This Week’s Puzzler

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The upcoming week offers a sad anniversary and a happy birthday, both of which will be commemorated in these virtual pages on the appropriate dates, but something has me perplexed today.

Yesterday, I received my copy of the English translation of Raif Badawi‘s book, “1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think,” a few days before official publication. First things first: I urge everyone to buy it, as proceeds from the title are slated to aid his wife, Ensaf Haidar, and his children; I will be writing about the book this week; and in the interest of full disclosure, my columns about Raif Badawi have appeared on the RaifBadawi.org website. Today is the 1172nd day Raif Badawi has spent in prison in his home country of Saudi Arabia. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1000 lashes for writing about liberalism. In the last year, hundreds of people have created a social media movement to attract and maintain attention on his case and Amnesty International reports that public involvement in his story has set records in that organization’s history. In a concert this summer in Canada, Bono spoke of the case from the stage while singing U2’s hit “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

Other than the fact that he should not be in prison for writing, none of the above is perplexing me today. This is:
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No Mystery

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We are speaking of the summer of 1976, when I was a seven-year-old hidden from myself, a summer I remember for being the Bicentennial, for being sunny every single day, and for the work of Leslie McFarlane, who around that time had published a book revealing he was the author of my favorite books. That book landed with a thud that did not reverberate into my world: as far as I was concerned, “Franklin W. Dixon” and not Leslie McFarlane was my favorite writer, and The Hardy Boys were the older brothers I did not have.

Books 1 through 22 of The Hardy Boys series were written between 1927 and 1947 by a Canadian writer who was desperate for income, Leslie McFarlane, and even though Grosset & Dunlap only paid him $85 per book with no royalties, he discovered that this was $85 per book that he could count on as long as he kept typing. He wrote the first eight in just over two years, just as the Great Depression was consuming all it could.
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‘Kids Who Die’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Not many writers compose laments or lamentations in 2015. Perhaps we need some. There is no specific metrical form for a lament, no rhyme scheme; there are no rules. How would one know when one has written one? A lament is meant to be sung or declaimed, and even though we listen to many singers and even though we hear too many speech-makers, the poetry that most of us encounter is read silently, nodded at, and then forgotten after the encounter. Too often, Americans seem to think of poetry as bloodless, intellectual.

A lament is an expression of grief captured in the moment or as close to the moment as it can be caught. Those who were left behind, those who do not want to imagine one more moment continuing to live on as someone left behind, they sing laments. As non-subtle as our culture can often be, “get over it” is just as often a guiding outlook. For most of us, life rarely if ever brings us to experiences so sad we proclaim we will never cease mourning, and when we do, we try to cheer each other up. Lamentations present meaning in mourning. We don’t often linger there long enough for meaning to germinate.
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