Happenstance: the Print Edition

I assume most visitors to this blog know that I spent many years creating a graphic novel, and that over the past two years I have been serializing it online (you can read it here.)  Now I am trying to fund a print edition by running a kickstarter campaign.  You can learn more, donate and pre-order the book here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/happenstanceprint/happenstance-the-print-edition

Go have a look!

My Photographic Novel, Happenstance, Is Nearly 3/4 Posted! Start Reading Now!

A graphic novel I wrote & illustrated (using photographs and photoshop) has been serializing online for about a year and a half, now.  It's about two friends who change their religious views in opposite ways, but in dialogue with each other; and about the fallout from those changes in each of their lives.  I thought I'd pop up here and say it's still posting! You can go read it!  Two new pages go up twice a week, on Mondays & Thursdays.  It's nearly 3/4 up — I just put up pp. 332-333 out of an eventual 444 yesterday, and we're nearing the end of chapter 9 (of 12).  So click here and check it out:

The graphic novel to date can be read here: http://happenstance.thecomicseries.com/

If you haven't read it, give it a try; and if you like it, share it with your friends!

My Photographic Novel, Happenstance, Is Now Being Serialized Online

So some of you know that I spent much of the past decade working on a (photo-based) graphic novel titled Happenstance. I'm pleased to announce I've begun serializing it online. My plan (kenina hara) is to post new images twice a week, Monday and Thursday (where each image is a two-page spread: the contrast between the pages becomes important down the line).

The graphic novel to date can be read here: http://happenstance.thecomicseries.com/

So please check it out, like & share with your friends!

Now We Are Six

Happy Birthday to my beloved son, Joseph Saperstein Frug, who is six today.

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

— A. A. Milne

Disclaimer: the picture above is actually from Thanksgiving, back when Joseph was still "just alive" and not yet "as clever as clever".

Quote of the Day

Is that really that, then? he thought, looking down into the brown slow river. Was he really now disburdened of history as an occupation?

Maybe the old bookstore would take him back. He really had a lot longer to live. What was he to do?

— John Crowley, The Solitudes (1987)

_____________________
(Incidentally, The Solitudes was originally published under the title Aegypt. The latter is the title of the four-volume novel of which The Solitudes is the first part. After the completion of the whole, The Solitudes was republished under its current title.)

Beginnings and Endings

This week we took Joseph to register for Kindergarten for the fall.

And today I went up to Hobart and William Smith for what may have been the final time.  (As happens to contingent faculty, after four years of being a Visiting Assistant Professor there — and eight years teaching there overall — I won't be returning next year.)

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."

Forty-Three (How I'm Living Now)

Today, for no particular reason, I was moved to reread Harvey Pekar's classic short comics story, "I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday (How I'm Living Now)".

Since my copy is buried deep in a box, I'm fortunate that someone posted it online. As of now (no guarantee to these things, of course), you can read the entire thing here, albeit in an awkward format.

Far From the Only Reason, But A Key One, This Blog Has Been Slow of Late, Revealed In Humorous Fashion as a Parodic Request

Hey, y'all, quick favor: I need the entire world to stop for, oh, I dunno, not too long, maybe a week?, yeah, a week, that'll do it, so I can sorta catch up on some things. You're all willing to do that, right? I mean, no big. I'd appreciate it. You're the best! See y'all in a week. Which, for you, will be tomorrow. KTHXBY.

5

Incredibly, my beloved son, Joseph, is five today.  Hard to believe.

Here are three photos from Thanksgiving (all by my uncle, John Henry Stassen):

And here's one from his school:

Happy birthday!

Michael Kammen (1936 - 2013)

I returned from a Thanksgiving trip to the news that my graduate advisor, Michael Kammen, died last Friday.  I hope to write something soon about him, in particular about what an amazing advisor he was.  For now, I don't have the heart.

For the moment, I thought I'd just post links to obituaries I've seen.  (I've seen precious few; I assume there will be more.  I'll add links when I see them.)  Here are some links:

Newspaper obituaries:

• The Cornell Chronicle
• Cornell Daily Sun (partially reprinted at HNN)
• The Washington Post
• Boston Globe
• The LA Times
• The New York Times 

Other comments & remembrances:

• US Intellectual History Blog• Organization of American Historians
• The Historical Society
• The Ithaca Journal
• Sara Polak

More will be added as I see them.  (If you have seen others, please leave links in the comments.)

Rest in peace, Michael.  You are sorely missed.

At the Ithaca Festival

I took my son, Joseph, to the Ithaca Festival last weekend. The good folks at the Family Reading Partnership Tent took our picture, and were kind enough to send it to me:

My First Favorite Jazz Album: Ella and Louis (Again, Porgy, Compact)

I have been talking about the first and subsequent jazz albums one ought to listen to, as well as about some of the famous ones that have achieved Governmental Recognition.  Those are all great places to start listening to jazz.  And I did, many years ago (when I started a never-really-engaged exploration with jazz) start with the first and then hear a few of the seconds before trailing off.

Then they got shelved, added to in a trickle, and enstoraged, and not heard again (save as incidental music to a modern life) for years.  (And now I have pulled them all out, and added to them substantially, and have heard more jazz in the last month than I've heard in the rest of my life combined (save for the album I'm about to discuss.))

Except that, in the same time -- starting, actually, probably a bit before, so this really was my first jazz album -- I heard another album.  And heard it over, and over, and over, and over, and over.  Memorized it; loved it.

I just didn't have the slightest idea it was jazz.  Which was pretty stupid of me, when it comes right down to it, since it had the word "JAZZ" right there on the cover in what Douglas Adams would have called big, friendly letters.  But when I thought "jazz", I thought of various instrumental music styles.  I didn't think of vocal music, which is what this was.  Letters be damned, or at least ignored.

I'm not sure what I would have called it, really.  "Popular music", I suppose.  Older, pre-rock popular music.  Maybe I would even have called it jazz, had anyone asked or I ever thought about it.  But I never did think about it what it was.  I just listened to it.

But, of course, it is jazz -- clearly, unmistakably jazz -- performed by two legendary jazz musicians, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

The album in question was called Compact Jazz: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.



This particular album is a compilation, a "best-of" collection (Compact Jazz was a series of those but out by Verve; I don't know how many were released, but it was a lot -- more than two dozen, certainly, possibly many more), drawn from three major albums released in the 1950s.  The three albums in question were: Ella and Louis (1956), Ella and Louis Again (1957) and Porgy and Bess (1957) (which, of course, were EF and LA's rendition of the classic Gershwin opera.)  It had four songs from the first album, six from the second, and two from the third.  (List of songs here.)

So, why did I hear it? Why didn't I think of it as jazz?

The answer to the latter is the answer to the former: I didn't think of it as jazz because I didn't seek it out; I heard it at work.

When I was in college, I worked two summers, full-time, and two years part-time during the academic year, in the package room at Harvard's Science Center (a big building of classrooms, offices, labs, public spaces and a library).  The package room at the Science Center received, in addition to the packages for the Science Center itself, all the packages for all the buildings in Harvard Yard, since package trucks weren't allowed in (letter carriers were).  Those were the freshman dorms, above all, but also a lot of office buildings and classrooms and so forth.  So it was a busy mailroom -- overwhelmingly so, at the end of every summer/beginning of every fall, when it would receive huge sets of all the earthly possessions of various freshman about to arrive, or just arrived, for the fall term.  But even otherwise, it was busy (the dorms housed summer students over the summer, who were generally high-school students in the pre-college program, and who thus got more than their share of packages).  Lots to do.

The person I worked for, the chief of the mailroom, was a large man named Sam McCleary.  He was friendly, good humored, whip-smart and a kind and generous boss (without tolerating any bullshit); I liked and admired him, and got more from knowing him, than I was ever able to properly say.  I would run out to deliver notices, but mostly I worked in the package room itself, as did he.  So we were together for hours every day (albeit busy and in different parts of the room).  When things got really slow, we'd chat.  He taught me how to play cribbage.

And we had a tape player which we could listen to music on while we worked.

I don't recall where this tape came from.  I assume it was Sam's.  I occasionally brought in tapes of my own; I remember once I brought in Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, which we listened to; when the UPS delivery guy remarked on it, Sam replied "we're very spiritual here".  And sometimes we just listened to the radio.  But there were a few tapes, and this was one of them.

Well, I liked it, so I put it on.  And again.  And again.  At some point, I remember, I told Sam that when I was a kid I used to listen to every album I really liked over and over and over and over, so he should tell me when he was sick of it, because I wasn't going to get sick of it myself.

"Well, you see," said Sam, "I did the same thing when I was a kid."

For all that, I think he flinched before I did.  Although I think it was more than a day.

But we kept listening to it frequently -- at least once a day, is my memory, although we're talking about two decades ago,  The point is, I really got to know that album very well.  Without ever thinking about what it was.  At some point, in a CD store, I saw the CD for sale, and bought it: I wanted to be able to hear it after I graduated -- forever, or the indefinitely that humans so often mistake for forever.

-- So why did I like it so much?  -- That's easy: because it's so damn good.  -- All right then, why is it so damn good?  -- Let me count the ways.

• The songs.  This was my first introduction to a number of classic American popular songs from the pre-rock era (say, before the mid-1950s) which can sound, to modern ears, old-fashioned if not mannered and contrived.  But they're really quite good: catchy melodies and quite witty lyrics (including lyrics that I remember thinking were racier than I would have predicted).  My favorites (although I never put it together at the time) were the ones by George and Ira Gershwin -- in particular, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and "A Foggy Day" -- but the album also included songs by Benny Goodman, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein (without Rodgers), Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, and others.  In other words, I got to hear a rich tradition of song which I was more or less ignorant of.  And they really are quite good.

• The performers.  They're just fabulous.  Ella Fitzgerald has a gorgeous voice and is a brilliant singer.  Louis Armstrong has a very different voice -- gravely and low -- but it's wonderful in its own way.  (Readers not into jazz might be most familiar with it from his famous version of the song "What a Wonderful World".)  And Armstrong plays trumpet on most of the tracks too -- and it's his trumpet which made his reputation and (in the process) remade jazz.*

• The duets.  But it's not just two brilliant performers.  It's what they do with the collaboration.  First, Fitzgerald's gorgeous voice and Armstrong's gravely one make a marvelous contrast, either sung together or in alteration, which is (I think) far better than either apart.  (I have to admit that, having learned to love this album first, hearing any of Fitzgerald's solo performances feel somewhat lacking to me.)  In addition to the marvelous textures of their raw voices, they play off each other, tease each other and quite noticeably interact in marvelous ways, that add a lot of humor and verve to the performances.  Then there's the fact that most of the songs are love songs (not all: for instance, "It Ain't Necessarily So, from Porgy & Bess, isn't one.)  So that singing them as duets makes an enormous amount of thematic sense -- and Fitzgerald and Armstrong play that up marvelously, to great effect.  They flirt, musically, and it really works.

• The music.  And then there's the instruments.  However much I may distinguish in my own mind (yes, still (perhaps mistakenly)) between vocal and instrumental jazz, there's a lot of great jazz instrumentation here.  One of the challenges in learning to listen to jazz (which I hope to write about in future posts) is figuring out what various soloists are doing -- which can be a puzzle even if you actually like it.  But for me, because I've heard them so much, Armstrong's trumpet solos sound not only good but inevitable: I can't imagine how you wouldn't orchestrate the songs that way.  (Which is to say that not only are they great -- which they really are -- but that they're great in a way that seems to make sense, rather than being great but mysterious.)  In that sense, this album did help me learn to hear jazz.

So, yes, it's a great album.  And in my most recent flurry of jazz exploration, one of the things I did was track down a more complete set of the Armstrong & Fitzgerald collaborations, and I can report that the other songs are as good as those on the Classic Jazz selection.

Would I recommend it as a starter jazz album?  Well, unquestionably, but with one major qualification: it's vocal jazz.  Perhaps I'm wrong to distinguish so sharply between vocal and instrumental jazz, but hearing them just feel very different to me.  For me, at least up until this point, they're different varieties of musical experience, on a fundamental level.  (And, in general, I'm more interested in instrumental than vocal jazz.)  I don't think I'm alone in this -- a few of the starter lists I talked about in an earlier post are specifically limited to instrumental jazz.  (And one of the lists that wasn't so restricted did include Ella and Louis in its suggestions.)  But if you're interested in jazz, then you have to hear at least a bit of the vocal jazz -- and for those purposes, I can't imagine a better starting point.  Speaking as an uneducated and beginning listener, it is one of my two favorite sets of jazz vocals; it's simply marvelous.  For that matter, even if you're not particularly interested in jazz, but just want to hear some great music, I'll recommend this unreservedly too.

So, if you want to hear it, how should you get it?  There's no reason to stick to the best-of set I happened to hear.  Get the full set of duets.  But how to do that?  It's complicated.  There's no one single set that has all of the recordings that Fitzgerald and Armstrong did together, but there are a couple that have most of them.

It goes like this.  (I'm working from the discography here.)  They did six songs (three singles, each with a B side) for Decca in 1950/1951.  Based on the success of those albums, I believe, they went on to produce a whole album -- Ella and Louis -- but this time for a different label, Verve.  Verve also produced the follow-up albums Ella and Louis Again, and Porgy and Bess.  The first and the third albums had pretty stable track lists (of 11 and 15 songs, respectively), but the second varied, with a fair number of bonus tracks added later.

Now, Verve released an album called The Complete Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on Verve -- but note those last two words, sometimes deemphasized, and occasionally omitted altogether: the six songs from Decca are not included.  But all of the three Verve albums are, the second in its most expanded version, plus two extra tracks that don't seem to be otherwise available.

Then there's an import set called the Complete Album Collection, which I snagged on Amazon.  (At the moment it's listed as out of stock.)  This has several advantages.  First, it's nearly half the price of the Complete on Verve set ($15 for CDs as opposed to $27 for mp3s).  Second, it's slightly larger.  The Complete Album Collection lacks one song that Complete on Verve has ("Undecided", one of the two never released prior to the Complete on Verve set); but it has two of the six Decca tracks ("Can Anyone Explain?" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me").  Which is a good trade.

...And then it has a song that's neither on the Verve nor one of the six earlier Decca songs -- one which is, in fact, not listed in the discography I'm relying on at all -- but which is, unmistakably, a duet between Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (including trumpet by the latter): "The Frim Fram Sauce".  I have no idea of its provenance.  But it's a third addition to balance out the single omission.  (And, of course, it raises the possibility that there might be still others.  I don't know of any; there are several other songs on the album Our Love Is Here to Stay: Ella & Louis Sing Gershwin, but I think they're all actually solo versions, by either EF or LA, from other sets they did.)

But the truth is the two sets are nearly identical: stick the CDs of the Complete Album Collection in a computer, and in two of the three cases the automated track namer will think it's actually the Complete on Verve set; only disk three differs at all.  (There are still others, such as one which is (mis)labeled** Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: the Complete Studio Recorded Duets, which omits some things from the other collections, but has all the Decca tracks.  Etc.)  Either will get you the bulk of their fabulous collaboration.***

Way or another, check them out.

____________________
* Really.  That's not hyperbole.  Armstrong's playing was what established the tradition of the individual solo, and his style dominated for nearly two decades (until the development of Bop in the early 40's.)

** One thing that a non-jazz listener has to get used to in getting into jazz -- at least in my experience -- is the really astonishing number of albums that are labeled "complete", or "best of", and so forth, which turn out to be nothing of the sort.  Sometimes there's some hidden qualification -- complete/best of from a particular record label -- but in general, there's a fairly shocking amount of poor labeling around.

*** I think the rest are purchasable as individual mp3 tracks; I haven't bothered to do this yet, though.  Some day.

Daily Fatherhood Event

Driving to school, he asks for a story.  I start a story about a rabbit who can play piano.  He immediately insists it needs to have the Hulk in it.

Today I Am (Well It's My Birthday Too Yeah)

"Good morning," said Deep Thought at last.
"Er ... good morning, O Deep Thought," said Loonquawl nervously, "do you have ... er, that is ..."
"An answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically. "Yes, I have."
The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain.
"There really is one?" breathed Phouchg.
"There really is one," confirmed Deep Thought.
"To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?"
"Yes."
Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children.
"And you're ready to give it to us?" urged Loonquawl.
"I am."
"Now?"
"Now," said Deep Thought.
They both licked their dry lips.
"Though I don't think," added Deep Thought, "that you're going to like it."
"Doesn't matter!" said Phouchg. "We must know it! Now!"
"Now?" inquired Deep Thought.
"Yes! Now..."
"All right," said the computer, and settled into silence again.  The two men fidgeted.  The tension was unbearable.
"You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought.
"Tell us!"
"All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question ..."
"Yes ... !"
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought.
"Yes ... !"
"Is ... " said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes ... !"
"Is ... "
"Yes ... !!! ... ?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 27

In fact it was simply chosen because it was a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also by six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents.

-- Douglas Adams (quoted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Original Radio Script)

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out `Silence!' and read out from his book, `Rule Forty-two. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.'
Everybody looked at Alice.
`I'M not a mile high,' said Alice.
`You are,' said the King.
`Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen.
`Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: `besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.'
`It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.
`Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice.

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12.

The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas! Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day. During these bewildering intervals the ship usually sailed backwards.

-- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Preface

 

42 is the 5th Catalan number.

-- What's special about this number?

The Catalan numbers (1, 2, 5, 14, 42, 132, 429, 1430, 4862, 16796, 58786, 208012, 742900, 2674440, 9694845, ...), named after Eugène Charles Catalan (1814--1894), arise in a number of problems in combinatorics.... Among other things, the Catalan numbers describe the number of ways a polygon with n+2 sides can be cut into n triangles, the number of ways in which parentheses can be placed in a sequence of numbers to be multiplied, two at a time; the number of rooted, trivalent trees with n+1 nodes; and the number of paths of length 2n through an n-by-n grid that do not rise above the main diagonal.

-- Source

Time is so short and I’m sure
There must be something more

-- Coldplay, "42"

For more see here, here, here, here and here.

Two Weeks Ago I Had Jury Duty

...and I live-tweeted it.  Since (rather to my surprise) a number of people mentioned that they liked the tweets I decided to wildly overreact to what was doubtless mere politeness collect them all in one place for the pathetic gratification of my swollen ego anyone who might be interested. Think of it as a performance piece about boredom.

So here they are. I hope they are at least as a tenth as pleasant as jury duty itself w...  Nah, I can't wish that on my Noble Readers.  But click through if you're curious.

(PS: For more exciting experiences in sheer dullness, you can follow me on twitter here.)

Happy Birthday Joseph!

Happy birthday to Joseph, who turns four today.  Two recent action shots:

 Happy birthday!  (And no, Joseph, you're still not old enough to be on the net.  Close that phone right now, or you're in big trouble, buster.)

The Morning After

...although I am bummed about Nate Shinagawa.

Resistance was Futile: I Have Been Assimilated

I was following the whole !@#$% election on Twitter and got tired of having ten windows open, so I signed up:
https://twitter.com/StephenFrug
I may not keep it up, but for now, I have some reactions over there.

Just call me Locutus.

Surprises in Rereading Classic Children's Literature: Kipling's Just So Stories edition

Content warning: this post quotes a book using two extremely offensive racial slurs.

So I took Joseph (now at the ripe old age of 3 and 3/4, as he'll tell you if you ask) down to the Ithaca Booksale today (currently on its second weekend of three of its biannual sale).  We got a bunch of things, ranging from simple picture books to longer chapter-books, of a sort we're starting to read Joseph (and which he likes to listen to as audiobooks -- he's heard Alice in Wonderland (both abridged & full) and The Wind in the Willows (each chapter full but some omitted) that way, for instance).

One of the books I got was a nice hardback copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

Now, what I remembered from Kipling's Just So Stories were a general impression that most were about how various animals got various features -- "how the elephant got its trunk", for example, with the elephant's nose being pulled by something-or-other until it got long.  And I remembered the story "The Butterfly That Stamped" very well, because it was always my favorite, and because I had a recording of it that I listened to repeatedly.  And I remembered that it was incredibly iconic -- not only a classic children's book, but one that has entered our language as a phrase in other contexts.  But I remembered little else.

Now, returning to a children's book for the first time in not-quite-four-decades is always a particular experience, a Zebra-stripes experience of familiarity and surprise.  A lot of this is just about memory.  "How the Elephant Got Its Trunk", for example -- I would have sworn that was the title; and it was, in fact, the story; -- but it's actually called "The Elephant's Child".  I remembered the story, and what it explained, but not the title, nor the details (all that spanking! I'm pleased to say that the second time through Joseph interrupted me to ask, "What does 'spank' mean?")

One particular fashion in which (I've found) the stories differ from my memory is in quality -- in both directions.  The Winnie the Pooh stories are utterly fabulous -- far better than I remembered; so are the Frog and Toad stories.  On the other hand, Babar is much worse -- not just in the colonialist implications, but the actual plain writing.  Curious George is kind of eh.  (But -- as has been true almost since the day of his birth -- Joseph's taste is not mine: he loves Pooh and Frog and Toad, but he loves Babar and Curious George equally well.)

Just So Stories was both far better, and far worse, than I remembered.

The first story we read was the first in the book, "How the Whale Got His Throat".  And it was fabulous.  Fabulous in many dimensions: an exciting and fun story for Joseph; filled with over-his-head but fun wordplay for me (always an important element in kids' books that are going to be read aloud (but see above re: Joseph's taste is not mine)).  It has a lot of great passages for reading outloud, which surprisingly many children's books are mediocre or even poor at.  But read this description of what a man does when swallowed by a whale (and to get the full effect, you should read it outloud):

But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale's warm, dark, inside cup-boards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and he danced hornpipes where he shouldn't, and the Whale felt most unhappy indeed. (Have you forgotten the suspenders?)

How fabulous is that?

Then there's the picture captions.  Kipling drew his own pictures, and writes his own captions, which not only tell what part of the story they're from, but which also tell what's in the picture, and tell what's left out, and complain about how much better they'd be if he were allowed to color them, although he isn't.  They include facts and details about the story which is not in the text.  They're quite simply wonderful.  Here, for example, is the caption to the picture above, which occurs right about the same point in the story as the above quote:

THIS is the picture of the Whale swallowing the Mariner with his infinite-resource-and-sagacity, and the raft and the jack-knife and his suspenders, which you must not forget. The buttony-things are the Mariner's suspenders, and you can see the knife close by them. He is sitting on the raft, but it has tilted up sideways, so you don't see much of it. The whity thing by the Mariner's left hand is a piece of wood that he was trying to row the raft with when the Whale came along. The piece of wood is called the jaws-of-a-gaff. The Mariner left it outside when he went in. The Whale's name was Smiler, and the Mariner was called Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B. The little 'Stute Fish is hiding under the Whale's tummy, or else I would have drawn him. The reason that the sea looks so ooshy-skooshy is because the Whale is sucking it all into his mouth so as to suck in Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens and the raft and the jack-knife and the suspenders. You must never forget the suspenders.

Note that the name, Mr. Henry Albert Bivvens, A.B. (fabulous!) is not otherwise given in the story, nor is the name Smiler.

So after the first story, I was utterly delighted, and ready to keep reading more.

"How the Camel Got His Hump" was fine -- a bit dominationist in how it thought animals related to humans, but whatever.  A fine story, although not quite as good as "How the Whale Got His Throat" in my opinion (Joseph didn't differentiate, that I could see).  "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin" had the rather unfortunate phrase describing a hat as something "from which the rays of the sun were always reflected in more-than-oriental splendour".  The phrase is repeated, too -- one of the wonderful things about the Just So Stories, and one of the things that make them particularly good for reading outloud, are the long repeated phrases, a technique of oral storytelling famous from Homer if not before, but one oddly underused in children's books.  Well, I wasn't thrilled about that, but this was Kipling after all, to say nothing of 110 years ago.  And frankly I doubted Joseph would pick up on it, or get that there was a questionable connotation (it's not even negative -- just orientalist).  So I plunged on to story four, "How the Leopard Got His Spots".

Oh, dear.

At first it seems ok -- animals with different looks, and a just-so story about how they're going to change looks.  Fine.  Then Kipling introduces a character referred to as "an Ethiopian" -- one who, incidentally, does not seem to be actually a person from the country of Ethiopian, but simply someone who is black.  And I got Worried.  Unfortunately by then I was already into the story -- not far in, but too far for Joseph to tolerate my stopping.  So with fear & trembling I explained to Joseph that an Ethiopian is a person from Ethiopia (true, of course, although somewhat disingenuous in this context: but then to children, my wife's rule has always been to tell the truth but not necessarily the whole truth, so I did). and I pressed on.

The story itself is questionable: the Ethiopian changes his skin, to fit in with a changed habitat, but then again so does the Giraffe, the Zebra and the Leopard.  You could debate how to take that -- making the Ethiopian into an animal?  Or implying that skin is ultimately changeable or unimportant?  It's hard to say.  Again, it's not something that I am thrilled about, but on the other hand I doubt it will do much harm, if part of a mixed and diverse literary diet.

And then -- in the midst of reading outloud -- I see this exchange:

'But if I'm all this,' said the Leopard, 'why didn't you go spotty too?'

'Oh, plain black's best for a nigger,' said the Ethiopian.

Oh, God.  I've already begun the sentence by the time I hit that phrase.  Improvising, I read "plain black's best for me", and continue.  Then one of Kipling's picture captions -- which I've been reading, because heretofore they've been marvelous -- includes the sentence "The Ethiopian was really a negro, and so his name was Sambo."  For that caption I simply stop before getting to that sentence.

Mixed with my general delight in the book, the overall effect is that of finding a dead cockroach in an otherwise excellent bowl of soup.  I felt rather nauseous.

Or perhaps I'm a hypocrite, because if I find a cockroach in a bowl of soup I wouldn't eat another bite (nor anything else from that restaurant, if I were eating at a restaurant); I certainly wouldn't pluck the thing out, throw it away, and keep eating.  But in this case I think I'm going to do that.  In fact, I did: I finished the story, after all.

Now the above-quoted phrase -- with the N word -- is sometimes simply edited out, even from otherwise unabridged editions.  (So if you have the book at home, you might not see it.)  Here, for example, is a copy of the text that seems otherwise unedited which ends the sentence with the word "best".  But the one we now have -- and a very nice edition it is too, especially for a used book bought for $1.75 -- has it.

My wife suggested we take a pen and simply black it out -- make it unreadable since (as she noted) Joseph will learn to read soon enough, and might stumble upon it.  I'll do the same for the sentence with "Sambo" in it, too.

Now, I'm against censorship in grown-up books, and queasy about the idea in kids books.  On the other hand, racial slurs need to be put in complex historical context -- the kind that a three-year-old, or even a vastly older child like a three-and-three-quarters-year-old, wouldn't understand.  I'm not sure a ten-year old would either, for that matter.  And of course the book doesn't have any such context.  And we don't want him, say, reading that and using it not knowing its actual history, meaning, and (especially) connotations.

Honestly, I should have known.  The story is based on a phrase "can the leopard change his spots?", which is the basis for the novel The Leopard's Spots by Thomas Dixon, one of the two Dixon novels which served as the basis for The Birth of a Nation, a film whose hero is the Klu Klux Klan -- as I should know, since I taught the film in one of my classes not three weeks ago.*  Actually, Kipling alludes directly to the phrase in the final paragraph of his story:

Oh, now and then you will hear grown-ups say, 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the Leopard his spots?' I don't think even grown-ups would keep on saying such a silly thing if the Leopard and the Ethiopian hadn't done it once--do you? But they will never do it again, Best Beloved. They are quite contented as they are.

...and of course Kipling uses the longer, explicitly racist version of the phrase, whose existence, I'm ashamed to admit, I had forgotten until getting to it in this story.  I can't decide if the story supports or undermines the sentiment, although I think it's the latter -- and I certainly can't decide whether the fact that Kipling undermines it (if he does) in any way mitigates its use in the story.  (I'm not at all sure it does.)

Honestly, if I'd pre-reread the stories, I would have been sorely tempted to skip this one.  But I read it, and it's part of the book now -- if I try to skip it, Joseph will notice and ask for it.  (We read Joseph the first Babar book similarly without any memories more recent than our own childhoods, and came unprepared on the infamous page four where Babar's mother is shot and killed.  The next time we read it, we tried to skip that part, and Joseph noted that we skipped it and ordered it put back in.  It doesn't actually seem to bother him.)

And it is a very lovely story about "How the Whale Got His Throat", and so is (we skipped ahead to reread my favorite) "The Butterfly that Stamped".  I'm not quite willing to "loose" the book.  But (once it is no longer in the room where he's sleeping, and when he's not looking) I shall edit it.

Now, I can imagine some people criticizing me for reading the book at all (there are questionable implications in that story even aside from the offensive language).  I can imagine others criticizing me for bowdlerization.  But in dealing with the reality of great, flawed texts, and the reality of morally terrible pasts and how to explain them, any action is a compromise.  I think this is the right one.  At least for us, at least for now.

*****

Links discovered while poking around on this topic:

• If you're curious, here's an old metafilter thread discussing this issue which I turned up googling for "Rudyard Kipling Just So Stories Racism".  People take, well, more or less the sort of stances you'd expect.
• Here are some scientists arguing that (in scientific contexts) the phrase "just so stories" shouldn't be used dismissively, but embraced.
• Here's a review of Kipling's Just So Stories from 1903, the year after it appeared.

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* It's not the only place where Kipling's racism crosses a topic I raised in the class: his other racial slur, "sambo", comes out of Minstrel Shows (Sambo was a minstrel show character who became a racial slur -- nor was it the only one to do so), which was the first topic in my class on the history of American culture.  What can I say?  American culture is, among other things, racist; nor is ours the only one, as Kipling demonstrates.

My Tom Friedman Moment

I haven't said anything about the big story du jour that everyone's talking about because, well, I haven't had anything particular to say about it. Romney would do incredible damage to our country (Romney would be worse in every single way that Obama -- terrible in the areas where Obama's good, and far more terrible than Obama in the many areas where Obama's bad), so I certainly hope it hurts his election changes. (It certainly makes him seem like a very unpleasant person.) But I don't know if it will hurt his chances; I'm skeptical of these developing campaign moments to really affect things. (Although the fact that Romney held a last-minute press conference last night indicates that someone thinks it might hurt him.) Really, though, who knows?

Ah, but then I donned the Mustache of Understanding, went to the grocery store and suddenly I realized: a single random comment from a single, randomly encountered working class person is the best -- nay, only! -- way to take the pulse of the country. And by that measure Romney is doomed, Doomed, DOOMED!

Here's what happened. Buying some coffee and a few sundry other items, the cashier in my checkout line began talking to the person standing behind me (whom I presume he knew). "Did you hear what Romney said?" he asked. "He said that people who pay payroll taxes and don't pay income taxes are moochers." He went on to complain about how Romney didn't respect him and people like him who were trying to work their way up. I made some mild comment about how people who pay payroll taxes pay more than Romney does (true enough), and he turned to me and told me that a friend of his was going to vote for Romney, but now he won't. "He's a Republican too," the man said. "This was the last straw."

And then I paid for my groceries and left.

From this single, random incident -- a bit of random bitching, plus some hearsay about a person (supposedly) changing his vote seven weeks before he has to cast it (and thus with plenty of time to change his mind again) -- I conclude that Romney's support is collapsing all over the country, and that he'll loose in a landslide.. Oh, and that the world is flat, or made of straw, or something.

Can I have a NYT column now?