Book Review: A Wrinkle in Time

Title: A Wrinkle in Time

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Date: 1963

Publisher: (for the reprint shown) Square Fish

ISBN (for the reprint): 978-1250004673

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “IT sometimes calls ITself The Happiest Sadist.”

As with so many other books, the question becomes: Is the book really like the million-seller Disney movie? And the answer is, “Much better.”

At least Madeleine L’Engle, during her lifetime, had given permission to a screenwriter to make a movie based on Wrinkle. (The fact that Disney finally sank a tentacle into Narnia, after Walter Hooper’s death, continues to be an irony overload for those who remember Lewis’s comments on Sleeping Beauty.)

There are some aspects of Wrinkle that worked all right in the book, but could profitably be changed for the movie. In the book there’s a smell-dominant planet where the native creatures don’t see much, and what the human visitors see is boring. How would that work in a movie?

In the book, not only the Murrys and O’Keefes, but their whole school and town, are relentlessly White. Middle-class and rich families have English or Scottish names, like Murry and Jenkins. Poorer families have Irish names, like O’Keefe. Madeleine L’Engle had lived in Europe and gone to enough international gatherings to be able to write stories that revel in multicultural richness, but the New England village where Meg and Calvin live is, like one where L’Engle used to live, too far inland even to have attracted Portuguese fishermen. There’s no particular reason for a movie version to keep that detail. Movies, especially the ones that star child actors, need to be able to use whatever physical type the most suitable actor of the season happens to be. A biracial Black-looking Meg Murry is a switch for book readers who remember that the Murrys and O’Keefes have either red or brown hair, but it does the story no harm.

Other changes go deeper and work to the movie’s detriment. I remember discovering A Wrinkle in Time pretty well. It’s not just another story about the kind of ordinary social bullying that goes on in all middle schools.

What Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace (middle school girl, high school boy, and primary school boy) have in common is genius-level I.Q.’s. What L’Engle made clear in the follow-up volumes is that all of them become real geniuses whose adult lives are full of impossible adventures in hypothetical spiritual “dimensions” of the universe. The three space aliens who introduce them to that realm, and some other aliens they meet in other stories, are what L’Engle thought angels might be, if angels are: creatures from other worlds who are involved in the same cosmic conflict that dominates Wrinkle. This made the original Wrinkle in Time a work of Christian Mythology, like Tolkien’s or C.S. Lewis’s science-fiction-fantasy stories. Exactly what the Bible meant by telling Christians “Ye are gods” is a matter of debate, but seeing their mutual mental/emotional/spiritual challenge played out in multidimensional space makes the Murry and O’Keefe children mythological “gods,” apprentice angels, beings who sail in and rescue entire alien worlds in times of spiritual crisis. The three alien “ladies” who guide the children through this initiatory adventure are mature angels.

So Meg is not an ordinary middle school girl having ordinary middle school social problems. She doesn’t relate to her classmates at all. Boys brawl, girls snub; girls like Meg don’t have school friends, or even individual school enemies. Normal children who were born in the same year Meg was are not her “peers,” and never will be. Kids like Meg and Charles Wallace, who don’t have outstanding looks, athletic talent, or musical talent to deflect attention from how different they are in other ways, stick out like sore thumbs in the public school system. They accept this. It takes its toll: the series that grows out of Wrinkle follows Meg Murry up to young-grandmother age and never mentions her having a close female friend. But it means that the school problems that concern Meg and Charles Wallace involve adults who don’t understand them. Other kids they can ignore, unless the hostility becomes physical. Teachers (or, for some kids who are even less lucky, parents) who want them to fit in with a group of no-talents are the real hazards to their sanity—and to their spirituality. In the book the children’s crisis is spiritual.

In the books Meg is a lot smarter and more mature than Principal Jenkins; in the second volume, A Wind in the Door, her task is to rescue him from the Evil Principle Itself. He’s older than her parents but still a paltry soul, a no-talent loser, not only unfit to make decisions for the Murry children but barely competent to make them for himself.

This may not be the way the N.E.A. wants children’s books to characterize school employees but it was not unlike the way my generation of his relatives saw the principal at my school—a party boss and school principal but never an elected official, not a perfect school administrator either, a heavy drinker, teetering on the edge of being worse than a no-talent, a Failure. There were, and there still are, children who appreciate having their relationships with school employees validated by reading about Meg’s unnatural relationship to Principal Jenkins. Children like Meg and Charles Wallace are a distinct minority in real life but they're much more numerous there than they there are in children’s literature, and they need the Murrys the way L’Engle wrote the Murrys.

Other children may not get the point of Meg’s strangely frequent, and strangely collegial, encounters with the principal at the school where she’s a student; this is not the way even graduate students normally relate to college deans. Other kids may find it easier to relate to a story about a normal ordinary girl who looks up to adults and reacts to all the little social drama about which other children are “friends.” Gifted children can relate to a story about a gifted girl who probably doesn’t even see one classmate as different from another one, half the time, and whose school anxiety is all about whether school employees’ efforts to “normalize” her and her brother’s school experience will do them real damage. Gifted children understand why neither Meg nor Charles Wallace, nor even their more athletic and popular brothers, even mentions a school friend or enemy by name. In real life girls like Meg probably do know their classmates’ names, may even claim a “friend” to sit beside when they have to sit beside somebody, but when they walk out of the classroom, no thought of their classmates crosses their minds.

A Wrinkle in Time was written in the mid-twentieth century. School personnel generally were trying to believe that peace would be achieved through conformity, mental health through “normality.” Children like Meg and Charles Wallace, and their parents, were being told that growing up as “loners” would probably mean growing up insane, that even destroying their talents in hope of “fitting in” might be preferable to...what, in fact, mid-twentieth-century psychiatry really did lead to. The people who popped tranquillizers to relieve anxiety in the 1950s became the twitching psychotic homeless population of the 1980s. The “loners” can still point out our emotional scars but we are, by and large, alive and sane...But let’s just say that if L’Engle had written A Wrinkle in Time as just another story where Meg is an ordinary little girl who cares what’s wrong with a bully who has a name and was probably claiming to be Meg’s friend last week, I wouldn’t have read all of the follow-up stories as they came out.

A Wrinkle in Time is not about conflict between Meg and Jenkins. It starts out that way, but that conflict resolves when the alien visitors take Meg and the boys into space and show them the Dark Shadows taking over planets. It’s not about whether Meg and wossname can be friends, it’s not even about whether Meg and Principal Jenkins liiike each other; it’s about a cosmic Good Principle, which, for L’Engle, recognized individual creatures by name, and a cosmic Evil Principle, which, for L’Engle, began with conformity. For L’Engle, spiritual evil began with the regimentation by numbering students that she described in And Both Were Young, and culminated with goose-stepping Youth Soldiers shoving dissidents into prison camps. That’s the point of the children seeing Earth in the Dark Shadow and listing Jesus, followed by a longish list of genius humans, as keeping the light burning on Earth. They’re being shown that it’s not about whether people “like” each other, but whether they can reject Jenkins’ bad ideas, as bad ideas, without necessarily having to reject Jenkins as a person.

Disney obviously wanted to dumb Wrinkle back down to an ordinary school social drama. This could have been plausibly done by cutting out Meg’s and Charles Wallace’s special problem-student relationship with Jenkins, but apparently it’s been done by trying to recast Jenkins as some sort of father-substitute in whom Meg is specially interested because her own father is a Missing Person. Apparently in the movie Principal Jenkins is wiser and nicer, as well as younger and better looking, than he is in the books. (The books frequently mention how weary and worried he is.) This is undoubtedly good for the actor involved, and probably good for child viewers who might have needed to see that The Principal Can Be Your Best Pal...but it’s a loss for those child viewers who needed to read that You Must Ignore False Teachers In Order To Help Them, which is what L’Engle wrote.

What I learned from my real-world experience as a Problem Student who knew the principal far too well is different from what Meg learns, and, again, arguably a more valuable lesson for more children. I wasn’t a blazing genius like Meg and didn’t grow up to be an angel (in the L’Engle sense—Meg has a long, apparently healthy mortal life along with her spiritual adventures). I grew up to be an adult, to see the principal not only as other relatives of his vintage saw him but as other people in the community saw him. I came to realize that although I remembered the principal as a Rotten Nut on a Distant Limb of the Family Tree, as someone who scolded my brother and me just as bitterly and whacked us just as hard as anyone else and then called us by our given names in front of people he’d paddled more recently, in some ways he had been an admirable principal. He’d rallied the team to win all those competitions against bigger and richer schools, defended old teachers for whom “real” retirement meant death, championed brain-damaged students’ right to be educated at all. If he could have done more with what he was given in life, he could certainly have done less. That’s not the story L’Engle had to tell, either.

So, leaving Jenkins aside for the moment, the children whirl off into space to rescue Meg’s father. Meg’s immediate task is to forget Jenkins, which is easy, and focus on loving her own men, which is harder as Charles Wallace almost succumbs to the evil compulsion of IT.

A side plot, which Disney probably can’t resist giving too much attention but which L’Engle played down admirably in the book, is the question of whether girls like Meg can expect to find boyfriends. This is not a concern for Meg in the book but it was a concern for some middle school readers, who were being told, at the time, that their vocation was to have babies and their primary task was to find mates. In the 1960s girls were still being told, “If you are undeniably ‘smart,’ at least hide it, because men want to be ‘smarter’ than the women they marry.” Relatively few girls had the fortitude to reply to that with “Whatever made you think I wanted to marry anyone?” Who, after all, wanted to do a pink-collar job forever when she could stay home and live on her husband’s income?

Once again, L’Engle had a good, true answer. L’Engle was not considered a great beauty, yet she had a long-term satisfactory marriage (the Two-Part Invention) to a handsome TV star. Shared adventures, more mundane than those in Wrinkle, drew them together the way time travel draws Meg and Calvin together in the books. L’Engle never wrote about their romance. She gave them one more apprentice-angel adventure, then skipped forward, in the third story, to the adventures their family have after Meg and Calvin are married. In real life introverts who bond by sharing their passions aren’t often so sure at such an early age as Meg and Calvin, but Hollywood movie buffs would be surprised how much height, glasses, money, etc., don’t matter.

The third and worst piece of damage Disney did to the book was changing Camazotz, the fully shadowed planet where Mr. Murry has been trapped. Camazotz is so fully controlled by the Evil Principle that all its inhabitants’ minds are psychically enslaved to IT, which L’Engle elsewhere explained as “intellectual thought” as opposed to spirituality, the sort of intellectualism that thinks spirituality can be ignored. IT reposes in state in a huge laboratory complex from which its pulsating rhythm is broadcast around its planet, causing all the children’s balls to bounce at the same pace. The laboratory is, of course, in a city. The people live in the suburbs. Rural and wild landscapes, like Meg’s rural home, are always good places in L’Engle’s fiction, and there aren’t any noticeable rural or wild landscapes on Camazotz.

The vision of Camazotz centered around a giant psychiatric laboratory was a good metaphor for mid-twentieth-century conformist thinking, the fear of all differences leading to “maladjustment” and thence to insanity. If anything this vision has become more relevant today. Meg and Charles Wallace were socially bullied with “You’ll die alone on psychiatric wards if you don’t learn to fit into a crowd”; today’s children who do well at math but not English or geography, or who aren’t interested in listening to yet another review of what they learned five years ago, are likely to be told outright that they have psychiatric problems, and ordered to take pills that may do real damage to their brains. Today, instead of those nasty conversations with Principal Jenkins, Meg would probably be on drugs for Attention Deficiency Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome, and if her parents protested that she did very well without medication when working with a few competent adults and no so-called “peer group,” they’d be told that “denying her right to medical care” was abusive. IT is closer to ruling us from the psychiatric institution than it was...

But there are those who want to teach children to fear the great outdoors and imagine that they’re “safe” in windowless cubicles in cities, so in the movie version IT apparently had to be transferred to a beautiful beach scene...bah, humbug. IT would not have been at home, and probably would not have survived, on a beach full of distinct starfish, each one of whom L’Engle’s Good Principle knew by name.

These shortcomings of the movie version form a pattern. L’Engle knew about being a gifted child, and had things to say to other gifted children. Disneyfication, as so many times before, cuts out that special for-readers-from-writer value, dumb down, flattens out, rewrites the story for a lowest-common-denominator audience. Disneyfication makes Meg an ordinary child whose real problem is an ordinary school problem, whose time-travel adventure might be a dream. L’Engle seriously intended Meg to be, if not a literal role model, at least a metaphor for the Christian as spiritual warrior—as apprentice angel.

So, as usual when reviewing books that have been made into Disney movies, I could almost type “Fiftieth verse, same as the first.” Disney makes good family-friendly movies—but the books are always much better than the movies.

Copies of Wrinkle aren't hard to find, and as Madeleine L'Engle is no longer in a dimension that receives payments for the sale of Fair Trade Books, there's no particular reason why you need to buy this book from this web site rather than some other source. It's a Newbery book; it should be in the public library. You can, however, buy a copy here to support this web site, for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. (Paypal buttons will be coming soon.) At least three books of similar size to the hardcover, more if you'll take the paperback edition, will fit into one $5 package. You could order all five of the Time Quintet novels where Meg appears "onstage," or mix Wrinkle in with vintage books by living authors whom we could encourage with Fair Trade Book payments.

Bill Carrico Celebrates Teachers, with Official Response

From Virginia State Senator Bill Carrico (R-40):

"

Teacher Appreciation Week: May 7-11

Please join me in recognizing Teacher Appreciation Week May 7 though 11. During this week, students, parents, and the community at large, are encouraged to thank their teachers, past and present, for their service, commitment, and dedication to our communities. Visit www.thankateacherva.com to submit a thank you note for a current Virginia public school teacher, and your teacher could win some great, well-deserved prizes.

"

Official response: I wish more of mine were still alive. The current Virginia public school teachers whose names are familiar to me were my classmates, not teachers. However, younger readers are encouraged to use Twitter to salute the good ones.

Among other hack writers, worldwide, I've been writing about education in general lately. The articles are anonymous and not meant to be recognizable, but several of mine reflect my belief that there's no such thing as a "best school" or "best teacher"; there are very few completely bad schools and teachers, but mostly it's "the best school/teacher for a particular student."

I may have noted this before...If asked from which teachers I'd learned most at Gate City High School, I'd say Mr. Cleek. Nobody liked Mr. Cleek. (He didn't want to be liked.) A few of us disliked him so much we rose to his challenge and forced him to give us A's in algebra. There might be more enjoyable ways to learn algebra, but it worked.

Also there was Mrs. Ramey, who taught home economics. She taught me to slow down, not rush on to more different designs, but make sure every seam in a simple garment was sewn right. I can still wear the skirt I made in ninth grade home economics.

Then there was Mr. S., who still believed in reciting poetry. I'm not sure of the value of knowing how to recite all four verses of "When the Frost Is on the Pumpkin," but I did learn that. That ought to count for something. (His full name does not belong on the Internet because he could still be alive.)

From which teachers I learned least? There was a lot of competition because I worked ahead of grade level, but Mrs. B. and Mr. M. would definitely have been leading contenders. Mrs. B. didn't go far enough, fast enough, past what some of us had already learned from Mr. Cleek, to keep my mind awake. Mr. M. taught mostly the slower students in English, plus a few people stuck in his class by schedule problems, and spent most of the time bantering with the sort of boys I avoided. I remember fast-track students laughing about how we got away with changing the boring grammar reviews to liven them up a bit and still got those "automatic" A's. Well, at least I had enough free time to watch for and smile at my favorite boy after dashing off those boring review assignments in Mr. M.'s class. (Yes, children, aunts and even uncles were once sixteen years old.)

Twenty-five years later, some classmates surveyed the friends with whom they'd stayed in touch and wrote a very nice article about their favorite teachers. I saw the names of Mrs. B. and Mr. M., and thought, "Say whaaat?" Then I read what those former students had to say about those two teachers, and I believe they were sincere. Mrs. B. and Mr. M. did bore me because they spent so much time going over things with people who had not learned those things in grade eight, or maybe even six. For people whose brains matured later than mine, which is normal, such that they weren't able to absorb grammar and algebra in middle school, Mrs. B. and Mr. M. were great, dedicated, bighearted teachers.

Even Principal Oscar Peters...he was my third cousin once removed and I hated him in a more enduring way than I hated any of the other older relatives who believed it was their duty to teach me things by hitting me. (Not only did baby-boomers think nothing of fourteen-year-olds dating thirty-five-year-olds if both of them were desperate enough, in the 1970s; many of us also thought it was normal that almost any adult could hit almost any child, and usually the parent of the child who'd been hit would side with that adult.) He paddled people whose footsteps could be heard in the corridor when he had a hangover, and worse than that, he'd stand in the corridor glaring at people he'd paddled and then greet my brother and me by our given names, which led to accusations that we were exempt from those paddlings (we weren't) and from those to hostilities. A lot of our relatives despised him: for being a heavy drinker, for having settled for being a Democrat Party boss and school principal rather than a lawyer or politician, in some cases just for being a Democrat. That he was handsome and had a good speaking voice...bah, other relatives did better things with those assets. I grew up absorbing the idea that "How he kept his job as elementary school principal, much less got promoted to being high school principal, had to involve bribery and corruption."

Then when I'd grown up and talked to more distant relatives and non-relatives, sometimes I wondered whether we were talking about the same man. Oscar Peters' speeches inspired people to win all those trophies. His political connections had a lot to do with the class trips to Washington, the college internships and scholarships, the real need for my brother and me to be drilled in what to say if we ever had to talk to the daughter of the President to whom we were Loyal Opposition. He'd used his assets and connections to allow old people to avoid forced retirement, allow people with disabilities to attend regular classes if they could, get tutoring for people whom other educators saw as ineducable. In some ways Oscar Peters' competence to be even a school office worker was still subject to some debate, and yet, in other ways, at the same time, he was an excellent principal.

So, for those who may be thinking "Why would I thank a public school teacher? None of mine was great," a suggestion: Maybe you went to the wrong school for you. Maybe you did, after all, have good teachers--even if they weren't particularly good for you. For any person of good will, having to teach a student who is just hopelessly stuck in the wrong course or school is a source of pain. Maybe, if they're still teaching, you could leave those teachers a note of appreciation for having put up with you.

Thank you, Mrs. B.

Thank you, Mr. M.

If I can't exactly apologize, I can at least regret that I was probably as much of a thorn in your sides as you were in mine.

Blessed may your retirement be.

Even More Condolences, Senator Carrico

From Virginia State Senator Bill Carrico (R-40):

"

Senator Ryan T. McDougle (R-Hanover), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules, announced Tuesday that the Senate of Virginia would reconvene the 2018 Special Session at noon on Monday, May 14.

The Senate will convene to refer House Bills 5001 and 5002 (the "Caboose Budget" and "Budget Bill" respectively) to the Senate Committee on Finance, which will meet immediately upon recess of the Special Session to consider those measures.

“The schedule we are announcing today will give the Senate the best opportunity to have the most current and complete information on the Commonwealth’s fiscal outlook as we craft a final budget agreement,” noted Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr. (R-James City). “We anticipate Secretary Layne will be prepared to update the Committee with revised revenue projections as we begin our deliberations.

"Governor Northam and the House have advanced plans to extend Medicaid benefits to able-bodied adults under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. While their plans are embedded in their respective budget proposals, Senator Hanger and Senator Wagner have advanced outlines of expansion proposals that are markedly different from the Governor’s and the House’s.

“It is our intention to consider the implications of all proposals when the Senate Finance Committee meets. To ensure Committee staff has the opportunity to fully vet any proposals prior to our meeting, we are asking senators with alternative proposals to submit them by May 7. Senators with budget amendments unrelated to Medicaid expansion should submit them to the Committee by that date, as well.

“With complete information on the state’s revenue outlook, and with a full understanding of the implications and ramifications of each of the respective Medicaid expansion proposals, the Committee will be able to act in the best interests of Virginia.”

"

Official comment: Bankrupting individual States is not the way to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States' federal budget. We need to repeal Obamacare, trim Medicaid, and focus on reducing unnecessary costs added to medical care (by allowing the insurance industry to run the medical care system for the insurance racket's own profit). Face reality, Democrats. Even if youall sincerely believe that entrapping people in welfare dependency and/or insurance gambling rackets is good, or pardonable, you can't seriously believe that dragging people into Richmond in May is a humanitarian act.

And, Virginia Republicans? Unfortunately our cities have been packed with people who may be in Virginia for the express purpose of exhausting our treasury, or may sincerely believe that exhausting the treasury and raising taxes is the only way they can help those other people. We are a "red state" but we need to acknowledge this infusion of alien "blue" in our voting public, and get to work educating them, using our Conservative Hearts. There's a lot of "conservative" thought in Spanish and Islamic culture. We need to start there. Think in self-defense-strategy terms, using hostile energy against the hostility. The way to "flip" the endless-immigration-and-overcrowding strategy is to stop rejecting foreigners, meet them with real Virginia hospitality, and show them that in fact we're the ones who are not exploiting them for bad purposes.

Book Review: You're Every Sign

A Fair Trade Book

Title: You’re Every Sign

Author: Phyllis Firak-Mitz

Author's web page: http://www.astrologerphyllis.com/

Date: 2002

Publisher: Health Communications

ISBN: 1-55874-963-2

Length: 362 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white graphics

Quote: “At the moment you were born, every sign of the zodiac was somewhere in the sky. The position of each sign in relation to you determines the area of your life that it influences...So you’re bound to express at least a little bit of the characteristics of each sign.”

Meh. Whether I consider this book seriously or as a joke, the best summary of my reaction is still: meh. At least it was good for lots of laughs, for me.

It was written seriously. There are people who never, even in the 1980s, considered psychotherapy; they didn’t want to admit that they had any, shudder quake, Mental Problems. Some of these people did, however, seriously consult the horoscopes in books and newspapers for advice. When a newspaper horoscope column goes beyond random platitudes (“Be kind”) or stabs in the dark (“Aries might call”), those who enjoy debunking newspaper horoscopes can demonstrate that literally years go by in between the days when any specifics those columns mentioned showed any accidental resemblance to our days, or our friends’ days. Nevertheless, as long as the general descriptions of astrological personality types resonated with these people (“See, I’m a Taurus, that’s an earth sign, and I’m very earthy”), they continued to treat their horoscopes like guidance, rather than random blather cranked out to meet a required word count.

So Phyllis Firak-Mitz organized her self-help book for people who still don’t want to talk to a therapist or counsellor, not according to “problems,” but according to astrological signs. Readers aren’t told they’re impulsive, histrionic, attention-deficient, or commitment-phobic; they’re told they’re expressing the Gemini influence on their personalities when they make and then abandon plans, ruining other people’s weekends. Firak-Mitz doesn’t tell them that they need self-discipline, or that they’re self-sabotaging; she tells them they “spread themselves too thin and lose touch with their inner core. What Geminis are learning works best is to bring everything they’ve got to whatever they’re doing at the moment. When they do that, they align with the vastness of their own nature.”

If you know a horoscope consulter whose personality could use a little help (I do; from whose library would you think I inherited this book?), you can’t blame Firak-Mitz for trying to meet this audience where they are. How much You’re Every Sign will help them is another question. As the cliché always went, they have to want to change. The person who gave me this book continues to express that annoying "Gemini influence," although Gemini is not this person's sun sign...

Even if they do want to change, how much will Firak-Mitz help to steer them in the right direction? What do you think the right direction is? I think the discussion of Aquarius, which Firak-Mitz identifies with New Age spirituality and Old Left idealism, betrays a bias in that direction. “When Aquarians remember to look upon their fellow humans as if they all are doing the best they can (and they are)...” I don’t believe the Austin bomber was doing the best he could. Do you? If you do, Gentle Readers, that is a religious belief that you hold (and I don’t). So despite Firak-Mitz’s attempt to avoid taking sides with one religion over others in her “spiritual” comments, some bias is inevitably present. It will bother some readers more than others.

There is of course another way to read anything about astrology—as a joke, for debunking purposes. You might enjoy reading this book just to see which people you know show the least resemblance to Firak-Mitz’s descriptions. You’re likely to find that, e.g., the chapter on Leo sounds like X all the way, only X’s sun sign happened to be Cancer, and it also sounds a bit like Y, only Y’s sun sign happened to be Pisces...I think the chapter on Pisces was good for the most out-loud laughter, for me (the most "fiery," macho, decisive living man I know was born under that watery sign), but it was quite a contest. Do you, too, know an annoyingly passive Aries, an obsessively focussed Aspie with a Gemini birthday, or a sloppy extrovert born in Virgo?

To buy You're Every Sign here, send $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. (A book-specific Paypal button is forthcoming.) At least one more book of similar size will fit into that $5 package, and we'll send $1 per copy of her book to Phyllis Firak-Mitz or a charity of her choice.

Book Review: Knitter's #58 New Directions

Title: Knitter’s Magazine, #58, Spring 2000

(That's the second printing, which I don't physically own. Contents are the same; covers vary.)

Editor: Nancy Thomas

Publisher's web site: http://www.knittinguniverse.com/

Web site founded by the author commemorated on the cover: https://www.schoolhousepress.com/

Ravelry page showing pictures of the projects: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/sources/knitters-magazine-58-spring-2000/patterns?show=&sort=favorites_

Date: 2000

Publisher: XRX

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: full-color photographs, most by Alexis Xenakis

Quote: “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.”

The knitting world knew that Elizabeth Zimmermann, the Busy Knitter, was dying and would probably never read the memorial issue of the magazine she’d helped to launch. Nobody knew exactly when she’d go. Thanks to the timing of its publication, Issue #58 was the only one of the first hundred issues of Knitter’s to be printed with two different covers. The first run featured a cute red-haired model whose face graced several issues of Knitter’s, and several XRX / Golden Fleece books, around the turn of the century. Later issues featured a picture of Elizabeth Zimmermann.

At a time when the commercial media were blaring about women who sought “liberation” from traditional domestic crafts, most of all from knitting and embroidery, it was hard to find a knitter who was not influenced by Elizabeth Lloyd-Jones, Mrs. Arnold Zimmermann.

Other knitting designers active in the 1960s and 1970s accepted publishers’ assumption that knitters were interested only in patterns and didn’t need to know who designed them. Pattern books explained, in numbers as much as possible, how one particular project could be reproduced using one particular kind of yarn; they tended to warn against any deviation from the manufacturer’s pattern exactly as written, most especially against using any other kind of yarn. Patterns usually, although not always, mentioned the weight of the yarn originally used, but when editors would allow it, corporate sponsors preferred just to specify how many skeins of their yarn the pattern follower should buy. Some yarn manufacturers offered, for an extra price, a list of the yardage of each skein of their yarn so that, if they’d stopped manufacturing the yarn used in an older pattern, a storekeeper could sell a pattern follower a different brand of their yarn. How many yards of yarn went into a product was not information sponsors wanted knitters to have, nor how to adapt a pattern to a different type of project.

EZ (she preferred initials to surnames or given names alone, probably because her initials were so fortuitous) was one wool spinner, yarn seller, pattern designer, knitting teacher, and pattern book publisher who did choose to publish that information. In well-written, hand-typed newsletters that read like a friendly teacher’s class lectres, EZ explained how just about any pattern could be adapted to just about any purpose, with a little planning, minimal use of arithmetic, and reasonable communication with anyone for whom we intended to knit. (“First catch your nephew,” EZ cheerfully warned aunts.) Yes, some of the patterns that were printed in magazines, adapting traditional knitting techniques to the current fashions, were EZ’s. She’d sold the magazines the rights to the “step-by-step instructions for blind followers.” In her books she explained how knitters didn’t have to be “blind followers.” Four books she wrote and published herself, plus a posthumous collection, explained her rules for adapting any technique to almost any project.

By the 1970s EZ was  one of those active-grandparent-figures whom the young, officially in rebellion against our parents’ generation, considered cool. She wasn’t telling us how to get ahead in the great rat race of life, nor how to drop out altogether and become a hippie-drug-prostitute-welfare-cheat. She was showing us that it was possible to marry your partner in a small business and live contentedly ever after, never getting super-rich, always having fun, making enough profit from the small business to finance quirky handmade clothes and skiing vacations. How cool was that?

In 2000, just as the first baby-boomers came within sight of retirement age...it wasn’t as if we hadn’t known she was old and ill, but just seeing the banner, “remembers Elizabeth Zimmermann,” sent the whole “Knitting Universe” into mourning.

So although this issue, like the other 125 issues of Knitter’s, is “as good as a book,” it’s an oddly mixed book. Articles that were written before November 1999 show everyone having fun; perfect young faces radiate good health and optimism in colorful, whimsical knitwear; Carol LaBranche writes snappy, snarky reviews of all the new books. Articles written between November 1999 and March 2000 show everyone having lost a friend (featured designer Meg Swansen had lost her mother). Old black-and-white photos adorn memorial tributes. On one page a knitter mourns, “Where would we be without Elizabeth?” A few pages over, another knitter warbles, “Life is a wonderful blur of pets, bicycles and glorious yarn—who could ask for more?”

What were they doing with that glorious yarn? Among issues of Knitter’s edited by Nancy J. Thomas, this was one of the thinnest. The theme of “new directions,” women’s sweaters made by any technique but beginning at the waistband and working steadily up to the collar, had been planned and most of the patterns had been knitted before November 1999. The techniques shown can of course be used to make all kinds of things other than women’s sweaters, and I have so used them over these eighteen years, but only one complete non-sweater pattern is illustrated.

The patterns are grouped by the “new directions” in which they were knitted: one from cuff to cuff, four in patches of mitered rectangles, three diagonally from corners, three basics in garter stitch, one worked from the neck down, and two with odd-shaped pieces.

The three basic garter-stitch patterns are there for confused beginners. Two are classic side-to-side cardigans in medium and bulky yarns. One is a bulky, unflattering, unwearable vest made by tacking big Brownie Squares together. Technically the squares are modified into trapezoids, but that’s an effect beginners are apt to produce unintentionally in any case, so the distraction doesn’t signify. As a beginner I figured out, from previous experience sewing, that putting the wider ends of my unintentionally trapezoidal pieces together would give my Obviously Very First Sweater a better fit, too. (This is true for Brownie Squares-Turned-Trapezoids that reach from the wearer's shoulders to waist; for even bigger trapezoids, bottom lines around the hips or upper legs may be better.) And I also figured out that if I were going to wear anything that bulky I was going to want it to be a real winter garment, with sleeves. (Two more uneven trapezoids of garter stitch form baggy, unflattering sleeves for your Very First Brownie Squares Sweater—if you insist on making sweaters at the stage of knitting where your squares seem to want to come out trapezoids. There’s a lot to be said for the idea of knitting scarves and patches until you’ve got control of your increases or decreases, but I didn’t want to bother with a scarf or commit to a patchwork afghan, either, until I’d worked that first clunky sweater out of my system.)

But the other designs are interesting enough that I never felt cheated by having bought a magazine that wasted two whole pages on a Brownie Squares vest. Deborah Newton’s side-to-side pattern is a real classic; Knitter’s had published it before and agreed to reprint it to satisfy popular demand. Other projects that said “must knit now” to me were Edie Eckman’s “Elemental Miters” or “Op Art” afghan (I used about twenty scraps of yellow, orange, and tan yarn), Candace Eisner Strick’s “Mitered Mozart” jacket (I used just one multicolor yarn), Valentina Devine’s “Randomly Slanted” vest, Kennita Tully’s “Mediterranean Blues” jacket, Rick Mondragon’s “Sideways Impressionist” jacket. Still on my “to knit” list are versions of Lee Goss’s “Garter Blues” jacket and Gayle Roehm’s “Two-Way Ribbing” pullover.

I’m not thrilled by piecing together sweaters out of tiny mitered squares, myself—that seems more of an afghan technique—but, if you are, you must have this magazine or “book.” Even if you’re not, this is an informative pattern collection.

Knitter's is one of a very few magazines for which the prices on back issues tend to rise, which is why I've decided to blog about the extra issues I've accumulated as "books." Amazon isn't showing a current price for this one at all. I have sold thinner back issues of Knitter's than this one for $20 on E-Bay. I'm not currently finding this one on E-Bay or other sale sites. All I can say to online shoppers is: watch this space. Copies may become available for $5 again, or not.

Tortie Wednesday, Too? Samantha Says Thank You

Here's the translated-from-nonverbal-communication Cat Sanctuary update, from Samantha:

This is Samantha. The calico kitten will be photographed when she's old enough to toddle out into the light, if she lives so long...there are no guarantees with kittens.

As my human mentioned yesterday, I am now a mother. Yes, although Burr is my best friend, that skinny, snobby, long-tailed cousin of his was the father of my babies. If my human prefers the way he looks, I don't. I was sad to lose three babies but, if I had to lose three of the four, I don't mind that they were the three who looked more like Tickle.

Our extra-long tails can actually be a nuisance, too, even if constantly curling them up off the ground is a trade-off for getting more use out of them in climbing and hunting. Old Heather once said one of her sisters got so tired of having a long tail with a kink in it that she chewed the end of her long tail off, and was content with a short tail, like my daughter's.

Will I get so close to my daughter that I'll want her to stay with me when she grows up? Will I want her to move out on her own? Will she even live to grow up? How would I know? I'm only one year old and I now realize that I don't know everything, yet, after all.

I am taking as good care of her as I can. She can't see anything yet but, whatever you may have been told about young kittens, she can hear. She can squeak for the human if I go out and leave her in the warm room while the human is there, and she can hear the human make human noises back at her. She'll go back to sleep if she was just squeaking to find out whether anyone was there, or squeak louder if she needs help. I was relieved that, when she squeaked because she'd got her foot stuck between the bars of my Safe Box, the human had enough sense to scoop her out. I would have done that myself if I hadn't been crunching up kibble outside.

For a while it really seemed that I'd broken through to the human and was working on something along with it, when we tried to get one of my kittens to live and breathe. Even though that kitten was only a fetus and never became a baby, and deep down I'd known that that was the case, for a few hours I really loved the human for trying.

Then she did the horridest, most disgusting thing...she took my Safe Box away from me, put it out in the yard, and left my poor little son's dead body in it. Out in the cold! To see what sort of hateful wild beast would come and eat him! In my box!!!

It was the other one of a kind of animal that was living here when I came. The old one was very old for its kind and, although it was a different, very stupid and nasty, kind of animal it seemed to think it was a sort of defective cat. Heather and the human used to treat it like a sort of defective cat. They didn't like when it would run into the house, but the human would give it treats to lure it out again rather than try to chase it or scare it. "Useful little thing" was what the human called it, or "Pally," by way of a name, because it tried to be our pal. In winter it lived mostly on our bodywastes, and what it could use its long, pointed snout to lick out of the cracks at the bottoms of food tins.

Pally's kind of animal aren't designed to live as long or hunt as well as cats. Their place in the world is to eat things that would make any other animal sick. The human often says, "Their short lifespans and weird metabolism allow them to absorb and neutralize toxins and disease-causing bacteria in the environment." I think that means that their eating our bodywastes keeps our sand cleaner.

Virginia Opossum photo donated to Wikipedia By Cody Pope - Wikipedia:User:Cody.pope, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1705724 .

Anyway there was another one, a new one, not as friendly as Pally, and that was what the human found in my box in the morning.

You can imagine how I felt! That filthy animal in my box! And then the human wanted me to stay in a little cramped cardboard box, with steep sides and a top that packed down tight, while she went into town and left that animal in MY BOX!!!

Anyway I didn't do her any permanent harm. I would never do that. I care for the hands that feed me but it's not the first time I have left a few marks on them, to teach that human a lesson. A cat has to look out for herself in this world.

But! When she came back from town, she came in a truck. Heather told me about trucks. Trucks sometimes stop and unload our human, or else draw our human out, and from inside trucks come food and supplies we can use, but some other cats Heather used to know were killed by running out and trying to make trucks stop and deliver good things.

This truck contained other humans who talked to mine. One of them was the very nastiest-smelling kind of human, the kind that go around with bits of burnt paper in their mouths so they always smell like smoke. They put my box in the truck with that other animal still in it. They brought out another box. It looked like one that belonged to my mother!

I've seen gray-topped or blue-topped models, but Amazon is featuring a purple-topped "Pet Taxi."

The other humans said that this box would break under the weight of a cat who didn't want to be in it, so they had left it out in the yard and thought about sending it to the landfill to burn, but if I needed a box to build a nest in I could have it.

It had bits of cut grass and gravel and insects and other people's scents and such stuck to it, including a trace of that stinky human's smoky odor, so it was nasty. The human wanted to leave it on the porch and do other things. I tolerated that for a few minutes, and then I politely redirected her attention to this new box.

She had some idea what to do with it. She went inside and got stuff to scrub all the dirt and most of the odors off. I stood and watched to make sure she scrubbed every crack and corner. She might have missed a spot if I hadn't politely pointed out spots she might have been about to miss. When she was finished the box still smelled nasty, but nasty like stuff humans use to scrub things rather than licking them with their own tongues, not like other cats' scents.

So now we have this new box, and although it's not big enough for me, it has no cracks for my daughter to get her feet stuck in. I would rather have spent this day in my own box if my human had to go into town, which I don't believe she really did. On the other hand I'm glad to have a safe place for my daughter.

Later the other humans came back again and brought back my box. It still smells like that nasty animal. It is still on the porch. I plan to make the human clean it for me when she comes home tonight.

Nevertheless it's nice to have a box where I can see out and see that I'm safe, indoors, alone with my daughter, while there's not enough direct light to shine in on her little face. I know it's better for babies not to be exposed to much direct light. The human was putting a scarf over the side of my box to shade my baby in the daytime. This is better.

Wherever those other humans have gone now, even the stinky one, I send them my thanks for giving my daughter a box of her own. One day she may need it. Heather told me that when humans give a cat something useful, such as food, they like for the cat to stop and rub her face against their hands. That usually sounds to me like a chance for some other cat to get at the food first. However, if those humans come back, maybe even the stinky one, I would rub my face against their hands! I am so glad that now my daughter and I each have a box of our own!

P.S. from P.K.: That's what Samantha thinks. I intend to find out, while Samantha is spending the nights snuggling up with her daughter, whether there are any raccoons in the neighborhood. But there's been no room for doubt that she likes that old broken "Pet Taxi" as much as I do! Since we have a carrying cage already, even less suitable for a kitten's nest than the working trap is, what do we care that this carrier box will no longer actually carry a cat? Thank you, local lurkers!

Book Review: A Love or a Season

Title: A Love or a Season

(Sorry, Amazon, that's an E-Bay picture. The copy I physically own is in better condition, with no black tape. Copies for sale on Amazon include paperbacks.)

Author: Mary Slattery Stolz

Date: 1954

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 257 pages

Quote: “Ah, when to the heart of man / Was it ever less than a treason / to go with the drift of things, / To yield with a grace to reason, / And bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?”

Harry Lynch, seventeen, and Nan Gunning, sixteen, have been friends all their lives. This summer, the rest of their lives seeming particularly stressful, they fall in love, shortly after Harry has informed “apeman” Phil that Nan is “not interested, that way, in the genus male.” What will become of their love at the end of the summer vacation? Young love, first love, filled with sweet emotion...that rarely lasts even a whole summer.

Although the characters are young, this is not a children's book. Even as a book for high school students it was debatable; it's hard to find, and Amazon didn't even have a picture of it. It was slightly revised from an earlier romance called Two by Two that was marketed to adults. It's just too real for high school kids; after successfully getting past the question of fornication, it ends with a bump of...well, that'd be telling, but let's just say it's an extremely sobering summer for Harry.

In 1954 not everyone in America was sixteen or seventeen and “in love,” but it would’ve been hard to prove it by pop culture. “Serious” books were both ponderous and dreary; “serious” music was ugly; “serious films” were no treat to watch. If artistic expressions were meant to be pleasant and cheerful, publishers demanded that they be romances with happy endings. Mary Stolz was new enough to writing to have to write teen romances to order, but hers were more thoughtful romances, with more thoughtful characters, than average. Among other things Nan and Harry think, quite seriously and rationally, that since they’re not religious and know what their romance is “all about” there’s no reason not to have sex, but soon discover that there is a reason: their parents would go batty.

Then the end of the season comes as an unromantic shock that breaks the “in love” mood. They’re still lifelong friends with congenial personalities, so when Nan says, “I love you, Harry. I’ll love you all my life,” we know that on at least one level she means it. But after a year of separation...? Nan and Harry can’t see ahead to their next summer, and neither can readers.

A Love or a Season never was my personal favorite of Mary Stolz’s young adult novels; there’s a lot of competition—they’re all well done—and Who Wants Music on Monday, with its quirky teenagers who end up uncoupled, was my pick, partly because I liked antiromance in stories about teenagers. I wasn’t opposed to adult characters getting married at the end of a story, but I remember thinking, often, like daily, of how many more teen romances fizzled out in a week or two (and became embarrassing) than developed into True Love. Classmates squealed in the locker room about falling in and out of love; I listened, knew what to expect, and, when hormone surges and hormonal fascinations came along, quietly ignored them to death. I wished more novels were written about teenagers doing that. When a novelist acknowledged that a high school boyfriend was not all it took to equal happily-ever-after for a high school girl, that novelist was telling me that s/he understood something other novelists either didn’t understand, or lied about. A Love or a Season made me think, in my great novel-reading years, 1974-1984, that Stolz could do better than this, and in fact she had.

You, on the other hand, might want to read a realistic, optimistic Teen Romance about preppy types on the North Atlantic beach in the 1950s, and if you do, A Love or a Season is for you. Witty and insightful, cheerful and full of “life” while acknowledging different levels of death, this novel could have been based on something that really happened.

In fact, the ending seems so out of place, I suspect it was based on something that really happened.

To buy it here, send the usual $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; three more books of similar size will fit into that $5 package, and this web site promises book-specific Paypal buttons are coming soon. For better security, scroll down to see our postal address.

Tortie Tuesday: A Fetus Is Not a Baby

Babies of any species are so vulnerable that a part of my mind is now going "Don't ill-wish that one little kitten by telling people about it!" Well, I have no choice; a kitten, especially an only kitten, is such an irresistible excuse to spend more time at home revelling in pleasant weather and useful outdoor work. Readers needed to know. I'll be taking the laptop home more often in order to write on it, spending less time in town, falling behind on e-mail and Twitter. Call it a Kitten Vacation.

Samantha, who is now one year old, understands many words but does not trust humans enough to obey any words that don't suit her. She does know that "no," uttered loudly when she's trying to run around someone's feet, means that the human saying "no" would prefer that she not run past the said feet. She pauses. But if she really wants to go in through that door, she doesn't stop.

Samantha's official picture 

Samantha also likes to eat until she bulges. Samantha is also very close to Burr, who is supposed to be a Cat Sanctuary Graduate, but spent a lot of time in my home last winter. (Visiting cats don't usually find the cat door, but Burr was the one who showed it to Samantha.) I recommended neutering for Burr, because he has the horrible Manx gene, so I wasn't sure whether he had anything to do with Samantha's bulging last week. She didn't bulge all that much.

Nevertheless, on Friday, she darted into the office room--which was also the warm room, during the Big Freeze--and confirmed that the cage I've nicknamed her Safe Place, or the Samantha Box, was still there.

I locked her into it for the work day.

Any other Cat Sanctuary cat would have taken that as the punishment it was. Any of them except Bisquit would have glared and refused to cuddle up to me for up to an hour after being released. (Bisquit spent a lot of time in Cat Jail, and always expressed her feelings by making the burying gesture, but then tried to cuddle and make peace.) Samantha, however, really is carrying around a lot of fear, and has consistently reacted to being placed in Cat Jail as if she takes it to mean that at least I care enough not to leave her alone in the big mean world outdoors.

Not that she wants to be an indoor cat. Not that, when I'm home, she'll lie around in the office room purring and cuddling and napping the way Heather was beginning to do, even on cold or wet days. I don't think she intends to take a nap during the daytime until she's caught a big fat gray squirrel. But apparently she feels safe in the orchard when I'm in the house, and wants to be locked indoors when I'm in town. She'd stay in the yard when Heather was there, and will if Burr happens to be there; otherwise she runs after me crying "Don't leave me alone!"

Anyway, on Friday night she went out and scampered about as usual. On Saturday she ran into the cage again (I hadn't lowered the door) and curled right up on her blanket, although it wasn't cold. I left her there, with the door ajar, and got on with what I was doing.

Two hours later I heard tiny squeaks from the cage. Samantha is still a kitten, still too small to scramble in and out of a nest box Heather chose; nevertheless, beside her on the blanket were some other bodies so tiny they made Samantha's body look suddenly large.

So were they Burr's, or had Samantha had enough sense to mate with one of the other male Cat Sanctuary Graduates in the neighborhood, e.g. Tickle? I restrained my curiosity and waited for Samantha to tell me I could look, on Sunday morning. Of course Burr and Tickle, being first cousins, would have passed down much of the same DNA, so only the Manx gene would confirm that a kitten was Burr's...I hadn't nagged about it, but a tomcat has to be either extremely social, or neutered, to stay as close to one female for as long as Burr has trailed around after Samantha. It's not as if he'd ever been my pet or as if I'd offered him food this winter.

But the kittens? Eww. Two of them had been jammed into an empty food bowl. The bowl was dry, but the bodies were wet and cold. The one that looked exactly like Tickle was completely lifeless. The one whose face looked like Burr's, but who had an extra-long tail like Samantha's, waved a paw feebly when tipped out into the garbage.

So of course, bleedingheart that I am, I scooped it up again, laid it on a stack of newspapers near the heater, turned up the heater, and invited Samantha to see whether, together, we could get the poor little thing's heart and lungs going. I'd stroke its back until Samantha nudged my hand aside, nonverbally saying "I'll groom my own kitten; you can scratch my back," and then she'd get bored and I'd stroke the fetus again.

All newborn kittens look fetal. Even when the placental slime was cleaned off its fur, this one was clearly a fetus not a baby. Its umbilical cord hadn't dried up and snapped off naturally, which suggested that it might not have developed the ability to breathe air.

The difference between a fetus and a baby is that, although late-stage fetuses look very similar to adorable tiny babies of whatever species they are, they're not. Babies breathe air. Fetuses are still growths that are capable of surviving only hours after separation from their adult host, or mother. No matter how much love and hope you gush out over a fetus, it does not embody the miracle of new life; it's not going to live.

The kitten who looked the way Burr probably wanted to look would have been male, if it had lived. It kicked several times, took maybe half a dozen separate gulps of air, even uttered a tiny stifled squeak, but it never really began to breathe. Its heart never started pumping blood to warm its tiny paws, either.

Its head and body together stretched almost all the way across my hand. One of its little ears started to unfold from the side of its head before our eyes. It was a cute little thing. I loved it, and Samantha loved it, for more than an hour. But it never really was alive, nor meant to be alive. It was a fetus not a baby.

Samantha went back to her two living kittens. One had a tail like Irene's, complete but short, and a calico coat. One was black, with a long tail, but it had that "runt of the litter" look, despite being the next to largest in this litter. Runts are often baby animals that started gestating later than their litter mates, and may be weak or stunted for life. The black kitten was definitely alive and not much smaller than Minnie, the "miniature kitten" who grew up to be a big tough Queen Cat. Samantha and I wanted it to live, too, but it didn't.

So at the time of writing there's one more Patchnose kitten, an adorable little girlcat with a patchy nose--but even she could have spent another day or two gestating before being born, and she'll probably be spayed this fall if she lives through the summer.

Samantha? Not yet. Cats seem to have some voluntary control of when they give birth. Annie held on to her first litter too long; Sisawat aborted her first litter by trying to time their birth to help "mother" Heather's and Irene's younger kittens; Samantha didn't hold on to hers long enough. Cats live and learn about these things.

This weekend I, also, learned something, or re-learned something I'd known for a long time: A fetus is not a baby. A fetus looks enough like a baby to trigger a gush of parental hormones, but it never will be a baby, no matter how hard you try. Only inside its mother's body can a fetus become a baby. When you can see a fetus you're seeing a death.

This web site will never for a moment suggest that women should imagine that they've gained a "right" to exercise a rational "choice" when they allow men to start unwanted fetuses, and then risk their lives and their ability to have babies they want later by using dangerous pills or surgical procedures to get rid of those fetuses. Being abused and exploited is not a right. Liberation for either women or men, even if they're Catholic, means accepting that there are other things nature intended us to do when we want to "make love not babies." But some fetuses are so incapable of ever becoming babies that they up and abort themselves, and "pro-life" correspondents would sound a lot more intelligent, to me, if they'd stop trying to pretend that a fetus is a baby.

This book is about the left-wing spirituality that helped its author survive the horrors of spontaneous abortion. In humans, who have little control over the timing of birth, a baby may pop out two or even three months short of the normal period and grow up normal and healthy. Before that, it's only a fetus.

Book Review: Immortal Wife

Title: Immortal Wife

Author: Irving Stone

Date: 1944

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 450 pages

Quote: “Imagine how outraged your family at Cherry Grove would be if they learned that a McDowell had married...an illegitimate child.”

Subtitled “The Biographical Novel of Jessie Fremont,” Immortal Wife is, like Clarence Darrow for the Defense, a vividly imagined work of fiction based on study of the primary documents. Irving Stone fantasized many dramatic private scenes, among real people, by reading their letters and their friends’ letters after they were dead. In the early nineteenth century people thought one way to discourage premarital pregnancy was to blame children if their parents hadn’t been married at the time of their birth. According to the law, a baby was legitimate if it was born minutes after the wedding, illegitimate if born minutes before. John Fremont, war hero, explorer, presidential nominee (as both Republican and Democrat), and husband of Jessie Benton, was born illegitimate. Jessie knew and didn’t care, since Fremont was an American earning his own money rather than a European dependent on his place in the paternal line, but from time to time through their more-than-forty-year active career people tried to embarrass both Jessie and John Fremont by revealing this “scandalous secret.”

That’s one of many fun facts about the Fremonts Stone weaves into his novel about them. John Fremont published his own memoirs of his long adventurous life. He was a popular celebrity, but, even in a period where women were supposed to want to retreat into “the home” and avoid being noticed, Jessie was if possible even more popular than John Fremont. A biography of her was written shortly after she died; Stone reviewed the evidence—letters and newspapers and so on—and improved that biography into his novel. We meet her quitting school when she was unable to get a friend elected May Queen (she’d been thoroughly homeschooled and never seen the need to go to school anyway), then see her arranging a secret marriage in a different church in order to tell her father she was married rather than asking for his approval, camping with her husband in the Western Territories, even advising President Lincoln on conditions and strategy for the West in the war.

She was not, of course, immortal. In the nineteenth century the life expectancy was less; both Fremonts died at ages that many now insist should not be described as old. They were, at least, “immortalized” by their place in the history of California and Arizona, which they helped to shape into States.

Stone had a tendency to idealize the subjects of his biographies. Vincent Van Gogh, Jack London, Eugene Debs, Rachel Jackson, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Clarence Darrow were interesting people, people you don’t meet every day—or want to; Stone wrote about them as if they were the kind of people he wanted to meet every day. Let’s just say that Jessie Benton Fremont, if not exactly a saint, was at least a smart, tough, charming, and adventurous lady, easier to admire than some of Stone’s other heroes. She consciously rejected her generation’s version of feminism as embodied by Margaret Fuller or perhaps Charlotte Corday, yet somehow she embodied a sort of proto-feminism anyway.

In Virginia, where I’ve spent most of my life, girl and woman, few people recognize Mrs. Fremont’s name. In California, where I spent just one school year, they remembered her, and held her up to little girls as a role model, rather like Martha Washington...The funny thing about that is that Jessie Benton, whose mother was a McDowell, was born in Virginia; she met John Fremont in Washington, D.C., while her father was there as a U.S. Senator.

This book was sufficiently popular in its day that the hardcover first edition is not especially hard to get, although prices are entering the collector range. What I physically have is the hardcover edition, with the pretty portrait of Mrs. Fremont on the (tattered) dust jacket. Run don't walk; in real life I'm asking less than Amazon. If willing to accept a later and cheaper reprint, you can still order this book for our standard price of $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. First editions will cost $10 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. Either way, at least three more books of similar size will fit into the $5 package, and those could be Fair Trade Books, so please scroll down to browse.

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Book Review: Gossips Gorgons and Crones

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Gossips Gorgons and Crones

Author: Jane Caputi

Date: 1993

Publisher: Bear & Company

ISBN: 1-879181-05-3

Length: 351 pages plus index

Illustrations: several black-and-white photos, drawings, and cartoons

Quote: “[N]uke is frequently meant as a synonym for f**k. A sexually sadistic attack or obliteration is always implicit in the phrase ‘f**k you.’”

This was axiomatic in 1993. Many would like to believe that the feminism of the 1970s accomplished its goals and moved on. This would have been pleasant if true, but no; just weeks after the #MeToo witch hunters tried to apply current social mores to a previous generation’s social behavior, the world saw a half-grown snotboy threaten an older woman who’d been very kind to him with “a sexually sadistic attack or obliteration,” and the so-called feminists of the Undead and Extremely Confused Left actually swarmed in to attack...her. The mind squirbles. Clearly there is still an ongoing need to resume the feminist thought of the 1990s (which publishers were promoting right up to September 2001, at which point they all decided they “needed” to print more war propaganda and drop all other non-required reading).

I’m not sure, though, whether Gossips Gorgons and Crones is the best place to begin. For those who’d been keeping up with Caputi’s reading and thinking, this book represented a valid step forward,around the Lavender Menace (cooptation of feminist groups and activities by homosexuals and the sexually-confused-yet-sex-obsessed; yes, it did destroy women's groups and enterprises), past the blather of Goddess Theology, into “eco-feminism” and antinuclear activism. For those who missed that whole era of thinking and writing, this book may not even be intelligible.

Jane Caputi is best known for her collaboration with Mary Daly on the hilariously incisive Wickedary, a book of radical feminist wordplay. What would a book written in Wickedary vocabulary look like, some readers wondered...Jane Caputi wrote one. In addition to the Wickedary, Caputi’s thought and language refers back to the work of “those thinkers whose writings have most instructed and inspired me: Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, Marilou Awiakta, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Bell Hooks, June Jordan, Robert Jay Lifton, Catharine MacKinnon, Barbara Mor, Diana Russell, Leslie Silko, Monica Sjoo, Alice Walker, and Barbara Walker.” If you’ve read at least one book by each of those authors, you won’t necessarily agree with them or with Caputi, but you’ll understand what she’s saying in Gossips Gorgons and Crones. Otherwise, statements like the introductory remarks on page 17—“In the second part, inspired by the Gossips, I embark with you on our journey, scathingly assessing the sexually abusive practices and beliefs of the nuclear fatherland...”—may not make much sense to you.

I’ve never heard from the majority of what the computer tells me are this web site’s readers. I generally write for The Nephews, to a lesser extent for their mothers; and while I believe the “feminist herstory” of Women’s Literature between 1960 and 1990 needs to be preserved in libraries, I would like to think that young men could afford to skip most of it. (“The Nephews” is a collective name chosen to anonymize a mixed group but, yes, more of them are nephews than are nieces.) The thing about the feminist writers Caputi’s list cited was that, although many of them seemed reasonably fond of their husbands and of their sons, they were always writing in combat mode against sexist “male thought.” They always used words like “fatherland” to imply things like “land where unfit fathers failed either to share with or to provide for the rest of the family.” It was possible, even for sympathetic readers even at the time, to see a name like Lifton’s on the list, and instead of thinking, “Well, he was an old left-wing Greenie,” think “How did he get into that crowd? Did they make him wear a dress?”

Right. The first rule for understanding this book: When Caputi means to include men she’s not casting as enemies, in terms like “thinkers” or “survivors” or “people,” she ignores their gender. When she uses male-gender words, she’s confronting her enemy. “Patriarchal” never means “pertaining to a male elder, or elders, whose wisdom and fairness have won respect,” but always “characteristic of a society that devalues women and young people.” “This man” never refers to a supporter observed at a demonstration, always to a hostile counter-demonstrator. Even “our hero,” in a summary of a TV drama, is necessarily a sarcastic term for a male character who sings “I would die for you” but “was never in any such danger”—Caputi would not use it to refer to, e.g., Lifton.

Got that? A little more grammar and vocabulary may help the young deconstruct and understand that introductory passage:

“Female Powers are returning to our sphere.” (We are learning to show more respect to women.) “It is imperative that we welcome, honor, and face these Powers now journeying toward us.” (The “Goddess Spirituality” crowd are a primary audience for this book.)

“I first conduct a brief survey of the terrain of patriarchal nuclear myth and metaphor.” (The first of the four main sections of this book documents some images of, and writing about, nuclear bombs in pop culture.) “[P]hallocentric associations with the bomb have been insinuated into our consciousness through everyday imagery, particularly in the areas of sexuality and divinity.” (Egocentric, narcissistic men seem to worship the power of nuclear bombs to attack and obliterate things in ways onto which they project sexual sadism.)

“In the second part, inspired by the Gossips, I embark with you on our journey, scathingly assessing the sexually abusive practices and beliefs of the nuclear fatherland.” (The second section discusses some feminist reactions to the observed tendency for men who disrespect women to disrespect the Earth, animals, and one another also.) “The Gossips whisper to us of the magical Powers of language, motivating us to shed the ordained role of the living dead and to become, instead, psychic activists.” (This Wickedary language may be useful; it sure is fun!)

“In the third part, we arrive at the abode of the Gorgon and there find ourselves facing the unfaceable.” (The third section discusses some of the theoretical possibilities that have been imagined for a nuclear holocaust.) “We reconsider patriarchal definitions of knowledge and taboo, finding surprising and even shocking connections between female Powers and nuclear technologies.” (Can feminists use or benefit from the fear nuclear holocaust inspires?)

“In the fourth part, guided by the Crone, we visit the house of the Grandmothers.” (The fourth section raises the point that we’re all growing older, and we’re all going to die, in any case.) “There we envision our participation in a cosmic change of life.” (What if either nuclear winter or the fear of nuclear winter reduced everybody to an equal level of helplessness, the way disease, disability, and death do?) “We contemplate the workings of Chaos in the evolution of human history.” (Toward the end I, Caputi, admit that this is a book of questions and speculations rather than answers. No one really knows what the future may bring.)

It is possible to read this book, sift out Caputi’s left-wing extremism, admire the audacity of her conclusion (imagine a scholarly book facing both uncertainty and mortality! !!!!!), and even find more hopeful uses for her Green-feminist philosophical insights...but it helps a great deal, toward that goal, to be a woman who remembers the same history and read the same books Caputi did. It also helps to have acknowledged uncertainty and mortality a long time ago. For me, the fourth section of this book is not so much intimidating as it is inconclusive. My mind goes, “Yes? We’re mortal; that’s axiomatic. Everything we think, write, plan, and do is about what we do with the little time we have. We’re uncertain; that’s also axiomatic. Everything we think, write, plan, and do is about how we use the little understanding our brains can absorb during the little time we have. Now, what is Caputi proposing to do about all this?” She’s not making very positive or concrete proposals, but then I remember how very brave it is for Humanists to face these two truths that Christians hold to be self-evident: that we don’t know everything, and that we’re going to die. Humanism generally prefers to deny both of these principles.

How relevant is her analysis of the pop culture of disrespect, the line of thought that positively upheld nuclear technology and other abuses of the Earth, rape and child abuse, violence and sadism, as manifestations or even celebrations of manhood? Weren’t most of the nuclear weapons dismantled, others acknowledged to have been fakes all along, and have not humankind as a whole agreed that we don’t need to monkey around with nuclear technology any more?

Not quite so fast, reality warns. Consider the way young women are embracing their “right” to be taken seriously as workers and thinkers while dressing like bimbos, and more power to them for that, but consider the discouraging way a few of them can still be persuaded to whine and moan about their “right” to have abortions (rather than, e.g., proclaiming that non-reproductive sexual expression is every bit as satisfactory as the procreative kind, and, if a woman doesn’t want a baby, moreso). Consider the way a left-wing bully-boy still defaults to “F—you” as a threat/insult when he wants to show extreme ingratitude to a woman older than his mother—and the left-wing “buzz” doesn’t even demand that he grovel before Womankind. Consider how, even though right-wingers aren’t known for their deft use of political “spin,” the right wing didn’t even surge forward to demand that the whole focus of attention immediately shift from “ignorant children whining for gun bans, which they don’t realize would put them in greater danger than they are” to “ignorant boys in howling need of a lesson in respect for women.”

The capacity of Humanity for living and not learning is astounding. Consider, in the context of the Hogg idiot, how even after the thirty-year experiment with a gun ban for private citizens in Washington, D.C., which demonstrated fairly conclusively that people who consent to “gun control” are doomed to be shot down at the leisure of the violent, young people are drivelling about how much safer they think they would feel if the gun ban that had made them targets at school were extended to cover their whole town. Feelings can be very misleading; people die with silly grins on their faces. But perhaps it’s time for young people to remember what violent people do if they really can’t drive a few miles and get firearms: They build bombs.

So, although Jane Caputi’s peculiar way of replying to all the little wormboys who fantasize the male sexual act as a threat of torture and death now reads, even to those who liked this book in 1993, like a nostalgically long-ago inside joke...it’s time somebody picked up this line of thought and reworked it in with current pop culture and language the young can understand. One way or another, the male mind has to be brought up against the fact that women don’t have to be intimidated by the threat of rape. Women can counterattack. Any reference to the male sexual act as other than mutual, consensual, even offered as an act of reverence to the chosen lady, needs to evoke a shrill and scornful chorus of “If you want to keep it, buddy, keep it to yourself.”

(That was a filk I wrote about twenty years ago...the verses and tune are available, but, for contract reasons, not on this web site, and not free of charge.)

Violate the Earth with bombs...what about nuclear winter? Violate the air with pollution...prepare to do a lot of coughing. Violate women, in any way...what Freud thought you always thought women were going to do is not, in fact, something women particularly want to do, but if you really push it, guys, we can. Jane Caputi’s message in Gossips Gorgons and Crones is one the young desperately need, whether their little minds can take it in directly from her book, or not.

Jane Caputi is still alive and teaching so this one is a Fair Trade Book. Buy it here for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment and, though other sellers may offer lower prices per book, this web site will send $1 to Caputi or the charity of her choice. Additionally, this web site will add at least one and possibly two or three more books, of comparable size, to the same $5 package, so the total price for the same number of books may be a better deal than those other sellers offer...and if the authors of those books are still alive we'll send them or their charities $1 each, too.

(Eventually, when I've closed all those other windows, a Paypal button for this specific book will appear here.)