The Pioneers: The Official Haiku Review

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I'd been having trouble making my way through the overgrown forest that is James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers. It's really not my fault; even the great Mark Twain opined that Cooper broke several literary rules, explaining: "I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote." I guess I should be glad I picked The Pioneers to read instead of The Deerslayer. And I did finish it, despite the struggle. So here is my Official Haiku Review:

Earth and her bounty
Are not a way to keep score
We should be stewards

The Pioneers was the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be written, but it falls last chronologically. It is set in 1793 in upstate New York, lately civilized by men such as local judge Marmaduke Temple (Cooper has some great names, at least). The new roads and towns and laws are making life difficult for the elderly Natty Bumppo (aka the Leatherstocking, aka the Deerslayer), who lives off the land much as the dwindling Native American population used to. The book opens with Bumppo and Temple arguing over which one of them shot a deer (and thus owns the carcass). This argument lasts a long time—they and other characters rehash it several times, much to my intense boredom—but it is representative of a larger problem: who owns the land and its resources? Bumppo used to hunt and fish at will; now Temple insists he observe a hunting season. This leads to a confrontation that enlivens the last 100 pages of the book. (Why is it only the last 100 pages? sigh.)

Ironically, while Temple tries to control the land and restrict Bumppo's hunting, he agrees with the old hunter when it comes to the wasteful ways of other townspeople. Instead of catching only the fish they need to eat, the locals use nets to trap the biggest fish, leaving the smaller ones to go to waste. When a pigeon migration flies overhead, the locals see it as sport, shooting as many as they can and leaving most of the meat to rot. Temple even worries that the trees may be overharvested. Of course, Temple's concern isn't purely out of love of nature; he is biggest landowner in the county, and depleted lands could lose their value.

Interestingly enough, there is a romance in the novel that almost exactly parallels the one in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's classic that I read last month. Of course, the novel's resolution favors white landowners like Temple; it's no great spoiler to tell you that the two characters who are closest to the land end up either die or move west at the close of the novel. Maybe Cooper thought this was progress, or Manifest Destiny; maybe he thought it was a tragedy. (He published the novel in 1823, less than a decade before the Trail of Tears forced the relocation of most of the South's Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi.) I can't really tell; either the author is too subtle for my poor understanding, or else Twain was right:

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

Photo of the Week--7/28/08

We began our second year of living overseas with a wonderful, week-long trip to Ireland. As you can see from the picture, there's a good reason why it's called the Emerald Isle—greenery everywhere. Even our rental car was acid green (about the only thing Boy remembers from the trip), and we drove it up and down, alongside beaches and through hills, occasionally getting stopped by an Irish traffic jam (ie, a flock of sheep on the road). The lack of signposts made getting lost a frequent but enjoyable event during our trip. This is Dunguaire Castle, a 16th-century tower house on the shores of Galway Bay. The hill, the rocks, the water, the green everywhere—it just seemed to encapsulate everything wonderful about Ireland.

Procrastination Vacation!

Ah, summer! It's August, and the fish are calling us. "Come catch us!" they whisper. "Come filet us!" they hint. "Come fry us up in pancake mix and butter!" they suggest. "Come eat us!" they insist. We shan't disappoint them.

Yes, it's time to join what's becoming an annual ritual for my family: fish camp. We find a place on a lake, rent a few cabins and a pontoon boat, catch fish like crazy, and eat eat eat! This year we will have almost 40 people from four generations of the family: my 92-year-old grandmother, still healthy and witty and determined to enjoy everything now that it's our turn to cook; 7 of her 8 children (plus 4 or 5 of their spouses/partners); 10 of her 11 grandchildren (plus 6 of their spouses/partners); and 8 or 9 of her great-grandchildren, from Boy, the eldest at 14, to the newest addition, only 3 months old. It will be quite the gathering, complete with food, cards, food, swimming, biking, food, reading, sightseeing, and I think some food.

So, Dear Readers (all six of you), I am taking a break from this blog. Although my laptop is accompanying us up North, I won't being trying to work. I have no need to procrastinate, and thus no need to spend time here. Besides, half my regular readers will be up at camp with me. Through the magic of scheduled postings, a new photo-of-the-week entry will appear on Monday; if I manage to finish The Pioneers tonight, I might schedule it to appear during the week. But maybe not. The fish are waiting, you see, and I need to get ready.

The Word Nerd Sez: A is for ...

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a word nerd. I don't just mean it in the sense of "words are my tools as a writer and I like to have a full tool box." I'm a word nerd in the sense of "sorry I'm late, I looked something up in the dictionary and got distracted and read the whole section between yak and yerk."

Words fascinate me. I like their precision. There are whole stories in their etymology.* Words are what separate us from the animals; they are uniquely human. So I get lost in dictionaries sometimes. I'm a longtime subscriber to the A.Word.A.Day listserv, and rarely get stumped by the Reader's Digest "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power." Being a word nerd means I also like to share my enthusiasm with others. So for you loyal readers of The Blathering (all six of you), I introduce a new feature: "The Word Nerd Sez..."

In this installment, I begin at the beginning. The Word Nerd Sez: A is for ...

abecedarian

It's only appropriate I begin this feature with a word whose meanings include "alphabetically arranged" or "relating to the alphabet." As you can tell from the pronunciation—ay-bee-see-DAYR-ee-uhn—the word was inspired by the first four letters of the alphabet. Medieval scholars coined the term abecedarium because they wanted a fancy Latin word to describe their alphabet books, and we changed -arium into -arian so it could serve as either noun or adjective.

I love abecedarian games. When Boy was younger, we often dealt with long waits by playing alphabet games such as "pick a subject and name words from A to Z." (It's relatively easy for astronomy—yay, quasar and x-ray!—but harder for subjects like vegetables or car models.) The abecedarian book constitutes a whole genre of children's books, from Sleeping Bear Press's state-by-state series of alphabet books to works by Caldecott winners like Chris Van Allsburg.

My favorite abecedarian work is Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a perfect antidote to the sugary saccharine books we sometimes see for kids. I wish I could find my copy (it's a tiny book, and has been swallowed up by one of my overcrowded bookshelves), but to give you a taste, the book begins: "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears." I was totally hooked even before I got to the exquisite line: "N is for Neville who died of ennui." I don't think I'll ever pen an abecedarian work, but the word sure is fun to play with.

*Etymology: the study of word origins (from the Greek etumon, true sense of a word + -logy, to speak of or study), not to be confused with entomology, the study of bugs.

If you tear it down, will they come?

So the other day we were headed to Canada and were detoured from the highway. They've got the roads shut down because they're rebuilding everything in order to provide a better "Gateway" to the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor. Of course, being an MDOT project, the detour signs were completely useless and we ended up wandering around Detroit. This is not scary to us, as both of us worked downtown for at least ten years and know that the city's horrible rep is for the most part undeserved. (Unless you're talking about city politics, in which case it's worse than you've probably heard.) Anyway, our version of the detour took us to Trumbull Street, the home of Tiger Stadium, former home of Detroit's professional baseball club.

Now, I'm not a diehard baseball fan. I enjoy live games (and courtesy of my writer's flexible schedule, have accompanied my friend to Opening Day the past six years), and might watch an inning or two if I click by it on the TV, but more likely than not I'm can't tell you the Tigers' record on any given day. I'm not compelled to follow every move of the club or watch every game, as I am with Michigan football. Still, I have a certain fondness for the Tigers. The first local championship I ever witnessed was the Tigers' run in 1984. I actually went to over a dozen games at Tiger Stadium that year, in which they opened the season 35-5 and finished with 104 wins. I remember watching Jack Morris throw a no hitter (on the tiny 10-inch TV in my folks' kitchen), and I was actually at the stadium when the Tigers won their 100th game, making Sparky Anderson the first manager to hit that mark in both the American and the National Leagues. When the Tigers clinched that fourth victory in the World Series, I remember walking out from my apartment on campus and hearing people honking their car horns and cheering. (I also remember the overheated coverage of people in the city "rioting" over the championship. Sigh.)

In later years I was excited to see the Pistons, Red Wings, and Wolverines win championships, but the Tigers were my first experience with sports glory, so I have very fond memories regarding the team and Tiger Stadium. This made what we saw during our detour so sad: Tiger Stadium is being demolished.

Don't get me wrong. The new stadium, Comerica Park, is a lovely facility and has contributed to a revival of that part of the city. But it seems so wasteful to just tear down the old ball park. Baseball was first played at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in 1896, and Tiger Stadium itself has been around in close to its present form since the late 1930s. After it closed following the 1999 season, however, the park has remained vacant. There is a group that is trying to redevelop the site, preserving at least the field, but it's not guaranteed that they will succeed. Seeing the left field wall come down seems like a blow against all the hopeful things people in this part of Michigan would like to see for the city of Detroit.

Photo of the Week--7/21/08

What can I say? I'm a sucker for beautiful architecture set against blue skies. It was a gorgeous spring day in Paris, way back in April 1999, and here you see the Mr. and the Boy sitting on the steps of the Sacre Coeur Cathedral in Montmartre. Tourists and locals, all enjoying the weather and the beauty of the city. What more could you ask for on a weekend trip?

American Lit 2, Poor Me 1

So I've been following the lead of my friend Jacqui in her Remedial Literature Project, trying to get caught up on some of those American authors and novels I somehow missed when I was farting around playing Lode Runner immersed in British and Latin American Lit in college. I'm not nearly as ambitious as Jacqui, trying to read one book a week; I've got other important things to read, like the latest for my children's book club (checking out the competition) and Entertainment Weekly's New Classics! the newspapers and newsweeklies I need to keep up on local elections and various important events in the world.

So if you've been following my blog, you'll know so far I liked Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, while Meville's Moby Dick totally kicked my ass. So I turned to James Fenimore Cooper, author of the classic Leatherstocking Tales, to break the tie. The Pioneers (1823) is the first and most realistic of the Tales, and made Cooper an international success. One critic called it his masterpiece. As a bonus, I was pretty sure there weren't going to be any chapters on whale heads.

I'm sad to report, however, that for me, reading The Pioneers is like undergoing "advanced interrogation techniques" at Gitmo. It may not technically be torture, but it sure feels like it. I'm a third of a way through the book, and so far Judge Marmaduke Temple has shot and grazed a young woodsman while trying to hit a deer. Then he argued with Natty Bumppo (aka Leatherstocking) about whether the deer was his or not. Then they took the young woodsman home to treat his minor wounds while they argued some more. Then they went to church. Then they went to the pub, where they argued about both the sermon and the deer. It's like Cooper decided to avoid breaking the classic literary rule of "Show, don't tell" by both showing and telling. (And I hate to break it to you, but having people sit around discussing what just happened counts as "telling," even if it is dialogue.)

That might not be so bad if he didn't break another rule regarding dialogue, namely, MAKE IT READABLE. Let's say you have a character who you want to portray as "uneducated." Ya cud do it by makin' everythin' he says drop a 'postrophe in ever' friggin' word, until yer reader feels like 'e is drownin' in 'postrophes. Or you could throw in a few choice words like "reckon" and "yonder" and the reader will supply the right voice.

Now, I understand that Cooper is trying to portray the diversity of the New York frontier. (It is set in 1793, back when New York state was the frontier.) There are immigrants from all over: a German major, a French gentleman, and an Irish barmaid, not to mention an African-American slave and the Native American John Mohegan. And Cooper had the right idea with the Monsieur, who speaks half in French, half in legible English. But then I had to endure the following within the space of two pages:

German major: "Ter teer is not so plenty as in ter old war, Pumppo; put ter lant is not mate as for ter teer to live on, put for Christians." Holy crap. At least I had the clue they were already talking about deer (teer), but mate for made? Put for But? Someone get me an aspirin.

Irish barmaid: "It's varry pratty men is the French; and jist when I stopt the cart, ... to kape the rig'lers in, a rigiment of the jontlemen marched by." I guess she's saying something nice about French soldiers, but exactly what is beyond me. If I have to stop to decipher what your characters are saying, I'm not reading anymore, I'm translating. And that's work.

Stubborn person that I am, I do plan on finishing The Pioneers. I'm pretty sure I know one of the major themes—who owns the land's bounty—and I think there might be a romance hidden among all the discussion about the deer. Here's hoping it's not so much more work to uncover it.