Kilmeny Of The Orchard, By L.M. Montgomery

Kilmeny of the Orchard, by L.M. Montgomery

This was originally published as a serial, and in its completed form it's quite short. The whole thing is pure romantic melodrama: a wealthy, intelligent young man goes to teach in a rural town, and he falls in love with the most beautifullest girl ever EVER in the whole WORLD, Kilmeny. Two problems (SPOILERS): first, Kilmeny is mute, even though she can hear perfectly; second, Kilmeny's mother was crazy and never let her out into the world to see other people, and also she broke all the mirrors in the house and told Kilmeny she was ugly, even though Kilmeny is the most exquisite thing in the entire world EVER. You'd think Kilmeny would have crippling psychological problems, but fortunately once her boyfriend buys her a mirror and shows her how ethereally gorgeous she is, she's fine.

There's an even more alarmingly racist subplot in this one, where Kilmeny's guardians take in an abandoned Italian baby and raise it as their own. He grows up to fall in love with Kilmeny and gets super-upset when this rich handsome white guy shows up and declares he loves her. His "uncouthness" is blamed squarely on his innate Italian-ness overcoming his Christian upbringing, and his guardians regret bringing him up in such a way that he "forgets his place." Ughhh.

So yeah, there wasn't a lot to redeem this one. I guess I can't complain that something written as melodrama is "too melodramatic," but come on, the guy who falls in love with a girl who can't speak just happens to be best friends with a throat doctor. I mean, COME ON, right?

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

-- Raymond Chandler

The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, by William Holtz.

This book is controversial because it suggests that the Little House books were only good because Rose edited them with a heavy hand. It's also controversial because it takes an unsympathetic view towards Laura Ingalls Wilder. But of course the information about Laura is filtered through Rose's perception, and Rose could turn violently against people she once considered friends if she felt they let her down. While I think LIW was probably guilty of some of the faults Rose ascribed to her, I also think Rose was writing out of a desire to vent, not because she wanted to objectively assess her mother's character.

Frankly, the Rose/Laura stuff wasn't what interested me -- Rose is what interested me! She was fascinating, complicated, liberated before the culture was ready for it, wracked with depression, viciously introspective, generous, and so fiercely opposed to the New Deal that she wished FDR would get assassinated. She prized freedom and individual autonomy above all other virtues (and it comes across strongly in the Little House books), but I never saw if she addressed the inevitable influence of culture over the individual. All her life she suffered from dental problems stemming from early malnutrition, yet she opposed any kind of "socialism" that might have helped her or her parents as they struggled in her infancy. She talked about how an individual must retain his absolute autonomy, but I didn't ever see her address the women and children that would be subject to the fortune or failure of an individual man's choice. I wonder if she did address it, but the author didn't mention it, or if her own experience as a liberated woman made her unsympathetic to women who felt trapped by life circumstances.

She essentially lived her life in a blind panic over money, but she gave freely to those in need. She refused to get a Social Security number and was disgusted that she was eligible for benefits. If she was alive today, she'd probably be horrified by our new socialist health care reform.

In her early life, her journals were full of howling desire, wit, strong emotion -- and then when she got older she found she couldn't journal anymore, and her emotional life seemed to shrink correspondingly. That freaked me out a little. Once she stopped the meticulous observation of her own life, she didn't feel things so deeply, and once she stopped feeling things so deeply she seemed to become more bitter and pessimistic. But where her early years were characterized by a feeling of aimlessness, a lack of center, her later years found her finally settled: on brittle libertarian philosophy. Suddenly aimlessness doesn't look so bad!

Rose Wilder Lane is still awesome, but man, what an argument against the tidy hopeful narrative of the Little House books!

rubadub:

Oh No, The Radio.

Owlsey

I just saw on Last Plane to Jakarta that Will Owsley died yesterday, apparently suicide. I didn't know he was a part of Amy Grant's touring band or that he was a well-regarded Nashville musician, but I loved the catchy power-pop album he put out circa 2000. "Oh No The Radio" was the bumper music for an L.A. radio show and I thought the opening guitar riff was the greatest thing, so I tracked it back to his self-titled album and put it on the minidisc I reserved for only the awesomest of songs. When my family drove up to Oregon one summer, I played this for them and waited with giddy expectancy to hear how much they loved it. But they didn't remark on it one way or the other and I was bitter about it from Redding to Grants Pass.

Knowing so little about him, the name "Owsley" has always conjured up this vague sense-memory of summer and happiness and the opening riff to this song. To find out that he was hurting like this is heartbreaking.

Finally listening to the American McGee's Alice soundtrack by Chris Vrenna. I was interested in the game when it came out a decade ago but I never bought it. I did download an mp3 of one of its songs during the promotional blitz, however, and it lived on a mix CD I kept in my car for about four years.  Fast forward to last Christmas, when my Alice-obsessed little sister asked me to find the game for her. I got her the game and the soundtrack, and she promptly became obsessed with both, making me feel really, really, really old. So now I'm listening to the soundtrack and feeling intensely nostalgic for a game I never played.

Unfortunately my sister loves the game so much that she wasn't amused by the scathing Old Man Murray review of it, which might be my favorite piece of web writing ever, even a decade down the line. It contains this great quote, newly relevant in light of Tim Burton's Alice remake:

The problem with making a dark and disturbing version of Alice in Wonderland is that it's pretty dark and disturbing to begin with, which gives it little training wheels that help cultural firebrands ride it into geniusdom once every eighteen months or so. Masterminding a trippy reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll is like making a version of Crazy Traxi, only crazy! At this point, about the edgiest thing you could do with Alice in Wonderland is try to make it a little less fucking insane. 

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh

I loved this book as a kid, but I've always loved The Long Secret more, because temperament-wise I was much more like Beth Ellen than Harriet. But I love Harriet -- her all-caps SCREAMING and her moments of insight and wisdom intermingled with arrogance and self-interest. Re-reading it was interesting, because the book feels so much shorter now: we've barely met Ole Golly before it's time for her to leave! I was also surprised by the instances where Harriet was being excluded by the other kids, but it took her a while to realize it. That's one of the distinct differences between her and Beth Ellen; Beth Ellen was always cringing in terror at the slightest hint someone was upset with her.

Reading this as an adult was nice, because I have some distance from the sensations of childhood (I almost couldn't get through the "everyone hates Harriet" section the first time I read it, I was so mortified on her behalf). But it's also very weird-feeling, because instead of identifying with Harriet, I was fascinated by all the adults: Ole Golly, Harriet's parents, the people on her spy route. Harriet gives details about them but doesn't always draw the correct conclusions about those details -- there are nuances that either don't interest her or don't mean anything to her. And for the first time ever, I was sympathetic toward the cook! She's constantly the target for Harriet's scorn, but she's also incredibly put-upon and dehumanized!

One opinion of mine has remained consistent through my childhood and adult readings, though. Harriet's newspaper writing, while interesting, was NOT real journalism, and no real school paper would've allowed half of it to be printed (I was a hardened realist as a child).