Shrinklets--A way to summarize

My sister Robin is taking a class to renew her teacher's certification in Virginia. I'm working through it along with her. The teacher introduced her to the form called the shrinklet. A shrinklet helps you get at the key points of a piece of writing. For fiction, it might include the traditionals: setting, characters, plot, theme, and so on. For non-fiction, it might include key points, overall presentation, and purpose.

First, you write a short summary of what you read. Then you pick from the summary to write 5-6 rhyming couplets about the piece.

Robin challenged me to do a shrinklet of a book. First I chose Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, a favorite of mine that I have memorized visually and textually. Here it is:

The Cat in the Hat Shrinklet

The Summary

In The Cat in the Hat, a strange visitor enters the lives of two bored children who live in an ordinary house in an ordinary town. The Cat breaks all the rules the children have learned, leaving them both horrified and marvelously entertained. His cleanup crew, Thing 1 and Thing 2, take care of the mess with zany energy and machinery, just before mom gets home. Everything is as it was, except perhaps the imaginations of the children. Growth doesn’t come through sameness.

The Shrinklet

Ordinary house, ordinary town,

Ordinary kids, feeling a bit down.

In comes the Cat, the Cat in the Hat

He make dizzying disorder—how about that!

Mom’s on her way home, what will we do?

Cat has the answer, Thing 1 and Thing 2.

All is now clean, well-ordered, the same,

No sign at all that Cat in the Hat came.

But chaos once loosed set the kids free—

But we won’t tell Mom, we won’t, will we?

Tidy and ordinary is more than a bit of a bore.

Now that we know there’s so much-much-much more.

Robin liked it, but we both thought Seuss was a bit too easy, so to explore the shrinklet further, I did Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which I've read as many times as The Cat in the Hat. I realize the key feature I forgot to use was the absolute beauty of Austen's grammar and punctuation. I'll try to add a couplet about that.

Pride and Prejudice Shrinklet

He emerges from the pond and thereafter she admires his "house."

The Summary

Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. D’Arcy. Jane Bingley and Mr. Bingley. Lydia and Wickham. A tangled skein of misunderstandings, cross-purposes, lies believed to be truths, truths believed to be lies. And that terrible Mr. Collins. A cast of memorable characters well drawn. All around the getting of husbands and the traps and lures attendant thereupon. Jane Austen has the most superb punctuation and grammar of any author; it’s like reading art. Balls and stiff formality. Singing at the piano. I have read this book at least 10 times and continue to love it. The tension of wondering whether Elizabeth and D’Arcy would ever both be ready to love each other at the same time pulls the reader through. Oh, and that memorable scene when Elizabeth sees D’Arcy emerge from swimming the pond, his clothes all plastered to his well-formed body…and she then starts to compliment his marvelous "house." 

The Shrinklet

The class struggle imperils the romance,

Leading D’Arcy and Elizabeth a slow dance.

But after D’Arcy emerges magnificently from the pond

Elizabeth admires his "house," which goes far beyond

The love-sickliness of Bingley and Jane

And the calculations of Lydia, so vain.

Pride and prejudice both must give way

For true love to blossom and triumph o’er the day.

Hearts and minds in balance—it’s this

That guarantees Lizzie’s matrimonial bliss.

[added couplet]

Reading Austen is absolutely no chore.

Her grammar and punctuation are really top drawer.

Never Less Than a Lady

These are the types of pictures I've been coloring.

I have taken time off from reading for the past couple of months. I seemed to need coloring and jigsaw puzzles. My right brain must have been feeling deprived. But with a spread of books in front of me and the longer hours of daylight, my inner reader is up and kicking. In the past week or so, I've been feeling restless with the visual and recognized a yearning for text. Here's what happened.

The blogger singing
earnestly at the St.
Patrick's show.

Last Saturday, I performed in a St. Patrick's Day revue at the dearly-loved Herbert Wescoat Memorial (Vinton County) Library. The show was totally fun and wacky--singing, dancing, skits, sketches, recitations on an Irish theme. The cast ended up using community room as the "green room" and it was full of the remains of the quarterly book sale. The tables were piled with every genre of fiction, from dull classics to racy paperbacks. And they said to us, "the more books you take, the fewer we have to pack up tonight." A medium-sized boxful of books later, I was eager to sit down and read my heart out.

This is a long way to say that I just finished a book that I plucked from the book sale on the night of the St. Patrick's Day celebration. It was a regency romance by Mary Jo Putney called Never Less Than a Lady. And it was everything a regency romance should be--funny, wry, sweet, sexy, and star-crossed. All regencies are pretty much the same.

• Man meets woman.
• Man and woman hate each other.
• Hate is really fear of attraction.
• Man and woman declare love and have marriage and sex (or sex and marriage, depending on the author).
• Events separate man and woman.
• They get back together.
• The end.

All regencies have an element of Jane Austen about them--in the early nineteenth century settings, the importance of manners and appearances, and rigid gender roles to fight against or accept. In a sense, these books are developmental. The heroes and heroines start out with immature ideas of love and marriage and end up with a mature love. That's the pattern. But there's lots of fun along the way--disguises, danger, escapes, near misses. The gender roles are clear--woman is always protected and saved from peril by man; man is always missing some part of life and gets it from woman. This is the classic romance formula.

Regency covers range from
suggestive to racy to downright
sexual!

Never Less Than a Lady was good. A quick read. Brisk. Read it in one day. The heroine was living in disguise--everyone thought she was dead. The man helped her reclaim her life. a funny twist was that the heroine was a midwife. This was less key to the plot than anything else, a bit extraneous, but plausible in that it let the woman live on her own without suspicion. Another funny twist was the problem of who had the most money. Would the heroine still want to be married when she reclaimed her lost birthright? Would the man feel like he didn't need to save her anymore. A tempest in a teapot. I think both twists were attempts to modernize the content a bit, to increase its relevance to the modern woman.

No fear, though. The formula stands the test of time. And the romance makes more sense in the nineteenth century than modern romances do in the twenty-first. This romance was a great way to get back into the reading mode. Next up? Kathy Reich, the author of the Bones books.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as
Elizabeth and Darcy. Now picture a zombie
face at the window!

     I loved Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and couldn't stand it. It failed in what it tried to do and succeeded in what it didn't try.
     As a piece of comic writing, this book failed. Grahame-Smith wasted an opportunity to really infuse Austen with zombies--the undead appeared infrequently, missing many opportunities to develop this book as a stand-alone work of comic horror. Really, zombies should have appeared randomly every few pages, but instead long passages of extracted Austen totally lacked brain-eating and bludgeonery. The zombies were more a novelty than anything else and did not contribute to the plot, which steadfastly followed Austen almost to the death (but not by zombies). It was a completely missed opportunity. I hope the impending film version of P&P&Z rectifies the failed courage of the book.

Warrior Elizabeth

     So, I was disappointed. I wanted a campy post-apocalyptic romp and got Austen more embroidered than anything else--and not embroidered with flowers, but with ghastly needlepoint body parts and gore. Lovely! Still, it was great fun and not at all serious--a great read for a summer weekend.
     I was heartened by the strength of Austen's story, even truncated as it was. I have read the original Pride & Prejudice maybe a dozen times and I know that story backward and forward. I have seen at least 10 filmed versions of the novel. And still, yes still, the story hooked me and held me. It didn't matter whether Elizabeth slayed with a glance or with a Katana sword or whether the carriage was  spattered with mud or with guts. The main point was whether Elizabeth and Darcy would find it within themselves to love each other, whether they could combat pride and prejudice in each other and themselves as efficiently as they slaughtered and beheaded the undead.

Zombies are everywhere, man

     In this book, Elizabeth and her sisters are trained zombie killers, warriors, really. The plague of zombies has overtaken England as the dead rise from centuries of cemeteries to menace both town and country. (London has been sectioned off into walled quadrants to better fight the unmentionables). These plot aspects are draped around Austen's plot in utterly silly ways. And hey, silly is OK. I liked it. If it brings readers even one step closer to appreciating Austen or voluntarily (Jake Shapiro) reading her books, I'm even more tickled.


SIDEBAR: Me and Austen

Books: My Life

     I knew I was supposed to like Austen, like I was supposed to like Dickens and James Joyce and Fielding, and so on. To be a proper English major, I must like them, to outstrip my high school friends in literariness, I must read them. But I just couldn't get Austen. It was so damned wordy! So polite! These books were politely written even when describing hideous social faux pas, wrongs, and sillinesses. I cleaned house for a professor while I was in college and one day she gave me a set of seven Austen novels and I took them gladly, if only for their symbolism.
     In the summer of 1980 (oh, those were halcyon days--NOT!) I went to England. And when I got home, I got Austen. I loved it. I dusted off the seven Austen novels and devoured them as eagerly as any zombie goes for brains; I redeemed those books from mere symbolism and they took on an amazing life in my life. And those books were no cauliflower (which zombies mistake for brains)! They were the real thing. Suddenly, the gorgeousness of Austen's writing shone through; her grammar, her perfect word choices.

Holden Caulfield (not cauliflower),
one artist's vision

    I think now that certain brain development (brains again!) and education needs to happen before a reader can appreciate certain literature. I see all the time that students are assigned literature to read that they cannot under any circumstances understand or appreciate. And you can see the fire light when a reader gets the right thing at the right time--like me reading Catcher in the Rye in 11th grade. As I consumed the book it also consumed me. I was irrevocably altered.
     One of the delights of the Eager Readers list I am working on reading is that I have revisited books that I read before I was ready. Dickens. I would've missed him but for this reading project. He's the best gift I've gotten. Rereading all of Austen was also an amazing pleasure. Neither of these authors ever intended for their audiences to be schoolchildren. These are adult works with amazing brilliance and scope. Coming to them as a mature reader and writer I again consume and I am again consumed. Wonderful! Very zombie of me.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

"They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? Is he in hell, that demmed illusive pimpernel?" This silly verse sums up the plot of The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, pretty well. Our hero, Percy Blakeney, well known as a fashionable but feather-headed fop, leads a double life. In public he is more concerned about the cut of his coat than about current events like the French Revolution. In secret, he is the daring Scarlet Pimpernel, the dashing hero who uses guile and disguise to rescue French aristocrats doomed to the guillotine and magic them to safety in England. Parallel to this adventure story is a romance. Percy has fallen in love with a French plebian and weds her. But he does not trust her and persists in playing the fool in her presence.

The Scarlet Pimpernel in disguise.

          Much confusion in identity and motivation occur. Lady Blakeney is blackmailed and bullied by the atrocious representative of the Revolution, Chauvelin. I loved this book's fast pace. One confusion is heaped upon another. Each solution seems to bring its own problems. Will true love win out? Will the Scarlet Pimpernel be exposed? Who will betray whom? My attention was captured and held even though I have seen two or three movie versions of this story and read the book several years ago.
          The Scarlet Pimpernel seems to lay the template for a sub-genre of romance called the Regency novel, which is traditionally set between 1800 and 1820 and plays off the conventions of Jane Austen's books. The romances take place against the backdrop of the lives of the upper class--the bon ton. Balls, banquets, horse-action, spying. Extreme propriety of manners. See the bulleted list in the Wikipedia entry for Regency romance for a more complete list of typical features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_romance. The article does not mention Baroness Orczy as an early Regency writer, and this book is set in 1792--a bit early for the Regency period. I think a good case could be made, however, for including her in the genesis of the genre.

Anthony Andrews as
the Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)

          The Scarlet Pimpernel was originally a play, and I think the wonderful pacing of the book can be attributed to its need to leap over narrative and get right to the action. The chapters are self-contained and all of them are 8-10 pages long. The publishers delightfully started every chapter on a right-hand (recto) page; there was often an empty page on the left. I like these little pauses. They reminded me of scene changes in a play.

Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes) as
the Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)

          Maybe its status as a play explains why this book translates so well to the screen--big and small. My favorite Percy Blakeney is played by Anthony Andrews in a 1982 television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Andrews was wonderful--he maintained an intensity behind the foppishness. And he looks like the character as he is described in the book--fair haired and just too beautiful. And Andrews plays the fop part to the maximum--he is very funny and annoying. In the book, however, Percy is a big man--tall and muscular; Anthony Andrews, as witnessed in the famous bare-ass scene in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited, is small-framed (and small butted). Andrews works with his stature, making Blakeney as light and airy as his bubble-brained persona. The other famous Pimpernel is Leslie Howard (1934), who is a bit severe and pointy-chinned for my taste.
          Both movies feature excellent casts. Jane Seymour plays the beautiful but possibly deceitful Marguerite St. Just in the 1982 production--a role that seemed written just for her (and her hair!). The evil (and a bit stupid) Chauvelin is played by Ian McKellan, of all people, and he is marvelous. You wouldn't see Gandalf in his future from this production. In the 1934 production, Marguerite is delectably played by Merle Oberon and Raymond Massey plays Chauvelin.
          My reading of this book was greatly enhanced by the large amount of 19th century literature I have read from my children's literature list. Austen, Dickens, Dumas. Even Twain! Each of them brought me new understanding and historical perspective on the period during and immediately after the French Revolution. My general knowledge of history and literature has continued to grow, which is a nice thing. I brought a lot more to the book this time than when I read it in my early twenties.
          I recommend this book for a bit of fun. Not all reading has to be serious, socially relevant, or challenging. And go ahead, Netflix the 1934 and 1982 movies. You won't regret it.


Sidebar: The Scarlet Pimpernel (flower)

Percy Blakeney uses a common flower, the scarlet pimpernel, as his emblem. This flower (scientific name Anagallis arvensis) grows freely in England and the United States, with many stems falling across the ground bearing brown-red flowers in loose clusters. Whenever the Scarlet Pimpernel rescues an aristocrat from the guillotine, he manages to slip a piece of paper in Chauvelin's pocket that bears an imprint of the flower. In the 1982 movie, the scene during which one character discovers the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel is filled with images of the flower. It's nicely done.


Sidebar: Anthony Andrews

Jeremy Irons (left) and Anthony Andrews (right)
in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited

Anthony Andrews is most famous for playing yet another featherweight aristocratic character--Lord Sebastian Flyte in the BBC production of Brideshead Revisited (1981). Although on the surface the characters have much in common, they are distinct in that Sebastian is based on a total absence of confidence and Sir Percy is based on a total presence of confidence. One thing is certain, however: Anthony Andrews looks great in his clothing. Sebastian and Percy are both lavishly costumed and housed. Extravagance is theirs to command. The paths they take with it are an interesting comparison. Percy Blakeney, certainly, uses his wealth and position to rescue people from certain (and for the most part undeserved) beheading. In the end, Sebastian, too, turns to service as a source of meaning, taking care of his lover like a house servant instead of a lord. Thanks, Anthony Andrews, for being magnificent in both of these roles.(And, no, I could not find a still of the naked-behinds scene that shocked us so in 1981.)