You are here:   Home > Culture & Arts > Literature & Poetry

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

A translation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel is available online through a Google digitization. The venerable story is being presented in a new Broadway production.

However, it's now possible to read the novel online as well, in addition to renting a DVD of the Milos Forman screen version, Valmont, and the Stephen Frear screen version, Dangerous Liaisons.

"He gives her numberless reasons that an involuntary passion is not criminal; as if it became involuntary in the moment of desiring to resist it. This idea is so simple, that it even struck the girl herself. He laments his misfortune in a manner somewhat pathetic; but his grief is so cold, and yet bears the appearance of being so fixed and sincere, I think it impossible that a woman, who has an opportunity of driving a man to despair with so small a risk, should not gratify the whim. He informs her he is not a monk, as the little one imagined; and that is certainly the best part of his letter: for, were a woman absurd enough to be seized with a propensity to monastic love, the gentlemen who are Knights of Malta would not deserve the preference."

Read on.

Poem in the Pocket

"For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences."
                         Rainer Maria Rilke

April is National Poetry Month, and the form can use both publicity and praise. Go to Poets.org to browse by poem title, first line, author's last name, by occasion and essays and interviews. There are, among others, poems about aliens, fashion and hell; explorations of poet couples, poetry and film and the women of Harlem.

Committed to Memory is a poetry anthology assembled by poet John Holland that can be memorized and recited:

"It is easier to memorize texts when you are younger than when older; but the practice, learned early, can be maintained. And thus, for matured readers, memorizing a poem or passage you liked, rather than one which had been required of you (but which, of course, you may very well have gotten to like eventually), was almost a matter of course. But this is no longer the case, and memorization — along with training in reading prose aloud, of which another word shortly — has disappeared from most school curricula."

"At the same time, we have suffered a rapidly accelerating decay in the quality of oral performance of text in public life: television and radio newscasters fumble pronunciations and read even minimal prose with a decreasing sense of how the written word makes sense when sounded aloud. Persons appointed by commercial or governmental institutions to speak for them frequently read text aloud as if they don't understand even the grammar of what they are mouthing. Now, as we anxiously reassess the condition of education in our country, the relations among reading, listening, and understanding become more significant. Nowhere are these relations more intensely embodied than in the matter of spoken verse. And nowhere does one learn better how to read either verse or prose aloud than by recitation from memory. Needless to say, it is an element of true literacy to be able to recognize in fiction, essay, and later poetry (with a sense of familiarity rather than by consulting a professorial footnote) the allusions to passages of great poetry of the past — not merely to Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible — that fill the stream of discourse."

Poetry Near You is a section informs of poetry landmarks geographically:

"Browse through the Academy's list of American Poetry Landmarks. Each site was selected by the Academy in 2004 for our highly publicized National Poetry Almanac. From New York City to Guthrie, Kentucky, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Dixon, Montana, you'll find a major poetry landmark near you."

Excerpt

Jane Austen's Lady Susan

Lady Susan Vernon to Mr. Vernon

Langford, Dec.

My Dear Brother, — I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending some weeks with you at Churchhill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs. Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with. My kind friends here are most affectionately urgent with me to prolong my stay, but their hospitable and cheerful dispositions lead them too much into society for my present situation and state of mind; and I impatiently look forward to the hour when I shall be admitted into Your delightful retirement. I long to be made known to your dear little children, in whose hearts I shall be very eager to secure an interest. I shall soon have need for all my fortitude, as I am on the point of separation from my own daughter. The long illness of her dear father prevented my paying her that attention which duty and affection equally dictated, and I have too much reason to fear that the governess to whose care I consigned her was unequal to the charge. I have therefore resolved on placing her at one of the best private schools in town, where I shall have an opportunity of leaving her myself in my way to you. I am determined, you see, not to be denied admittance at Churchhill. It would indeed give me most painful sensations to know that it were not in your power to receive me. Your most obliged and affectionate sister,

S. Vernon

II

Lady Susan Vernon to Mrs. Johnson

Langford.


You were mistaken, my dear Alicia, in supposing me fixed at this place
for the rest of the winter: it grieves me to say how greatly you were
mistaken, for I have seldom spent three months more agreeably than those
which have just flown away. At present, nothing goes smoothly; the females
of the family are united against me. You foretold how it would be when I
first came to Langford, and Mainwaring is so uncommonly pleasing that I was
not without apprehensions for myself. I remember saying to myself, as I
drove to the house, "I like this man, pray Heaven no harm come of it!" But
I was determined to be discreet, to bear in mind my being only four months
a widow, and to be as quiet as possible: and I have been so, my dear
creature; I have admitted no one's attentions but Mainwaring's. I have
avoided all general flirtation whatever; I have distinguished no creature
besides, of all the numbers resorting hither, except Sir James Martin, on
whom I bestowed a little notice, in order to detach him from Miss
Mainwaring; but, if the world could know my motive THERE they would honour
me. I have been called an unkind mother, but it was the sacred impulse of
maternal affection, it was the advantage of my daughter that led me on; and
if that daughter were not the greatest simpleton on earth, I might have
been rewarded for my exertions as I ought.

Read the entire novel, Jane Austen's Lady Susan, at the Gutenberg site. The date is 1795 but the novel was never published.

Article

Jane Shortall, Ring Them Bells: A Novel in a Month: I felt my heroine was a shallow, silly person, over concerned about her mother's attitude to her life, for someone well into her forties? The following [writing] days were no better, and another note said 'Wine Fair Toulouse, excellent day, spent lots of money. Only 5,000 words behind now'

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Ann Brontë

You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.

My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in -shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel. My mother had done her utmost to persuade me that I was capable of great achievements; but my father, who thought ambition was the surest road to ruin, and change but another word for destruction, would listen to no scheme for bettering either my own condition, or that of my fellow mortals. He assured me it was all rubbish, and exhorted me, with his dying breath, to continue in the good old way, to follow his steps, and those of his father before him, and let my highest ambition be to walk honestly through the world, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, and to transmit the paternal acres to my children in, at least, as flourishing a condition as he left them to me.

'Well! — an honest and industrious farmer is one of the most useful members of society; and if I devote my talents to the cultivation of my farm, and the improvement of agriculture in general, I shall thereby benefit, not only my own immediate connections and dependants, but, in some degree, mankind at large: — hence I shall not have lived in vain.' With such reflections as these I was endeavouring to console myself, as I plodded home from the fields, one cold, damp, cloudy evening towards the close of October. But the gleam of a bright red fire through the parlour window had more effect in cheering my spirits, and rebuking my thankless repinings, than all the sage reflections and good resolutions I had forced my mind to frame; — for I was young then, remember — only four-and-twenty — and had not acquired half the rule over my own spirit that I now possess — trifling as that may be.

However, that haven of bliss must not be entered till I had exchanged my miry boots for a clean pair of shoes, and my rough surtout for a respectable coat, and made myself generally presentable before decent society; for my mother, with all her kindness, was vastly particular on certain points.

In ascending to my room I was met upon the stairs by a smart, pretty girl of nineteen, with a tidy, dumpy figure, a round face, bright, blooming cheeks, glossy, clustering curls, and little merry brown eyes. I need not tell you this was my sister Rose. She is, I know, a comely matron still, and, doubtless, no less lovely — in your eyes — than on the happy day you first beheld her. Nothing told me then that she, a few years hence, would be the wife of one entirely unknown to me as yet, but destined hereafter to become a closer friend than even herself, more intimate than that unmannerly lad of seventeen, by whom I was collared in the passage, on coming down, and well- nigh jerked off my equilibrium, and who, in correction for his impudence, received a resounding whack over the sconce, which, however, sustained no serious injury from the infliction; as, besides being more than commonly thick, it was protected by a redundant shock of short, reddish curls, that my mother called auburn.

Read the novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall at FullBooks.com

Doris Lessing

Ms. Lessing (now 87), has earned the Nobel Prize for Literature, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." One of her early novels was The Grass Is Singing, published in 1973.

What follows is part of a summary of the novel by The New Internationalist:

This, ‘the first law of white South Africa’, is Doris Lessing’s political benchmark in her agonising story of a poor white farming couple. At its simplest The Grass is Singing is the story of Dick Turner, a hapless white farmer, and Mary, his pathetic wife, who fail in their struggle to make a life and a living from the merciless land of black Africa. Beaten by the unforgiving soil, sullen native labourers, the fellow whites who despise them and finally by their own desperate incompetence, they are each driven slowly mad.

The Grass is Singing, like all Ms. Lessing’s early novels, is deeply evocative of life among southern Africa’s white settlers. Her own childhood was spent in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She left school at 14 and by the age of 31, when she moved to London, had been twice married and divorced, borne three children and written and destroyed six novels.

Read the rest of the review at The New Internationalist

Better known is The Golden Notebook and it, too, is available for reading online.

Article

Rose Mula, The Stormy Road to Publication: Forty years ago, when I sold my first piece to a magazine that has since died (not my fault!), I was thrilled. My struggle was over. It would be a snap from then on, I was certain. I was wrong

The New York Public Library's Digital Collections

The New York Public Library has put on display the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

One of the early images I came across is a stipple engraving of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), author of Jane Eyre. Robert Louis Stevenson's portrait is oddly captioned: "seated on chair with left leg over knee, left hand on left knee."

A photograph of Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth (an English composer and a leader of the women's suffrage movement) is undated but interesting, nonetheless, for Woolf's attempt to engage her companion.

An image from another collection, 500 Years of Italian Dance: Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection, reveals a cartoon of the dance of Jason et Médée, Ballet tragique, captioned thusly: left to right, "Giovanna Baccelli as Creusa, bending to left, arms thrust forward; Gaetano Vestris as Jason, in a heroic pose, arms outstretched, head tilted back; Mme Simonet as Medea, holding knife in right hand. Three musicians playing two oboes and a transverse flute. Five bars of music from the score by Jean Joseph Rodolphe."

Dance in Photographs and Prints brings dance much more into the 20th century so far as library collection focusing, however, on a more well-known era of the dance: Irene Castle (in an American Indian costume), Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis (including her jewelry and her wig).

Neither Vamps nor Victims

The Library of Congress' Center for the Book hosted mystery author Sara Paretsky in a talk about her craft. We quote from the release from the Center:

Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world when she introduced the V.I. Warshawski character in her 1982 novel Indemnity Only. By creating a strong female investigator who uses her wits as well as her fists, Paretsky challenged the conventions of a genre in which women traditionally were either vamps or victims. Eleven other Warshawski novels followed, all national bestsellers, including Fire Sale (Penguin, 2006).

In addition the Warshawski novels, Paretsky has written a nonseries novel, Ghost Country, which blends comedy, magic and gritty realism in the streets of Chicago. She has also edited three collections of short stories, and her books are published in 24 languages. She is currently at work on a collection of essays that will be published in 2007.

Sisters in Crime, www.sistersincrime.org, which Paretsky helped found in 1986, combats discrimination against women in the mystery field and promotes the professional advancement of female mystery novelists.

For the entire talk by Ms. Paretsky, tune into the webcast of her hour-long talk:

What do basketball, a discount superstore, two runaway teenagers and an explosion that screams of foul play have in common? They are just a sampling of the twists and turns found in the latest mystery thriller by Sara Paretsky who discussed her most recent book Fire Sale.

The Readers' Catalog

As a collaboration between two independent publishers, The New York Review of Books and The Little Bookroom, the Readers' Catalog presents gifts and products interspersed with books throughout the catalog.

There's a section for Women's Fiction (Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West), smart-looking reading glasses, children's gifts (Little Brown Bear Won't Take a Nap and a travel journal kit), and craft kits such as marbleizing and a letter portfolio.

Henry James' Washington Square

"Well, my dear, did he propose to you to-day?" the Doctor asked.

This was just what she had been afraid he would say; and yet she had no answer ready. Of course she would have liked to take it as a joke — as her father must have meant it; and yet she would have liked, also, in denying it, to be a little positive, a little sharp; so that he would perhaps not ask the question again. She didn't like it — it made her unhappy. But Catherine could never be sharp; and for a moment she only stood, with her hand on the door-knob, looking at her satiric parent, and giving a little laugh.

"Decidedly," said the Doctor to himself, "my daughter is not brilliant."

But he had no sooner made this reflexion than Catherine found something; she had decided, on the whole, to take the thing as a joke.

"Perhaps he will do it the next time!" she exclaimed, with a repetition of her laugh. And she quickly got out of the room.

The Doctor stood staring; he wondered whether his daughter were serious. Catherine went straight to her own room, and by the time she reached it she bethought herself that there was something else — something better — she might have said. She almost wished, now, that her father would ask his question again, so that she might reply: "Oh yes, Mr. Morris Townsend proposed to me, and I refused him!"

Read Washington Square, the novel, online at Project Gutenberg

American Bloomsbury

From an excerpt from Susan Cheever's new book, American Bloomsbury:

Mrs. Bronson Alcott, who stepped down from the stage after her husband and children that spring afternoon, was an aristocratic woman whose fine bearing and light step had been worn down by life with a great man. In June, she would give birth to the Alcotts' fourth daughter. She wore an old-fashioned bonnet with a flaring wide brim, and a long muslin dress. As a young girl, Abigail May, known as Abba, had been the earnest daughter of a romantic, erratic father. Colonel Joseph May had won his rank in the Revolution. Abba's Boston upbringing had offered no attractive suitors, and she fell in love with Bronson Alcott, a visiting teacher, months before he returned her passion. At first, Alcott didn't seem to be the marrying kind. He had been a peddler before he was a teacher, and there was something about him that suggested the lightness of wandering, the ability to sleep on a stranger's floor or in the hay in an alien barn, and the quiet willingness to do without domestic comforts.

Nevertheless, after a long courtship, often veiled in plans for the education of the young or the relieving of the suffering of the poor, Abba and Bronson had been married in 1830 in a world where a woman's deference to her domestic duties and to her husband's wishes went unquestioned. Even the idea that women were more than possessions or able to think for themselves was heresy. There were already some rogue political voices questioning the morality of men owning slaves, but no one had yet thought to question the morality of men owning their wives. Although Bronson would dominate his family for a few more years, Abba Alcott already found herself making up for his deficiencies, always excused by high-mindedness, both in practical ways and with money borrowed from her family.

Read the rest of the excerpts from American Bloomsbury at the Simon and Schuster site.

Banned Books

Banned Books Week has passed but in case you hadn't updated your list of what not to read, the following may be used as a guide from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression:

The most common reason given is for: "vulgar language, sexual explicitness, or violent imagery that is gratuitously employed." 

Author Cris Crutcher responds to an objection to his book, Whale Talk, being removed from shelves in the Limestone School District in Alabama:

To the Citizens of the Limestone School District, and to the Board of Education:

I understand there is a challenge to the use of my book Whale Talk in your schools and I thought it might be of some help to talk about what is behind the story.  From what I have been told, the major issue is the language used by the characters in the book.  Probably the most offensive scene, taken out of context, would be on page 68 and 69 where a four and a half year old mixed race girl is working in a play therapy session, mirroring what her life is like living with a racist stepfather and a mother who won’t protect her.  In the course of her therapy she is taking the role of the offender, yelling out all the names that she herself endures on a daily basis.  Because she is screaming the words, they are in large font, which, I assume, makes them even more offensive to those paging through the book.  The scene read in the context of the story, I believe, is heartbreaking.  It is also true.  It is something I have seen played out by a real four and a half year old mixed race girl in that very situation.  Of course some things have been changed to fit this story, and to mask it from the real event, but it is real, and it is actually milder that what I witnessed in that case, and in hundreds of others. 

Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language.  They can make the argument that since we don’t allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn’t give them stories in which it is used.  But that’s an easy thing to deal with, and I’ve seen it done a hundred times.  Teachers bring up the offensiveness of the language and talk about why it’s used to make a story real.  We don’t have to use the language to talk about the story in the classroom, but we can certainly talk about the raw power of any good story told in its native tongue. 

I worked full time as a therapist in the world of child abuse and neglect for fifteen years, and continue to do pro-bono work even today.  I hear stories like these and stories far worse on a regular basis.  I am struck by the fact that the kids I hear them from, populate our classrooms.  They do not tell their stories because many of them feel shame because they are treated that way, and they hold the secret; the only real power they have over their situations.  They would rather be angry or depressed than vulnerable, and so they sit, many of them believing they are alone.  Stories like Whale Talk and other, far better stories, let them know they are not alone, while not forcing them to talk about their personal situations at the same time.  When we censor these stories, we censor the kids themselves.  Imagine falling in love with a book because somehow it mirrors your life, and gives meaning to it, and may even offer solutions to your personal situation, only to have those in power over you censor it because it is offensive.  All but the most hard nosed of us might think our very lives were offensive. 

Sylvie and Bruno

Lewis Carroll's text for a lesser-known children's book is available on the Web:

From Chapter Six, The Magic Locket:

“Where are we, father?” Sylvie whispered, with her arms twined closely around the old man’s neck, and with her rosy cheek lovingly pressed to his.

“In Elfland, darling. It’s one of the provinces of Fairyland.”

“But I thought Elfland was ever so far from Outland: and we’ve come such a tiny little way!”

“You came by the Royal Road, sweet one. Only those of royal blood can travel along it: but you’ve been royal ever since I was made King of Elfland that’s nearly a month ago. They sent two ambassadors, to make sure that their invitation to me, to be their new King, should reach me. One was a Prince; so he was able to come by the Royal Road, and to come invisibly to all but me: the other was a Baron; so he had to come by the common road, and I dare say he hasn’t even arrived yet.”

“Then how far have we come?” Sylvie enquired.

“Just a thousand miles, sweet one, since the Gardener unlocked that door for you.”

“A thousand miles!” Bruno repeated. “And may I eat one?”

“Eat a mile, little rogue?”

“No,” said Bruno. “I mean may I eat one of that fruits?”

“Yes, child,” said his father: “and then you’ll find out what Pleasure is like — the Pleasure we all seek so madly, and enjoy so mournfully!”

Bruno ran eagerly to the wall, and picked a fruit that was shaped something like a banana, but had the colour of a strawberry.

Read the entire novel at the Sylvia and Bruno section at Hoboes.com

parole in libertà, or words-in-freedom

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has organized an exhibit around a "new kind of poetry [that] rejected conventional grammar and punctuation and employed devices from non-linguistic domains. Existing at the intersection of art and literature, these poems were to be read visually and verbally, vertically and horizontally, iconographically and analytically."

The exhibit is titled A Tumultuous Assembly, devoted to Italian Futurists, "who believed the visual qualities of letters and words should be elements of a poem's meaning."

The last paragraph in the online text for the selected images from the exhibit explains somewhat one of the controversial aspects to the futurists' political stance following World War 1:

"Although many European intellectuals shared the Futurists' enthusiasm for World War I as a necessary passage to modernity, the unprecedented carnage of the war led many to an antiwar stance. The tumultuous years after World War I saw acute social unrest, leading eventually to Fascism in Italy. Something of this instability is already present in Rognoni's manuscript, where the bread riot depicted in Strike ends with beatings and buildings in flames."

Suite Francaise

Written in 1942 by Irène Némirovsky before she was arrested and deported from France to Auschwitz where she died, Suite Française was one of the first novels written about the Holocaust.

Chapter One, War

Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn't sleep — the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"

The women, more anxious, more alert, were already up, although some of them, after closing the windows and shutters, went back to bed. The night before — Monday, 3 June — bombs had fallen on Paris for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced. "We don't understand what's happening," people said.

They had to dress their children by torchlight. Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: "Come on, don't be afraid, don't cry." An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multifaceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves. From above, it could be seen flowing along, as white as a river of milk. It guided the enemy planes, some people thought. Others said that couldn't be so. In truth, no one really knew anything. "I'm staying in bed," sleepy voices murmured, "I'm not scared." "All the same, it just takes one ..." the more sensible replied.

Read the rest of the chapter at the Washington Post site. (May require first-time registration)

Muriel Spark

An excerpt from Muriel Spark's final novel, The Finishing School:

College Sunrise had begun in Brussels, a finishing school for both sexes and mixed nationalities. It was founded by Rowland Mahler, assisted by his wife, Nina Parker.

The school had flourished on 10 pupils aged 16 and upwards, but in spite of this flourishing, mainly by reputation, Rowland had barely been able to square the books at the end of the first year. So he moved the school to Vienna, increased the fees, wrote to the parents that he and Nina were making an exciting experiment: College Sunrise was to be a mobile school which would move somewhere new every year.

They had moved, leaving commendably few debts behind, from Vienna to Lausanne the next year. At present they had nine students at College Sunrise at Ouchy on the lake. Rowland had just taken the very popular class, attended by five of the students, on creative writing. Rowland was now 29, Nina 26. Rowland himself hoped to be a published novelist one day. To conserve his literary strength, as he put it, he left nearly all the office work to Nina, who spoke good French and was dealing with the bureaucratic side of the school and with the parents, employing a kind of impressive carelessness. She tended to crush any demands for full explanations on the part of the parents. This attitude, strangely enough, generally made them feel they were getting good money's worth. And she had always obtained a tentative licence to run the school, which could be stretched to last over the months before they would move on again.

It was early July, but not summery. The sky bulged, pregnant with water. The lake had been invisible under the mist for some days.

Read the rest of the excerpt at The Guardian's site and her archive at the National Library of Scotland

Dime Novels for Women

A new website, started out as a dissertation of Felicia Carr's entitled All For Love: Gender and Class and the Woman's Dime Novel in Nineteenth-Century America, highlights the dime novels written for women between 1870 and 1920:

"While other forms of nineteenth-century women's writing have been the focus of extensive scholarship and have developed a strong presence on the web, it became clear to me that dime novels have not received the attention they deserve. This genre, once enormously popular with its readers, has been neglected for most of its history by scholars, collectors, and libraries. It suffers from the double burden of being both popular and written for working-class women. This project hopes to overcome the history of oversight to both the form and its readers by providing information about the novels themselves, the authors, the readers, and nineteenth century public reaction."

She is also working with Emory's Women Writers Resource Project to digitize women's dime novels. If you have materials you would like to contribute or additional information about women's dime novels that would enhance this project, please contact Ms. Carr.

Meanwhile ....

Here are some of the titles shown in the gallery of dime novel cover art:

Arm of the Unwritten Law by Asa Arp
At Love's Fountain, Beauty's Marriage and A Dark Marriage Morn, all by Bertha M. Clay

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

We found this at a librarians blog and as with all things librarian, it's interesting, especially for those who think they, too, could write a blockbuster fantasy novel:

The Fantasy Writer's Exam
By David J. Parker
Additional Material By Samuel Stoddard

Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis created the worlds of Middle Earth and Narnia, it seems like every windbag off the street thinks he can write great, original fantasy, too. The problem is that most of this "great, original fantasy" is actually poor, derivative fantasy. Frankly, we're sick of it, so we've compiled a list of rip-off tip-offs in the form of an exam. We think anybody considering writing a fantasy novel should be required to take this exam first. Answering yes to any one question results in failure and means that the prospective novel should be abandoned at once.

The Exam
1. Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages?
2. Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?
3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn't know it?
4. Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme bad guy?
5. Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?
6. How about one that will destroy it?
7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about "The One" who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
9. Does your novel contain a character that is really a god in disguise?
10. Is the evil supreme bad guy secretly the father of your main character?
11. Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?
12. Does "a forgetful wizard" describe any of the characters in your novel?
13. How about "a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior"?
14. How about "a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons"?
15. Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?
16. Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?
17. Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?
18. Would "a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword" aptly describe any of your female characters?
19. Would "a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan" aptly describe any of your female characters?
20. Is any character in your novel best described as "a dour dwarf"?

Read the rest of the exam at Rinkworks as well as The Filmmaker's Exam.

Excerpts

Alexander's Bridge

LATE one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood smoke in the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles Street between jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his sharp eye upon the house which he reasoned should be his objective point, when he noticed a woman approaching rapidly from the opposite direction. Always an interested observer of women, Wilson would have slackened his pace anywhere to follow this one with his impersonal, appreciative glance. She was a person of distinction he saw at once, and, moreover, very handsome. She was tall, carried her beautiful head proudly, and moved with ease and certainty. One immediately took for granted the costly privileges and fine spaces that must lie in the background from which such a figure could emerge with this rapid and elegant gait. Wilson noted her dress, too, — for, in his way, he had an eye for such things, — particularly her brown furs and her hat. He got a blurred impression of her fine color, the violets she wore, her white gloves, and, curiously enough, of her veil, as she turned up a flight of steps in front of him and disappeared.

Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that passed him on the wing as completely and deliberately as if they had been dug-up marvels, long anticipated, and definitely fixed at the end of a railway journey. For a few pleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he was going, and only after the door had closed behind her did he realize that the young woman had entered the house to which he had directed his trunk from the South Station that morning. He hesitated a moment before mounting the steps. "Can that," he murmured in amazement, — "can that possibly have been Mrs. Alexander?"

From Chapter One of Alexander's Bridge from The Willa Cather Archive at University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Chapter One: Radiance

On the night that they found Lightfoot, the stars were falling down.

All along the pirate coast the lighthouse keepers cast their practiced eyes into the night, raking dark infinity with expectant scrutiny the way the lighthouse beams combed cones of light over the tillered sea.

Over the Outer Banks, from the eastern constellation Perseus, shooting stars like packet seeds spilled across the sky, tracing transits of escape above the fourteen lighthouses from Kitty Hawk and Bodie Light to Hatteras and Lookout.

It was the yearly August meteor shower and Fos had driven out from Tennessee across the Smokies to the brink of the Atlantic for the celestial show as he'd done each August for the last fifteen years ever since he'd shipped home from France in '19, once the War was over. He and fifteen other sons from Dare County had been among the first recruits to go across the North Atlantic in '18 for valor, decency, and hell like they'd never known. Not one among them who survived was proud of it in any way that didn't cast a shadow back across his pride. Fos himself, by accident, had been a sparker in the field, an incendiary artist, and he'd been brilliant at it. He'd always had an interest in what made things light up, made things radiate, but he never knew he had a latent genius like a fuse, a flare for fireworks, until they handed him a uniform and stood him up in front of a regimental officer and asked him what, if anything, he was good at doing. I'm good at making things light up, Fos said. Looking at the open file on the camp table between them, Fos watched the R.O.'s pen stall where Fos's name was written on the page. You mean explosives? the R.O. said.

Read the reset of the chapter, Evidence of Things Unseen, a novel by Marianne Wiggins at SimonSays.com (Simon and Schuster)

Nature Writing Recommendations

Writing in the Guardian Unlimited, Robert Macfarlane recently called for nominations of British and Irish nature writers to form a 'library' of that genre. Hundreds of suggestions poured in and here is a bit of his review of the public's response:

Such a library, as I imagined it then, "would not kowtow to the doubtful idea of a 'national' literature. Instead, it would be a series of local writings, which concentrated on particular places, and which worked always to individuate, never to generalise." Any book to be included in the series, I suggested, would "firstly have to evince the belief that the fate of humanity and the fate of nature are inseparable. Secondly, it would have to imply, however obliquely, that the natural environment must be approached not with a view to conquest, acquisition and short-term use, but according to the principles of restraint and reciprocity."

Macfarlane focuses on three of the most recommended names. The hyperlinks are those of seniorwomen.com's:

Among the many suggestions, three names recurred. The first was unsurprising: the Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864). Clare was a hider-away, a lane-haunter, a birds'-nester, a field-farer. His artfully simple poems ring with the suddenness and surprise of the discoveries which he made during his years of countryside foray. The second was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose nominations outnumbered those for her more famous brother. Dorothy's exquisitely exact journals - the Alfoxden Journal, written when the Wordsworths were living in Somerset in 1797-98, and the Grasmere Journal, kept at Dove Cottage from 1800-03 — support Wordsworth's own observation of Dorothy that "she gave me eyes, she gave me ears".

The third, and by far the most frequently nominated, was the novelist, memoirist and country-essayist, Richard Jefferies (1848-87). Jefferies was born near Swindon, and spent much of his life exploring the rural southern counties of Wiltshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire, and Somerset. His writings show him to be the exponent of a rare but deeply English materialist-mysticism. For he possessed and practised what the poet Jeremy Hooker has called "ditch vision" — an ability to find the extraordinary in the rurally local. For Jefferies, the English countryside was rife with wilderness. Not in the North American sense of wilderness as a function of grandness of scale, a phenomenon to be experienced only amid the red-rock dihedral citadels of the desert states, or the vaporous magnificence of the Niagara Falls, or the vast mirror lakes of the Rockies. No, Jefferies located the wild in the strange and ragged interzones of a farmed English landscape — in hedges, ditches, ponds, spinneys — and he wrote about that landscape with the same astonishment and wonder that his travel-writing contemporaries were voicing in their reports on the Amazon, the Pacific, and the Rub al-Khali.

The oddest and most magnificent recommendation, which came from Caspar Henderson, was Herefordshire Pomona, by Drs Hogg and Bull. The Pomona (from the Latin pomum, meaning "fruit", and then "apple") was a vast guide to the apple and pear varieties grown in the county, and to the arts of their growth, husbandry, harvest and use. Six hundred copies only were printed. The book came in seven parts, published between 1878 and 1884, and was accompanied by 441 original watercolours of the various fruits, buds, blossoms and blights of the different cultivars. Even poor quality second-hand copies now cost about £10,000. In George Monbiot's fine and appropriately plosive description, "it constitutes a classic of late Victorian natural history, pedantic and passionate ... a poem in pomology; a history of rural England, rough, bitter and sad".

Read the entire article at the Guardian site, Where the wild things were

Writing: Voting for the Bad and the Good

Two contests determining the best of the worst and the best of the best have been offered:

The nominations for the Quill Awards, chosen by some 6000 booksellers, have been announced and readers can vote for those books they prefer in nineteen categories. For instance:

Health/Self Improvement nominees include: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys; and Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Physical and Emotional Health.

Biography/Memoir includes one of Julia Sneden's picks, Will in the World.

The best of bad fiction prize has been featured in these pages before and we are pleased to announce the winner of this year's annual Bulwer-Lytton award, the 23rd: Dan McKay of Fargo, ND.

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

The runner-up was Mitsy Rae of Danbury, NE who entry follows:

When Detective Riggs was called to investigate the theft of a trainload of Native American fish broth concentrate bound for market, he solved the case almost immediately, being that the trail of clues led straight to the trainmaster, who had both the locomotive and the Hopi tuna tea.

Auchincloss' and Writers and Personality

In Writers and Personality, the novelist Louis Auchincloss examines 22 writers in a series of essays covering, among others, George Meredith, Wharton, Flaubert, Proust, Cather and Trollope. What follows is part of his chapter on Hawthorne:

In the end Hawthorne sums up the case against Hester:

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate and as shadowy, as the untamed forest. . . . Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from the estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established, criticizing with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other woman dared not tread. Shame, despair, solitude! Shame, despair, solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

But that is not the final judgment that I derive from the novel. It leaves me with the picture of a brave and passionate woman gloriously liberated by cruel suffering from the bondage of ignorance and superstition and taking her place in the freer intellectual atmosphere that was dawning in the Europe she had left behind. The dark forest that surrounds and threatens to engulf the small, struggling New England colony represents the wild force of uninhibited nature, and the Puritan community symbolizes the desperate effort of man to impose some kind of order upon it. Hester’s flight to the woods is her attempted escape from the rigors of the arbitrary moral code of the pioneers. But it is doomed, and Hawthorne appears to take his stand with the elders of the colony.

But does he really? This to me is the question that pervades his book and gives it much of its peculiar flavor and interest. Hawthorne’s personality was a deeply divided one. On the one hand, as a romantic and a lover of colorful history, he greatly admired the rugged Puritans, true to their stern God and resolute faith, bravely fortifying their little settlement against the dark menace of the surrounding wilderness and also against the intrusion of modern
heresies from the Old World on which they had turned their backs. He found a greater appeal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony than he did in what he regarded as the shallower, more material, and often irreverent society of contemporary Boston. His loyalty was essentially to the past, and his religion was the old one.

Read the entire Nathaniel Hawthorne chapter from Writers and Personality by Louis Auchincloss at the University of South Carolina Press (pdf can be converted, if desired, at Adobe

Austen's Persuasion

A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own), there could be nothing in them, now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem. He had never indulged much hope, he had now none, of ever reading her name in any other page of his favourite work. All equality of alliance must rest with Elizabeth, for Mary had merely connected herself with an old country family of respectability and large fortune, and had therefore given all the honour and received none: Elizabeth would, one day or other, marry suitably.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth, still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago, and Sir Walter might be excused, therefore, in forgetting her age, or, at least, be deemed only half a fool, for thinking himself and Elizabeth as blooming as ever, amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else; for he could plainly see how old all the rest of his family and acquaintance were growing. Anne haggard, Mary coarse, every face in the neighbourhood worsting, and the rapid increase of the crow's foot about Lady Russell's temples had long been a distress to him.

Read the entire book at the Berkeley Digital Library site and afterwards, rent (or buy) the DVD of the film, a favorite of ours, with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds.

Poetry Site

This year's annual poetry month inspired the selection of a site aptly named The Poetry Corner. Having to admit that we don't have a mind suited to interpretation, this site was a great help in the dissection needed to appreciate this art form.

The Thomson-Gale site affords some explanations as well as biographies, links, a quiz and timeline. We refuse to get into the turmoil caused by the revelations about the poetry site, foetry.com

Book Bindings

Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books is a combined resource created by the The University of Alabama, University Libraries, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.

PBO, a significant digital collection of decorative bindings, along with a comprehensive glossary and guide to the elements of these objects, will strengthen the growing interest in and create broader awareness for this “common” object called the book. Decorative bindings cover many of the books that people have in their homes today, but their owners are often unaware of their cultural and historical significance. These bindings reflect not only social and cultural history, but bibliographic history as well.

PBO expands awareness of the book as artifact and of the role decorative bindings play in providing a window into historical, cultural, and industrial period of 1815-1930. This project increases the awareness of the general public about the importance of publishers' bindings as reflections of historical events, art movements, and the evolution of commercial binderies.

There is a list of subject terms that appear in the first version of the Publishers' Bindings Online site. These terms have been used to describe the books that populate the database to date. It will be updated with each update of the database. The terms are an interesting reflection of 19th century bindings as a whole.

Simply click on any term and you will be taken to the search results in the PBO database for that term. That's how we arrived at the first 'A' listing, Diddie, Dumps, and Tot; or, Plantation child-life — a colorful title for an agriculture book.

"A Literary Website, Sort Of"

"Identity Theory is a website. If printed out, this website would consist of a couple thousand pages of interviews, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and various other forms of expression. It would be kind of tricky to get the mp3s onto paper, but we have a couple of those, too."

"Identity Theory contains, primarily, original work donated by creative minds from all over the world. We also publish public-domain classics from dead people like Thoreau or Aristotle when the spirit moves us."

I went there looking for an interview with Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (reviewed by Julia Sneden at SeniorWomen.com) and was delighted to find many other author interviews. And being a baseball fan, of course I loved the interview with the man who writes best about it: Roger Angell.

There's a section entitled Backpage (odds and ends, letters) that currently features Birds and All Nature: August 1898; A Seminary for Teaching Birds How to Sing

The Social Justice page, among other interviews, contains one with Dr. Sherri Fink, author of War Hospital, telling "the story of a group of young doctors trapped along with 50,000 others in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovenia, during the Bosnian war in 1992. Lacking surgical training and ample supplies, the doctors faced extraordinarily trying circumstances. David Rieff calls War Hospital 'a fascinating account of what it is to try to uphold (or fail to uphold) one's medical oath in the midst of genocide.' "

A recent addition to the site is a poem by W.D. Ehrhart, The Bombing of Afghanistan.

National Book Awards

Fiction Excerpt:

For him it began with a feather. A bright blue parrot feather that fell out of Ella Lynch's hat while she was horseback riding one afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne. Blond, fair-skinned and Irish, Ella was a good rider — the kind of natural rider who rides with her ass, not her legs — and she was riding astride on a nervous little gray thoroughbred mare. Cantering a few paces behind Ella and her companion, Francisco Solano Lopez was also a good rider — albeit a different sort of rider. He rode from strength, the strength in his arms, the strength in his thighs. Also he liked to ride big horses, horses that measured over sixteen, seventeen hands; at home, he often rode a big sure-footed cantankerous brown mule. Pulling up on the reins and getting off his horse, his heavy silver spurs clanging, Franco — as Francisco Solano Lopez was known — picked the feather up from the ground; it briefly occurred to him that Inocencia, his fat sister, would know what kind of parrot feather it was, for she kept hundreds of parrots in her aviary in Asunción, but it was Ella and not the feather that had caught Franco's attention.

The year was 1854 and the forty miles of bridle paths and carriage roads were filled with elegant calèches, daumonts, phaetons; every afternoon, weather permitting, Empress Eugénie could be seen driving with her equerry. Every afternoon too, Empress Eugénie, in fashion obsessed Paris, could be seen wearing a different dress, a dress of a different color: Crimean green, Sebastopol blue, Bismarck brown.The Bois de Boulogne had recently been transformed from a ruined forest into an elegant English park.

From The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck, winner of the National Book Award's 2004 prize for fiction.

Non-Fiction:

Word that a colored family had bought the bungalow on the northwest corner of Garland and Charlevoix had first spread up and down the street in the early days of summer. The place was kitty-corner to the elementary school and directly across Garland from the Morning Star Market, the cramped neighborhood grocery where many of the women did their daily shopping. The rumors had caused a lot of consternation, much tough talk, and some serious threats. But most people were still surprised when, the day after Labor Day, policemen took up positions around the house.

The Negroes had arrived in the morning, half a dozen of them. Since they didn't have much furniture, they'd finished the move in no time at all. But the police had stayed all day and into the night. They returned first thing the next morning. A couple of patrolmen wandered listlessly back and forth along the blistering sidewalk as school let out at 3:15. An even larger official presence was in position-eight officers stationed around the intersection-when the men came home from the factories a few hours later.

Garland wasn't a friendly street. Neighbors might nod as they went to work, chat in line at the market. Kids might play together. But there were a few too many transients-a young couple renting out a flat, a single man boarding in a back bedroom-for folks to really feel connected to one another. Even longtime residents generally kept to themselves.

An excerpt From Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction

New Link

From the website's About Us page: WordCount is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.

A Poet Dies

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.

So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.

I told you the truth about my distancing myself.

I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.

It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies

A stanza from the poem, A Conversation with Jeanne by Czeslaw Milosz from the site that contains two of his poems and readings, Ibiblio.

NPR has celebrated his work by a program, Requiem for a Poet and the his 1980 Nobel Prize page has poems both in English and Polish. There are a further two at the American Academy of Poets site. Perhaps the richest mine for Milosz's poem is at the University of Buffalo site, Info Poland.

New Link

Oxymorons - While the phrase "never say never" may make some think of a certain suave British spy of the silver screen, to wordsmiths this is a thoroughly noxious example of an oxymoron. Strictly speaking, an oxymoron is a literary figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas are combined to create a rhetorical effect by paradoxical means. For those with a budding love of oxymorons, this website will be of great interest. Here visitors can read growing lists of oxymorons, organized by subject (such as religion, relationships, and household), or breeze through the listings by first letter. The site also has a number of oxymoronic quotes and sayings for perusal, including the oft-quoted phrase from Mark Twain: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."  The site is rounded out by a series of discussion boards where visitors may harangue with other visitors over the merits of such terms as "jumbo shrimp" and "anarchy rules."

(From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2003. http://scout.wisc.edu/ )

New Link

Bullfinch's Mythology - It's never too late to read these tales and myths. The site begins with an inscription to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Poet Alike Of The Many And Of The Few, This Attempt To Popularize Mythology, And Extend The Enjoyment Of Elegant Literature, Is Respectfully Inscribed." There's an author's preface to the three volumns as well as a biography of Bullfinch himself that should be read first. Then it's on to Vol. 1, The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes, Vol. 2, The Age of Chivalry or Legends of King Arthur, and Vol. 3, Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages.

Pompeii

22 August Two days before the eruption. . .

"Already he could feel the heat of the morning beginning to build, the promise of another day without rain. He was younger than most of his work gang, and shorter than any of them: a compact, muscled figure with cropped brown hair. The shafts of the tools he carried slung across his shoulder — a heavy, bronze-headed axe and a wooden shovel — chafed against his sunburned neck. Still, he forced himself to stretch his bare legs as far as they would reach, mounting swiftly from foothold to foothold, and only when he was high above Misenum, at a place where the track forked, did he set down his burdens and wait for the others to catch up.

"He wiped the sweat from his eyes on the sleeve of his tunic. Such shimmering, feverish heavens they had here in the south! Even this close to daybreak, a great hemisphere of stars swept down to the horizon. He could see the horns of Taurus, and the belt and sword of the Hunter; there was Saturn, and also the Bear, and the constellation they called the Vintager, which always rose for Caesar on the twenty-second day of August, following the Festival of Vinalia, and signaled that it was time to harvest the wine. Tomorrow night the moon would be full. He raised his hand to the sky, his blunt-tipped fingers black and sharp against the glittering constellations — spread them, clenched them, spread them again — and for a moment it seemed to him that he was the shadow, the nothing; the light was the substance.

"From down in the harbor came the splash of oars as the night watch rowed between the moored triremes. The yellow lanterns of a couple of fishing boats winked across the bay. A dog barked and another answered. And then the voices of the laborers slowly climbing the path beneath him: the harsh local accent of Corax, the overseer—“Look, our new aquarius is waving at the stars!”—and the slaves and the free men, equals, for once, in their resentment if nothing else, panting for breath and sniggering.

"The engineer dropped his hand. “At least,” he said, “with such a sky, we have no need of torches.” Suddenly he was vigorous again, stooping to collect his tools, hoisting them back onto his shoulder. “We must keep moving.” He frowned into the darkness. One path would take them westward, skirting the edge of the naval base. The other led north, toward the seaside resort of Baiae. “I think this is where we turn.”

From the first chapter of Pompeii by Robert Harris

New Links

Luciferous Logolepsy - From the Scout Report: "Developed by Alan M. Taylor, a Web site developer based out of Seattle, Washington, the Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. The name of the project is (not surprisingly) based on two obscure words: Luciferous, which means illuminating and logolepsy, which means an obsession with words. As Taylor himself notes, 'For the purposes of this project, words are included that may stretch any basic definitions. Particular attention has been paid to archaic words, as they tend to be more evocative.' Visitors may elect to browse through this collection alphabetically, or through the search engine provided online. Web crawlers with an unquenchable desire to know the meanings of such words as quantulum, quartan, raceme, or wanion, will not be disappointed by this fun site."

The Dickens Project - The Dickens Project consists of faculty and graduate students from the eight general campuses of the University of California as well as from other major American and international universities. Founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, the consortium includes among its institutional members the City University of New York, the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, Rice University, Tulane University, New York University, the University of Iowa, Indiana University, MIT, Vanderbilt University, the University of Exeter, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."

The Dickens Universe: "Held every year at the beginning of August at UC Santa Cruz campus, the Dickens Universe brings together scholars, graduate students, high school teachers, and members of the general public for a week of study and Dickensian conviviality. The Friends of the Dickens Project support programs for the general public during the The Dickens Universe. They sponsor performances and special lectures by visiting scholars, refreshments, dances, films, games, and other enriching activities."

Our Mutual Friend, The Scholarly Pages is an electronic archival resource dedicated to gathering and providing scholarly information on Dickens's last completed novel. Designed to complement the BBC's 1998 the novel, the Scholarly Pages offers a storehouse of information for those who wish to explore in the novel in depth.

If you want to play the game, Survive Dickens' London, visit the BBC site for an online game "not for the faint of heart."

Carnegie Libraries

"Carnegie libraries — public libraries built between 1886 and 1917 with funds provided either by Andrew Carnegie personally or by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (the foundation he established in 1911) — are among the most numerous public buildings in the United States. They are also as familiar as old friends. With classical colonnades supporting triangular pediments and surmounted by domes, they present a face that is immediately recognizable. Symmetrical buildings cloaked in a variety of classical styles, their dress is both conventional and easily anticipated. Located in public parks, their behavior is neither threatening nor eccentric. We expect neither drama nor excitement from them, and find it comforting when they meet our expectations."

"For women and children, the new library offered unfamiliar freedom. Women were no longer segregated into ladies' reading rooms, as they had been in the 19th century. Whereas earlier libraries had been exclusively adult affairs with separate reading rooms for male and female readers, only the smallest Carnegie library failed to provide a special reading room for the use of children. Young readers found in the children's reading room a portion of the public landscape that catered directly to their needs."

"In short, Carnegie libraries are more than they seem from the sidewalk. At one level, they take us on welcome journeys into the past. They are familiar, conventional, and appealing buildings that have inspired several ambitious preservation projects aimed at renewing their original architectural character. Yet, at another level, they open unexpected vistas into the future."

From Carnegie Library Architecture by Dr. Abigail A. Van Slyck.

History of the Carnegie Libraries

Literature, Poetry and Reading Links>>

Sightings>>

© 1999-2008 Tam Martinides Gray for SeniorWomenWeb