Now many books take on a life of their own. Any reader of note can cite a half a dozen books that catch the heart and imagination of the public (Make that fifty books. Harry Potter turned the reading world on its ear more times than I can count on one hand) and a play or a film will sometimes add up to more than the sum of its parts. We’re all glad when these moments occur. It isn’t often, though that the production of a play makes that big a stir. If a play is memorable it’s revived often, people start putting new interpretations on it and pretty soon the initial production is a faint and lovely memory. It’s late and my brain may not be working but I can only think of one time where the book, the play and the production of the play all became moments that people discuss later. And the all three are named The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I talked about the book yesterday and mentioned how Dickens indulged his love of the theatre by incorporating a sub-plot about an acting troupe. Well the theatre has always returned the author’s affections…
It’s almost winter again and I keep thinking the books of Dickens. For many of us, Dickens is an immutable part of this season although I don’t think he reached that place just because of his famous Christmas tale. Winter is a melodramatic mix of beauty, fear and hope, just like his stories and the first one that comes to mind is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Nickleby is Dickens’s third novel and by that time he had his formula down pat. There’s the hero, young Nicholas, impetuously ready to take up arms against every unjust cause he meets; there’s his impossibly good and patient sister Kate who is just a little too close to her brother for twenty-first century sensibilities and their addle-pated mother. There’s a rogue’s gallary of baddies to threaten them including the sneering, high-born, louse, Sir Mulberry Hawk (whose picture should be in the dictionary by the term “sexual predator.”) For those who favor the emotionally crippled-bad guy, Uncle Ralph Nickleby spends his life and reason plotting for money and vengeance on our hero since people like Nicholas but they don’t like him! (Seriously, this guy needed therapy!) There are other not-so-nice guys but…
Mythology is a fascinating subject. The elders of every culture create stories that explains their view of the world to themselves. They pass those views and stories on to their descendents and the children incorporate or revise those stories to suit their own world view. An observant human can trace the changes of a civilization by reviewing the variations in a myth. As cultures go, the American one is still fairly young and versatile but there are a few stories that have lodged in our national psyche and show signs of becoming a cultural touchstone. One of the strongest is the children’s classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Wonderful Wizard is about 114 years old now and has attained a level of popularity that Harry Potter only dreams about. Between the author and his publishers, more than 40 sequels of the original story were published and another fifty or so accompanying and revisionist novels or comic books have been added to that list. There are a dozen and a half movie adaptations, about two dozen stage productions and enough material referencing Dorothy Gale’s adventures to sink the Emerald City. Every generation since its birth has reviewed, amended, attacked and…
There is something special about a Southern Mama. I used to explain it by saying I moved to Alabama because, “I married a Southern Boy. And Southern Boys don’t get too far away from their mamas.” That usually got a laugh because, on one level, it’s true. Southern mothers are strong women and their children respond to that strength. These women have raised generations of kids who know Mama is stronger than anyone except Grandma or God Almighty. Dads are dads and everyone should have a good one but no one’s more certain than Mom. That standard was true of my southern mother-in-law and it is certainly true about Rick Bragg’s mother. In All Over But the Shoutin‘, his mom is the heroine of the story and the center of his life. To hear Rick tell it, life should have been nicer to Margaret Marie Bundrum. Although she was born into a large family in one of the poorer areas of the United States, the country was beautiful, her family was loving and her father provided for them all by building houses and making moonshine. It was a reasonable childhood for that area and at seventeen, Margaret Marie had the…
Writers steal, that’s a fact. You can call it an homage, revisionism or Fried Wild Peacock, but the fact is the roots of almost every popular written work can be traced to some other writer’s creation or an event the writer experienced. What makes the work interesting is what happens to the source material once the writer pushes it through the filter of his or her imagination. That’s when you get parodies, like Bored of the Rings or revisions like Wicked or Wide Sargasso Sea. With Robert Heilein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you get a recounting of what the American Revolution could have been like, if America had been in outer space. It goes like this: after creating a life-sustaining habitat on the moon, mankind initially developed the sphere as a planetary sized Alcatraz for its criminals and political malcontents. No guards or monitoring are needed since the prisoners cannot escape and Earthlings enjoy a serene existence with their agitators gone. Decades after transportation been halted, the descendents of the original settlers (Lunar colonists or “Loonies”) now supply Earth’s population with food. Of course a lot of technology is used to run the colony and one of…