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The Best in Wikipedia Prose

Timothy Dexter.

For those of you looking to go down some seriously deep rabbit holes or just appreciate the outsider art that is Wikipedia prose at its best, may we suggest this beautifully curated list of the fifty most interesting articles on Wikipedia? While this compendium is indeed fascinating, we can’t help feeling that Timothy Dexter is a glaring omission.

 

Taking It to the Mattress

I’m eighty-one but I can feel like I’m fifteen when I’m talking baseball. It brings you back.

—Buck O’Neil, Kansas City Monarchs, Negro Leagues

The ball explodes from the pitcher’s hand like a bullet, but it’s high and inside. “BALL!” the umpire yells, and the batter takes his base. The Bulls have two men on with no outs, bottom of the seventh. Neither team has scored a run. I sit near the visitors’ bullpen, watching the drama unfold. The pitcher on the mound has been throwing the proverbial smoke up until now. He’s given up two walks in a row, and if he gives up a third he’ll load the bases with our designated hitter coming up.

The visiting team’s relief pitcher starts stretching in the bullpen. A gangly Latino fellow, he rotates his arm in big circles and begins to throw. Slow at first, then faster, harder, until the ball disappears the moment it leaves his hand, only to reappear less than a second later in the catcher’s mitt. For anyone who’s ever played baseball, the ballpark is a time machine: the green of the grass, the crack of the bat, the pow the ball makes when it hits the glove all release memories buried by the daily grind called life. The ballpark allows us to live multiple places at once: at the game we watch and at the games played on the sandlots, backyards, parks, and school diamonds of our yesterdays. Each ticket is also a ticket to ride one’s personal baseball memory train.

I’m standing in my grandmother’s backyard, pitching distance from her tool shed. My Houston Astros cap pulled low, head down, holding the ball in my glove, I check my finger placement for my fastball. I am J. R. Richard and I can throw a hundred miles per hour. Really, I am Howard Craft, twelve years old, most often referred to as June Bug by family and friends. My fastball isn’t a hundred miles per hour, but it’s loud enough to make a bang when it slams into the side of the tool shed. After several of these bangs, the back door of the house opens and my father comes out. He crosses the backyard like an angry manager en route to pull a pitcher after he’s given up a home run in the bottom of the ninth. Read More »

High-Altitude Language, and Other News

Reading can affect the behavior of those who identify strongly with the central characters, a new study (and a million Twi-hards) finds.
In other research news: a controversial linguistics study suggests that high altitude can directly impact the development of languages.
“Civil libertarians and consumer advocates call it digital book-burning: censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books in electronic formats.” 
The activist group Geeks Out has called for a boycott of the upcoming Ender’s Game film in protest of author Orson Scott Card, who opposes same-sex marriage. Card responds, in part, “Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.”
In less fraught lit-cinematic news, Charlie Kaufman is taking on the adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five.

 

Girls Together

Courtesy of the Blanchard family.

It’s a gray day in April and after nine hours on a crowded BoltBus I arrive in Philadelphia to see my old friend from college, Nicole, a fellow writer and veritable one-woman repository of Philadelphian history. I’m here to celebrate her birthday, to drink wine, and to comb through the detritus of a difficult past year for both of us. Really, I’m not here for research.

So, of course it makes perfect sense that within five minutes of picking me up she turns her car toward 4100 Pine Street, an address I’ve seen scrawled on the front of numerous letters, in nineteenth-century directories, in the chicken-scratch handwriting of an 1870 Philadelphian census worker, and in journal after journal of Amy Ella Blanchard.

I first encountered Blanchard’s work as a sullen adolescent, forced to go to an island in Maine every other weekend with my father and soon-to-be stepmother. The house where we stayed was built by Blanchard in the early twentieth century and her books lined the shelves, but I was too busy reading classics like Salem’s Lot to be bothered with these dusty old tomes. The fact that she was a relative of my father’s girlfriend made Blanchard’s novels even less attractive to me.

Not many readers these days know who Blanchard was, but just barely a century ago she published at least a book a year, sometimes more, for girls and about girls. During her lifetime she wrote over eighty books, a play in 1896 about the importance of exercise for women, and even a couple of small booklets flouting such morals as “fritterings” and being “pound foolish.” A self-described late bloomer, Blanchard’s writing career started, and sputtered, with a story she published in a Salem, Massachusetts newspaper when she was in her teens, but it wasn’t until she was well into her thirties that her novels became an indispensable part of every young girl’s library.

4100 Pine Street is where Amy Ella Blanchard met her writerly fate, personally and professionally. In 1871, when she was fifteen years old, the Waugh family of Philadelphia hired her to be a tutor for their young son, future marine artist and camouflage designer Frederick Judd Waugh. Patriarch Samuel Bell Waugh was a renowned Philadelphian painter of portraits, including at least two of President Lincoln; his wife, Mary, specialized in miniatures; and Frederick’s older half sister, Ida, was hard at work pursuing her own painting career. A family of artists, the Waughs quickly took young Amy under their wing. They kept inspired company in their time and introduced Amy to a creative world that was far removed from her hometown of Baltimore in more ways than one. Read More »

Book and Cheese Pairings

Bayley Hazen Blue: Virginia Woolf.

“It would be too simple to say this is any ordinary cheese with the blues—it’s dense with flavor, care and feeling. The Bayley Hazen has a balanced mix of flavors that range from buttered toast, to chocolate and hazelnuts, and even the dark bitterness of liquorice. This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives—the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will. It’s a delicious modern classic. Its taste, and the moment you first fell in love with it, will permeate in your memory for years. Don’t let this one get away.” (Via Airship Daily.)

 

Dirty Parts

The last time I slept with Carolyn she pushed me off her in the midst of our lovemaking and turned away from me.

At first I did not understand what it was she wanted. But she bumped her behind against me until I realized that was what I was being offered, a marble peach.

No, I said.

Try it. She looked over her shoulder. Please.

I came up close behind her.

Just easy, she said. Just a little.

I went in too fast.
Not that much, she said.

She said, Oh.

I pressed in, remained, pumped. She arched, clearly in some pain.

And I found, suddenly, that I was thrilled.

I started raiding my parents’ library on the belief that reading their books would let me reproduce their thoughts. Same words in, same ideas out: the alchemy made sense to a middle schooler. When I started plucking novels from their shelves in an investigative frenzy, I was surprised that my parents didn’t seem more concerned about their privacy. Couldn’t they see that I was about to tunnel into their psyches? Wouldn’t their jig soon be up?

A nice theory, but a book or two later, the ominous fog of adult tension that drove me to espionage in the first place still pervaded our house, inscrutable as ever. If novels couldn’t help me decipher it, I consoled myself, at least they could help me escape it; that much I knew from an established history of total, meal-skipping absorption in the Lois Lowrys and L. M. Montgomerys on my own bookshelf. So I kept at my parents’ paperbacks with a shrug of “why not?”—feeling at times engaged and accomplished, at others bewildered and bored—until the day I picked up Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and wandered into that passage, in which the narrator found, suddenly, that he was thrilled. Read More »

Giant Mr. Darcy Terrorizes London, and Other News

A twelve-foot fiberglass Mr. Darcy is currently standing in the middle of Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake, and is terrifying.
A new analytics tool claims it can detect sarcasm in online comments. But the best part: “Its clients include the Home Office, EU Commission and Dubai Courts.”
The artist formerly known as “the” is now represented by the symbol Ћ.
Book titles missing one (key) letter.
A scientifically accurate “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Sample lyric: “Thirty-two light years in the sky / Ten parsecs which is really high.”

 

Say Uncle

My average encounter with my eighteen-month-old nephew, Crosby, goes like this: First, I press a button. The boy, who lives in Charlotte, appears on a piece of handheld video technology, wobbling like a sleepy bear cub, eating something that’s not food (a TV remote; a shoe, maybe). Several states away, my wife and I speak into our technology. We say “Crosby-face! There’s Crosby-face!” Then my brother-in-law’s unseen voice commands his son, like God or a drive-thru employee, to “give your aunt and uncle a kiss.” Crosby lunges at his screen, at us, toothless, dripping with joy. Like it’s a part of a script, I yell “Crosby’s trying to eat my face!” then my wife yells “Who’s trying to eat somebody’s face?” and right on cue our screen goes pink with a toddler’s wet gums. It goes on like this for minutes, my wife and I encouraging our poor nephew—this pure, adorable maniac—to actually ingest a touchscreen device. “Oh no! Crosby’s eating us!” we say to no one. “He’s eating our noses! What will we do?!?” we say, until Crosby, cackling wildly, knocks the device from his father’s hands, and like the ill-fated hunters of the Blair Witch ghost, our transmission falls black at once.

Until seconds later, when we repeat the whole encounter again.

This interaction, or some version of it, has happened at least three times a week for the last year and a half in my home. As an uncle, I don’t know if I can take much more. Read More »

“I Ducked Behind My Paris Review…”

This song, “Dear Joseph,” comes courtesy of Australian group t:dy t:wns. As they explain it,

“My friend and I wrote a song about an airplane trip I took where I was distracted from reading my Paris Review by my seat mate, a guy named Joseph, who was very chatty and DEMONSTRATIVELY scared of flying. He was really something.”
 

 

Daring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist

It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler’s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere’s diary. Alfred and Guinevere is the best novel I’ve ever read about childhood, because it accurately depicts the way children brilliantly and hilariously mimic adults, the way that children’s conversations are imperfectly observed imitations of adult conversations. Because of this insight, it doesn’t read like an adult imitating children—and it is incredibly funny. I’ve read it many times; I can’t get enough of it.

Going through it again this spring, I was caught by a review from Commonweal quoted on the back cover. “A deft and funny creation of a high quality,” the critic wrote, “somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters.” I had never heard of The Young Visiters. Neither, as it happens, had any of the dozen people I’ve mentioned it to in the months since. When I sought The Young Visiters out at the library, I was startled by what would seem to be the most important fact about it. “You could have told me,” I said silently to Commonweal, “that this book was written by a nine-year-old.”

When in 1919 a grown-up Daisy Ashford rediscovered and agreed to publish The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan, which she had written twenty-eight years earlier, it was an immediate and absolute success. It is a Victorian “society novel” following “an elderly man of forty-two” named Alfred Salteena and his friends, the young lovers Ethel Montecue and Bernard Clark, as Mr. Salteena strives to become a gentleman. With its distinctive, graceless narrative voice and original spelling errors intact, readers regarded it as a remarkable specimen of children’s grand and unselfconscious ridiculousness. It was so popular in the United States and in Ashford’s native United Kingdom that it went through eight printings in its first year. Read More »