Neil Serven

Found in the corner lending library of our favorite local breakfast hangout.

Apple Paperbacks were a staple of my late elementary-school reading, though I honestly can’t say I remember them hewing so closely to assigned gender targets as Boys Are Yucko! obviously tries. Certainly there were books tailored for girls that I avoided: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (a Dell Yearling paperback) was practically radioactive in both cover and title. But there was other books with female protagonists that were less pinpointed in their themes. I do remember reading Freaky Friday, which had a girl protagonist who was into a boy. And I might have read Katie’s Baby-Sitting Job—the cover looks familiar—but I don’t remember for sure.

From this fan’s collection I remember reading Just Tell Me When We’re Dead! and the original Upchuck Summer (mentioned in this post), neither of which got much into coming-of-age subject matter, as I recall. Also, of the titles mentioned here, I believe Aldo Applesauce was, appropriately, an Apple Paperback.

According to Anna Grossnickle Hines’ website, Boys Are Yucko! is the sequel to an earlier protofeminist treatise, Cassie Bowen Takes Witch Lessons (Dutton, 1985).

Reading Karl Knausgaard’s New York Times Magazine piece about his trek from New Brunswick from Minnesota:

One of my favorite books about the U.S. is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which among many other things is also a kind of road novel. It describes a journey through the small-town world of post-World War II America, where the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is constantly on the lookout for distractions for his child mistress, and therefore stops at an endless series of attractions, which every single little town seemed to be in possession of. The world’s largest stalagmite, obelisks commemorating battles, a reconstruction of the log cabin where Lincoln was born, the world’s longest cave, the homemade sculptures of a local woman. Humbert’s gaze is European, deeply sophisticated, cultivated and ancient, but also perverted and sick, while the things he observes on the journey across America are superficial, childishly un-self-conscious, ignorant of history, but also innocent and possessed of the freshness of the new.

There’s an opportunity to read a criminally reduced book in a whole new light–one that finds echoes in real-life crimes purported perpetrated out of immigrant disaffectation. I am thinking of the Boston Marathon bombing, among other things.

What are we to make of the sudden news that Harper Lee will publish a pre-sequel, for lack of a better term, of To Kill a Mockingbird? The literary community appears to be responding to the news that Go Set a Watchman, a novel set in Maycomb, Alabama twenty years after the events of Mockingbird with Scout Finch as its protagonist, is due to be published this summer with a mixture of hopeful enthusiasm and understandable apprehension.

At Jezebel, Madeleine Davies offers fair warning that we should be suspicious:

Sadly, this news is not without controversy or complications. Harper Lee’s sister Alice Lee, who ferociously protected Harper Lee’s estate (and person) from unwanted outside attention as a lawyer and advocate for decades, passed away late last year, leaving the intensely private author (who herself is reportedly in ill health) vulnerable to people who may not have her best interests at heart.

Harper Lee is 88 years old. When I saw her name pop up on my phone via a New York Times Breaking News alert, I feared that she had died. Her vision and hearing were both severely impaired by a stroke eight years ago, and Davies writes that Lee “often doesn’t understand the contracts that she signs.”

Mockingbird was supposedly written at the suggestion of an editor who read Go Set a Watchman and wanted to know what Scout and Jem Finch were like as children. Did Alice Lee know something about the contents of Watchman that made her wish to shelter it (but not Mockingbird) from the light of day? Did she fear it would harm the universality of the first book, or did she think that the second book just wasn’t any good? And can we trust that all aspects of authorial intent will continue to be respected if the book’s author is no longer of sound mind?

My hope is that, if Watchman is ultimately published, its editors leave the text alone. Let its assumed flaws as a young writer’s first novel remain in place, if only for the historical value. We might be surprised: the fact that Watchman was written before Mockingbird could suggest that there won’t be much of an emotional “distance” from the first book (Scout, you’ll recall, is already an adult when she narrates Mockingbird); the characters had not taken hold in the public consciousness as they have over the past six decades, and since Lee did not write the book with any kind of pressure, perhaps she would not have had the impulse to do anything contrived, loud, or forced to the narrative. At best, the two books could be part of a larger, more expansive twentieth-century portrait of a young woman growing up in the Deep South during the civil rights era. It will be strange to behold these characters sprung from the frame through which we have long regarded them, but I suspect that, even if Go Set a Watchman turns out to be awful, Atticus and Scout and Jem and Boo Radley will retain their cultural import, as humans seeking to live moral lives free of prejudice and pressure and fear.

For Christmas my wife gave me three Wes Anderson films on Criterion DVD (Bottle Rocket, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Grand Budapest Hotel) as well as the Criterion editions of Jules Dassin’s Rififi and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. I also got some nice books from my Wish List: Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey; The Fun Parts, by Sam Lipsyte; and Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, by Richard N. Goodwin.

The Goodwin book was out of print for a long time and only recently published in a new edition by Open Road Media. A chapter of the book served as the basis for one of my favorite movies, Quiz Show. Goodwin, who worked as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and later worked as a speechwriter for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was the Congressional investigator who cracked open the cheating scandal on Twenty-One and in doing so tarnished the reputation of its star contestant, the Columbia scholar Charles Van Doren. His character is portrayed in the film by Rob Morrow.

I’m looking forward to cracking into all of these.

Barrelhouse is celebrating the Christmas season with a special Ghosts of Christmas Future issue, in which writers revisit characters from their favorite holiday specials and stories and see how they are holding up in their later years. Featured so far: Gina Myers on the Wet Bandits from Home Alone; Alissa Nutting on Della and Jim from “The Gift of the Magi”; Dave Housley on the Peanuts gang; Erin Fitzgerald on Flick from A Christmas Story; Tom McAllister on Karen from Frosty the Snowman; and my favorite so far, Ravi Mangla on Hermey the Elf from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:

For Hermey, those snowy, lamp-lit evenings had lost their luster. Once, as a younger man, he would frequent the queen bars in the Village: bottomless glasses of bourbon and crushed up Klonopins. But he was six years sober and Karim could sense when he had been in the proximity of liquor. (He didn’t mind the nannying. Besides, those bars had been bought up by uptown carpetbaggers and stripped of their louche decadence.) He was supposed to call Karim when he finished with his last patient—an injury attorney with an impacted molar and low threshold for pain—but had forgotten to follow through on his promise.

I am honored that the editors at Pithead Chapel have nominated my story “Baby Elephant Walk,” published back in May, for a Pushcart Prize. It’s my first-ever nomination for the award, and I’m extremely grateful to the journal’s super-supportive editors, Keith Rebec and Ashley Strosnider.

My mother died on November 23. Her last week had been particularly harsh. She couldn’t speak, but we could tell from her expressions that she could hear what we were saying, and so we thought it would be a good idea to read to her at her bedside for comfort.

She had always enjoyed reading, mostly mysteries and romances: Danielle Steele, Barbara Cartland, Michael Palmer. She read these on a Nook that allowed her to enlarge the font.

I found a copy of Little Women in her nightstand at home. It was a Boston Globe Family Classics edition, low-priced hardcover, that someone from her church must have given to her, as the bookmark was printed with a calendar of church events. From the position of the bookmark I would guess that she hadn’t got through much of the story. But it seemed a suitable choice: a book that I knew to be about family, faith, absence, and uncertainty, and one I figured she wouldn’t have trouble following, if she could understand that much.

We didn’t get very far in the book before she died, only to the middle of Chapter 2, where the girls put on Jo’s play on Christmas night:

Out came Meg, with grey horse-hair hanging about her face, a red and black robe, a staff, and cabbalistic signs upon her cloak. Hugo demanded a potion to make Zara adore him, and one to destroy Roderigo. Hagar, in a fine dramatic melody, promised both, and proceeded to call up the spirit who would bring the love philtre:

‘Hither, hither, from my home,
Airy sprite, I bid thee come!
Born of roses, fed on dew,
Charms and potions canst thou brew?

‘Bring me here, with elfin speed,
The fragrant philtre which I need;
Make it sweet and swift and strong,
Spirit, answer now my song!’

A soft strain of music sounded, and then at the back of the cave appeared a figure in cloudy white, with glittering wings, golden hair, and a garland of roses on its head. Waving a wand, it sang:

‘Hither I come,
From my airy home,
Mar in the silver moon.
Take this magic spell,
And use it well,
Or its power will vanish soon!’

Having never really lived in anything like a city before, being able to pick up on a community’s the sense of humor, range of tastes, and common interests, just by stopping into the neighborhood bookstore, left a big impact on me. Between the shop’s rainy-day discount, campy pulp novels, handwritten employee recommendations on little notecards taped to the shelves, curated sections of fairly odd fairy tales, a how-to section filled with titles specifically beginning with the words “How To”, the prominently displayed primers on tap-dancing and left-handed calligraphy highlighted the strange and curious details of this new setting I was just beginning to understand.

(Peter Loftus, store manager)

At The Media, friends and staff members offer their memories of Lorem Ipsum Books, the Cambridge bookstore, tiny concert venue, literary salon, and communal hangout space that lasted for ten years before closing its doors last month.

I only met the founder, Matt Mankins, once, but he was a friend of my (now) sister-in-law, and my only visit to Lorem Ipsum came when the store was still finding its shape. Mankins had developed his own inventory and pricing software that set prices based upon a book’s scarcity according to searches of other inventories across the web. Lorem Ipsum began as an extension of his online business.

The store site became a neighborhood staple of Cambridge’s Inman Square before falling behind on its rent. An IndieGoGo campaign helped to stave off eviction for a little more than a year.

Tom Hanks has a story called “Alan Bean Plus Four” in The New Yorker this week. It’s also available online and there’s an audio version read by the actor/author himself in his dramatically trained voice.

It’s not a very good story. Set in the near future, it’s a first-person-narrated account of some friends’ attempt to orbit the moon in a homemade rocket. So there are app-based technologies and social media concerns and pop-culture currency, not to mention a very strong and unlikely conscientiousness with regard to the short history of space travel. And it is delivered with a waggishness meant to amuse the author:

The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments. The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of “Breaking Bad.” We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna.

It even not-so-subtly makes allusions to Tom Hanks lore, including Apollo 13, but not the movie Apollo 13.

Naturally, people are criticizing The New Yorker for the decision to publish Tom Hanks’ fiction. The gist of the gripes being: he’s not a writer, he’s a famous guy who happens to have written something. “Couldn’t get James Franco to submit anything?” wrote one Facebook commenter. Not that The New Yorker has been an equal-opportunity for platform for emerging writers in recent years. And it doesn’t help that Tom Hanks is white and male.

Famous people publishing their stories is nothing new. If anything, the work rarely has staying power. I was working in a chain bookstore 15 years ago when John Travolta published the slim fable Propeller One-Way Night Coach, about a boy’s first journey on an airplane. It was supposedly written to amuse the actor’s friends, until someone decided to publish it. I don’t think we sold a single copy—Entertainment Weekly said, “there’s not a moral to be found in 42 pages of untrammeled, possibly unedited starry-eyedness”—and I doubt John Travolta was torn up about it.

And perhaps that’s the heft of the objection: the suggestion that Tom Hanks and John Travolta get opportunities to wade into the publishing scene without concern for critical fallout, much like a protected billionaire investor wading into a new industry, while the rest of us nobodies place full emotional investment and risk into our projects, the only things that offer us a chance to rise above the mundane. How do we know how much soul was spilled here? How can we know how important “Alan Bean Plus Four” is to its creator?