On Snowflakes, Paper and Ice

I've been a bit sad this year, because this is the first Christmas in several years that I have not adorned my desk at work with paper snowflakes. Snowflakes, I feel, have been getting a bad rap lately, being used as a term to describe young people who think they are more special than they are. What did snowflakes do to deserve such negative associations?

The tradition of making paper snowflakes is something that comes naturally to children, but for me it  took on another level with home-schooling. My mom got a book from the library, Easy-to-Make Decorative Paper Snowflakes by Brenda Lee Reed. 

Reviewing "The House of Arden" by E. Nesbit

After reading Harding’s Luck and realizing halfway through it was a sequel, I decided I’d better go ahead and read the original story, The House of Arden, while the plot was fresh in my memory. Written by E. Nesbit, both books follow the adventures of children who magically time-travel into somewhat major events in English history, including the Gunpowder Plot, the Napoleonic Wars, and even meeting Henry VIII and Queen Anne (Boleyn).

In The House of Arden the history lesson quality is stronger than in Harding’s Luck, with siblings Edred and Elfrida Arden discovering that they can time travel by reciting poetry and dressing in period costumes. Their goal is the same as in Harding’s Luck: the once-influential and wealthy Arden family has fallen on hard times, having to rent out rooms in their small cottage as their ancestral castle crumbles into ruins. 

Flapper Shakespeare

"One of the most remarkable things about the great writers of antiquity is that they appear to be so modern in their outlook. what we really mean is that they are both ancient and modern at the same time. there are certain things in life that time cannot stale. Hamlet has recently been played in modern dress, an experiment that has met with extraordinary success. Why is this? surely it is because great poetry is concerned with those feelings and thoughts which are innate and unchanging in human nature, and continue to resist the assaults of time and he vagaries of fashion." 

The Study of Poetry by Paul Landis

Chapter 1: The Nature of Poetry, pg. 13

I found this passage interesting because of what I'd discussed in an earlier post about setting Shakespearean plays in other-than-Elizabethan times. Landis has a point. One of the aspects that constitutes great art (literature, poetry, paintings, etc.) is that there is something about it that transcends the time in which is was created, representing some universal characteristic of humanity. Therefore, as long as the core content is left unchanged, it's possible to alter or remove superficial details (such as clothing in the case of performing plays) without damaging the essence of a particular work.

Perfect Little Protagonists: from E. Nesbit's "Harding's Luck"

As luck would have it, I began reading this book completely unaware of anything about it except its author—E. Nesbit. The copy I pulled (at random) from my mom’s bookshelf one night when I was desperate for more reading material (at the time my TBR pile was dangerously short for some reason) was an older hardcover with no dust jacket, no blurb on the back, or really any other indication of what sort of book it was. I’ve read several of Nesbit’s other books for children, so I was sort of hoping this one (it had gilt lettering on the spine) was for adults.

It was not, which I realized as soon as I opened it. This copy was full of illustrations that immediately exposed Harding’s Luck as following a boy protagonist through various adventures. Although disappointed that it wasn’t a more sophisticated story, I wasn’t so deterred from reading it. In fact, for the first several chapters I rather enjoyed it….

Dickie Harding is an Oliver Twist sort of character, a young orphan boy living in poverty with his “aunt” (really just his father’s landlady, who took Dickie in as a sort of ward/servant after his father died). Dickie is crippled, uneducated, and generally unloved. His only treasure is a possession given to him by his father, a silver rattle he calls “Tinkler.” Without really understanding what is missing from his life, Dickie longs for love, relatives, friends, and (on a more general note) beauty. 

Perfect Little Protagonists: from Edward Stratemeyer's "First at the North Pole"

In penning this volume I have had a twofold purpose in mind: the first to show what pure grit and determination can do under the most trying of circumstances, and the second to give my readers an insight into Esquimaux life and habits, and to relate what great explorers like Franklin, Kane, Hall, DeLong, Nansen, Cook, and Peary have done to open up this weird and mysterious portion of our globe.

~ Edward Stratemeyer, from his 1909 preface of First at the North Pole

This was the first novel I’d read by Edward Stratemeyer, and frankly it will probably also be the last.
First at the North Pole, or, Two Boys in the Arctic started out promising, introducing the main character Andy as an orphaned eighteen-year old in Maine, and his struggle to survive in a job recession and with the added dead-weight of his lazy Uncle Si. This uncle showed up out of the blue after his parents died, claimed he was his guardian, and settled into a drunken, loafish lifestyle all the while hypocritically cracking the whip over his honest-working nephew’s back. What’s worse, Uncle Si tries to keep Andy from befriending another orphaned youth, Chet, on the flimsy excuse that Chet’s father was accused of embezzlement and forgery, and had run off never to be seen again…which of course proved he was guilty!

The plot thickens when Andy finds out that he has inherited some land in Michigan, which might prove valuable to the mining corporations who want to take control of that territory. Of course the wheedling Uncle Si snoops through his nephew’s things (after sending him out to find a job), and decides to try to sell it to the first land shark that conveniently shows up pretty much the same time he finds the deeds to the land. Andy discovers the plot and runs away into the Maine winter, taking refuge with his friend Chet while he tries to figure out what to do. They have a few adventures in the woods, trying to hunt to survive and so on, and Andy even manages to lose his papers in the vast expanse of snowdrifts.

So far, so good. The story establishes the protagonist as a “good guy” with an oppressive uncle and difficult challenges ahead. But here the story wavers, because Stratemeyer suddenly remembers the title of his novel, and needs to figure out a way to redirect the plot northward rather than towards Michigan. So he introduces a professor and an explorer. They meet the boys (again, conveniently), and during their conversation the idea of travelling to the North Pole comes up.