Sunday, January 23: The A.D.D. Detective
LITERARY NEWS
by Leigh Lundin
Lots of news is happening in the world of writing. Let’s get started.
The Visitor Nevermore?
For six decades, a mysterious visitor left roses and a bottle of cognac at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in Baltimore. However, for the second year in a row, the phantom mourner failed to appear, lending credence to a hypothesis he may have died. It’s also possible our visitor decided the two century birthday might be a good time to halt the practice.
I found it interesting the visitor signified his presence with cues to Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, using a particular arrangement of roses and a secret hand signal. None of Wednesday’s four impostors passed on the secret codes.
The Blessing: Canon +1
As Dale Andrews could tell you, winning approval of heirs and authorial estates for publishing under the aegis of original authors can appear a formidable task. Many authors publish Sherlock Holmes stories, but until this past week, no one has done so with official backing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. That changed when Doyle’s estate chose Anthony Horowitz, author of stories about teen spy Alex Rider, to write an as-yet untitled full-length Holmes novel to be published this fall by Orion.
The Reader
Back when the Kindle was $350 and the Sony eReader not far behind, I commented the ideal price point would break at $100. Over the holidays, we saw selected Nooks and Kindles offered at $89 while Radio Shack and competitors advertised more for less. In a celebration of mysteries, Stieg Larsson hit the million dollar mark on the Kindle last summer and, in recent weeks, others have followed.
As we previously observed, women are the largest purchasers of digital readers and eBooks. Women’s literature, particularly erotica and the big names in romance, remain the most popular genres.
The Writer
The January issue of The Writer magazine offers several useful tips for writers. If you’re interested in writing, check out these articles:
Screen writer Sy Rosen suggests personal embarrassments make good seeds for characterization and plot in "Turning an Embarrassment into a Terrific Story". (I have a silo full of such fodder.) Sy bases part of the article on Sigmund Freud’s "Creative Writers and Daydreaming".
Meanwhile, agent/instructor Lisa Cron tells why writers should read bad literature in her article "The Love of a Good Story". She suggests you don’t know what your expectations are until they’re not met. In other words, you learn how not to write from stories that irritate the hell out of you. (Check out her excellent writing blog.)
Thomas Bowdler versus Mark Twain
This came to me from a reader: You may have heard NewSouth Books plans to publish yet another expurgated Huckleberry Finn. These days, the ‘n-word’ is commonly heard in rap, hip-hop, and BET, but some of us have disgusted memories of its use and others have painful memories. Without a Ghetto Pass, white folks should avoid the word, though to our dismay, the n-word reared its ugly head in recent politics.
|
Reverse Bowdlerisation Clergyman Jonathan Swift didn’t shy away from slippery graphic details, such as the scene where Gulliver puts out a fire. This has led to extensive revisionism of Gulliver’s Travels. When I was a kid, I came across a peculiar edition of Gulliver’s Travels that used the word c—t. In my parents’ version, I noticed something very different. More than once, Disney animators have been outed slipping sly graphics into movies. I suspect the bored lowly editor of Gulliver thought he (or she) was equally clever. Though I don’t recall the context, he (or she) had altered the perfectly innocent original ‘court’ to ‘c—t’. |
That said, James and I have been particularly outspoken about emasculated literature and none of us at Criminal Brief likes bowdlerised prose. Neither do The Economist, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, which weigh in against sanitizing Twain.
Censors and critics fail to understand Clemens opposed slavery and other social problems of his time. (Or, as my father observed, perhaps critics do understand and use censorship to subtly undermine Twain’s message.)
NewSouth Books also eradicates the word ‘injun’, which personally offends me… the removal, not the word. My Algonquin ancestry isn’t the least bit insulted by a 19th century mispronounced misnomer.
While I understand children’s editions of classics, I wasn’t aware so many ‘classics’ series (including Sterling’s Classic Starts, Signet Classics, and Loeb Classical Library) issued milquetoast versions. As Twain biographer Ron Powers points out, if children (and their parents) don’t get Twain’s writing, the original wording provides a ‘teachable moment’.
The mystery community is not entirely guilt-free. Our own Agatha, a product of her era, used the n-word in the original British title of the book now known as And Then There Were None. However, Jamelle Bouie writes this in a short but brilliant essay:
It doesn’t provide racial enlightenment, or justice, and it won’t shield anyone from the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination. All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection. Which is a shame. If there’s anything great about this country, it’s in our ability to account for and overcome our mistakes. Peddling whitewashed ignorance diminishes America as much as it does our intellect.
“The Most Offensive Word That’s Knowed” from the artist John Sherffius:
Leigh, as is often the case, has offered up a buffet of material today. Thought I ought to say something on at least one topic since I popped up in the early paragraphs!
So — Nooks. I love mine. We are about to fly off to Panama for a two week cruise. All of the books I need are downloaded and won’t threaten to send me into the horrors of checked luggage. Also — what a joy to be able to set the font so that I can read (particularly at night) without reading glasses. And wonder of wonders — falling asleep with a book that does not proceed to then lose your place!
BTW, LOVE the cartoon, Velma!
Great column as usual, Leigh. And you’re right, Lisa Cron’s blog is outstanding!
Reading about the NewSouth’s Books’s new version of Huckleberry Finn, reminded me of the time a few years ago when some African American organizations tried to have “nigger” removed from the dictionary.
In my small fight against such whitewashing of the language, I refuse to substitute the term “the N-word” for “nigger” in my writing and in discussions about African American literature.
The word for me hasn’t always had derogatory connotation. I heard it when I was a boy from friends and relatives. My uncles and other older men would say to us small kids with affection: “you my nigger if you don’t get no bigger.”
I received a Nook for my birthday, and I’m still trying to make up my mind whether I like it or not. I read faster with it but I can’t get use to not turning pages.
Thanks Louis, John, and Dale. I find the Nook, Kinkle, Sony eReader, and the Radio Shack Novel intriguing, although I’ve not attempted to read a book with them. The Nook is giving the Kindle major competition.
Louis, I commend your battle as well as your facile use of language here. As Dick Gregory said, it’s a matter of context and how you use it. (I can only hope to be as funny as he.)
Dale, I hope you and your wife have a wonderful time in Panama!
Thanks so much for mentioning my blog on writing, you made my day! And I couldn’t agree with you more about the damage neutering language does — it neuters thought, discussion and the ability to spawn new ideas. And if idea spawning isn’t the business of writers, what is?
I don’t own a Nook, Kindle, or any other e-reading device, and don’t have any plans to. But I recently used a Kindle application installed on my Droid phone to read Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE, and was surprised at how painless it was.
Re. expurgation, I think I’ve commented on this, especially as it relates to Mark Twain, in my past columns. It was okay for Tom to get Jim to whitewash a fence (in Adventures of Tom Sawyer), but it smacks of Fahrenheit 451 to whitewash Mark Twain’s writing by removing “offending” language.
(I once watched a version of “Blazing Saddles” that had been sanitized for network broadcast, and the result was an absurd mess.)
I’m not fond of the word “nigger” but removing it from literature and history books is a disservice to everyone. Leigh mentioned Dick Gregory. God love the man; he may offend, but he’s honest.
Hi Lisa! Thanks for both your article and your comment. My father (in)famously said if you control the language of a populace, you control its thought.
You’re right, Steve, and I think Rob also wrote about dumbed-down language as well. Twain isn’t Twain in anyone else’s hands.
During one of Dick Gregory’s lectures, a handful of students started ragging on white kids. Gregory stopped his monologue and told the students, “You haven’t been listening.” He wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind.
Bravo for pointing out the rap lyrics. And I actually thought “And Then There Were None” was a more ominous title and therefore better. (How many people today would know the poem that was the source of both titles?)
A late note addressing the Jonothan Swift side-bar, which I missed on my first read. My wife Pat encountered a similar funny mis-type some years ago. Government attorneys (which we both were) spend a lot of their time reading briefs produced by the Department of Justice. (We are often, in the English tradition, solicitors to their barristers.) Anyway, one standard for judging a statute’s legitimacy is whether it is “in the public interest.” The problem with the word “public” is that tiersome “l”, which gets touch typed by one of the weaker fingers. Some years back Pat received a brief for review that strongly (and repeatedly) defended a statute as being in the “pubic interest.” After correcting the mistake before the brief hit a clerk’s office she went one step further and removed the word “pubic” from her spell checker. As she said, it may be a legitimate word but I would just as soon have spell check ask me every time I use it whether I really want to!
My recollection from Gulliver’s Travels was how surprised I was at Gulliver’s relationship with the farmer’s daughter on Brobdingnag. Unless I was reading it wrong, at one point their relationship became distinctly sexual, even though she was something like 50 feet tall.
My seventh grade class was required to read Gulliver’s Travels and when we got to that part there was an uproar from the more conservative parents of the kids in the class. Our poor English teacher (who didn’t even know that chapter was going to be in the book) really got called to task. Actually the whole narration reminded me of an absolutely terrible Lou Costello movie — The Fifty Foot Bride of Candy Rock.
Loved the cartoon, Velma.
I also agree wholeheartedly.
Censorship in my opinion is a form of revisionist history.
Our past whether as a nation or of self can be rewritten over and over. Facts don’t change and will catch up to one sooner or later. Usually sooner.
I hate speech cops….like this new stupid crosshair thing.
Comedians of all ilk, never mind their politics, are going to be targeted. Whoops…that’s a no no too I guess.
What will the media do if they can’t lambast and blame somebody for something or everything??
Enjoyed your aricle.
Dead on.
Steve, you weren’t misreading Swift. That famous scene is the only literal example of “toy boy” in literature.
(laughing)
… toy boy, indeed! Steve and James, anything I could add would only subtract.
Jeff, I’ve noticed several cultural instances of our grandparents’ generation fading from public memory. There’s an tendency of on-line experts (e.g, Wikipedia editors) who remark “If I never heard of it, it never existed.”
Dale and Pat, we citizens wondered what government lawyers were thinking! Now we know.
alisa, you’re too sly! And right… nothing is worth censorship. Thanks!