Wordcraft -- Things you've looked for

There’s so much to write about, I don’t always take the time to address the concerns you, my reader, have. You use great search words, but I don’t always see page views in Blogger’s statistics for the posts they relate to. So I’m spending today’s post addressing more direct links to plug into this blog’s search engine for the posts you like best.

And because I haven’t been able to archive the pictures originally published with posts, I’ve set up a pinterest board named “melissa embry’s blog in pictures” to put favorite images in one place. You’ll need to ask for an invitation at www.pinterest.com/ .  I’ll add more pictures each week, including alternates that didn’t appear with the original posts. I also include search words and any updated information available. Tell me which posts’ pictures you want to see!

To help make sense of the archives, here are some posts with frequently used search words:

Anne Lamott -- April 13, 2011, for “Anne Lamott on writing, families and faith.” Or friend her on Facebook. Yes, she’s on the internet now! She’s your all time favorite blog subject -- so I’m reprinting her picture, taken with my phone, since I forgot my camera that day.

Blueberries in Texas -- Blueberry Hill Farms reports berries still available. See their site, www.blueberryhillfarms.com/ and my June 15, 2012, post, “Berries blue and beautiful.”

Bran Mak Morn -- See June 6, 2012, “Entry to the storyteller’s guild,” for a discussion of Robert E. Howard’s semi-historical take on his Pictish hero.

Duck Creek train -- December 26, 2011, “Can you hear the train coming?” Train administrator Joel Occhiuzzo doesn’t list a date yet for the 2012-2013 season, but if he’s on his usual schedule, the downscaled train in the Duck Creek neighborhood of Richardson, Texas, will start taking riders the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday,
Nov. 23, 2012. See his site,
http://holidayexpressridingtrain.wordpress.com/ .

Heard Museum’s animatronic dinosaurs -- See October 24, 2011, “Robot dinosaurs invade McKinney.” The museum’s site, www.heardmuseum.org/, reports the dinos will return October 2, 2012.

Katharine Woolley -- Agatha Christie killed the fictional counterpart of the demanding wife of her husband Max Mallowan’s boss in Murder in Mesopotamia. See April 20, 2012, “The art of murder made personal.” I’d love to see a biography of the mysterious Mrs. Woolley whose first husband was reported to have committed suicide on their honeymoon.

Sonia Pahcheka (great-great-granddaughter of Comanche chief Quanah Parker) -- May 11, 2011, “Quanah Parker’s descendent drops in.” Ms. Pahcheka’s picture is on my pinterest board. Recent news from Comanche country -- the tribe’s adoption of actor Johnny Depp, playing a Comanche character in the upcoming Lone Ranger movie.

State Fair of Texas -- See October 3, 2011, “State forecast: Sunny and fair.” The 2012 state fair dates are Sept. 28 - Oct. 21.

Wolf Larsen -- I discussed Jack London’s anti-hero August 12, 2011, in “The author as
super-man.” Another London work also appeared February 10, 2012, in “Spinning fool’s gold into fame.”

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Sister-in-law Juneau Embry sent a link to a new-to-me writing conference, Lexicon, this coming weekend, July 21-22, in Denton, Texas. Sounds interesting. See their site,
http://lexi-conwritersconference.com/.

Adventure classics -- The author as super-man

The Sea-Wolf

by Jack London

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In a letter to fellow writer Mary Austin, Jack London claimed to have written his 1904 novel, The Sea-Wolf, as “an attack on (Nietzsche’s) super-man philosophy.” But decades after I stayed up all night reading it, the character who stays in my mind is the amoral super-man Wolf Larsen, a character both London and his effete narrator Humphrey Van Weyden clearly both love and hate.

Perhaps that’s because, as short story author Edmund Gilligan wrote in his introduction to my 1962 edition, “I believe Wolf Larsen was London himself. In his own self London found the Wolf and Van Weyden. London divided his own personality and gave part to each.”

In my opinion, the sea captain Larsen got the better part, despite the ferocious cruelty that earned him the nickname Wolf. London blessed his anti-hero with strength both of body and character, courage and good looks -- all attributes denied, at least initially, to the “civilized” Van Weyden. Not satisfied with so many advantages, London added intellect to Larsen’s arsenal.

Although Larsen rescues Van Weyden from a wreck, his apparent altruism turns to tyranny when he presses him into servitude aboard his seal hunting ship. After a vicious kick from Larsen for a minor infraction, Van Weyden is sent to the captain’s stateroom to make the bed. “Against the wall . . . was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe and De Quincey. . . There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall,

Unable to reconcile such works with what he has seen of Larsen’s character, Van Weyden still doubts the captain’s ability to read or appreciate them.

Jack London

“But when I came to make the bed I found . . . Dropped apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition. It was open at ‘In a Balcony,’ and I noticed, there and there, passages underlined in pencil.”

No wonder London sometimes signed his letters “Wolf.” Years later, when he was rich beyond the socialist dreams of his youth, he would name the mansion he built on his Sonoma County, California, “Wolf House,” only to see the 15,000-square foot stone mansion destroyed by fire two weeks before he and his second wife planned to move in.

In a modern sidebar, Texas author Rick Riordan used the ruins of Wolf House (now protected in the Jack London State Historic Park near Glen Ellen, California) as a setting in his young adult novel The Lost Heroes. Riordan’s characters take advantage of London’s disputed parentage -- his birth records were lost in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake -- to claim, as whimsically as Larsen could, that London was an lost demigod.

For more about Riordan’s fantasy world and Jack London’s place in it, see www.rickriordan.com/
(Next Friday: It would be hard to imagine a sea captain more different from Wolf Larsen than Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander.)

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Another writing contest -- SheWrites' first-ever "We Love New Novelists!" contest, open to emerging authors and members of She Writes.  See www.shewrites.com/group/we-love-new-novelists/ for rules and to join She Writes if you're not already a member.