Breakfast with Pandora caters to everyone interested in ancient Greek and comparative mythology, good stories, the craft of writing, food, theology, education, and other humane things. Ask a question at teenage underscore heroes at yahoo dot com.
I felt a small earthquake in the book sales realm this week and found that someone had recently bought “Zeus is My Type!” my book on Myers-Briggs and Greek divinities.
On a whim I googled the title to see if the buyer had had a reaction, and lo and behold, she had.
Sam over at Spines in a Line, a book blog, gave ZIMT! four stars and a number of flattering compliments.
But I was particularly gratified by her use of the book to consider her own type and personality.
A personality test is okay for figuring out generally who you are.
But comparing yourself with characters from a brilliant set of long-lived stories might make it easier to illuminate your personality from a different angle, and in a deeper way.
Sam’s review captured this process wonderfully.
According to the review, she has always typed out as an ISFJ or an ISTJ. But the description of those types in ZIMT! left her cold.
That makes perfect sense. A book lover with a penchant for introspection probably isn’t purely an ISFJ (Hestia) or ISTJ (Hera). The strong ISFJ is about quiet, compassionate service to others; the classic ISTJ is similar, but with an organizational streak and a spiky edge to her personal interactions.
Hestia wouldn’t have a book blog. She did not call attention to herself or her opinions. As the mistress of the hearth, she was anonymously providing for others.
Hera, similarly, wouldn’t have time for anything as frivolous as book reviews. She was too busy managing the heavenly household.
So where should Sam land?
She gravitated to the chapter on the INFJ, especially the narrative about Penelope. Now Penelope, in the Odyssey, is about loyal service, and in a way is quite ISFJ. But she also has a more introspective and clever side, which is more Intuitive than Sensing.
The section on Hades, and more specifically the part about Sophocles' play Antigone (Sam’s favorite) also was a highlight for her of the book.
That doesn’t surprise me either. Antigone herself is an ENFJ, and Hades is married to Persephone, another INFJ.
So, because of all that triangulation, it makes perfect sense to me at least that Sam is more INFJ than ISFJ.
(And, of course, maybe it’s most accurate to say that Sam is IXFJ. The “X” reflects that we complex human beings are not restricted to 16 personality types).
Sam came upon ZIMT! as a happy coincidence ("a really random selection"). I probably need to make it more available if I want more readers to benefit as she has.
What do you do if you’re looking down the barrel of a storm of Biblical proportions?
Hunker down inside and read a book of Biblical proportions.
This weekend I sent out a social media call for a book to help me cope with a deluge to which I am currently waving a long, unfond goodbye. That book ended up being Shattered Walls, Jane Lebak’s third book of five in her Seven Archangels series.
I am not the biggest heavenly host fan and theologically I find angels and demons edging over into the Manichean, but for a good story they’re hard to beat.
The author herself describes her work as “offbeat fiction for clever readers,” and Shattered Walls is absolutely that. To me, it comes off as ultra-original and yet ultra-familiar, and though the book is set about twenty years after the Resurrection, it also reads as ultra-contemporary with the author’s microscopic attention to psychological, technological, and scientific realism.
Now you might think, is a book going to work where angels make offhand references to neuroreceptors, or say things like “Your stress hormones are pegged”? You might say to yourself, shouldn’t angels be saying King James things like “Be not afraid, for behold I bring you tidings of great joy?”
But on the other hand, why shouldn’t angels be technologically advanced? After all, they aren’t limited by the understandings of humans of any age. They are beings who have spent thousands of years in the presence of God, honing their organization, hierarchies, roles, and effectiveness. Why shouldn’t they behave with the technical expertise and teamwork of a Google project team, and the bravery, fury, and service ethos of the US military, while exhibiting the love, care, insight, and consideration of social workers and clinical psychologists?
All this, of course, along with a genuine, heartfelt dedication to prayer, devotion to God, and to God’s plan for the world.
And the cherry on top: they all have sparkling senses of humor and a penchant for a quip, especially during the worst moments of a crisis.
They're very much what angels are cracked up to be, and I like 'em. They are on the one hand like the best comic book superheroes with a good amount of spiritual depth. There's no reason why this series couldn't be turned into a feature film, except the Christianity would have to be toned down for wider audiences.
Just a little about plot and characters: the two leads are Remiel and Zadkiel, female angels (yes, these angels have gender; Michael and Gabriel are two of the males ones) who are investigating a super-secret weapons project in Hell being organized by a higher-up in the infernal hierarchy, an aptly-named demon named Hastle.
Of course, the infiltration of the weapon’s workshop goes awry and both angels find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. The race is on to figure out what exactly happened, how it is related to the weapon, and what consequences there will be from the initial snafu. Hint: potentially enormous both for individual angels and for the angel realm.
The climax is climax-y. I enjoyed it.
Big kudos to Jane Lebak for unraveling and weaving back together this highly entertaining and intricate ball of yarn.
PS: I looked for a place online where there might be a discussion of the background of the series and the author’s own thoughts about world-building decisions, but could not find any off the bat. The author might well consider adding a page to her website that gives some insight into how her version of Heaven versus Hell came to being, along with a glossary of characters and technical terms. What exactly was the “Winnowing”? What are the rules for making and unmaking a “Guard”? What is the difference between a “Dominion” angel and a Cherub? Inquiring minds want to know.
PPS: I'm not wild about the cover and I hope my promotion of the book will lead to huge sales that finance a cover re-do. But that's just me.
It is really impossible to say anything about Half Sick of Shadows, Richard Abbott’s newest and most creative book, without giving the whole thing away.
So instead of reading this review first, go out and buy the book and read it— I promise, it’s very inexpensive— and then come back and read this.
If you have already read the book and want to know what someone else thinks about it, go ahead and keep scrolling.
Otherwise, I’ll see you in… however long it takes for you to read and come back.
In fact, if you read the book and hate it, I will treat you to another book of the same or lesser value as an apology for making you read Half Sick of Shadows.
Now that we have established I am biased towards this book, and now that everyone is gone except those who have read the book already, the way is clear to say a few spoilerish things. Spoilerish because I know there are a few lingering readers who haven’t gone away and gotten the book, and believe me, you will be disappointed.
(Shoo! Shoo!)
Okay.
First, you don’t need to know that Half Sick of Shadows is taken loosely from the British legend of the Lady of Shalott best known to poetry readers in its version by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It’s a fun curiosity to map Half Sick of Shadows on to the legend-- especially the weaving and mirror parts-- but the story stands on its own.
You also don’t need to know what genre the book is in order to enjoy it. The author says it is Historical Fantasy. I would say it’s Speculative Science Fiction. But it really is its own thing.
Now, for the spoilerish stuff: lately there was a flurry of activity on the internet about alien intelligences and whether we would want them to contact us when it is somewhat more or less likely (how does one decide these things?) that they would be hostile to us.
Stephen Hawking has famously said for years, for example, that if intelligent life outside our solar system tries to contact us, we should act as if we’re not there.
"Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well,” he is recently quoted as saying.
Also, there's a new short film by a director I admire, Neil Blomkamp from South Africa, about a yuckfest alien invasion that is our worst nightmare. (I loved the film and I don't like yuckfests, by the way.)
But with all due respect to Stephen Hawking and rousing good stories, I think the proposition absurd that aliens advanced enough to travel through space for light years are as callous, cruel, and greedy as Christopher Columbus and the Europeans who followed him.
I find it much more likely that truly advanced aliens would have no need of exploiting worlds they found, but in fact would be more benevolent than we are, having come to the conclusion that survival depends on creating abundance rather than hoarding scarcity.
So far in history, all human cultures that pile up resources at others’ expense have fallen hard after no more than a thousand or so years (the Byzantines did a great job for a long time, but that made the Turks really, really jealous).
But to live through the long haul— long enough to develop viable light-year space flight technology— I think you’d need to find a way to make resources abundant enough that people don’t need to fight over them and kill each other off.
And thus, aliens traveling to earth would know to leave well enough alone.
Unless, of course, they found a way to hang around us without destroying us.
And this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Richard Abbot has that question of alien intelligence absolutely spot on. Half Sick of Shadows is an intricate, delicate story about a Lady who grows through time into something new, both physically and mentally, and how interaction with those she encounters affects that process. But it’s also a wonderfully imaginative take on how we might be-- or have been-- in touch with others outside our ken.
Now is Half Sick of Shadows as fun as Neil Blomkamp's yuckfest with the Texas flag whipping from armored trucks and people exploding and lizard men and squirty goo and methane manufacturing towers?
Yes. Make a movie of it now.
Well, maybe not.
But so few books have that quality of an engaging story that also makes you think. Half Sick of Shadows is one of those few, and it deserves widespread attention.
I love the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator (MBTI). In fact, I have a written an entire book about MBTI and Greek mythology.
So when I saw a link to a blog post about MBTI and sorting personalities into Harry Potter houses, I immediately clicked.
And the results of my research are below.
The premise of this blog post is that there are four houses in Hogwarts School (Griffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff) and sixteen basic MBTI personality types. So naturally, four personality types should go well with each of the houses.
So far, so good. Although I would say that personality types of human beings are not so easily sorted into quarters, I'm willing to see what types the blog post picked out for each house.
Griffindor: According to the blog post and the Harry Potter fan wiki, Griffindor values bravery, daring, nerve and chivalry. Now, I will tell you, who doesn't value this and want to be part of it? I, an INFP, would love to be part of Griffindor. I am not exactly that brave or daring, but I like being around people who are, and in fact if I were around such types, I think I could muster up more bravery or daring than I otherwise might.
Unfortunately, INFPs are not allowed into Griffindor. That is the house for the ENFJ, ESFP, ESFJ, and INFJ. All these types are really my favorite people. And they tend to be quite brave and daring. I would love to be in this house.
Slytherin: This house values ambition, cunning, leadership, and resourcefulness. All things to which I am allergic. And I am quite glad INFPs are not allowed into this house, either. Slytherin admits ENTJ, ENTP, ESTJ, and ESTP. All of whom mostly drive me crazy. This is a lovely place to warehouse all people who don't have a sensitive bone in their bodies. I say, Vive la Slytherine. Far away from me.
Ravenclaw: I have never understood the existence of the other two houses in Harry Potter, since I see the first two as rivals and therefore all you really need for a good story, but nevertheless, they are here and they have values. Ravenclaw values intelligence, creativity, knowledge, and wit. Here is another bingo for me. I like all of these things. Sometimes Ravenclaw might get a bit nerdy for me, but the creativity would redeem that. Hey, allow an INFP into Ravenclaw? Nope, no chance. Only INTP, INTJ, ISTP, and ENFP get in. Humph. That would be a fun group to be in. With all the introverts geeking out by themselves, you'd have the ENFPs trying to get us out of our shells and having fun. Perhaps the ENFPs would be a bit exhausted doing that, but they'd have a good time with it.
Hufflepuff: And now, the deal breaker. Finally we come to the blog post's preferred home for the INFP, the house that always struck me as needing to have a mascot that was a cloud or a bubble. Hufflepuff's values-- hard work, patience, justice, and loyalty-- are not nearly as inspiring to me as Griffindor's. I mean, I'm not against any of this, but every one of these values is learned for me rather than natural.
And just look who I'm paired with: ISTJ, ISFJ, and ISFP. Pardon me, but... blah. Four sets of introverts all ignoring each other? No other intuitives besides the INFP with whom to have a deep conversation? A relentless insistence on the concrete world, service, doing the right thing just because?
Well, the blog post says, INFPs are "very loyal and believe very strongly in justice. They fit very well into everything the Hufflepuff house stands for."
No, child, no. INFPs are creative, deep thinkers, and idealists. We go crazy when we're with people who don't think mainly towards the big picture.
We INFPs are not going to be sorted into a bin that doesn't suit us just because of symmetry.
So now, the adjustment.
By the way, All tl;dr types must get off the train at this stop.
If we are going to say that around 25 percent of Hogwarts students must go into each house, and that furthermore (for the sake of argument) Hogwarts students reflect the personality distribution of the general public (I don't agree with this, but still), then we must take into account the frequency of each personality type and group them so that around 25 percent go into each house AND the personality types are compatible with the house's values.
(BTW, To do this, we will need, unfortunately, to violate the "four personality type" rule for each house. But I think it works out anyway.)
At present, according to the blog post, Griffindor would have 24.8 percent of Hogwart's students, based on the MBTI Foundation website of frequency of personality types. Slytherin would have 18 percent, Ravenclaw 18.9 percent, and lo and behold, Hufflepuff would have the balance, a whopping 38.3 percent.
So that's right out.We need to change things.
For Griffindor, things work out nicely. We will put ENFJ (2.5 percent of the general population) and ESFP (8.4), both fearless types, with the ISFJ (13.8), who are very helpful, sensitive supports to those who need to do daring deeds. Let's add the "squirrel with a bazooka" INFJs, who are absolute rocks, and that gives us 26.3 percent.
For the resourceful leaders, Slytherin, the original four types are perfect for this house, but as they make only 18 percent, we need at least one more type to up the numbers. That type would be the ISTP (5.4), who are quiet but effective risk-takers and rule-breakers. That would give Slytherin 23.4 percent, a little low, but then, they would think they are rare and can do more with less.
Ravenclaw, the intelligent knowledge seekers, would count INTP (3.3) as charter members of that group. ENFPs (8.1) are witty and intelligent, and the ISFP (8.8), are quiet, thorough observers. Here also would be the new and more compatible home for the INFP (4.4).
(If I can't be with the bold, daring types, at least put me with the intelligent and witty ones.)
All told, 23.6 percent. This house, with all its perceiving types, wouldn't end up getting a lot done, but think of the fun they'd have on deadline night. Quite a party with the ENFPs livening things up.
Hufflepuff, the loyal, patient ones interested in justice, will get by with 3 types: ESFJ (12.3), ISTJ (11.6), and the INTJ (2.1). INTJs are great leaders with a thirst for justice; ESFJs excellent middle-managers who are good with people; ISTJs perfect foot soldiers for the agenda laid out by the INTJ. That makes a total of 26 percent.
And that's that. Not exactly symmetrical, but much more compatible AND distributed more evenly.
Not that you needed that, but you're welcome anyway.
This insight, which I love, is spliced out of a post by a Facebook friend. I tend not to have to deal with this phenomenon socially, because I don’t go to high-gloss parties where the movers and shakers move and shake, but I recognize it from my days at professional conferences.
There’s nothing more disheartening than watching the eyes of the person you’re talking to scanning the crowd for someone other than you.
You may be good, but there’s always someone out there who’s better.
My Facebook friend thinks there may be a “throughtalking” trend for beer that’s manifesting itself in online reviews. No matter how high the quality of one craft brew, somehow there must be a better one out there. So proper attention is given to nothing.
I think we can apply this same trend to books, but bear with me for a little on this.
If “throughtalking” beer is a thing, I think it has to do with the sheer number of beers now available. Time was, there were about seventeen brands of beer, and if there was something new, you had plenty of time to taste it and figure out whether you liked it.
I remember in the previous century sitting down in a restaurant near Cincinnati and asking the waitress whether they had any local beers on tap. She looked at me as if I were from Mars.
I wasn’t talking about brewpub stuff. Back in the old days, there were some regional brands. if you were in New Orleans, you drank Dixie. Texas, Lone Star. Oregon, Henry Weinhard’s. Upstate New York, Genesee. Baltimore, Natty Bo. That’s what I was asking for. Even Bud is supposed to taste good if you order it in St. Louis.
But Cincinnati, apparently, had its Waterloo (or Beer-loo) during Prohibition, and never recovered.
Today things are different. I can get thirty kinds of beer brewed onsite in just one establishment.
How am I going to keep up with that?
Maybe, by “throughtalking” beers until I get to the “ultimate.”
Except that there isn’t an ultimate.
Now for the books part.
Independent (small-press and self-) publishing, like craft breweries, has exponentially increased the number of books available, especially novels.
Now, instead of there being a thousand “literary” or “high quality” novels per year, of which ten to twenty were played up by publishing houses and the media, there are tens of thousands that may be good or not. But because there are so many, it’s impossible for anyone to curate them the way we used to when traditional publishing had a chokehold on supply.
For me personally, I seldom buy books anymore. I “try” a lot of them. I will go to the Amazon page and dip into the book, effectively taking a sip. Some of them are just bad or don’t interest me, so I move on.
Others look like they might be good, but I’m not looking for “might be.”
I want that one that knocks my socks off.
So I end up not buying anything at all.
I am guilty of “throughtalking” books.
The last book I bought was The Bookminder by M.K. Wiseman. It’s a historical fantasy about a girl and would-be wizard set in what appears to be medieval Serbia. I was attracted by the setting and similarity to my own The Mirror and the Mage, and yes, the sample shows that the author has respectable writing chops.
I hope to “drink it down” and give a review soon.
So what’s the upshot of this? Am I advocating, like some, that we should turn off the taps on the book supply?
Should us authors all voluntarily stick to one book per year, to let breathless readers catch up?
Maybe we’d get less “throughtalking.”
No. Not at all.
I’m still in the more-is-better camp. I think especially of those dedicated book devourers who have benefited the most from the independent revolution. True book lovers always want more.
And I say, give it to them.
Online book curation methods are still pretty crude, but I think they'll improve.
And we “throughtalkers” will always be around, and maybe we’ll leave snarky reviews about the few books we actually bought.
My Facebook account is now about seven years old, and what a time it’s been.
Back in 2009, I figured that Facebook would be used primarily for sharing from our own lives. “We are becoming the poets of our own myths, in 140 character plus segments,” I wrote. “We are becoming micromythologists.”
It was a bit romantic to think that Facebook would be anything so positive, that we would stick to the kind of posts that some of us still post. “Went to the store for bread and milk. Paid it forward for the next person. They were so surprised they dropped the National Enquirer they were reading in line.”
I also thought there was a downside to so much micromythology. In my naiveté, I thought that such a practice would cut down on people watching TV and reading— that our fundamental human need for story would be satisfied in some significant percentage by reading Facebook posts.
Hello, Netflix binge series.
In 2013, I wrote that Facebook had turned into something like a “shopper,” the midweek newspaper supplement that used to come out way back when, and which consisted mostly of the advertisements that wouldn’t fit into the regular week’s pages.
In that year, apparently, everyone was using Facebook to plug something for sale, or a fundraiser for a worthy cause. I felt the tug; I had just published my first novel and wanted everyone to buy it and read it.
But I also didn’t want to add on to the glut of pitches.
Now, in 2016, Facebook has become a minefield.
It was developing all along. Politics began to overtake a lot of folks’ consciousness in my home state recently, and it just ratcheted up along with the presidential election, and then the election became the apocalypse, and now I can’t really post on Facebook without considering the political ramifications of my words.
Who’s going to be offended by what I say? If I post about my life, will someone be mad that I’m ignoring the political horrors going on around us? If I post about politics, will I get into a no-holds-barred flamefest? Should I pile on someone else’s comment and make the original poster feel worse?
If I mention religion, will my atheist friends taunt me for being an idiot and in cahoots with the religious folk they think are ruining the country?
Of course, I can get into it with my religious friends, too. There’s a lot of room for disagreement there.
And what about those fake news posts that people use to back up their deeply-held convictions?
All this is a symptom of something that I consider to be all to the good: the discussion we are all now having about women, people of color, and LGBTQ folk.
I think it’s especially good that we are discussing race. The discussion was curtailed in the seventies and eighties when we made what looked like a little progress in establishing the American values of freedom and justice for all, and decided to take a thirty-year break. But we’ve found out that we haven’t done nearly all the work we need to do in that area.
This is painful, of course.
We’re re-opening wounds that we thought were healed, but were only closed and now are infected. Much of the election has been, in my opinion, a referendum on whether we should continue the pain.
To heal properly, much collective national courage will need to be mustered.
And we’re trying. I see that.
So I’m fine with Facebook blowing up as it has, even the fake news stuff. It means we’re still talking.
And that's why I’ve also decided to subscribe to the New York Times.
I’ve always valued journalism. Some of my best friends are journalists, and I’ve been a freelance journalist for much of my professional career. But well-considered, vetted, edited stories are now more important than ever.
I can see that now.
I once thought that we could just post the truth and we wouldn’t need newspapers. That, in fact, newspapers were too slow to the punch. News was over before they could report it.
But now it’s clear that people don’t just post the truth, and not everything is easy to understand out of context.
So we are all going to need to sit back and consider rather than consume everything indiscriminately.
Round about the middle of Richard Abbott’s cracking new novel “Timing,” I began to think of James Bond.
“Timing” is the second book in a series involving Mitnash Thakur (“Mit” for short), investigator of interplanetary economic fraud, and his bosom companion Slate, an intelligent computer.
The first book, “Far From the Spaceports,” introduced us to a solar system in the (not-so-distant?) future where humankind has found a way to make travel from planet to planet a matter of weeks rather than months, and has extensively colonized convenient bits of rock, including a set in the Asteroid Belt called the Scilly Isles.
Humankind has also found a way to create an artificial intelligence— called a “persona”— that is more sophisticated (and way more emotionally sensitive) than the remarkable HAL of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A persona can be so integrated into their user's brain that they can even detect their user’s subconscious thoughts.
But about Mr. Bond.
On the surface, Mit has little in common with 007. He’s a technocrat, an employee of the Economic Crimes Review Board (ECRB), which is charged with investigating hackers who try to exploit the far-flung network of colonies to perpetrate digital economic fraud.
He’s scrupulously polite, fair, loyal, and good— to a fault, it turns out, in this book.
He’s got a steady girlfriend, Shayna, back on Earth, whom he worries he’s neglecting due to his frequent travel for work (In “Timing,” he’s as far out as Jupiter’s moons, and as close as Mars, with the Scilly asteroids in between).
And I’m quite sure he wouldn’t hurt a fly. No super-villain could say to Mit, “Come, come, Mr. Thakur, you enjoy killing just as much as I do.”
But if you spend any amount of time at all with Mit, you notice he’s an ultra-smart, resourceful guy who isn’t above a bit of adventure— a quick-witted improviser, like our James, but much handier with computer code than he is with a Walther PPK pistol.
Also, in this particular novel we see Mit dealing with a bevy, not of “Bond Girls,” but of intelligent and formidable women (including, presumably, his persona Slate, who is referred to as “she”), both on his side and not, romantically and not.
In fact, there isn’t a single male supporting character who makes much difference at all to the plot, and a couple are real blockheads.
So here he is, Mit, a dashing yet ethical nerd, threading his way through entanglements virtual, emotional, and both at the same time, while hunting down the shadowy anarchist group “Robin’s Rebels” and sending down versions of new software written on the fly to his superiors, with the obligatory “interim release note.”
It’s all in the timing, and it's a grand time.
One small glitch in the system might be the jargon-heavy description of most everything that works in this future world where space colonization has almost become routine. If you know nothing about computer programming, you will learn quite a bit or it will go straight over your head, but all of it comes with the territory, and a reader has to be up for it.
To me, it is part of Abbott’s genius as a storyteller that he is able to create a Bond-like character in such a technical environment. Never does a golden gun go off in “Timing,” but the action feels somehow similar to the movie where the villain has one.
You could call it James Bond for the new millennium.
Sometimes when I am in the valley of the shadow of self-doubt about my writing, I think, "I write ridiculous things in my novels. Who would ever believe them?"
One book has talking bears and a parallel universe, another a kind of Pez dispenser that does magic if you know Latin grammar. In my latest book, the hero defends a mystical goal against a hockey-puck-spitting pelican.
Weird, right?
But I'm here to declare that I will fear no idea that comes from my muse, ever again. That is because I have just re-read Stuart Little by E.B. White, and I'm going to tell you, he has us all beat.
E.B. White is probably more famous for Charlotte's Web, which has a talking spider and talking pig, but that type of weirdness is nothing compared to that of Stuart Little.
I don't remember reading Stuart Little all the way through as a child, though I'm pretty sure I was impressed by his toy sports car. I just went along with everyone who thought the book was adorable.
Adorable it may be, but it's just straight-up bonkers, too.
Now let me be clear that I'm not dissing the classic status that Stuart has achieved. There's a lot of whimsical fun in the book. It's charming and witty. There is much food for thought and respect and love for those who are different.
I'm just saying what happens in the book strains the boundaries of credulity in a thousand ways, small and large.
First of all, and this has been noticed before, the book claims that Stuart came to the Little family naturally:
When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way.
I usually read books before bed, when I'm already sleepy. But this shook me wide awake. I was sure that Stuart had been adopted and was all ready for that fact to be announced in Chapter One.
But no.
So Stuart is genetically a Little, but in substance a mouse. Right there, any New York editor would stop reading and have his or her assistant prepare a rejection notice. But E.B. White wasn't a peon from Peoria. He was in the inner circle of the New York literary world, a respected writer for the New Yorker magazine.
So he got a pass.
Now Stuart gets into a number of scrapes and has a number of charming adventures, but it is natural that a mouse have a love interest, and that love interest is a bird.
Stay with me, here.
The bird's name is Margalo, and she is one of those talking birds you see quite often in Manhattan. Margalo is responsible for a number of charming acts, including saving Stuart's life, but she flies the coop (the Littles' Manhattan apartment) when a pigeon writes her a note warning her that a cat is plotting to eat her.
This motivates the action of the book, which is Stuart's quest for Margalo. He obtains his transportation from his friend Dr. Carey, a dentist, who claims that Stuart will be less noticeable as an anthropomorphic animal driving a toy sports car when he activates the car's invisibility function.
Yes, indeed.
When Stuart tests out that function, hilarity ensues, but the author never explains whether Stuart himself will be invisible when he drives the car, or whether he will seem to others to be sitting in thin air being self-propelled, which would definitely be noticeable.
It's actually more astonishing that anyone in this book would think that anything strange would, in Stuart's words, "attract too much attention".
Are you getting the message, here?
I'm going to pass over the charming scene where Stuart takes over a one-room schoolhouse for a day, although I find it highly unusual any school district would allow such an unqualified substitute to teach children.
Then again, maybe that's not so far-fetched.
But I do have to mention the two-inch tall Harriet Ames, a tiny human equally as tiny as Stuart. How does a local storekeeper explain her presence in the world?
"...All of her clothes are specially tailored for her... Yes, Harriet's quite a girl. Her people, the Ameses, are rather prominent in this town."
Harriet almost but not quite makes Stuart forget about Margalo. Clearly, she is a more suitable partner for a mouse than a bird, but their love isn't to be, mainly because Stuart can't get over the fact that his miniature canoe, in which he was going to take Harriet for a ride, has been smashed, presumably by malicious boys, though this is never confirmed.
Okaaaaaaay.
Finally, and most incredibly for the story, Stuart Little peters out at page 131 in my edition with this sentence:
But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
In other words, Stuart never finds Margalo. Not even close. He just drives off into the sunset with the quest still unfinished.
I kept stupidly looking for more pages, as if I'd find another chapter in a hidden trap door of my paperback.
Unreal.
Again, I'd be the first to say, "Whatever! This is a children's book, and in children's books, anything goes. As long as the spirit of the writing is true, children (and adults) will love it."
And so that must be the case with Stuart Little, though I'm going to tell you it creeped me out when I read it this time.
But all of this has taught me a valuable lesson: if E.B. White can write from his imagination and succeed, then by golly, I'm going to write from mine. No more self-censorship, no more self-suspicion. My cup of weirdness runneth over. And I will dwell in the house of--
You get the idea.
Now go out there and write some puck-spitting pelicans into your book.
Mustin is now ranging over new territory. Collateral Damage and Stories, his just-published fiction collection, showcases the author's considerable talent-- for observation, for a well-turned phrase, for sensing the significance of a moment. But it's hardly a solemn affair. There's weirdness, myth, the supernatural, baseball, over-the-top stuff, keenly felt yet wry at the same time.
My favorite story was "Object of Affection," an elegy for Carlos, a star baseball player who has succumbed to Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a simple idea, the memorial for a hero taken before his time, but the means by which it is delivered is anything but. The narrator performs a subtle alchemy throughout, taking the spoken memories of the star's mother and reporting them, through the ether, to the absent Carlos:
The Game. She tells me that by six you were on the diamond, slapping the ball with authority, bouncing it from the child's tee through a maze of soprano crow calls along the red dust infield and onto the grass beyond.
The result is a kind of intimacy amidst loss that is wickedly difficult for any narrative to attain, and a great pleasure to read.
The title novella is tough to get through-- not because it isn't written well, but because it is. The narrator is John, a schizophrenic freelance political journalist. Mustin takes the reader fully into John's skewed perspective and his multiple "figments," characters that pop from nowhere in a jangly soap opera gone wrong.
The story, which seems to take place during the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, reads like a "No Exit" type of stage play, with John's house as the set, and with his wife, Janet, his mother, and his teenaged son, Ted, as the characters trapped in hell.
"Collateral Damage" refers to that regrettable phrase conjured by the American military during the war, referring to unavoidable civilian casualties. It's an apt metaphor for the havoc wreaked by John's illness as the family battles over the possession, not of land, but of Ted.
If there is a theme to this collection, I would say it is elegy-- all of the stories except for "Collateral Damage" itself have a voice-over quality to them, with a let-me-tell-you-how-it-was storyteller anchoring the narrative. It's a look back over many years, wistful, grief-tinged, but not nostalgic. There is a sense in these stories that you shouldn't ever want to go back to the past, or have things be the way they were. Life was what it was, had its joys and sorrows, and the impulse to tell the story comes not from longing for the lost moment but from the compulsion to declare, "This was significant. It mattered. It bears remembering."
The collection ends with "The Phantom," an homage to a magic baseball that follows its possessor's life, the narrator, and almost but not quite rubs off its magic on him. Could the baseball be a metaphor for writing talent, that phantom that follows us all our lives and changes them depending on the way it bounces here or there?
Well, all I can say is, keep swinging, Bob Mustin. You hit a home run with this effort. Time to get back to the plate.
English grammar, like a lot of things these days, has become political.
But just to clarify, this isn't a political post. It's a statement of amazement.
Image: Map of Borschland with no relation to current post.
When I was in high school in the seventies, I would say my default was to use the word "they" for the generic singular pronoun. That is, I would write and say "Everyone should get their coats" or "Everyone should know where they're supposed to go."
At the same time, I'm pretty sure my teachers encouraged the use of the masculine generic singular pronoun-- that is, "he," "his," and "him": "Every traveler should have his boarding pass available" or "Every player should know what he is doing" or "everyone should keep his wits about him."
The argument ran that "person" was a singular noun, and that a pronoun that referred to that noun would have to be singular as well, to agree with its noun. And the masculine gender was considered to be default, by tradition.
"Tradition" probably referred to Latin, which by then had been used to shape English grammar for several hundred years. The masculine gender is default in Latin, though the words Latin uses for "his" ("eius" or a form of the word "suus") happen to be gender-neutral.
As a student of Latin, I appreciated the argument and changed my written usage.
But pretty soon after that, and as I progressed in college and graduate school, it came to my attention that using "he" and "his" as a generic singular pronoun could be considered sexist.
And so an interior debate opened: what should I use instead?
Some people were deciding to respect grammar but change their generic pronoun to "she" and "her." I sat up straight in my pew the first week I heard that usage from the pulpit of a church I was attending. And it's still done today, though most of the time the writer or speaker will alternate between "he" in one sentence and "she" in another, to be fair. Or, in referring to those in a dominantly female profession, such as elementary school teachers, "she" will be the generic.
Others faced with this issue decided to be creative, and used the abomination "s/he." Even worse were the coinages "e" (for he or she), "es" (for his or her), and "em" (for him or her). Apparently this kind of thing has been going on for quite a long time (click here for an amazing article-- a worthy timewaster).
Many of my friends and colleagues settled on "he or she" as a respectable if inelegant compromise, and so did I.
But nearly no one-- except for professional linguists (such as Stephen Pinker), who love to thumb their nose at populist grammar rules-- suggested that generic singular "they" and "their" were actually very logical.
Of course, everone could still use "they" and "their" as an alternative to the singular "he or she" by changing the example sentences to the plural, like so: "All people should know what they are doing." "All travelers should have their boarding passes."
And I do that fairly often.
But nowadays, as a side effect of the larger cultural wars concerning LGBTQ people, there is a growing chorus for using "they" and "their" in a new way: to refer to an actual specific person who does not identify as strictly male, or strictly female. This person is often referred to as "transgendered" or "trans."
So a trans might prefer a conversation about that trans person to go like this:
"Did you see Taylor this morning? They were so pumped up!"
"No, what's going on with them?"
"They got a 1500 on their GRE. They hadn't been expecting such a high score."
"Awesome. I'll text them and congratulate them."
Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion, which is not meant to be political at all, by the way.
We probably should just go back to "they" and "them" for the generic singular pronoun now that our trans friends are asking for the courtesy of its use with reference to them.
It's not the only reason, it's for me a tipping-point reason.
"They" is certainly not singular, but if Stephen Pinker thinks it's logical, we might as well go with that.
And it's all over the Internet that "they" has been used as a generic singular practically since English was beginning to be written down.
Not to say that everyone who uses something else besides "they" is wrong, shameful, and horrible. I think I will probably continue to pluralize everything just to maintain harmony with my readers.
But now I've gone full circle with "they," like a lot of things with my high school self.
