The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

(Reblogged from http://http://aliapdliteratureblog2010.blogspot.com)

Some time ago I borrowed The sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent, by Washington Irving, specifically to read "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". These stories have been floating around the cultural psyche for some time, and I've always been aware of them - but I've never actually read them in their "original" form.

Having borrowed the book, it took me an awfully long time to get around to reading the stories. In spite of the fact that I am a fan of both short stories and essays (both of which are in the book), I simply never got around to sitting down and reading this work. I had briefly glanced at the opening paragraph for "Rip Van Winkle", but at times when I didn't have an hour to spend on reading a short story properly.

Having renewed the book several times (and, because I'm a staff member, I have longer loan periods than "normal" patrons), I decided I should return the thing and release it into its natural environment. Having decided to return it on Monday, on Saturday I actually made the effort to read the two stories that had interested me in the first place.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) has what I like to think of as a travel-writer's style of writing. The stories he tells are rather short, when you boil them down to the plots, and could easily be conveyed in a couple of paragraphs, but he takes the time to introduce you to the place and people involved in the tale. He touches on the little, quirky details that add character to a place. He tends to write around the details - giving you a raft of impressions from which to construct the picture, rather than simply telling you what you need to know.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" has slipped a little in the public psyche from its original position. These days, many people just know it for the "headless horseman", and then get a bit fuzzy on the details. The story is actually a very intriguing character study of Ichabod Crane - a man who is rather fond of food, and rather easy to frighten with ghost stories.

As a self-confessed "Disney kid", I remember the 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which I saw many long years ago as a small child. I think I would have been under ten years old the last time I saw it - young enough to forget all but a handful of scenes and the echo of Bing Crosby's voice singing "Ichabod Crane..."

Reading the story was an interesting experience in half-recalled images from the Disney film. It felt like I could remember aspects of Ichabod Crane's character being quite effectively captured by the Disney version - flashes of Crane patting a child on the head to impress a mother who was giving him dinner, the way he would see happy autumnal scenes converted into veritable banquets...

I remember Brom Bones being more of an out-and-out bully in the film, while in the story he was a bit more likable - and certainly more understandable. In the story, Ichabod comes across as being a little more obnoxious and, quite frankly, I think I'd probably play a few pranks on him myself, given half the chance.

There's an extent to which "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (and another story in the same book, "The Spectre Bridegroom") is more of a Scooby Doo episode than anything else. You get the feeling, as you are reading the tale, that Irving could have written a ghost story using the same basic plot, but instead he wrote a story about people who listen to ghost stories. He weasels out of the scare factor - you always feel "above" the ghost story - separated from it. Irving writes with something of a "but of course, we both know there's no such thing as ghosts" tone, and as such you never get the full depth of suspense the story could have if he just threw himself into it.

It's the way the story ends that kills its chances of working as a ghost story. Without directly telling you what happened, it makes the "truth" rather obvious, completely throwing away whatever unanswered questions might allow the tension to remain.

But then, the few other Irving stories I've read indicate he has a habit of easing people out of his tales. Perhaps this is part of the travel-writer's style as well - letting you travel comfortably in your own armchair, and leaving you sitting comfortably in the end.

Viscocity

And that's what it's all about, baby!

Some desperate soul comes to the reference desk and says:

"I need to find the dynamic viscosity of seawater. I've looked everywhere in books and online, and I just can't find it."

I have no idea what the dynamic viscosity of seawater is. Heck, I can only hazard a guess at what those words might mean in that particular order. But five minutes later she's walking away with a smile on her face because I tracked down an article that gives her the information she wants.

That's the power of a librarian - we find stuff we didn't even know existed without even knowing what we're looking for.

Too Many Books

Every now and then I can't shake the feeling that there are too many books in my life.

Let us, for a moment, forget the books I actually own. Let us forget that I currently do not have enough shelf-space to store the books I have. Let us forget that I deliberately chose to take a small bag with me when I went on holidays, determined to have a vacation where (for once in my life), I did not add two kilos of books to my baggage weight for the return journey. Let as forget that, due to a series of no-doubt-entirely-avoidable events, I had to buy a new bag - and had to make sure it was big enough to fit the books I bought in spite of myself.

Let us, instead, focus on the fact that I live in a library. Sorry, that should have been: "work in a library". I may spend more time at work than I do in my own house, but that's another problem.

The trouble with working in a library is that you are in a position to borrow books whenever you feel like it. A passing thought runs through your mind... you feel strangely compelled to see if the library holds a book about the thing you thought of... next thing you know you've just checked out another four books.

Do I read all of the books I check out of libraries? Heck no. I've barely even scratched the surface of the books I own.

So what do I do with these books? They fill up space in my life as I think about reading them. I think "I should return that, but I haven't read it yet" and renew them when I should just be releasing them back to the wild. I find them buried under who-knows-what other reading material on my desk and next to my chair months down the track and think "Oh, yeah, I wanted to read that", and promptly put it back on the pile so that I can "get around to it".

I know I'm not going to get around to it. I know I should just clear the decks, forget I borrowed the book in the first place and wait to see if I actually do want it enough to find it again. But...

But I borrowed it because it looked interesting, and every time I look at it, it still looks interesting.

No good can come of this.

The Author in my Head

Isn't it odd, the way you get a picture in your head of what a particular author would look like... right up until you see a picture online or on a book jacket or something?

For some reason, and I have no idea why, I had this image in my head that Geoff Johns would be some guy in his late thirties, balding slightly, with large glasses and a moustache.

I think my interpretation of what comic book writers/illustrators look like must have been formed in the 80s, and it just hasn't changed since then. Mind you, if you've ever seen a recent picture of Mark Waid, it's kind of hard to think that there's been much change...

He's actually much young, better looking, hairier (on his head) and more clean shaven than the image in my head. That doesn't make him less annoying, though.

Geoff Johns would happily ret-conn the Bible, the Koran and the Tipitaka, if you let him. And Dan DiDio would encourage him.

Finish What You Started: Riddle of the Sands

Some months ago, as part of my "Finish What You Started" project, I decided to finish reading The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

I had stalled on this book about three chapters from the end, and thought that was just a bit stupid. So I sat down one weekend and finished it.

I bought this book last year whilst on vacation in Estonia. I had just finished something exceptionally light and trashy, and thought I'd go for a "genre classic". Riddle of the Sands was one of those books I knew by title alone. Well, I knew it was a spy book - espionage of some sort - which is a genre I don't usually read. I had a fling with James Bond a couple of years ago (hasn't everybody), but after reading three or four of Fleming's books (slightly out of sequence) I stalled about two chapters into Live and Let Die and never got back to the series.

Live and Let Die would be included in the "Finish What you Started" project, but I can't find it. I lost the book when I moved house, and I just can't be bothered borrowing it from a library when I have so many books in my house I haven't finished.

Anyway, I knew Riddle was a "classic" spy book and I knew it had something to do with sand. For some reason, I had imagined that to involve deserts and the foreign legion, or something. Not so much. It's actually about a couple of guys mucking about in boats off the coast of Germany at the turn of the 20th Century. A lot of the book involves a government desk-jockey discovering the joys of yachting in amongst the sand-banks of the Frisian Islands. Oh, and we think there may be a plot to invade England, but it could just be a salvage company trying to find treasure.

I have to admit that the reason I stalled so close to the end was because the book is actually kind of boring. On the one hand, you do get a real sense of what it must be like to be on a little, ramshackle boat piloted through the sand banks by a boating savant, but on the other hand nothing much happens. We slowly gather hints, which slowly turn into ideas, which slowly suggest action which slowly unfolds. I never felt any real tension or danger in the whole thing. Plot "twists" were rather predictable. The only real surprise was that there was no surprise. For some reason I was expecting something unexpected to happen in the end.

I quite enjoyed bits of the book on-and-off, and I was impressed with the verisimility of the book - the boating scenes seemed entirely real, and the simplicity of the plot lent it believability. However, I think it says something about a book if you can stop reading it three-chapters from the end and not really feel as if you're missing out on anything.

A Tale of Two Christies

In the past couple of weeks I've read two Agatha Christie books featuring Poirot: The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd.

It was an interesting comparison as I didn't have any advanced knowledge of the plot for ABC, but I knew what the 'trick' to Ackeroyd was before reading it.

I've always maintained that I don't care about spoilers - I get great pleasure out of seeing how things are done, so my enjoyment is not diminished by knowing the twists ahead of time.

This was more or less a chance to prove that theory: two books in the same series by the same author, one which was a complete surprise and the other with "spoilers".

Hard to say what my conclusions are. On the one hand, I did spend a large amount of ABC second guessing my assumptions, which was fun. I didn't pick the killer until a few pages before the reveal - I had actually formulated a completely different "clever-pants" twist, that seemed perfectly reasonable until the last couple of chapters.

On the other hand, Ackeroyd had always been on my list of things to read precisely because I knew what the twist was, and I wanted to see how Christie pulled it off. I was very impressed. Knowing what the twist was, I accurately picked the point were the "tell" occurred, but spent the rest of the book wondering if I had been misinformed. Christie did such a brilliant job with her treatment of the characters that I started second guessing my conclusions even when I knew they were correct. I kept watching to see when Poirot would figure it out, and if he would give us some indication. It really felt like he had made the wrong call regarding the killer and, when everything came together in the end, I still managed to feel somehow surprised.

So I can honestly say I did enjoy the book I read "with spoilers" more than the book I read without them, but then it was also the better book of the two. And I did enjoy the book I read "without spoilers", for completely different reasons.

As experiments go, it didn't really give me any viable data. I did get a couple of good reads out of it, though, so I guess there was no time wasted.

Oh, and you should read The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd. You can skip the other book without really losing anything from your complete reading experience, but Ackeroyd is a must.

Studies

I think I can safely say that linguists make terrible scientists. Also, on the other hand, scientists make terrible linguists.

“How dare you!” I hear you cry, “Besides, you have shown your ignorance, for linguistics is a form of science!”

Whatever. You try reading a few dozen 'scientific studies' conducted on language classes and see if tell me that with a straight face. That's what I say.

For some reason, the linguists I've read can't seem to bring themselves to create a study that isn't completely riddled with holes. Blind Freddy* could see that the methodology is unsound - or, at worst, completely ridiculous - the numbers involved are not statistically significant, the data collected is barely qualitative and hardly quantitative and the controls are almost entirely uncontrolled. I've yet to read a study that doesn't qualify itself in its own conclusions by saying something like “this study doesn't really show anything conclusively, so more people should study this stuff and try to avoid the following sixteen mistakes we think we made...”

On top of that, the closer the researchers come to trying to make a proper, scientific, controlled study, the worse it is for the students involved in the darn thing.

Half the studies I read involved exposing language learners to completely made up words just so the researchers could make sure they weren't learning this vocabulary through some other means. Sure, it means you have a better understanding of the efficacy of that method of vocabulary acquisition (assuming the rest of the study isn't completely daft)... But what about the poor students who have now wasted valuable time learning words that don't exist? These words have been learnt and associated with meanings. They are now sitting in the students' synapses, ready to be pulled out and used “correctly” in term papers and job interviews.

As someone who often finds herself accidentally pulling out an Indonesian or French word when trying to remember a German or Estonian one, I can assure you that words previously learnt do stick around in the brain and reassert themselves at inopportune moments. And now these “scientists” have essentially graffitied the brains of well-intentioned language learners. It's negligent, from a language teaching perspective.

It's almost like those “scientists” who genetically modified a mouse to grow a human ear on it's back. Sure, the results are interesting, but the treatment of the subject boarders on the unethical.

Stop it. Stick with anecdotal evidence. It usually filters out the good from the bad over time.



*One day I'd like to meet Blind Freddy. He seems to be a very observant fellow, and would probably be an interesting conversation partner.