Lawler Literature: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Mick sat on the steps a long time. Miss Brown did not turn on her radio and there was nothing but the noises that people made. She thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her firsts. Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did not know. (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers. P 52)

Man, Carson McCullers really had an appreciation for what it's like to be in that chaotic intermediary place between childhood and teenagerdom. For that matter, she had an appreciation for what it's like to be an unfulfilled human being. And what human being isn't unfulfilled?

McCullers herself had a huge interest in Freud and psychoanalytic theories. Quite intentionally, I think, the above passage illustrates unconscious motivations and the youthful, barely bridled id.

It seems that each character in A Heart is a Lonely Hunter, adult and child alike, displays similarly Freudian characteristics, from the sexually frustrated diner owner to the orally-fixated deaf-mute locked up in the mental ward.

So, say what you will about Freud as a sexist, grandiose, unscientific theorist, but the guy's whacked out explanations for human behavior did improve literature. We otherwise might never have met Biff Brannon: a grown man in love with a preteen, an obsessive collector of old newspapers, whose soul ambition is to be a real mother to the lonely children of the world. Or, of course, John Singer, another deaf-mute, who suffers in silent psychic agony, though he is surrounded by admirers.

Reader Roundup

Berlin Library plans to return books that were stolen by the Nazis, including a copy of the Communist Manifesto that seems to have been owned by Friedrich Engels

Bookslut contributer Roxane Gay offers a very astute reading of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, both the film and the book. The novel is in my to-read pile, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it squares with this essay. Also, Gay wrote a very moving piece about weight issues in fiction for Bookslut.

Meg Campbell, founder of Codman Academy Charter Public Academy made a list of her favorite libraries for the Huffington Post. Her list includes the National Library Service of Malawai, which also serves as an open to the public school, college, and university.

At The Millions, author Steve Himmer argues that no person, especially a child, should be barred from reading a book.

The British Columbia library will soon be lending out people, actual human beings, as well as books.

City Island in the Bronx, meanwhile, offers fresh produce aside its books.

And Saul Bellow’s the Adventures of Augie March has been selected by the Chicago Public Library system as this year’s One Book, One Chicago feature.

Reader Roundup

While the UK is cutting its funding for 400 libraries, South Korea is vowing to build an additional 180.

Meanwhile, Time has first-person coverage of the riots in Tottenham.

Al Jazeera posted photographs of the London streets during the chaos.

If you’re doing research online, you might be interested in signing up for Pubget, It collects a bunch of open-access pdfs in one spot, including the journals and documents you can get through library cards and university IDs.

NPR has polled its listeners in order to create a masterlist of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books. If you trust NPR listeners and like sci-fi/fantasy, it is a very useful document.

I really enjoyed this LA Times piece from last week. It profiles a Holocaust survivor who was forced to give his infant daughter up to a Christian orphanage, only to be reunited with her years later.

At the New York Times, a psychologist explains how President Obama’s failure to tell the public a good story is holding him back. (You’ll have to sign in to read the article)

Lawler Literature: Little Women Revised

I’ll be honest. When I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as a pre-teen, I gave very little thought to the patron of the March family. In fact, I gave very little thought to the Civil War that was supposedly raging around the borders of Alcott’s narrative. I was much more concerned with the Jo/Laure will-they-or-won’t-they plotline. The notable absence of the war, and of the father, was, it seems to me now, by design. This was not a novel that entwined the domestic and political spheres.

Little Women follows the adventures of the forthright, thrifty, hardworking March daughters as they come of age in Civil War-era Concord. Their father, a middle aged minister, had voluntarily joined the Union army. Meanwhile, the little women must survive their somewhat dire financial and social decline.

March, Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitizer Prize winning historical novel, is named for the March girls’ missing father. Here, in contrast to Alcott’s original text, we follow March through the broad sphere of the American Civil War, from battlefield to cotton plantation to veteran hospital. In the interim, it is revealed that the pure pluck and goodness that characterizes March’s daughters in Little Women becomes fanaticism in their father, a fanaticism enflamed by equal parts love, nobility, and guilt. Needless to say, by the end of his service, the convictions he instilled in his little women seem a trite naive.

Interestingly, rather than merely fill in the formless figure of Mr. March with pure guesswork, Brooks shadows her character after Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, a real historical figure. Bronson was an abolitionist, an intellectual, a radical, an educator and an avid vegetarian. He was bosom friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And he wrote extensive journals and diaries, currently housed at the Library of Congress. The fact that he is Louisa May’s actual parent is just icing on the proverbial cake. In Brooks’ telling, he is a bit of an intolerable moralist, but endearing nonetheless.

The closing hospital scenes in the novel are particularly amazing. Brooks drew them from a book Louisa May wrote before she published Little Women. Hospital Sketches was, in turn, based on Alcott’s experiences working in a Civil War veteran hospital.

Here, Brooks (from the perspective of Marmee) describes Blank Hospital, the hotel-turned-ward where Mr. March convalesces:

At the end of the hall two vast double doors gave on to an ornately corniced room, hung with chandeliers. A gilded sign above the entrance said BALL ROOM, and the name seemed a bleak joke, for inside, arrayed on the polished dance floor, lay the victims of the Minie ball, many of whom would not dance again. There were forty beds within, all handsome hotel beds with turned posts rather than humble hospital cots. Some beds were tenanted, some vacant. A muddy, bloodied group of gaunt new arrivals, slumped against the wall, awaited the surgeon’s attention. Their faces proclaimed defeat as plainly as any banner headline reporting wartime’s latest blunder. The black nurse approached a green-sahsed, silver-haired gentlemen and set down the instruments, taking up a metal bowl to receive the bloody shrapnel piece he plucked from his patient’s shoulder. She inclined her head to where I stood, hesitating, by the wide doorway, and said something to the surgeon in a low voice. Then she beckoned me forward. I came reluctantly, feeling I intruded on the injured man with his shoulder bared to the probe and his pain patent upon his face. (p. 217)

Like Brooks latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, March was written as a first person historical account. Unlike her more recent foray into American history, March does eventually allow us a glimpse inside the mind of another charater: Mrs. Marmee March. Several of the last few chapters are told from her point-of-view, and it is here where Brooks reveals the raw pain of a woman left living on the homefront of a war. We finally get to witness the emotional honesty that Louisa May Alcott, through Marmee, stifled and ignored. Such revelations have the potential to muddy up the simplistic story of triumph as it was originally told.

As a kid, I had nothing but happy, warm feelings about Little Women. Now, I appreciate March, and, indeed, Louisa May Alcott herself, for very different reasons. The contemporary novel will not give you warm feelings. But it may yet make you happy, if only because it is a more honest accounting of a war-torn family.

Comic Encounters:Witch Doctor

Witch Doctor Vol. 1 No. 2, Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner: Dr. Vincent Morrow makes house calls. He wears a white coat, latex gloves, and has a doctor’s bag brimming with medical paraphernalia—including, apparently, a hypodermic needle the size of my forearm and a sword that glows red and cuts through anything.

If you’re wondering why a medical doctor brandishes a sword at his patients (in this issue, an eerily cherubic baby), then you clearly misunderstand Vincent’s job description. As a witch doctor, he cures ailments of the supernormal sort, well beyond the sniffles and tummy aches that are standard infant complaints. This baby needs to be stabbed. And when that doesn’t work, Dr. Morrow shakes the creepy little tyke—shakes it “like a polaroid picture—of an Etch-A-Skech—and some maracas!”

Only then does the “baby” reveal it’s true, nightmarish form: it’s a cuckoo faerie, a species that practices brood parasitism. The Mother Faerie replaces human babies with her young’uns, so unsuspecting families raise her mandible-faced alien children.

Witch Doctor is a medical procedural, and in the grand tradition of medical procedurals, Dr. Morrow uses his erudite knowledge, high tech tools, and a pinch of magic to eradicate nasty parasites. In this case, of course, the nasty parasites look like babies, with a pregnant woman to spawn them. When the humanoid, visibly pregnant Mother Cuckoo throws herself out of a hospital window to escape, Morrow laments his lost opportunity to kick her down the stairs.

The artist maintains that his final design of Mother Cuckoo was inspired by pictures of pregnant Barbie dolls. The resemblance is somewhat evident. I believe M. Cuckoo’s dead eyes, rosy cheeks, and shiny visage will be visiting me in my nightmares.

In lieu of a picture of the visceral Barbie horror, here’s Seifert’s description of the cuckoo faeries:

These are wildly alien creatures, creatures with an exoskeleton, that mimic humans the way some spiders mimic ants. They’ve got pretty much human-shaped bodies—only it’s an exoskeleton with segments visible at the joints. All the details, they just fill in with magic illusions and psychic mind-control.

When the offspring eventually reveals itself, it is a sickening, unholy combination of insect parts and plump baby extremities: ten fingers, ten toes, and a pair of dripping mandibles opened wide. Morrow and co. don’t need a pediatrician so much as they need an exterminator.

All together, it is a gory, luscious little episode. I like how Seifert and Ketner pull of a Lovecraftian marriage between scientific scholarship and unfathomable supernatural occurrences. (The story takes place in Arkham, Oregon. I’m guessing that’s their necessary pious nod to Lovecraft).

Ketner explains his approach to science and magic thusly:

It’s not replacing folklore with science as much as it is using the most interesting hooks from real life to rethink what something like a faerie could do and how they might have to go about it. They are, after all, from their own natural world. It might be a world that’s completely unlike our own science-based reality, but it’s always possible to find the right parallels.

Whatever it is, it works.

Read another review on this blog.

Reader Roundup

So, the other day I was reading and listening to music simultaneously—because recreational multitasking is the only kind of multitasking I do—and the strangest thing happened. The book was, as I’ve mentioned, Daniel O’Thunder. The music was Kaiser Chief’s 2007 album Yours Truly, Angry Mob. And then the book and the music aligned. I won’t get into spoilers, but fictional Victorian London erupts into…an angry mob, complete with outbursts of violence, property damage, and many a well-meaning idealist spiraling out of control.

As the Kaiser Chiefs describe such scenes:

You can try anything

And no-one would know apart from you and me

You can stop anything

It starts with just one and turns to two then three

And now I will forever associate that band with 18^th century London drubbings.

More recently, I started reading March by Geraldine Brooks. I was reading Caleb’s Crossing not so long ago, and I’ve read People of the Book, so this makes it a Brooks trifecta. I’m ecstatic to be own a postmodern version of Little Women. I read Louisa May Alcott’s novel repeatedly as a tween. March is obviously much darker, mostly because it explores the perspective of the March family patron as he witnesses the American Civil War. Of course, I still squeal like a 5^th grader on pixie sticks and pop-rocks every time he mentions his daughters.

I’ve also started Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples, which seems relevant, no? This one is textbook sized, so it will take me a while to get through it. My sister, an Air Force Reservist, is being deployed to Kuwait soon. I therefore think it’s important to get myself a bit more familiar with the culture.

Meanwhile, I would really like to see The Interrupters, a documentary about the former gang members involved in CeaseFire, an organization on a mission to end pervasive urban violence. From what I’ve read, the doc is no propaganda piece, unrealistically optimistic and thus totally inaccurate.

At the blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe, Gretchen Kolderup wrote about the experimental developments in Young Adult literature that have transformed the literary “category”. Indeed, such categorization should never be proscriptive. Right what you like, people. Especially if what you read deviates from the standard formula.

I also enjoyed this piece over on the Information Tyrannosaur blog about the Tao of Librarianship. It inadvertently reminded me of the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. Literature and Taoism! Meant to be? Probably.

Finally, The Chronicle of Education informs us that many universities are trying to extend their broadband service to surrounding communities. That is so sweet.

Awesome Sauce for Chicagoans

The Midwest chapter of The Awesome Foundation has elected to give $1000 to a nonprofit called Little Free Library. As this WBEZ article explains, Chicago’s Awesome Foundation is a group of ten individuals who seek to better the city by collectively donate money to a single chosen organization.

Right now, they are supporting Little Free Library, a choice I fully endorse. The Wisconsin-based LFL funds an effort to create clusters of micro libraries all over the world. These “libraries” are actually rather small shelves (they look like custom dollhouses or bird cages). But they each contain an unlimited amount of information, for whenever a patron takes a book, they must leave one. That’s it. No registering for a library card, and no payment of any kind. What the libraries may lack in depth they make up for in convenience. Better yet, they have the potential to bring communities together to support literacy, no small thing in areas that lack functioning public libraries.

So far, Chicago locations include:

Langley Ave. Church of God

6159 South Langley Ave.

Lincoln Memorial Congregational United Church of Christ

6454 South Champlain Ave.

The Young Women’s Leadership Charter School

2641 South Calumet Ave.

Angelic Organics Urban Learning Center

6400 South Kimbark Ave.

Ian’s Pizza

3463 North Clark St.

Lawler Literature: Lucifer's Lit

I cannot write of what took place in that wetu, because I made a solemn oath, which I have never broken. Some would say it was a pact with the devil, and therefore I am not bound by it. But after that day I was no longer certain that Tequamuck was Satan’s servant. To be sure, father and every other minister in my lifetime has warned that Satan is guileful and adept at concealing his true purpose. But since that day I have come to believe that is not for us to know the subtle mind of God. It may be, as Caleb thought, that Satan is God’s angel still, and works in ways that are obscure to us, to do his will. (Caleb’s Crossing, p. 295)

I am not the devil. I need this to be understood from the outset. If you won’t accept it, then please stop reading. Set these pages aside, and go away. Go and judge someone else. God knows I am not an angel, either. I don’t even profess to be a very good man, for we are none of us good, not in the way that Heaven yearns for us to be. I am just a man. I have needs and desires, some of the lamentable, for like yours my nature is Fallen. I have from time to time indulged these desires, for like you I am weak. At moments indeed I have walked at the Devil’s side, and heard his sweet seductive whispers and perhaps even for the span of a heartbeat been his man—as you have—body and soul. (Daniel O’Thunder, p. 7)

There’s no denying history. For a long time, the average person from the Christianized West believed not just in God, but in the real, physical, non-metaphorical existence of Satan. Eerily enough, I’ve spent the last week reading the fictional accounts of people who believed that the Devil was among them.

The first was Geraldine Brooks’ novel Caleb’s Crossing. It is the first person narrative of Bethia Mayfield, a Puritan minister’s daughter in 17^th Century New England. Her father is a missionary, dedicated to converting the native Wopanaak natives to Christianity. As the above paragraph illustrates, the Puritans believed that native religious leaders were the embodiment of Satan. As Bethia learns the native language and befriends the locals, she slowly discovers that Tequamuck, the powerful pawaa, is merely dissimilar, not demonical, as she has been told.

The second excerpt comes from another era and another age, but not one so very different. Ian Weir’s Daniel O’Thunder tells the legendary tale of the titular Daniel O’Thunder from the perspective of the fawning multitude. Some might call the narrators Daniel’s disciples. Daniel, a boxer-turned-Evangelical preacher in mid-19^th Century London, wants to thrash Satan. Really thrash him. With his fists. The perpetually benevolent Daniel takes Satan literally.

The excerpted passage is from the primary narrator, Jack, who is more than a little bit like Judas (There also seems to be a Mary Magdalene equivalent). In any case, Jack gets nice and acquainted with a man who seems to be Satan himself. His claim that he is not Satan, therefore, are more than just a rhetorical flair.

So, in Caleb’s Crossing, in the small world of the Puritans, Satan is a foreigner, worshipping strange idols. Two hundred years later, he is a moneyed Lord, arrogant, but otherwise unremarkable. He melts into the London throng, just like everybody else.