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Libraries and Optimism

Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.

I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.

In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.

But we are not.

In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.

Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.

The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.

Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.

But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.

The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.

Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.

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Raymond Chandler on Plot

Raymond Chandler was one of the greatest detective story writers of the twentieth century. Chandler himself said that Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled style, but Chandler was at least Hammett’s equal as a practitioner. Many film critics acknowledge that Chandler was responsible for bringing hard-guy detectives on dark streets and seedy alleys into movie theaters.

We all know that the essence of the detective novel is the murder plot. Chandler’s stories transformed murder from the intellectual puzzles of his predecessors into the quest for truth and honor in a deceptive and transient world. Chandler’s Los Angeles language, characters, and settings ushered classic drama into the popular detective story.

Chandler did not much care for who-dunits. He maintained that a mystery that depended on the final reveal of the murderer for its appeal was a failure. Famously, when a filmmaker working on a movie version of The Big Sleep sent Chandler a telegram asking who killed the chauffeur who drowned off the Lido dock, he wired back “Damned if I know.” Exactly who sent the telegram is unclear, but Chandler acknowledged writing the reply.

Chandler had his own way of composing a mystery plot. He said in various letters that he did not plan plots, he let them grow on their own. This runs counter to conventional writing advice and Chandler admitted that his method was inefficient. In a letter to an aspiring writer, Chandler explains the inefficiency of his method: “I do my plotting in my head as I go along and usually I do it wrong and have to do it over again. I know there are writers who plot their stories in great detail before they begin to write them, but I’m not one of that group.” (2 July 1951, in Selected Letters.)

Chandler wrote to his friend, mystery critic James Sandoe: “…my plot problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive. It’s probably a silly way to write, but I seem to know no other way.” ( 23 September 1948, in Selected Letters.)

When a scene went wrong for Chandler, he did not try fix the flaws with piecemeal editing; he could only start over. He tailored his method of typing his manuscripts for ease in rewriting. He typed in portrait mode on letter-size sheets cut in half. It appears from his manuscripts that he revised by underlining the words on a page that he wanted to keep and used only the underlined words as he rewrote the entire page. By keeping his pages small, revising by rewriting was more manageable in those pre-computer word processing days. (See “Chandler’s Writing Process” in Writing The Long Goodbye.)

Constrained to this torturous process, Chandler was not prolific. He wrote only seven novels, a couple dozen short stories, a few screen plays, a handful of essays, and a sprinkling of poems. He started writing mysteries in middle age after alcoholism destroyed a successful career as an oil company executive. Inefficient or not, Chandler’s process lead to his success as an virtuoso stylist and creator of characters.

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Reading Trollope On Line

When I mention that Anthony Trollope is one of my favorite authors, I get eye rolls, even among Downton Abbey fans, a series that I don’t care for because I think it is the Gone With The Wind of the British aristocracy.

I won’t get into why I prefer Trollope— any Trollope, even The Fixed Period— to Downton Abbey, but I have many reasons, which I might get into in another post, but not now.

Anthony Trollope was a mid-nineteenth century British Victorian novelist, roughly contemporary with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, the Brontë’s, and George Elliot. He was somewhat older than Thomas Hardy who wrote well into the twentieth century. Jane Austen preceded Trollope, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although Trollope is by far my favorite among the Victorians, I notice that he is not listed among Victorian novelists in the Wikipedia article on Victorian Literature, not even in in the subsection on other Victorian writers. Why is that? I am not an expert, but in his own time, Trollope’s contemporaries accused him of being too prolific and too commercial. He was not ashamed to fret over payment for his books.

Trollope was a bureaucrat in the British postal system and he often wrote while traveling on official business. He kept to a strict schedule, rising early to get in his daily quota of words and said that if he finished one book during a writing session, he started his next without pausing. He kept meticulous records of his number of words per day.

In other words, Anthony Trollope was a novel writing machine. He wrote forty-seven novels in addition to short stories, travel books, a history of the English clergy, an autobiography, and other writings on miscellaneous subjects. Contemporary critics roundly condemned him for being overly prolific. Today, he might be accused of being a hack, of substituting quantity for quality.

Myself, I am profoundly grateful that Trollope wrote every day and turned out books one after another. I have been reading Trollope regularly for thirty years now, and there are still books I am looking forward to reading for the first time and there are others that seem completely new because it has been so long since I read them.

Some things make it easy to become a Trollope enthusiast. Project Gutenberg has made most of his books free in electronic editions. Amazon also has many of Trollope’s works available electronically at nominal price or free. These electronic versions are not perfect— the transcription process introduces a few errors and they are often the product of enthusiasts rather than experts, but they are still very readable. Cheap used paper copies are also easy to find on-line.

For me, however, the gem is the Group Reading of Anthony Trollope , which I call the “Trollope list.” The Trollope list reads a book by Trollope together every two or three months. I think they are unique in that a volunteer member of the group summarizes each week’s chapters. This is startlingly effective. The summaries spark discussion, and busy people who have trouble keeping up with their reading, can keep up with the discussion based on the summaries even when they have slipped behind. I admit to occasionally reading only the summaries during a busy week and skipping a few chapters in my own reading. This makes group reading so much less onerous. You can relax and enjoy Trollope instead of worrying about finishing a reading assignment each week.

I cannot say enough about the group members. Some are academics, some are dilettantes like me, others are just enthusiastic readers. The discussions are wide ranging—some go into Victorian arcana, others apply Trollope’s insights into contemporary society, some revel in the Trollope’s romance and dramatic tension. Anyone who enjoys Dickens or Jane Austen should dip into Trollope. He touches many of the same topics, but with a different style and perspective that I find fascinating.

The Group Reading of Anthony Trollope is an excellent starting point for getting to know Trollope. The group is well into Phineas Finn at this writing, but do drop in, you may find that starting in the middle, “in medea res,” works for you. You must join to participate or read the discussion, but it’s all free. Civility and absence of politics are the rule. There are no trolls on the Trollope list.

If you don’t care for the daily and hourly emails of an active group, opt for “no email” and go to the group website, Group Reading of Anthony Trollope when you feel like it. You only get one email a day if you go for a “daily summary.” My choice is to enjoy the continual conversation of “individual messages.” You can subscribe below.