merrycoz

Because it's that time of year in the northern hemisphere, I've transcribed descriptions of the September storms that socked New England in 1815 and 1821.

I've put up a new web exhibit at merrycoz.org:
"A Former State of This Earth": Fossils in Early American Works for Children.


Before the Civil War, children were introduced to a number of prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs (not that the word appeared in early works). The exhibit includes what's probably the first dinosaur picture published for American children; like almost all early illustrations, it's a reworking of an early illustration, in this case, "The Country of the Iguanodon," by John Martin, which appeared as the frontispiece of the first volume of Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology.

As in, I've permanently disabled comments, since the only ones here are spam for-- Well, who knows? Does anyone actually follow those links?

Also as in, yes, I remember that I've got this journal here, but either I have time to write in it, or I have time to work, & work pays the bills. The teaching of 4 classes each semester isn't conducive to non-grading activities, especially when it involves coming up with stuff for public consumption.

I'm not very Web 2.0.

Updates: new bookcases (already full); new books (many); new periodicals (well, old periodicals, actually, but new to my house); new students, etc.

More interesting:
My issues of Friend of Youth (a ferociously difficult periodical to find) include a two-part serialized story by E. D. E. N. Southworth, which I'll be transcribing. Eventually.

My issues of the (apocalyptically difficult to find) Little Forester contain a literary feud and attempts to introduce phonetic spelling. (Has anyone traced American literary feuds? because we've had some dandies.) Feud, you can read about in the bibliographic description of the Forester at the web site. Phonetic spelling ... I'm still working on how to present that.

The frontispiece for one of Samuel Goodrich's chapbooks was recreated by a hack in a giggle-worthy version for which I'm trying to find the date.

Children's Magazine has a nice description of a fireball in Kentucky; Youth's Cabinet followed the Amistad case as it happened; James Redpath wrote quite a few columns for the Youth's Companion....

And instead I've been redoing handouts and revamping lectures and recreating materials for class that were destroyed at the end of last semester (5 weeks! $50 in materials!) and gearing up for blitz-commenting on rough drafts of student papers.

I'll be back to the transcribing and researching and trying to make sense of early American works for children.

Eventually.

It's official. Almost the entire web site has been redesigned via css.

I have been working on this for a solid 5 weeks. I have been through all of Farscape, almost the entire World Cup, and an entire weekend of Whose Wedding Is This, Anyway? Bartlett's alone took a 12-hour marathon.

But things do look nice.

Though I still have Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime and my dissertation to do.

Good thing I've also got six new movies & 23 hours of Nero Wolfe.

Judging by the statistics for merrycoz.org, I've successfully blocked the googlebot, which is no longer allowed to index the site. I have a "China policy," too, & it includes not dealing any more than necessary with companies helping that government censor a free Internet.

It may appear to be a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face, but there are other search engines. (Though I may need to block some of them, too.) And, while this means that academics may not be able to find all the wonders I've added to the site, it also means that there may be fewer students presenting my work as their own, & fewer eBayers copy/pasting information from the site into their descriptions. And I may hear from fewer "Poe hunters": people convinced they've OMG! discovered at the site a new work by Edgar Allan Poe. Once the site drops on the google search results page (do these things ever disappear?), opening merrycoz's e-mail could become a little more relaxing.

Blocking the site will have no discernible impact on the People's Republic of China or on google & their bottom line. But, my site; my rules; my sense of what's right.

(Not that anyone reads this.) Added Ladder of Learning, the 1839 version of an absolutely charming chapbook with wood engravings by Alexander Anderson.

who slid a term paper under my office door a week after it was due, two days after you said you'd get it to me, an hour after the two-hour final for the class:

Learn to plan ahead. I did.

Which is why when you so conscientiously swooshed in your paper, your final grade for the class had been in the registrar's system for half an hour.

I hope you like it.

My university is giving all concerned an education in Life Without the Internet. Or, actually, Life with Something Electronic, But Not Everything, Because It Depends on Where You Are: who/what is connected & isn't is too confusing to keep straight.

Suffice it to say, I innocently went to my 9:30 a.m. class on Thursday (October 27), & returned to my office to find that the entire network had gone someplace else. No unlocking a student's account so she could register for classes; no registering for classes; no checking the U's library catalog; no drifting through the eternally entertaining Internet. Nothin'.

Even though some of the network is back, the Internet isn't, which is strangely frustrating: no browse-through of WorldCat for an article I'm working on; no check of the U's library catalog for same (though--weirdly--I can do it from home); no quickie look-up of something for class I forgot to find out at home--which I hadn't realized I do as often as I must.

And I'm feeling oddly paranoid. This is about six weeks after I innocently went to my 4:15 p.m. class & returned to my office at 5:30ish to find that the lock had been changed; & nobody had the master key (including the custodian; & wasn't he upset). Apparently an e-mail to the effect that hey-howdy, the locks are going to be changed, so get your new office key now hadn't made it to my inbox.

And about two weeks ago, I innocently went to my 12:30 class & returned to my office to find that the lock had been removed. Highly entertaining for the two students who'd hoped to pick up their papers, & for the 113 people who passed by during the 45 minutes I waited outside the office for the locksmith to come back. (He'd given some offices the wrong kind of lock & had ignored our two-day fall break that week in favor of removing the locks in the middle of the work day & taking them somewhere else. Without telling anybody he was going to do it. My thoughts on this subject will remain my own.)

So, like I said: paranoid. Because I keep getting locked out of something when I go to class, & I still have one class during which something hasn't happened to make academic life ... challenging.

And trying to figure out what'll be blocked/missing/completely destroyed next time is driving me bonkers.

In honor of the holiday, some strange & beautiful stories from homeless children in Miami, in 1997, where Bloody Mary* has allied herself with Satan, the Blue Lady will save you from drive-by shooters if you shout her secret name, & angels & demons can find you if they've seen your face:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/Issues/1997-06-05/news/feature_print.html




*And I must tell the funny story one of my students told, when we were discussing (okay: telling) urban legends in class: At a slumber party, she & her friends decided to invoke Bloody Mary. The only available mirror was in the dining room, next to the living room, where one of the lamps had been plugged into one of those "clap-on, clap-off" devices. They turned out all the lights & gathered in front of the mirror & chanted, "Bloody Mary; Bloody Mary; Bloody Mary...." Finally, one of the girls thought she saw Mary in the mirror & let out a shriek.

Which startled everybody, so they shrieked. And that triggered the lamp, which turned on.

Which startled everybody, so they shrieked again; and the lamp went off.

Which startled everybody, so they shrieked again; and the lamp went on; which startled everybody, so they shrieked....

She said they must have had that lamp flashing on & off for a good five minutes.

Different economic backgrounds; very, very different relationship with the world & all its terrors.

Watching what turned out to be "Einstein's Big Idea" on PBS last night (I came in late), I found myself wondering why science gets all the cool & sometimes-goofy recreations on public tv. How come science nerds get to rule the airwaves? What about us lit nerds? I do remember a series on Great Books, with academics & non-academics enthusing about some of the books I should have read long before now--but we don't often get this treatment, & I didn't see it on PBS.

Surely something could be done with American lit: there are some damn interesting folks who've flourished & fallen--or fallen & flourished--in American culture. Anne Bradstreet, & her wonderfully intimate & apparently unPuritanic poetry ("If ever two were one, then surely we./ If ever man were loved by wife, then thee"). Phyllis Wheatley, confounding her contemporaries by writing poetry. John Dunn Hunter, confounding his contemporaries by writing about the Osage as human beings. Harriet Jacobs. George Lippard (who doesn't love a good potboiler?). Frederick Douglass. Emerson & Thoreau (Emerson: "If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men impossible."). The friendship between Hawthorne & Melville.

Actually, I like the thought of pairings. Lippard & Poe: Gothic gone American. Hunter & James Fenimore Cooper (Cooper was quite taken with Hunter, until the doubts crept in). Catherine Sedgwick & Harriet Stowe, & the regional novel--you could add in the Jack Downing letters & sprinkle in some Davy Crockett & William Gilmore Simms, & have an interesting little stew of regional writers. (& not forgetting Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood as a comically bad attempt at the regional.) Those scribbling women: "Fanny Fern" & the still-read E.D.E.N. Southworth & Lydia Sigourney. The neat little soap opera that was Fern's life alone would make for some dandy drama.

And all the folks I'm forgetting. What a colorful quilt of literature people have pieced here over the last 300+ years. Surely we could stand to hear about it more often.

"Bloggers Need Not Apply," in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has been raising eyebrows across the Internet. "What is it with job seekers who also write blogs?" the author begins. The rest of the piece is a blahblahblah discussion of why academics shouldn't be bloggers, written in a crypto-curmudgeonly style that is far too familiar after years in academe. Academics shouldn't blog, it seems, because blogs are revealing: one job seeker was enthusiastic about computers, which apparently hinted that said applicant would be "ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job"; another applicant's blog was a personal one, & "it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process"; a third applicant "misrepresented his research, ostensibly to make it seem more relevant to a hot issue in the news lately" & was "outed," apparently, on a blog written by the applicant's friend.

Basically, though, academics shouldn't blog because ... well, academics just shouldn't blog: a department that allows a blogger to join might find its "dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see." & if you think you're being careful by deleting the blog during the search, why, think again, because there's such a thing as a cache, & your would-be colleagues are sure to find your "cranky rant." Control yourself, the article seems to caution. Control your friends. &, don't forget, we can still rummage through the trash to find out what you really think.

Oh. my.

Leaving aside the Internet comments I've seen (oh, say, here), & also ignoring my own snarky little interior commentary as I read the piece (could anybody possibly be this stuffy & still be breathing? &, it may be "best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process," but she's not the one who made it part of the process, was she--you did that! & what about the colleague who starts a blog after tenure has been won, now that she has the real dirt on the department?), I was tickled to notice how neatly this piece points up a couple things about academe, especially in the humanities.

One is the Great Divide between techno-with-its & techno-won'ts. An amazing number of English profs are technophobes. We're book people (I'm currently surrounded by approximately 500 books--& that's just in the living room), which seems at odds with being computer people. Word processors are ... all right; & so is e-mail. Mostly because they're text-based. But that other stuff.... Ten years ago, someone pointed out at a conference I attended that the technophiles in many humanities departments tended to be those who are "marginalized" in some way: either they're minorities or they're the profs who don't teach or study the canon. True 10 years ago, & still pretty much true. (You teach "kiddy lit," &, yes, you're going to be marginalized--probably why among the 500 books in this living room are three computers, a PDA, a scanner, a digital camera, & two mp3 players; & that's just the living room....) A number of my older colleagues don't use technology nearly as much as they might, but I've also got colleagues younger than I who can't make a web page & one or two (still, younger than I am) who aren't sure how to log off properly from the Internet. So, to an appalling number of humanities profs, all this Internet stuff is just ... suspicious; & so is somebody keeping some kind of online diary. (Unfortunately, for the author of the Chronicle piece, it didn't seem to occur to him or to anybody else on the search committee that it would be very very useful to have a colleague hanging out in computer science. That dingdanged newfangled Internet isn't going away in your lifetime, & neither are those computers; & wouldn't it be nice to have some young whippersnapper in your department who can harness & hogtie all that technology for you?)

An uglier thing the piece pointed up is the great wall of "keep-your-mouth-shut" in academe. It's not as supportive as the police officers' "blue wall of silence"; it's more along the repressive lines of an academic cosa nostra, in that you do "our thing," or else. It starts in grad school, when you need the good will of the other students, as well as references from the profs in your department; & it thickens, brick by brick, after you're out of grad school & starting to teach. If you're an adjunct, you need the good will of the department(s) hiring you, & you need references if you're ever going to get a tenure-track job; &, once you've got the tenure-track position, you keep quiet so as to get tenure; & once you've got tenure, you shut up so you'll be promoted or can make the leap to a better job. It doesn't even have to be something illegal/horrific/justWRONG that you're keeping quiet about. It can be along the lines of enjoying romance novels or watching television--both of which hint that maybe you're (1) not intellectual enough or (2) not working hard enough. (I had a colleague delightfully horrified that I watched MacGyver, which shows you how long I've been appalling my colleagues. He also pointed out that I probably didn't want to mention the tv-watching to other colleagues; &, yes, he was serious.) It's part of being part of the crowd: you let your peers steer your way. Groupthink-wise, it may be helpful: academics are independent & often a bit ornery (especially when we've been grading), so a little repression can be rather cohering. But it can also be toxic--witness the examples in the article, where there's a filtering out of the "Our Sort" from the "Not Our Sort" that comes off as downright nasty. &, believe it or not, it's those odd wacko interests that keep scholarship lively & moving in new directions. (Okay, biased, because most of the 500 books in the living room are bound volumes of early 19th-century American children's magazines which have a lot of interesting things to say about how American culture has developed, even though an intellectual focus on them comes off as ... eccentric.)

How thoroughly delightful that this little anti-revealing-yourself-through-a-blog piece is so very, very revealing about how snarky we can really get.

"The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself." Oh, that's gonna get this piece included in the medium-of-the-moment a hundred or so years from now, as an example of wacky early attitudes about the Internet. I just bet.

This one is too good not to share, & far too good to let be forgotten.

Several years ago, I bought a few issues of Youth's Companion from 1865 & became enamored of pieces by "Uncle James." They're gritty, sometimes-intense vignettes & anecdotes about slavery & the American Civil War. I found copies of all the pieces & put transcriptions up at the site. (merrycoz.org/yc/eye/EYE&EAR.HTM) Who "Uncle James" actually was was anybody's guess, since that name isn't in any of the reference books I consult.

About a month ago, Judy Albergotti Hines -- a researcher in South Carolina -- wrote to me. She's been researching the history of Decoration Day -- the early Memorial Day. & she suggested a bit diffidently that "Uncle James" might have been James Redpath, an abolitionist & journalist who admired John Brown. Surely, she wrote, this had been noticed by many people. To which my response was, Well, if it had, they'd certainly kept that information to themselves! When I wrote to historian John R. McKivigan, he agreed that -- yes -- given the biographical info Ms. Hines had noticed in the pieces, Redpath probably did write them.

This is what I love about the Internet: I'd never heard of Redpath; Dr. McKivigan had (probably) never looked at the Companion; Ms. Hines -- who knew about both -- put them together. & not only have there been additions to the list of Redpath's works, but another writer for the Companion has been identified. (& I've been handed a hmmm..., because these pieces & some others appearing in the Companion at that time are very different from other works on the War being written for children; & just why is that?)

Fabulous!

Having added the 1819 version of Samuel Goodrich's chapbook, The Two Doves and the Owl to my collection (grocery money? I know not this "grocery money" of which you speak...), I added it to the site. The covers are ... unexpected. A dog fight & a horse kicking a dog wouldn't be considered appropriate today, but they probably piqued the interest of 19th-century readers.

It took the better part of a week, but I've managed to RESCAN EVERY MAGAZINE COVER AT THE SITE (& add some that have been languishing in various piles around the place).

The emphasis was on (1) more accurate representation of the covers' colors, (2) better representation of the relative pages sizes on http://www.merrycoz.org/covers/COVERS.HTM (it's possible now to actually understand just how tiny The Slave's Friend actually was, compared to other magazines available at the time -- it was, after all, a pretty radical magazine for its time, & this size would be easy to hide in your pocket), (3) a reorganization of what was becoming a REALLY HUGE directory, & (4) me being able to store a .tiff version of each of the covers, so I don't have to maul them again.

This necessitated a revamping of a number of pages at the site. I'm hoping I got all of them, but I'm sure I'll notice what's been messed up, once I take a look at the statistics for the site.

It also means that links at some sites will be broken. C'est la Internet.

As always, HOTLINKING IS DISABLED AT THE SITE, SO EVERYBODY WHO'S DOING IT CAN JUST QUIT! (The statistics are a source of amusement. Why don't people realize that their pictures aren't showing up when they think they are? And, why, oh, why is that stupid squirrel picture so darn popular?)

Added Catherine Elizabeth Havens' Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York (diary of a white girl in New York City, 1849-1850) to the page on Children at the site.

Added reviews of The Token to the web site. (Why a bunch of small pieces should take 4+ months to get up is beyond me.) That there are NO reviews of the 1841 volume shall remain one of those unsolveable mysteries -- you know, like yetis & Caspar Hauser & why nobody's noticed that all of Western civilization was built around Robert Merry's Museum.

I have notices & reviews of a number of children's magazines, too; they'll be added when I can (probably another 4+ months).

btw, I apologize (if anybody's reading this, which I doubt) for the broken links that no doubt will show up the instant somebody clicks anywhere near the reviews. It's surprisingly easy to lose track of your links when you dawdle on a project (the reason I've failed to put up an entire directory of stuff for 3 years).

A bit of advice to the guys who work in computer stores. First, let me point out that I know this has to be a tough job that I wouldn't last long in. Customers can be annoyingly clueless. (I remember a chat with someone doing tech support for LucasArts games in the early 90s, who mentioned the callers who, when she asked them what type of computer they had, answered, "Beige.")

BUT. Just because you have to deal constantly with people who who are honestly uninformed or humorously stupid, don't act as if the person you're talking to is one of them. This has happened to me several times lately, & these guys have yet to make a commission off of me.

In May, I had to send off laptop #2 to be repaired; & I decided that this was the right time to buy the sexy desktop, with an obscenely large hard drive & the kind of monitor you just want to stare at alllllll niiiiight. The first one let me down (its modem wasn't up to the job); the replacement -- well, same problem. So I got frustrated & took everything back. Since then, I've been back in the store a couple times, planning the final purchase. This is when I've run into the lunkheads.

Today's won the prize. "I had problems with this model," I said to the guy. "The two I bought here had bad modems."

"Are you sure?" he asked.

& I did the double-take of someone thinking, Are we speaking English? Because -- gosh -- I'd been the one of us who'd actually used the thing; & because his manager had taken computer #2 into his office to check it, since if it wasn't defective they'd have to charge me a repacking fee. Did he not know about this policy?

"Yes," I said. "They had bad modems.."

"Are you sure it isn't your line?" Asked with every word clearly enunciated, as if he were asking a 4-year-old.

That was the beginning, because I started to steam.

No," I answered. "The modems were--"

"Are you on AOL?"

Uhh. "No."

"What service DO you have?"

I told him.

Then he frowned. "On dial-up?"

& this was actually the end of our potential relationship as seller & sellee. Because I thought, very distinctly, Gee -- I better TELL that company that they don't do dial-up, which I'd have to break to them gently, given that I've been giving them $$ for dial-up service for three years now. & I also thought, rather loudly, Honey -- I been working with computers since before you were a glint in anybody's eye. I may be female, but I ain't stupid.

Plumpish women old enough to wear reading glasses & dressed not in the latest fashion probably don't look as if they know what they're doing in a computer store. But this will be the sixth computer I've owned; & the fourth currently in residence in a two-bedroom apartment (I have trouble throwing things away). &, yes, I'm not a computer major, but DO NOT TALK TO ME AS IF I WERE AN IDIOT.

The guy who came closest to a commission (I did have to take back the computer, which I think may have erased his commission, for which I'm terribly sorry) put out conversational feelers that told him that I'm not the Compleat Geek, but that I know what I want, & that I know what I want because I've had experience with computers. Thus, he didn't try to argue me out of any of the wonko prejudices I've developed. & if those blasted modems had worked, he'd be having a good time with his commission.

I'm still going to buy the machine, with all the gewgaws. I'm just not going to buy it from the guy I talked to today.

So, some advice: try not to stereotype your customers. Talk to them without condescending, even if they don't sound as if they know what they're doing.

It'll be a lot more rewarding. Trust me.

Rescanned the page images of Noah Webster's American Spelling Book, at
http://www.merrycoz.org/books/spelling/SPELLER.HTM

(Four hours to scan, trim, resize, & sharpen. Three & a half hours to load at the size, on dial-up. Gee: I just can't imagine why I've been putting off doing this. )

101 "Great Books", as from
College Board

(What I've read marked bold:)

Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane Pride and Prejudice [er ... that's "Austen," guys]
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert The Stranger
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
Dante Inferno
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
Golding, William Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
Homer The Iliad
Homer The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik A Doll's House
James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
London, Jack The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur The Crucible
Morrison, Toni Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William Hamlet
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles Antigone
Sophocles Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice The Color Purple
Warton, Edith The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard Native Son

----
Looks like I've got some catching up to do, especially in the 20th century.

But, really: if you're going to list War & Peace, why not Tale of Genji? (which, yeah, I've read & am rereading) &, where's that great, entertaining meta novel, Tristram Shandy?

Of course, the list doesn't include children's books, beyond those slung at teenagers in English classes; but, if by "great books" you mean books that explore the human condition, kids' books do all kinds of exploring. So here's a start of a "great books" list in children's lit:

Avi, Nothing But the Truth
Beverly Cleary, Dear Mr. Henshaw
Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War
Chris Crutcher, Ironman
Paul Fleischman, Saturnalia
Leon Garfield, Smith
Alan Garner, The Owl Service (once you hash out the plot)
Kevin Henkes, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse
Angela Johnson, Toning the Sweep
Jane Langton, The Diamond in the Window
Lois Lowry, The Giver
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
Rosemary Sutcliffe, Sun Horse, Moon Horse (okay: my "the power of art" novel)
E. B. White, Charlotte's Web
T. H. White, Once & Future King
Taro Yashima, Crow Boy

(I'm going to want to add to this, but errands await.)

(... than doing what I'm doing right now, which is spending the fourth? fifth? hour trying to find the 7-digit number I need in order to give awards to two outstanding students. Time spent going through every folder I've got on the subject & being phone-shuttled from one person to another. Occasionally, being a prof bears an unfortunate resemblance to the temping stint I did many years ago.)

Reading Fever Season, to be specific. Or the other books in Barbara Hambly's mystery series about Benjamin January in 1830s New Orleans. Rich in detail, & with a sense of the times. January is "colored," in the language of the day; & Hambly never lets us forget that, since January can't. A Free Man of Color -- the first in the series -- gave a wonderful sense of the complexities of January's position & of the ways in which people react to him according to their own race. Fever is also blending in the complexities of being female in that maddening racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, lush, graceful, vulgar time.

Not everybody can manage to give a sense of the past as its own country. A lot of recent writers of children's books haven't. For example, Cushman's Ballad of Lucy Whipple, which a colleage gave up on when she hit the sentence in which Lucy describes Jacob Abbott's Cousin Lucy books as rather preachy. sigh They weren't, & they aren't; & even if Cushman thought they were, children of the time period wouldn't have. &, yes, I can actually prove this; but certainly Cushman wouldn't have needed to read Letters from Nineteenth-century American Children to figure it out, given the ton of books (I can probably prove that, too, just from my collection) that Abbott wrote & which sold into the 20th century.

If the writer can't get into the mindset of the period, it's improbable that the reader will do so. The people of the 19th century weren't us; they didn't want to be us, either. Hambly gets this; & I can't wait until the end of the semester (only 60 more papers & 120 finals left!), so I can see more of what January sees.