GOODBYE, GOOGLE

I've decided to move my blog to wordpress, so any future postings will be there.  I am continuing the name "Random Literary Blog."

I hope you will find something interesting there.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT CENSORSHIP

As long as there have been writers and written material there has been censorship or attempts at censorship.  Writers have been censored because they wrote about intimate matters, such as sex, or they wrote about politics and what they wrote offended the powerful.

Even in the twenty first century some books have come under constant attack.  J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye has been a frequent target of censors.  Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita offended the mores of many.  John Steinbeck has been attacked as a "Marxist" for novels such as The Grapes of Wrath.

For a very long time writers were prohibited from using "bad words."  Hemingway had a constant battle with his publisher because he wasn't allowed to use the more descriptive profane words in his fiction that people use in real life.  I like the way he substituted the word "obscenity" for actual obscenities in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

We've come a long way since Rhett Butler shocked people in the movie version of Gone With the Wind.  "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."  Apparently, people did give a damn about the use of the word "damn."

BOOKS YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN

I doubt there is anything really more pleasurable than a book that you find so compelling that you almost can't put it down.  It's the kind of book you keep close by so you can read a little more when you have a moment, or it's the kind of book that you lie awake reading all night.

Not all the books that make such compelling reading are necessarily great literature.  Sometimes they aren't even favored much by critics.  But there is something in the story that keeps you hooked until the end.

A few books come to mind for me.  I remember The Firm by John Grisham.  I remember The Hustler by Walter Tevis.  Mario Puzo's The Godfather was fascinating.  I carried around Hawaii by James Michener for days until I finally finished it.  

Times that you read a particularly gripping book can stand out in your memory.  You can remember if you were having good times or bad times or maybe just in-between times, but the books got you through it all.

BOOKS AROUND ME

I remember a line from the movie Norma Rae.  The movie was about organizing workers in a textile mill and I remember the union organizer saying one of his greatest fears was waking up without something to read.  I would feel lost without something to read, or the possibility of something new on the horizon.

The first book club I remember joining was the Literary Guild in the  late 1970's.  It was a thrill getting that introductory shipment and it has been a thrill every time I've joined a book club since then.  In those days I remember getting a short story collection by Irwin Shaw.  I read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song around that same time.

Nowadays we have electronic book readers like Kindle and Nook and they have some noted advantages, particularly in their portability and the fact they don't take up much space.  But I will always prefer traditional books.  I like the way the book feels in my hands and the way the ink smells and the texture of the paper.  I like to see it on my shelf always ready to keep me company as many times as I choose.  So I see electronic readers as enhancements, not replacements.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE

Some people might like to dismiss the arts, including literature, as frivolous.  They like to think in terms of what is "practical," especially if it means making money.  But I contend the arts are among the most important creations in all human cultures.

Literature has not only reflected cultures, but helped to shape and even move them.  Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.  The novel brought the reality and horror of slavery to life for people who may have been indifferent before and was at least partly responsible for the move to end slavery in the United States.

Western culture has been shaped, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, by the great religious literature contained in the Koran and in the Bible.  Eastern cultures have likewise been influenced by their great religious literature.  The mythology of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and others continues to matter today.

Shakespeare has been one of the most influential people in human history.

I was thinking of Barbara Tuchmann's history The Guns of August.  President John Kennedy had read the book and what he learned from the book influenced him during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Kennedy took a calm and measured approach to the crisis when many of his generals were ready to hurl us into a war that could have resulted in a nuclear conflagration.  So Barbara Tuchmann, in an indirect way, may have saved us from nuclear annihilation.  

MORE LITERARY TALISMANS

Literary talismans can be places rather than objects.  I can use a Blackwing pencil to emulate John Steinbeck, but I can also visit places Steinbeck wrote about.

I have been to Monterey, California, one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and to famed Cannery Row.  Cannery Row is much different than when Steinbeck wrote about it in his novel, but I still felt the place was special.

I got to visit the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and the home where Steinbeck was born.  The home is now a restaurant.

I also got to visit Key West, Florida, where Ernest Hemingway lived and did some of his best work.  The Hemingway House has been converted into a museum and descendants of Hemingway's cats still live on the premises.

I hope I can visit John's Grill in San Francisco.  Dashiell Hammett used the restaurant as a setting in his novel The Maltese Falcon.

Another restaurant I would love to visit is Max Bloom's.  Famed mystery writer Raymond Chandler spent time writing there. A good cup of coffee and the ghost of Raymond Chandler sounds like a good way to spend an afternoon.

LITERARY TALISMANS

I don't really believe in magic.  At least I don't think I do.

But I must confess that details about famous writers interest me and a part of me wonders if I emulate them if a little of their talent or success will rub off.

I read, for instance, that John Steinbeck was an aficionado of Palomino Blackwing pencils.  The Blackwing has been almost a cult item down through the years and other devotees of the pencil included Chuck Jones, who created Bugs Bunny, Stephen Sondheim, and Vladimir Nabokov.

I've wondered what it would be like to write on Hemingway's typewriter.  Would those marvelous descriptive minimalist sentences come from the typewriter for me too?

How about if if bought a dog house and sat on top the way Snoopy did?  

THE SWERVE

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is a dual story of a Medieval monk named Poggio Bracciolini and an ancient Roman writer named Lucretius.

Many of the ancient writings had been lost.  One of the most tragic losses occurred when the library in Alexandria, Egypt was destroyed.  Estimates are the library held as many as a half million documents.

Greenblatt talks about how books were copied by the monks of the time.  The monks were really the preservationists of culture.  They laboriously copied books onto vellum, which is made from animal skins.  Bracciolini had beautiful handwriting and there is a photo showing some of his work published in the book.

When Bracciolini discovered the ancient manuscript of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius the poem had largely been forgotten.  The ideas Lucretius wrote about have since had a major impact on thinkers as diverse as Galileo, Freud, Darwin, Einstein, and Thomas Jefferson.

Now thanks to Bracciolini we can read On the Nature of Things.  I even downloaded a copy for my Kindle.

HEMINGWAY'S BOAT

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about ten years old.  When I was recently graduated from high school I was at K-Mart checking out their book section.

Carlos Baker's biography of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway:  A Life Story had been published in paperback and I  bought a copy.  I was fascinated by Hemingway's story and as I began to read his work I became an admirer.

There are lots of Hemingway detractors.  He drank too much.  He was too macho.  He didn't develop the female characters in his fiction.

But I think Hemingway is a lot like his fiction. You have to read between the lines.  When you read between the lines you find a sensitive, compassionate man who wrote fiction that is deeply touching.

One of the biographies I read recently is Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson.  It deals with the influence Hemingway's boat, the Pilar,  had on his life and relationships.

I consider Mr. Hendrickson's book one of the best biographies I have read of Hemingway  It is by no means a hagiography, but it doesn't engage in constant bashing either.

FINDING LONGITUDE

We take it for granted now when a location is described as so many degrees latitude and so many degrees longitude, but it wasn't always so simple.

That's the story of Dava Sobel's book Longitude.

Longitude is the story of English clock maker John Harrison, who invented a working chronometer that made the calculation of longitude practical.

Sailors were always capable of sailing by latitude, the imaginary horizontal lines that circle the earth.  Sailors could use celestial navigation to determine their latitude, but longitude presented problems, because longitude is dependent on knowing the time at two separate locations.

The concept of longitude is fairly simple.  A day on earth is twenty-four hours.  If you divide a circle by twenty-four, you arrive at fifteen.  So an hour is equivalent to fifteen degrees.

The problem sailors faced was having a clock or chronometer that was accurate enough to tell them how many hours they were from a designated spot such as a home port.

John Harrison devoted his life to manufacturing an accurate chronometer and his work revolutionized navigation.

THE MAGNIFICENT PHOTOS OF EDWARD CURTIS

I wasn't familiar with the photos of Edward Curtis until a few days ago when I began reading
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan.

Curtis was a 19th and early 20th century photographer who did extensive work with Native Americans.  He was not only a photographer, but an ethnographer, and his objective was to learn as much as possible about Indian cultures before the cultures disappeared.

Curtis photographed legendary figures such as Nez Perce Chief Joseph and the great Apache warrior Geronimo.

Until Curtis investigated, General George Armstrong Custer was lionized as a hero in his last stand at the Little Big Horn.  But Crow scouts who survived the battle and who worked with Custer gave a different account.

You can see some of Curtis's work if you use Google and bring up images of his photographs.

This is a fascinating book about a fascinating and talented man.

LITERARY SNAPSHOTS IN THE MIND

Favorite scenes in literature are a little like snapshots in the mind.  They become a part of our own memory album and they can be summoned at a moment’s notice.

Ernest Hemingway wrote some of my favorite scenes.  In The Sun Also Rises the novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes, is on a fishing trip in the Spanish mountains with a friend. They rest by an icy mountain stream for lunch.  They put their wine into the stream to cool and they dine on the frosty wine and fried chicken.

Another of my favorite  Hemingway scenes  is in the short story “The Battler.”  Nick Adams has been thrown off a freight train by a railroad “bull” and  he sees the glimmer of a campfire in the woods.  When he investigates he finds a former prizefighter named Ad Francis and the prizefighter’s companion.  The man fries  ham over the campfire and invites Nick Adams to join.  When he describes dipping bread into the hot ham fat you can taste it yourself.

In Chapter Fifteen of The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck describes a roadside diner and a fry cook preparing a hamburger.  You can hear the sizzle of the meat and smell the sharpness  of the onions and the yeasty scent of the buns toasting on the grill.

Great writers can make fiction as real as actual life and the scenes can become treasured  snapshots in your mind.