Reading the last few days:
Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which slides down easily and makes me feel like I can take deeper breaths than usual (physically and mentally) – Should you read this? YES!!! Read it!!!! It explains some of the underpinnings of my feelings about why we should not be “going to Mars”. (Sorry.) I always tell Danny he can go to the Moon when we are very old if he really insists but I will be here making healthy soil from compost and a lovely ecosystem for bugs, grubs, and fungus.
Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf – Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret – To go with the Haraway book. Useful background.
Fourth Grade Rats – a very annoying short children’s book I got on spec from a little free library and am putting right back out – It is about toxic masculinity I suppose where one boy persuades another, more kind and innocent boy that to really grow up, he must be a bully, and misbehave, and throw away all the toys he loves and his cartoon lunchbox and stuffed bear, etc. This doesn’t go well and our soft boi is miserable. Their moms discuss the situation and meet them with a mixture of sternness and laughing at them. Soft boi gets a hug and his stuffed bear is returned to him. That sounds nice but something about it annoyed the hell out of me. I think the part where the moms fix it. Figure yourself out! Jeez. So it is both putting the burden onto women, and also, condescending somehow. Also, sure fine maybe this would KIND OF happen at age 9 but try it in 5 years and see how it goes down.
Uncle Wiggly’s Fortune, by Howard R. Garis, in a splotchy pale green hardback from 1950, much like the ones I remember reading at my paternal grandparents’ beach house in the 70s as they were strangely short of books and yet had a large run, a whole shelf, of this Uncle Wiggly nonsense, which bored me even when I was small but I was desperate. I remember once starting to list out all the goofy chapter endings, where the author says something extra cornball and fake-down home, in a particular formula, like, “My! And if the butterfly don’t decide to take the grasshopper and use it for scissors to cut out a quilt pattern out of the tigerlillies to give to the post wagon man, then I’ll tell you the story of Uncle Wiggly and how he met the Littlest Hedgehog.” I made that one up, but let me find a real one. “If the parlor lamp doesn’t go out to a moving picture show and melt all the ice in the gas stove, the story will be about Uncle Wiggily and also some more about the horseshoe crab.” You may be able to imagine my childhood fascination (mingled with something a bit like horror, or snobbery) at these tag lines. They were foul, and boring, but I had to read them, and the only thing left to me was to overthink about the (horrible) style.
Looking it up now gives me a clue to where these books came from. Garis wrote a daily (!!!!) Uncle Wiggly story in the Newark News for over 50 years starting in 1910. My grandfather John A. Henry was born and raised in New Jersey (born in 1919) so he would have grown up reading this stuff maybe in the paper. It seems like a good theory – either he had some of these books as a kid, or he got them or was given them by his parents, to read to his children. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers them.
I guess we have to acknowledge Uncle Wiggly as a disabled protagonist – he walks, or hops, with a crutch.
Is he a manifestation of the African trickster rabbit? Even . . . a whitewashed one? Maybe! He is not very tricksy. But I could sort of see it.
I had also not realized Garis was a hugely prolific author not just for Uncle Wiggly but for a lot of the Stratemeyer syndicate books including early Bobbsey twins books. Probably the more boring of them.
As usual I spend more time writing about this nonsense than about the actually good soul-feeding book that I loved (Staying with the Trouble). Partly because i would have to think harder about what I’m saying.
I also read through a little new looking translation of Sallust (“How to Stop a Conspiracy”) which as I remember from some other reading/translation, is extremely confusing. To really understand what the hell is going on I would need to make a lot of little index cards for the cast of characters or generate an entire cheat sheet. Who said what, and who said who did what, and who said who said someone did something else, and for everything (this is the good part!) there is at least one other theory of what happened or some other group or different factions making different claims. Holy shit! Anyway, it also made me think again about Megalopolis which uses some of the names but none of the actual information or “plot” or anything you might think of as history, somehow. Like how you go from Sallust’s “everyone said something different and the situation kept changing very rapidly” utter chaos, to a grossly boring plot about a genius great man inventing something with the love of a good woman buoying him up, but also somehow it feels like the Fountainhead, I do not fucking know. WTF again, Francis Ford C?