Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

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Anne Shirley is a toad. And in my mind, she could receive no greater compliment.

Others may have used this terminology before me, though I've never heard it. A toad sees the best the world has to offer, and a toad always has ambitions simply because the world has so much possibility. A toad may go along with society's rules, and a toad may shatter them; either way, a toad is indifferent to those societal standards, because a toad has her own standards of what is great and glorious, good and worthwhile.

I wrote a few months back about Toad from The Wind in the Willows and how so many folks try to squelch his free-spirited ways. Since then, I've developed a bit of a toady fascination, and I see toads in all kinds of great stories. Ramona Quimby is a toad. Jane Eyre is totally a toad. (Goodness, why are so many toads female?) I think Bilbo Baggins is a toad, though he has to learn to embrace his toadiness. And young Anne Shirley is as toady as the best of them.

She does not bow to the expectations of others simply because it is expected of her. She finds exceptional beauty in the most routine locations, and for her, every individual has great heroic and tragic possibilities. Through it all, she is neither selfish (a claim often levied against the toads of the world) nor selfless; her wild spirit enriches her own life in ways she sees fit, and still she is always concerned with the well being and benefit of everyone in her wider community.

No one sees the world quite like Anne Shirley does. And her enthusiasm for life itself makes Anne of Green Gables the funniest, most endearing, and most uplifting book I've read in ages.

Everything goes right for Anne throughout the book, yet we do not begrudge her the seeming luck. After all, her accomplishments are earned more through pluck and dedication than blind luck. When things go horribly wrong for her, as they inevitably do, she feels as deeply and powerfully as anyone else; yet on the other side of tragedy, she sees opportunity and possibility where others might see only a narrowing of the road. Where her road was once straight and marked with possibilities, Anne ends the book with a bend in the road. "I wonder how the road beyond it goes," she says, "what new landscapes--what new beauties--what curves and hills and valleys further on."

Like a true-blooded Toad, she knows that "nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams." Oh, if only we could all live with such satisfaction in our birthrights! If only we could all be toads, thrilled by the bends in the road! Poop poop!

Misery, by Stephen King

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This is a book only a writer could have written.

Who else would understand the brutal anguish of burning a stack of papers -- or even the desire to spend two years pouring forth sweat and tears and energy and life creating said stack of papers in the first place? Who else would understand the power of a story to tip the scales of life and death? I don't even mean in an external, my-crazy-number-one-fan-has-me-trapped-oh-god-what-do-I-do situation, but in a I-cannot-leave-this-mortal-coil-until-I-know-what-happens way.

For a writer, the true horror of Misery isn't the axe-wielding, or the forced drug addiction, or the psychological domination. The horror is that Annie Wilkes is all the worst traits of an editor, a publisher, a fan base, and a meal ticket rolled into one.

I think that the biggest development as a person for writer-turned-prisoner Paul Sheldon is not whether he overcomes the physical hardships, or whether he gets free (can't have spoilers leaking into this blog!). It's whether he recognizes, and then acknowledges, the kind of writer he truly is.

You see, I find that so many fresh, new, young, up-and-coming, developing, whatever-other-euphemism-for-"beginner" writers (and in fairness I'll include myself in this bunch) have an idea of what sort of writer they think they are. That's the sort of writer they want to be, and you'll almost always hear these writers saying that they hope their novels get picked up and then strike gold -- and until then, they'll just have to toil through day jobs. Some fraction of these writers figure out that they can write "other things" to pay the bills. At least they're still writing, and on the side they can still work on their real projects.

That second one is the kind of writer Paul Sheldon is in Misery. Every writer who makes it that far has a decision to make (or maybe more accurately, a self to uncover). Are they the kind of writer they think they are, the one whose best and most soul-enriching writing is the side-writing that might not sell but dammit is good? Or are they really the kind of writer who has pretensions about being a "serious novelist," but whose true talents lie in the smut-and-pulp realm of popular fiction?

The first of those two shudders at the very concept of "popular fiction." The second, which I think includes Stephen King, embrace their talents and run with them.

No judgment calls here -- plenty of canonized Novelists made their wages writing for the masses, and plenty of canonized books were smut-and-pulp upon first publication. (Vonnegut or Chandler, anyone?) Just thoughts. Thoughts that so many beginning writers would be happier upon doing a little soul-searching and discovering what truly gets their mind-gears greased and their fingers twitching.

So amend that first sentence: Misery is a book only a self-aware writer could have written.

Americana, by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

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Nostalgia is an erratic conglomerate of emotion, and at its worst a dangerous one. At its core, it supposes that some point in the past was fixed, constant, and true -- that, for a while at least, the past flew by less transiently and confusingly than the modern world. We might know that the past was as varied and as subjective and as nuanced as our present, but we don't like to feel that way.

Take the American folk music tradition, just as a crazy random example. If I threw out any Stephen Foster-esque song title, like "Oh Susannah" or "Clementine" or "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain," to a room full of Statesmen, they'd all be able to join in and sing the same melody and all the same words (for the first verse) as if the song were permanent and petrified like wood. They'd feel like part of a tradition -- and they wouldn't be wrong, even if the bean-eating tent-throwing wagon-driving cowboys in their collective imagination didn't match the real historical precedent. They'd be subject to a powerful dose of national nostalgia, part of a long and broad musical heritage, even if said heritage has failed to pass down all the lyrics and any of the meaning of its most popular songs. (It's also largely failed to pass down the idea of these songs as mutable and malleable. I seriously doubt every 19th century American with a guitar or a harmonica played those songs sans improvisation or alteration.)

Perhaps our modern sensibilities (no judgment here -- every time period has its own sensibilities) don't particularly allow us to receive our American musical heritage. Neil Young has said of the songs on Americana that they are all tunes we've known since kindergarten, and I just don't think that's true anymore. For one, music in general and singing in particular factor ever more minutely into our public education (despite the fact that, as I learned in my college German classes, music and singing can be incredible teaching tools). If we're not being taught the lyrics to "Clementine," how should we know that despite its jaunty tune, it's a wonderfully tragic song? (And how should we know that "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" is at all political or apocalyptic when it sounds like someone's aunt is coming for a weekend visit, probably with gifts?)

I had my first ritual listen-through of Americana last night, with my partner by my side. She speculated that, aside from not teaching us the songs in the first place, our modern sensibilities don't particularly allow us to juxtapose melody with meaning -- that is, are our minds on guard for this dissonance between lyrics and music? The composer of "Clementine" must have wanted to contrast the story of a girl's death with a whistle-able tune. Could we even wrap our heads around that today? Could we, as a nation of nostalgic first-verse singers, comprehend the significance of an adapted version?

The Horse wants to find out.
---
Americana is getting all kinds of hype -- it's officially released tomorrow, June 5, though anyone with an ear to the e-ground has heard it already. (Hey, Young has said that streaming/piracy is the new radio, which I take as a full-out endorsement of all the free streaming versions of the album available. If you like it enough to carry it around on an iPod or spin on your home turntable, you'll buy it.) Long story short, Young and Crazy Horse have taken eleven songs from different periods of America's past and reinvented them to varying degrees, mostly with electric guitars, all with percussive garage-rock attitude.

I'm one of the deepest Neil Young fans out there. So when I say this album perplexes me, that means something. (In fairness, the first internet rumblings of Le Noise had me incredibly skeptical, and now it's one of my favorite albums by anyone, ever.)

I'll be giving my CD (better sound quality than mp3, not as good as vinyl -- darn this living abroad without an awesome sound system business!) several good listenings when it arrives this week, all in an attempt to sort out the puzzlement. First impressions are that some of the songs are geniusly reinvented and will wear out my speakers:
-"Oh Susannah" sets the tone for everything this album could be -- groovin', funky, and like seeing your former babysitting subjects all grown up, a fascinating combination of familiarity and newness.
-"Jesus' Chariot" you'd know better as "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain." This song is on the warpath. It's frightening. It's doomsday with a four-piece band. It's easily my favorite track.
-"Gallow's Pole" is a great take. It's not Zeppelin's, it's not trad, and I think it more than any other track captures the dissonance between subject and sound.

At the same time, other songs are disappointing:
-I love the Horse for their ragged looseness as much as anyone, but "Tom Dula" feels just too strung out and jagged. I'm curious to hear the CD version, as I do think my low-quality streaming threw off some of the sounds. But meh.
-"This Land Is Your Land" is the song that stays truest to form, and I wish so badly that it hadn't. Maybe the band felt the often-dark album needed a pick-me-up, but this isn't it. I'm glad that the more questioning lyrics come through, but the music does nothing to challenge my brain. I wanted a rearrangement, not a cover.

Some are very rockin', very worthy of inclusion, and yet...
-"Clementine" gets dark and mournful... yet I keep imagining what it would have been like slowed down to a meandering, lamenting, "Cortez the Killer"-like tempo. I feel like the Horse was in a groove, and nothing could slow that freight train down.
-"Travel On" could have been plucked straight from the 1991 album Ragged Glory. If you liked Ragged Glory, you'll dig it... yet you can also take that to mean that it fails to break new ground.

Then there are some oddities (and I think liking oddities is a requirement of being a Neil Young fan):
-"Wayfarin' Stranger" is deep and off-kilter, like some of Young's more peculiar late-'70s material. It's also the only acoustic track, and very much worth hearing.
-"Get a Job" has to be the first grunge doo-wop cover. However much fun that sounds like to you, that's how much fun you'll have with the track.
-"God Save the Queen" is like this: Hendrix doing an anthem, minus all the flash and drugs, plus a medley with the American reclamation of the song ("My Country 'Tis of Thee") that chronicles both America's colonial past and our (light-hearted?) musical finger to the old monarchy. It also continues Young's relatively recent penchant for ending an album with a full choir. (Go back over the last decade's albums and look at the closing tracks. I'm not kidding.)

Americana is absolutely worth getting. Despite my quibbles and as-yet uncertainties, it blows most cover albums out of the water because it's so much more than a cover album. For the most part, the songs take on new meaning because of their arrangements. It advances the American folk musical heritage without being irreverent, allows the songs to speak for themselves rather than wielding them as modern-day commentary (and boy, are they still relevant or what!), and ultimately continues looking forward. That's how it avoids the worst pitfalls of nostalgia. It's a risky album, and ultimately a successful one.

The Tower Treasure, by Franklin W. Dixon

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Our perspectives on the outside world shift as we grow older and, for those first fifteen years or so, bigger. Our memories fail to adjust accordingly. Think about it: have you ever gone back to your elementary school (or even your high school) and sworn that it used to be... well, not so tiny?

Remember when you had a babysitter and you thought she/he was the very pinnacle of womanhood/manliness? Think about that now that you know she/he was all of fourteen years old at the time.

Pull out your favorite childhood VHS and reminisce about how you would watch it for hours. Then find a VCR, dust it off, find a place in town that will actually repair it, and then watch that tape. Yeah, it's all of twenty five minutes long.

That's kind of what rereading the first Hardy Boys book, The Tower Treasure, was like for me. Even as a young reader, I could whip through one of those adventures in about two hours... but now, that seems like an hour longer than necessary. I remember the mysteries being truly mystifying. I remember being terrified of the hobo who locks Frank and Joe in an old, rotten water tower -- like, I couldn't go to sleep after reading about his dirty, cackling face disappearing behind the trap door.

Now? Not quite so frightening.

Revisiting a childhood favorite is a good lesson in relativity, though. I feel like I see all the time some instance of an adult coaxing a kid by saying, "Oh, come on, it's not too far" or "Oh, come on, it's not too scary" or "Oh, come on, it's not too tall." The adults aren't lying -- the challenge in question is neither too far nor too scary nor too tall.

To the adult, at least.

We may not be able to fully sympathize with folks of another culture or gender. But everyone is a kid at least once. Perhaps we could all benefit from occasional reminders of what intrigued or overwhelmed or otherwise affected us in our own smaller days, so we can better comprehend how our smaller counterparts are interacting with their worlds.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

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The first good reason for my finally reading Jane Eyre is the richer understanding lent to this webcomic (full props and credit to Hark! A Vagrant):

The second good reason is for getting over this stigma that Charlotte Brontë and other authors like her (see: Jane Austen) produce pure chick-lit. Yes, women seem to love this story type more than men do; honestly, I think this difference stems more from our manly prejudices than from any qualities inherent in the works.

Why shouldn't men like to read a good love story? Especially when that story is not mere mush and sentiment, but chock-a-block full of subversion, spooky attic noises, and near-death wanderings, its romance element nearly takes a backseat. (I say nearly, for Jane Eyre is a wholly different kind of story without the love interests.)

Actually, these romance stories--when well done!--are among the most intriguing. We know these two characters are perfect for each other; we know they ought to get together and get on with the down-and-dirty already; and we really really believe they will. How is it that the protagonists' inevitable pairing is stretched so thin that we demote it from knowledge to belief? How is it that, despite our knowing (or thinking we know) precisely how the story is going to end, in the generalities if not in the specifics, we keep reading, enthralled, our certainties tempered and our knowledge doubted?

Pulling off those questions is a remarkable enough feat for any storyteller. And readers, male and female alike, appreciate when an author does it well. We men, though we might not like to admit it, fall in love as often and as powerfully and as capably as our counterparts. We have the same doubts and anxieties about romance, and the same exultation and exuberance. So why should we not partake of the same literature with the same enthusiasm?

Give romance a shot, men. You couldn't start with a much better example than Jane Eyre.

Podcast of "In the Haus of Broken Toys"

To coincide with the launch of A Thoroughly Good Blue, podcasts.ie have recorded several of the anthology's contributors reading their pieces and are now releasing them (for free!) to the public.

Already my reading of "In the Haus of Broken Toys" seems to be well-received, and it just launched on Friday. So follow the link to get the podcast for your very own (for free!). It's also available on iTunes (for free). And then please feel welcome to let me know in the blog comments what you think of the reading.

Did I mention that it's for free?

If you like what you hear, and you want to read more, remember that the ebook of A Thoroughly Good Blue is available on Amazon for a steal of a price.

Thank you, Microphone readers, for your support!

Needful Things, by Stephen King

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I've finally taken the plunge and read my first Stephen King book -- which is my disclaimer way of saying that, for all I know, what I'm about to write may be no-duh to longtime King readers. It's what struck me after reading Needful Things, though, so I'll say it anyway. (And before anyone rides me on a rail for being King-ignorant [Kingorant?], I've got Misery on my shelf to read soon.)

This book is (so I'm told) not King's most horrific writing, nor his most frightening, though I would call it frightful. What struck me so deeply was not the fact that the Devil comes to town as a well-groomed shopkeeper looking to con some people out of their souls, but that the town goes to hell on the highway of their own paving. Human greed and pride rule the day here, and while the people of Castle Rock may push their vices to the extreme, they act in ultimately human ways -- ways in which, under the right circumstances, you and I might well behave.

King could have actually made the story more frightful by backing off on the shopkeeper's control over human characters. Throughout the novel and up to right near the end, his powers of mental persuasion and delusion remain evident and only grow more powerful. I had the very real sense that the townspeople were being played -- not merely manipulated, but moved around the board like stiff, non-living chess pieces by an all-powerful hand. Persuasion is not the name if the game so much as domination. Yes, human desire for physical possessions (and the attendant jealousy and greed that fester like aggravated cold sores) courses through all the characters -- but we don't need the subordinating hand of a demonic salesman to induce magnificent and irrational destructive behavior. You don't even have to wait for Black Friday to observe how covetous normal people can be. Even your run-of-the-mill advertisements recognize this covetousness and employ incredible amounts of psychological influence on the human mind when it comes to triggering "need" rather than mere "want"; basically, what the impish shopkeeper in this book does to his customers, people themselves do to others anyway.

Yes, a satanic proprietor can exacerbate the worst of our qualities. The traits are already there, though. The frightful part of Needful Things is not that the Devil has ridden into town; it's what we're capable of doing with a little nudging. And all I have to do is look around my own reality to see that perhaps, in some ways, King overestimates just how much evil influence we might actually need to jump off the deep end.