Category: Book culture

Sex ed in poetry

One of the sessions in the Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education curriculum for grades 7-9 involves inviting a couple with a baby to visit the class. The couple tell the teens what it’s like to have a baby in the house. Topics that usually come up include parent sleep deprivation, the sense of tremendous responsibility, and of course how much work it takes.

With that in mind, here’s a poem by William King (1663-1712).

The Beggar Woman

A gentleman in hunting rode astray,
More out of choice, than that he lost his way,
He let his company the Hare pursue,
For he himself had other game in view.
A Beggar by her trade; yet not so mean,
But that her cheeks were fresh, and linen clean.
“Mistress,” quoth he, “and what if we two shou’d
“Retire a little way into the wood?”
      She needed not much courtship to be kind,
He ambles on before, she trots behind;
For little Bobby, to her shoulders bound,
Hinders the gentle dame from ridding ground.
He often ask’d her to expose; but she
Still fear’d the coming of his Company.
Says she, “I know an unfrequented place,
“To the left hand, where we our time may pass,
“And the mean while your horse may find some grass.”
Thither they come, and both the horse secure;
Then thinks the Squire, I have the matter sure.
She’s ask’d to sits: but then excuse is made,
“Sitting,” says she, “’s not usual in my trade
“Should you be rude, and then should throw me down,
“I might perhaps break more backs than my own.”
He smiling cries, “Come, I’ll the knot untie,
And, if you mean the Child’s, we’ll lay it by.”
Says she, “That can’t be done, for then ’twill cry.
“I’d not have us, but chiefly for your sake,
“Discover’d by the hideous noise ’twould make.
“Use is another nature, and ’twould lack
“More than the breast, its custom to the back.”
“Then,” says the Gentleman, “I should be loth
“To come so far and disoblige you both:
“Were the child tied to me, d’ye think ’twould do?”
“Mighty well, Sir! Oh, Lord! if tied to you!”
      With speed incredible to work she goes,
And from her shoulders soon the burthen throws;
Then mounts the infant with a gentle toss
Upon her generous friend, and, like a cross,
The sneet she with a dextrous motion winds,
Till a firm knot the wandering fabrick binds.
      The Gentleman had scarce got time to know
What she was doing; she about to go,
Cries, “Sir, good b’ye; ben’t angry that we part,
“I trust the child to you with all my heart:
“But, ere you get another, ’ten’t amiss
“To try a year or two how you’ll keep this.”

Now you can see why this poem reminded me of a sex ed lesson. The beggar woman just taught the gentleman that there’s more to sex than he knew.

The meaning of life

Still recovering from a mild concussion. As the brain fog clears, I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett, one of the great philosophical novelists of the early twentieth century. In an introduction to a collection of Hammett’s stories, Steven Marcus discusses the famous “Flitcraft parable,” contained in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man named Flitcraft is almost killed by a falling beam. His narrow escape from death causes Flitcraft to completely abandon his old life, but within five years he has settled down to almost exactly the same life, just in another city with another wife. Marcus writes:

[The parable] is about among other things is the ethical irrationality of existence, the ethical unintelligibility of the world. For Flitcraft the falling beam ‘had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.’ The works are that life is inscrutable, opaque, irresponsible, and arbitrary — that human existence does not correspond in its actuality to the way we live it. For most of us live as if existence itself were ordered, ethical, and rational. As a direct result of his realization in experience that it is not, Flitcraft leaves his wife4 and children and goes off. He acts irrationally and at random, in accordance with the nature of existence. When after a couple of years of wandering aimlessly about he decides to establish a new life, he simply reproduces the old one he had supposedly repudiated and abandoned; that is, he behaves again as if life were orderly, meaningful, and rational, and ‘adjusts’ to it…. Here we come upon the unfathomable and most mysteriously irrational part of it all — how despite everything we have learned and everything we know, [humans] will persist in behaving and trying to behave sanely, rationally, sensibly, and responsibly. And we will continue to persist even when we know that there is no logical or metaphysical, no discoverable or demonstrable reason for doing so…. The contradiction is not ethical alone; it is metaphysical as well….”

So, what’s the meaning of life according to Hammett? There isn’t any, except what you make.

Free book about mosses

Everything you wanted to know about mosses in a free ebook, written in a style understandable by laypeople: Bryophyte Ecology by Janice Glime et al. I’m especially enjoying the chapters about the other organisms that live in mosses (tardigrades! slime molds!) and bryophyte phenology. Maybe it’s more than you really want to know about mosses, but hey, it’s a free book by a working scientist about a really cool taxon of organisms.

Way more books were challenged in 2023

The American Library Association (ALA) issued a press release on Thursday about the rise in attempted book bans last year. The ALA tells us: “The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the ALA. The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship….”

Not surprisingly, about half the books that were targeted for banning are about LGBTQ+ people and/or non-White people.

The ALA is offering a number of resources to fight back against book bans. They have teamed up with the New York Public Library to create the Teen Banned Book Club and other programs to get banned books into the hands of young people. The ALA has also created a website called “Unite Against Book Bans” offering resources to help you if (when) book bans come to your community.

The ALA also maintains lists of the top ten challenged books for the past quarter century. I love the fact that in 2019, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale made the list, ostensibly for profanity, vulgarity, and “sexual overtones.” However, I suspect the real reason The Handmaid’s Tale got banned was because the people calling for the ban didn’t want to admit that’s the society they desire.

Noted without comment

It may not surprise you that the data show that people who regularly participate in faith communities are likely to live years longer than those who do no. People connected to communities of shared purpose are less lonely, more motivated, more hopeful, and more fulfilled. Even still, I don’t know anyone who ever joined a church because of advanced metrics.

— Rabbi Sharon Brous, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom To Mend Our Broken Hearts and World (2024), p. 41.

Noted without comment

“‘Of course, I did it!’ she blazed.’And why not?… It’s all right to talk about respectability if you’ve been educated so you can get by and be respectable, but when you have nothing back of you, you have to take things as they come….”

A character being interrogated by the fictional lawyer Perry Mason, in Erle Stanley Gardener’s The Case of the Rolling Bones (William Morrow, 1939).

Bookstores in Pioneer Valley

Last week, Carol and I spent four days at a retreat center in Deerfield, Mass. We managed to visit four bookstores in those four days. Here are some notes about each bookstore:

World Eye Bookshop is quite small. As is often the case these days, about half the store is taken up with gifts, toys, art supplies, etc. But although the book selection is small, it’s well chosen. A number of interesting books on local history (I almost bought a book on the history of the Mass Central Railroad). If you’re in downtown Greenfield, it’s worth stopping in.

I was sad when Raven Used Books closed their Cambridge location, so I made Carol drive down to Northampton because I wanted to stop in at the store’s original location. Not what you’d call an expansive store, but they pack an enormous amount of books into their relatively small space. Fewer scholarly books than I remembered, but used scholarly books are hard to sell these days so the fact that they had any at all made it worth the thirty-minute drive.

Federal Street Books in Greenfield is an absolute delight. They have a good selection of both new and used books. Not many scholarly books, which is my always my main interest. But the selection of fantasy and science fiction books was especially good, and there were lots of quirky fun books, like the children’s book titled “Goodnight Krampus.” I like the fact that they require masks in the store — lately I’ve been forgetting to put on my mask when I go in stores, and I liked being reminded. This bookstore is worth a special trip.

The real find, though, was Roundabout Books in Greenfield. They’ve just re-opened in a new location. They’re still bringing in books, so the shelves looked a little bare when I walked in. But once I started looking around, I realized that there are actually a huge number of books; they’re just lost in the huge space. I was happy to find both new and used scholarly books mixed in among the more mainstream books. I found an excellent selection in most of the subject areas in which I tend to buy books, including religion, poetry, science fiction and fantasy, and nature and the environment.

Just to give you an idea of the range of the titles they stock, I bought a complete translation of the Ramayan; a trashy science fiction novel; three books of poetry, American, contemporary Chinese, and contemporary Greek; a field guide to the grasses of New England; and I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said’s America by Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst.

Roundabout is so good, it’s worth a long drive to visit.

In our four day trip, I bought a dozen books. The only reason I purchased any of these books is when I leafed through them I realized they were exactly what I needed to read right now. It’s still important to be able to pore through dozens of books, brought into the store by someone who knows books, so you can find books that you didn’t know you wanted, though once you see them you know you need them. (The same principle holds true for libraries, by the way.) This is why Amazon can never replace real bookstores. And that’s why we need to buy our books at real bookstores; even if it costs a little more than Amazon, we need to make sure the real bookstores stay in business.

(And before you ask: No, we did not visit the Montague Bookmill. We’ve been there; you should go if you haven’t been before; but it isn’t a perfect match for us. This, by the way, is why we need a wide variety of bookstores: everyone should have access to a bookstore that’s a perfect match for them.)

Banned books pamphlet

Beacon Press has published a pamphlet about banned books. You can download a PDF here. I picked up a hard copy at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. — presumably when bookstores buy books from Beacon, they receive some hard copies of the pamphlet.

The best thing about this pamphlet is not the infographics or text — it’s the QR code that links to some Beacon Press ebooks. These ebooks are free for people who have any difficulty obtaining them, which presumably means schoolkids.

If you’re not familiar with Beacon Press, it started as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) publishing house, got spun off as an independent publisher, but still retains its UU connections.

Other professions

In 1778, James Boswell recorded a conversation between Dr. Samuel Johnson, then aged 68, and a man with whom he had been at college, one Oliver Edwards, then aged 65. One of these exchanges, included by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, interested me:

“Edwards. ‘I wish I had continued at College.’ Johnson. ‘Why do you wish that, Sir?’ Edwards. ‘Because I think I should have had a much easier life than mine has been. I should have been a parson, and had a good living, like Bloxam and several others, and lived comfortably.’ Johnson. ‘Sir, the life of a parson, of a conscientious clergyman, is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls. No, Sir, I do not envy a clergyman’s life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.'” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson [Oxford Univ. Press, 1924], pp. 229-230).

I’m in my early sixties, and find myself thinking the same kind of thoughts that Oliver Edwards thought. Except that instead of wishing that I were a clergyman (because after all I am a clergyman), I think about other professions I might have followed.

But I find myself disagreeing with Johnson. I often disagree with Johnson. He liked patriarchy and hierarchy, and I don’t. So I don’t take the (literally) patriarchal view that a clergyperson is “the father of a larger family.” In my view, clergy (of all genders) are co-equal with congregants. And I’m sure Johnson would be as appalled at my views as I am at his views.