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If ya don\u2019t read, ya can\u2019t write, and if ya don\u2019t learn, ya can\u2019t teach.\u00a0 Christmas season afforded me some recreational as opposed to work-related reading time for a change\u2026and whaddaya know, I learned some stuff.<\/p>\n
I grew up reading the work of Dashiell Hammett, who created the original hard-boiled private eye genre with characters like Sam Spade.\u00a0 I had always heard the author\u2019s first name pronounced \u201cDASH-ee-ell,\u201d or occasionally \u201cDAY-she-ell.\u201d\u00a0 Turns out the man himself pronounced it \u201cda-SHEEL.\u201d\u00a0 Learned it from the superbly researched bio, \u201cThe Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett\u201d by Nathan Ward.<\/p>\n
Likewise, I was a little kid when I read Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin.\u201d Little kids tend not to pick up subtleties.\u00a0 Reading Shelley Fisher Fishkin\u2019s recently published \u201cWriting America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee,\u201d I found the following:<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 1949 in an essay\u00a0 titled \u2018Everybody\u2019s Protest Novel,\u2019 James Baldwin wrote that Stowe was \u2018not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer,\u2019 author of \u2018a very bad novel\u2019 whose sticky sentimentality gave life to racial stereotypes while denying life and complexity to its black characters; the book, Baldwin believed, promoted rather than challenged prejudice based on color and race: the only black characters in the novel who manifest intelligence, initiative, and independence, he reminds us, do so in direct proportion to the lightness of their skin.\u201d<\/p>\n
I totally missed that as a young boy, and am going to have to reread \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you folks out there have had any such \u201cDamn\u2014I didn\u2019t know that\u201d moments lately, you\u2019re invited to share them here.<\/p>\n
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