Congratulations to Mercantile member, University of Cincinnati English Dept. PhD. candidate, Cincinnati Review volunteer, cyclist, dog owner, and all-around literary nice guy Brian Trapp for placing in Narrative Magazine‘s 30 Below contest with his story Liability. This isn’t the first contest he’s won. Do yourself a favor and read it.
-Ed Scripsi
It’s January 25th. That means it’s Robbie Burns’ Day, people. By law, on Burns Day you cannot be fired from your job if you stumble back from your lunch hour reeking of haggis and Laphroaig. Well, by tradition. Or rather, that’s how it should be. I think so, anyway.
Let’s get out there and do the man proud.
-Norm De Plume
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Anthony Trollope’s novels read fast. Way faster than Eliot or Dickens. For the nineteenth century, they’re almost like Elmore Leonard in their sparseness. Having finished Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw we can now suggest that Anthony picked up that clear fast prose style from his mother. Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw: Or Scenes on the Mississippi reads like a crime novel. But it plays like an opera. About a third of the way into the book we started thinking that it was too bad nobody pitched the story to Verdi. He would have loved it. Whitlaw turns out to be as rotten as the Duke of Mantua. There’s a scuttling semi-magical crone for the mezzo role. There’s a martyred missionary, his devoted sister (lyric soprano) and a chorus of German good guys. It would have been wonderful. It still could be. All it needs is a big swashbuckling composer and a librettist other than the piously revered but incompetent novelist who tackled the Margaret Garner task and failed utterly.
The Hervieu illustrations? Mon Dieu! Sensatonelles! Teriffiants!
-Nemo Wolfe
On this day in 1809, Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston (follow the hotlink, assuming that Wikipedia isn’t down to protest legislation with cute-sounding acronyms, or that an anonymous group of hackers called “Anonymous” hasn’t destroyed the internet in an act of defiance, only to realize that the internet was the only thing that elevated them, mere dorks, geeks and nerds, to “hackers” in the first place, although if you’re reading this, that probably hasn’t happened… yet. What do you think Edgar Allen Poe would have made of all this nonsense? Probably another great story in the vein of “Fall of the House of Usher”) . According to The Washington Post‘s The Style Blog, up until the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, a mysterious stranger left three roses and a half-drunk bottle of not very expensive cognac at his grave. Why? Perhaps because half-drunk bottles of laudanum are difficult to come by. -Ed Scripsi
From The New York Times, October 14, 2010:
“[Dickens] had this whole punch ritual,” Mr. Wondrich explained during a recent interview at a bar near his own home in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. “This whole punch performance. He liked to set the liquor on fire.”
There’s a recipe for Dickens Punch taken from his letters. This will become important within the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
-Norm De Plume
With a title longer than a tweet, the three-volume first edition of Frances Trollope’s 1836 anti-slavery novel came to the Mercantile as part of the McLaughlin Collection, housed for years in the Fry-carved McLaughlin case, one of the glories of the Library. The novel now sits in the cataloguing cage where it is as unlikely to be browsed as it was behind glass and butternut. Which is too bad. We’ve always liked Domestic Manners (required reading for Mercantile employees) and we’re famously devoted to Anthony, so we’ve always been curious about Frances’s fiction and are not at all surprised to find, having finished the first volume, that it’s Good Stuff. Not only is it good, but there are plenty of local connections. Unsurprising, given FT’s exposure to the neighborhood.
We will report fully upon finishing the novel. What we will tell you now is that the book was illustrated by Auguste Hervieu, the long-suffering but devoted French artist who kept the Trollopes from starving while they were here, and those illustrations are worth the price of admission. And the book is printed on the most luxurious vellum. It is a great pleasure to handle and hold.
-Nemo Wolfe
The 200th anniversary of Charles John Huffam “Boz” Dickens’ birth is creeping up and will be celebrated here at the Merc with, if I have anything to do with it, Dickens punch. You can begin celebrating his life and work, as well as that of the late great Hitch, with Hitchens’ ultimate piece in Vanity Fair on the vastly popular and prolific Victorian scribbler–A good way to spend a winter day while, in the words of Rizzo the Rat’s chum in A Muppet Christmas Carol, “our assets are frozen”.
-Ed Scripsi
By pure luck, the Mercantile’s Reading Room happens to be an acoustically blessed place. That’s why you should never, ever miss an opportunity to hear live music here. Especially if it’s free.
As it happens, you have two opportunities to do just that in the coming weeks. The first will be on Saturday, January 7th at 8 p.m., when the folks from Oberlin’s ACADEMY will be renting the Reading Room in order to present a program of new music. Although this is NOT an official Mercantile event, it is free, it looks interesting, and I understand refreshements will be available, so what have you got to lose?
Then on Friday, January 13th, the Kenyon College Chasers a cappella group will perform at noon in the Reading Room. This event is free, and it IS an official Mercantile event, so attendance is mandatory.
-Norm De Plume
via shawncalhoun (http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawncalhoun/)
We’ve lost track of all the books we read over the hols, but here are a few: The Drop, which is the new Michael Connelly, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, Spycatcher by Matthew Dunn, and 2011 Man Booker winner The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes. We haven’t event cracked the spine on Status Anxiety, The Only Book Anyone Gave Us This Christmas even though the whole point of the holiday is to give books, don’t you agree?
The Drop is Connelly in top form. Not to be missed. The Hollinghurst is something like an abbreviated A.S. Byatt, mostly notable for the case it makes that all biographies are so flawed that they might as well not be read, a conclusion we reached decades ago which is why readers will never see bios in this blog. Utter bunk. The Dunn goes on much too long, but there is enough authenticity about it and enough scary Balkan stuff that one’s time is not totally wasted.
Liesl Schillinger couldn’t say enough about the Barnes in the NYT, and there is that Booker, so we expected the very best, and we read it in the prescribed single sitting after lunch and after hanging up the alarmingly bodybaglike, re-useable, already-lit, Xmas tree and storing the ornament boxes on the most unreachable garage shelves yesterday, but here’s the thing: we felt, as they used to say in the eighties, violated, when it was all done. And we told Mrs. Wolfe that we weren’t at all sure that the Barnes wasn’t, as Joseph Kerman said of Tosca, “a shabby little shocker.”
-Nemo Wolfe
Happy Holidays from the Mercantile Library!
-Ed Scripsi
