Fiendish Books!

Thanks to Fiend for her holiday generosity! Three books, three well-chosen books which I enjoyed immensely.

Playing with Trains, by Sam Posey. A memoir of one man's experiences with model railroading. Posey describes both his own experience in constructing a model railroad (with some help) and the different reasons that people -- mostly men -- become obsessed with such an odd hobby. Along the way, he interviews modelers with wildly different approaches and wildly different layouts. His old schoolteacher loves busy, busy Lionel layouts crowded to a circus-like degree with action figures and accessories. Meanwhile, out in the New Mexico desert, artist Malcolm Furlow constructs wild, phantasmagorical landscapes that resemble hallucinogenic impressions of the mythic Old West more than they resemble actual railroads. Elsewhere Bob Hayden and Dave Frary build layouts tailored for photography; George Sellios reconstructs the towering city buildings and grimy streets of the 1930s in painstaking detail; and Model Railroading editor Tony Koester and his buttoned-down cohort meticulously research their favorite historical railroads in order to recreate them in faithful miniature and operate them according to prototypical rules.

Proving, I suppose, that model railroading is not just a hobby; it's as many different kinds of hobbies as there are model railroaders.

Most amusing -- if logically dubious -- observation from the book:

Not only are trains for men, it seems that among modelers at the top level they may be only for men who are the oldest (or only) sons in their family. Incredibly, Tony Koester, Jim Hediger, John Pryke, Malcolm Furlow, Bob Hayden, Dave Frary, and George Sellios were all oldest boys -- that is, seven out of seven of the big-time modelers I visited.... This is because if the dad likes trains himself, he bought them at the first appropriate moment for, naturally, his oldest son....

The other startling commonality among the top modelers I met is that they have beards! Forget my friend's thought that the world of model railroading is populated by geeks or nerds -- it's a world of the hirsute. John, Malcolm, Bob, and Dave have beards, while George has a mustache. Only Tony and Jim are clean-shaven.

The connection between beards and trains is obvious. Consider the front of a steam locomotive. It is strikingly anthropomorphic.... Virtually all steam locomotives have narrow steel ladders, one on each side, that begin at the sides of the big round smokebox (the locomotive's "face") and extend down to the top of the cowcatcher. This combination of ladders and cowcatcher unquestionably resembles a beard.

What a bearded modeler sees when he looks in the mirror each morning is nothing less than a locomotive.

Like I said. Amusing but logically dubious. Now excuse me while I go look into the mirror and make chuffing noises.


Weight, by Jeannette Winterson, and The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood. These two books are parts of the Myths Series, which Atwood, in this essay, describes as "ask[ing] a number of writers from around the world to retell a myth, any myth, each in his or her own way and in his or her own language, at a length of roughly a hundred pages."

(more on these two books later)