reading

[calimac]

Reading one's newsmagazines a week or so behind can be amusing. The Newsweek I was reading today featured a puff piece about what a wonderful Heimatland, er Homeland, Security chief Bernard Kerik will make. Said Emily, "never mind."

In the Dec. 13 New Yorker, an article on the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green, a great Sherlockian. First they thought it was suicide, then they thought it might be murder, and then they thought ... well, read it.

I'm not a Sherlockian - I like the Holmes stories, but I can't imagine doing anything with them other than re-reading them - and was not aware of Green's fame in the field, but I'd heard of him. The article mentions his father, Roger Lancelyn Green, children's author and friend of Tolkien & C.S. Lewis. Ironically, given that the article focuses on the difficulty of determining rights to some of Conan Doyle's papers, I was once involved with an effort by the Mythopoeic Press to contact Richard to see about purchasing rights to reprint some of his father's fiction. We'd been told that Richard was a terrible correspondent, and we never did hear back.

Also in the reading pile, an academic study of British By-Elections: The Volatile Electorate by Pippa Norris (OUP, 1990), and I ran across my copy of C.S. Lewis's Selected Literary Essays. Some great stuff in there, especially his essay on Hamlet, in which he points out that Hamlet is not a tale of a man who has to avenge his father - any old guy can avenge his father - but of a man who has been given a task by a ghost. That's what gives this play its juice, and why a purely naturalistic historical novel of Hamlet wouldn't interest me. (Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, a purely naturalistic historical novel of Macbeth, bored me for an equivalent reason. Where's the blasted heath? Where's the witches? Where's the creepy logical bind of their prophecy? It's not Macbeth without them.)

Comments

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

I liked that New Yorker piece a lot. When I was about 11, I went through a fairly intense Holmes-fan phase--I still remember being seriously creeped out by the line "Holmes, a child has done this horrid thing!" So when Adrian Conan Doyle (described in the article as a thief, or something equally unflattering) blew into New York to open an exhibit of Holmesiana, I went. It was in an art gallery on 59th Street and 5th Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel, and featured a replica of the drawing room at 221B Baker Street, a simulacrum of the Giant Rat of Sumatra ("a story for which the world is not yet prepared") and other tchotchkes. I imagine the whole thing was part of the British effort to promote tourism from the US, now that rationing was finally over (this would have been 1953) and they were avid for hard currency so they start paying down their wartime debt. Meanwhile Doyle got himself written up in Life magazine, pictured in armor--he belonged to some medieval re-enactment club.

I see you linked to a Jon Carroll column--does this mean you're in the Bay Area?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am in the Bay Area, as it happens, though thanks to the Web one can be a Jon Carroll fan anywhere, and I know some who are. I was a fan of his before the Web, though.

I was about the same age when I read the Holmes stories, but Holmes fandom never attracted me. (Tolkien fandom, on the other hand, did.) I think even at that age I knew that the Giant Rat of Sumatra was better as an untold reference than it could possibly be as a story, let alone as a simulacrum.