Wrapping Up Ghosts and Gothic Tales

Carl V. over at Stainless Steel Droppings suggested that if participants did a wrap-up post on the Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) 2006 Autumn Challenge , he would add it to his Newsletter of the event. Well, I entered his challenge about a week after he'd announced it and so I suppose it's characteristic to respond to that blog entry more than a week late as well.

First of all, this was the first time I had participated in a reading challenge on the Web; I had no idea how it would work and I wasn't sure I would actually sustain the effort. I do an enormous amount of reading for a variety of roles (day job, local library work, personal book group, etc.) and unless I enjoyed what I picked, it was going to be a crap shoot as to whether or not I would continue with it. Blogging takes time as well and I hadn't been able to sustain the activity for any length of time before. But my youngest had just left for college when I first saw Carl's posting, so I thought a new reading approach would at least distract me from worrying about "freshman follies".

I plunged in. H.G. Wells didn't write lengthy works so I buzzed through two of his novels fairly quickly. The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds both held my interest as entertainment and, given some of the philosophical discussions, gave me a certain low-level of anxiety well in keeping with the spirit of the autumn challenge. As a largely scientific society, we still haven't ironed out the ethics supporting our scientific endeavors and explorations. The human failings of those who faced the Martians seem still to be around a century later. (I wonder if any of this influenced my voting in the midterm elections...I hadn't thought about that until just this minute.)

Elizabeth Gaskell's Gothic Tales weren't really very spooky, but she captured beautifully the way in which bad behavior carries down the generations. The misunderstandings between parent and child, and the impact of a parent's emotional maturity and personal behavior on their children played throughout her stories. Those themes came up again in Grange House by Sarah Blake. There was the romanticism of thwarted loves, ruins and ghosts, but the point made by both of these authors seemed to be that we are allowed to make choices in life, those choices in turn have consequences, some of which won't always be happy.

All of this was lightened by the happy discovery of Montgomery Rhodes James, a nineteenth-century antiquarian scholar and teller of literary ghost stories, whom I had never encountered prior to Carl's early reference to Edward Gorey's The Haunted Looking Glass. His short stories were quite enjoyable, particularly Casting the Runes and The Mezzotint. I found one collection of his short stories at a Borders in Center City Philadelphia, and happened upon the other volume in Coliseum Books in New York. As the clerk finalized my sale, we chatted about horror movies inspired by James!

I tripped over ghost stories by all sorts of Victorian writers because of the Gaslight etexts and the content made available at LitGothic.com. I ended up reading ghost stories by Rudyard Kipling , Frances Hodgson Burnett, and other Victorian types. I didn't blog about all of them, but I certainly encountered and enjoyed more than I had anticipated.

I was writing as well on my blog about all of this. My formal entries for the challenge came across as a little too formal and a little too long, perhaps, but I am still working out the best way of thinking out loud about books and life. (I haven't yet figured out how to make Blogger let me do one of those (more) below-the-fold links.)

The last weekend of the challenge was tough, trying to finish The Unburied , a mid-stream substitution for Dracula. The college freshman had come home for birthday presents, extra sleep and mom's meals; I was glad to get a better handle on his life and his new experiences, but somewhat selfishly also wanted to finish my book for the challenge!

I think this was a great experience. I'm participating in other challenges like Michelle's From the Stacks challenge, but the RIP challenge was a fun first foray!

Low-key charm

Television and Charm

"Mulberry" (1992)

Usually one doesn't put the word "television" in the same sentence as "charming". Charming implies something low-key and likeable, rather than the blaring broadcasts of the "squawk box". Mulberry was a wonderful television series from the early '90's that really was charming in the most positive sense. It's a story of a young man luring an elderly woman back into life, along with her two rough-edged family retainers, Alice & Bert. Miss Farnaby, played by Geraldine McEwan, is delightful. The young man playing Mulberry is gently funny without the raucous rudeness of so much television. Buy it, watch it, keep it and most of all, talk about it with those you love. One of my favorites!

The Activity of Reading

One of my books for the From the Stacks Challenge is The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer which I had originally purchased about two years ago. I had bought it on the strength of the discussion of *how* one should read; Bauer outlines a set of steps that an adult might follow in order to maximize the value of reading literature, autobiography, history, drama and poetry. Each form has its own demands and therefore a discerning reader will want to adapt his or her reading style and mental thought processes in order to ensure the likelihood of engaging fully with the work. Bear in mind that Bauer's reputation in the public community is based on a book she co-authored with her mother for those interested in home schooling their children (see The Well Trained Mind). This book is an offshoot of that text, aimed at helping adults, who may find themselves at a disadvantage in trying to teach their children, to improve their own skills in reading analytically. I don't need to homeschool my children (my two have made it into college) but Bauer's book is a detailed outline of how to gain the most benefit from reading beyond superficial distraction. I don't necessarily employ all of her recommended techniques, but there is enough overlap between my own habits and her process, that I don't feel I'm missing any essential step.

Her program requires scheduling and committing to an undisturbed segment of time for reading each week. She specifically recommends to her audience that they begin with four segments of thirty minutes each over the course of a seven-day week. Personally, I can read in 20 minute chunks on the train while I commute, but retention is often spotty. If I really want to extract something from my reading, I prefer to do it mid-day ideally in an undisturbed 90-minute session. Those sessions can only happen on a weekend, and many weekends it would be a challenge.

Her recommendation of taking notes is something I do follow, although I can't bring myself to write in a book. My mother raised me to take care of my things and she taught me that you don't write in a book. That might have been largely because we tended to rely on library books growing up, but I don't think she saw writing in books as anything other than damaging or defacing a text. Formal library training just reinforced the idea. I do take notes but tend to scribble on index cards or on small notepad sheets that you can stick inside a front or back cover. The difficulty in doing this task on the train is that jostling little sheets of paper while balancing a book on my knee in a moving train can be somewhat disruptive to the thought process necessary to thoughtful retention. Only in the past eighteen months have I indulged in the extravagance of Moleskine notebooks for ordinary note-taking. Post it notes and flags are good, but I am well-aware that the chemical make-up of the adhesive can hasten acidification of the paper page. There is a certain guilt associated with using them. For work-related articles, I generally use a yellow highlighter on pages that I've printed off from the Web.

The real question that I'm asking myself while reading The Well Educated Mind is when does someone need to be able to read at this level of depth, if one isn't reading for purposes of education? Why do we stop engaging at this level with the content we read once we get out in the so-called real world? Is the lack of time really the reason? These are rhetorical questions to a certain extent, but feel free to chime in.

Update

Yahoo has actually been in touch and is working on a fix/work-around for my problem (see entry for Wed, Nov 8). I really hope this works out! At any rate, I wanted to make sure folks know that Yahoo actually does pay attention!

Claiming the blog for Technorati's purposes

Technorati says I have to do this in order to be crawled by their system. [Technorati Profile ] Of course, this is the beta version of blogger so for all I know that won't work (I may have read that in the FAQ but am too busy to go look it up.) I know that the Google Blog Search tool has picked up this blog, because I searched for my review of The Unburied (see below) earlier today and I was in the first ten hits.

Idiots! A rant aimed at Yahoo!

This post started out as a rant against today's changes at Yahoo! But like most rants, a good deal of the outburst can be discarded once one has had time to think and work out the correct next action. It started this morning when I opened up my personalized page at Yahoo! While it's not fashionable to still have one of those pages, I have honed my own MyYahoo page to the point where it is actually very efficient as a launch pad through out my work day. The most successful column I ever wrote to our membership was the one I did on my use of this particular page; it got circulated throughout organizations and I even got a speaking engagement out of it.

At any rate, one of the things that the page has allowed me to do for years (up until this morning) is keep a static list of about a dozen to eighteen bookmarked pages in a special segment of the page. I used that segment of the page as a navigational launch pad to reach sites whose content was not really suited to an RSS feed. I'm talking about sites like Techmeme and Reddit and Google Books, sites whose engineering of content makes them of more value when you pay an actual visit. As near as I can think it out, content comes in three ways for my purposes: RSS feeds for content updates, aggregation sites for overviews of multiple feeds from sites that I might or might not need to follow daily, and individual content pages that are stored because they are useful for background and/or current research. I use news readers (like the one built into the Flock browser), I use aggregation sites like Findory and I use social bookmarking tools. (I have bookmarked pages in all three Yahoo tools (del.icio.us, MyWeb, and the recently launched beta Yahoo bookmarks).

Yahoo this morning eliminated the static bookmark listing from my personalized page (without warning me that if I didn't move those 12-18 links to one of the bookmarking tools, they would disappear at a time of Yahoo's choosing). Without that static navigational list of bookmarks immediately accessible to me on that page, the value of the MyYahoo! page as an information dashboard is lessened considerably.

I suspect that Yahoo! wants to drive me in the direction of what they deem to be better tools -- social bookmarking tools (one huge database of valued web pages visited by many people and against which they can sell advertising), their social networking platform (360) and the handy Yahoo toolbar. Bear in mind I already use all of those tools at Yahoo! I suppose they ultimately hope to drop the hosting of personalized portal page in favor of these other offerings.

But as a user, I'm really not happy now. I had honed that MyYahoo! page down to the specific elements I regularly consulted. I visited that page multiple times daily (in large part to use the navigational links). Yahoo! in turn sold advertising off that page and reaped the benefit of my frequent visits.

My solution (and I'm not thrilled with it because I am not all that fond of the personalized Google homepage) was to replicate the list of links over in the Google environment. My attitude has always been to distribute my "Attention data" through use of a variety of sites and now Yahoo has forced me to move something over to Google's column. Believe me when I say I emailed Yahoo this morning and let them know that they were driving me over to that side of Silicon Valley Street. Should they be allowing that to happen when they just got downgraded by analysts this past month?

Hey, Yahoo guys! Guess what? You're trying to be "helpful" and I don't want to be helped and/or upgraded! Don't force me into adopting a tool or service I don't want. I want my nice legible static page with my static list of bookmarks that I've used for years!

Do you suppose anyone heard me?

Official List for the Challenge

Okay, I have dithered long enough regarding the From The Stacks Challenge. The list is as follows:

1. The Well Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
2. The Battle for Middle Earth - Fleming Rutledge
3. The Things That Matter - Edward Mendelson
4. A Splendour of Letters - Nicholas A. Basbanes
5. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction - T.J. Binyon

This is way too ambitious in many respects...I am, after all, only a "bear of little brain".

Working Up to the Challenge

I am still debating what titles I want to include on my list for the From The Stacks Winter Challenge. (Visit Overdue Books to learn more.) I've got two definites:

1. The Well Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
2. The Battle for Middle Earth - Fleming Rutledge

I'd like to work my way through both of those. Throughout the other titles I've pulled, there is something of a reading-as-activity theme. I could go back to a book from a year ago, Walking A Literary Labyrinth, which I got halfway through before being interrupted. It deserves additional attention. I have two titles by Nicholas Basbanes (A Splendor of Letters and Every Book Its Reader). I have another book, The Things That Matter, by Mendelson (picks up on life stages in seven classics including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and Middlemarch). I have an older book from Oxford University Press, Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. For that matter, I could finally read Mary Barton, because I really do like Elizabeth Gaskell.

Hey, at least the first two are set....

Chortling rudely

Indiana Jones is denied tenure. Well, yeah....

The Unburied

The Unburied
My final entry in the R.I.P. 2006 Autumn Challenge!

Title: The Unburied

Author: Charles Palliser

Copyright: 1999

Length: 402 pages (link to work on LibraryThing )

Summary: The plot centers around an historian visiting an old friend who has contacted him after a lengthy separation. He visits his colleague at Thurchester with the intent of making good use of his time by researching documents in the cathedral library that will set him on the path to an important discovery relevant to his specialty of early British history, specifically the period surrounding King Alfred (he of the famous burned cakes). During the week he is in Thurchester, there is a murder, a suicide, a corpse unearthed from prior centuries, a crumbling cathedral, a crisis at the choir school and a complex set of revelations to be deciphered and grasped. It is this last aspect of The Unburied that has put off many readers; it is indeed a most complex literary construction. This is not a book that can be skimmed rapidly. As one reviewer put it at LibraryThing, "This isn't a beach read." There are two narratives (the outer frame by a Mr. Barthelm and the lengthier internal story told by Dr. Courtine) and there are several manuscripts and stories (the fragmented historical manuscript, the fairy tale, and the completed manuscript that provides the final explanation of The Thurchester Mystery.) Each narrative unfolds as a segment of another and the result (as many unwary readers found) is a gothic novel that requires extended attention if one is to grasp both the resolution and the author's point.

Eerie/Creepy Quotient: This is a gothic novel, not a ghost story. It is on the creepy side, but it is not perhaps conventionally scary (a 3.75 out of 5 on the eerie/creepy scale). There are tragedies and shadowy encounters, but in the final analysis, this is an elegant historical/psychological mystery. One could read this in a house alone without fear of nightmares, but I must say that it might not be a pleasant experience. One would ultimately grasp the final resolution and be somewhat distressed/sickened. As modern Gothic novels go, this one is very well-done.Genre: Definitely a Gothic novel. Definitely adult reading. This one doesn't belong in your average high school library (not that most of them can afford to buy much in the way of books these days).

Extract: Go here for the extract. Do bear in mind that this is *not* the first chapter of the book as the NYTimes' site suggests. It is actually the first chapter within the Courtine narrative. That's relevant when you actually begin the book, because you may assume (as I did) that the editor's foreword is just that. A foreword (as in prefatory material) and not part of the novel's action.

Also Relevant: There were mixed reviews on this book. The New York Times panned it badly although the book showed up on the New York Times bestsellers list published the week following the review. Various other readers, posting well after its initial publication, had both good and bad reactions to the novel. As near as I can gauge it, the general consensus is praise for the construction of the novel but unhappiness with the final resolution. I think I'd agree. I'm not sorry I read it, but neither am I sure that it would be a suitable selection for a general book group. Say that it has niche appeal, and you've probably captured it.

The book's complexity makes it challenging, but a careful pacing of one's reading allows the author to unfold his message which is essentially that perception influences internal and external assignment of guilt. (That's certainly a valid point, but not perhaps news to a modern audience used to discussions of profiling in criminal investigations. This may be why some readers become impatient with his story-telling style.) Palliser makes his point by allowing his characters to focus on and unfold historical events, tracing criss-crossing versions of those events. I do think The Unburied suffers from a lack of distinction between the voices of those attempting to unravel the various threads of mystery. To my ear, all of the voices sounded just a little too like one another. One could barely keep them straight even while one was struggling to remember who was who among the various names (Gazzard vs. Grimlake; Speldrick vs Sisterson). That was indeed aggravating, which is why (I suppose) the publisher provided a list of the various characters at the end of the text. [One final warning: if you dislike tales involving child abuse, you should *definitely* avoid this one.]

As with all Gothic literature, various forms of uncertainty thread through this book. Such uncertainty reflects the fears that accompany an internal recognition that things don't always happen as planned. Actions have unintended consequences which teaches us to watch and proceed with caution. The message for at least one of the characters in The Unburied is that such caution may preclude us from taking the necessary actions to free ourselves from doubt.

As modern renditions of Gothic novels go, I preferred Grange House to this selection. The convoluted narrative is present in both as is the voice of an earlier age, but Blake seems to have the knack of moving her story along at just that slightly faster pace that satisfies the modern reader's need to move along quickly before a daily obligation arises and eliminates reading time.

By the way, I actually learned a new word from this book - pulpitum. Look it up. St. Peter's Cathedral in Exeter (UK) apparently has a very nice one.