American Bee - James Maguire

Some people have an idea that correct spelling can be taught, and taught to anybody.  That is a mistake.  The spelling faculty is born in man, like poetry, music and art.  It is a gift; a talent.  People who have this talent in a high degree need only to see a word once in print and it is forever photographed upon their memory.  They cannot forget it.  People who haven't it must be content to spell more or less like thunder, and expect to splinter the dictionary wherever their orthographic lightning happens to strike.    
                                                         -Mark Twain- (American Bee, pp. 63-64)

American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds begins with a look at the last moments at the 2004 National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.  Middle-schooler David Tidmarsh emerges as the champion with his correct spelling of "autochthonous".  Author James Maguire then shifts his focus to the history of the spelling bee in America.  Apparently the Puritans, who generally frowned on anything remotely enjoyable, gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to competitive spelling as recreation.  First known as "spelling parties", the name was adjusted to "spelling schools" to dispel the notion of fun.

Whatever the activity was called, it quickly caught on and as Americans traveled west, spelling schools, spelling matches, spelling fights and finally, spelling bees (the latter term came into vogue in 1870) went with them.  In 1871, spelling bees became a fad because of a popular novel called The Hoosier Schoolmaster by Edward Eggleston.  The title character uses his orthrographic skills to beat the best speller in town, but when he's pitted against a beautiful young girl, words literally fail him and he ends up falling in love during the match. (My own favorite incidence of spelling bees in literature -- not mentioned in this book --  is in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie when Pa "spells down" the whole town.)

Spelling bees were now an institution.  According to Maguire, in 1913, a spelling bee was organized between U.S. legislators and journalists.  You'd think that the press would have taken that one handily, but surprisingly, a representative from Ohio named Frank Willis hung in there to win.  In the 1920s, the first National Spelling Bee was staged and continues to the present day.  Surprisingly, in those early years, the winning words seemed to be on the easy side:  Gladiolus (1925) Knack (1932) and Therapy (1940).

In Part 3, Maguire profiles past champions from 1960 to 2004.  Jacques Bailly (1980) is now one of the "pronouncers" for the Bee.  Paige Kimble, another past winner, is one of the organizers.  Part 4 provides an amusing look at the English language and how its spelling got to be so weird.  The primary culprits are The Norman Invasion (1066) and The Great Vowel Shift (1500-1600s), but the event that put the skids to any kind of reason or logic in English spelling was colonization, which introduced thousands of foreign words into the language.  As Maguire puts it:

Today's modern speller, while cursing William the Conqueror for the French influence can also curse these land-hungry British leaders.  Curse Fletcher Christian and curse Captain Bligh.  Curse them all.  Then reach for your spell-check.  You'll need it.  (p. 158)

In Part 5 of American Bee, Maguire introduces readers to five contenders who most emphatically do not need spell-check:  Marshall Winchester, Kerry Close, Samir Patel, Jamie Ding and Aliya Deri.  Samir emerged victorious at the 2005 Spelling Bee (which Maguire covers in the final part, Part 6) and the very next year (I rushed to the National Bee website to look) another in this profiled group came back to win all the marbles for 2006.

Since I'm in Sedalia, Missouri right now, I have give a shout-out to the hometown contender for 2005, Megan Courtney, who missed "trichotillomania", (she only missed it by a single L) which means "an abnormal desire to pull out one's own hair."  How appropriate.

The sections of this book seem to have been written at long intervals and for different publications, so there is some annoying repetition (I got tired of Maguire constantly referring to what he obviously considers the spelling words from Hell, "rijsttafel" and "boeotian") that could have been avoided with more careful editing, but that's just a minor gripe.  I LOVED American Bee, and I put it right up there with my other favorite books about language, books and obsession like Stephan Fatsis' Word Freak (Scrabble players) and A Gentle Madness (bibliomania) by Nicholas Basbanes.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Getting In Touch With My Inner Canadian Child

It hasn't been that long since Canada Day and I've got awhile till the next one, but I still remember snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (11/13 books) at the end of June.  I will read 13 this year!  I must.  What's an American girl to do with only one book down and the end of August approaching?  What's the answer?

Robert Munsch.

Armed with my library card, I marched into the Sedalia Public Library* (this could also serve as a "Library Loot" post)  and downstairs to the children's department.   I found some Munsch books and brought them home.  I was back in time for Jeopardy!  Oh, Alex, Alex -- I'll miss you so badly when I go back to Korea.  Ahem.  Anyway, I read these five books -- after Jeopardy! -- last evening:

1. I Have To Go! - When asked, Andrew never needs to pee.  Suddenly, when it's most inconvenient (during car trips or when he's dressed in an elaborate snowsuit) he needs to go RIGHT NOW.  As usual, Michael Martchenko provides a capable assist with his hilarious illustrations.

2. Thomas' Snowsuit - Thomas doesn't want to wear his new snowsuit because he thinks it's ugly.  His mother manages to get it on him and off to school after a battle, but when the teacher and principal take him on, mayhem ensues.  Munsch and Marchenko win again.

3. Show and Tell - Ben decides to bring his baby sister to school in his knapsack for Show and Tell.  She starts crying and no one -- Ben, the teacher, the principal, the doctor --  knows how to soothe her.  The last page, an illustration by (you guessed it!) Michael Martchenko is a laugh-out-loud fest for Munsch fans.

4. Andrew's Loose Tooth - Andrew (the same Andrew who couldn't pee at convenient times, but older?) has a loose tooth that no one can seem to pull out.  Even the Tooth Fairy (a cool and crazy biker chick who has baby teeth dangling from herself and her motorcycle...I never get tired of giving shout-outs to MM for his artwork) is at a loss to know what to do.  Finally, Andrew's friend Louis comes up with a creative solution.

5. Get Out Of Bed! - Amy stays up all night and watches TV from the Late Show to the Early, Early, Early, Early Show.  No one in her family can wake her, and they are due at work and school.  Finally, they bring her and her bed to school and her class carries on as usual over the sound of Amy's snoring, then her parents and brother fetch her and the bed back home.  My favorite line is uttered by her older brother:  "If she never wakes up, can I have her room?"  This time, the illustrations were by Alan & Lea Daniel.  Very nice -- not cartoonish, more like paintings -- but I missed you-know-who.

Was it wrong of me to leapfrog ahead in the challenge, reading books that ranged from 23-30 pages long?  Probably.  Sorry (or "soar-ee", as the Canadians themselves would say).  I promise that my remaining 7 books will be more serious, more thoughtful, more challenging.  I can't say they'll be more fun, though.

* I feel compelled to praise the Sedalia Public Library for its fragrance.  Built in 1901, this Carnegie library has that bouquet of age and pages that would make even the most experienced and blase of bookworms heady with delight.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  This is the first time I've really really read Tom Sawyer.  When I was in grade school, I had an abridged version, which I loved.   In college, I took a 16-week Mark Twain course and the book was on the reading list, but I reread my favorite episodes and skimmed the rest.

Now that I'm truly done, I can see that Mark Twain seemed to waver about whether this would be a children's book or a book about a boy for adults.  During the "Pinch-Bug" chapter, Twain had a few sharp and funny comments about organized religion, but managed to hold himself down.  By the time the chapter in which the yearly student examination/exhibition took place, it seems as if he could restrain himself no longer and he scathingly and at great length satirized the young lady students' original compositions.

 Twain took pains to give his audience three of these literary groaners in their entirety and I figured that he had lost control, (like in those final chapters of  Huckleberry Finn, when he seemed to not only lose control but his damn mind) but he brought it all back for a superbly comic chapter finale, in which the boys in the class got very creative revenge on their schoolmaster using a cat, some rope and a fair amount of gold paint.

Since I was just in Hannibal last month, it was fun to try and match up the fictional location names with their real counterparts.  My favorite:  Tom's love interest, Becky Thatcher, spends most of the summer in "Constantinople".  According to the foreword, this was actually Palmyra, which is only a few miles from Hannibal.  (For some strange reason, my mother kept wanting to take the exit to Palmyra.  She seemed to like the name. "There's nothing in Palmyra," I told her.  "Let's press on."  Maybe I was wrong.)

The ending of Tom Sawyer seems a little weak, with Tom talking Huck into returning to the widow's house by threatening not to let Huck join his gang if he's not "respectable", but it sets up the action nicely for the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, and gives the reader a preview of the controlling (not to mention bizzare) behavior Tom will exhibit late in that novel.

 A fun summer read, and the first in my new stockpile for my planned Mark Twain binge.

Two Cents!

Oh. My. God.  Bookish delight.

 I stumbled into the graphic novel section at Hastings today.  It was kind of funny right from the beginning.  I was squinting at the shelves (bifocals, I scorn you but I need you) looking for some Rick Geary.

 The sales associate came up to...associate?  I mentioned Geary's name and his series of books based on grisly events like the Lizzie Borden case, the bloody Benders, the murders of Lincoln, Garfield, etc. and he looked blank.  Then he admitted that even though he's read 300 and The Crow, and graphic novels were a cool medium, his knowledge of the genre "basically suck[ed]" and he was being transferred to another department.

The section wasn't anything to write home about, but I found a GN for $1.99 called Last Exit Before Toll, and decided to give it a try.  Then I found another graphic novel called Maria's Wedding.  Not bad; I decided to get it as well if it was the same price as the other book.  I peered at the back.  $0.02!  Really?

At the register, I handed the book to the checkout guy.  "Is this price for real?"

He immediately went into a whispered conference with his supervisor, who was standing nearby.  The supervisor said, "Go ahead," in a loud, pissed-off voice.

"OK," the checkout guy said, "Two cents."  He rang up both books.  "Your total is two-seventeen."

"Wow," I said.  "That's mismarked, isn't it?"

"It might be."  He sounded a little pissed himself.  I wondered if he was pissed at me; if he thought I was moving stickers around on books.  I wanted to pursue the subject, but there were customers behind me, so I took my books and moved on from concerned to triumphant as I exited the store.

 Two cents!  Have you ever high-fived yourself?   I'm so going to enjoy this book.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood

I'm getting another late start but as Alanis Morrissette would put it, everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine.  I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is holding a copy of Margaret Atwood's short story collection, Moral Disorder.  This collection seems almost like a novel since all the stories revolve around the same character, Nell (according to the last story, apparently her mother named her after a favorite childhood horse). 

The stories covering Nell's growing-up years and her relationship with her 12-years-younger sister, Lizzie, are standouts.  One of my favorites was "My Last Duchess", in which Nell is tutoring her prematurely staid boyfriend Bill (as in a bill that must be paid?) for exams, and they end up fighting and breaking up over the characters in in Browning's poem.  Bill is aghast that Nell has decided that the Duke might deserve some sympathy because his last duchess was smarmy and stupid with her indiscriminate smiles.

When Nell is in her late 20s, she gets involved with a kooky couple called Oona and Tig (short for Gilbert).  She and Oona become friends, but oddly, Oona has handpicked Nell to be Tig's next wife.  I couldn't quite follow why Nell just went along with it; Tig remains a nonentity.  The two of them settle into a farmhouse in the title story and it felt like The Egg & I with Atwood's trademark unpleasant twinges when she's writing about relationships.

My other favorite was "The Labrador Fiasco".  Nell, now middle-aged, is visiting her parents, and her father, a recovering stroke victim is captivated with the ill-fated account of Hubbard and Wallace, two Americans who blithely decided to make their names exploring "the last unmapped Labrador wilds", along with a Native American guide, George.  As Nell's father, who was an adept outdoorsman in his younger days, compulsively follows the story again, he can point with assurance to the errors Hubbard and Wallace made.  Then, after suffering a second stroke, he falls under the impression that it is he who is lost in a forest.

"I never thought this would happen," he says.  He doesn't mean the stroke, because he doesn't know he's had one.  He means getting lost.
"We know what to do," I say.  "Anyway, we'll be fine."
"We'll be fine," he says, but he sounds dubious.  He doesn't trust me, and he is right.

It's been several years since I read any of Atwood's work (unless I count her brilliant introduction to Frozen In Time) and Moral Disorder has whetted my appetite for more.

The Boxcar Children - Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Boxcar Children (1924) was my mom's favorite childhood read, but for some reason, she didn't read it to my brother or me.  I finally got it done, and now I don't know if I would have liked it as a child or not.  I think I would have.  I liked old-fashioned stories, stories about orphans and plenty of descriptions of food and finding cool places to live.

As an adult, The Boxcar Children seems musty and dated.  Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny are a little bit too good to be true.  They seem like paper dolls that Gertrude Chandler Warner cut out and arranged prettily.  Her authorial intrusion felt like heavy, adenoidal breathing over my shoulder as I tried to concentrate.  The language is stilted and insultingly dumbed-down.  I'm with E.B. White who said something something like if you lob challenging words at children, they intercept them quickly and smash them back over the net with great force.

Here's where Warner lost me:  Henry leaves his siblings in the boxcar in the woods and goes into town to find work.  He earns a dollar or two and buys food and a tablecloth.  He gives the tablecloth to Jessie, warning her that "It's not hemmed."  Please.  Even back in the 1920s, did boys generally notice if tablecloths were hemmed or not?  Did they even care?  Upon reflection, I suppose that the clerk at the store pointed this out to Henry, but by then my need for verisimilitude was overwhelming me.  I wanted someone to get smacked or arrested.

I'm charmed by the idea of the little red boxcar somewhere in Connecticut that is a museum devoted to Gertrude Chandler Warner and her literary creations, but a whole linen chest full of hemmed tablecloths could not induce me to read any more about the Aldens.