The Little Professor

How they got to America

Mom the Retired School Administrator has recently started looking into the family genealogy--which can be tricky when all the names are a) anglicized from something that has been b) transliterated.  Right now, she's pursuing one of the wealthier branches of the family, the Wilsons.  By which we actually mean the Voloshins.  Or the Wolozhins.  (See under: transliteration.)  The Wilsons/Voloshins/Wolozhins owned a department store in Kiev--in fact, according to family lore, it was the first department store in Kiev--which allowed them to enter the USA with $$$; alas, they had less $$$ after they tried farming in Pennsylvania.  (Er, long story.  Perhaps this is the genetic explanation for my lack of interest in things either agricultural or horticultural.)  They then relocated to Brooklyn, which seems like a somewhat more logical destination for the former owners of a department store than rural Pennsylvania.  In any event, just yesterday Mom found the ship on which they arrived at Castle Garden (not Ellis Island) in the early 1890s.

Existential cry

Rats! The book I wanted to assign has gone out of print!

(I was reassigned to a class that I haven't taught since 2001, and the disappearance of several novels from the known universe is wreaking havoc with my poor syllabus.) 

My Year in Books:with a Postscript on GoogleBooks

• Favorite literary fiction: Briege Duffaud, A Wreath Upon the Dead; Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic; Akira Yoshimura, Shipwrecks; Jim Crace, Being Dead; Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen; Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries.
• Favorite mysteries: Ian Rankin, Exit Music; James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia.
• "Well, that was...different": Douglas Martin, Branwell.
• Favorite exercise in intellectual and physical weight-lifting: Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, & Reputations.
• Favorite scholarly work having nothing to do with the Victorian period: Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe.
• Work of literary criticism that didn't quite do what its promotional materials said it did: Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature.  (I'm not complaining, I hasten to add--it's quite a good book.)
• Favorite Victorian novel, read for the first time: Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, by One of the Firm.
• Favorite reread Victorian novel: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
• Victorian novel that did not improve upon rereading: Bram Stoker, Dracula.
• Book that my freshmen somehow managed to survive: J. M. Coetzee, Foe.
• Book that made my freshmen say "Huh?!": a couple of chapters of Varney the Vampire.  (Different group of freshmen.)
• Victorian religious novelist who was easiest to tolerate: A. D. Crake.
• Biggest let-down: Kate Grenville, The Secret River.
• Book I could not force myself to finish: Jane Bowles, My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles. 
• Book that had me contemplating the editorial use-value of a hatchet: Dan Simmons, The Terror.
• Most welcome Choice review copy (because there was no way on this green earth that I could afford the book otherwise): Murray Pittock, ed., The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (retails at just $250!).
• Favorite free books:  a lifetime's supply of Victorian Christian periodicals.
• Favorite bargains: John N. King, Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture (just under $12, as opposed to $117); J. M. Klaver, The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (c. $30, as opposed to $209).
• Favorite super-rare Victorian novel acquired for almost nothing: Emily Sarah Holt, Margery's  Son; or, "Until He Find It."  A Fifteenth-Century Tale of the Court of Scotland.
• Books I was happiest to stumble across at the MLA: Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan; Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow.

And a special postscript on GoogleBooks:

• Favorite finds: Celia and Marion Moss, The Romance of Jewish History; E. C. Agnew, Geraldine.  (In case you're wondering, Geraldine was one of the best-known Catholic novels of the nineteenth century.  It's now completely forgotten.)
• Most useful finds: several Victorian Catholic novels, which are extremely difficult to hunt down in the wild; lots of random and very rare Victorian periodicals.
• Most helpful function: being able to "search inside the book" across thousands of volumes. 
• Most infuriating trend(I):  novels with missing pages.  Yes, I like having most of the novel.  No, I don't like having to send money to various libraries to photocopy random pages of text.  And yes, this does pose credibility problems for GoogleBooks: how useful will this project actually be for scholars if you cannot trust the text in front of you?
• Most infuriating trend (II): missing bibliographical data from twentieth-century periodicals.  Er, hello? How the [insert multiple expletives of your choice here] are you supposed to ILL the article if you are missing the year, the month, the volume, and the issue?!
• Most infuriating trend (III): snippet view.  Snippets of the margin (no text!).  Snippets of text above your search terms.  Snippets of text below your search terms.  Snippets of text entirely unrelated to the matter at hand.  Surely Google can do better than this?
• Most puzzling trend: out-of-copyright texts available only via snippet view--or, sometimes, not accessible at all. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure (Del Rey, 2007).  Medieval Jews, swords, fighting, trekking, etc.
• Angelique Richardson, ed., Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914 (Penguin, 2006).   Anthology of "New Woman" stories.
• Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (Routledge, 2007).  Reprint of Walder's 1981 monograph on Dickens' "liberal Protestant belief."

Seven random things meme

(Seen at various places, most recently at Sherman Dorn.  Consider yourself tagged if you want to play.)

• The first "grown-up book" I can remember reading is James Clavell's Shogun, which I undertook at the age of ten.  (It took me about a week to get through it.)   
• There are/were two modern dancers in my family: my late maternal grandfather was (briefly) in a WPA-sponsored company, and a cousin I've never met, Sasha Soreff, has her own company.
• I was a regional spelling bee champion in junior high.   
• Shopping is on my list of least favorite things to do (unless it's shopping for books, of course).
• I'm the shortest professor in the English department.  So far, my colleagues have failed to perceive the urgent necessity of hiring someone even shorter, but I remain optimistic.    
• I hate making phone calls.
• I'm a very (very...) distant cousin of a minor celebrity from the 1930s, the "human calculator" Salo Finkelstein. 

Department of creative shelving

Having survived my flight to Chicago (the plane arrived at O'Hare ahead of schedule--can this possibly be the right place?!), I hopped aboard the (renamed) #6 express bus and schlepped myself down to Hyde Park, where I spent a couple of hours hanging out in Powell's and the Regenstein library.  In any event, while in Powell's, I was bemused to discover Cecil Lang's complete edition of A. C. Swinburne's letters, shelved in...the theology section.  Next to Richard Swinburne.  I'm not sure R. Swinburne would altogether appreciate the error... 

Dance break: Jose Greco

Here's a brief flamenco solo by the late Jose Greco. 

(I must say that MLA presentations might be made more entertaining with a dollop of flamenco here and there.) 

Slightly confused

This Jew is heading off for a Christmas dinner at a Catholic friend's house, where I'll be frying latkes to go along with the roast pork.  Whee!

The Broken Lands and The Terror: Two Novels about the Franklin Expedition

Winter seemed an appropriate time to buckle down to Robert Edric's The Broken Lands: A Novel of Arctic Disaster (1992; rpt. 2003) and Dan Simmons' The Terror (2007).  Both novels speculate about the still unsolved fate of the Franklin expedition, with some overlap that derives from their shared sources; in particular, Edric and Simmons agree that the men died at least in part from lead poisoning and/or food poisoning. Genre-wise, however, the novels are quite different: The Broken Lands is a historical novel in the realist mode, while The Terror is historical Gothic (cf. Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor).  Unfortunately, neither novel proved particularly satisfying...

Told in the third person, The Broken Lands features sparse dialog and large quantities of exposition.  The narrative proceeds in linear fashion, from the ships' departure to the expedition's eventual fatal attempt to walk to safety; it opens and concludes with the Erebus' James Fitzjames , who provides the novel's dominant POV.  Atop the Fitzjames "loop" is a more ironic reversal: the contrast between the celebratory dinner that marks the expedition's departure (23) and the starvation that marks its end.  Not surprisingly, the novel focuses on the primal battle against both the elements and the crews' own bodies.  This is not a philosophical novel, and Edric spends little time meditating on the expedition's significance, historical, ideological, or otherwise--although Dr. Goodsir angrily exclaims, "What have we done but pitted our strength against the ice, barging and blasting our way into this miserable dead-end?" (293)  Goodsir's frustration permeates the narrative, as the characters find themselves faced with pointless orders and rapidly-decaying food.  Juxtaposed against the expedition's failure to thrive are the Eskimos, whose near-total indifference to the Europeans personifies nature's equal lack of concern; on the novel's penultimate page, one hunter studies Fitzjames and his companion, then "stare[s] with greater interest at the contents of the cabin all around them" (368).  The crew find themselves either actively repulsed by their surroundings or simply absorbed into them.  In this novel, the expedition constitutes not so much a heroic failure as a tragedy of pointlessness.

I've now read three of Edric's novels, and all of them are narrated in the same flat, affectless, rather stilted prose.  Here, Edric frequently strips emotion from the dialog and inserts it into description--e.g., "Crozier was the first to his feet.  'But surely navigable by us along a good deal of its length,' he said, masking his anger at the realization that his own opinion had not been sought in advance of Franklin announcing his decision" (60).  The characters are not well-differentiated by voice, and often seem interchangeable.  Franklin, in particular, is a cipher.  Much of the text aspires to a kind of documentary tone, largely free of figurative language or any other sort of rhetorical flourish (a rare exception occurs near the end, when Fitzjames studies some photographs in a series of anaphoristic, parallel sentences); while this approach has its benefits during the gorier scenes, like an early amputation or various descriptions of scurvy, it ultimately drains the narrative of urgency.  For a novel about impending death by cold and starvation, The Broken Lands is surprisingly free from tension.

By contrast, The Terror is decidedly overstuffed--and not just because it's over 760 pages long, perilously close to one of Stephen King's clunkier doorstops (think It).  Besides the usual run of ice, starvation, and scurvy, Simmons includes murder, cannibalism,  second sight, and Inuit folklore (including Sedna).  Written from multiple POVs, the narrative tracks the expedition's simultaneous struggles against Arctic cold and a very unpleasant carnivorous beastie, dubbed "the Terror" (to go along with The Terror), which turns out to be the primeval result of a battle between the gods.   This is very much imperial Gothic: the European explorer or colonizer, floundering about in unfamiliar lands with their own deep history, finds himself under siege by a supernatural Other whose behavior cannot be controlled by "normal" (Western, Christian, whatever) methods.  (Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" is a famous example.)  In this case, both the Arctic and the Tuunbaq destroy those who want to appropriate the ice for their own purposes.  Simmons makes no attempt to conceal the political allegory involved:

The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq's domain was finally invaded by the pale people--the kabloona--it would be the beginning of the End of Times.  Poisoned by the kabloonas' pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die.  The Real People would forget their ways and their language.  Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair.  Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives.  The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams.  (710)

The Tuunbaq is thus a double-edged sword, but one which can be controlled by a chosen few who relinquish their tongues (literally) in order to worship it.  Those few are also gifted with second sight, which is not confined to the Inuit; the one officer who survives the novel does so by relinquishing his European identity (ultimately symbolized by his destruction of the remaining ship), marrying an Inuit, and giving up his tongue to the Tuunbaq, in a moment explicitly associated with that most conventionally Gothic religion, Roman Catholicism.  (In a sense, the officer's embrace of the Tuunbaq atones for his childhood anxiety about taking communion in a Catholic church.)  Cultural assimilation becomes the route to both physical and spiritual survival, healing the wounds left by European national and class prejudices. 

While Simmons' prose style is undeniably livelier than Edric's, salted with idiom and profanity, the book suffers from two key problems.  First, while I'm always anxious about suggesting that a novel might have profited from better editing...really, The Terror might have profited from better editing.  Several set-pieces--Crozier's hallucinations during DTs, an elaborate carnival sequence, one man's escape from the Tuunbaq--begin tautly, then slowly run out of steam as they continue for far too long.  At other times, Simmons repeats himself unnecessarily.  Overall, the story feels padded--and here's where our second problem arises.  The novel doesn't need the Tuunbaq.  Between the Arctic and the canned food, the men are already in terrible danger; the demon feels superfluous.   Nor, for some reason, is the Tuunbaq especially frightening, perhaps because it comes across as the love child of Harold, the yeti who hangs out in the Matterhorn Bobsleds, and Armus, the evil oil slick that did in Tasha Yar .  Although I can see what Simmons was attempting to do with the Tuunbaq, he never really justifies its presence as a plot element.  There's a much tighter narrative in here, screaming to be let out. 

APA Guide to Chicago

The American Philological Association, which is blowing into town as soon as the MLA leaves, has published this handy rundown of affordable Chicago restaurants and attractions.