books – Page 7 – The Constant Harper

Yankee Go Home

(The following is an excerpt from my work in progress “Not From Around Here.”)

People who speak wistfully about the innocent pleasures of childhood give me a pain. Were these people never children? Did they never have to go out onto a public school playground during that hellish free-for-all called recess?

I have to assume that the law of averages applies to childhood experiences. Thus I can accept that for a certain percentage of the population the years between five and twelve offered carefree delights that vanished once the teen age began. But I never felt at ease in the company of other children. They’re so irrational. So unpredictable. So moody.

I certainly was anyway. I entered first grade in Falls Church, Virginia, shortly after we had moved from Pennsylvania, where we had been living for one year while my father tried to pass the bar there. When he failed, we returned to Virginia, where he went to law school at UVA on the GI Bill. In Falls Church we lived in one of those “Wonder Years” kind of neighborhoods. Small one-story houses with three tiny bedrooms on small lots. Everyone had kids. The fathers went to work. The mothers stayed home and did laundry, cooked and, in some cases, counted the hours until cocktail time. The televisions were housed in cabinets and the screen was small and circular, and there wasn’t much on aside from the Walt Disney show and Ed Sullivan. At five o’clock every day all the kids whose families had TVs ran home to watch the Mickey Mouse Club. I envied Annette Funicello with her beautiful wavy hair and perfect smile.

By the time we moved there I had gained a couple more brothers, so we all shared rooms. But when my older brother and I started school, he quickly distanced himself from me; he could sense my nerd cooties emanating like some radioactive force field. I walked to school alone, whistling show tunes. In those days there were no ‘gifted and talented’ programs. If you were a kid who demonstrated skills beyond those of the rest of the class, they might suggest to your parents that you skip a grade. But the schools worried that children who moved away from their peers would fail to adjust socially. So they left me in first grade, where I had to steel myself to listen to dozens of my classmates stumbling courageously through sentences like: “See Jane run. Look at Dick. Jane knows Dick.” Yeah. If I hadn’t been a snide little bitch-in-training before public school first grade, I sure as hell soared to the head of that class.

As any geek who has survived public school can tell you, kids are savages, and the process of blunting their claws and muting their shrieks is not for the faint of heart. The teachers loved me, of course, at first. But that only made things worse for me with the squirming masses who saw in my innocent brown eyes and baby soft blonde hair a perfect target for ridicule. And, admittedly, I was, and for most of my life have been, gullible as hell. My brothers never tired of teasing me to the point of tears and beyond. Until the year when, in a flash of focused rage, I lashed out at one of my younger brothers and broke his arm with a single blow. I felt terrible about it immediately afterward, but the event did realign the course of our later friendship, as if I’d passed some unspoken test and proven myself not guilty of total wimpdom.

However, that watershed event hadn’t taken place yet when I first had to endure the rigors of recess in Virginia. At first, slinking out into the brisk sunshine of September on the bare asphalt playground, I looked around for some group of likely shields, a knot of girls perhaps, or, failing that, some chubby boy with glasses. The old safety in numbers concept is embedded deep in the human psyche; sheep gravitate to other sheep.

Unfortunately, the same group-think applies to the wolves. As I stood there trying to work up the nerve to approach a cluster of girls in poodle skirts and crinoline, a loud boy with the musculature of a future footballer and a glint in his eye that would make him a standout in any police line-up ran into me, and as I was regaining my balance he looked down at me as if just noticing I was there and said, “Are you a Rebel or a Yank?”

I stared at him. I had no idea what he was talking about. During my kindergarten year in Pennsylvania we had covered letters, numbers, primary colors and learned to sing “My Country T’is of Thee” but no mention of Rebels or Yanks had been made.

“What?” I responded.

The boy narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down, from saddle shoes to plaid skirt and white cotton shirt with suspenders. “Yer not from around here, are ya?” he said accusingly.

I told him we’d just moved to Virginia.

“Where you from?” he demanded.

“Erie,” I said, my lips barely moving.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“Pennsylvania,” I said.

“Hah!” he barked. “I knew it. Yer a Yankee. A damn Yankee.” He reached out and shoved me, not hard, but enough to let me know that whatever a Yankee was, he wanted nothing to do with it. He ran back to his fellow hooligans, and I could see them hooting and pointing at me, as I stood alone, feeling, I imagine, as a gazelle on the African plains must feel when it notices the rest of the herd edging away and the jackals circling.

I waited until I got home that day to ask my father about the difference between Yankees and Rebels, and my father, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, told me that the Rebels wanted to keep slaves and the Yankees fought to free them. Simple as that. No gray areas, no muddling the debate with sophistry about state’s rights or Southern hospitality. Good old right and wrong, my Dad’s strong suit. He never wavered when it came to the fundamental divide. All his life he struggled with doubts about religion and politics and women, but he never doubted his instinctive grasp of justice. Whether or not he was actually right is, as they say, another story.

But as a child, up until the Nixon-Kennedy debates, I accepted my Dad’s views pretty much without a qualm. I loved my Dad. He was a good man. Ergo, what he said was true.

Armed with this conviction I returned to school and hoped that the issue would not come up again, but if it did, I was prepared to have a dialogue with my inquisitors and set them straight as to the error of their ways. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. What a ninny. Yet, you see, this is what I mean by the earlier assertion that I was never a whiz kid. People then, and now, assume that if you can read early, and you continue to read often, that you must, perforce, be acquiring some sort of smarts in the process. And, to a certain extent, this can be true, if you embark on a course of directed reading with someone knowledgeable, say, a college professor, or perhaps a talk show host – just kidding – guiding your analysis of the texts. However, mere reading alone is not a guaranteed path to wisdom, particularly if all you read is fiction.

Even as a child my passion for imaginary stories far surpassed any interest I had in history, math, geography, etc. However, that first year in public school in Virginia forced me to embrace a previously unknown field of writing. I became a philosopher. It may have been dormant in my crabby baby years, but it really got traction on the playgrounds of Westlawn Elementary, where for several years I endured hours of bullying torment and scathing social ostracism because I wouldn’t back down from my pride in being a Yankee.

This only got worse by the time I reached fourth grade and the school curriculum began to include months of indoctrination into the Southern view of what they like to call The War Between the States, which had, according to our textbooks, nothing to do with slavery, but revolved solely around issues of states’ right to do as they pleased without interference from some know-it-all federal government who only wanted to fund their own fancy lifestyle with taxes squeezed from honest Southern farmers.

In the first years of my schooling in Virginia, this view remained almost unchanged from textbook to textbook until in the early 1960s when the Civil Rights movement finally began to make some progress. When I started as a freshman in high school in Fairfax there were no black students in a school with three thousand students. The next year we had half a dozen. They were from around there, but I suspect in that school they felt farther from home than I did.

Honk If You Love Books

Not everyone does, you know.

If you believe the statistics commonly tossed around on the Internet, 80 percent of Americans didn’t read or buy a book last year.

Yet at the same time, the statistic munchers also assert that 80 percent of Americans claim they’d like to write a book. Picture the Venn diagram.

Well, we all know numbers lie. And words can too. But for my money, words deceive with more grace and wit and style. Thus, I number myself among the 80 percent with authorial ambitions. I’m a consumer of books, a lifelong lover of libraries and a connoisseur of book stores.

If you like bookstores, you’ll love Powell’s.

We visited Portland for the first time this week. I had a number of touristic objectives. We strolled through the famous Japanese Garden, admired the amazing blooms at the International Rose Test Garden, and marveled at the elegant beauty of Lan Su Yuan, the classical Chinese garden in downtown Portland. We stood in line for Voodoo Doughnuts, savored Stumptown Coffee and took in a Bite of Oregon. We heard some blues, some cool jazz, and a lot of high energy street music.

But of all the pleasures of Portland, the only one that made my heart beat faster was the city within the city: Powell’s City of Books.

I’ve been to The Strand in New York City. I’ve been to Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. I had high hopes that Powell’s would be their equal. It’s more. Much more. It’s a world of wonders, staffed by acolytes of the written word who not only guide customers through the labyrinth of volumes, but also seem to care about books.

Strong free-spirited independent book stores are a dying breed in this country. Portland is blessed to have Powell’s. Visit if you can.

Loosly Blonde

When you are a girl like I it seems very important to get educated. Because there is a lot to learn, such as French, which is very hard because it seems only French gentlemen speak it and they are very hard to understand for a girl like I. So I am always interested in books because you can learn a lot just by reading them and not have to listen to any French gentlemen.

So yesterday my girlfriend Gladys and I went shopping and we went into a delightful store which had lots of books and one of them was called “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and it was only two dollars which is quite a bargain because it turned out to be two books inside of one. And the really intreeging thing is that I learned they are both by the same arthur who is a lady named Anita Loos.

So I thought this would be a really interesting book for a girl like I because I was blonde for many years and it always seemed that gentlemen were preferring me quite a lot. But it turns out the book is not really about hair but is all about a very refined girl like I who likes to go shopping and drink champagne with gentlemen who buy diamond tiaras for girls like I.

But I was surprised to learn that the book is an anteek, because it was written in 1925, which was before I was even born blonde. Usually anteeks cost ever so much money, which always seems strange to a girl like I because new things seem so much nicer, but this anteek book was quite a bargain even though I have not learned any French from it yet. But maybe that will happen in the second book, which is called “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes” and is a sort of seequell, which is when more things happen, which it seems to me is very true to life.

And so I wreckommend this book to any girls which are interested in getting educated about how to act refined, even if they are not blonde, because in this life you never know when a tiara might come in handy.

Vampyres-R-US

I had thought I was finished with vampires.

You know how it is. One minute you’re obsessed with the whole ‘creature-of-the-night-immortal-love-hunk’ idea and the next . . . not so much.

And with the plethora of vampire-related novels, television shows, and films glutting the marketplace, it seemed inevitable that the mania for all things fangish would play itself out. And I was fine with that. Until I took one last bite. Now I’m ready for more.

Or rather, Moore, as in Christopher Moore, whose hilariously snarky Bite Me simply won my heart. Yes, it’s wildly inventive, raunchy and irreverent, as are all of Moore’s works. But there’s also a cleverly hidden soft delicious core of sappy goodness that—well, I’m a sucker for sappy goodness, what can I say?

It’s not a book designed to appeal to the masses, which is probably just as well. Nor is it likely to win any awards from highbrow literary types who sneer at pop fiction. But, you know what? There are times when I don’t want to read a book that’s going to break my heart, or completely hammer me with the unrelenting misery of much of the world. Yeah, I know it all needs to be fixed. But every now and then, we who hope to make things better need a break from all the angst and anguish. And for that, I’m deeply, truly grateful for Christopher Moore and his brilliant comic gift.

My advice for the world weary? Next time the news makes you want to do something unhealthy, try Bite Me instead. It may surprise you.

What’s News?

The news is old as humankind. It moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to report.

We feed on it, stoke the fires of rumor, inhale the smoke of conjecture. We are a species who thrive on stories. We respond to drama. We want heroes.

For the last few centuries the primary vector of news was paper, but since the advent of the electronic age the medium has undergone a series of rapid changes which for better or for worse have changed, it seems irrevocably, the way in which news is shared.

I am saddened by the diminished power of newspapers in our time. The once great papers of the past are fighting for their economic lives in a world increasingly swayed by the glib sophistry of ranting opinionists on television, radio and internet. Few media outlets have the budget or the time for thoughtful, in-depth analysis anymore. Everyone seems in a race to jump to conclusions, which are refashioned daily, sometimes hourly, depending on the pace of events.

Such flexibility has its virtues. But on the whole, the credibility of the entire news media has been sorely damaged by continuing compromise with economic and social reality. We are no longer a nation of readers, if we ever truly were. A nation of viewers is far more easily misled it seems.

When I was growing up in Northern Virginia I was spoiled by The Washington Post, a great international paper which has somehow managed to survive, so far. To maintain correspondents around the world, on the ground, doing actual reporting, is a luxury few modern papers can afford. Most crib their news from the wire services. They reheat the stories with a slab of opinion, serve them with a side of “who cares, it’s not happening here,” and get on with the important news of what happened at the local school board meeting last night. Because, the truth is, for most of us, the news that matters most is the news that hits home. In our schools, on our streets, in our communities.

I learned this when I worked at a small local newspaper in Warrenton, Virginia, where I had the good fortune to see how much work it takes to provide news coverage that was honestly fair and balanced (as opposed to the much-touted and completely bogus “fair and balanced” product so widely dispersed these days). The Fauquier Citizen was an independent newspaper in a county where the leading news source was firmly in the pocket, and lining the pockets, of the old money, who wanted the news, and the county, to stay just the way it had always been, since before the Civil War.

The rivalry was intense between the newspapers, and competition lent zest to our quiet little rural life. But, eventually, after some fifteen years, The Citizen packed up its tents and closed its doors, following the route of hundreds of small independent papers around the nation in the last twenty years.

It saddens me to think there will come a day when no news will be printed on paper. And not just because I will miss all the little things about newspapers, although I will – the sounds alone – the slap of the daily hitting the porch, the rustle of pages over coffee, the snap and crackle of folded sections.

Yet a newspaper is so much more than an information delivery system. A newspaper organization is an ecosystem. An endangered one.

I just read a wonderful book called The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman about one such marvelously complex and perilously fragile newspaper organization. Rachman, a former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press stationed in Rome, also worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and his familiarity with the drama, the dark humor and the human foibles that make newspaper work so maddening and yet so addictive lends authority to the novel. Covering a hundred year period in a series of interelated stories, the novel builds a brilliant portrait of the intricate organism that is a newspaper. The writing is crisp, evocative, moving and even funny at times.

But, ultimately it’s an obituary, mourning and celebrating the extraordinary life of a newspaper. We who have known them must count ourselves lucky.

The Dragons of Summer

Summer’s almost here. The ice cream truck has already made a few tentative sweeps of the neighborhood, tootling its signature “Bicycle Built For Two” theme song. Lawn chairs have been wiped free of spiders, and umbrellas lowered to half mast. Any day now the rains will taper off and the glorious Seattle sunshine will triumph over the gray sky for a few blissful months.

Many people choose summer as a time to travel, to leave home and see exotic new lands. But it’s hard to leave Seattle in the summer, when for two straight months it’s a non-stop hiking, biking, sailing, gardening, ball playing, fireworks dazzling, festival dancing in the street kind of place. The sun comes up around four a.m. and the sky stays light until ten. You have to pace yourself so that you don’t burn out by two in the afternoon. Coffee helps. But for me the best strategy to get the most out of the summer marathon is to partake of a shady spot and a good book midway through the long afternoons.

Currently I’m savoring His Majesty’s Dragon, an exceptional fantasy by Naomi Novik, whose interest in Napoleonic history and experience as a computer programmer working on game design is reflected in the smart plotting and clear vision of her writing. The dragon at the heart of her novel is a fully realized character, and the alternate history in which dragons form an integral part of the military force is brilliantly evoked. I’m so in.

It helps, of course, that the day before I started reading the book I went to see How To Train Your Dragon. The bulk of the matinee audience was made up of fidgeting four-year-olds, a few parents, and a handful of college-age dragon enthusiasts. And then there was me – absolutely mesmerized from start to finish. And not just by the dragon, who is as cute as a kitten, if a kitten were the size of a seaplane. What keeps HTTYD in the air is the snarky humor, the sleight of hand plot exposition, and a core of timeless themes – the tension between father and son, the desire to fit in, to stand out, to find love/acceptance, etc. Yeah. I liked it. It’s a kids’ movie and I liked it. So there.

The common denominator in Novik’s dragon series and the animated film is that the dragons conflate expectations. By avoiding the pitfalls of conventional conceptions of dragons as mere one-dimensional fire-breathing monsters, the author and filmmakers succeed in making dragons heroic. And that’s what I’m looking for these days. The world seems all too well supplied with real monsters. It’s hard to get away from them.

This summer, when I want relief, I’ll take dragons.

Spill and Spoil

Humans are a fun-loving species.

We’re born to mock. It’s in our DNA.We can even laugh when the joke’s on us, though of course, it’s always funnier when someone else slips on the banana peel.

A certain school of humor is rooted in humankind’s blithe self-assurance, as evidenced in the frequent Internet “Fixed It!” mailings, which feature hilarious photos from the duct tape and paper-clip school of do-it-yourself repair.

But when the leak to be repaired is a mile deep under turbulent seawater, the logistics are a bit daunting.

Today is May Day, a date synonymous with danger, and in the Gulf of Mexico another 200,000 gallons of oil will seep out into the water from the wreckage of the British Petroleum oil drilling facility Deepwater Horizon, which exploded on April 20. Another day, another environmental disaster.

When I first heard the expression “It’s Earth’s immune system kicking in,” it was spoken by Kurt Vonnegut, appearing as a guest on “The Daily Show”. He was talking about global warming. At the time I thought the legendary satirist had coined the phrase, but since then I’ve learned that author/environmental visionary Paul Hawken popularized the phrase in his 2008 book, “The Eleventh Hour.” The phrase exemplifies the human inclination to try to make a joke out of unpleasant facts.

Even the most obstinate ostrich can’t fail to have noticed the earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, even, which seem to be getting bigger, deadlier and more frequent each year. Whether you view these events as part of the normal give-and-take of the natural world, or as the inevitable consequence of human impact on the environment, or the wrath of the god of your choice, it’s getting harder to avoid acknowledging what Al Gore in his landmark book called “An Inconvenient Truth.”

This planet is in need of a fix. And duct tape ain’t going to cut it.

The current crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, where 200,000 gallons a day continue to leak into the sea, is a case in point. BP has admitted it has no system in place for dealing with such an accident. They had a cut-off valve. That’s broken. Now what?

Now, thousands of dolphins, pelicans, shrimp, herons, crabs and sea turtles are in grave danger. Now, millions of people in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida who depend on the Gulf for their jobs face yet another hardship in this difficult recession.

At this time there is no solution in sight. The oil will continue to leak and could do so for months, which would put the Deepwater event in the running for the worst oil spill in history — far worse than the headline-grabbing Exxon Valdez accident in 1989. The Valdez spilled a paltry 10.8 million gallons of oil into the Alaskan sea, and killed thousands of birds and fish, along with 2,800 sea otters. Exxon rushed to blame the drunken captain, who was eventually fined $50,000 and given 1,000 hours of community service. Doesn’t that make you feel better? No? How about this: Exxon has been fighting in court ever since to avoid paying any fines or clean-up costs. No doubt they’re counting pennies like the rest of us. Yesterday they reported only a 38 percent profit jump as oil prices leapt in response to the Deepwater mess.

Humans forgive and forget it seems. Few people remember the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, where in June of 1979 the Ixtol 1 leaked 140 million gallons of oil over the course of a year. And even it wasn’t number one on the Spill Spectacular List. That singular dishonor belongs to the June 1991 Persian Gulf War crime in Kuwait, when Saddam Hussein ordered his soldiers to dump 520 million gallons of crude in the sea rather than surrender it to US troops.

But of course, we weren’t fighting for oil. Then.

The pressure to drill in ever more dangerous and environmentally sensitive locations never stops. As recently as last month President Obama agreed to open previously off-limits areas in the Atlantic, Alaskan waters, and the eastern areas of the Gulf of Mexico. If there’s any tarnished silver lining to this whole Deepwater fiasco it’s that Obama has reversed his decision. For now.

But we all know the pressure will build again. An election will up the ante. Slogan slingers will reload and fire away.

And we, the people, will watch the oil sludge pile up our beaches. When it does, we’ll make jokes about it. Because that’s what we do.

Exit, laughing.

Write or Wrong

I can’t relate to Kindle.
The iPad leaves me cold.

I understand that the publishing industry is running scared. Fewer people read books these days. Fewer still buy them. Profit margins are shrinking, and publishers are grasping at any device to lure customers away from movies, television, and video games and back to the printed word.

I have friends who adore their high tech gadgets. But I cannot embrace a future without books. And when I say books, I mean the kind with paper pages that whisper softly as you turn them, that get stained but don’t die when you spill coffee on them.

So, being the deluded optimist that I am, after reading in The New Yorker how Apple founder Steve Jobs asserted that forty percent of Americans read only one book or less in the last year, I choose to focus on the positive side of that statistic. Math was never my strong suit, but it seems to me that the other sixty percent must be reading at least one book a year. In fact, according to some sources, the Americans who do read tend to read an average of twenty books a year (http://BookStatistics.com). Not too shabby.

However, we all know that statistics were invented to facilitate obfuscation.
What has me worried is the idea of a future in which children don’t sit in their parents’ laps listening to “Goodnight Moon,” or “Where the Wild Things Are,” but instead watch a video played on a flatscreen mounted in the crib. I suppose that seems fairly harmless to the generation whose children have grown up watching videos in the family SUV.

Of course sci-fi writers have been painting ominous pictures of dystopian futures for some time, but the disturbing truth is that reality has a way of outdoing fiction for flat-out bizarre terror. I recently read a deeply disturbing yet brilliant book about an all-too possible future where the kind of non-stop video and internet info-slush-pile no longer takes place outside the human body in a handheld device. In “feed,” M.T. Anderson’s 2002 prize-winning young adult novel, children are implanted with a transmitter that keeps them continually updated, connected and marketed to in a world which has become toxic through pollution and corporate over-reaching. In the context of Anderson’s imaginative vision, the notion of reading a hand-held book seems laughably out-dated. But the chilling message of “feed” reveals the danger of surrendering our autonomy to giant powers outside ourselves, who decide what stories will be told, and how.

Stories have power. Every religion is founded on a story. Something precious is lost when we lose our ability to give and receive the spoken and written word. I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with the iPad and the Kindle and the Nook, and whatever comes after them. But I hope in our rush to “improve” the technology of the book we don’t lose sight of what really matters.

Written books are the notes we pass in the classroom of human history. Pssst. Pass it on.

The Big Tease

They’re doing it again.

Up there in Skagit Valley, where the land flattens out for miles and the snow geese arrive in feathered clouds each spring, the tulips are tempting.

I succumbed to the call when I first moved to Seattle four years ago. I thought what could be more thrilling than acres and acres of tulips in bloom?

I can laugh about it now.

Veterans of the Pacific Northwest know all too well that only an idiot would expect to tiptoe through the tulips in early April, when the annual Skagit County Tulip Festival gets underway. The sadder but wiser tulip enthusiast wears full-body Gore-Tex and carries a sturdy full-size umbrella. For, although it is true that when the tulips bloom, the fields light up, it is also true that the sun is under no obligation to make an appearance.

The year I went, the temperatures were hovering in the low forties, wind gusts were in the teens, and a bracing drizzle completed the ensemble. Before I’d managed to shoot my compulsory two dozen snapshots, my nose was red, my lips were blue, and my teeth were chattering. Good times.

I’ll always remember that day for another reason, too. When I got home with my frozen feet and chapped face, I was drinking a restorative cup of cocoa when I opened my email and found a gushing note from my then-publisher, who was halfway through reading my second novel and loving it. She assured me she would be contacting me soon and that I could “expect good news.”

Hah, hah. Yes. I can laugh about it now.

Still, I’m glad I went to the tulip festival, if only because now each year when the forecasters begin the tulip drum roll, I don’t feel the urgency to salute. Been there, survived that. I’d do it again. Probably not this year, though. After we had the warmest January on record it seems we shot our wad for warmth. Since then it’s been back to the good old forty degrees with intermittent showers that we all know and love so well. It’s not so bad as long as you can find a nice warm bookstore or cafe to while away the wet hours. And of course it makes it easier to stay inside at one’s desk and work on that next novel. The one that’s sure to find a loving home somewhere.

The sun will come out eventually. I’m still expecting good news.

The Beauty in The Beast

The spirit of the wolf lives on in every dog.

Beasts: how we love them. Love to fear them. Love to hate them. Love to hunt them. Love to tell tales about them.

Since before the dawn of printed words, stories of wild animals whose actions blur the line between species have fascinated humans. To talk to the animals, to know what they think and feel, remains a subject of vivid interest. And of all animals, dogs have shown the greatest ability, and desire, to bond with humans, to serve, follow, and work for them. But . . . inside every dog, from the tiniest Chihuahua to the burliest mastiff, lurks genetic memory code of its ancestry — the wolf. Not exactly man’s best friend.

The romance of this idea has been exploited for centuries. And while modern teenagers may think, judging by some of the gushing postings on the web, that werewolves were reinvented solely by the author of the “Twilight” series, the truth is more complicated. The concept of the man/wolf, or the beast within us all, has been the subject and/or inspiration of many imaginative works, both literary and cinematic. When the “Twilight” generation were still wearing Pampers, Jack Nicholson astounded audiences in 1994 with his riveting portrayal in “Wolf.” One of the things that made Nicholson’s performance so impressive was that his convincing transformation from man to wolf was produced without the aid of digital enhancements or fake fur. It was all in the eyes, the attitude, the snarl.

Last week Benicio Del Toro joined the ranks of fine actors who have taken a walk on the wolf side in the new film, “The Wolfman.” It’s a grittier rendition than, say, Hugh Jackman’s pimped-out Wolverine character in the X-Men movies. But that’s part of what makes the genre entertaining. In literature and film, you really can teach a dog new tricks.

In Toby Barlow’s brilliant 2007 debut novel “Sharp Teeth” the myth of the lycanthrope is given a terrific noir spin. Set in modern LA, with a cast of characters that include a down on his luck dogcatcher, some female werewolves with sharp teeth of their own, and some competitive bridge players with more than cards up their sleeves, the story deals with issues of loyalty, justice, compassion and community without ever slipping into sentimentality. And, did I mention the entire thing is written in blank verse? I know. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to hack it. But the clarity and occasional poetic power of the language, the nimble pace, and the fine-edged tone of the whole is such that you forget about the form and get swept away by the wonder of a good story well told.

Allen Ginsberg would have loved it.