Hello, I’m Lin Thompson, with Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte. Business has been terrible, the bank delivered an overdraft letter Friday, and my family is, I assume, enjoying Christmas- like the former Vice President, Mr Cheney- in an undisclosed location.
So Happy Christmas to you, too!
If you’re also at loose ends, LitHub has a list of 15 BOOKS TO READ IF YOU FIND YOURSELF ALONE FOR THE HOLIDAYS. You can also watch the interminable winding down of Peter Capaldi, who managed- as the 12th Doctor Who- to not only cut its audience by half but make past casting follies like Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann seem inspired.
The new Doctor- the first women, debuts in Capaldi’s swan song, on BBC America tonight at 9. Many purists are irked. It is not enough that the Doctor is still white in iteration 13, and still British.
Turner Classic Movies will give a welcome break from TV ad inanity this evening, with five back-to-back Hitchcock films.
On to other news:
Colin Dickey, Smithsonian, December 15: For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, in the run-up to our only real haunted holiday, Halloween. But it wasn’t always this way, and it’s no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas story—or, put another way, that the most famous Christmas story is a ghost story. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843, and its story about a man tormented by a series of ghosts the night before Christmas belonged to a once-rich, now mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much of the 19th century, was the holiday indisputably associated with ghosts and the specters.
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection, Told After Supper. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
Telling ghost stories during winter is a hallowed tradition, a folk custom that stretches back centuries, when families would while away the winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” Mamillius proclaims in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” And the titular Jew of Malta in Christopher Marlowe’s play at one point muses, “Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts by night.”
Based in folklore and the supernatural, it was a tradition the Puritans frowned on, so it never gained much traction in America. Washington Irving helped resurrect a number of forgotten Christmas traditions in the early 19th century, but it really was Dickens who popularized the notion of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. The Christmas issues of the magazines he edited, Household Words and (after 1859) All the Year Round, regularly included ghost stories—not just A Christmas Carol but also works like The Chimes and The Haunted Man, both of which also feature an unhappy man who changes his ways after visitation by a ghost. Dickens’ publications, which were not just winter-themed but explicitly linked to Christmas, helped forge a bond between the holiday and ghost stories; Christmas Eve, he would claim in “The Seven Poor Travellers” (1854), is the “witching time for Story-telling.”
He ended the practice in 1868, but it saw out the century:
While readers could suspend their disbelief for the supernatural, believing that such terrors could turn a man like Scrooge good overnight was a harder sell. “People always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, but with the most allegorical apparition; …. and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances.”
Dickens’ genius was to wed the gothic with the sentimental, using stories of ghosts and goblins to reaffirm basic bourgeois values; as the tradition evolved, however, other writers were less wedded to this social vision, preferring the simply scary. In Henry James’s famous gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, the frame story involves a group of men sitting around the fire telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve—setting off a story of pure terror, without any pretension to charity or sentimentality.
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At the same time that the tradition of Christmas ghosts had begun to ossify, losing the initial spiritual charge that drove its popularity, a new tradition was being imported from across the Atlantic, carried by the huge wave of Scottish and Irish immigrants coming to America: Halloween.
The holiday as we now know it is an odd hybrid of Celtic and Catholic traditions. It borrows heavily from the ancient pagan holiday Samhain, which celebrates the end of the harvest season and the onset of winter. As with numerous other pagan holidays, Samhain was in time merged with the Catholic festival of All Souls’ Day, which could also be tinged towards obsessions with the dead, into Halloween—a time when the dead were revered, the boundaries between this life and the afterlife were thinnest, and when ghosts and goblins ruled the night.
Carried by Scottish and Irish immigrants to America, Halloween did not immediately displace Christmas as the preeminent holiday for ghosts—partly because for several decades it was a holiday for Scots. Scottish immigrants (and to a lesser extent Irish immigrants as well) tried to dissociate Halloween from its ghostly implications, trying unsuccessfully to make it about Scottish heritage, as Nicholas Rogers notes in his Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night: “There were efforts, in fact, to recast Halloween as a day of decorous ethnic celebration.” Organizations such as the Caledonian Society in Canada observed Halloween with Scottish dances and music and the poetry of Robbie Burns, while in New York the Gaelic Society commemorated Halloween with a seannches: an evening of Irish poetry and music.
Americans’ hunger for ghosts and nightmares, however, outweighed their hunger for Irish and Scottish culture, and Americans seized on Halloween’s supernatural, rather than cultural, aspects—we all know now how this turned out.
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The transition from Christmas to Halloween as the preeminent holiday for ghosts was an uneven one. Even as late as 1915, Christmas annuals of magazines were still dominated by ghost stories, and Florence Kingsland’s 1904 Book of Indoor and Outdoor Games still lists ghost stories as fine fare for a Christmas celebration: “The realm of spirits was always thought to be nearer to that of mortals on Christmas than at any other time,” she writes.
Tennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing opens at the Morgan Library & Museum on February 2nd and completes its three and a half month run on May 13, 2018. The plays of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) are intimate, confessional, and autobiographical. They are touchstones not only of American theatrical history but American literary history as well. By 1955 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, and a Tony. Williams embraced his celebrity even as he struggled in his private life with alcohol and drug addiction and a series of stormy relationships with lovers. Moreover, he was often at odds professionally with critics and censors concerned about the sexuality and other subject matter, then unconventional, explored in his plays. He found his safe haven in writing.
Opening February 2 and continuing through May 13, Tennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing highlights the playwright’s creative process and his close involvement with the theatrical production of his works, as well as their reception and lasting impact. Uniting his original drafts, private diaries, and personal letters with paintings, photographs, production stills, and other objects, the exhibition tells the story of one man’s ongoing struggle for self-expression and how it forever changed the landscape of American drama.
“It is almost impossible to overstate the impact of Tennessee Williams on theatre as we know it,” said Colin. B. Bailey, director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “His plays are so acclaimed and so well-known that one can conjure his unforgettable characters and their immortal lines almost at will. Yet, behind these great works is an artist who struggled mightily—sometimes publicly—with a host of personal demons. Real life was unsatisfactory, Williams once said in an interview, so he wrote to create imaginary worlds. Writing was his refuge.”
Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. Named after his paternal grandfather, he was always known to family and close friends as Tom, but adopted the name “Tennessee” when submitting his work to a play contest in 1938. He was one of three children born to C.C., a traveling salesman, and Edwina Williams. The family would move to St. Louis in 1919 and from his earliest years Williams was fiercely dedicated to his older sister, Rose, who suffered from schizophrenia. Tom also had to contend with the derision of his father, who often referred to him as “Miss Nancy.” Later, Williams would explore the dysfunction of his home life in his plays and Rose would remain a lifelong muse.
Williams began a lifetime of restless travel in the late 1930s, but returned to his family in St. Louis in the summer of 1939 to spend several months working furiously — “with seven wild cats under [his] skin”— on the play that would become his first commercially produced, Battle of Angels. He sent a draft to his agent, Audrey Wood, that November, and, as soon as he won a Rockefeller Fellowship at the end of the year, moved to New York to keep working on it. In the theatrical capital of America, he made important new contacts, attended plays regularly, and recorded in his diary a period of “appalling” promiscuity. But what his new friends, who nicknamed him “Tennacity,” remembered most was his commitment to work: he could sit in the middle of a bustling apartment “typing ninety words a minute, plainly deaf and blind to all the bedlam.” Battle of Angels failed in its tryout in Boston. Some of the audience, offended by its violent and sexual themes, walked out. The show was scheduled to open at the National Theatre Broadway, but the production was canceled.
Few have had such a lasting influence on American theater, and so many awful movies made of his work. From 1944’s The Glass Menagerie to Streetcar Named Desire, 1948, 1950’s The Rose Tattoo and 1955’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, through Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer, his plays harbor all kinds of new insights for a depraved new era.
Hyperallergic: The Guardian reports that government officials declared the original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom a national treasure and banned its export from France, just as it was about to go up on the block at the Aguttes auction house. The manuscript was part of a cache of historic documents owned by the French company Aristophil, which had amassed a massive collection of French literary and historical manuscripts before police identified it as a pyramid scheme two years ago and arrested its owner, Gérard Lhéritier, who was known for selling rare books at stupendous profits.
As an example of the Marquis’ doctrine of absolute freedom, The 120 Days of Sodom, more than two centuries later, retains all its powers of shock, titillation, horror, and wit. Also declared a national treasure and pulled from the auction was André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.”
One imagines Breton would be pleased. A great admirer of the Marquis, he praised him effusively throughout his life, writing in the “Second Surrealist Manifesto” of the “impeccable integrity of Sade’s life and thought, and the heroic need that was his to create an order of things which was not …dependent on everything which had come before him.”
So vast was the Aristophil collection, Reuters reports, that its disposition has to be controlled in order to avoid a panic: “The entire collection is now being liquidated, a process that is expected to take six years spread over more than 200 auctions, partly to avoid saturating the market and suppressing prices.”
De Sade’s manuscript was written on 33 pieces of scroll while he was imprisoned in 1785.
“It’s a book written on a 12-metre (yard) long roll which if it’s rolled up tightly can be hidden in your hand,” said Claude Aguttes, the chief auctioneer. “Sade used to hide it every night behind a stone in the Bastille.”
Sade wrote the controversial work about four rich libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification on a roll made from bits of parchment he had smuggled into his cell in the Bastille.
When the Paris prison was stormed at the beginning of the French revolution on 14 July 1789, the famously philandering aristocrat was freed, but he was swept out by the mob without his manuscript.
Sade believed it had been lost to the looters and wept “tears of blood” over it, but the unfinished manuscript turned up decades later.
Even so, the book remained unpublished for more than a century and was banned in Britain until the 1950s. It was expected to sell for between 4 million and 6 million euros ($4.75-$7.10 million).
In the United States, popular holiday gifts come and go from year to year. But in Iceland, the best Christmas gift is a book — and it has been that way for decades.
Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders. But what's really unusual is the timing: Historically, a majority of books in Iceland are sold from late September to early November. It's a national tradition, and it has a name: Jolabokaflod, or the "Christmas Book Flood."
"The culture of giving books as presents is very deeply rooted in how families perceive Christmas as a holiday," says Kristjan B. Jonasson, president of the Iceland Publishers Association. "Normally, we give the presents on the night of the 24th and people spend the night reading. In many ways, it's the backbone of the publishing sector here in Iceland."
Iceland has a long literary history dating to medieval times. Landmarks of world literature, including the Sagas of the Icelanders and the Poetic Edda, are still widely read and translated there, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
Today, Icelandic isn't spoken by many more people than the roughly 319,000 who live in the small country. But in 2009, book loans at the Reykjavík City Library totaled 1.2 million — in a city of only 200,000 people. There's a popular TV show in Iceland, Kiljan, which is devoted entirely to books. And in 2011, Reykjavík was designated a UNESCO City of Literature.
So Icelanders love books. And that love involves most of the population, according to Baldur Bjarnason, a researcher who has written on the Icelandic book industry.
"If you look at book sales distribution in the U.K. and the States, most book sales actually come from a minority of people. Very few people buy lots of books. Everybody else buys one book a year if you're lucky," Bjarnason says. "It's much more widespread in Iceland. Most people buy several books a year."
What kind of books, exactly?
"Generally fiction and biographies would be the mainstays, although it varies a lot," Bjarnason says. "Two years ago one of the surprise best-sellers was a pictorial overview of the history of tractors in Iceland."
That book, And Then Came Ferguson, wasn't the only unusual breakout success. Another, Summerland: The Deceased Describe Their Death And Reunions In The Afterlife, came out last year. The book, by Gudmundur Kristinsson, an author in his 80s who believes he can talk to the dead, sold out completely before Christmas 2010 — and sold out yet again after being reprinted in February 2011.
And Summerland was self-published — a fairly common phenomenon in Iceland, according to Jonasson. "There is some kind of a myth that people like to tell here, that every Icelander dreams about writing a book," Jonasson says. "And sort of 50 percent of those who dream of it actually do it. Before they die they try one way or another to write a book."
The Book Flood tradition, according to The Reykjavik Grapevine's Hildur Knutsdottir, dates to World War II, when strict currency restrictions limited the amount of imported giftware in Iceland.
"The restrictions on imported paper were more lenient than on other products, so the book emerged as the Christmas present of choice. And Icelanders have honored the tradition ever since," Knutsdottir writes.
The Flood begins with the release of Bokatidindi, a catalog of new publications from the Iceland Publishers Association distributed free to every Icelandic home.
"It's like the firing of the guns at the opening of the race," Bjarnason says. "It's not like this is a catalog that gets put in everybody's mailbox and everybody ignores it. Books get attention here."
Iceland is Europe's most sparsely populated country, with just more than 3 inhabitants per square kilometer. So while there's a high level of engagement, the Icelandic book market is still one of the smallest in the world.
This year's Bokatidindi, for instance, includes a record number of new titles — 842. For comparison, nearly 350,000 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2011, according to Bowker, which tracks the publishing industry.
IBryndís Loftsdottir, project manager for Icelandic books at the book chain Penninn-Eymundsson, says that until about 15 years ago, paperbacks were rare because Icelanders didn't see books as something to be read and bought cheaply.
The success of translated Scandinavian crime fiction has made paperbacks more common today, Loftsdottir says. But the industry and Icelanders have been slow to move to e-books. Part of the reason is a consequence of dealing with a language that's not widely spoken. But it's also cultural.
But some things do seem to be changing in Iceland's book world. Jonasson says putting all of one's products in a single shopping season is financially risky. For that reason, he says, more publishers have begun releasing some of their titles during the spring and summer.
Still, Bjarnason says, the power of the Book Flood remains.
"It's still very difficult to release a popular fiction title outside the Christmas season, unless it has its own kind of cachet, like the Harry Potter books and the Twilight books," Bjarnason says.
Bjarnason said publishers released the translations of those books as soon as they were available because they knew they could sell them instantly, any time of the year.
Some things about books, it seems, are simply universal.
Thanks very much for joining me! I’ll be back January 1.
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