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March 24, 2006
The Jones Salvage Yard, or, How I Discovered Reading
There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.
—Emily Dickinson
Recently my memory has been bent on re-treading the days of my ninth year… I recall my classroom—warm—with green carpet. There’s a small bookshelf and rain outside, and because it is after lunch it is Quiet Reading Time, a time I had always spent reading magazines or doodling secretly. But on this day I look hard at the ‘shelf—the contents now mostly fuzzied with time—and pick up a copy of Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, a long-running kids’ detective series about three young and exceptionally resourceful Californians. I’m holding book number two in the series, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, first published in 1964, and it is still raining outside, hard now, the sound of water falling from a broken gutter obvious. I open up Parrot, and find “Alfred Hitchcock’s” introduction. I sit down. As I read more and more of the series, the reading of the warm introductions took on the benevolent glow of custom, and I learned to savor the lightly reverential tone, transforming it into the generous twitches and curls of anticipation.
And now again with that green carpet. Old and warm, and I take my first copy of The Three Investigators and curl up on the floor at the base of the ‘shelf. I finish the intro and begin to meet the gang for the first time. I say “hello” to the group’s natural leader, Jupiter Jones, a precociously bright young man with a glutton’s taste for fat-food, but an eye like Sherlock’s; I extend my young hand to Pete Crenshaw, serious, loyal and athletic; a bright and happy illustration of America’s potential. Finally, I am greeted by Robert Andrews, the Three Investigators’ collator of data, a position invaluably assisted by his job at the local library, and his own deep-seated fastidiousness.
A good group.
Their headquarters are ingeniously implanted beneath the large and sprawling mass of junk which comprises Jupiter’s auntie’s salvage yard. The seemingly impregnable clutter secretly houses the boys’ HQ—complete with telephone, filing system, darkroom and workshop, and made accessible only through the use of cleverly concealed entrances.
The Three Investigators’ mobility is provided by their bicycles and the helpful assistance of adult sympathizers, and their individual talents, and their impressive sum, invariably lend themselves to the cracking of seemingly impenetrably bizarre phenomenon. But I won’t here spoil the mystery of the stuttering parrot.
As I write this, many, many years on from that classroom and that discovery, Neil Young jangles out an extended solo and Edmund White’s essay “On Reading: An Exaltation of Dreams” sits next to my laptop. I glance down at it, and immediately feel silly.
In his essay, White recounts a book he read at the age of 10 resurfacing in his life: “…there was Disenchanted by Pierre Loti, the tale of women’s liberation in turn-of-the-century Turkey that had so engrossed me when I was ten. It was the same book I remembered, with the gold letters on the raincoat-coloured cover…”
Not for White the juvenile pleasures of the Three Investigators then, but that’s okay. Reaching over the ledge of my mind’s eye I can see, wafting upwards in a curious formation, chatters of scents and excitements encouraged by my falling in love with the young group of private eyes. For the first time in my life I appreciated the Emily Dickinson quote given above, and I was only nine. Trips to the library became great harvesting operations, and, if for whatever reason, my parents could not take me on the decided fortnightly run, then I would scream and throw things and become so generally unpleasant and unreasonable that a belated trip would be made.
I needed my fix.
True, for the remaining years of lower-school I read nothing but teen-detective pulp—Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, The Hardy Boys. A much limited literary diet, it’s true, but far richer than my high-school diet, which was non-existent. How I came to avoid reading for half a decade is another story—this little spot is for Jupiter, Pete and Bob.
Thank-you.
Posted by Marty at March 24, 2006 2:29 PM
Comments
i hated nancy drew - they were full of incomprehensible americana, like rain slickers and grape nuts, which i read as squeegees and sultanas, starting a chain of misunderstandings that corrupted the entire sense of the thing. but encyclopedia brown - wow. them, i loved. even though i knew that his name was missing an all-important 'a', i brushed it aside for the boy with the freckles and insatiable curiosity. as a kid who grew up being called 'dictionary girl', it was a demonstration of the depth of my affection for that pesky kid ('and ida gotta way with it, too, it it weren't for you pesky kids...'). man, makes me hanker for the wet jumper smell of kalamunda library. do you remember graduating to the 'young adult' section? i half-expected all the books to be about sex...
Posted by: clare at March 24, 2006 6:41 PM
"i brushed it aside for the boy with the freckles and insatiable
curiosity." so what's changed? if only we'd met when i was ten... oh,
hang on - you would have been three. hmm. when you were ten? nope. I
was seventeen. no better. shit. ah, my freckles were already fading
at seventeen, weatherfield.
young adult books *were* all about sex, weren't they? remember
waiting in the *endless* queue to read judy blume's 'forever' ...
yeah, encyclopaedia brown (and the ever-resourceful Sally, come on!),
T.A.C.K, The Great Brain, Alvin Fernald – I loved all those kid
detectives, too.
marty – happy birthday for this week. i'm missing you already,
despite loving being back home. i'm reading franzen's 'the
corrections' at the moment and it's as great as i imagined it would
be from his non-fict/essays in 'how to be alone'. how fucked are
families? and yet you'd keep them alive forever if you could ... it
was really lovely to meet some of your siblings this time round,
actually. i got a slightly clearer picture of the mmm web, especially
being an 'older brother' myself.
if you're on a kid-lit tip at the moment, i'm still (forever)
bleating for 'the phantom tollbooth' by norton juster; it's out of
print (which I can.not.believe.) so you might have trouble finding a
copy, but I highly recommend it. time hasn't dulled it's utopian (yet
more affirmative than naif) Brit '60s take on imagination as
emancipation – it's like what 'alice in wonderland' would be if it
were instructional, rather than pure fantasy. you'll dig the
trajectory, if perhaps not the writing style itself.
stay gold, ponyboy.
r
Posted by: reuben at March 27, 2006 4:37 AM
was really going to send you an eamil today, kiddo--but such lines--even if true--should be silenced, eh?
those two books are still sitting on the hallway table--i'll send 'em over after wednesday (payday), so email me a postal address...
was terrific to see you, rubes, really good...
b-day tomorrow--i'm gonna play "supersonic" on m-mag to celebrate. first time oasis has been played on rtr for probably... well, probably a decade.
oh, well.
be good,
m
p.s. am googling "phantom tollbooth" now...
Posted by: marty at March 27, 2006 10:55 AM
ruby i can't believe you are still talking about finding the phantom tollbooth - does it really exist? i'm gonna google it myself to find out.
nancy drew was crap, she was uptight and annoying, but trixie belden was queen cool. and her hot little friend honey who always had perfect hair and gorgeous clothes... i bet she was a total fox, in a hilary duff meets carmen electra kind of way. (hilary duff??? god, i'm ashamed i even know what she looks like.)
Posted by: clance at August 2, 2006 1:58 PM
