covert classics

Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland - Through the Looking Glass
Mark Twain:  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Charles Dickens : Oliver Twist - A Tale of Two Cities
Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
Jules Verne: A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Washington Irving: Rip van Winkle

Although all of these authors wrote books that became famous as stories for children I don't think any of them wrote the books strictly for children. Like most great children's classics, the authors used the unintimidating forum of children's literature to speak to people of all ages with the hope that somehow we'd understand the deeper messages they conveyed.

For the sake of space I've left a number of wonderful books off the list but the one I want to mention now is Rudyard Kipling. When we say "The Jungle Book" most of us invariably think of Disney's films, both animated and live action, that have become the norm for Rudyard Kipling's immortal children's stories. While the Disney interpretation is fun and enchanting, it makes a dramatic departure from the actual stories and takes considerable creative license in telling just a part of the Kipling stories. Even what we get from Disney falls far short of the applicable parts of Kipling's original that Disney used. What? Kaa, the snake, as Mowgli's friend and powerful ally? What? A deeper story of Mowgli's experience as a wolf and his relationships with Mother wolf and Father wolf? Oh yes, much, much more.

Kipling's original masterpiece also includes several other wonderful chapters about the continuing adventures of Mowgli and also adds the marvelous tale of "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," the heroic mongoose whose battles with wicked cobras in an Indian garden easily matches Mowgli's showdowns with Shere Khan.

The book also includes the tale of "The White Seal." This short chapter of "The Jungle Book(s)" provides a wonderful commentary, in the form of animal parable, on human society, competition, male ego and human pride. Our hero, Kotick, the white seal, through his fearless explorations and his willingness to fight for a dream, changes the minds of his parents, his peers and his society for the better. The invitation to each of us is very clear to find and free the white seal that exists in all of us.

If you haven't seen the Disney film in a while I thought I'd share what was probably everyone's favorite scene when Baloo (Phil Harris) and King Louis the orangutan (Louis Prima) sing a scat duet (never mind Sebastian Cabot as Bagheera the worried black panther):



The pictures here are copies of the Jungle Book illustrations done by the brilliant 19th century watercolorists, Maurice and Edward Detmold.

The other cool thing about all of these books is that they're cheap and easily available.
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gone baroque

If anyone has wondered about my slightly longer than usual recent absence, I present the above photograph as a perfectly reasonable excuse, and one instantly to be recognized by any reader who has found him/her self caught up in Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque Cycle'. The three volumes, at about 900 pages each, were originally published in 2003 and 2004, and that was when I read them last. I've always intended to repeat the experience, thinking they'd come in handy for some long, dark winter evenings, but a few weeks ago at the beginning of our current heatwave I found myself drawn to the shelf where they've been sitting, picked up 'Quicksilver', and dove in. What a refreshing treat it was.

Taking place roughly between 1660 and 1715, The Baroque Cycle covers a period in which many of the foundations of our world are laid down. Things we take for granted now, like science, mathematics and currency weren’t obvious as our culture stepped away from the dark ages. What Stephenson did  is to take us through a period rich in intrigue, discoveries and innovation to show where the system of our world comes from.

There are three main fictional characters who drive the novel - all of whom could well be described as larger than life personalities. The first one we meet is Daniel Waterhouse, an eminent Natural Philosopher, member of the recently established Royal Society, and close friend of Isaac Newton. As the story begins we find him at his recently established Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts (circa 1714, in a log cabin). The second main character is Jack Shaftoe, (known as Half-Cocked Jack - you must read to find out why) an English vagabond who by chance takes up with the Polish army at the siege of Vienna, meets and kills a Janissary, and in the process rescues the third character, a young slave girl from the oddly named island of Qwghlm, a fictional place that resembles the Outer Hebrides of Great Britain.

Through the course of the books, these fictional characters interact with all sorts of famous historical figures, from Newton and Leibniz to Kings (James II, William III, Louis XIV), Queens, Electors, a young Ben Franklin, Peter the Great and John Locke, just to name a few. Their extraordinary adventures take them across Europe, the Middle East, India, the Americas, and Japan. There are thrilling pirate, naval and ground battles, political intrigues, poisonings, and sword fights. Amazingly enough, the history described is extremely accurate as I discovered while doing follow-up searches about specific topics that interested me as I read.

I admit I have a few nerd-like tendencies but even more I love to be entertained while being educated. I read an interview done by the Guardian shortly after the novel was first published and it appears Neal Stephenson has views about teaching that would be nice to see enacted:

'History is dull unless there's a yarn in it. A yarn by definition has to be about a small number of individuals who are in some kind of an interesting situation. It is, therefore, a rather fine-grained kind of history. But history teachers in schools are not allowed to teach that way. Instead they are told to teach a class called something like "The Ancient World" or (in this country) "American History." And this makes it impossible for them to teach at the fine-grained level of individual yarns; it filters out all the interesting content and leaves only the dull stuff. If I were running a school I would begin by chucking all of those courses into the dustbin. In place of "American History" I'd have the kids read Cabeza de Vaca, or a biography of Jim Bowie.'


You may have noticed there's another of his books in the photo, 'The Cryptonomicon'. It was written before 'The Baroque Cycle' and takes place during WWII and our era but the research done for it inspired the larger book. This time I'll read it second.

.. and I'll try not to be gone so long.
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Have you read anything interesting this summer?

what are words worth?

This is about some books I can't find. I think I had them here in Portland and if so, I must have loaned them to someone who forgot to return them or, knowing me, I probably gave them away. Italo Calvino's 'Cosmicomics' and 't-zero' would make perfect gifts for anyone who loves to read. In less than a paragraph, he can convey the vastness of the universe; in less than a chapter, he can describe the beauty of primeval Earth. It's amazing.

While looking for a place to buy the complete collection (both books plus some stories not published before) I found some paintings by Yan Nascimbene who began illustrating Italo Calvino's work a few years ago. They're beautiful paintings and this one certainly hints at Calvino's magic but I rather hope he doesn't attempt to illustrate my two favorites. These tales are best read and internalized in the old fashioned way. Visual media, even paintings by masters, can't compete with nuanced depths of well written prose or poetry.

Qfwfq is the narrator of 'Cosmicomics' and although it's hard to say simply who or what Qfwfq is, the truth is it doesn't matter because even though the stories are surreal they are quite ordinary events - except that they happen in quite un-ordinary contexts. Qfwfq may be understood as a sort of embodiment of life spirit, a being who has existed - along with family and friends - since the dawn of time.

In the beginning, before the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. Qfwfq can tell you about it: He was there.

"Naturally, we were all there—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time, either: What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?"

All at One Point, in which people are "packed in like sardines," along with their furniture, their laundry, "all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe." They are stuck there until one of them, Mrs. Ph(i)nk0, exclaims, "Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd like to make some tagliatelle for you boys!" At that moment, Qfwfq and the others begin to picture "the space that her round arms would occupy," the space for the dough, the flour, the wheat for the flour, the sun on the wheat, the galaxy to harbor the sun . .

Calvino succeeds in making the unimaginable accessible to us, so that we can begin, at least mentally, to take leaps that span light-years.

"And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her...in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries."

While looking for excerpts to share I also came across his description of the time when the moon and earth were much, much closer than they are today. It's not a description you'd find in any astronomy text but his version is definitely a lot more fun to read:

At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth's waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.

How well I know!--old Qfwfq cried--the rest of you can't remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full--nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light--it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind; and when she was waxing, she came forward with her horns so low she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there. But the whole business of the Moon's phases worked in a different way then: because the distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits, and the angles of something or other, I forget what; as for eclipses, with the Earth and Moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute: naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly, first one, then the other.

Orbit? Oh, elliptical, of course: for a while it would huddle against us and then it would take flight for a while. The tides, when the Moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair's-breadth; well, let's say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

In these stories linked together to describe the beginnings of everything and the end of some things human emotion is the one constant. In the Cosmicomics we discover jealousy, irritation, pride, generosity, and love. The most beautiful of all the stories may be that one quoted at the start, "In the act of making pasta, the universe can be imagined." In that moment of generosity, imagination, and love, Calvino says, our world and all of us were born.

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