Cooverthon: "Ghost Town"

Robert Coover had dabbled with "trapped in a genre" stories before, but "Ghost Town" (1998) was the first time he extended the concept to a novel.

The genre in question is the Western, and "Ghost Town" has it all: shootouts, train robberies, gambling, cattle rustlers, Indians, loyal horses, and a climactic hanging. The protagonist is a nameless gunman who has been wandering through the desert for an unknown length of time. He stumbles upon the Ghost Town, which embodies all the classic Western cliches...and it's a bad place for a lone gunman to hang around in.

The townsfolk are a constantly shifting mish-mash of characteristics; they swap injuries, hairstyles, and body types as the book goes on, particularly the town's deputy, who undergoes a steady transformation from one page to the next. The buildings in the town shift in a similar way, with buildings moving from place to place as the plot requires.

There are only two females in town: the dancehall girl and the schoolmarm. The protagonist, of course, is constantly defending himself against the former and trying to win the esteem of the latter...and because this is a Coover novel, he suffers constant humiliation and can never live up to the standards that others require of him: he is never brave enough, never smart enough, never suave enough, or -- conversely -- never enough of a rogue. The lone gunman fails again and again and again.

And hence my first real fatigue in this Cooverthon: I'm sick of the repeated humiliation of his protagonists. He always brings them to the brink of success -- often extending the scene to ridiculous lengths -- only to have them fall flat on their faces, worse off than ever before. There's a moment in "Ghost Town" when the gunman seems to have finally won the heart of the schoolmarm, and even though his success seemed guaranteed I KNEW Coover would pull the rug out from under him.

The fact that the "rug pulling" is always done in a surprising and inventive way does not alter the fact that it all gets a bit tedious. Coover simply cannot allow his heroes to win...they can't even get a GLIMPSE of happiness without being slapped in the face. Granted, his more straightforward novels give us more satisfyingly mixed character arcs, but these "I'm stuck in a nightmarish world" books always follow the same trajectory. And that's annoying.

But still, "Ghost Town" is a fun read, with everything getting jumbled up as though it were a movie set, and some of the more unsettling moments in any Coover book (the gore is notably exaggerated here). There's also an enhanced surrealism to events that contrasts nicely with the grittiness of the situations themselves.

NOTE: In some ways, "Ghost Town" revisits Coover's play "The Kid," which appeared in "A Theological Position" (1972). It has the same collection of anonymous characters and the same tendency to "flash back" to notable past events, something unique to this book and to the play. I suspect that the long list of dedications at the beginning of "Ghost Town" are to actors who appeared in some performance of "The Kid," assuming it was ever performed at all.

Typical Cooverisms: Humiliated protagonist, confusion of time and geography, bawdy puns, a penis exposed for an extended period of time, a woman who "digs at" her crotch. But even this far into his career, he's still inventing new elements which continue to surprise the reader, even if some of the conceits are getting a little old.

Cooverthon: "Briar Rose"

If "Briar Rose" (1996) appeared in a collection of short stories, I would probably appreciate it more. There is something about a "book" which implies depth and weight. "Briar Rose," sadly, holds neither of these things, and it's the only Coover book that I previously owned but which I never bothered to finish. Much like "Spanking the Maid" (1982) it's what everybody assumes Coover always does, but seems -- when compared against the rest of his work -- lightweight and sort of frivolous.

It shares the same structure as "Spanking the Maid," a narrative which shifts focus between two protagonists (the Prince and Sleeping Beauty) as they repeat the same actions endlessly without ever achieving their goals. The Prince wants to rescue Sleeping Beauty, but he's trapped as much by the briar hedges as he is by his doubts: is he the one? Is she the one? Is he accomplishing his tasks properly?

Sleeping Beauty, likewise, is enduring a hundred-year sleep in the company of a good/evil fairy. The fairy tells her stories about all the possible Princes and the possible resolutions to the fairy tale, invariably terrible. Usually these hypothetical princes are already married, and their wives kill Sleeping Beauty and eat her. Sometimes the princes wake her up only after having fathered several children by her while she was sleeping. Some princes only want her property, or they turn into monsters when they kiss her.

Every second (large-print, small-margin) page is basically a resumption of the tale with a new twist. This is Coover's "phantasmagoria" approach, which reads like a fever dream but -- sadly -- has little else to recommend it, especially when you've already read his similar short stories in "Pricksongs and Descants" (1969) and "A Night at the Movies" (1987).

If you have a burning love for fairy tale deconstruction, this could be a good book (in the same way that "Spanking the Maid" has been cited as the ultimate text for S&M devotees), but otherwise it's Coover at his laziest. It lacks the invention and passion that he injects into better examples of this style (eg. "The Magic Poker" and "The Babysitter"), and also lacks the satire and political consciousness of Angela Carter's fairy tale treatments.

"Pinocchio in Venice" was dedicated to Carter just a few years before, so maybe this was an homage of some kind, though Coover had tackled fairy tales before ("The Door," "The Gingerbread House") and would come back to them again in "Stepmother."

Typical Coover themes in "Briar Rose": Repetitious scenario with disconnected geography & time, characters can never succeed because the rules of the scenario are unspoken or more complicated than first considered, scatology, idealized situations become disgusting/horrific when subject to real life.

Cooverthon: "John's Wife"

Robert Coover's novels tend to come in one of two formats: either they're teeny-tiny books with huge text and wide margins (glorified short stories), or they're larger books with minuscule text, non-existent margins, and the smallest possible space between the lines (deceptively epic tomes). The fact that Coover tends to have a high "bulky paragraph" to "terse dialog" ratio makes the latter type of book particularly long.

"John's Wife" (1996) is ENTIRELY composed of bulky paragraphs. It never settles down and it never lets you rest. Its 420 pages feel like twice that many, and in a more sensibly formatted book they probably would be. But there's so much invention in it that you'll never feel the drag...unless you become hopelessly lost, which is possible, especially the first time through.

First, the structure: "John's Wife" is a book-length string of big paragraphs. Each paragraph focuses on a particular character, and the story flows between paragraphs as the characters encounter each other, think about each other, or when the plot naturally moves in that direction. These paragraphs come in unbroken sections about sixty pages long, but the separations between these sections -- a simple double space -- doesn't seem to serve any purpose. The story is one shifting character focus from page 1 to page 423.

These characters all live in a quaint midwestern American town, and -- as you'd expect in a small town -- they all have some connection with each other: parents, children, spouses, workmates, golfing buddies, drinking partners, and the professionals they deal with (a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, the newspaper editor, the town photographer, etc.)

The town's biggest booster is John, a hedonistic businessman, son of one of the founding fathers, frat boy, continually shaping the town by buying up and then over-developing property for maximum profit. John is the strongest motivating force in the town...

...with the exception of his wife. She's nameless, simply "John's Wife." The center of everything. Beloved by everyone. Half the men in town are hopelessly in love with her, and most of the women admire and respect her. Considering the book has about fifty major characters -- explored serially and organically as the book goes on -- there's a lot of "John's Wife worship" in those pages.

The curious thing is that John's Wife is the only notable character who is -- quite pointedly -- never explored. Everybody talks about her but she never earns a paragraph for herself. We learn about every other character's hopes, dreams, activities, and darkest secrets...but not her. She appears and (literally) disappears, setting things in action and then wandering into another paragraph to motivate somebody else. But she's the only person in town whose head we never get a look inside.*

What's "John's Wife" about? It's about everything that the characters care for: love, sex, power, life, hatred, art, philosophy, and survival. It's about the things that motivate these townie characters: infatuation for John's Wife, lust for revenge, craving for affection, dark regrets which cannot be forgotten. The novel is, in short, about the deep-down things that obsess us.

The first section of the book is an amazing study of how people motivate themselves to get through the day -- the sort of thing Coover wrote so truthfully about in "The Origin of the Brunists" (1966). We learn how all these characters know each other, the common touchstones they share (John's stag party in particular), and their own personal foibles which roar around in their brains: housewife Veronica, for example, is unable to forget the fetus she aborted when she was a teenager, and unable to forgive the man who fathered the child. Marge is driven by her need to finally win a contest -- any contest -- against John. Ellsworth (the newspaper man) is using his unwritten novel to try to understand the relationship between artists, models, and audiences. Poor teenage Jennifer has a hopeless crush on John's business partner and fantasizes about running away with him.

This is fascinating enough, but after 160 pages the town begins to unravel. It begins with the strange behaviour of John's Wife herself: sometimes she disappears when people aren't looking at her, leaving nothing but her car (or her clothes) behind. Latent murderers begin to make all-too-serious designs on the lives of others. Ellsworth is terrified to discover a new character lurking in his book's pages, and Stu's dead wife -- who he killed years ago -- reappears as a ghastly and blazing-eyed ghost. Meanwhile Pauline -- the novel's most tragic character -- is growing to a surprising size in the photographer's studio...

I don't want to tell you any more because part of the book's joy is the shock at every new twist: the way the yearnings and regrets of these otherwise normal characters become hideous reality as the book goes on. Eventually time and geography begin to collapse, and as an all-too-familiar monster finds herself under siege in the middle of Settler's woods, the town goes absolutely bonkers. Events move to their natural end in a way that only Coover could manage. Fire, disaster, storm, accident, death, destruction. And a huge part of the forest soaked with urine.

The book ends with all of the characters newly matured...the town has healed and so have the people who live there. They're not better than they were -- some of them are in a new kind of private hell -- but everybody seems to know a bit more about themselves. John continues to buy and renovate property, John's Wife returns and brings everything back to a state of normality, and the impossible events of the previous (day? week? month?) recede into the legends and tall tales that make a town unique.

"John's Wife" is a non-stop burst of creativity: characters, events, collisions, distortions, it never ends, and -- now that I've read it a second time and I have the characters straight in my head -- I think it's Robert Coover's masterpiece. It has the best of his realistic writing, and also the best of his impossible stuff, with both extremes perfectly meshed in an utterly flawless structure.

That said, it's a damn frustrating book, especially the first time through. It's easy to mix characters up and forget where they've been, dulling the ironic beauty of events seen through dozens of different eyes. It's also easy to lose sight of the subtle and beautiful surprises that are lost in the surrounding bombast: the really complex and unusual stories of Corny and Beans, for example; the former one of the most rich characters in the book, and the latter a strange and significant footnote that the casual reader will miss altogether.

Common Coover touches in the book: the warping of time and geography, lots of different spouses screwing around on each other, toilets referred to as "stools," dense meditations on art and philosophy (though nicely spaced out this time), a comical cowboy character, women with big butts, metaphoric darkness/blindness, lewd puns, and outrageous pantomime.

* With the exclusion of the mysterious "Sassy Buns" who wreaks male havoc during the extended climax of the book, and who may be a sort of "Anti-John's Wife." Or something.

Cooverthon: "Pinocchio in Venice"

"Pinocchio in Venice" (1991) was the first Robert Coover novel I read. Having just finished it now for the third time -- and in the midst of a chronological re-reading of all his books -- I can best sum it up as...weird.

It's "weird" because it's an uneasy mixture of his already well-established styles, and because it comes perilously close to actually "saying something," which few of his books ever do. I'm not entirely sure WHAT (if anything) it is trying to say, but if you pressed a gun to my head and demanded a moral, I might just say: "Selfish prigs are bound to suffer, both outside (because people resent their priggishness) and inside (because prigs cannot achieve the high standards they set for themselves)."

Part of the book is -- simply -- a playful reinterpretation of the Pinocchio story. By claiming that all of Pinocchio's adventures (somehow) happened in Venice, Coover can push the well-known character (now an ancient and venerable scholar) through all of his old haunts, where his friends and enemies are far more complex than we'd ever thought. Coover takes the black-and-white morality of the original book and applies it gruesomely to the more "human" characters in Venice, and suddenly the Blue Fairy's moral lessons and Pinocchio's upstanding actions seem as sinister as...well, moral ideologues really ARE in real life, when their beliefs collide with flesh-and-blood.

The book's first third is in Coover's "languid phantasmagorical" style, wherein Pinocchio -- returned to wintry Venice to write a manifesto which summarizes all his moral precepts -- suffers a series of terrible indignities, either thanks to long-ago villains or his own personal failings (which might best be summarized as lust, ease of distraction, and an unyielding priggishness). This style also returns in the final third, which is more "frantic phantasmagorical," wherein Pinocchio's sins REALLY come out to get him. And...err...he gets baked into a donkey-shaped pizza.

It's the section between these two thirds that I've never really liked, mainly consisting of meditations on art and theatre, subjects which Coover has been dabbling in since "The Public Burning." It reads like an essay and a "guidebook to Venice," made even more tedious by the fact that the protagonist has been rendered totally immobile through most of it. Many of Robert Coovers novels seem to be about 15% too long, but while in other cases this tends to manifest as a protracted ending which tries to cover its tracks by being as ambiguous as possible, in "Pinocchio and Venice" the extraneous pages are all in the middle, and caused -- perhaps -- by Coover trying to say too much.

Then there's the ending, the final chapter which -- after 300 pages of playful allegory and abstract theorizing -- is an ACTUAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS STORY. It contains exposition and straight-forward revelation. It's beautiful and moody and strange, yes, but it also adds to the book's confusion as a whole: if there was never supposed to be a point, why did it end like that? If there WAS supposed to be a point...what was it?

At its best, "Pinocchio in Venice" is an adventure story, overlaying a deconstruction of the original children's book, and also combining the unrealistic morality of the children's book with the facts of the real world. At its worst it's...well, an awkward partnering of those "best" elements with dense art criticism interspersed with repetitive action sequences. I wouldn't consider it to be an essential Robert Coover book, necessarily, but it's an interesting experiment nonetheless (and darn fun when it works!)

Throb of Tom-Tom Cats!

Here's a wonderful advertisement from Womrath's bookstore, intended to convince us that READING about stuff is more exciting that actually EXPERIENCING it. They make a strong case for the joy of delightful puns and alliteration, at least...

Ankles aweigh! All abored the SS. VAN DINE...sailing to darkest Boop-a-Doop...land of mystery and philovances. Star-drenched daze. Sunkist knights. Drone of dramaturgic dromedaries...drowse of drastic dhuhinkies. Lots of good fellahs. Oil-burning cannibals...ready to take pot-luck with missionaries. Pooh yourself! More fun to stay home...

The advertisement mentions fiction, travel, biography, and history, so I suppose the dense wordplay is meant to evoke all those things: the mystery books of Philo Vance, the "darkest Africa" travel literature, Hollywood biographies, and...whatever "dhuhinkies" are.

(The New Yorker, November 15, 1930)

Quick Acknowledgement of a Cooverthon

For the past six weeks or so I have been engaged in a Cooverthon...that is, I've been re-reading all of Robert Coover's books* in chronological order in an attempt to get a sense of his development and his themes.

Doing this same thing with John Barth a few years ago pretty much destroyed my enjoyment of his work, so I'm aware that this is a dangerous and stupid thing to repeat with another of my favourite authors. One reason I'm doing this is to prove to myself that I didn't sell John Barth short; that other authors CAN stand up to such a rigorous and exhausting re-reading without becoming repetitive.

In some ways, Coover has an edge on Barth because his fiction is so unabashedly repetitive to begin with. My impression after years of fandom has been that -- following "The Public Burning" -- Coover used the same structure over and over again in all subsequent books: a protagonist is stuck inside a nightmarish (and usually genre-specific) environment from which he cannot escape, and as the book progresses the environment becomes increasingly horrifying.

That assumption was incorrect. Coover has been dabbling with that "nightmare" structure since his 1969 collection "Pricksongs & Descants," and while the structure DOES become a regular background feature of most of his subsequent novels, those novels ALSO contain many other novel elements: distinctive characters, bizarre authorial quirks, new types of focus.

We'll see if that impression continues to hold as I make my way through "Pinocchio in Venice" (1991) for the third time. Halfway through "Gerald's Party" (1986) my enthusiasm flagged a bit -- particularly discouraging because it has always been and still remains my favourite Coover novel by far -- but that's to be expected: most of Coovers books are INTENDED to exhaust you ("Gerald's Party" more than most).

I wish I'd rigorously blogged the earlier novels while I was reading them (and I wish I could guarantee that I'll continue to blog them as they come), but here are some scattered impressions:

• Coover has dabbled occasionally with theatre, but his plays are underwhelming. Having just read "A Theological Position" (1972) for the first time, my belief that Coover is not a great playwright is further reinforced.
• The real joy of "The Public Burning" (1977) is Coover's characterization of Richard Nixon: insecure, self-centered, nervous, awkwardly outgoing. Much of the book is just Richard Nixon endlessly pontificating in his head, and this is some of Coover's best writing. He's masterful at distinctive and consistent characterization (see "Gerald's Party" for the extremes of this), and it's easy to lose sight of that with all the experimental flim-flammery going on.
• On the other side of this, however, is "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears" (1987), whose Jewish socialist sculptor is Coover's biggest failure: he never comes to life.
• "You Must Remember This" (the concluding short story in his "A Night at the Movies" collection) is, I think, his crown jewel. Although "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" tend to be his most anthologized stories (probably because they're early works and -- more importantly -- do not have extended scenes of outrageously graphic sex), "You Must Remember This" sums up everything Coover does well. A close second is "Charlie in the House of Rue," also in the same collection. If you only read one Coover short story, pick one of those.

And now, a list of common Robert Coover themes.

• Women with big hips and butts. This obsession tends to taper off eventually, but it begins right there in 1966 with the introduction of the wonderful nurse "Happy Bottom."
• Cartoon/vaudeville mime routines. This again is more a feature of his early work, and again begins with "Happy Bottom."
• Bawdy songs.
• Vicious, fickle audiences.
• The protagonist is trapped inside an environment which he cannot escape, and the environment degrades over time. The landscape is usually disconnected -- doors never lead to predictable places -- and often chronology is confused as well.
• As a continuation of the nightmare environment, the protagonist usually suffers most when he is feeling proud or confident.
• In addition, the protagonist is constantly being punished for failing to follow rules, through no conscious fault of his own.
• Sometimes the environment and protagonist are part of an obvious genre.
• A large cast of couples who screw around with each other.
• Scatology. People tend to poop their pants.
• Puns.
• Extremely dense, impenetrable, high-brow concepts introduced in tiny snippets within the most banal of events, with the result that the concepts themselves seem banal. This starts happening during Coover's middle period.
• Sex with strangers.

* ...with the exception of independently-published pieces, which are difficult and expensive to find.

"Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon

I've spent over a month reading Thomas Pynchon's massive novel "Against the Day." I have lugged it from home, to work, to lunch counter, with little regard to the damage it was causing to my shoulder. I've gotten lost in it and become frustrated with it, I've gone back and forth to reread parts that I'd missed, I've visited Wikipedia to learn about Iceland Spar and the quaternions, I have struggled to stay awake and I have struggled to put it down, and I have thought "I am spending far too much effort on this goddamn book."

Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.

Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.

All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.

Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.

When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.

"The Snake Pit," Plus Bonus Memories From the Psychiatric Hospital

At the end of the 1948 movie "The Snake Pit," our newly-sane heroine tells her heroic doctor that she knows she has recovered her sanity because she's no longer in love with him. The same woman in the original 1946 novel has a similar moment of epiphany...but for entirely opposite reasons.

I've just finished reading the novel after years of enjoying the film, and the glaring differences between the book and the film are almost as fascinating as the themes that both products share. They are both about the institutional experiences of a woman following a nervous breakdown, and they both give insights into what is effective and what is counterproductive when treating mental illness, but when you compare the book and the film you learn an awful lot about Hollywood -- both then and now -- and about what happens when men who haven't been there adapt a book by a woman who has, and about the fundamental differences between life, art, and entertainment. Mary Jane Ward's fictionalized account of her own experiences is the life and the art...the movie is the entertainment.

I've loved the movie since I first saw it as a teen, and there's no doubting it had an impact on American policy regarding state-run institutions (though how much impact is up for debate). It's heart-wrenching and quite beautiful. Olivia de Havilland -- as protagonist Virginia Cunningham -- is an absolutely jittering wreck and she more than earned her Academy nomination. Helen Craig is also excellent as the vicious Nurse Davis, and Betsy Blair is also pretty spectacular as the silent and dangerously bottled-up Hester. You might also recognize Marie Blake as "Patient Awaiting Staff," twenty years before she became Grandmama in The Addams Family (if there's anybody you'd expect to see in an asylum, it's her!)

But one thing always bothered me about the movie: Sigmund Freud is practically a co-star. His picture hangs on the wall of saintly Dr. Kik's office, overseeing endless psychotherapy sessions and actually taking center stage during the final, Perry Mason-ish explanation that Virginia's problems started when she wasn't given enough affection as an infant. You see, interspersed with gritty scenes of institutional life are long sequences when Dr. Kik probes Virginia's childhood. She had a nervous breakdown because -- in a textbook case of Freudian psychology -- she transferred her love from a cold mother to a warm father, then hated him when he sided with her mother, then felt guilty because he died after she wished he was dead, then felt even guiltier because she accidentally caused the death of a father-surrogate fiancee.

This always seemed like so much bullsh*t to me, even more so after many years studying Psychology (including All Things Freud) in University. So I was wary about reading the book...if the Freudian angle was so significant in the movie, imagine how much Elektra complex backstory I'd have to wade through in the book?

Well, I finally read the book, and the answer is: none. Oh, there IS a Dr. Kik in the book, and he IS a Freudian therapist...but--

(are you ready for this?)

--in the book, Virginia only gets well when she is TRANSFERRED TO A DIFFERENT DOCTOR AND HAS LEARNED TO STOP EXPECTING DR. KIK TO ACTUALLY BOTHER TO HELP HER.

If you've seen the movie, think about that for a second. Mary Jane Ward -- who WAS Virginia Cunningham, for about 18 terrible months of her life -- credits Dr. Kik's psychotherapeutic approach with actually HOLDING HER BACK. By insisting that Virginia's nervous breakdown was the result of guilt about the death of her fiancee after a long illness and her subsequent marriage to her fiancee's friend, Dr. Kik did nothing but chase his tail while neglecting what Virginia REALLY needed...

...which was a healthy environment, an understanding ear, a realistic assessment of her capabilities, and some frigging books to read. Instead, she was kept underfed and cold in a succession of wards where the staff were too busy to notice that she wasn't as capable as they thought she was, then she was punished horrifically for falling short of their (and Dr. Kik's) expectations. She spent the entire time wearing dirty clothes, sitting around women with unspecified skin conditions ("Not syphilis!" says one doctor), usually on the floor, with nothing to occupy her day except confusion and utter boredom. In fact, she suspects that many of the women in Ward 33 (where you're sent if you've been at the institution for more than a year) talked to themselves and created imaginary friends because they had nothing else to occupy their minds.

I mentioned horrific punishment. Some of Virginia's earliest memories of the institution -- all of which are muddled and foggy -- are of a succession of shock treatments. Later she is subjected to the dreaded "tubs," continuously flowing baths that were meant to sedate patients, but involved them basically being wrapped in canvas and submerged up to their necks in tepid water.

The worst torture in the book, however, and one that was whispered among the patients as the ultimate punishment for disobedience: "packing." This was a hydrotherapeutic technique called a "wet sheet pack," where the patient was wrapped in cold sheets, around which were wrapped blankets, then held down on a rubber mat by series of tight sheets over the body.

I suppose there's a fine line between shocking a person to attention and teaching them to avoid terrible punishments, but there's no indication in the book that these treatments helped Virginia (in fact, whereas in the movie the shock treatments are administered as a last resort and are presented as helping Dr. Kik "make contact" with Virginia, in the book it seems that Virginia was getting them constantly since her arrival, and she suggests they may be blamed for much of her disorientation and memory loss).

So if the point of the movie was that psychotherapy and gentleness helps patients and that institutions need to be run with more consideration, what is the point of the book? Well, it's pretty much the same point, except for two things: psychotherapy is barely mentioned, and the entire situation is much less black and white than it is in the movie. There's no explanation for the onset of Virginia's illness -- thyroid trouble and difficulty adapting a life in New York City are the primary suspects -- and even less a resolution for why she actually got better.

In the movie, her recovery is solely the result of Dr. Kik's miraculous unraveling and exposure of Virginia's background. There is absolutely nothing like that in the book: maybe it just took eighteen months for her to recover, or maybe the treatments (and the endless doses of paraldehyde) DID help her focus. A contributing factor seems to have been diversionary  and social occupational therapy that she could actually perform, as opposed to types of work that she was incapable of doing properly due to her well-hidden confusion (or -- in the case of the dreaded floor polisher -- her lack of upper-body strength).

What IS apparent in the book are the signs that she's getting better: she begins to understand jokes and she actually starts to find them funny. She starts engaging in the only sort of therapy she's allowed: "thinking therapy." And -- as is touched on in the movie -- she starts to become selfish, as result of her renewed acquaintance with time:

The softness is leaving. The sympathy. Yes, and the generosity...I no longer distribute cigarettes the way I used to. it is a queer way to judge your sanity...I am able now to take heed of the day to come. I have three cigarettes and if I look ahead I'll see that I cannot order more until the day after tomorrow. Therefore I shall not share my supply but I shall hoard it so that each day I can be sure of having one smoke. That, dear lady, is sanity.

Incidentally, sympathy and generosity are presented as contributing factors to the decline of Miss Sommerville from nurse to patient. The nurses in the book are simply too busy to be able to really help anybody (let alone everybody), and poor Miss Sommerville finds herself walking around the ward keeping track of everybody's bowel movements. As an indication of the differences between a gritty novel and a slick Hollywood film, consider Miss Sommerville in the film: she takes people's temperatures. The film also neglects other significant themes in the book: Virginia's amusing anecdotes about her "True Trotskyite" friends, her less amusing anecdotes about the bathroom arrangements in the institution, and the plight of black patients dealing with white nurses.

You should read the book if you find the subject even remotely interesting. It is superbly written and surprisingly funny -- all hilarious scenes from the movie have been taken word-for-word from the book, including the repartee about "The Hopeless Diamond" -- and it is REALLY gripping from beginning to end. Unlike the movie character, the Virginia in the book is not a cringing little kitten looking for daddy to save her (or husband or therapist, which amount to the same thing). The book's Virginia (that is, Mary Jane Ward) is terrified on the inside but visibly strong and capable (which is ultimately part of her problem).

As a hilariously ironic indictment of the movie's deviations, I give you the following dialog from the book:

Well, the hell with my subconscious. What I'm interested in is getting the old conscious to working again. You know, maybe my subconscious did cook up something like Dr. Kik said, but if it did I'm sure it was for a novel. I always did have a secret, anyhow I hoped it was secret, ambition to write tripe.

Bonus Memories From the Psychiatric Hospital

For several months during the early '90s I volunteered in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. My job was to help manage recreational activities for the patients on Sunday mornings.

Since I was the new volunteer I was required to take direction from the more keen and seasoned organizers. We'd breeze into the recreation room at 10am, and one of the announcers would say "Hello everybody! Here are some old magazines and some Bristol board. Let's make collages about our favourite sports!"

I couldn't believe it. The patients were uniformly either depressed elderly people or depressed university students. They were adults, and we were telling them to make COLLAGES.

And they WOULD. Next week the announcer would say "Let's make decorative coat hangers!" and these grandparents and adolescents would shamble up and start working with the yarn. I stood there among the cardboard crafts and thought: these people need dignity, and we are stealing it from them. We are making them worse.

So I spoke up. "Here's a deck of cards. Does anybody want to play cards, or chess?" and people would stare at me in amazement. One University student -- a major in NUCLEAR PHYSICS -- came up to me and whispered "THANK YOU SO MUCH" and we played chess together. When I asked him why people came to these things even though they hated them so much, he said something that pretty much convinced me that I was in the wrong major: "If we don't show up, they think it's an indication that we're antisocial and getting more depressed."

You get that? These people were being trained to do something totally abnormal -- to take part in a degrading activity that they hated -- under the belief that doing so would make them BETTER. Their sanity was judged in inverse proportion to how insane they behaved. I was immediately reminded of the rug scene in "The Snake Pit," a huge rug in the middle of the dayroom that the patients were forced to huddle AROUND instead of standing ON because the nurses were afraid of getting it dirty.

Here's what I read today in "The Snake Pit," a book I wish I'd read a long time ago:

That afternoon she was invited to a popcorn party. [Nurse] Vance thought that was just too super for words. When the Popcorn Ladies were summoned, Virginia stumped over to the door to join the group. If you were going to get out of this prison it looked as if you'd have to do what they said, even to the extent of going to a damn popcorn party.

I guess some things never change...but they should. Anyway, I already hated the place because they kept the electroshock therapy bed in the entertainment room beside the ping pong table. When one of the organizers said "This week I've got a Jane Fonda workout tape...we're going to march around the room!" I quit.

Don't Be a Farty Bugger When You Get Old

I rarely throw down a book in disgust, but after twenty pages of "You Had To Be There" by Robert Collins I feel like tossing it in the trash, and THEN streaking through an old folk's home.

Here's some advice for Mr. Collins, and for you as well, reader: If you're going to complain about the behaviour and beliefs of a younger generation, stop and ask yourself if your parents said exactly the same thing about YOU. If so, shut your farty old bugger mouth and get reacquainted with the world. If not, shut your trap anyway, because nobody likes a smug blog-reader who has nestled into the generation gap like it were a comfy couch or the very vagina of God/Family/Country herself.

First, the younger generation is not fundamentally different from yours, with the possible exception that they generally don't believe the same things you believed, probably because you wouldn't shut up about those things during their formative years.

Second, your generation was not The Best Generation Ever. Disregarding all the selective memory and willful blindness and massive generalizations you make about other people based on your own narrow peer group, don't forget that YOU BROUGHT THE YOUNGER GENERATION INTO BEING. It was YOUR social structures, YOUR upbringing, YOUR revolutions (or lack thereof) that brought us to where we are today. Before you point fingers at "the kids," ask yourself who their ARCHITECTS were. You, goofy!

And finally, your anecdotes about the superiority of your idyllic development are worth nothing whatsoever from a sociological standpoint. They are skewed and selective and personal and do not say anything about the development of the other people around you. Likewise, the snapshot behaviour of some teenager who cut you off in traffic does not a generational trend make...how do you think your grandparents felt when some kid almost ran them off the road during a drag race, Big Bopper tunes all a-blastin'?

I get this increasingly from a baby boomer family member who is CONVINCED that the world is going to hell. I'll grant that the population density is higher than it was (partly because those boomers just couldn't stop making babies), but when this person bemoans urban crime or the latest child-sex scandal, I can only point out the increasing millions of dollars that the Catholic church needs to spend to redress the long-ago crimes of pedophile priests. I can point to books from EVERY generation which describe that decade's Unprecedented Urban Crime. I can point to endless editorials from every year in every age about how Those Damn Kids Have No Respect.

When Robert Collins -- under the guise of teaching the next generation how their grandparents live -- tells me that his own generation was so chaste and patriotic, I say PHOEY. Kids his age were having sex, getting venereal diseases, and going to unlicensed practitioners to abort the children they'd conceived in the stable/carriage/roadster. A sizable proportion of Collins' fellow citizens wanted nothing to do with the second world war and did everything they could to stay out of it. Phoey again!

Collins is the archetypal crotchety senior citizen who wants to boost is own sense of nobility by denigrating others. The first twenty pages of the book are peppered with constant digs at the lazy baby boomers...those same boomers who now berate subsequent generations for their laziness.

Whenever somebody tries to start a conversation with me about "kids today" and the first words out of their mouth (or the first paragraphs in their book) have something to do with the immorality or incomprehensibility of contemporary popular music, I know immediately that there's no hope for them. They are crotchety old fogies already. They have already forgotten KISS, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, and every jazz orchestra that got their start in a Harlem nightclub.

Nobody's generation can claim superiority or wash its hands of today's problems, which is why "You Had To Be There" is going in the garbage can, and then I'm going to run through an Adult Education Center without any pants on, as soon as it's a bit warmer.

Closing In on the Car Heater

A few years ago I realized that automobiles weren't magically invented with heaters already installed. By coming across random references to motor robes I became aware that car heaters were uncommon until at least 1940, and the earliest reported sighting of a car heater that I could find was in a 1951 Plymouth (thanks, Gary!)

I'm pleased to report that we can narrow the field down even further, thanks to "The Boys' Book of Engines, Motors, and Turbines" by Alfred Morgan. Published in 1946, the book lists "car heaters" among the devices in which a curious suburbanite boy might find an electric motor...and since their inclusion in the list is totally blase, I assume that they were quite common by that time.

Therefore we can safely say that car heaters became standard devices between 1941 and 1945, based entirely on anecdotal evidence and my sort-of-quirky and extremely lucky reading habits. Anybody care to find a patent or a catalogue to back me up?

PS: This book is fabulous. When I started reading it I had no idea of how engines, motors, or turbines worked, and now that I'm halfway through I even know what a camshaft is, how hydroelectric power is harnessed, and that if you try to blow out the fire in your miniature steam engine you'll scatter burning alcohol around the room and "singe your whiskers."

How Long Can Marriage Last...In a Cocktail Setting?

I love the qualification in the Mark Hellinger endorsement: one of the best novels IN ITS CLASS. Just so we're not confusing it with Dostoyevsky or anything.

Here's How to GET RID of Prohibition

As best as I can glean from the pages of The New Yorker, 1930 was the year of:

• Backgammon. All the department stores were selling deluxe sets and offering free lessons and tournaments.
  
• Tom Thumb golf. Suddenly there were courses everywhere. Rather than the low-rent "mini golf" of today, the fad was marketed to the Gay Young Things as an after-club pastime drunkenly played in evening gowns, tuxedos, and high heels. Much ado was made about the damage to the courses caused by high heels.
  
• Maybe this "depression" thing isn't going away?
  
• Even the staunchest defenders of prohibition are getting sick of it. Like, to the point where virtually everybody wants to somehow repeal it.

The most obvious sign of the anti-prohibition fever so far is this advertisement in the October 18, 1930 issue. It sums up everything I've been reading (click for a larger view).


Joseph S. Auerbach seems to have been a moderately well-known lawyer...well-known enough to have been publishing books before and after this one, at least.

The Volstead Act would not be repealed until 1933, so it will be interesting to see if this vocal opposition continues to swell, or if it will simply be viewed as a fait d'accompli in the laps of the lawyers.

Gary Jennings: Smut, History, Purity, Coincidence, and Torture

I'm re-reading "Aztec," the Gary Jennings book that I first read many years ago, and I have a few things to add to my previous post about the Jennings formula (at least as it applies this novel and "Raptor").

Yes, Jennings does his research, and combined with a perfect sense of pacing he manages to convey a realistic impression of what it was like to live at the time (in this case, to be an Aztec before, during, and after the Spanish conquest). I'm re-reading this particular book because I want to learn a bit more about Central American civilization, and "Aztec" is telling me a hell of a lot.

But Jennings isn't content to write 750-page books about dry old history, he must also introduce characters who are almost Ayn Rand-ian in their purity: the loyal and innocent servant, the battle-hardened and kind-hearted soldier, the intelligent and noble protagonist, the honest craftsman who pours his entire soul into his work.

These characters would be the first to disappear in an Ayn Rand novel, though, because they are so noble and pure that they can't even be CAPITALISTS (what sort of craftsman would give away his work for free simply because he is proud of what he does?), but they do share the Rand-trait of being such focuses of ideology that reality seems to WARP AROUND them. Thanks to their unswerving characteristics they form impossible alliances, get out of impossible (but clever) traps, and discover impossible things...you know, like Mayan eyeglasses.

During all of this they engage in meticulously-described sexual acrobatics, and they also witness meticulously-described tortures that make even the most hardened reader (me) physically ill. When reading either "Aztec" or "Raptor" you can rest assured that if things are getting a bit bogged down in philosophy or natural beauty, a flaying or an orgy is right around the corner.

As amazed as I am by Gary Jenning's audacity at writing historical novels which are simultaneously accurate and wildly exploitative and impossible, I have to admit that he's an incredible writer. In the pauses between the lesbian couplings and the guys whose guts splash out, his characters meditate on civilization and love, on warfare and writing, on the beauty of the universe and the beauty of the flowers. I have never read any other author who could pull this off so seamlessly that it becomes a genre unto itself...and for 750 pages, no less!

Here's to Gary Jennings. I wish I knew more about the man who wrote these books. In fact, I wish I could read at least one other review that bothered to mention this curious juxtaposition of brilliance and cheap smut.

Recently...

Many things have prevented me from blogging recently, not least my own laziness and ennui. My computer's hard drive totally died after my post about the importance of backups, requiring a trip to the repair shop (and then a total update of everything to Snow Leopard which does kick ass).

This misfortune was immediately followed by a five-day heatwave. Despite my perverse resistance to installing my window air conditioner -- and therefore many nights spent sweating buckets into my sodden bedding -- I learned two things about humans and heat:

1. When people who live in an extremely HUMID area -- like those of us in Southern Ontario -- complain about 35-degree temperatures that feel like 42-degrees due to the humidity, people who live in DRY areas say -- repeatedly and disdainfully -- "Ha! It's that hot here ALL SUMMER!" To which I can only say: try going out in that heat with a wet towel wrapped around your nose and mouth.
2. When people complain about the devastating heat, a subset of other people say "Ha! In the winter you complain about the cold, now you complain about the heat! You just like complaining!" This is like saying "You complained that you were thirsty, so you'd better not complain when I throw you in the pool and drown you!" However illogical it is to complain about the weather -- since nobody you complain to can actually change it -- it is NOT illogical to complain about temperature extremes.

I only mention this because people say these things all the time, and it's tiresome.

Anyway, I'm also living with a cat who is a bit like the Tazmanian Devil, only more hyperactive and noisy. She is a fearless destroyer of bookshelves. She has learned that the best way to send me leaping out of bed in the morning is to sharpen her claws on my mattress, which I imagine her doing with a big grin on her face.

As of this morning, Muffet is forbidden from entering my bedroom. This is difficult because I haven't lived with closed doors for over ten years, and also because I don't think she'll adapt quickly or quietly to this change. Her favourite window is in my bedroom, and so is the sock drawer. I foresee many challenging nights ahead.

Third obstacle: constant pain in my shoulders. Sometimes it's barely there, and other times it feels like my biceps and shoulders are being held together by old rusty rivets made out of bubbling lava.

When I told my family doctor that I was on a three-year waiting list to see a shoulder specialist, he had a fit of furious Irish passion and booked me for a series of examinations. Yesterday a delicate lady held an ultrasound paddle to my shoulders and we viewed the inside of my pathology: wavy lines of bone and fat surrounding ominous black holes of encysted fluid.

Then I crossed the hall to get some X-rays done. It was a much more respectable operation than the last place I went to, though it ALSO had a cupboard which emitted terrifying scrabbling sounds.

Most interesting was the woman who took the X-rays. She was brusque and businesslike, but every time she prepared to take another picture she'd say "Hold your breath!" in an incongruous sing-song way, like the way you'd speak to a mischievous child. I felt weird, standing there in my lead girdle, with this extremely professional lady buzzing around who would suddenly disappear into a booth and sing out -- as though she were offering me a popsicle -- "Hold your breath!"

In other news, I have joined the board for the condo corporation, which is a story I'll tell someday. I also joined the board for the Open Ears festival. I have added "The Toronto G-20" to the list of topics which must not be discussed in friendly company. I walked past my old apartment and saw that the vegetation grew back but the junker cars remain. I read "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis, "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, and a beautiful book about undeciphered ancient scripts by Andrew Robinson. If I go on any sort of vacation this year it will hopefully be to Easter Island, because I want to see what their discos are like.

Goat-Goo in Roman Plays

I've never had a sense of human history; other than Geography, History was the class I was LEAST interested in during school. But now I'm learning everything for the first time from scratch, and what fascinates me most about human history is how little we have changed.

It's for this reason that I'm thoroughly enjoying "Five Roman Comedies," a collection of Plautus and Terence plays translated into "modern verse" (eg., "the modern verse of Classical Studies professors in 1970").

It is really, really wonderful to know that we find the same things funny today that we did 2200 years ago: the irony of confused identities, the bumblings of a cocky idiot, the old routine of "Go quickly! And wait, don't forget what I told you to do! Now go, hurry! Wait, remember to be careful! Now hurry up and go! Wait a second, don't forget to be as quick as you can!"

Isn't this touching? Obviously our brains have changed little (if any) since Roman times, but neither have our joys and fears. And there is something ESPECIALLY touching that -- so long ago -- we had a theatrical system to entertain each other with, and that -- against all odds -- so many of these works have survived for us to read today.

Anyway, while reading these plays I'm torn between enjoying the "modern verse" translations and wishing they were a bit more literal. Like, I know instantly what "knucklehead" means to us today, but I sort wonder how the ROMANS had expressed such a thing. I'm currently reading the hilarious "Mostellaria," and the translator (Palmer Bovie) has really gone to town with the idioms. Here's my favourite section, which I hereby decree to be the best part of any play, anywhere:

TRANIO:

Why don't you go up in smoke? I'll see you inhale first,
you halitosis garlic-green rotten excuse for a rustic
retreat, with goat-goo on your feet. I repeat:
You whiff of damp air, what's it like down there in your pig-sty?
Whew! What a combination of nanny goat and mongrel bitch!

That's great stuff! Then, as now, we've always found it enormously funny when two unlikeable people insult each other.

"Constipation," Volume II

Fans of yeast will remember that two years ago I printed the words of Parisian Dr. Victor Pauchet, author of that world-famous book "Constipation." That was from the October 16, 1928 issue of The New Yorker.

Lo and behold, here in the August 2, 1930 issue of the very same magazine, we find Dr. Alberto Catalina of Madrid...

...He is the author of an important treatise, "Constipation."

I guess it was a popular title for books at the time. Folks used to be awfully concerned with their bowels, after all.

BONUS FUNNY JOKE

Included here is the testimony of Mrs. Marguerite Falkenburg, who had intestinal trouble until she started eating Fleischman's yeast. Please note the name of her hometown.

It Is Doubly Difficult to Get Out

I am reading William T. Vollmann's second-latest enormous book -- "Imperial" -- and I came across this apt, wonderful, and terrible paragraph which addresses why the New River (in Mexico and California) remains so terribly polluted.

Maybe the New River wasn't anybody's fault, either. People need to defecate, and if they are poor, they cannot afford to process their sewage. People need to eat, and so they work in the maquiladoras--factories owned by foreign polluters. The polluters pollute to save money; then we buy their inexpensive and perhaps well-made tractor parts, fertilizers, pesticides. It is doubly difficult to get out. And it's all ghastly.

Sigh.

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

In January I read an extremely positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction in a 1930s New Yorker magazine. Unable to find any of her short stories at the time, I instead read "The Heat of the Day," which I found tedious in its obsessive examination of people's thought processes. In short, I was impressed by her approach and her zeal but I found the book extremely annoying.

Now, after a long slog, I'm finishing off "The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen," which apparently contains all of the short fiction she ever wrote...and let me tell you, she wrote a lot. Many of these stories were ones that the New Yorker reviewer raved about. How has it been?

Complete collections of a prolific writer's short fiction should come with a big warning, which unfortunately I know I'd disregard anyway: "Do not read all these stories in a row. They were not meant to be read this way. They previously appeared in diverse periodicals and smaller collections. You have been warned."

So I'm warning you: just as the complete short fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges can drive you insane, so can the complete short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Not because it's BAD -- it's brilliant, in fact -- but just because there's too much of it.

And like the complete works of ANY writer I found myself noticing the trends in her work, most particularly:

• The trauma of moving to different houses, particularly among the upper classes. Her characters suffer the sale of the ancestral homes and the purchasing of newer, awkward, unpleasant homes which turn out of have sweaty plaster.
• The trauma of living off another person's charity, especially when the other person isn't charitable and -- in reality -- just keeps people around to traumatize them.
• The strange boredom of off-season luxury resorts.
• The thought processes of alienated, troublesome children.
• Aunts. Everybody's got an aunt who is the most significant secondary character.

These are things that you wouldn't notice if you read her stories occasionally, and they're entirely superficial to the plots themselves, but when you're reading them all in a row it's like "Oh yes, a new house, a strange aunt, now let's get to the heart of it please."

And the hearts of these stories are devastating, especially the ones written during the '20s and '30s. Most of them are about the slow, mundane grind of everyday relationships and the hidden compulsions that modernists so loved to write about. Bowen has a particular ability for troubled children who are so lifelike that you almost want to turn away. The precocious Maria (in the story of the same name) the crying little boy with his ducks (in "Tears, Idle Tears") and the absolutely doomed Hermione (in "The Easter Egg Party") are permanently stuck with me.

Bowen's style isn't one that relies on an all-encompassing statement to make its point; instead, the drama builds and builds through successive examples, leaving you squirming with the terrible, truthful awkwardness of it all. Here's a description of Hermione, viewed through the eyes of a pair of aunts who are trying a last-ditch attempt to integrate her with other children.

She shook hands with a rigid arm, on which all the bracelets jumped. She looked straight at everyone, but from a moody height: what was evident was not just fear or shyness but a desperate, cut-off haughtiness. In her eyes existed a world of alien experience. The jolly, tallish girls with their chubbed hair, the straddling little boys with their bare knees, apt to frown at the grass between their sandshoes, rebounded from that imperious stare. Either she cared too much or she did not care a fig for them -- and in either case they did not know how to meet her.

And that's before things get bad. You see, it's both normal and abnormal, expected and unexpected: it's the odd part of people and everyday life that you try not to look closely at.

Elizabeth Bowen writes almost all of her stories about these situations.

Then there's the other, somewhat less satisfying trend, the one that the New Yorker reviewer had particularly liked: the ghost stories. These appear from out of nowhere in the collection and they disappear just as quickly and bafflingly. Why did Bowen write about ghosts as often as she did?

Well, most of the ghosts are catalysts for the emotional outpourings of her characters, and likewise the reader is uncertain as to whether they're REAL ghosts or not...except in two stories, one of which (Green Holly) is surprisingly gruesome.

Unfortunately Bowen had an occasional tendency to doddle, in which case her longer stories end up in the same vein as "The Heat of the Day," seeming directionless, obsessive, and far too inward-looking. Her writing was at its best at ten pages or less. I found every story that was longer than 15 pages to be virtually unreadable (and believe me, I have a high threshold for this sort of thing).

Rather than tell you to go out and read the whole book (which I don't recommend) or tell you NOT to read her work (which would be a disservice), I suggest you pick up her Collected Stories and only read the ones from the '20s and '30s, and only the shorter ones. If you have a personal interest in the London Blitz then you should read the War-Time stories as well (and at least give "Mysterious Kôr" a try, which harkens back to her best creepy character studies).

If any Elizabeth Bowen fans read this, please let me know which novels YOU would suggest. I have another one lying around someplace but I don't think I can handle it right at the moment.

The Hallowed Halls Emmanuel

I love reading yearbooks. They're curious anthropological documents that capture certain elements of a subculture, allowing some degree of "backstage" information to seep through, while simultaneously being constrained by the idea of what a "yearbook" should be: that is, a collection of memories that everybody can supposedly relate to, giving tribute to the institution and its people, and also usually some really terrible poetry.

Imagine my joy when I discovered a heap of yearbooks that a nearby church was throwing out! But these weren't just run-of-the-mill highschool yearbooks...these were for the Emmanuel Bible College.

Oh bliss.


I had no idea that our twin cities contain a thriving, long-standing bible college, and I'm anxious to take a bus out there just to look at it. Other than looking at the slick website and fantasizing about what the dorms must be like, how could us secular folk ever know what a bible college is really like?

By reading the yearbooks, spanning the years 1966 to 1991, and finding all the little gems of culture: the things that you'd find in ANY yearbook, and the things you'd ONLY find in the yearbook from a bible college.

First off, the similarities. The usual tributes to the institution's president, the pictures of the students with special attention given to the graduates, the pages given over to clubs and teams (and the egotistical editorial by the yearbook editor), the myopic cafeteria ladies, followed by a dry list of advertisers. And don't forget the candid pictures of goofy campus life! Yes, even in the Emmanuel Bible College yearbooks you will find men in drag with balloon breasts.

But what's different? First, lots of pictures like this.


That's not a bomb drill, it's a time to make personal contact with your multi-denominational saviour. Myself, already breaking the commandments, I covet that girl's leopard jacket.

Next, many of the students are quite old. Ex-farmers from a myriad of itty-bitty Ontario towns seem to come to Emmanuel when they get the calling. Here's Harry Habel from the graduating class of '66, and one of the little poems that the yearbook staff banged out for the graduates that year.


As somebody who was once a member of my highschool's yearbook staff, I vividly remember the torture of having to write upbeat and personal blurbs about people I disliked and barely knew. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Habel -- in between doing a spot-on Jimmy Durante impersonation -- got on everybody's nerves in the cafeteria. Inka dinka doo!

What's disappointing about the books is the constant focus on God's authority. It's to be expected, obviously, but simply EVERY piece of text must lead into a parable or a scriptual quote of some kind, which reduces all of the activities -- even badminton -- into a Thin Tasteless Gruel of God. I can't help wondering if these students -- who so happily write "God is GREAT!" on their dorm murals -- secretly wish the message was toned down a little bit. It's not like everybody who goes to bible college is exactly the same as everybody else.

But besides the emphasis on two aspects of evangelicalism that I find particularly horrible -- missionary work and the Crisis pregnancy center -- there's very little in these books to offend or to cast the college in a bad light. These folks seem intelligent, diverse, passionate, and fun. Granted I'm getting that impression through the rosy-coloured yearbook lens, but even so I find myself wishing I could spend a day or two there, just to experience the comfort and solidarity of a bunch of people who believe very strongly in what each other are doing.

Hey, is there any chance I can get a scholarship? And if so do I REALLY have to learn Greek, and why?

Scrutable Poetry Corner: "Guestroom Books" by Newman Levy

"Guestroom Books" by Newman Levy (The New Yorker, April 12, 1930).

Beside my chaste and downy cot
There stands a goodly number
Of stately tomes of prose and pomes
To lull the guest to slumber.

The verse of T. S. Eliot,
A copy of "Ulysses,"
As though to say "No place you'll stay
So cultured is as this is."

The works (in French) of Baudelaire,
And Keats "Epipsychidion"
And next to it The Holy Writ
Purloined, I fear, from Gideon.

A goodly and narcotic list
Of literary glories,
While down below my host, I know,
Is reading Snappy Stories.