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I am taking this week off since I'm still recuperating from my epic trip to Kalamazoo last weekend. There's a great diary up at Daily Kos on Doc Savage, Man of Bronze, by Xaxnar, so if you're looking for a great tribute to one of the pulpiest of the pulps, check it out!
As I've mentioned before in these diaries, right now I'm on my annual pilgrimage to the Western Michigan University International Congress on Medieval Studies, known affectionately among medievalists as K'zoo. This is quite simply the largest and most prestigious gathering of medievalists in North America, with over 3,000 scholars and graduate students presenting and listening to thousands of papers, workshops, musical performances, and material culture demonstrations. The book room alone is worth the price of admission, as 20-30 of the best academic publishers and used book dealers display their wares, often at very deep discounts, and when I say that it would be shockingly easy to drop the equivalent of a mortgage payment in about five minutes, I speak from personal experience.
I've presented twice as part of DISTAFF, Robin Netherton's coterie of medieval textile specialists, and hope to present next year or the year after as well. All my work for Robin has been serious, well researched, and (God willing) of lasting merit, and I am honored to call myself part of DISTAFF even though I am a lousy spinner.
Tonight, though...is a bit different.
Last night I presented as part of the annual Saturday night session sponsored by the Societas Fontibus Historiae Medii Aevi Inveniendis, vulgo dicta, "The Pseudo Society." This exclusive coterie of insane dedicated jokesters scholars presents papers on such amazing discoveries as Geoffrey Chaucer being reincarnated as Bruce Springsteen, the sad death of St. Guthlac thanks to evil mortgage brokers and a real estate bubble, or the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon poem about Beowabbit (relative of Crusader Rabbit, who was alas killed and eaten by pious Muslims during the First Crusade), and I am honored to join their ranks this year.
Only a few hundred people can cram into Fetzer Auditorium at WMU to hear me live, but since you have all become like family to me over the past year or so, I'm going to share my paper with you, my loyal readers. Even better, I've included links to the images I've created to illustrate my paper! Please click to see what I'm talking about, and enjoy!
One of my favorite blogs is John Scalzi's Whatever.
Scalzi, a best selling author, popular blogger, and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, is perhaps best known on teh Intarwebz for taping bacon to his cat, Ghlaghghee, a few years back. However, as several other Kossacks can attest (waves at plf515), Scalzi is also a smart, readable, and frequently very, very funny writer, both in his fiction and on his blog. If nothing else, his takedown of the Creationism Museum is something every science-loving American should read, if only for the so-funny-you'll-need-oxygen commentary.
One of Scalzi's pet peeves is bad cover art on science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. He's pointed out more than once that any number of well written, thoughtful, and thoroughly entertaining genre books have gone all but unread because of cover art that no one over the age of 14 would want to be caught dead with, let alone reading in public. If SF and fantasy really want to emerge from the ghetto and take their place alongside respectable genre fiction like mysteries and historical fiction, the hideous covers have got to go.
As in so many other things, Scalzi is right: an awful lot of SF and fantasy covers are terrible. However, as much as the terrible SF cover has become a commonplace of modern life, Scalzi doesn't go quite far enough. Literary fiction, children's books, romance novels, mysteries, classics, thrillers, advice books, experimental fiction and poetry - all of them, without exception, can and are adorned with cover art so unredeemably bad that the reader might wish the art director responsible to be transported back to London for a session in Ye Olde Stocks during tomato season If nothing else, the resulting splatter marks might be just as good on a book cover as the hideous examples below:
Tonight we're going to do something a little bit different.
I am about to go into what I like to call Stealth Mode for the next two weekends so I can finish the serious paper I'm preparing for the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress in three weeks. I've fallen behind thanks to a combination of work, a cold, and nasty reaction to fish oil supplements that left me feeling like my head had been mashed in a wine press for five straight days, and the only way I can avoid falling flat on my face is to take the next couple of weekends and work on something a bit more serious than the pleasure to be found in bad books.
That means returning to themes I've used before (and will likely use again, God help us all): good books that mutate into awful movies (tonight), and good books with terrible, terrible, terrible cover art (May 5th), followed by a Very Special Diary on May 12th that will miraculously transport you - yes, you, o best beloved! - to Fetzer Auditorium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for the closest I can get to a simulcast of my groundbreaking paper "Noble, Honorable, and Utterly Unbelievable: The Unsung Influence of Jean-Louis de Pouffe." Regular diaries will resume on May 19th, as I return from what will either be a triumph for the ages or an epic battering with custard pies to pen a diary on bad sports biographies.
So be patient, gentle readers, and know that everything I do, I do it for yooooooo........
I mean that in the most literal sense. Oscar, born in 1910, was the second oldest of eight children, and the oldest at home after his older brother Julius left home to work in a glass factory in Port Jervis, New York. He left school in his mid-teens to help support his family after his father was crippled by arthritis, and he soon was working as a bookkeeper at a coal mine near Pittsburgh.
I'm not sure what Oscar did during the Depression - I know he continued to work as a bookkeeper and accountant, but just where is not clear. My grandmother, a force of nature in some ways, had sold the family's property in Baldwin and moved most of the family to a farm she and her husband owned in Venango County, about two hours north of Pittsburgh, and I'm pretty sure Oscar stayed near the city. He sometimes mentioned that he'd worked downtown during the days when the smog was so bad that they turned the streetlights on at noon, so it's likely he didn't make the move. Grandma still relied on him for advice and support, though, especially after Julius died in 1940.
Everything changed in 1941. America was attacked on December 7th, the day that still lives in infamy, and Oscar, near-sighted, shy, and painfully thin, was drafted. He would have been a terrible infantryman and everyone knew it, but his background as an accountant made him a perfect candidate for the Inspector General's office. Oscar was sent to school to get his CPA, then spent the rest of World War II as an auditor. By the time he mustered out in the mid-1940s, he was a fully qualified and experienced auditor, and ready for anything.
It was around then that he met the man who changed his life: George Main.
This sounds like great fun, especially if crystals are considered for solely for their esthetic qualities. Brightly colored, naturally formed into geometric forms that catch the light and break it into equally colorful spectra, these wonders of geology are endlessly fascinating. Even softer varieties such as feldspar, or less valuable gemstones like quartz, are intriguing in their uniqueness, and it's not hard to see why artists, writers, and lovers of rare and the lovely have been mesmerized by crystals, especially the harder varieties that can be shaped into gemstones. Presiding over an entire store of these beauties could not help but be a visual delight.
Unfortunately for Caroline, she managed her friend's crystal shop during the 1980s, during the height of the "crystals have special, magical powers" craze. What this meant was that despite a singular dearth of evidence that the vibrations from, say, a watermelon tourmaline would align one's chakras, make mounds of delicious cole slaw give ultra-powerful orgasms, and instantly cause their wearer to lose fifty pounds of ugly fat while simultaneously curing cancer and ingrown toenails, a great many people spent a great deal of money buying pretty crystals in hopes of tapping into the vibrations.
As great as this was for Caroline's employer, who owned the shop and selected the crystals, the truth was that despite the genuinely lovely jewelry or paperweights that could emerge from crystals and other stones, when it came to healing, sex, or delicious cole slaw weight loss, the average person was better off consulting a professional (or ordering takeout).
Thus it was that my friend Caroline found herself managing that crystal shop in Atlanta one fine day. The shop was in a mall, and sold the usual assortment of New Age bric-a-brac: books, incense, block printed Indian clothing and bedspreads, batik sarongs, and Windham Hill CD's. Its best selling item and most profitable line, though, was crystals, and Caroline, who had done a fair bit of research into neopaganism and alternative healing, was simultaneously amused and appalled at how much the innocent and trusting were willing to pay for a geode or a polished stone that cost a dollar or two wholesale.
One day she was working the register when a woman came in, all aglow with the enthusiasm of the new convert. She had just seen a psychic who had advised her to buy certain stones in hopes of alleviating a host of annoying but not deadly conditions, and that very shop stocked almost everything on her wish list. Caroline watched as the newcomer assiduously chose the right stones for her ills, along with whatever accessories the psychic had suggested.
Finally the woman came up to the cash register and started unloading her basket. She was evidently a chatty sort, for Caroline soon found herself knowing much more about her customer than was strictly necessary. Being a polite, well brought up Southern girl, she nodded and made small talk as she rang up and wrapped each selection, even if she privately wanted to tell her new friend that she'd be better off eating more fiber and less red meat.
She was nodding away when the customer suddenly leaned forward and confided that she had just undergone a past life regression and had learned the most exciting thing! Caroline, who had heard all too many claim to be Marie Antoinette or Charlemagne, did her best to look interested as she placed the last crystal in the bag and handed it over.
"The psychic told me that - "
The customer paused. Caroline paused in mid-pass and waited, smiling slightly. "Yes?"
"She told me I was the reincarnation of Isis!"
Caroline, who knew very well that Isis was a goddess, blinked at her new friend. She then said the only thing that came into her head.
No, not that sort of folding chair. Despite its popularity in fine entertainment such as professional wrestling, Mum never owned such an article of furniture, nor would she have regarded it as a fit inheritance for her only child. Neither did she mean an elegant Italianate scissor chair, fitting though that would have been for my obsession with the Middle Ages and Renaissance. My dowry was somewhere in the middle, both in terms of style and utility, and was as much an exemple of the 1970s esthetic as the hideous lime green polyester double knit pantsuit I wore for special occasions when I was in high school. I'm not sure where exactly Mum found it - the Lillian Vernon catalogue, perhaps? - but found it she did, and it took pride of place in the TV room/study that had begun as my father's bedroom.
We do not have much in the way of decent journalism in my neck of the woods.
For those who don't believe me, consider the choices that the beautiful Pioneer Valley offers to the eager newshound who is either unwilling or unable to access the Internet. I'm not talking about the big metropolitan dailies, like the Boston Globe or the New York times. These venerable bastions of journalism, full of wonderful writing, cutting edge criticism, and the aura of quality that comes only with dozens of Pulitzer Prizes, aren't local. All too often their writers seem to regard those humans unfortunate enough to live west of Route 128 as quaint rustics in mud-caked barn boots, over-educated hippies in lesbian feminist communes that produce artisan cheese and hand-crafted herbal soaps, or, if they're young and articulate, waitrons for the overpriced bistros in Great Barrington and Williamstown that cater to the summer people up from New York in search of fresh air and an artsy atmosphere.
When Love arrives, I hide myself away,
Though filled by burning torments of desire,
That scorch and sear and scar my breast with fire,
And flames devour my heart both night and day.
O how I feel the harsh travails of Love!
The wounds and devastating dreams of death
Descend on me whenever I draw breath,
And so I sigh although I make no move.
The more Love comes, the more I am besieged.
I gather up my forces, yet I fear
The crack in my defenses may be fatal.
O archer Love, who scorns both gods and mortals,
You draw your bow and aim your shafts for all,
Then stab our hearts despite our fortress walls.
Or this:
Do not blame me, ladies, if I've been moved,
If I have felt a thousand fiery flames,
A thousand wincings, and a thousand pangs,
If I've been worn out weeping for my love.
Oh, no! Don't whisper insults at my name.
If I have erred, my sentence is at hand.
And don't let fly your barbs. But understand
That love does appear in its own sweet time.
Don't say it is the god of fire who lights
The match. And don't be finding fault with fair
Adonis, for your plunge into the bright
And lovely passion. Please take care.
And have a bit more sense than I have had.
Then try, dear ladies, not to be so sad.
After the initial thrill of discovery, I was determined to find more works by women, especially one who had lived unconventional lives. it wasn't as if my high school library didn't have plenty of fiction and poetry by women, but with the exception of classics like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, a handful of books by Andre Norton and Madeline L'Engle and some historical fiction with strong female characters, most of the selections were distressingly ordinary. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's magnum opus was Aurora Leigh, a proto-feminist tale, but all I could find was Sonnets from the Portuguese. The Scarlet Pimpernel had the beautiful and intelligent Marguerite St. Just, but not only was she not the main character, she had this annoying tendency to need rescue from the clutches of the evil Citizen Chauvelin. Even Madeline L'Engle wrote about boys, at least in the YA section, and as wonderful as Adam Eddington and Josiah Davidson were, they were male.
It was very frustrating. Even more frustrating was getting to college and discovering that even here, at a women's college, most of the works we studied were by men. The English faculty was starting to incorporate books and poetry by women into the curriculum by my senior year, but it was too late to do me much good. If I wanted to read books by women, I had to find them myself in the dark and dusty stacks of Neilson Library, and read them on my own.
Of course I wasn't the only woman who wanted to read books by members of her own gender. Small presses dedicated to republishing forgotten classics by women sprang up thickly enough to populate a fairy ring in the 1970s and 1980s. The most famous is probably Virago Press, (originally all reprints, now publishing original work as well), with Naiad (now part of Bella Books) and Seal Press not far behind. Calyx, Cleis, the Feminist Press, Persephone Books, Pandora, Shameless Hussy, Honno...whether reprinting the works of good writers who had been forgotten or allowing fresh new voices to find a literary home, presses devoted to works by and for women gave half the population a voice in a way that mainstream publishers (especially non-genre publishers) never had.
Along the way many, many women writers were rediscovered and incorporated into the literary canon: Aphra Behn, the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady Murasaki, Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anna Akhmatova, Charlotte Yonge, and Elizabeth Smart are only a few of the writers who finally took their place in the syllabus. Even better, established writers like George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Lowell, Dorothy Sayers, and Christina Rossetti were reexamined by feminist critics with an eye to teasing out the nuances of their work that male critics either hadn't or couldn't see.
Unfortunately for literature, not all the authors reclaimed by the women's press movement were on the same level. Some were no better than the men whose works had somehow made into the canon (Colley Cibber, anyone?), and some were important mainly for their popularity or their impact on other writers (Ouida, anyone?).
And then there was the author of this:
Do you know what it is to be poor ? Not poor with the arrogant poverty complained of by certain people who have five or six thousand a year to live upon, and who yet swear they can hardly manage to make both ends meet, but really poor, - downright, cruelly, hideously poor, with a poverty that is graceless, sordid and miserable? Poverty that compels you to dress in your one suit of clothes till it is worn
threadbare, - that denies you clean linen on account of the ruinous charges of washerwomen, - that robs you of your own self-respect and causes you to slink along the streets vaguely abashed, instead of walking erect among your fellow-men
in independent ease, - this is the sort of poverty I mean. This is the grinding curse that keeps down noble aspiration under a load of ignoble care ; this is the moral cancer that eats into the heart of an otherwise well-intentioned human creature and makes him envious and malignant, and inclined to the use of dynamite. When he sees the fat idle woman of society passing by in her luxurious carriage, lolling back lazily, her face mottled with the purple and red signs of superfluous eating, - when he observes the brainless and sensual man of fashion smoking and dawdling away the hours in the Park as if all the world and its millions of honest hard workers were created solely for the casual diversion of the so-called 'upper' classes, - then the good blood in him turns to gall and his suffering spirit rises in fierce rebellion crying out - 'Why in God's name, should this injustice be? Why should a worthless lounger have his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage, while I, toiling wearily from morn till midnight, can scarce afford myself a satisfying meal?'
The above is the first paragraph of one of the first modern bestsellers. This remarkable book, an examination of the temptations and evils that great wealth can bring to an ordinary man, was championed by Oscar Wilde and beloved of Queen Victoria and her brood. It made its author very, very rich, and is the origin of the name "Mavis." It has also been a critical punching bag for over a century for its florid language, immensely long paragraphs, and melodramatic, almost fevered plot.
The book is The Sorrows of Satan. It was written by Marie Corelli. And it, and the rest of her work, are among the most unusual examples of Books So Bad They're Good.
Everyone has secrets, of course. Whether large or small, trivial or the size of Lake Victoria, mildly embarrassing or fatal to one's hopes/careers/love life, secrets are as essential to human existence as oxygen or clean water. Even people who claim that they don't have secrets, that their lives are open books, have done or seen or lusted after something or someone that they will never, ever, shove-red-hot-apple-seeds-under-my-toenails-and-read-me-slash-porn-about-Hedwig-and-Lyle-Lyle-Crocodile-until-my-ears-bleed reveal to another human being, Father O'Flanagan at Our Lady of Perpetual Ennui included. You do, I do, the Dalai Lama does, even Father O'Flanagan, and no, Father O'Flanagan's secret is not what you think it is. We all have our secrets, and there are times when I am certain that half the problems of the human race stem from the keeping of secrets.
My secrets are relatively mild - what, you think I'm a moll for the Patriarcas? - and mainly involve my taste in erotica and my early and terrible attempts at a novel. Betty's were another matter. Because my silly, beautiful, heedless aunt, the same woman who used to play Batman and Robin with me, who could and did refer to the last Fascist dictator in Europe as "the little man with the mustache," was responsible for an unspeakable tragedy.
I was disqualified from the needlework division of a city-wide public school classics festival when I was fourteen.
This was not because I had cheated in any way, oh no. Every stitch in my entry, a wallhanging done in gold applique and crewel embroidery, had been done by my own hands, using the crewel stitches that had become second nature to me since I'd taught myself to embroider six years earlier. The subject matter, a leaping Pegasus, was perfect for a classics festival, especially since I'd included a little index card telling the story of Pegasus and Bellerophon in Latin that my teacher had carefully corrected. I'd even included a dowel rod, carefully spray painted gold by my father, so my entry could be properly hung instead of lying flat on a table.
The week before the classics festival, my teacher collected our entries, made sure they were all properly labeled, and transported them to Buhl Planetarium for judging and display. The organizers of the festival, who included a couple of the Planetarium's trustees, were there to check in the entries, and Mrs. Berube later told my mother (who taught remedial reading at my school) that jaws were all but dropping when they saw my wallhanging. One trustee said, "This is the best in show, no question about it," while others were convinced that at the very least, I'd win the needlework division. Mrs. Berube was delighted, and took my mother aside during a free period to give her a heads-up so she'd be prepared for my reaction when the Latin Club attended the festival the next Tuesday.
Then came the weekend, and everything changed.
Saturday was shaping up to be a quiet, lazy day. It was March 1st, a gray, overcast day, and Mum was making biscuits while Dad and I slept late. I was half awake when I heard her walk upstairs, go into Dad's bedroom, and tell him that breakfast would be ready in about fifteen minutes. He murmured a reply, and then I heard her footsteps retreating to the first floor as he got out of bed and started for the bathroom.
The crash that occurred a few seconds later boomed through the whole building. I had never heard anything like it, but I knew what it was: the sound of a body, limp and unsupported, slamming into the ground.
I was fully awake, but too terrified by that awful, familiar, unknown sound to move as I heard Mum scream my father's name and pound back up to the stairs to the bathroom. I'm not sure what happened next, but I will never forget the agony in her voice as she shouted at me to stay in my room, no matter what, or her desperate pleas for my father to answer when she begged him to say something, anything.
I knew what was happening. And as much as part of me ached to open that door and see my father, I obeyed my mother's orders, and stayed in my room, shaking a little and praying that I was wrong about that awful noise.
It was perhaps the kindest thing Mum ever did for me, telling me to stay put. I heard but didn't see the paramedics arrive, sirens wailing, and their efforts to revive my father. I was spared the sight of them asking Mum to ride in the ambulance, and her telling them that she had to wait until her brother and sister arrived because someone had to stay with me. I didn't see the gurney, or the equipment, and I didn't see them take him out of the house for the last time. I did peek out of my window long enough to see the paramedics load Dad into the ambulance, but only for a moment, and then I turned away.
I waited until my aunt, numb at what had destroyed her sister's peaceful Saturday, called for me to come downstairs before I finally had the nerve to creep out of my room, dash past the bathroom that I couldn't bear to see, and finally, finally empty my aching bladder in the powder room off the kitchen. I glanced at the preparations for the breakfast we'd never eat, and tried to make small talk in the face of doom. And when the inevitable call came from my mother, all I could do was howl my grief into the air as I crouched on the steps leading to the bathroom where my father had died.
Somehow Mum and I got through the next few days, the young widow and her daughter. Our old minister came out from Cleveland to conduct the funeral, and my uncle Oscar paid the bills and made sure we lacked for nothing until Mum was able to access their joint bank account. We faced that bathroom together that night, locked arm in arm, and somehow, some way, we reclaimed it long enough to bath and wash and brush our teeth before stumbling to our respective beds.
We buried Dad on Monday, and Tuesday we went back to school, Mum to teach and me to class. Her colleagues had urged Mum to take a week or two off, but she insisted that work would be better for her than being home alone while I was at school and her siblings at their respective offices. And so she pulled on the gray dress that was as close as she had to widow's weeds, got in the dark green Buick Skylark that had been Dad's pride and joy, and drove to work the day after she buried the love of her life.
As for me...I think one of my uncles gave me a ride in that morning, but it's all something of a blur. The one thing I do remember is that the Latin Club was supposed to go to Buhl Planetarium for the classics festival, and that meant I was on the bus with my classmates almost as soon as I arrived, safely away from the inevitable murmurs from the rest of the school.
The festival was a lot of fun, and that helped; there were science entries and costuming entries and research papers and dioramas that ranged from excellent to well-intentioned, and I still remember laughing at a Mount Vesuvius that someone had constructed of Play-Doh, little plastic aquarium trees, and "lava" that was actually the sparkly red hair from a decapitated wishnik. And of course there was the needlework division.
Where I saw a blue ribbon pinned not to my carefully stitched Pegasus, but to a crumpled thing that looked like a cross-stitched tea towel.
I stared at the tea towel, and then at my wallhanging, and then at the tea towel again. There weren't many entries, but not one of them came close to mine, not in workmanship or display or even the Latin on the little index cards next to each entry. I turned to my teacher, mouth open in shock, trying to figure out what had happened.
That was when Mrs. Berube, eyes suspiciously bright, told me what had happened. It seemed that the judges had seen my work and decided that it was too good to have been made by a fourteen year old. The volunteers who had checked my work in earlier had protested, but the judges would not be moved, and so the tea towel, which wasn't even pressed, was given the award and I was disqualified. Mrs. Berube's protests that she had seen me work on the Pegasus, my classmates' outrage at the news, an abortive attempt by the juniors and seniors to drive to the planetarium at the news to tell the judges that I'd done the work myself - none of it mattered. What was done was done.
It's been a year since the first of these little excursions into the savage wasteland of Books So Bad They're Good.
Well...not really. The first diary was published on February 23rd and tonight is February 25th, so it's actually a year and two days. I'm writing this introduction on the actual anniversary, though, so this is the Official First Anniversary of Books So Bad They're Good, at least to me, and since I'm the one who risks my sanity researching and writing these diaries who's produced most of the diaries in this series, I get dibs on choosing the official anniversary date.
So, happy anniversary to Books So Bad They're Good! And a huge BSBTG thank you to Limelight, who asked me to write this series in the first place, Quarkstomper for filling in with a splendid entry on mythopoeism, Youffraita and RiaD for letting me republish on Firefly Dreaming, and of course all of you who've been willing to accompany me down the untracked wilds of the Umbobo River, armed only with an assegai on this exploration of the most hilariously awful books imaginable. Without all of you, this series wouldn't exist, and most of you would never have heard of Pedro Carolino, I, Libertine, or Morris Klaw, the Dream Detective, and wouldn't your Saturday nights be just a little bit less exciting without those authors and their masterpieces?
In honor of this momentous occasion, tonight we're going to discuss someone truly special. This amazing man, author of over fifty books that could almost be precursors to the works of such luminaries as Thomas Pynchon and the deconstructionists, is the living, breathing original of Ignatius Reilly and Kilgore Trout, a man whose works are even weirder than those of Phillip K. Dick after he went completely insane had the religious experience he called VALIS...and though I could easily have included his work in a diary on lousy genre books, let's just say that Books So Bad They're Good would be forever diminished if I didn't devote a night exclusively to this magnificent talent.
First, though, here's a foretaste of what's in store for the next two months:
- March 3 - Undeserving prize winners.
- March 10 - unusual love stories.
- March 17 - pulp fiction that makes one glad that the pulps folded.
- March 24 - Marie Corelli
- March 31 - bad criticism
- April 7 - Southern-fried Gothics
- April 14 - reincarnated mediocrities
- April 21 - Horatio Alger
- April 28 - "autobiographies" of sports figures.
So keep watching this space, true believers, and don't blame me for any yaws, boils, infections, Black Plague, weeping sores, erections lasting more than four hours, muscle pain, uncontrollable diarrhea, hallucinations of little dancing pink elephants, screaming meemies, and tuberculosis resulting from reading these diaries. You have been warned.
Now, the above warning may be superfluous when it comes to my little list; after all, WarrenS suggested Horatio Alger a few months ago, so it's not as if you didn't know that a diary eviscerating the legendary Unitarian minister, pulp author, and lover of young and lissome boys was in the works. The same cannot be said for tonight's author. The faint of heart are advised to turn back now, before encountering prose of such incredibly low quality that the author was accused more than once of being insane.
You think I jest? Check out this dialogue from The Steeltown Strangler:
"Now, local-colourist, we can eat up-town at an air-cooler place--rather half-way de luxe, too, for a town like this--or we can eat at a joint outside the gates where a hundred sweat-encrusted mill-workers, every one with a peeled garlic bean laid alongside his plate, will inhale soup like the roar of forty Niagras, and crunch victuals like a half-hundred concrete mixers all running at once. Which--for you?"
Lest you think this is but an anomaly, an out of context quote from an otherwise competent writer, consider this passage from another work of this master stylist:
Redwayne TerVyne, known to the Chinese of America, because of his passion for Chinese items in his nationally syndicated column, as "The Great White Prynose," and to New York in general as "The Keyhole," hopped out of his luxurious $10,000 purple car in front of the row of de luxe art shops on Fifth Avenue.
And for those seeking proof that the third time isn't the charm, from this author's best known work, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull:
Either as a detective I was a good sofa-pillow crocheter, or else I was playing in the identical luck of the piccolo player when the eccentric millionaire filled up the instruments of each member of the German band with $5 gold pieces.
Yea and verily, the man who wrote these words, and many more (so many, many, many more), was more than just bad. He was a true American original, a Gargantua of Garbage, a Murasaki of Mediocrity, an author who bestrode the ranks of Authors So Bad They're Good like unto a latter-day Colossus of Crap Rhodes. "I damn near busted my cerebellum making them up," he once wrote about his own books, and anyone who reads them will be hard pressed to say otherwise.
Ladies and gentlebeings, bad book lovers of all ages, I give you the one, the only, the immortal:
As most readers of these diaries know, I'm a quilt historian.
This was not my original goal in life. I'd originally wanted to be a paleontologist, then a crusading lawyer, then a college professor, then a Unitarian minister. All of these dreams yielded to reality as I gradually became aware that I wasn't suited to be anything but what I am: an overeducated officer manager with a love for old textiles, too many books, three obstreperous cats, and a tendency to crack jokes at odd times.
How I got that way is anyone's guess...but the quilting part is easy. I became a quilt historian because someone pissed me off at an SCA event in the spring of 1992.
Precisely which lucky gentle is responsible for irrevocably changing my life is a mystery; all I remember about him is that he was tall, wearing a brownish tunic, and seemed to find the idea of medieval quilting amusing. He might have had a mustache and glasses, but since that would describe roughly two-thirds of the male population of the Laurel Kingdom of the East, my mocker's facial hair and ocular deficiencies (if any) are no help.
Our exchange was simple: he asked me what I was teaching at the day's event. I said, "Medieval and Renaissance quilting," and smiled up at him. He chuckled with the same gentle condescension that a parent gives a clumsy child who's just announced that she's going to win an Olympic gold medal in the balance beam.
"Why are you teaching that? They didn't have quilts in the Middle Ages!"
I fired back with, "No, we actually have records - " but he'd already faded into the crowd, probably in search of the class schedule or possibly the dayboard. I never did get his name and probably wouldn't recognize him on a bet, but his words lit a fire that hasn't gone out yet. I'd been quilting for about ten years and loved it, but it was only after he told me what I knew was wrong that love became obsession. I started reading everything I could on pre-1600 quilts, textiles, and interior design, determined to make so strong a case that no one, no one would ever tell me I was wrong again.
To my dismay, most of what I found was unsourced, vague, or even wrong. It seemed that no one had actually done any primary research on very old quilts, at least since the death of an elderly English antiquarian named Averil Colby. The information was there - a line about silk quilts as Ottoman tribute here, a paragraph about Bengali coverlets being imported to Spain there, pictures of what appeared to be patchwork heraldic banners and tabards everywhere - but it was uncollated, uninterpreted, unread...for all intents and purposes, unknown.
And so I started gathering all that scattered information, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, reference by reference. Year by year, note by note, I teased what had been lost from books on the Silk Road, on heraldry, on court life in England and France and Florence. If I was somewhat surprised when I joined Kris Driessen's old Quilt History mailing list to find that I knew more about pre-1600 quilts than the professionals, well, I was too busy developing courses and teaching classes and transcribing inventories that someone had decided to reprint in 8 point type for it to register. I even had the dubious honor of being plagiarized by another SCAdian who wrote to me seeking information and then took what I'd sent her, rewrote it enough to pass muster, and put up a website back when it was still expensive and I was struggling to pay the bills.
My break came in 2003, when costume historian Edward Maeder read my e-mail offering to volunteer at an upcoming symposium on early quilting at Historic Deerfield and asked me to teach two workshops. I did, and when I saw a call for papers on medieval textiles at a medieval studies congress in Michigan in 2005, I swear it was only the knowledge that I'd already done this for Edward that gave me the courage to hit "send" on my abstract. Before I knew it I was in Michigan, my friend Yolanda riding shotgun to keep me from bolting for the nearest ladies' room, delivering a paper on what may have been Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon's wedding quilt. That article was accepted for publication on the spot, and after eight rewrites and several more migraine-inducing reads through Henry VIII's death inventory, I had the satisfaction of seeing my paper in print.
I'm not ashamed to say that I burst into tears at the sight of my author's copy,
One article led to another, and now I'm not only writing about old quilts, I'm reviewing books by acknowledged experts in the field. I'm welcome at the Metropolitan Museum and Old Sturbridge Village, people write to me from all over the world for information, and I'm slowly gathering the courage to write an actual, genuine book on medieval and Renaissance quilting and patchwork. If I'm ever rich, or even just get a big enough tax refund, there's an interesting piece of 14th century applique in Breslau that's never been written about in English, and since no one else seems interested in writing about it, well....
As for the man whose little jibe was the catalyst? As I said above, I haven't seen or heard of him for years. It's more than possible that he got married, had kids, and gradually faded away into Mundania like so many others before him. But if he is still attending kingdom events, I hope he attended Birka in 2006, when the seed sown by "Why are you teaching that? They didn't have quilts in the Middle Ages!" came to full bloom. That's the day when I was given the highest honor the SCA can bestow upon its members: elevation to the Order of the Laurel for - you guessed it - my fourteen years of research into medieval quilting and patchwork. And if through some peculiar bit of synchronicity my mocker is reading this diary, he has my eternal gratitude, because if he hadn't pissed me off none of it would have happened.
(Bad love poetry: what could be funnier? - promoted by Youffraita)
First, my apologies for being absent from comments for the last few weeks. I've been super-busy and just got over a cold which sapped my energy. I promise to be more active henceforward, former Scout's honor!
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When I was in high school, a friend loaned me a book of poetry by this man.
At this point I've mercifully forgotten whether she inflicted Listen to the Warm or Seasons in the Sun on me, but I remember reading a few selections, not being impressed, and then mumbling something about how much I enjoyed stuff like
It's nice sometimes
to open up the heart a little
and let some hurt come in.
It proves you're still alive.
If nothing else
it says to you-
clear as a high hill air,
uncomfortable
as diving through cold water-
I'm here. However wretchedly I feel,
I feel.
The same thing happened a few years later when a friend gave me a copy of one of this actor's books of poetry. I read one or two lines, cringed, and lied through my teeth the next time I saw her about how moving and sensitive it all was. It was not pleasant either time, and I sometimes found myself wondering if there was something wrong with me for thinking that Rod McKuen was a kitschmeister who played to the lowest common denominator, or that Leonard Nimoy should stick to acting and photography.
Part of the reason I couldn't stand either man's work was that I started reading genuinely good poetry at a very early age; I found and started memorizing selections from my mother's college poetry anthologies in my early teens, and soon could quote Donne, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Whitman whether my audience liked it or not (I was particularly fascinated by the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, which I correctly intuited were not about Whitman's love for women - but that is neither here nor there). Compared to these giants, Rod McKuen in particular was very small beer indeed.
I don't read nearly as much poetry as I used to, but I still have some favorites; I've loved Richard Wilbur's work ever since I was lucky enough to take a couple of classes with him in college, while certain of Geoffrey Hill's poems have haunted me for years. I still love Donne and Dante, Louise Labe and Jane Yolen, and I still can quote the classics when appropriate. One of my favorite recent books is Seamus Heaney's marvelous translation of Beowulf, which begins with:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coats
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.
and only gets better.
Good poetry distills life into a few choice lines, taking personal emotions and thoughts and making them universal; has anyone done a finer job of identifying the briefness and fragility of human life, and the awareness that death is ever present no matter how busy we are, than Emily Dickinson in these few words:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
or made clearer the stupidity and waste of war than Wilfred Owen:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Humans being humans, romantic love is the subject of an overwhelming number of poems, from the Song of Songs on down to the verses that pimply faced kid in Creative Writing submitted to the literary magazine. Some love poems are exuberant, like Donne's To Mistress, Going To Bed:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
while others, like the dying Keats' message to his beloved Fanny Brawne, are quietly tragic:
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.
while still others, like Anne Bradstreet's To My Dear and Loving Husband, are full of the contentment of a solid life with a compatible mate:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of Gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompence.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold I pray.
Then while we live, in love lets so persevere,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
Alas, the vast majority of humans are not so eloquent, nor so skilled, as Keats, Donne, or Bradstreet, or even Rod McKuen. For every good or great love poem, there are dozens that are forgettable, mediocre and cliched.
And of course, this being Saturday night, it is incumbent upon me to point out that there are some that are just plain terrible.
(Do Not Sip Your Coffee While Reading This. - promoted by Youffraita)
I was a failed Girl Scout.
This does not mean that I was drummed out of the Scouts for moral turpitude, embezzlement of cookie money, or failure to sing High Up, High On the Mountain in a pleasing manner. I had my little green uniform and my little green sash, and no one was prouder of the Sign of the Star than I was. My first merit badges were in needlework, which shouldn't surprise anyone, and cooking, which should given that I'm about as interested in the finer points of preparing meals as I am in diesel engines.
No, my failure came about thanks to a nasty cold I acquired in the late winter of my first year as a Scout. This was back in the old days, when Scouts were actually supposed to go door to door selling cookies, not sit outside grocery stores selling boxes of Tagalongs (then called Peanut Butter Patties) or hand off sign-up sheets to their parents so Mommy and Daddy's co-workers can get their Thin Mint fix for the year. Everyone in my troop was given a territory, a cheat sheet touting the good works that would be financed by the sale of each and every box, and instructions to sell forty-five boxes of cookies so we'd make our yearly quota.
All this was well and good, and I was more than prepared to wear out my Mary Janes tromping the mean streets of Middleburg Heights, Ohio. I'd actually sold three boxes of cookies to my piano teacher and was all set to inflict my winsome green-clad self on the neighbors until I started coughing, sneezing, and running an impressive fever. My pediatrician forbade me to go outside to do anything, let alone sell cookies, for fear that I'd contact pneumonia, bronchitis, or some other interesting lung disease, and I spent what should have been the prime sale weeks watching TV and trying to figure out why anyone would be stupid enough to watch Winky Dink, let alone actually draw a bridge so he and his friends could escape the bad guys.
Homebound I was, and miserable knowing that I'd let down the troop. If it hadn't been for my father buying the remaining forty-two boxes of Girl Scout cookies, and my mother freezing most of them, I would have been inconsolable. As it was, we enjoyed a steady diet of Girl Scout cookies well into July, and I must say that Thin Mints taste just fine with Baskin-Robbins French Vanilla.
Fortunately we moved to Virginia the next year, and I don't remember any cookie quotas at my new troop. They did, however, hike and camp out a lot more than my troop in Ohio, and one of the reasons I ended up with a massive tonsil infection and spent much of Christmas 1970 convalescing may have been all the hours I spent wading through pristine Appalachian streams, eating bargain basement hot dogs, and similarly enjoying the alleged delights of Scouting.
I also nearly cut off my thumb attempting to whittle, but that is neither here nor there.
Alas, I dropped out before becoming a Cadet, which meant that I missed the joys of wearing an ugly white blouse and a beanie that would have looked stupid on Winky Dink. I also missed the revolution in Scouting that took place thanks to the women's movement, the one that junked those hideous uniforms in favor of slacks, useless crafts involving felt and glitter in favor of scientific experiments, and feminized woodcraft in favor of a return to the original intent of Scouting.
This isn't a surprise to anyone who's actually been a Girl Scout, or knows anything about the Girl Scouts' founder, Juliette Gordon Low. Juliette Gordon, best known as Daisy, was the great-granddaughter of a white girl who had been adopted by the Seneca chief Cornplanter. In many ways she was the ideal Scout: intelligent, spirited, and strong, her hobbies including hunting, enjoying the great outdoors, and metalsmithing so she could build the gates to her country house in England. Her non-Scouting accomplishments including organizing a hospital for war wounded during the Spanish-American War, as well as a successful lawsuit against her husband's estate after Mr. Low died and attempted to leave his entire estate to his mistress.
Daisy, who had severe hearing problems thanks to a freak accident on her wedding day, founded the Girl Scouts of America after meeting Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and bonding with him over their shared enthusiasm for blacksmithing. Daisy intended the Girl Scouts to be a means by which girls could leave the family circle and develop qualities of leadership, self-reliance, and good old American resourcefulness through outdoor activities, community activities. Her aim was to produce girls with backbone and a strong sense of duty, not the gentle, fainting ornaments of Edwardian fiction.
To this day the Girl Scouts are staffed, run, and intended solely for girls and women, regardless of the body one was born with. The Girl Scouts are a rare and refreshing national organization that simultaneously promotes wholesome American values while making sure that its youthful members have a good time, learn something useful and scientifically accurate, and treat their fellow Scouts like human beings regardless of whether they have a mommy and daddy, two mommies, two daddies, and or one or the other. Modern Scouts can and do earn merit badges in subjects like being a locavore, public policy, and geocaching and if a young Cadet or Senior Scout finds herself dreaming of the captain of the field hockey team instead of the football team, no one much cares.
Unlike the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts don't care if you're religious, agnostic, gay, straight, rich, poor, disabled, or transgendered. All they care about is the kids (and the cookies), and if that means that the less enlightened aren't all that happy, so be it. Daisy herself never let a crappy marriage, deafness, or the cancer that eventually killed her slow her down, and in a time when women were encouraged to stay home, she forged her own path and showed young girls that they could more than drudges or decorations. The American dream of self-reliance and inner strength became acceptable in the mainstream at least in part because of the Girl Scouts, and that includes girls like Bobby Montoya.
