Lovecraft on Twitter

by Pa Rock
Fan of Good Literature

H.P. Lovecraft is my second favorite American writer. Tim Macy of Kansas City is first, Michael Chabon is third, Mark Twain is fourth, and the top five is rounded out by Kurt Vonnegut.

Lovecraft published his stories in pulp magazines in the 1920's and 30's, sometimes for as little as a penny a word. He took the concept of horror fiction that had been practiced so well by Edgar Allen Poe, and took it places that Poe could never have contemplated - creating a world that is unmistakably Lovecraftian. From the dank halls of Miskatonic University where a fragile copy of the evil Necronomicon was housed in the school's library, to the ice fields of Antarctica, to the falling down houses of Providence, Rhode Island, in the early days of the twentieth century, Lovecraft created mysterious worlds that were truly gateways to terror.

The works of H.P. Lovecraft are an acquired taste, and once a mind has experienced his disquieting tales, it will forever know tremors of trepidation at every chance encounter, every coincidence, and every surprise that presents itself onto the quiet tranquility of day-to-day life.

I began using a tracking site on July 23rd of this year to get some sense of who was reading The Ramble and the types of things that drew people to the site. The runaway favorite post has been "Lovecraft Words," a piece that ran on June 14th, 2008, and examined the beautiful vocabulary that Lovecraft used in one of his short stories. That post has had 48 hits in less than two months, almost double the number of visitors to the second most popular piece - "The Lumley Vampire," which ran on May 31st, 2009, and has only recently outdistanced the third placeholder "The Sad Ballad of Randy Leach," a column on a Kansas mystery that was featured in The Ramble on April 16, 2008, and has been viewed 23 times since the tracking service went into effect in July.

I learned yesterday that there is a new twitter site dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. I am hopeful that it proves to be an effective medium for reaching the fans of this prolific and amazing author. The site is LovecraftNews@Twitter.com. It is just getting up and running.

If you are on Twitter and have an interest in H.P. Lovecraft, check it out and become a follower.

Banned Books Week: Day Three Incendiary Prose

by Pa Rock
Cultural Commentator

Sometimes books are just so blatantly God-awful that banning them isn't enough to ensure that their free-thought might not seep out and be absorbed by some unsuspecting open minds. When that happens some moron with a book of matches is usually close by.

Civilization has a long history of burning troublesome things: witches, crosses, and yes, even books. The Nazi's were consummate book-burners, dutifully torching any bound volume of ideas that didn't fit their ideology. The books that the Nazis burned were dangerous, damned dangerous, like Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Their rigid minds could not accept a tale of sled dogs and the struggle of man against the elements. It's a good thing that the twenty-first century Nazi's and fundamentalist Christians haven't bothered to read any of London's other books. The first few pages of The Iron Heel alone would send thousands of these intellectual midgets racing to flick their Bic's.

Kurt Vonnegut, the genius who looked and wrote like Twain, ran afoul of book-burners. His very provocative Slaughterhouse-Five was publicly burned in Drake, North Dakota, in 1973. Vonnegut, like London, wrote many novels that challenged our core beliefs and values. And Vonnegut's characters have evolved into classics, from Billy Pilgrim to Kilgore Trout, they have become part-and-parcel of the American literary experience.

Several years ago the Board of Trustees of the East St. Louis Library ordered all three of the library's copies of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath pulled from the shelves and burned. They described it as "vulgar, immoral, and bestial." In some places comments like that would sell books!

The Reverend (sic) George Bender of the Harvest Assembly of God Church near Pittsburgh, PA, held a large public bonfire on a cold evening in 2001 that was fueled by Bruce Springsteen CDs, Disney videos, and Harry Potter books. The showboating minister made sure that the press was there before he put the torch to his pile of filth.

Ray Bradbury, one of the best wordsmiths of the last fifty years, wrote a book about book-burners entitled Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which a book will burn. When teachers at the Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, ordered Fahrenheit 451 for their classrooms, they were shocked to find that the books were censored by the school district enroute to the teachers, and many words, mostly "damns" and "hells," were blocked out. How's that for irony?

It's Banned Books Week! Why not celebrate by reading some Bradbury (if not Fahrenheit 451, consider The Martian Chronicles - both are great reads). Or curl up with a Harry Potter novel (with Bruce Springsteen playing in the background, of course!). Anything by John Steinbeck makes for a good weekend of lazing on the couch and reading. My personal Steinbeck favorites are The Winter of Our Discontent and East of Eden. And then there's Kurt Vonnegut. If you are brave enough to look at the world from an off-center perspective, read some Vonnegut - and start with Slaughterhouse-Five. Just keep it out of the reach of morons with matches!

Banned Books Week: Day One The Works of Mark Twain

by Pa Rock
Cultural Commentator

American literary scoundrel, Mark Twain, has been dead for nearly a century, yet his works stir as much controversy today as they did during his lifetime.

Of the enormous body of work left by Twain, he considered his masterwork to be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which also happens to be his most widely banned tome. The tale of Huck's voyage down the Mississippi River with the escaped slave, Jim, was thought to be crass and vulgar at the time of its publication, and there were certainly people around at that time who were offended by a friendship between a black man and a white boy. Today it is still being banned, but now for its accurate depiction of the language of the times (such as the commonplace use of the "n" word), and the portrayal of Jim as uneducated and somewhat dependent on the white boy's intellect to help him make it to freedom - again, an accurate portrayal of the times. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has also hit the banned books lists many times for essentially the same reasons.

But there is so much more of Twain's work that could easily be banned by the morons who try to control our access to ideas - if only they took the time to read them and the intellect to understand what the rascal was saying. A wonderful (and often overlooked) novel by Mark Twain is Pudd'nhead Wilson, the tale of a light skinned slave baby boy who was born on the same day as the Master's baby boy. The babies looked very similar (and probably shared quite a bit of the same family tree), so the slave baby's mother decided to switch them shortly after their birth. When the duplicity is discovered after they become adults, the result is a suddenly "white" man of privilege who is illiterate and lacks the skills that he needs to operate in "civilized" circles, and a well-educated and socially skilled man of color who must now function as a slave.

Mark Twain's dead-on commentary on America's social conventions and absurdities earned him a loyal following in the Soviet Union. (Those ardent socialists were also enamored of Jack London, another sharp-eyed social critic.)

Twain was piercingly critical of religion. While in college I purchased a copy of Letters from the Earth, a heady collection of his views on religion that was not released until about fifty years after his death. The old lady who took my money literally picked the book up by two fingers (like it was covered with vomit or some equally foul substance) and placed it in a bag. "This is the book where he says he doesn't believe in God," she said with obvious disgust. I'm sure that the hateful Christian fundamentalists have added it to their lists of filth by now.

My favorite piece of Mark Twain's work is The War Prayer. It is a short tale of a minister who exhorts his parishioners with a long prayer to support the troops. The minister spoke from the pulpit praying that

"an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work, bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory..."

As the minister finishes his patriotic prayer, and old man (a stranger) steps up to the pulpit and motions for the minister to step aside. He explains to the congregation that he has been sent by God to explain to them the import of what they had just prayed for. His rewording of the minister's prayer follows:

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Mark Twain was unable to get The War Prayer published during his lifetime. It is a wonder that timeless and powerful piece ever made it into print at all.

Let us pray for our troops and their families, the children of Iraq and Afghanistan and their families, world peace, and the positive power of unfettered words and ideas. Amen.

Pompoms and the Decline of American Education

by Pa Rock
Educator

Christian Lund Ducheylard was born in Santiago, Chile, in the mid-1960's. The son of moderately successful parents, he was a bright boy who was popular with his peers, had a good academic record, and loved his futbol (soccer, to the uninitiated). He came to North America in the early 1980's to live with my family and to do his senior year at a rural Missouri high school. One of Christian's first observations upon beginning classes was his amazement at how easy academics were in the United States. He said that he had nine subjects to study each year in Chile, and that daily class schedules were devoted entirely to academics. "Pompoms," his catch-all term for athletics, cheer-leading, and other high school distractions, were scheduled on Saturday in his country - and they were truly "extra-curricular."

While few would argue that the overall academic achievement in the United States has seen a steady decline over the last three to four decades, the opinions as to why that has occurred are as varied and numerous as fleas on a country hound. Teachers, of course, form the easiest target. They are charged with teaching, and if the kids aren't learning, well then, the problem must be the teachers. Radio talk show hosts, television preachers, and other demagogues love to rail on teachers. Teachers, in turn, often point at parents and say if they would just provide some support such as checking to see that homework is completed, ensuring that kids get enough sleep and proper nutrition, or, God forbid, instilling some respect for authority in their spawn, then the result would be better students. School administrators focus on budgets and test scores in an effort to quantify education and boil it down to something that can be manipulated like a pocket calculator, and school board members listen to their loudest and most contentious neighbors in order to craft school policy that reflects the will of the well-connected. Everybody has an axe to grind or a finger to point, and education just keeps on sliding into the crapper.

When all of the studies have been completed, all of the test scores analyzed, all of the innovative teachers fired and replaced by people who don't even believe in Darwin, will things be any better? When teachers are paid what they believe they are worth, will kids learn more? Will test scores rise? Will futures be brighter when all of the "problem" kids are forced out of school and onto the streets in the name of discipline, or safety, or national security? Will our kids be smarter when the halls are devoid of all but those born in the best zip codes and a small contingent of babysitters with teaching certificates? Don't bet the farm on it!

Christian had it right. In a world of Friday Night Lights and Beverly Hills 90210, we have let schools evolve into little more than host bodies for athletic teams and a coiffed cadre of class-conscious princesses. School is no longer a sanctuary for learning. It has morphed into the place where kids come to hook-up socially and be admired for their clothes and cars and gizmos rather than for academic achievement.

But football is important, isn't it? And basketball? And baseball, and track, and maybe even volleyball, skeeball, and croquet? Don't team sports build character, teach teamwork, and separate the real men from the pansies? Does a game on Friday night really take away from academics? Maybe not much if the school only has one coach per sport and that person also has an academic load. But if the school has a squad of coaches and assistant coaches for each sport and their salaries are fluffed with extra titles to the financial detriment of the classroom teachers and the student body, then the athletic program definitely takes a toll on the educational potential of the school. Sadly, though, athletic programs are often seen as sacred cows that are immune from budget scrutiny or criticism.

Aside from the funds that athletics siphon away from academics, there are also the issues of time and elitism. The "game" may be on Friday night, but practice occurs daily, taking time that could be dedicated to study. And it's more than just Friday nights and weekday practice sessions. When do junior varsity and junior high teams play? Not on Friday nights because that time is reserved for the real jocks and the entertainment spectacle that sports provide to the community. Those "junior" teams are on buses late into the week nights going to hell-and-back and who-knows-where in order to learn the skills and pay the dues that may one day earn them their ticket to the Friday night show.

And which students benefit from the athletics program. Clearly the biggest beneficiaries are the ones who participate. If sports have merit for one student, then every student should have the opportunity to participate. If cheer-leading has value for one, then it should be made available to all. But that is not the way things work in most of our schools. The emphasis is on winning, and winning is not congruent with spreading the resources of time, instruction, and money throughout the entire student body. Unfortunately, the elitist, extra-curricular programs that exist in American schools today shortchange most students in all of those areas.

Why not save pompoms for Saturdays? Maybe then we could get back to the very real issue of education and make every hour spent at school a time for learning.

"God made the idiot for practice, and then he made the school board." -- Mark Twain