Literature

Where: The Conversation Room in Mellon Hall at St. John's College, 60 College Ave., Annapolis When: noon-1 p.m. Monday Why: Kick the Monday lunchtime blues with a discussion of Joseph Conrad's short story "An Outpost of Progress." Bring a brown-bag lunch, sit down with other literature fans and chew the fat for a while. Other seminars are July 18 and Aug. 8. Register in advance to make sure you have a seat at the table. Information: 410-626-2881, www.stjohnscollege.edu. Free.

Norman Henley, a retired Russian-language and world literature teacher and academic editor, died of congestive heart failure at the Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville. He was 96 and had earlier lived in Remington and Charles Village. Born in Auburndale, Mass., he earned a bachelor of arts degree at Boston University. He then studied at Andover-Newton Theological School and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. While a student in Boston, he worked as a hospital orderly and assisted in the care of the injured in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire.

TO JUDGE from a sobering report issued by the National Endowment for the Arts, we can now add a new animal to the endangered species list: the American reader. Or more specifically, the reader of literature. As a nation, we seem slowly but surely to be throwing overboard such cultural staples as the novel, the short story, poetry and drama. According to the July 8 report, Americans are deserting these forms in astonishing numbers. To choose just one example, the percentage of literary readers between the ages of 18 and 24 has dropped by 28 percent over the past two decades.

At our monthly breakfast gathering at the big round table by the kitchen at Jimmy's, the Fells Point diner, someone remarked that Ron Matz, the affable WJZ-TV reporter who frequently reports from there, looked dapper as a pallbearer in a black wool topcoat and dark suit. "I'm practicing for my next job, after I retire," Mr. Matz said. "I'm going to be a greeter at Sol Levinson. " Someone went a step further and suggested that Mr. Matz, a longtime Baltimore broadcaster, might finally make his fortune in retirement by anchoring live cablecasts of funerals from the Sol Levinson & Bros.

THE MONTGOMERY County Board of Education decided by a 7-1 vote last week that the Boy Scouts and other select religious or community groups cannot have their literature distributed in classrooms. Organizations such as day care centers, nonprofit sports teams, government welfare agencies, anti-drug campaigns, computer clubs, chess clubs, honor societies and PTAs may continue to provide literature for distribution in schools. But the Boy Scouts and church groups cannot. That's because the board wants "to keep out proselytizing pieces of literature," says its vice president, Patricia O'Neill.

The early Eastern black stonefly, the Plecoptera taeniopteryx, treasured by wild, spring-enlivened trout, is slithering up from the ooze these days on thousands of miles of streams, some no wider than a sofa cushion. A third distinct life form mystically senses the inalienable rhythms of the bug to breed and the fish to gorge. These stalwart, sedentary men, and an increasing number of women, are fly fishers. May God have mercy on your soul, should you stand in their paths as the spring hatches commence.

Phillip Charles McCaffrey, a longtime Loyola University professor of English and poet whose academic interests included medieval and 17th-century English literature, died of pneumonia Oct. 16 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Original Northwood resident was 63. Dr. McCaffrey, the son of a career Coast Guard officer and homemaker, was born in Mobile, Ala., and raised in Beverly, Mass.; Los Angeles; and Michigan. After graduating from Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Wheaton, he earned a bachelor's degree in 1968 from Fordham University.

KEY WEST -- The continuing obliteration of America's unique creatures and communities may be bad for the planet, but it's a boon to literature. American writers and readers have always been infatuated by stories about the land. We're a nation of wanderers and their descendants, and the question "What is my place in the world?" has always been a compelling one. In the past couple of decades, it's become even more urgent as we face the hard truth that, whether we choose to leave home or stay put, home is leaving us. More and more of our best writers are turning away from the gee-whizzery, the preoccupation with wordplay and with stories set in the arid halls of academe that dominated American literature during the Cold War years and well beyond.

I was standing with my mother on the stoop of an unknown house. A woman answered the door and bent over to retrieve the newspaper lying before us on the doormat. "Do you know how to read yet?" she asked me, and I shook my head. "Oh, it will be so wonderful when you learn how to read!" she exclaimed, "You can learn about the whole world." I believed her. So, it saddens me that Americans are increasingly restricted in what they might read from the rest of the world. A recent survey by the NEA Literature Program showed that of the close to 13,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, a total of 297 were translated from other languages, including new translations of classic works.

Clarification An article in yesterday's editions may have implied that a small crowd turned out for a meeting in Annapolis to discuss hate literature. About 100 people attended and more than 20 spoke.

When local author Rosalia Scalia visited India, she was able to sit down with Amandeep Sandhu, author of " Sepia Leaves. " She was kind enough to recount her meeting for Read Street. We'll break her missive into a parts, starting with her description of the encounter, and bit of a Q&A. More of the interview will follow tomorrow. Here, then, is Rosalia: A recent trip to India finds me sitting in Delhi's historic Khan Market in an Italian restaurant run by Tibetans called The Big Chill.

I told some friends that Tomas Tranströmer had won the Nobel Prize. Some responded, "Who?" and others said that it was cool that someone in Baltimore had won the Nobel. This latter group, of course, had heard the local hubbub and were thinking about Adam Riess at the Johns Hopkins University, who (along with two other physicists) was awarded the Nobel in physics for showing that the universe is still expanding. Mr. Riess was able to infer this by observing close by and further away supernovae.

With the release this weekend of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II," the final movie in the "Harry Potter" series, fans around the county have enjoyed numerous events to mark the occasion, with more still planned in the weeks to come. Whether making pumpkin juice, creating a family shield or role playing, fans of the boy wizard can't seem to get enough of the popular children's book series and movies. "A Week at Hogwarts," a SummerKids class for ages 9 to 12, has been held at Carroll Community College every summer for the last five years.

J. Desmond Corcoran, a retired McDonogh School English department chairman who was recalled as a demanding but inspirational teacher, died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at his Owings Mills home. He was 74. "In the eyes of Des Corcoran, one sees the soul of a great teacher — twinkle, tears, unflinching, caring. It's there in those eyes that tell his students of his understanding and his compassion and his faith," said William C. Mules, McDonogh's former headmaster. "They are the eyes that have seen hardship and misery and that know well the strength of the human spirit.

It's cop against cop in a standoff over the use of a police badge in a race for the Baltimore County Council. Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson has sent a cease-and-desist letter to council candidate Charles "Buzz" Beeler of Dundalk over the retired officer's use of a police badge in campaign literature. The chief threatened legal action in the Aug. 11 letter to Beeler, a veteran of the county force for more than 30 years, if he did not immediately stop using the badge and retrieve any fliers or mailers with the symbol.

Howard Russell Simpson, a longtime Baltimore broker and bond specialist who was an accomplished hiker and canoeist, died Thursday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Roland Park resident was 83. "His physician said the cause of death was a 'failure to thrive,'" said Mr. Simpson's wife of 31 years, the former Katherine Goodman. Mr. Simpson, the son of a homemaker and a Central Railroad of New Jersey executive who joined the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1931, was born in Elizabeth, N.J., where he also spent his early years.

Now we know why the O's unloaded Smokin' Joe O. They ought to give Yugoslav novelist-president Dobrica Cosic the Nobel Prize for Literature and hang him for crimes against humanity.

Victor Lange,87, a longtime Princeton University professor who was president of the International Society of Germanists for five years and received a University of California award in 1975 as the dean of German studies in the United States, died last Saturday in Princeton, N.J.An authority in the fields of German and comparative literature, he retired in 1977 as John M. Woodhull Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton, where he had begun teaching German...