Toys in the Age of Wonder

My new book has been published.

I am here announcing it . . . about a month late. Am I laggard in my affections? (Where in the world does that line come from?) Actually, I rather like this book. I have lived with it for ten years, and have struggled over its myriad subjects, facts, and ideas for many more. It has its flaws, but sits all the same among my most important efforts, in the arts.

Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society, and the Symbolism of Play brings together many things. My personally favored title, Wonder Tales, Toys, and the World that Swallowed Itself, I believe does convey some of the book's breadth. In it, I am talking much less about science fiction than the wonder tale; I am thinking about toys whether they were dimestore baubles or Emerson's "toys that infatuate men and which they play for;" and I am exploring the West's efforts to technically envelope the human sphere — a "consolidated civilization scheme," as I recall a character saying, in one story I discuss. I speak about toy history, history of science, novels, poetry, comic strips, lexical changes, and cultural changes. I draw in works by Poe and Verne, in particular, and by many other authors along the way — with "the way" moving mainly along a time-line from 1859 to 1957-8. My method is cultural criticism, on model of Lewis Mumford, with further guidance taken from the writings of Northrup Frye and Van Wyck Brooks — among, again, many others.

The book's illustrations, all in black and white, make it other than the glossy and colorful affairs which some among my earlier ones were. The items pictured, however, show what sorts of things fascinate me: illustrations from both children's and older-reader books; photographs of children with toys; catalog pages; postcards; World's Fair images and memorabilia; and the toys themselves, children's and adult — anything, in other words, that conveys the symbolic reality that prevails, to my point of view, over the concrete, in culture.

I should note that my announcement's delay comes from concern and circumstance. I did and do wonder: should I, indeed, make a quiet noise about this, and act as though the book's publication might rank in any way against the troubles of our time — the pandemic, the criminal political "leadership," the bought-and-sold legislatures, the bestial police actions, the wildfires, the extinctions, the dying of the only economy that truly matters, which is the economy of life on Earth?

The book does rank, in a way, and not only because it happened to become a fact in this particular time. It ranks, in its small way, because, for the patient few who read it, it will help elucidate how it is that we placed ourselves into these times which encompass our lives. Moreover, it discusses the process by which our present conditions came into being.

A circumstance working into this announcement's delay came about from my having an "outdated" computer system which my blog's host decided to stop recognizing or allowing, a few months ago. Having limited means, limited technical savvy, and a will-to-succeed that often ends up absorbed in soup-makings, dishwater, and garden dirt, it took me quite a while to reach that point in which I could not only pencil these words but also publish them electronically here.

My sympathy for those poorer than I am has grown quite keen. So much activity has shifted on-line during the pandemic that ever more individuals are, literally, being virtually excluded from society. While a part of society is reflected off and conducted by the shell of satellites circling Earth, another part goes unreflected.

Now myself enabled, until that point when I am granted obsolescence once again by our technological shell, I propose to make some quiet noise in relation to my book — with the hope that people will understand that if I make myself a nuisance — oh, if only! — I do so not to advance my fortunes, which will grow by little more than nothing from this effort, but to advance my society's, in however microscopic a manner.

Cheers . . .

P.S. The book has a higher price-tag than I might wish. When your nearest library reopens, please make a request for it.

The Cask of Purple ... and Poe's Prose

The other day my eye caught on a line written by a writer with experience, who was giving advice to one without:

"I can't advise on how to make one's writing more Poe-like because I don't admire purple prose."

It being his birthday today I feel it only fitting to let Poe's prematurely buried spirit utter its "Nemo me impune lacessit." To say Poe's prose is purple is to call it, as this writer also does, "the overwrought, some say hysterical, prose of Poe." This writer offers it as representing one end of the writing spectrum, with the "minimalist approach as used by Carver and at his best Hemingway" as the other.

To say some among Poe's narrators are overwrought and sometimes hysterical seems to me fine, as a statement. So does saying that some among Poe's narrators are saturated with rationality. We could also say that some are murderous, because of their being actually murderers; or that some are witty. Poe himself takes no place among the characters in his stories. His stories require that their narrators be someone other than Edgar, in order to work.

Clearly Poe put words in his narrators' mouths, or writing hands. I hope no one sees this as a damning observation: for he did so with a fine command of his materials.

Clearly, too, Poe worked in a literary atmosphere influenced by the Gothic; and his genius likely found this influence inescapable because complete escape offered no particular attractions. Yet his vision arose from within a sphere of other influences, as well, including that of Milton—although some readers may regard Milton, too, as "overwrought."

In any case, even if an author's narrator's expressions might seem to do violet violence to the English tongue, for someone to take that one narrator's narrative rhetoric from among the variety to be found within that author's works, and then to glue that particular rhetoric-name as a generalization upon that author's prose, strikes me as unfair to the author, and unbecoming to the one so gluing.

One might as well call "The Cask of Amontillado" purple in its prose because its hapless character Fortunato, who is not the narrator, in essence purples himself with wine.

Poe's prose offers many examples of his utter clarity of expression, as well as his economy of expression. These should offer correction enough to any accusation of purpleness in his prose.

(At a time when I was reading more Hemingway than I have in recent years I happened to read "Amontillado" for what seemed the first time. It may well have been my first time as an adult reader. I recall clearly my impression upon emerging from it that Hemingway would never have become the writer he did without Poe's story to point American letters in the direction it did.)

While as a reader I relish some wildly absurd passages in Poe's stories, I cannot call his prose in general wildly absurd, even as to its content. The absurd, however, has its place as a technique in his tool box. Similarly we would find Gothic excess to be a technique in his tool box. Similarly, too, we would find expressive restraint.

Among his stories we encounter some among the most analytically constructed works we ever will. In thinking and speaking about Poe we need to keep in mind his distinct and distinctive grasp of literary craft.

Grapes going into a crush destined to become Amontillado, by the way, I imagine must be darkly purple. Any excess of color falls away, however, by the time of casking. This happens to some degree naturally during the wine-making process.

Yet it happens to some degree, too, thanks to the skill of the winemaker.

Cheers ...

A Poem for a Birthday

This morning I wrote, and this evening over a scotch read aloud to Martha,the following lines (copyright 2012 Mark Rich):

He seizes us by the roots of our hair.
I am not speaking of fear: we pass
beneath an arch of Gothic archness
to Modernity, under the guidance of Poe.
The symbols of the Moderns awaken
in his pages. How to perceive
the shadow culture haunting the century
after his death if not by peering
into the shades of his? Such stirring
we feel in our scalps reveals stirrings
of learning. We, the post-Moderns, thought
we knew it all. How shocking, to love
being forced to learn, and learn better.

This short poem I suppose should bear the title, "Lines Written on Poe's Birthday."

Cheers ...

A Legacy Less Thorny

To continue my notes concerning the shadow of Eliot: what seems to me surprising is that I could be for so long so oblivious to his echoing similarity to Poe.

A suspicion that occurs to me is that I was resisting echoing Eliot's cadences myself to such a degree that I kept myself from hearing those cadences elsewhere.

I think the musical influence, however, was of most significant impact. I responded (albeit with a great deal of incomprehension) to Pound's poetic effluences -- and as I recall Pound had a pivotal role to play in the revival of J.S. Bach -- another writer to whose work I responded (albeit with a great deal of wrong notes and finger-tangling).

"Emotional enervation" -- one of Wilson's descriptors, as I recall, for Eliot's works. How nice not to be young any more, so that even the mere idea of an emotionally enervated poise, for rhetorical purposes, seems ridiculous. And how nice to begin hearing a particular metric without feeling the restraining tug of reservation ... to understand poetic lines in the light of a tradition that included Eliot but which cannot be said to have been his.

Cheers ...

The Illusion of the Legacy

As I noted earlier, I faced the difficulty of accepting, or warding off, the influence of a verbally powerful Modern. The familiar intonations of his poems had a way of locking into the workings of the creative mind and bending and swaying and affecting whatever that mind was attempting to voice. Those familiar tones came from Eliot -- and came accompanied by the disturbing baggage of his flirtation with the political philosophy -- if you wish to call it philosophy -- that came near to destroying Europe in the early 20th.

Edmund Wilson pointed out to what degree Eliot owed his apparent inventiveness and even his metrical sense to French Symbolist precedent. Discovering Wilson's insights, not long ago, did much to relieve my mind -- for it had seemed hard to imagine such a champion of the sere, dried and defeated, as Eliot was, to also be as commandingly inventive as he seemed.

I wonder now if it might not have been that tension itself that gave Eliot's poems much of their power.

The other part of the puzzle -- I want to say, "of course" -- is Poe. Back in the 1980s, for some reason, I readily saw that Eliot's critical approach was not dissimilar to Poe's. For some reason I failed to have the same understanding of the relation between the Poe and Eliot metrical senses ... I think because I was struggling to such a degree myself with a personal metrical sense that was being unnecessarily complicated through, but perhaps fertilized by, so much study of musical notation and musical composition.

Cheers ...

The Dregs of Memory and Awareness

Last night in re-reading a favorite writer I happened upon this line: " ... a contemptible falsehood -- a poor hoax -- the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner." So I must have run across this phrase before, "penny-a-liner," for hack writer.

I wrote down part of Poe's line, to help me remember.

To show that my mind even in this rediscovery was not wholly alert, I note that this morning I was thinking about "racking," a word not used in the winemaking sense by non-winemakers nor non-brewers, so far as I know. Racking refers to using some means to draw the clear liquid off the sludge or dregs that will accumulate at the bottom of a fermenting vessel.

The other day I was doing my racking quite inefficiently. Some of the wine we made last summer and fall went into odd-sized secondary fermenters, because we were running out of gallon jugs. Since we have no siphon-pump to fit in a smaller-size bottle, "racking" a liter bottle, for instance, means pouring it off into another same-size bottle -- as carefully as possible, to minimize the inevitable stirring-up of the yeast that has settled out.

So this morning in thinking about racking, it struck me that, of course, the dregs or sludge is called "the lees." I had read the word in Poe's line thinking it more-or-less meant dregs, without thinking past that meaning to its winemaking reference. I felt pleased enough about finding "penny-a-liner" -- and I could have felt twice so.

Cheers ...