, this has a dreamy edge, but here it's more like an overlay: the details of the bonfire disguise the unreality of the situation nicely.

William Ochse, "Gravitas": A drunk returns to home to rediscover that his imaginary friends are just as deadly; and then he expiates his sins by dying and becoming a buffalo spirit. I'm still not sure about this story: the mix of old-school horror story (monsters kill people) and the magical ending (buffalo spirit) is certainly interesting, but I'm not sure it's successful. Worth re-reading, I think, especially after reading an interview with the author where his thoughtfulness about writing comes through.

Hugh Howey, "Deep Red Kettle": A child's view of the on-coming meteor that could destroy much life on the world or could provide lots of mineral resources; from the child's POV, the uncertainty of the people resembles the rabbits that he accidentally runs over when plowing the fields or like the buffalo that were stampeded off the nearby cliff. The child view--limited, far from power--gives Howey an excellent opportunity not to decide but to stand off and judge uncertainty.

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

Gene Wolfe, "Innocent": A vampire/cannibal monster tells a priest in prison how he's really just a guy with a weird need. The reading of this story is done very well, giving the narrator a very winning simplicity. Of course, he's innocent only of malice, since he really does kill and eat people. An interesting view of a monster that is somewhat hard to classify (there's vampiric markers, but plenty of difference).

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 9: Thornton Wilder, Chefoo, China (#113)

Thornton Wilder, "Chefoo, China" (unpublished) from Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings:
This piece was probably written for the autobiography that Wilder never finished, and it's not clear to me that these pages are themselves finished. But they are fascinating.

The notes to this page tell the bare-bones of the story: the Wilders traveled to China, where Papa Wilder was a consul, and Baby Wilder (well, one of the many Wilders) got sent to boarding school in China. So not only is Wilder facing the culture shock of China, he's facing the culture shock of English-style boarding school.

From a narrative stance, there's a great character structure here with semi-outsider Thornton not-really-befriending an American who is an outsider in the school (in his way--there's really no bullying here, which is a huge change in boarding school stories from today, I think) but also an insider in his own way with Chinese culture: his main goal is to escape the school for a night and go into the Chinese area of the city. There's hints of his adaptation to China, as when he prizes a gift from his Chinese nanny and speaks Chinese to an old man visiting a graveyard. Otherwise, the boy simply says that he wants to get into town to make money.

As a story, there's also an interesting format that I think Wilder gets away with only because of the semi-memoiristic nature of the piece: the first section is all about China, told from several different POVs telling their stories about how it's great to be a rich European in China and terrible to be Chinese because of all the famine, etc. There's also some psychologizing of the Chinese: they are so multitudinous (like locusts or stars) that they are indifferent to the life of a single person. Considering that Wilder is writing this in the 1960s, the fact that he sounds like McNamara talking about the inscrutable Vietnamese is an unfortunate coincidence.

But once we get past the world-building, the set-up of nested culture-shocks is very interesting: Wilder isn't just shocked by Englishness and Chineseness but even by some types of Americanness, as for instance the Tennesseans who are hard to understand. And the position of an old man looking back on his youth gives the Wilder-narrator the authority to very rarely dip in with some post-incident knowledge, as when he describes a boy's smile--both what he thought then and what he knows now:

At first it seemed to have nothing behind it except brazen impertinence. I wrote in my journal that it was like the reflection of a winter sun on a sheet of polished tin. I was to understand later that it was a mask to conceal despair.

There's no real end to this piece; and the front-loaded world-building would get this tossed out of many science fiction/fantasy slush-piles that would read this as pure story. But the story is very interesting when we finally get to it; and the story even allows for some interesting general comments, as when the narrator notes the war between students and masters in the school, and their shifting sense of what constitutes fair play.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 8: John Schulian, Nowhere to Run (#138)

Oh man, another non-fiction piece--how many non-fiction pieces are there in this story-a-week set?

John Schulian, "Nowhere to Run" (1979) from At the Fights:
Taking a break from flying and Paris, the random number generator gave me this column on faded boxer, Johnny Bratton. Now if you're like me--and I hope you're not--reading an old column about an even older boxer gives you an itch that only internet research can scratch. I've just spent a few minute reading up on Bratton and the Del Prado hotel, so now I'm an expert.

But no matter how much of an expert I may be, I will never master the world-weary omniscient style of Schulian. (How world-weary is Schulian? After his career as a sports columnist, he moved to Hollywood and worked on Xena: Warrior Princess among other shows.) Schulian doesn't just tell us that Honey Boy Bratton was successful and now isn't. He starts with a description of the run-down Del Prado Hotel, where Bratton hangs out/sleeps when he's not downtown panhandling so that we know how far Bratton has fallen.

Schulian isn't shy about this: "How sad and yet how perfect for the setting" is Bratton now. This omniscience--not just of fact, but of feeling--gives Schulian nearly god-like power where Bratton and everyone else around him has none. Even the manager of the apartment building seems beaten by life: Why let Bratton sleep in the lobby? According to the manager, "The hotel doesn’t look like the Astor anymore, so why should anyone care?”

Schulian drives home the melancholy of this piece by alternating between the past omniscient (this is the way things are in general) and the present terrible tense when, for instance, he describes the aging boxer going through the motions with no one but the mirror to see him. Also, just as Banning flipped between the epic and the pathetic by running both feelings together in a sentence, so Schulian abruptly runs together two notes in the final paragraph: Bratton has found a place to crash--but now the Del Prado is being re-gentrified, so he's got nowhere to run.

Bonus: Schulian never uses the phrase "nowhere to run" in his column, making him my favorite person today.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 7: J. Herman Banning, The Day I Sprouted Wings (#95)

J. Herman Banning, "The Day I Sprouted Wings" (1932) in Into the Blue:
This piece was originally published in the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper that I have looked through a bunch in my time (George Schuyler, woo!). The headnote for this piece gives a lot of helpful info for James Herman Banning, not the most well-known name in aviation history. The story is very historically interesting: first licensed black male pilot; transcontinental flight that took three weeks since they had to raise funds for fuel at every stop; died in 1933 when he couldn't get a plane in an airshow because he was black and had to go up with a less experienced white pilot.

As Bisgood's piece gave us a historical view of commercial flying (and for a woman!), Banning's piece gives us a historical view of a wannabe pilot (and a black man). The story is as interesting as his biography, with his torturous training involving a near brush with death--

This particular day the pilot complimented me on my progress up to that date, and five minutes later he took a new student up in the same ship and was killed in a crash.

--; the difficulty of getting an experienced pilot to fly the plane he built himself after salvaging the engine of the plane his instructor died in; and his eventual accidental first solo flight in the plane before anyone else tested it.

The story takes a little while to get going--or at least it feels that way since he starts with that old cliche, "It has often been said truth is stranger than fiction." But once he gets into it, it's a short little anecdote that goes along pleasantly, especially since Banning is always willing to deflate his own legend. My favorite section of this short piece does just that, describing at length how great he feels to be flying before reminding himself that he might just die:

I immediately became self-reliant. I felt as only one who flies can feel—that here, at last, I have conquered a new world, have moved into a new sphere. I had sprouted wings, a rhapsody in air, but the stark realization came to me that I had yet a landing to make!

His undercutting deflations often take place in the same sentence as the inflation, which helps to give this a breathless forward momentum without letting us build a legend out of this epic and totally accidental moment.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 6: Randolph Bourne, Mon Amie (#59)

Randolph Bourne, "Mon Amie" (1915) from Americans in Paris:
Randolph Bourne sounds like a character out of a Robert Chambers story, like "The Yellow Sign": disfigured in face (thanks to doctor's forceps during birth) and hunchback (thanks to youthful spinal tuberculosis), large hands that could play piano, a genius, a cape-wearer. The headnotes to this piece note that his relationship with "mon amie" (my friend) sounds intellectual rather than romantic perhaps because of his handicaps.

Though it doesn't sound exactly chaste when he notes that her mind "became the field where I explored at will"; or that what he had with her was either a flirtation or an "intellectual orgy." For all this piece is supposed to be a paean to his female friend--a 19-year old who responded to his note at the Sorbonne--what comes out of this is a pretty flat and objectified view: woman as symbol of France.

No surprise that this was printed for an American audience in the Atlantic, with its ooh la laing over French life: oh, this woman is all of France; and like all of France she is modern and a feminist, wanting to live her life (vivre sa vie) and permitting herself all sorts of luxuries, including refusing to marry and wanting a free life. By contrast, Bourne says, American girls are "so pedantic and priggish." Honestly, this seems like the 1910s, middlebrow version of sex tourism, as Bourne describes the young woman's modern views on love.

But for all my distaste at the subject and subtext, Bourne does a good job of dealing with French language, translating or contextualizing--and not overusing any French to emphasize foreignness.

Some thoughts on Wreck-it Ralph

I really enjoyed Wreck-It Ralph and wanted to make a few notes on it.

One: it welcomes video-game illiterates since many of the video game references are made up--the game Fix-It Felix, Jr. resembles in some ways King Kong, the first Mario (Jumpman) game, but is totally it's own thing. (Also Rampage, but no one remembers that.)

Two: but if you do know video games, there's a few little jokes in it, as with the jerky animation style of the Fix-It Felix, Jr. characters.

Three: Ralph's backstory is insanely interesting--but not really examined. He's been thrown out of his rightful home so that some people could build a condo on it. The song over the end credits makes reference to how Ralph was tossed out for eminent domain reasons. So it sounds like he's got a pretty legit reason to be angry. (NB. See note at end.)

Four: the movie has some philosophical incoherences; for instance, Vanellope at the end declares that her real self is the hoodie-wearing rebel, even though the code says that she's a princess (a standard "the system doesn't define me" move)--but elsewhere she talks about how she's really a racer "in her code." This may be less a movie inconsistency than a linguistic/character inconsistency. But this sort of problem seems to bedevil lots of literature; cf. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where Hank goes on and on about how the system is what defines people--and then every once in a while notes that the system can't really keep a good guy down.

Five: one of my favorite things about the film is how it gives the four main characters some sort of arc / flaw. First up is Ralph, the displaced angry guy who comes to re-engage with his power to wreck things by using it in different ways. (Although, his sacrificial moment at the end is very reminiscent of The Iron Giant.) Next, and parallel, is Vanellope: displaced like Ralph, outcast like Ralph, has to learn to use her debility (her glitch) as a power like Ralph. Fix-It Felix, Jr., learns there's more to life than just fixing (though this is underdeveloped) and Sergeant Calhoun has to learn there's more to life than just fighting (though this is ditto). Hmm, actually the more I think about this, the more I think they could've added to those two secondary characters, who nicely mirror each other as Ralph and Vanellope do.

Six: a villain is revealed in the last half of the movie, which is fine, but which could have been made to fit more tightly with the main story. After all, Ralph and Vanellope both want to fit in more with their video game or at least be appreciated. And the villain's desire is to be appreciated and to blend in a video game where he doesn't belong. The connections could be clearer.

Final thought: Is Wreck-It Ralph ultimately an anti-protest movie? Look at it this way: Ralph has been moved off his pleasant forest and put in a dump made up of the cast-offs from the rich Nicelanders. So whether you want to put that in First World-Third World or One Percent-99 Percent terms, his desire is pretty recognizable: he wants a slice of the pie (literally in the movie).

Now, when Ralph absents himself from the economy of the game, it breaks down--the same way our economy would break down if, say, certain agricultural states tried to enforce laws against the illegal migrant workers that helped pick their crops. So at the end, the Nicelanders realize Ralph's value and, after throwing him off the roof, give him his own pie--separate but equal, with a nice message and a representation of Frank on top of the building with the Nicelanders.

So, materially, nothing has really changed in Ralph's world: he still gets thrown off the building, still (probably) lives in the dump, still has never been properly compensated for that first removal from his land. Instead, he becomes satisfied in his position because of the symbolic differences: the cake, him on top of it.

Some spoilers here: We could also say that his story of displacement (he lived somewhere till he was kicked off that land) gets displaced onto Vanellope's story: like Ralph, she was displaced from her position, only her displacement is recognized as wrong by everyone and is substantially corrected by the end. She was kicked off the throne by Turbo and she gets it back by the end. All of her "I won't be a princess, I'll be a president" is a sharp joke in this direction since no one actually voted for her. It's still an inherited position (like Felix with his magic hammer from his dad*). So Ralph was on that land first, but that position (inherited, gained, whatever) is forgotten; while Vanellope gains her position back. So why can't Ralph?

*Ever note that Felix's favorite way to refer to Ralph is "brother"? That might just be friendliness (though he doesn't call anyone else brother, iirc), but even so it metaphorically sets up an Esau-Jacob sort of relationship, with the wild brother and the favored brother. No wonder Ralph is so angry to be displaced from his land--and from his family.