[If you’ve been stapled to this rumination list long enough you may already have read what follows. I know it or its near-twin ran at some point, but given my inherent inability to keep things in neat order, I have no idea when.
[But why run it now – again – anyway? Because over the past week I’ve been accumulating notes on the current political situation, and if I didn’t quickly come up with a diversion, you and I would be disgraced by my unloading them here.
[Much better to celebrate frivolity and ancient personal history than yet another paean to our national putrescent decay. This way you can laugh up your sleeve, rather than puke therein]
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I was afraid I’d made a mistake a couple years back.
I’d ordered a copy of Cursed Be the Treasure, a 1920’s novel by H.B. Drake. As I reviewed it from memory on Goodreads (likely the book’s only review in the past 100 years):
“This is something I read as a teen and that has stayed with me forever. Probably I should never read it again, because, as a jaded old man, I could only be disappointed. But at the time it hit me like a ton of bricks. What happens to the young protagonist, his father and his friend could make a statue weep. Wonderfully descriptive and evocative.”
My intention in buying a new-old copy was to pry open the cover, fondle it a bit, but never, ever read it again, to avoid the certain sad, ludicrous letdown.
Yet, of course, I did. You have to know. And, god be good to bibliophiles, it was every bit as wonderful as I’d remembered it: engrossing, convoluted, heartbreaking, redemptive.
Our family had an odd collection of kids’ and kid-inflected reading material, mostly British, because my mother was mired in a false sense of inherited aristocracy from her (mostly crazy) Canadian relatives. In prime living room shelving, we had:
- a fairly complete set of Kipling that made me want to spend at least a decade in India
- a shelfload of G.A. Henty, Canadian-based historical fiction that I never cracked as a kid; I read one years later and was bored near comatose
- several volumes of E. W. Hornung’s tales of master-thief “Raffles”; him too I read only recently – free on Kindle, thank god. What godawful crap
To prime the intellects of my two older brothers, my mother installed both the Compton’s youth encyclopedia and the14th edition of the adult Britannica in the late 1920s. They still recline at my elder brother Rod’s home – now my daughter Morgan’s – a decade and a half after his death.
But my greatest reading joy came from works like the Drake and the unlikely-to-the-point-of-ears-falling-off-absurdity Old Nursery Rhymes Dug up at the Pyramids. (This thin but broad-format hardcover, bound in burlap, featured one corner chewed off by rats – my mother’s childhood rats, not mine.) Each nursery rhyme presented a traditional Mother Goose stanza followed by four new verses illustrated with midnight-blue pseudo-Egyptian relief drawings.
As an adult, I didn’t remember a thing about the content of those verses. The book itself was what fascinated – the feel of it, the rat-nibbled corner, the sense that, even at the age of ten, I knew it was truly weird.
Last time I looked online, I could have picked up a copy for around $35, “with one corner damaged” – wait, it couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be…. I’ve since downloaded a digital copy. Interesting, and still damned weird, but digital burlap doesn’t quite meet the test.
From her own youth, my mother had kept six or eight volumes of Playbox and Chatterbox annuals, year-end supplements or recapitulations of British children’s magazines from the early 20th century. Occasionally these float around the online stratosphere, wonderful silly adventures of anthropomorphic animals like Tim the Tiger, in story or comic-strip episodes. The strips sported a very different feel from American comics, leaving me with a slightly uncomfortable sense of otherness, as though I’d entered a room that smelled both heavy and quaint.
Mom’s anglophilia led to our continuing subscription to Punch, the finest adult satirical magazine ever produced (well, until Paul Krassner’s The Realist); it was going strong into the 1950s after 100 years.
Long before Volkswagen and Geico, the ads in Punch had a raucous yet self-deprecating sense of humor, such as “Schweppervescence lasts the whole drink through,” at a time when Schweppes, for Americans, was a mysterious, almost magical liquid imbibed 3,000 miles to the east.
Marvelous cartoons and tiny squibs attached themselves to the ends of articles, usually absurd bumbelations gleaned from newspapers and other magazines, with telling responses added by the editors. (They were the forerunners of the short ruminative blats I drop in here when high on Yukon Jack.)
My brothers had passed down to me Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat and Other Tales, a 1932 edition with Art Deco typography and drawings by Keith Ward, a blessed marriage of text and illustration (the latter much livelier than Lear’s own cramped pictography).
I loved that book. Our copy returned to me a few years back with the cover and several pages missing or mangled. When I checked for a replacement, it would have taken 50 dollars to retrieve a complete copy. Now I can find no listing for it. But at the time, I had more pressing needs for the 50 dollars).
Back to Cursed Be theTreasure: I will probably read it yet again, because the plot turned out to be far more complicated and intertwined than I realized at the first go-though, especially the mutual betrayal of the boy’s dead father and the man who saved the boy’s life
Is all this just nostalgia realized? Could be, though I think it’s more my rejoicing in a reawakened sense of wonder. In part, the sense of wondering what gets me into thinking about such things.
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Our current PA state representative is one Joe Hamm. Our previous rep was Tina Pickett. Our friend Karen, in Tioga County, is represented by Clint Owlett.
Owlettt, Pickett and Hamm – a great name for a law firm, but a godawful sandwich.
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Can anyone tell me the principal vice of the vice principal?
lickhaven 