The Black Count, Bushman Lives, and A Wrinkle in Time

As it is the time of year people are thinking of gifts – and books make tremendous gifts – I've got a trio of titles that I've been suggesting lately that might just suit an otherwise tough-to-shop-for boy.

What if I were to suggest that the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo was partially based on a true story? Or if some of the swashbuckling in The Three Musketeers came from stories passed down father to son? And what if it turned out that much of the inspiration in Dumas' tales came from a mixed race general who fought alongside Napoleon but was despised because everyone assumed the striking black man charging ahead fearlessly on his horse he really was the one in charge?

I suppose you can guess the final question: What if I were to tell you that this striking historical figure was, in fact, Alexandre Dumas’ father? Author Tom Reiss’ delivers all this and so much more in The Black Count: Glory, Revollution, Betrayl, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, the biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. From his birth and brief experience with slavery in Haiti, to his Paris education where he learned to sword fight with aristocracy, to his rise in the French Revolutionary army, The Black Count is a biography that reads like an adventure novel. I’ll be honest, i don’t generally like biographies, but I love sweeping adventure stories and this one, steeped in Reiss’s well-sleuthed family history, feels both familiar and new at the same time.

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

For information on the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC, please see our post from last week. Over 100 books have been bought from the Powells wish list thus far! -CM It being October, it means that Halloween is right around the corner. Although Halloween has become associated with scary stories, it is more rightly associated (historically) with the telling of stories. Period. And what better stories than those found in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe?

Poe, after all, invented detective fiction in the English-speaking world with his creation of C. Auguste Dupin, the detective in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". (Dupin appeared in additional stories, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" and "The Purloined Letter". "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" feature a grisly double murder, made all the more baffling by occurring inside an inaccessible fourth-floor room that is locked from the inside. Ear-witnesses agree that they heard the attack, but cannot place the language used by the attacker. Dupin and his friend (the unnamed narrator) sort out what actually happened. Dupin, it should be noted, is not actually a detective, any more than Sherlock Holmes is - he is just a guy with an interest in learning the truth of the matter, who has the time and ability to track things down. Dupin is, in fact, a prototype for both Holmes and for Agatha Christie's detective, Hercule Poirot.

Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses by Ron Koertge

It starts with a creepy introduction, and Ron Koertge's take on fairy tales gets darker and twistier from there.

Do you want to sleep? Find another storyteller. Do you
want to think about the world in a new way?

Come closer. Closer, please.
I want to whisper in your ear.

Written largely in free verse (although much of it reads like spare prose, and not actual poetry), this collection is decidedly not a hearts-and-flowers account of Happily Ever After (HEA). And it's accompanied by what appear to be cut-paper representations of many of the tales.

For instance, the first story fills you in on what happened to Cinderella's stepsisters after Cinderella moved to the castle, and it involves various forms of mutilation and wishing for death. There are other characters who don't exactly get their HEA endings either, such as the characters in Rapunzel (who knew?), the mole in Thumbelina, and the father in Hansel & Gretel (at least impliedly, based on Koertge's telling).

Some of the tales are brought forward in time to the present, such as "The Little Match Girl", which features a kid trying to sell CDs on a corner in a very bad neighborhood, Little Red Riding Hood, or "Bearskin", in which the soldier who makes a deal with the devil is a veteran from Iraq, living in the psych ward at the Veterans Administration hospital.

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

I never quite developed the muscles for reading poetry.  The year that it was covered in my high school, I had a kind but somewhat inept English teacher who could have done a better job of introducing me to Betjeman and who probably shouldn’t have let me memorize a song from Chess for a recitation assignment.  (Don’t cry for him: after one year teaching private school eleventh graders, he fled back to his girlfriend in England and subsequently became a mildly successful novelist and critic.)  So I’ve been trying to build those muscles as an adult and not quite succeeding.  Thanks to podcasts (mostly from Poetry Magazine, who produce several terrific ones), I’ve discovered that I enjoy listening to poetry, but I still find reading it to largely be a challenge.

Although he mostly covers fiction, Michael Silverblatt does occasionally interview poets on his invaluable radio program Bookworm.  (He also makes me jealous, as he once noted on the program that he has two separate apartments: one to live in and one that holds his books.)  A few years ago, one of his guests was a poet named Brian Turner, who had recently published his first book after returning from a tour of duty in the Middle East.  And a year or so later, when I found myself browsing the poetry shelves at the big Barnes and Noble in Union Square, looking for something to try reading, my mind flew back to that intriguing interview and the fascinating excerpts that Turner had read.  And so I bought Here, Bullet and proceeded to read it slowly over the course of two months, a poem or two at a time every few nights.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (and William Shakespeare)

Here’s a secret that’s totally not a secret: I’m a Shakespeare dork. I suppose this makes sense, when you consider that my undergraduate degree is in drama. (Although I certainly knew classmates who didn’t like his work—even in the advanced Shakespeare class I took.) I also have a deep fondness (in fiction, at least), for what a friend of mine once described as “twee postmodern crap.” So it’s really not the least bit surprising that I would go for The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips.

I’ve been intending to get to Phillips’ work for quite some time now—I picked up his first three novels, Prague, The Egyptologist, and Angelica, long ago, but this one is the first one that I’ve read. The conceit of The Tragedy of Arthur (the book) is this: officially, it’s a rediscovered Shakespearean tragedy about King Arthur with an introduction by notable novelist Arthur Phillips. It is also, in the form of this introduction, the story of Arthur’s relationship with his father, a counterfeiter whom he believes forged The Tragedy of Arthur (the play). The introduction runs more than 250 pages, in which Arthur Phillips (the character), while fulfilling the terms of his contract with Random House to synopsize and annotate the play, gives the reader a history of his life with his father (brilliant, troubled, jealous of his ex-wife’s new husband) and his sister (brilliant, talented, obsessed with Shakespeare in a way that Arthur is not). It’s then followed by the play (itself about 100 pages long), with copious notes of the sort you’re likely to find in your average copy of King Lear or Much Ado About Nothing—explications of archaic vocabulary, occasional dramaturgical commentary—plus some notes by Phillips detailing the places where he believes his father’s game is given away.

Filthy Shakespeare by Pauline Kiernan

Ever wonder what the Bard was on about? I mean, really on about? If you've read Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet for English class (and if you haven't, you probably will), you've probably figured out that there are some double meanings in the text. And if you've ever been to a live production of one of his plays, the snickers from at least some of the members of the audience have probably cued you in to the fact that just because it's Shakespeare doesn't mean it's high-brow. In fact, Shakespeare's plays were well-loved by the (unwashed - literally) masses during his lifetime, and with good reason: even the tragedies have really bawdy bits in them.

Hence today's book: Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns by Pauline Kiernan. The book has a somewhat titillating title, and it certainly is chockablock full of blunt - nay, crude - sexual terms. But it does a good - if overenthusiastic - job of identifying representative scenes in many of the plays that involve decidedly bawdy terms.

A Coney Island of the Mind with CD, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry became better for me when I stopped having it as assigned reading. And when I'm not feeling self-conscious, and I read it out loud, then I'm doing it right.

You don't have to get the book-CD version of A Coney Island of the Mind. But hearing Ferlinghetti read these will be a treat. Here's one:

Christ Climbed Down
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

CHRIST climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems

Rewarding though it is, poetry is not always welcoming. Emily Dickinson is rather staid. Robert Frost is so somber. Muriel Rukeyser is frequently esoteric. Even Shakespeare’s sonnets can be at times as overwhelmingly florid as the lace cushions on your grandmother’s couch.

Frank O’Hara has seen a resurgence of interest lately. His Meditations in an Emergency popped up in Mad Men and friends keep bringing him up. O’Hara achieves the neat trick of placing within a taut form a spontaneous eye for his world.

Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme

Remember learning nursery rhymes when you were a kid? Ever wonder what Jack and Jill were doing? Ever think that maybe Andrew Dice Clay was onto something? Then Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme: The seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes by Chris Roberts is the book for you.

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

One saucy explanation of this rhyme is that "up the hill to fetch a pail of water" is actually a euphemism for having sex and that "losing your crown" means losing your virginity (in much the same way that people might "go to see a man about a dog" or get up to ab it of "how's your father" if they want to be vague about what they are doing). So here you have a rhyme about a young couple slipping off for a bit of "slap and tickle" and the regrets that come later. This may explain why Jill is the one most severely punished in the additional verses once her mother realizes that she has been frolicking in the hills with jack. It is interesting that Jack runs off rapidly, probably to tell his mates about what happened.

BASEBALL HAIKU, ed. van den Heuvel & Tamura

It's almost playoff season, so today, I'm talking about baseball - specifically, I'm talking about a book that's a few years old now, Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game, edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura.

This book of poetry is one that I found in the "sports" section of the book store when it came out, which gives you some idea exactly how sports-oriented it is. The book is intended for adults, but there’s no reason that baseball-lovers of all ages wouldn’t enjoy it (apart from a lack of pictures for the very young, that is).

Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins

Billy Collins has quite a reputation among U.S. readers of poetry as a somewhat folksy, wry sort of poet. He draws large crowds for his readings. He sells large numbers of his books. And all of it, I submit, is well-merited, since he has the knack, like Robert Frost before him, of speaking his poetic truth - however erudite or deep it happens to be - in such a way that most people can catch at least one meaning of the poem - the surface, at least, whether they choose to look into the depths or not.

Horoscopes for the Dead picks up with some of the same themes Collins's readers are used to seeing. There are some especially funny ones, such as "Hangover", which has nothing to do with the movies of the same name, but which finds a somewhat curmudgeonly (yet still funny) Collins suffering from a severe headache:

Hangover
by Billy Collins

If I were crowned emperor this morning,
every child who is playing Marco Polo
in the swimming pool of this motel,
shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth

Marco &emsp Polo &#8195 Marco &#8195 Polo

would be required to read a biography
of Marco Polo-a long one with fine print-
as well as a history of China and of Venice,
the birthplace of the venerated explorer

Marco &#8195 Polo &#8195 Marco &#8195 Polo

after which each child would be quizzed
by me then executed by drowning
regardless how much they managed
to retain about the glorious life and times of

Marco &#8195 Polo &#8195 Marco &#8195 Polo

It's kind of crappy audio quality, but you can hear Billy Collins read this poem here if you'd like.

Lyrics by Sting

First, the technical stuff. This book is really well-made. The white hardcover is covered with a gold-hued replica of Sting's handwritten lyrics. On the front, "Message in a Bottle" and "King of Pain"; on the back, bits from "Roxanne", complete with doodles. And covering the hardcover is a tan vellum that allows those bits to peek through a bit. The book contains a foreword and the lyrics from the first Police album, Outlandos D'Amour through Sting's solo, Sacred Love. It has two indices - one by first line, one by song title; the song title stuff includes copyright info, which is cool, but should have added the album titles, I'm thinking. Also in the book? Photographs, as one might expect. And here and there, some clarification from Sting.

You can read the complete foreword over at the Barnes & Nbble site (and probably elsewhere as well). What Sting notes first is that separating lyrics from their music can be a dicey thing, as they are mutually dependent beings.

The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth. . . . I have set out my compositions in the sequence they were wrritten and provided a little background when I thought it might be illuminating. My wares have neither been sorted nor dressed in clothes that do not belong to them; indeed, they have been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the first place. No doubt some of them will perish in the cold cruelty of this new environment, and yet others may prove more resilient and become perhaps more beautiful in their naked state.

Print your own Poetry Anthology!

For the past couple of years, I've offered a "short story anthology" post, where I link to some great short stories out there on the internet. This year, I thought I'd do the same thing with poetry for National Poetry Month. But you don't have to go to any links to read it, you only have to print it out, make a few simple folds and one little cut in the middle to have your very own anthology of poems for your pocket.

So, first, the anthology, then I'll explain the poems I chose and why. Click the image on the right for the file. This is a .jpg you print on a full sheet of 8.5x11 piece of paper, fold along the dotted gray lines, and make one cut along the solid gray line to construct the anthology. Here's a link (via pocketmod.com) for instructions on the folding and the cutting to turn it into a booklet. Join me after the jump for the breakdown of the poems...

Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems

I don't actually read a lot of poetry (I had a bad time with it in school.), but there are a couple of poets these days who always make me smile: Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. Mr. Collins' new collection, Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems, is one I'm looking forward to. I heard Garrison Keillor read one of the poems, and want to share it. Reading this poem silently is OK. But read it aloud, too, please. It's National Poetry Month, and they're best when read aloud.

"What She Said"
by Billy Collins

When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.

I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.

As I said, I was like give me a break.

I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,

but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.

And that was close enough
at that point in the evening

even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
give me a break,

for God's sake will you please give me a break?!

No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,

I felt the most I could be was like

to a certain degree

give me a break.

"What She Said" by Billy Collins, from Horoscopes for the Dead. © Random
House, 2011.

Pick-Up Game edited by Marc Aronson and Charles R. Smith Jr.

It's not just basketball games that go down at The Cage, the fenced-in court on West 4th Street in New York City. In Pick-Up Game: A Full Day of Full Court, nine short stories introduce a handful of players and spectators there on one July day.

I'm calling Charles R. Smith the point guard in Pick-Up Game, since it's his photographs and poems that lead in to the stories that comprise the book. Told in different voices, from different perspectives, each story picks up where the previous story leaves off. As co-editor Marc Aronson writes in the Afterword, "We chose the setting and the date and gave each author a time slot. Each author knew who was on the court because we didn't let an author write a new story until the previous one was done. Each writer came on the court knowing who was playing, who had won, but ready to tell his or her own story." (p. 164)

ARR you ready for some haiku?

Pirate Haiku: Bilge-Sucking Poems of Booty, Grog & Wenches for Scurvy Sea Dogs by Michael P. Spradlin is a small collection of pirate-related haiku that is likely to appeal to fans of humorous poetry and piratical antics. When I say it is small, I mean it in two different ways:

1. The trim size of the book itself is smaller than your usual tome. It measures 6" x 5" x 1/2".

2. There may be 185 poems in this book, but each one is a mere 3 lines (totalling 17 syllables) so . . . it's not a lot of words, I guess, is what I'm getting at.

When I think of books of this sort, I immediately think of the (sometimes disgusting but always entertaining) work of Ryan Mecum, whose collections Zombie Haiku, Vampire Haiku and Werewolf Haiku have been featured here. This book is truly different. For one thing, it's not about monsters, unless, of course, you consider pirates to be monsters - and certainly they do monstrous things sometimes, but it's not quite the same. Second, Pirate Haiku lacks the same degree of unified narrative as the Mecum books, although it does manage to put one together, telling the tale of One-Leg Sterling, a pirate who works his way up from crewman to captain the old-fashioned way: by mutiny! Quite a number of the haiku in the collection are the equivalent of one-liners. Like, say, this one:

Pirates like the dice
Except when they are loaded.
Er, the dice, that is.

Or this one:

Pirates are simple.
We like rum, guns, wenches. And
Women like bad boys.

He spends some time marooned on one of Japan's islands where he learns martial arts, which leads to some really interesting shipboard battles as the book progresses. :

I learn FACE-KICKING,
Which will come in handy when
I go back to sea.

Marines and merchants
Don't expect to get faces
Kicked when they are robbed.

And hey, along the way, the book manages to answer the question: Pirates or Ninjas?

You can check out the book and its author quite a bit more at the Pirate Haiku website, which contains amusing things like a video and excerpts from the book.

POETRY ROCKS! Modern American Poetry "Echoes & Shadows"

Sheila Griffin Llanas has written a great resource for modern teens interested in poetry and, more particularly, in its history with POETRY ROCKS! Modern American Poetry "Echoes & Shadows". The book contains information about twelve great American poets, beginning with Robert Frost and concluding with Langston Hughes. The poets are arranged in birth order, and each chapter begins with their biography (in brief), then provides sample poems - the first of which is accompanied by a summary and explanation. The themes and poetic techniques used by each poet are discussed, as well as their critical reception. Additionally, there's a bibliography.

The manner in which poems are discussed is conversational, staying away from too much jargon and explaining any technical terms as they arise. The poets included in this particular volume are:

Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
H.D. (Hilda Dolittle)
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
E.E. Cummings
Louise Bogan
Langston Hughes

This book is probably not the sort of thing most teens will want to own themselves, but to my way of thinking, it should be a must-buy for libraries and writing programs because of how it deals with the history of modern poetry and the lives and work of the included poets.

WEREWOLF HAIKU by Ryan Mecum

Remember ZOMBIE HAIKU, with all its humor and gorey details? Well, Ryan Mecum returns to that particular form with WEREWOLF HAIKU, in which a mild-mannered mailman is bitten by a (not) dog while on his daily rounds and finds himself a werewolf.

Turns out there are pros and cons to being a werewolf:

I can hear better,
even though both my ear holes
are clogged with whiskers.

Spiders have eight legs,
each of which I hear stomping
on my hardwood floors.

With heightened hearing,
current pop songs hurt my ears
more than they used to.

The poor mailman develops a unibrow and a lot of other hairy areas - ears, chest, tongue. And a tendency to chase cars and rabbits, howl at sirens, and hump legs. He's also become more of an attraction for dogs, which now follow him like the pied piper.

Metamorphosis: Junior Year by Betsy Franco

There better be some god of journals and blogs who cares about what I'm saying, or I'm screwed.

Thus starts Metamorphosis: Junior Year, the story of a high school junior named Ovid, whose sister got hooked on meth and ran away, leaving him home alone with his hovering parents. Ovid is an artist and a poet, so occasionally there are poems (by Betsy Franco, like the rest of the text) and drawings (by her son, Tom Franco - and yes, he's one of James Franco's brothers).

Ovid spends a lot of time talking about his friends in high school, all of whom are in situations that are very much like those faced by actual teens - a girl with an eating disorder, another who shoplifts and might be bisexual, another who prefers to hang out online and can't really deal with an in-person relationship; a guy who totally loved his girlfriend and was messed up when she dumped him; another who cuts himself. There are others, too, with different problems.

Ovid talks about his parents, too - how they are trying so hard to get everything "right" with him so that he won't turn out like his sister that he's going mental. He talks about his sister, too - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and about his artwork.

Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days

On the day of President Obama's inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander read her poem, "Praise Song for the Day". Alexander's poem is the poem posted on Day 1, and it can be seen as a celebration of the moment, with mention made of the historical nature of his presidency based on his race as well as mention made of the simple joy of the day. Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg, the forces behind today's book, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days, put out a call before the inauguration for 99 more poets, creating a blog with a new poem posted every day. The catch? Apart from Alexander's poem, most or all of the poems were written only a day or so before they were posted on the blog that housed them. (Sadly, the blog has since been pretty much wiped clean, although there are now a few poems - and their performances - posted there.

Within the remaining 99 poems, there are occasionally other poems celebrating the new President and his life. I am fond, for instance of the poem offered for Day 27, which was Valentine's Day. It's a poem by Diane Wald entitled "nonromantic obama valentine for america, february 14th, 2009", and it opens with a focus on Obama's smile:

let us just make a note of one thing before traveling too far on:
obama eats the camera.

in every single photograph where he is smiling
the presidential teeth
require a taming of light, a scrooching in of every aperture
so the picture is not too far bedazzled.

in honor of this i send all america this nonromantic obama valentine command:
thou shalt smile!

for our president
is smiling.

just a man.
openly smiling.

Read the rest of the poem here.