Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)

“The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
   Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
   And waited in a row.
 
"‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
   ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
   Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
   And whether pigs have wings.’"—English children’s book author, poet, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
 
By now, you’d think I’d know better than to listen to sports radio. I keep tuning, for instance, to my local version of the form, WFAN-FM, hoping for news or insights into my favorite sports teams—the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants.
 
But as often as not I have to put up with idiotic ravings that fill up the airspace featuring the hosts’ hobbies, family lives, or, God help me, political leanings.
 
Even so, I was a little surprised the other day when, on WFAN’s afternoon show, Craig Carton and on-air partner Chris McMonigle, in a not particularly inspired bit of free association, came up with “the carpenter and the walrus.”
 
These two figures, the pair thought, were from a “fable.” If that was the case, Carton believed, maybe it was from Aesop’s Fables, as he was “an Aesop man.”
 
By now, their producers perhaps have told them this is not the case. Not that this would matter, because next week the pair could come up with an equally wrongheaded misattribution and make their schoolteachers roll over in their graves.
 
Even so, maybe someone can tell them that the Walrus and the Carpenter don’t appear in a fable but in a narrative poem enclosed in the fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Better yet, could someone please send them a copy of these verses?

By the way, the image accompanying this post, of the Walrus and the Carpenters speaking to the oysters, was created by English illustrator Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) for the original edition of Through the Looking-Glass.

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Why Books Excite Us So Much in Childhood)

“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?...It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.”—English novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist Graham Greene (1904-1991), The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951)

Quote of the Day (Roald Dahl, on Why a Person With Good Thoughts Can Never Be Ugly)

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”— British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot Roald Dahl (1916-1990), The Twits (1980)

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on Fairy Tales and Dragons)

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”― English fiction writer and screenwriter Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2012)

(Photo of Neil Gaiman taken at the 2007 Scream Awards, Oct. 19, 2007, by pinguino k from North Hollywood.)

Quote of the Day (Kathryn Schulz, on How Encyclopedia Brown Resembles Adult Detectives)

“In addition to his formidable intellect, [boy detective Leroy “Encyclopedia”] Brown possesses three features common to nearly all respectable literary detectives: a private code of conduct, a nemesis, and a sidekick. The code of conduct is a kind of one-man omerta: ‘He seldom spoke to anyone, not even his parents, about the help he gave to others. And he never spoke about the help he gave grownups.’ The nemesis is Bugs Meany, Idaville’s thug-in-chief and ringleader of a gang called The Tigers. (Bugs Meany: has there ever been a better bad-guy name? The Genovese clan meets the playground; the villain meets, eponymously, the villainy.) The sidekick is the tomboyish Sally Kimball, who was, unusually for the era — for any era — the heavy of the operation. (‘She was the only one, boy or girl, under twelve who could punch out Bugs Meany.’)”— Kathryn Schulz, “Case History: Donald J. Sobol and the Gateway Mysteries of Encyclopedia Brown,” New York Magazine, July 30, 2012

There are far newer, glossier covers for later entries in this series, with photographs of the hero. But memory freezes everything at a point in time, and the image accompanying this post is how I always remember encountering “Encyclopedia Brown” about 50 years ago, on a corner shelf in the fifth grade of my parochial school. I only distinctly recall picking up the first book in the series, Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, but that one encounter made its mark on me.

It wasn’t long, after whizzing through the two-minute mysteries of Encyclopedia Brown, that I was graduating to Sherlock Holmes, Jacques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine, Father Brown, Miss Marple, Lt. Columbo, and, more recently, Adrian Monk and D.C.I. Banks.

I was hardly alone in this progression—a fact recognized by The Mystery Writers of America, who, grasping how Donald J. Sobol had prepared young readers for their genre—and, more specifically, for them—presented him with its prestigious Edgar Award for the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, film, and theater published or produced in the previous year..

Even more remarkably, Sobol kept at it for nearly 50 years, with the last in the series, Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Soccer Scheme, appearing in 2012, three months after his death. That meant, effectively, that two and a half generations of readers came to see that learning about things could be fun, and that no stereotype should interfere with using one’s intellect. (That’s right—sometimes Sally got to solve crimes, too.)

In a sense, Encyclopedia Brown also prepared me for my career in research and even this blog. Whether reading stories as a youngster or familiarizing myself with a new subject, I’ve learned that the same combination applies: endless curiosity and dogged, even obsessive, pursuit of clues.