Apostle of Epistles pt. 1

I watched a gripping film recently that some of you who subscribe (but never comment except in email!) may have seen titled We Need to Talk About Kevin.  I noticed on the menu list that there was contained within, an interview with the author of the  novel about which the book was written.  With a desire for eager consumption, my daughter and I selected this option.  We were to be grievously injured by it. Not only did this detestable (in my opinion from 30 seconds of an interview) woman seem to have a narrow view of motherhood, postpartum depression, and mental illnesses in children, but she also opened her mouth and vomited all over the epistolary novel!

I had intended to read it, as everyone who spends more than 5 minutes in serious conversation with me knows that the portion of air I breathe that is not my children belongs to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the subsequent movies it spawned.

However, the author, with her spewing verbiage on camera, turned me off. She stated her book was tested to some readers and it was suggested that she make it a series of letters so she simply "stuck Dear" at the beginning of each chapter and " Love," at the end. "And there you have it. An epistolary."

To write an effective epistolary, one must needs employ such a thing as talent, rather than the childish idea that letters begin with Dear and end with Love.  Epistolaries, likewise, need not be completed with letters.  Epistolaries may rely upon only what one is told in a series of legal documents discovered in the briefcase of a dead man.  An epistolary may tell its story through the eyes, and diary,  of a young girl, hiding for her life in the middle of a deadly crusade against her people.  Furthermore, an epistolary's story may unfold through newspaper articles, the importance of which may increase to the reader as the page number in the publication decreases and becomes a very vocal portion of the story itself!  And the writer of the epistolary novel must have eloquence that may be ignored in typical modes of conveying stories to readers.

So, I have decided to come up with a list of epistolary novels that will get you on your feet if you decide to check out this unique and exciting form of literature.  And this time, tell me which ones you like, or reasons you don't like them!

Historical Fiction

1.  Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
2.  Dracula by Bram Stoker
3.  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4.  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
5.  Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
6.  Poor Folk by Dostoyevski
7.  The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder

For Young People

1.  Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney
2.  Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks
3.  The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
4.  The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson
5.  Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
6.  Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey by Margaret Peterson Haddix
7.  Kathleen, Please Come Home by Scott O'dell

Contemporary

1.  Bridget Jones' Diary by Helen Fielding
2.  Diary: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk
3.  Fan Mail by Ronald Munson
4.  The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
5.  The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers
6.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
7.  Overqualified by Joey Comeau

Pontypool's Secret PULP Origins! (Pulp Fiction Part 4)

I intended to address fans of the tantalizingly written novel, but if you've just seen the movie, that works, too.  Most of us were rendered speechless in 2008 with the release of the movie Pontypool, set in the town of the same name in Canada, wherein a zombie-like virus envelopes a county, spreading through the bacterium of words. However, unbeknownst to some, a novel preceded the movie.

The movie Pontypool took one chapter late in the novel and centered around it and the limited connection with the towns surrounding that were falling rapidly into chaos.  Even more unbeknownst to move fans,( and to me until a friend bestowed upon me the short story written by H.P. Lovecraft's cohort Henry Kuttner in 1943) Mr. Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool, most likely did not have divine inspiration when he came up with his tale of semantic terror.

Enter Mr. Henry Kuttner, pulp terrorist. He deserves a post all his own, so I will not go into detail about him now. However, his story is another story.

Nothing But Gingerbread Left.

In the story, a professor and one of his grad students are having a discussion while the professor's teenage son sits in the background muttering a silly schoolyard sing-song rhyme that gets stuck in their heads.  At the forefront of their minds is the war in Europe and the spread of Hitler's propaganda.  Both scholars, who are German-as-a-second-language speakers, devise a scheme wherein they will use the pattern, rhythm, and particularities of the German language to write a nonsensical verse, say it for a group of German prisoners of war, and analyze the results.

Results, to whit, that are the undoubted origins of Mr. Burgess' Pontypool novel.

The link below provides a skip over to the short story in whole. There are some annoying errors in format, but these are easily ignored, for the most part.  The story is very short, 15 or 20 minute read for us logophiles, 5 or 10 for everyone else. If you have to ask why it takes some of us longer, then praise the lord that you are not damned to read blissful words and phrases three or four times, then call up a friend and read them aloud for as long as the friend will tolerate it.

               Henry Kuttner's Nothing But Gingerbread Left (1943)

Opinions? Comparisons? Curses?

Pulp Fiction Unpacked! Part 1

And I don’t mean the movie Pulp Fiction. If you need someone to explain that to you, then you may be of too sensitive a constitution to get into the deep end of the pulp pool!


I mean the genre that created genres, defined men, and gave evil a face.

Emerging from the frivolous dime novels of the last half of the 18th century, pulp magazines opened the wide world to the average Joe.

History
There assuredly are factors that contribute to the popularity of the pulp magazines in their hay day that go beyond the inexpensive cover price. For one thing, in the years following the civil war, elementary and secondary school enrollment for African Americans increased dramatically. By 1880, around 35% of black youth were registered in school, compared with 10% in 1870. Even into the 1920s the school enrollment rate was at its highest for all races of children in America. Government attention was also focused on education, with the first annual report of the Office of Education in 1869. The report focused on informing congress yearly the condition and progress of American education. During the 1940s, an increase in higher education began to push others to continue at least through high school when the trend had been a completion of education in the 8th grade.

So it’s easy to see that the whole attitude of the country toward literacy and education of all people had taken a swift kick in the pants.

In 1870, 20% of Americans age 14 and over were illiterate. By 1920, the number had dropped to 6%. And with this new voracious appetite for knowledge came what I’d like to think was dissatisfaction with their mundane existence. After all, dissatisfaction is from whence comes the best invention.

The pulp business

The new educated masses had jobs which meant they wanted things. They were tied down to what they now realized were boring existences. Enter the story writer. Of course, no one could afford a $12 paperback in those times, so crafty publishers took the cheapest bits of paper leftovers, paid writers barely enough to keep themselves in typewriter ink, and the pulp magazine was born.

The new bourgeois of literacy, with ten cents to spare, converged on the magazine racks with a vengeance. Big bosomed damsels, square-jawed gangsters, grinning heroes, mammoth-sized tigers, and haberdashered aliens. Inside those colorful covers were three or four tickets to other worlds.

Whatever your taste, the pulp publishers would pay someone peanuts to write to you. There were military adventures, sexy trysts, mysticism from the dark continent. And thanks to the pulp era, the science fiction and hard-boiled detective genres facilitated the births of generations of geeks!

H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and the Weird Tales magazine brought unknowable creatures to life. Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard ushered in an era of exploration beyond our Earthly shores. While back in deepest Africa, Tarzan was being adopted by apes.

And if you think that Trekkies invented the fan convention, think again! Long before mere humans were learning proper Klingon, pulp fans in the 1960s were organizing conventions.

The end?

World War II brought not only fear of real world terrors, but rationings of everything, including paper. Thus began the demise of the pulp genre. But was it the end?

From the murky depths of the Internet, a rise in the popularity of pulp has been seen. Despite the encroaching terror of the viral video, the Kryptonite of Tila Tequila, and the staggering atrocities of bulletin boards, real heroes reemerge in the form of Dashiell Hammett on ebook, and reprinting of 1930s magazines so that all may acquire the knowledge that Doc Savage was the first man to have a Fortress of Solitude!

Has pulp fiction seen it’s end?

I think not, Drummond. I believe that we shall meet again!

...end of part one.  Tune in next time for Pulp Heroes...EXPLAINED!

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I attempted to take my children to New Orleans to see Howl's Moving Castle at the Canal Street theatre, the closest place to my home that was showing it and that was about four hours away.  Unfortunately, when we attempted to go the 2nd night we were there the film had broken of the English dubbed version.  My kids were very young then and incapable of reading the subtitles as quickly as they went by.  We were crushed, needless to say and sat in the lobby of the old theatre trying to figure out what to do from that point on.  The ushers felt sorry for us and got the manager who let us see March of the Penguins for free.  It was great, but not what we had wanted.

When we finally got to see the film, I fell in love with it of course, like with all of Miyazaki's work.  Howl was a lovely-drawn character with a depth that was impossible to hit on in a short movie.  Events were hinted at that stuck with me, sparking my imagination to figure out what they meant and what was going on behind the scenes outside the main plot of the movie.  Of course I had no idea there was a book!

It was written when I was a child and was something I would have adored.  But I think I appreciated it more having discovered it at this age.  Isn't that the way it is with so much of what we see in life? True appreciation only comes with age, just as Sophie learned in the book.

The novel is written in a fast-paced, entertainingly worded prose that carried me through the novel at such a rapid pace that I don't remember much else of the three days I spent reading it between homework assignments and driving kids about.  It is the perfect supliment to the movie. Wait, strike that, reverse it.

While the basic plot of Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer trying to break curses remains intact, and a few of the subplots, there are even more! The movie weaves several threads of the story together so that we get a breathtaking view of the world in which Howl operates.  But the book takes us there.  Through all the doorways, across the Waste, and into modern day Wales!

Sophie's family even has a major plot line! Watching the movie does not spoil anything about the book! You may think you will know how it ends, but do not be so sure! I fell in love with Howl all over again, seeing him as even more of a womanizing rogue in the novel than they dare portray in the movie.  I would classify the novel as fantasy, but it is not the sort of fantasy that takes all your concentration attempting to envision alien lands, pronounce impossible names with too many vowels, and wading through chapter upon chapter of history and genealogy.  It is humorous, heartwarming, tense, scary, and romantic.  If you've seen the movie, you have not seen the whole story.  I am in the process of tracking down more of Diana Wynne Jones' work.

My Reading Challenge

On the right hand sidebar of my blog I've listed about 60 or 70 books that I've never read.  The school I attended until my last few high school years did not have a focus on literature for whatever reason, so the books that are often required reading for high schoolers, I never read. Of course, I was never seen without a book in my face. Cheerleading practice, I was sitting with a book until everyone got there (usually a horror novel to gross out the other girls).  In the dressing room at ballet school I was reading (usually a novel or biography of famous prima ballerinas or primier danseurs).  And in bed at night or in my treehouse I was usually reading some spanning epic like Count of Monte Cristo or Anna Karenina or Gone With the Wind.

History in novels was always an attraction for me.  The Alienist, Sherlock Holmes, the French Revolution, Jack the Ripper, the Spanish Inquisition.  I read Count of Monte Crist, of over 1000 pages, when I was 14! But I didn't read Anne Frank's diary. I read Hamlet when I was 12, but I didn't have the required (for other schools) Julius Caesar.

So what I've done here is look over twenty or so greatest books lists, and seek suggestions from others which did not go over well (forcing me to assume that the majority of people I know do not read), and compile a list of what I think are great novels that I have never read, or read so long ago that I do not remember enough about them.  I tried to pick works from across the board: German, Netherlands, Asia, Europe, Britain, America, men, women, classics, modern, horror, science fiction, fantasy, tear-jerkers, young adult, exploitative, political, etc.

I've toyed with the notion of creating a 2nd list of the greatest short stories or poems that I've not read because these are often over looked and have contributed to the advancement of the culture as much as novels.  We'll see. I have an ambitious list already!

I would like anyone who happens upon this blog to post a comment with any book, short story, poem, etc. that should be on my list but isn't.  Just put whether it is a novel, short story, etc. out to the side and the author if known.  I don't anticipate finishing this in any short time span, and I'm sure that I will close a few of them after 100 pages and never pick them up again.  The point isn't to torture myself; the point is to enrich my knowledge of what is out there to be consumed.