Except for most of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work, some Hardy
Boys, and a little Dick Tracy, a sprinkling of Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred
Hitchcock mysteries series, and a couple of Goosebumps
books—I didn’t read any Young Adult Fiction as a young adult (unless you
think the 1992 NIV Student Edition of the Bible and 1984 edition of the World Book
Encyclopedia qualify).
No Lovecraft in childhood. No Tolkien. No Stephen King (in
book form). I did, however, read Lewis’s The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) but none of its sequels,
even though we had the whole series sitting right next to the encyclopedias.
(And I’m too old for Harry Potter to have made an impression.)
So I don’t know if I’m an apt critic to comment on current young adult fiction like Jeff Duke’s Ghostly Tales of Mississippi (2018). I have, however, had no hesitation in writing about the most recent work that I’ve read in this genre: the first two books of Heidi. So in what follows, I hope not to disappoint.
Besides being young adult fiction, Duke’s book is certainly southern gothic in genre. But thankfully, its aromas contain none of the musty smells of imitation-disguised-as-influence so frequently found in writers who were repeatedly burdened by classroom-assigned readings of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily (1930) and O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953). Duke was taught by Barry Hannah (1942–2010), a highly revered writer, but one I’ve yet to read (so I can’t tell you how strong his influence on Duke is).
But the stories in Duke’s book do remind me of the things I as
a child liked (and of which I was chased by the occasional nightmare) in the works
of R. L. Stine. Most of
the ghosts and witches that appear in Duke’s stories, however, don’t cause most
of the characters they’re chasing or spooking much harm. Most of them….
I’m particularly appreciative how the title of each story in
Ghostly Tales of Mississippi is of a
particular place in that state. This detail is part of the book’s larger intention
of weaving together an intricate pattern from various strands of local
folklore, geography, and family mythology.
“Rosehill Cemetery (Brookhaven)†and “Cinema Theater at the
Barnes Crossing Mall (Tupleo)†remain my two favorite stories. The first for
its simplicity at rendering spookiness; the latter for its keen combination of nostalgia
for playing Street
Fighter II at an arcade, the vivid image of a phantom seen in the
reflection of an arcade video game screen, and the very Kubrickian environment of
a quiet, empty, cinema at night.
And there’s even a bit of Joyce in Duke’s collection of local tales; for his final story “Witchdance (Houston),†(Houston, Mississippi, of course), almost overpowers all the stories that came before it––very similar to the way “The Dead†does for the rest of the local tales in Dubliners (1914). But only almost.
Recently, I read for the first time Johanna Spyri’s (1827-1901) Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning) (c. 1880) and its sequel Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was Es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) (c. 1881).
They are nice, pastoral books, set in the elevated Arcadia of the Swiss Alps.
Then, today, I saw these bluejays:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yCyP5hBB4/
And these bluejays reminded me of a passage from the fifth chapter of the first Heidi book:
“What are you going to make of the child?†the pastor asked. “Nothing; she [Heidi] grows and thrives with goats and the birds. She is well enough with them, and she learns no harm with them,†[said the grandfather].
My great-grandfather’s autobiography mentions that he was a hobo in North Texas during the early 1920’s. While researching some of his claims, I came across some wonderful illustrations by Gregory Orloff in Thomas Minehan’s Lonesome Road (1941), a kid’s book about the dangers of hoboing:
This translation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist comes from 1927, printed in Stuttgart, contains some beautiful illustrations by H. Grobet. It was a gift, and I believe it was purchased at Historica Antiquariat Bertz Wawrzinek on Heinrichstraße in Dresden.
14 Different Ways to Think About Books:
Or, Do Good Questions Make Good Books?
I’ve been thinking about Kevin Kelly’s book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (2016) where toward the end of his rather interesting book he lists some provoking questions. Their provocation led my thinking to take an initiative. So I went ahead and transposed the word “book” for the word “question” in this quotation from Kelly:
A good [book] is not concerned with a correct answer.
A good [book] cannot be answered immediately.
A good [book] challenges existing answers.
A good [book] is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked.
A good [book] creates new territory of thinking.
A good [book] reframes its own answers.
A good [book] is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business.
A good [book] is a probe, a what-if scenario.
A good [book] skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious.
A good [book] cannot be predicted.
A good [book] will be the sign of an educated mind.
A good [book] is one that generates many other good questions.
A good [book] may be the last job a machine will learn to do.
I think the transposition works well for intriguing lines of thoughts and, ironically enough, questions, except perhaps for no. 14. If the statement is understood as a good book is made for humans, I see no problem. But if the statement means humans are made for good books, I feel I’m on shakier ground. Yet here I recall Owen Barfield (1898-1997) once recalling Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):
Oscar Wilde’s mot—that men are made by books rather than books by men—was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare’s ‘meaning’. [2]
For scenarios (1) and (4), the answer involves me as an individual recognizing my own need to read. But in scenarios (2) and (3), it is someone else who recognizes the need for me to read something I have yet to get around to or perhaps deserve to reread. For I read differently when I want to read compared to the times when someone else wants me to read, either silently to myself or aloud to anyone around.
*****
When I was a child there were two kinds of trees: those you could climb, and those you couldn’t. Funny, I don’t remember thinking of buildings this way, even though the same principle would apply. But architecture is frozen music,[2] while books are trees. My childish eyes looked only for attainable branches to grab, sturdy knots to claw, and convenient toeholds to brace.
And these days I think I still think of books like that: books and trees that can be read or climbed versus those that can’t, or, at least on initial inspection, look too challenging to attempt. For example Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) is a towering redwood whose canopy I slowly approach. ’Tis a big book, one I began reading in June of this year, and, after taking about 60 pages worth of notes, am only about a third of the way through. I scoot up its trunk with some fear and much trembling, not knowing what I’ll find when I reach the top, or how I’ll safely get back down.
NOTES
[1] Andrew Lang, The Library, (New York, NY: Macmillan & Co, 1881). Reprinted under Dodo Press. 2004:
The Book-Ghoul is he who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking up and mutilating the volumes from which he steals … He prepares books for the American market. (p. 28)
See also D’Israeli’s essay “A Bibliognoste†in Curiosities of Literature – Vol. III, (Sixth edition, London: John Murray, 1817.)
[2] Goethe, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, (1811–1830) in Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, (trans. R. O. Moon, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1949) II, 43.
It is whimsical enough, that as soon as I left Magdalen College my taste for books began to revive; but it was the same blind and boyish taste for the pursuit of exotic history. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved—to write a book.
In a conversation which he had with Vico in a bookstore on the history of collections of canons, he asked him if he were married. And when Vico answered that he was not, he inquired if he wanted to become a Theatine. On Vico’s replying that he was not of noble birth, the father answered that that need be no obstacle, for he would obtain a dispensation from Rome. Then Vico, seeing himself obliged by the great honor the father paid him, came out with it that his parents were old and poor and he was their only hope. When the father pointed out that men of letters were rather a burden than a help to their families, Vico replied that perhaps it would not be so in his case. Then the father closed the conversation by saying: “That is not your vocation.â€
—The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, translated by Max Harold Fisch & Thomas Goddard Bergin, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944) 134-35.
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“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” — is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
–Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature (1849), “Ch IV: Language.”
And:
“‘I, too,’ he said, ‘have closely studied this man’s soul; but, unlike my learned friend for the prosecution, I have found something there. Indeed, I may say that I have read the prisoner’s mind like an open book.’ What he had read there was that I was an excellent young fellow, a steady, conscientious worker who did his best by his employer; that I was popular with everyone and sympathetic in others’ troubles.â€
–Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. (The Stranger.) 1942. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. NY: Vintage. 1954. p. 131.
