Giving Children the Classics: Moppet Books and Copyright

For the past few weeks, Publishers Weekly has been covering a copyright case involving publisher Moppet Books, which seeks to print a series of picture book adaptations of several classic novels that are still under copyright. These “KinderGuides,” as Moppet calls them, would aim to get young children interested in reading classic works of fiction. However, the estates of several authors, as well as Random Penguin House and Simon & Schuster, have brought suit to prevent the books’ publication. Thus far, the litigation has gone the copyright holders’ way.

As Andrew Albanese reported this past Thursday, Judge Jed Rakoff of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has:

…signed off on a permanent injunction immediately barring Moppet Books from distributing in the U.S. any versions of its KinderGuides series held to be infringing, until the works on which they are based enter the public domain. In addition, Moppet Books also agreed to destroy all current copies of the infringing works “in its possession or under its control” within 10 days… [However,] the injunction includes an automatic stay on the destruction of existing stock, pending the “final outcome” of the appeal process.

I am obviously not a lawyer, so I don’t know whether Moppet Books’ KinderGuides are sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use, as their defense has claimed. (Completely uninformed gut feeling: the copyright holders are in the legal right here.) And I can’t comment much on the adaptations themselves, since all I’ve seen of these books are few scattered page scans included in the press coverage.

What I can do, though, is talk about the concept of adapting classic novels for children. Based on my own experience, I think that something like the KinderGuides could be a valuable tool for getting children interested in the classics, and it is a shame that copyright law makes publishing such adaptations for tomorrow’s canon so difficult.

When I was in elementary school (probably 3rd grade), I remember a used book seller coming to our classroom and laying out tons and tons of cheap books for us to buy with our spare quarters. Younger me came across a somewhat beat-up paperback with a cool looking cover and an interesting title: Around the World in Eighty Days.

Now, this was not in fact Jules Verne’s original 1873 novel, but rather an illustrated and abridged version published by Moby Books. And oh, how I loved it. Every spare moment I had for the next week went toward following the adventures of Phileas Fogg and Passpartout in their quest to, well, travel around the world in eighty days. I can still see Passpartout’s towering figure from the illustrations on every other page, still feel the tension from the hurried, perilous transatlantic voyage on the Henrietta.

I wouldn’t read the original, unabridged version of Around the World in Eighty Days for a few more years (which was about the time it took me to realize that I hadn’t actually read it yet). But that cheap little paperback sparked my love of Jules Verne, and for that I’m thankful. I’m pretty sure that if I had started with the original text, younger me would have been rather bored and confused, or at least overwhelmed by the length, and would thus be reluctant to give Jules Verne a fair shake when he was older.

For the Twains and Melvilles of the world, the Dickenses and Brontës, it’s easy to find approachable adaptations of their works for children. After all, all their books are in the public domain, so there is no legal barrier to producing them. But when it comes to the likes of Hemingway, Kerouac, Clarke and Capote (the authors whose estates are involved in the Moppet case), copyright law makes producing such adaptations far more difficult.

Whether something like KinderGuides would actually lead to more children reading classic literature, I’m not certain. But at the very least, it did so for me. It’s an idea worth pursuing.

The Poetry of Anticipation: On Edward Mullany’s Syntax

In her book The Art of Syntax (Graywolf Press, 2009), the poet Ellen Bryant Voight places special emphasis on a linguistic concept that she calls the “fundament,” which is the unsubordinated subject and predicate of a sentence. Whenever we read a sentence containing a subordinate clause, such as the one that you are currently reading, we instinctively look for the main noun-verb combo to ground us. That is, after all, the fundamental part of the sentence. Only when we arrive at that particular phrase can we be sure of the sentence’s primary meaning. “To say…that a sentence provides a complete thought,” writes Voight, “is actually to say it resolves the brain’s search for the fundament” (p. 6).

You might think of that search for the fundament as a source of tension in a sentence, one which the fundament itself will relieve. Many poems feature sentences which deliberately delay the fundament to exploit that tension, to place the reader in a state of anticipation that is only satisfied at the poet’s chosen moment.

This strategic delaying of the fundament shows up repeatedly in Edward Mullany’s collection of short poems, If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, 2011). Indeed, the ideas of anticipation and incompleteness runs through the book from beginning to end. The title not only suggests an upcoming demise, but also takes the form of a subordinate clause in search of a fundament. To scan the cover art from left-to-right involves moving over an expanse of empty, white space between the silhouettes, breaking the implied image into two discrete sections. A good number of poems feel like premises that lack conclusions, or even vice versa.

Mullany’s syntax is no different; his one sentence poems often delay the main clause until near the end for maximum impact. But what I find most compelling in Mullany’s syntax is how it wrings extra tension out of the fundament even after the reader has discovered it. I’ll look at two such poems to demonstrate.

The first poem is “Widowed,” which originally appeared in the now-defunct literary magazine Keyhole. The first three lines consist of a long abverbial phrase, a sure sign that the fundament is being delayed: “During the previews for a movie / that was playing on a weekday / afternoon in a mall in a small town” (lines 1-3). This clause does a lot to set the scene for the poem, giving us time and location as context for the main action. There’s a fair amount of branching syntax here as well, which slows down the pace: a relative clause, some prepositional phrases. The reader is ready to know what happened at these previews. They will find out, but in due time.

The next line introduces the first half of the fundament, the subject: “a man” (line 4). But the fundament has only been started, not completed, for the speaker inserts two relative clauses to expand on the subject: “who’d entered the theater / alone, and who’d been unsurprised / to find himself still alone” (lines 4-6). Because these relative clauses are in the past perfect, placing the actions they described at some point before the previews started, the reader is in some sense further from the main point of the sentence than they were just a few lines ago.

Just when the reader might be growing frustrated with the poem’s syntax, the speaker finishes off a line with what looks like the second half of the fundament, the main verb phrase: “got up” (line 6). The whole sentence up to this point is an elaborate way of saying, “The man got up.” We of course have the context which makes the poem more interesting than that. But those four words are the core of the thought.

Except, the predicate doesn’t end with “got up.” It’s not even the predicate’s only main verb phrase, because the next line coordinates it with a second: “and went out to the lobby” (line 7). If anything, “went out” is the dominant verb phrase of the sentence, because the poem immediately tacks on two more phrases parallel to it: “and out / through the front doors and out into / the bright light” (lines 7-9). In the same way that getting up is a prelude to the real action, the phrase “got up” proved to be a prelude to the “real” predicate.

The second poem I’ll consider, “The Not So Simple Truth,” goes a step further than “Widowed,” in that it delays not just the fundament of the sentence but the sentence itself. The first lines of this poem are a series of sentence fragments:

Potatoes. Dirt and
water. And a soft

towel left for us while
we shower. (1-4)

The reader is presented with a list of items, with no guarantee that a predicate will ever appear (although the “and” which starts the third fragment does suggest the list is concluding). The fact that this list will function as the subject of the poem’s one grammatical sentence only becomes apparent from the next two words: “These // things” (4-5).

Already we see how Mullany uses punctuation to delay delivering the subject. One could easily rewrite the sentence with more standard punctuation, for example with a colon: “Potatoes, dirt, water, and a soft towel left for us while we shower: these things…” It’s not necessarily elegant, but it is grammatical. Yet Mullany uses periods, rather than serial commas, to separate items. The reader must first consider each item as a discrete item, rather than as part of a collective grouping that the above rewriting might suggest.

“These // things” gives us the subject’s noun phrase. The predicate’s verb phrase follows immediately. The main verb is “are” (5), but that’s as nondescript a verb as one can have. We technically have the fundament, in that we have the head of the predicate phrase, but not the satisfaction it provides. “Are what?” the reader must ask. The sentence responds: “no / truer” (5-6). The topic of the sentence is becoming clearer: the “truth,” in whatever sense, of the aforementioned things. However, the word “truer” is a comparative, which implies a point of comparison. One mystery solved, another presented.

Instead of simply providing us with that point of comparison, the poem first mentions the grounds of that comparison: “for their // plainness” (6-7). This phrase is useful for understanding the predicate, in that we’d like to know what the speaker means by “truth.” But the phrase also returns us to “these things,” encouraging us to see the items as plain. (Easy with the potatoes, perhaps a challenge for the soft towel.) When one might expect the poem to move forward through the predicate, it instead cycles back to the subject.

What does such backward-looking move achieve? I’d call it a mental smash-cut. The reader’s mind has just reproduced the starting images when the poem finishes by throwing on several new ones: “than peas / or pus or leprosy” (7-8). Finally, the point of comparison arrives. While the peas might not be so different from the potatoes, the diseased imagery of the final line represents a sharp break from the rest of the poem and its quotidian objects. The reader, anticipating mere completion, receives a broken-skinned punch.

The takeaway for your poetry: consider the holding back the fundament of a sentence, letting the reader anticipate the next move. You might, as in “Widowed,” use that delay to weave in context or show a character’s thought process. You might, as in “The Not So Simple Truth,” decide it best serves to set-up a punchy ending. Whatever the case, the reader will thank you for making the wait worthwhile.

On Reading Multiple Books at Once

One of my favorite YouTube channels, Philosophy Tube, recently posted a video simply titled “How to Read Difficult Books,” in which the show’s host, Olly Thorn, offers five tips for doing just that.

Some of Thorn’s tips are fairly standard fare: take notes, don’t be afraid of rereading passages, etc. But the first tip he offers is perhaps the most interesting: “Read Two Books at Once.”

It seems like an odd bit of advice, especially when it comes to reading philosophical texts (the kind that Thorn’s viewers probably have in mind when they ask about reading difficult books). Whether it’s because the language is now antiquated or the concepts are abstract, a philosophical text can be a great challenge to work through on a word-by-word and paragraph-by-paragraph level—even with completely undivided attention. Why suggest that someone tackle another book on top of that?

Thorn brings up one crucial reason, one which is kind of obvious when said aloud. Reading two books at once means you will have to stop reading one to work on the other. It encourages you to break a difficult text into discrete units, rather that rushing from one section to another. To quote Thorn:

Often with academic books, they’ll try and say a lot in the chapter and it’ll be quite meaty, and if I try to sit and read two chapters of an academic book in one reading, the points that it’s making will just kind of tend to bleed into one, and I won’t really remember it very well. But if I physically stop myself and then pick up a chapter of something else, then I find I retain it a lot more easily.

And course, there’s the fact that reading a second book can provide some relief from the first. Especially if one book is rather dense or dry, a little fanciful escapism can help even things out. (Poetry, I find, fulfills a similar function. You can revel in the aesthetic pleasures of language for moment, rather than just piecing together its semantics.)

For me, though, the reason to tackle multiple books at once is all about drawing connections. Suppose you are reading a book on ethics. It might help, for example, to read a play or a novel at the same time, because you can think about the moral decisions of the various characters in the context of whatever philosopher’s theory of ethics. Would that philosopher approve or disapprove of how they act? This approach was really helpful for me in my last semester of undergrad—Aristotle’s system of virtue ethics made more sense to me when I could apply it to Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women, which I was reading for a different class.

I obviously can’t guarantee that any two texts will pair well together. (I’m not sure reading Shakespeare would make modal realism any clearer, for example.) But you may be surprised at the connections you’ll find; that’s more-or-less the thrust of the soon-to-be-defunct PBS Idea Channel. Even if the connections are tenuous, the simple act of making them can at least make the ideas easier to remember.

So don’t be afraid to double-up on the readings.

Just don’t do it like this:

Olly Thorn, Hardcore Reader

Henri Cole and the Sentimental Interruption

Natural disasters, death, isolation: how many poems take these topics as their subjects? Poets from all over draw inspiration, however weary, from such grave events, yet these are difficult subjects to address well. The temptation is always present to slip into sentimentality or detached philosophy, which would do great disservice to these grave subject matters. What could trivialize heartbreak more than a Hallmark card?

At the same time, we expect poets to find deeper meanings within the events they relate; rarely are we satisfied with the written equivalents of still lifes. This is especially true when it comes to subjects worthy of elegies. Without the solace that poetry can provide us, we’d be left staring at despair — perhaps an emotionally powerful experience, but hardly a useful one. And so the tension poets face: how is one to avoid cloying sentiment on the one hand and callous objectivity on the other?

The poems in Henri Cole’s latest collection, Nothing to Declare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) — which often describe scenes of devastation, physical and emotional — resolve this tension in a curious way: they temporarily indulge in sentimentality, only to change course abruptly and return to the facts at hand. Like a release valve, the sentimental interruptions relieve some of the pressure that these scenes entail, but not to the extent that their powers are completely emptied.

To demonstrate how this “release valve” technique works, let’s take a close look at two of Cole’s poems: “City Horse” (originally published in The Threepenny Review, text available here) and “Dandelions” (originally published in The Paris Review, audio available here). In both poems, the speaker momentarily departs from a gut-wrenching situation, only for the situation itself to drag the speaker back into the moment. Once that final transition is complete, the speaker (and so the reader) gains a fuller of understanding of the tragedy they face, one for which the earlier sentimentality would not be sufficient.

As a single sentence spanning fourteen lines, “City Horse” captures a moment of continuous agony: a boy seeing a dead horse in the aftermath of a storm. The opening line leaves little doubt as to the direction of the poem; it’s a journey to “the end of the road from concept to corpse” (line 1). What was once a living, moving beast has been tossed by wind and waves, dumped alongside piles of inanimate debris (“uprooted trees, crumpled cars, and collapsed houses” [3]). Although she is positioned “as if trying to raise herself still,” she is irretrievably dead (4). The only question is how to confront that fact.

At first, the speaker appears absorbed with the physical facts of the horse’s death: broken legs, face in the mud. Of particular interest is the horse’s appearance: “the color around her eyes, nose, and mane (the dapples of roan, / a mix of red and white hairs) now powdery gray” (7-8). The declension narrative is clearest here. This beautiful horse, because of the capricious weather, has been reduced to a monochromatic object. One might expect, then, to read of further and further decay.

Instead, the speaker interrupts the description with a set of apostrophes: “O, wondrous horse; O, delicate horse–dead, dead–” (9). The register is so elevated, the repetitions so sudden, that it sounds out of character for the speaker. Whereas the first eight lines were earthy and plainspoken, line 9 is more consciously poetic, if not bathetic — can readers feel this sort of emotion for a horse they hardly know?

But “O, wondrous horse” is not indicative of the poem’s progress; it’s a sudden pulling back, an unsustainable retreat. Just after the speaker’s interruption ends, we hear the boy who sees the horse with his vernacular speech: “‘She was more smarter than me, / she just wait'” (10-11). The two voices in succession shake the reader back and forth, from lofty sentiment back to the raw details. And once the poem returns to those details, the import of the interruption becomes more apparent.

The closing image sees the boy attempting to comfort the dead horse, “stroking the majestic rowing legs, / stiff now” (12-13). It’s a heartfelt gesture, but a futile one, much like the horse’s attempt to escape its fate. She simply “could not outrun / the heavy, black, frothing water” (13-14). But then, neither could the speaker “outrun” the tragedy of the horses death by invoking some sentimental muse — he must return to the situation, the heavy, black, frothing situation.

“Dandelions” follows a similar path as “City Horse”: the speaker is confronted with an uncomfortable situation, attempts to escape via a sentimental interruption, but gets drawn back to the reality of the scene. What makes “Dandelions” a little unusual is that the scene itself has no reality — it’s a dream, as the first stanza explains:

In the dream,
a priest said
it was time
to be entirely
adult. (1-5)

The set-up suggests a confrontation between the speaker and the priest, but in fact the priest is addressing the speaker’s mother, who is “bedridden / because of diabetes” (6-7). The priest seems convinced that the speaker’s mother has little time left, repeatedly asking about her beliefs. His insistence frightens the speaker, who retreats into his own head (or further within his own head, as the case may be).

Specifically, he starts to think of the title flowers, of their simple beauty, which appears to provide him some comfort in the midst of the confrontation:

those silver gray
stems and lemony
blossoms
that transform
any landscape (36-40)

That landscape, of course, is the speaker’s mental state. For the moment, his mother’s health and the priest’s insistence have faded into the background, subsumed by the soft colors of the dandelion imagery. If “City Horse” drifts into the language of sentimentality, “Dandelions” indulges in its visuals.

But, as with the sentimental interruption in “City Horse,” the speaker’s self-distraction cannot be sustained here. He’s brought back to the dream-proper when his mother’s ailment intervenes: “and then I heard / Mother lifting her stumps, / where the hands had been” (41-43). It’s an unnerving image in any context, but when contrasted with the dandelions, it’s a downright shock.

“Dandelions,” however, arrives at a different attitude than “City Horse.” The mother’s closing declaration (“‘I believe / in these living hands'” [44-45]) might provide the speaker with some consolation at the end of the dream. His mother is aware her hands have been amputated, but she does not try to ignore than fact. Instead, she finds a kind of strength within her condition, hence why she loudly lifts her stumps. She has embraced her situation and come out stronger for it. Perhaps the speaker, once he awakes, can learn from her example.

Cole returns to the structure used in “City Horse” and “Dandelions” throughout Nothing to Declare, and it proves surprisingly durable. It never loses its punch, seeing that moment where a sentimental interruption collapses and the speaker confronts reality again. It reenacts a thought process which all of us indulge in at various points in our lives, then shows the limits of that very process. Whether solace or mere devastation await at the end, Cole’s poems show us those difficult facts that our minds attempt to cloud.

Nothing to Declare is available through Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s website and through Amazon.com.

(Disclosure: I received Cole’s collection as part of a Goodreads giveaway sponsored by the publisher. Neither the author, nor the publisher, nor Goodreads had any input regarding this post.)