Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

In February 1882, devious showman P. T. Barnum purchased Jumbo the Elephant from London Zoo in England. The rest of Jumbo's career would resemble the fall of a self-destructive rockstar. Born around Christmas of 1860, in Sudan, the African bush elephant was captured as a calf. He likely took his name from the local port of Jumbo, which he may have been shipped through to the Paris zoo, Jardin des Plantes. From there, he ended up at the London Zoo and became a star of the British Empire and a darling of Queen Victoria. He traveled the world and grew to a remarkable height of 10' 7". But tragedy struck. One day, Jumbo suffered a seizure and snapped off his tusks on a wall of oak while in convulsions. The incident left Jumbo with a permanently abscessed upper lip. Which caused his tusks to grow in crooked the rest of his life. Tusks are upper incisors, essentially teeth, so Jumbo was consistently in pain and acting erratically. His peculiar behavior, tusks, and size flashed dollar signs in Barnum's eyes.
 

The London Zoo controversially sold Jumbo to Barnum after the elephant developed a dangerous temper. Barnum wasn't concerned about it; he knew that investing in an international star was sure to have returns. So life grew a lot more complicated for Jumbo. His bouts of anger continued, not only due to his abcessed lip but also the loss of his old caretakers. Barnum assuaged the elephant by letting him knock back bottles of champagne or whiskey. Jumbo's fall into alcoholism was swift and his favorite food became biscuits soaked in whiskey. A peaceful drunk, he headlined shows at Madison Square Garden and the Brooklyn Bridge, quickly recuperating Barnum's investment. Then his pain was cut short. On September 15, 1885, at a railway yard in St. Thomas, Ontario, Jumbo noticed his tiny clown elephant co-star, Tom Thumb, was strolling on the train tracks. As Jumbo, possibly drunk, struggled to budge Tom Thumb from the path of danger, both were struck by a locomotive. Some sources say Tom Thumb survived, but Jumbo was killed. An autopsy revealed keys, rivets, various English coins and a police whistle in his stomach. Today, Jumbo's sad story endures and feeds the animal activist movement. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus no longer uses elephants in its shows. It's the right call. If all the mentions of Jumbo as an elephant were left from his tale, I'd have thought I was following the life of a human being.
 

Image credit & copyright: Tufts University
 

One could easily argue that children’s authors are as powerful as superheroes, but have even more responsibility. After all, they influence how generations of children grow up! Never was this truer than in the case of beloved American children’s author Beverly Cleary, who passed away last month at age 104. Cleary used two simple tools to create her timeless characters: her own childhood memories and the advice of children.
 

Although Cleary loved to read and write, she had a difficult time finding stories about average American children. “I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school,” Cleary told NPR in a 1999 interview. “And in my childhood, many years ago, children's books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. And that wasn't what I wanted to read.” Cleary published her first book, Henry Huggins, in 1950. Henry was an ordinary boy from Oregon who got into funny situations with neighboring children and his dog, Ribsy. The book also introduced a character who would go on to be Cleary’s most famous: Henry’s neighbor, Ramona Quimby. Ramona’s scrappy, mischievous nature, as well as many of her adventures, were based on memories from Cleary’s own childhood. Neither a model of perfect femininity nor a one-to-one stand-in for a male character, Ramona had a lovable quality all her own, which resonated with young female readers.
 

Cleary’s habit of listening to her young fans and changing with the times paid off, throughout her career. During the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s, Cleary began integrating working mothers into her stories. In 1982, Cleary received letters from children asking if she could write a story about divorced parents. In response, she published Dear Mr. Henshaw, about a young boy struggling with his parents’ divorce. In 1984, it was awarded the John Newbery Medal. When asked how her books managed to stay relevant from the 1950s into the internet age, Cleary told the Atlantic, “I think it is because I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don't think children's inner feelings have changed.” If the current popularity of Cleary’s work is any indication, her legacy will continue to inspire children well into the future.

 
[Image description: Author Beverly Cleary sits, smiling, in a room beside a table lamp, with flowers in the foreground. ] Credit & copyright: Peter DaSilva

 
Written by: Maria C.

Friday the 13th? That's child's play when it comes to actual bad luck days. On her album release of Time (The Revelator) (2001), alt-country singer Gillian Welch crowned April 14th "Ruination Day" in America, and with good historical support for her claim. The earliest date mentioned in Welch's song Ruination Day (Part II) is April 14, 1865: that evening, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater while watching Our American Cousin. The second April 14th tragedy occurred in 1912 when the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, and some 1,500 people died in the freezing North Atlantic waters. The third and final date was April 14, 1935, when the "black blizzards" of dust reached the droughted southern plains states, causing the Associated Press to coin the term "Dust Bowl."
 

Welch took musical inspiration for Ruination Day from the works of folk singer Woody Guthrie and bluesman "Blind" Willie Johnson—though one doesn't have to dig into the lore of 20th century folk music to get a handle on how bad the middle of April is in U.S. history. A 2014 Vice article highlighted some of the worst American tragedies that happened not only on April 14th, but the third week of April, and they're a doozy: the devastating 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906, the Oklahoma City bombing occurred April 19, 1995, and the Columbine massacre in Colorado happened on April 20, 1999.
 

So what's with all the bad luck and trouble in April? In the northern hemisphere, there is evidence that warming temperatures have some correlation with rises in crime rates, but causation hasn't been scientifically determined in such studies. Or maybe there's something to the T.S. Eliot quote from "The Wasteland" that "April is the cruelest month." Barring natural disasters or an anachronistic rise in unsinkable boat-theories, April 2021 is looking to be a transitory time at the end of covid rather than a tragic one. Let's remember to stay safe, follow CDC guidelines, and thank the artists who's creative works have kept us entertained and intrigued during these trying times.

 

Below: Ruination Day (Part II) by Gillian Welch.
 

[Image description: The bow of the sunken Titanic. Located 370 south-southeast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean.] Credit & copyright: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2004.

 
Written by: Esther P.

It takes quite an author to successfully release a novel about travel during lockdown! Then again, bestselling Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee is known for his bold writing choices. Unlike the dystopian novel Lee released in 2014, My Year Abroad, released February 2, 2021, is so optimistic that the New York Times Book Review called it “a manifesto to happiness.”
 

Born July 29, 1965, in South Korea, Lee’s family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old. Although he earned a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1987, it wasn’t immediately clear to Lee or his family if he would choose to write professionally. In fact, following his graduation, he took a job on Wall Street as an equities analyst. It wasn’t until a year later that Lee decided the finance world wasn’t for him, and began working toward his Masters of Fine Arts degree in writing at the University of Oregon. The manuscript he’d been writing in his spare time became his thesis, and would eventually transform into his first novel, Native Speaker, in 1995. Realizing his passion for teaching, Lee became an assistant professor of creative writing at the very university he’d just graduated from. Over the following years, Lee would hold teaching positions at several universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
 

Lee’s novels often explore issues of identity and belonging, especially relating to the experiences of Asian-Americans. Lee’s first book, Native Speaker, focuses on the internal struggle of a young Korean-American man who is hired to ruin the reputation of a Korean-American politician in New York City. In A Gesture Life, released in 1999, an ethnically-Korean man, who was adopted by a Japanese family and served in the Japanese army, deals with haunting memories and struggles to break out of his routine in order to reconnect with his estranged adopted daughter. 2004’s Aloft features Lee’s first non-Asian-American protagonist, an Italian-American retiree who is forced to grapple with the fact that his life and family aren’t as perfect as he had always supposed. Lee’s 2011 novel The Surrendered, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of three characters who survived the Korean war and are reunited years later. On Such a Full Sea, published in 2014, takes place in a dystopian future-Baltimore. It’s Chinese-American protagonist works a dangerous job as a diver at a fish farm.
 

While many of Lee’s books focus on older characters, 2021’s My Year Abroad stars a young college student named Tiller, who describes himself as “twelve and one-half percent Asian.” Unlike the older, world-weary protagonists of Lee’s most famous novels, Tiller is portrayed as ordinary and relatively unremarkable. However, when Chinese-American business mogul Pong Lou brings Tiller along on a trip across Asia, a range of wild experiences open Tiller’s eyes to the wider world. Tiller also finds that, although his ethnicity causes him some difficulty fitting in, in the U.S., he is also considered foreign in Asia, leading him to question where he truly belongs. In an interview with NPR, Lee described My Year Abroad as a subversion of the typical American story, where a white protagonist travels abroad to expand their horizons. “We all know that story, of course. And it's essentially a colonial story. And I think we're all done with that story. And what we want is to find out a little bit more about ourselves, as we always do, as peoples everywhere do. But the ways in which we get that story isn't as easy and simple as it's been told to us before,” he explained.
 

My Year Abroad has already garnered praise from critics, many of whom see the novel as a lampooning of capitalism as well as an exploration of identity. As Tiller faces increasingly bizarre situations on his trip, sometimes fueled by expensive alcohol or drugs, the novel makes it clear that luxuries don’t always equate to a great time, and there is such a thing as too much excess. Readers who have been stuck at home for the past year, however, may well find My Year Abroad's wacky misadventures in far-flung locales a welcome break from the COVID-19 blues.

 
[Image description: Author Chang-rae Lee, wearing a blue shirt, sits at a table in an otherwise empty library.] Credit & copyright: Penguin Random House

 
Written by: Maria C.