Breakfast with Pandora

Further thoughts on Jill McCorkle's Going Away Shoes

Jill McCorkle's Going Away Shoes was a challenge and a revelation to review. Contemporary short stories have seldom floated my boat, and this one was mostly about women and relationships, which is not my most favorite topic.

Photo: Carolina Beach, NC.

Still, McCorkle did a great job with a genre that bestselling authors Daniel Wallace and Allen Gurganus, at the recent North Carolina Literary Festival, agreed was tough to get right, much tougher than a novel.

I was impressed by McCorkle's ability to coax originality out of characters and situations that are very, very familiar. The crucial paragraph in the review was supposed to go like this:

It is not just that McCorkle takes something old and makes it new-- it's that all her stories retain their ordinary-ness while simultaneously brimming with her unique moral imagination. New wine that makes old bottles stronger.

My editor changed the strange and idiotic coinage "ordinary-ness" to "originality":

It is not just that McCorkle takes something old and makes it new -- it's that all her stories retain their originality while brimming with her moral imagination: new wine that makes old bottles stronger.

I wish something like "ordinary-ness" could have stayed in the review. Most of the stories in Going Away Shoes are ordinary on one level. You've got a lot of women reflecting on stuff that's gone bad in their lives. This is common grist.

But the execution of the stories hooked me. There's a richness that you can't explain in a review and you can't read if you're just skimming.

I was particularly haunted by the title story, about a woman who longs to leave the responsibility of caring for her dying mother.

The heroine, Debby Tyler, sees herself as Prometheus, the god who is chained to a rock for his sins, and who has his liver pecked out every day by an eagle sent from Zeus.

Just when she got her liver plump and healthy again, the eagle descended to peck on it. The eagle with piercingly dramatic mascaraed eyes and talons done perfectly in Revlon's Rich Girl Red. Dear God, next time I have a whole liver, please break the chains and let me catch a Greyhound the f*** out of here.

Prometheus does get free, finally. Hercules wanders by and undoes his chains, and since H. is the son of Zeus, Zeus doesn't mind.

But by the end of "Going Away Shoes,"

[Debby] is Sisyphus. All day long she pushes that rock, and when she is almost to the top, something happens to distract her, and it all rolls back to the very place the journey began.

There is no cheap grace here, no temptation to extricate the heroine from the family hell that traps her so completely.

I've done a bit of living now and I understand this idea of not being able to break free from one's patterns. I also understand the difference between being a Prometheus, a person who suffers but finds a way out of suffering, and a Sisyphus, a person who never does get out of that well-worn groove, and maybe on some level is incapable of truly wanting to.

When I was young and much more romantically tragic, I really hated modern short stories. As a teenager I'd bought a used copy of O. Henry's The Four Million, and I loved "The Gift of the Magi" and all the other perfect creations he tied up in a bow with perfect endings. I also read Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and thought he'd done such a fantastic job with "Hills Like White Elephants" and the rest.

But when I got into college and started reading contemporary stuff, I was disillusioned. Most of the stories I read in the Atlantic and the New Yorker seemed to be about young women throwing up in the bathroom at a party because their boyfriends were horrible to them. My peers were writing stories about killing wounded kittens with shovels. Another was about an old woman lying on the floor with a broken hip after she'd tried to change an overhead light bulb. Gaah.

I have now come full circle. I have found a modern short story collection that I like, and it's about women and relationships. There are no dead kittens in it, and no conspicuous throwing up.

Change is possible.

NC Literary Festival: the uses of fiction

Question: why sit inside a lecture hall during a perfectly lovely day off and listen to people read from and talk about their writing instead of going outside and playing softball?

Photo: a perfectly lovely day in Greece.

Answer: when you've got a chance for a wonderful reunion with some old and dear writing friends (hi Bob, Lyn, and Frankie!).

Bob provided  companionship, commentary and feedback as we listened to writers hold forth on their craft and celebrate their successes. A highlight was Ron Rash and Lee Smith, who are engaging and extremely talented. Rash's Serena is a firecracker, and Smith's new set of short stories sounded like a winner.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Strout provided me the most food for thought in her keynote address last night. She is the latest thing, a favorite of Oprah, and had an adoring crowd eating out of her hand as she read from Olive Kittredge, a set of linked short stories that had heretofore flown under my radar.

Strout came out on stage looking like an aging starlet who'd spent the last month at the beach. Darkly tan, she'd twisted her blonde hair, shining like new straw, into something resembling a do. She had on a ruffled white blouse and oversized black slacks, and everything about her was fashionably rough, wrinkled, and disheveled. Her only concession to writerly appearance was her thick-framed black glasses, which were absolutely the height of chic. Kate Hepburn comes to Chapel Hill after a stay on Bald Head Island.

Like many writers who are basking in the glow, she seemed happy and perfectly at ease in front of the packed house, and fielded questions such as whether her characters took on a life of their own and told her things. "I'm pretty sure I'm making my characters say things," Strout said, eyebrow raised.

The main event for me was Strout's take on the importance of fiction-- that is, well-written stories on a page, electronic or not. You'd think that this would be obvious, but it isn't anymore, what with everyone crazy for reality shows, video games, and anything other than a book.

She began by pointing out how whenever people come out of the subway or their plane has landed, they immediately call someone on their cell phones. "I'm here, I exist," is what people want to tell someone. Everyone is craving connection, a sense that they matter, that they are not alone.

Fiction, Strout says, helps people to locate themselves in the world. Whenever a reader identifies with a character in a story, it creates a connection, community, and a sense that the reader matters, regardless of who and where they are.

I have been attempting throughout my career on writing about mythology to point this out, especially in my online course on Greek mythology. Good stories make people connect and cohere.

Now, I have focused mainly on the tribal aspects of good stories. I define mythology as a set of good stories that are good for a particular culture. Each culture tells its own stories as a way of setting itself apart from others, of creating and maintaining its character, its ethos. A culture's myths do not necessarily translate to other parts of the world. In other words, I do not subscribe to the idea of the archetype-- the notion that characters and stories are basically the same the world over.

"So are there no universal stories?" Bob asked me as we walked back to the parking lot in the late summer sun.

"Maybe, but that wouldn't be myth," I said. "That would be..."

I paused. What would it be?

"That would be fiction," I finally decided.

And I realized that like Elizabeth Strout, I did feel that the role of the author, the novelist, the short story writer, was very important to the world.

Anytime an author attempts to connect us as human beings, rather than as members of a tribe, that, to me, is an act of love. It is so easy for us to sort ourselves into groups, into us versus them. I think it's perfectly natural.

What's difficult is to reach out to other groups and acknowledge what makes us the same.

Fiction has other benefits, too, that Strout did not mention. Maybe the most important is depth and thoughtfulness. In myth, you are looking to have people say yes to your world view as quickly as possible and over and over again. With fiction, an author is trying to say that things are complicated, messy, and take time to resolve-- if they can be resolved.

This messy aspect of fiction is probably a significant reason why, in our nanosecond culture, no one wants to read books anymore.

Maybe all of this is just a snobby and underhanded way of saying that High Literature ("fiction") is better than Popular and Pulp Junk ("myth").

If it is, that's okay with me. I do like both myth and fiction, as I've defined them here (or myth and author, as I suggest elsewhere). But I salute those who are writing that definition of fiction. It's a losing battle for us to try to find our humanity rather than our tribalness. Still, it's worth it.

Harry Potter 6: whole lot of snogging going on

When the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince released, someone on a local radio station hereabouts reported that at least there were only two more left to go after this one.

Ginny and Harry consider sixteen going on seventeen. Photo here.

They got their math wrong by one. Only one Harry Potter book remains to be made into celluloid, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I can't say I blame a casual observer for losing track.

All in all, I'm not sorry to see the end coming. Not because I don't like the movies-- I've enjoyed the technical aspects of every one of them, and I have a special fondness for the characters both main and supporting (Luna, played by Evanna Lynch, was especially good in this one). I just think it's time for the young stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint to move on. They are too old for their roles now, and I'm anxious for them as I see them onscreen.

We have come a long way since Miss Watson, who plays Hermione Granger, made her debut as a frizz-bomb eleven-year old. The three friends have lived their teenage herodom with us, maturing both in ability to take on great challenges and adventures, and in attracting the opposite sex. Much of this movie is taken up with teen soap opera drama, as Ron, previously lukewarm in the hottie department, suddenly heats it up with the batting-eyed Lavender Brown, and Hermione waits in the wings, impatient for him to notice her.

The "snogging" quotient is pretty high, appropriate for sixteen going on seventeen, apparently. I missed all that in high school, even though I was a pretty good quidditch soccer player.

The quidditch part of this movie is humorous and fun, as is wide swaths of this movie. It runs at a leisurely 153 minutes, and if you're waiting for a plot synopsis, stop waiting. There really is no plot here, just a set-up for the last movie, with a lot of cameos of beloved characters, and one very large event.

That was all there was room for in a feature film. If the reviews on IMDB.com are any indication, huge amounts of the book were left out.

Those who have bought into the J.K. Rowling universe enjoy living in it, the way I enjoyed all the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. I do prefer Narnia, if only because each book is a story on its own, rather than a 200,000 word chapter of a larger saga. When I first read Narnia books, I was disappointed that by Book 3 the original characters Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were replaced, but I came to love all the other ones, and I admire Lewis for doing it.

Lewis was classically trained and must have agreed with Aristotle's contention that a good story must have proportion-- that is, it must have a discernible beginning, middle and end, and that its events should be, as far as possible, determined by cause and effect. All of the Narnia books, even the ones with the original characters, have separate, distinct and causative plots. What they lose in coziness and nostalgia they gain in narrative force.

Rowling decided to go for coziness and nostalgia, I believe, because it was what her fans wanted. I don't believe that she would have left Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Book 5, at its first-edition length of 896 pages unless millions of people were wanting her to let them marinate in her universe for as long as possible. The Narnia Chronicles never weigh in at more than 200 pages, and with fewer words per page, as well.

It's a strange phenomenon. In our brave new world of ultra-tiny stories, short attention spans, and next-big-thing expectations, Harry has managed to slow us down and sit for a while.

And hopefully Rowling has created something of a book-chic culture for at least some of our young people. The next big thing in young male heroes facing supernatural circumstances is now Percy Jackson. He was in the coming attractions for 2010, and his universe is-- I'm not surprised-- that of Greek Mythology. In fact, his story is a loose retelling of the Perseus saga (hence the name Percy). Stay tuned, everyone, and be ready to read The Lightning Thief if you haven't already. This is going to be the next big thing.

Fiction in the digital age

Would you give away your novel for free on the Internet?

A surprising number of authors do, and they are encouraged by Cory Doctorow, a best-selling and multi-awarded science fiction author, who offers his novels (published by major houses) for free downloading and claims that this does nothing but increase sales.

Photo: Sunset seen from Weathertop, during warmer days.

He tries his best in the article linked above to show that his is not a unique case. But for sure you are not going to increase sales if you write books that no one wants to read. As the Irish say, every man is wise until he opens his mouth.

So that leads me to my next question:

Would you visit a website that offered serialized novels (chapters posted regularly) for free? Say, novels from unpublished authors who nevertheless have talent?

I don't know that authors who have a real desire to publish a certain manuscript wants to give it out for free before it has had a chance to be published. But what about the stuff that an author has already tried to publish, without success?

My friend Bob Mustin and I have had discussions on the merits of a website such as this. I think that if the author's tried-and-failed manuscript is good, putting it on the web will only help that author sell his or her next effort. If it's no good, then the author should keep it on the shelf.

I just like the idea of having a site such as toogoodtoshelve.com where readers can go and find good stuff that didn't quite make the cut. The job of the editors at the site would be to evaluate the manuscripts and post those that are good, and convince the authors of the others that they really don't want that particular effort circulating around cyberspace.

What do you think? Weigh in as you wish!

Le Guin writes Lavinia

It's not often that one of my favorite writers collides with one of my favorite stories, but that's exactly what's happened with Lavinia, the new novel by Ursula Le Guin.

Lavinia's title heroine is the princess of Latium-- stomping grounds of the most ancient Romans-- who is the prize in an ancient civil war, subject of the Roman poet Vergil's Aeneid.

Aeneas, survivor of the Trojan War, lands in Italy years after the fall of Troy with the remnant of his people. Aeneas is fated to become the father of the Roman race, and as a widower he can only become the father of the race if he has a new wife.

Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, has been betrothed to Turnus, native son of the neighboring Rutulian tribe. But when Latinus finds out about the Aeneas prophecy, he is more than happy to re-gift his daughter to a genuine war hero and legend in the making.

Juno, goddess who hates the Trojans, tries to derail the marriage by inciting Turnus and his mother Amata against the Trojan/Latin alliance.

It's war, and in all the action we never find out much about Lavinia. She is a symbol and a plot device more than a person. Lavinia

The last I read of Le Guin was the Earthsea trilogy, which I loved and which I should read again, as I have a feeling it will help the writing of Healing Knowledge.

If you read the book, let me know what you think. I will, and I will.

Initial thoughts on The 48 Laws of Power

Thanks to friend and blogger Loafing Cactus for the discovery of this book, something I would not pick up on my own, and missed completely when it came out in 1998, though it is still today in low triple digits on the Amazon.com sales list.

The 48 Laws of Power celebrates the idea that power is good for its own sake. It doesn't worry about hair-splitting questions such as what are you trying to get out of your life, is there a higher meaning to our existence, or does love conquer all. It assumes that its readers "want power, watch power, and want to arm themselves against power."

Here you can learn how to create a cultlike following (#27), how to crush your enemies utterly (#15), how to blame others for your own mistakes (#26)-- in short, 48 ways to be a jerk.

For those of us who don't see life as a power grab, it is a face-slap of a perspective. My eyes were opened-- wide.

I am not as interested, however, in the practical application of the book, as in its masterful demonstration that stories are powerful. The book is set up as a series of propositions, all of which are supported by an appeal to precedent-- making it a kind of casebook of power.

Many of the stories in the book I had never read before or imagined were possible-- including a 1920's story about a certain J. Frank Norfleet, a rancher who, upon being swindled by con men out of a huge amount of money, spent the next five years hunting them down.

Or the numerous examples from medieval and early modern European history, reminiscent of Machiavelli's preoccupation with the Florentine power-broker Cesare Borgia. There are also stories from China, India, Japan, and plenty of other places, along with ancient stories from authors such as Herodotus, the Greek historian and champion storyteller.

And the story about terrorism in Czarist Russia is eerily relevant to today's war on terror.

But I keep coming back to the costs of power, which author Robert Greene lowballs with this enticing formulation:

It is a game. You opponent sits opposite you. Both of you behave as gentlemen or ladies, observing the rules of the game and taking nothing personally. You play with a strategy and you observe your opponents' moves with as much calmness as you can muster. In the end, you will appreciate the politeness of those you are playing with more than their good and sweet intentions.

I think his book could have been better with the following tale. It is salutary.

In the Latin textbook that I use, there is the story of the Sword of Damocles . In the story, retold by the statesman and orator Cicero, the tyrant Dionysius of Sicily (birthplace of the mafia) teaches a lesson to one of his yes-men, Damocles.

Damocles had said that no one was happier or more blessed than Dionysius, owing to the tyrant's riches, lands, and armies. Dionysius said, "Do you want to know what it's like to be me, Damocles?"

Damocles assented, and Dionysius ordered Damocles to recline on a golden bed, surrounded by precious possessions. Then he ordered slaves to bring in a sumptuous dinner.

And the cherry on top? A sword was suspended above Damocles' neck, ready to slice through it. The only thing holding back the sword was a horsehair.

Damocles begged to be let off from being such a "happy" person.

Cicero was a good Stoic, and his philosophy was to do the right thing for one's country and family, regardless of the personal cost. So it makes sense that he would tell a story about how a tyrant is happy only so long as someone else has not succeeded in cutting his throat.

If you decide to do anything in the book, prepare to be clobbered by folk who are cleverer and more powerful than you-- though it is absolutely true that Cicero knew his share about power, and tried to use that knowledge to further his own interests. But Cicero ended up with his head and his hands liberated from his body and placed on the speaker's platform in the forum of Rome.

As for me, rest easy. I will not go out for world domination. You can count on that.

Unless I am lying.

Why they got a guy to do this essay

In the Sunday paper, my essay on romance novels: what they are, how far in history they go back (very far), and a little bit on what's going on with the sex in them.

Since the large majority of romance readers are women, some may wonder (one reader already has-- check the comments in this post) why they got a guy to do this essay rather than a female woman of the feminine persuasion.

The answer is pretty simple: my editor knows I write good copy for cheap and I meet my deadlines.

Also, possibly, no one else on staff or freelance admitted to wanting the assignment.

Third, I've written a romance novel and used to be a member of the Romance Writers of America. I workshopped my novel with a very good teacher, Doris Betts, and entered it into a couple of contests, winning honorable mentions.

This novel is on the shelf currently, where it will stay. It was, as my interviewee Caren Crane puts it, a learning experience. She was extremely gracious, by the way. Keep writing, Caren. You are funny and smart and you will break through.

I haven't been working on romance novels lately, but I do have two chapters of a new one, which may never get finished. Read on. It's called Grounds for Love, for a reason that becomes clear in Chapter 2.

*

Patience Carruthers (not her real name) saw the foul ball coming, and was sure it was going to conk her right on the head.
Smack. Lights out. Paramedics, emergency room, no health insurance, coma. Then she'd wake up and see Mrs. Peach staring her in the face.
"I've paid your bill, Madame Light," Mrs. Peach would say, her lipstick garish in the harsh fluorescent glare. "Now it's time to come home."
Patience stood up with all the other people in her section. She'd chosen a crowded section. She felt safer in crowds. The ball was a little white bean in the night sky, bigger than a star, smaller than a UFO. It hung there, and then it fell, on a direct line to the crown of her head.
It was destiny.
Patience crouched and braced herself for impact. She felt her Asheville Tourists ball cap, purchased in the second inning, the beige one, not the pink (price didn't matter: they were both $16.95, too much), and wished it were a helmet. As she crouched, her sunglasses fell off, rattled on the concrete floor, sent peanut shells flying.
She shut her eyes tight.
WHACK.
Patience opened her eyes, and saw two eyes.
It was a baseball player, staring at her through a grove of arms and torsos. All she saw at first were colors. His Asheville Tourists hat was not beige. It was navy, with a red "A" and a baseball flying through it like a comet. He was tan, like all baseball players get, but darker than that, and his jaw was blue-black with his nine o'clock shadow.
And his eyes. Bright whites, and the pupils so rich brown they were almost purple.
One word came into her head then, big and unmistakable: hungry.
Patience gasped.
She stood up, and the baseball player turned, took the ball out of his glove, and threw it to another player. Then he took one last look at Patience, and jogged back to the middle of the field.
The crowd was cheering. Patience could hear them now. She could see the ball park again, the outfield fences with the big trees behind, the slick, short grass, the light pole with twenty bulbs shining down bouncing rays off the players' uniforms.

A man, a big one, with a sparse beard and beer breath, smiled in her face and said, "Hee Hee. What you scared of, sweetheart? That weren't near to hitting you."
"Who you fooling? You was down there on the ground with her," said the tattooed lady next to him, grunting with laughter.
"The wind took it," said someone behind Patience. "It was coming right for us. The wind just steered it right to the third baseman."
Patience turned to the someone, who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. "Excuse me," she said. "That player who caught the ball."
The someone was an elderly gentleman with rimless glasses and sandy, silvery hair poking out from under his ball cap. He leaned forward.
"Do you know who that was?" Patience asked. "The one who caught it."
"Sure," said the gentleman. "That's our old-timer. Jon Andropoulos, the Cyprus national teamer."

*

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Further thoughts on Beginner's Greek

That which did not get in to my review of Beginner's Greek, a new novel billed by advance publicity as the next coming of Jane Austen:

This book got an astonishing number of reviews from readers in the Amazon Vine program, a group of frequent reviewers on the list to receive advance review copies (ARCs) of new releases. The total number of reviews on the website as of today was 57. Beginner's Greek has been available to reviewers for about 2 months. By comparison, Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Iliad, which has been out for 10 years, has amassed only 32.

In any case, that's a lot of reviews for any new first novel. Absolution, a solid first novel I reviewed late in 2007, has no Amazon reader notices yet.

The marketing department at Little, Brown has worked overtime on this one. I received a handwritten note with the book from a publicist, thanking me for reading the book on short notice.

On to the funny-strange thing about the book: it is, in my opinion, a pretty poor effort, and the Amazon Vine frequent readers mostly agree. They have collectively given the book 3 stars, with some scathing 1-stars that line up with my assessment.

Here's one really good one:

From very early on... I had this horrible feeling of dread. Seeing the gigantic paragraphs (some a page in length), the overuse of commas, the piling up of unnecessary details, and the big, obscure words used primarily by the sort of person who loves to hear himself talk, I knew. Once again I would undoubtedly be read the riot act for judging an ARC too harshly.

I don't believe that's an excuse. An ARC is not retyped by some coffee-fetching lackey. It's the author's own work and there's no excuse for it being sloppy.

In the case of James Collins' novel, I find myself horrified. Kind reader, if you will, please open your book and notice the About the Author on the inside of the back cover. Please note how it proudly proclaims James Collins to be a former editor for Time Magazine and a sometime-contributer to The New Yorker.

Now, sit with me a moment and let your mind be utterly and completely boggled by the fact that a man with such a lack of knowledge on how long a paragraph should be became the editor of anything, much less Time Magazine. Perhaps you, like me, will be puzzled that someone without a grasp on how to use commas properly or how to avoid slapping on the unecessary details was allowed to write for The New Yorker. I'd been led to believe they had high writing standards.

This reader goes into telling detail, but I will leave it at that.

The thing is that sometimes the book is kinda fun, but, like this reader, I was bowled over by the kind of writing that I tend to produce on my first drafts. I wondered why I was so irritated by the writing when I realized that I had fallen victim to the syndrome a former English teacher once described to me: "If you spot it, you got it." In other words, you as a reader most loathe what you as a writer are prone to.

An example...

"Like a layer of dark paint bleeding through a coat of white, the taste of the bourbon and cigarettes emerged underneath the taste of the toothpaste."

This is something someone who is reading for the plot will not worry about, but it screams at me. When I write fiction I am constantly evaluating my similes and metaphors.

Starting a sentence with "like" is suicide.

"Emerging" is a weak verb; I'd stuff it under the surface again.

Also, paint is nothing like bourbon and cigarettes, unless you happen to take a roller to your tongue.The author has given us a simile of sight when he needs a simile of taste, or no simile at all.

And anyway, what did the combination of tastes taste like?

Something like "The sour aftertaste of the bourbon and cigarettes fouled the mint of the toothpaste" would be a quick fix, but in any case the whole job can be done with many fewer words than are left there now.

And one might think of a metaphor, if one is going to use one, that is appropriate to the point of view of the subject. If the person talked about is an interior designer, the metaphor of paint might be appropriate in its proper place.

Here's the bottom line: neither James Collins nor anyone at Little, Brown took the time to worry about any of this, even though they billed the novel as "literary."

In fact, James Collins betrays the lack of sweat he put into the book in a little essay he wrote for the publisher's website:

Certainly, while writing this book I experienced periods of frustration, but overall I had a lot of fun. In the morning I would actually be eager to get to work. In fact, I might have finished the novel much sooner if I hadn't enjoyed writing it so much. The original manuscript was probably two-thirds again as long as the book and the reason the manuscript was so long was that I would get an idea and just write and write even when I knew that there was very good chance that it would have to be cut.

To me, the reason writing the book was fun was because he never made the hard choices which make a book the best it can be.

If this thing had been submitted by a novice, it would have been thrown on 100 agents' slag heaps. But because Collins is a New York insider with a track record, he could afford to write whatever the hell he wanted.

And to all this, a postscript: take what I say with a grain of salt. The book is selling very well.

Harry Potter and the Libation Bearers

18 hours after all the hoopla, I found a display rack of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows tucked away in the northwest corner of a Target, behind rack after rack of video games, movies, and music. It was so neatly camouflaged, you'd think Target didn't really want to sell any.

But today I am not interested in the sociology of marketing, nor am I interested in the ending, about which there will be no spoilers in this post. BwP follows J.K. Rowling's plea for restraint.

Unless there is a clue to the ending in the frontispiece of the book, where an extraordinary thing caught my eye as I walked to my car.

There are two quotations. One is from William Penn, and the other is from the Libation Bearers, a Greek tragic drama by Aeschylus. It is the second in the trilogy called the Oresteia, the family saga of King Agamemnon, his queen Clytemnestra, and their two children, Orestes and Electra.

In a chain-reaction of murders, Agamemnon first kills his daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis for the slaughter to come in the Trojan War (this is not included in the Oresteia itself). Then at Agamemnon's return from the war, Clytemnestra kills him for murdering their daughter. Some years after that, the god Apollo urges Orestes to kill Clytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon. This killing is the main action of the Libation Bearers.

The Oresteia was the biggest box office phenomenon in Athenian history, revived more often than any other set of tragedies. The material is very strong for our tastes today, including as it does three family members killed by three family members. As a result it is not taught in the K-12 classroom, and you will only encounter it if you take a Classical Mythology class in college.

The quotation excerpted by Rowling comes at about the midpoint of the Libation Bearers, at a moment of supreme tension, just before Orestes will go in disguise into his own house to murder his mother. Alongside his sister Electra and the chorus of foreign women, slaves captured in wars abroad, Orestes prays to the gods and his dead father Agamemnon for success.

It is a strange prayer, asking the gods to allow you to kill your mother, and the chorus acknowledges this fact just before the quotation begins:

My flesh crawls as I listen to them pray.
The day of doom has waited long.
They call for it. It may come.

(translation Lattimore)

Now the selected quotation itself:

Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death
and the stroke that hits the vein,
the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse that no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house,
and not outside it, no,
not from others but from them,
their bloody strife. We sing to you,
dark gods beneath the earth.

Now hear, you blissful powers underground--
answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.

(translation Fagles)

Why did Rowling choose this quotation? Maybe because children-- Harry, Ron, and Hermione-- have undertaken a quest to murder someone, in this case Voldemort, the grand villain of the epic.

Shall we take the quotation at face value, then, and conclude that Voldemort is blood-related to Harry?

That would not be surprising, knowing now the famous relationship in Star Wars between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

But the texture of these words makes me want to press further and deeper.

These prayers are to the dead ("you blissful powers underground"), and most specifically to Agamemnon, because they are made at his grave. Conservative Christian critics of Harry, who have decried the occult aspects of the series for a long time, could have a field day with this. It is almost as if Orestes, Electra and the chorus are having a seance. Some have even argued that the ghost of Agamemnon made an appearance on stage, though he has no speaking role.

More troubling still is the context. This ancient Greek story is not a clean, American quest to kill a bad guy. It is a murder within the family-- vengeance on a family member. The audience was not supposed to cheer at the end of the play. Woo hoo, Clytemnestra got what was coming to her! Yes, she is a villain, but in this play Aeschylus wrings a large amount of sympathy out for her.

But Voldemort, so far, has been seen as unmixedly evil and someone to get rid of at all costs.

I'll read the book and see what's going on. Comments welcome, and spoilers too, if you label them so.

And someone more versed in William Penn-- the founder of Pennsylvania, Quaker, and pacifist, will have to write about the interaction between the two quotations. It is always a delicious thing to juxtapose the pagan and the Christian.

Clearly, Rowling has left something here for adults. Let's see what the message is.

Do we need Nancy Drew?

In her June 20 column in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus opines that Nancy Drew, the spunky, independent girl sleuth of decades ago, who starred in dozens of books and was idolized by the girls of her generation (and now has a new movie out), has become obsolete.

(Illustration: Color Nancy!)

She writes,

Girls now don't need Nancy Drew. They know what we had to learn -- that self-confidence is something to celebrate, not suppress; that they don't need to apologize for being assertive, or even, heaven forbid, ambitious.

For us, Nancy Drew was revolutionary. Today, she's the new normal.

I personally will go along with that, even if, according to the feminist blog I Blame The Patriarchy (this post on marriage currently has 317 comments), women seem to be worse off than ever. As an overeducated someone, I like nuanced critiques and distrust the prevailing opinion. But Ruth Marcus, you've got my vote this time.

My daughter doesn't like Nancy Drew either-- but I think it might be my fault.

When I was a boy I loved series, and I tried out the Hardy Boys but didn't get far because they seemed just the least bit dopey. Girls were reading Nancy Drew, and I tried her too, but she was also very white bread.

What I loved was the Freddy the Pig series, also about a detective, but porcine rather than human. Now there was a well-written, funny, and well-plotted set of books. As a third grader I learned a tremendous amount of fiction technique from author Walter R. Brooks, including the trick of the interrupted quotation:

"That," said Jinx with a delighted flick of his tail, "was a real knee-slapper."

And the surreal quality of it all-- from Martians playing baseball to talking pigs and cats-- got me ready, much later on, for my French Literature of the 1920's course, and gave me the grounds for my blockbuster article on Snowball, Freddy, and Intertextuality in Animal Farm.

In all seriousness, I gave the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew a go. But Freddy was my man-- I mean, pig.

When beloved tween daughter inherited a copious set of Nancy Drews around age 9, I figured she would be different from me. She was a girl, and she liked series, and I honestly hoped that she'd take to them. It was the hope of a person who puts Green Bean Casserole (canned beans, cream of mushroom soup, canned fried Chinese noodles) on his child's plate at a church potluck. People keep bringing it to potluck after potluck, so it must be good.

Daughter labored her way through The Hidden Staircase, with some help from Dad at the end in the form of bedtime reading. She is not the most avid reader, but she will burn through what she likes.

I noticed, however, that it wasn't just outdated characters and plotting that was the problem.

The writing was also just plain bad.

It makes sense. "Carolyn Keene," the author of the series, was really a group of uncredited writers who churned books out to a formula. They never met an adverb they didn't like, and the telling won out over the showing every time:

"I'm afraid not," Mr. Franklin apologized.

*

"We're in luck!" Nancy exclaimed happily.

*
The frail, elderly woman smiled. There were deep circles under her eyes, indicating that she had had a sleepless night.

*

Nancy hurried to the hall, grabbed up the phone, and said, "Hello."

My impatience with the writing came to a head when, in a last effort to give Nancy her due, I began The Bungalow Mystery with daughter at bedtime, and together we counted half a dozen instances of "smiled" within four pages.

"Why is everyone smiling so much?" Daughter exclaimed irritatedly.

Was it my fault? Did I put it into her head that Nancy Drew was drippy? If so, then the Mystery of the Spoilsport Dad will have been solved. Guilty as charged.

Photo of casserole here.