Salon's Literary daybook, for August 27 takes aim at the Leatherstocking Tales in mentioning Mark Twain's scathing review titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." While Steve King presents Twain's third rule of romantic fiction, he doesn't mention any of the others nor explain how Cooper violates them. In case you were wondering, here are the 19 rules of romantic fiction as Twain listed them (paraphrased where possible for brevity):

1. A tale shall do something and go somewhere.
2. The episodes given should be necessary and develop the tale.
3. The characters of a tale should be alive unless dead, and means to discriminate between both types shall be provided.
4. The characters - living and dead - shall be there for a reason.
5. Speech should be natural, appropriate, and meaningful. It should be relevant and in proximity to its topic, be interesting, and further the storyline.
6. Characters shall act and speak in accordance with their descriptions. (The protagonist Natty Bumppo, in particular, refuses to obey this maxim.)
7. Twain cannot be paraphrased here: "They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Frendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played on the reader, e.g., "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," etc.
9. Characters shall confine themselves to the possible and eschew the miraculous unless adequate provisions for miracles have been established.
10. The author must lead the reader to empathize with the characters and like the good ones and hate the bad. "But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together."
11. Character behavior should be predictable and plausible with respect to action.

Twain adds 7 more minor rules:

The author shall:

12. Say what he means and not merely approach it.
13. Use the right word, not "its second cousin."
14. "Eschew surplusage."
15. "Not omit necessary details."
16. "Avoid slovenliness of form."
17. "Use good grammar."
18. "Employ a simple and straightforward style."

If you have had the misfortune of being forced to read some of Coopers's racist, sexist, melodramatic drivel you will readily admit that the Leatherstocking Tales regularly and unambiguously violate all of the above principles. Rule 19, by the way, simply states a work contain or be "art" and because some art is atrocious and gawdawful to behold, Cooper gets a grudging pass on this one.

Now, I can't sit here and label Cooper's writing as strongly as I have without backing up the assertion, thus for your agreement I posit a selection from The Deerslayer. In this scene, Natty Bumppo is in the deep woods and has just been shot at by a Native American, who misses his mark and thus condemns us to the following:

Deerslayer knew that his adversary must be employed in reloading, unless he had fled. The former proved to be the case, for the young man had no sooner placed himself behind a tree than he caught a glimpse of the arm of the Indian, his body being concealed by an oak, in the very act of forcing the leathered bullet home. Nothing would have been easier than to spring forward and decide the affair by a close assault on his unprepared foe; but every feeling of Deerslayer revolted at such a step, although his own life had just been attempted from a cover. He was yet unpractised in the ruthless expedients of savage warfare, of which he knew nothing except by tradition and theory, and it struck him as an unfair advantage to assail an unarmed foe. His color had heightened, his eye frowned, his lips were compressed, and all his energies were collected and ready; but, instead of advancing to fire, he dropped his rifle to the usual position of a sportsman in readiness to catch his aim, and muttered to himself, unconscious that he was speaking:

"No, no - that may be red-skin warfare, but it's not a Christian's gifts. Let the miscreant charge, and then we'll take it out like men... No, no; let him have time to load, and God will take care of the right!"

12:30:46 PM       

Did you hear about the plight of the New York poor who are being warehoused in a former prison called The River? Although NPR gave it a quick mention last week, I didn't see any follow up. Mayor Bloomberg, who probably considers "conservation" to mean wearing an Armani suit twice before tossing it out, is apparently just fine with placing 200 families a night in an abandoned facility that sounds grimly Dickensian. Families interviewed speak of "cells with windows nailed shut, tiny beds and the stench of ammonia and urine." The homeless deserve a better shake than this:

Officials said they have tried to make the prison look a bit homey. They've built walls, hung shower curtains and installed a few fans. But the doors are locked until 8 a.m.

Outside the brick homeless office in the Bronx, a toddler threw a tantrum, a rail-thin woman vomited and a homeless woman ate an orange and wept. A night in prison had offered them no rest.

Light Reading

Y'know, an educated voter is a Good Thing. We want those who go to the polls to have a solid grasp of the issues and a fairly accurate sense of where candidates for office stand on those matters. Well, they sure feel that way in the Bay Area. San Francisco's Nov. 5 voter handbook is predicted to hit some 350 pages in length. This makes it "just a tad shorter than the Sacramento White Pages." And probably not quite as interesting.

"It's a little bit scary, overwhelming," said Sarah Diefendorf, co-president of the San Francisco League of Women Voters.

8:01:58 AM