The Sheila Variations

Oh well

I have this big post I want to do on Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Shakespeare's Henry plays ... and the compare, and the contrast ... I had it all planned out in my head, and I assure you it was quite brilliant. But I have the flu. So the brilliance will have to wait. "Damn", you all must be thinking.

I will leave you with this tidbit from Tamburlaine, Marlowe's feckin's GENIUS play (I love Marlowe. Like Shakespeare, he BEGS to be read outloud):

Nature, that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all:
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

Yum.

Yum. On multiple levels.

First of all, the language level: "the wondrous architecture of the world" ... "the restless spheres" ... "climbing after knowledge infinite"

"The wondrous architecture of the world."

You know, I know exactly what he's talking about.

Marlowe completely rocks.

But I have the flu. One cannot be brilliant, and also have the flu. Not possible.

And so, to bed.

I have commitment issues

I cannot settle down on reading JUST ONE BOOK. It is impossible. I cannot commit. I want to keep my options perpetually open.

And so I am juggling the following books now:

-- still working on Underworld (took a break on that one during the Ireland trip)

-- still working on Secret History of the IRA- usually read that one during my commute (which lasts, on a bad day, about 15 minutes - so it's kind of slow going)

-- tearing through Conquest's The Great Terror. It's dense, yeah, but the dude can feckin' WRITE, okay?? It's a page-turner.

-- and now - I couldn't help myself. I had to start my latest: Joseph Ellis' American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. The prologue alone brought mushy tears to my eyes. Why? Because I am a total fucking geek. That's why.

Despite my promise to myself

that I would not start The Great Terror right away, to give myself a break from the violence and torture in Rape of Nanking ... I read over 100 pages of it this morning, doped out on Thera Flu, drinking water, sitting next to the blasting radiator in my kitchen. I had a ton of candles lit around the apartment, it was 5 am, I had just slept 9 hours, unheard of for someone like me who only needs 5 hours at the most, and I felt energized, and "purged" (perhaps an unfortunate word choice, in light of the topic of The Great Terror) - and I felt like starting a new book.

Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow was one of the most haunting upsetting books I had ever read. And his analysis of Stalin in Stalin: Breaker of Nations is RIVETING. Because at the heart of Stalin, at the darkness at the center, is a mystery. What creates a Stalin? Nobody really knows. Conquest discusses that part of Stalin's staying power had to do with the fact that he avoided clarity. He obscured, he hid his manipulations and maneuverings, he remained separate ... and one of the problems was that many people, even those closest to him, did not believe that his intentions (completely obvious, through his ACTIONS) were real. "He can't REALLY mean what he says ... can he? Moderation HAS to come soon ... doesn't it?" But Stalin's true ambitions and plans were obscured, purposefully. I suppose this is a very extreme example of plausible deniability. Stalin could not be pinned down. And yet his ACTIONS told the whole story. Tragically, many people (in the Soviet Union, and in the rest of the world) did not look at Stalin's actions and see the monster within. They missed the point - that the entire story was right before their very eyes, Stalin was letting the entire world know what he was about - through his ACTIONS. And yet, his thoughts/motivations/ambitions were hidden behind a smokescreen. That was one of the main things I took from Stalin: Breaker of Nations - but now, with The Great Terror, Conquest goes into that mystique, that mystery, on an even deeper level.

The book is terrifying.

I like it, too, because it is unforgiving. The prose is filled with outrage, Conquest is like a dog with a bone ... It's obvious why this book is looked at as so definitive, so IT. I also like it because of the sense of vindication, woven throughout the writing. Conquest had published this book in the 60s. Much of his conclusions were based on speculations. Conquest was crucified and shunned by academia (many of them who refused to believe that Communism could be so evil, could manifest itself in such butchery - many people STILL refuse to believe this to this day - a shocking example of the "la la la la I CAN'T HEAR YOU" mentality). With glasnost, and the opening up of the archives in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Conquest was able to go back and confirm all of his theories. He was right on every score.

Great book. I'm tearing through it.

The continuing horror story

I came home today from my holiday to find a Christmas present off my wish list a-waitin' for me.

The Great Terror: A Reassessment - by Robert Conquest.

I've been wanting this book for a long looooong time. My library has not felt complete without it, frankly. And yet - I'm gonna hold off on reading it for a while - too much pain, too much evil, and I need a break after Rape of Nanking. But - as always - I will let you all know when I read it, let you know my thoughts on Conquest's great work. I've read Conquest's biography of Stalin (Stalin: Breaker of Nations), and I also read the book he wrote on the 1930s famine in the Ukraine (called The Harvest of Sorrow) - but this, I believe, is considered to be his master-work. Well, it's a re-assessment of the information he brought forth in the original book (published in the 60s, I think).

From the back cover of this mammoth book:

When it first appeared, The Great Terror was universally acclaimed as the definitive work on Stalin's purges. Edmund Wilson hailed it as 'the only scrupulous, non-partisan, and adequate book on the subject ...' It later received equally high praise in the Soviet Union, where it is now considered the authority on the period. When Conquest wrote the original volume, he relied heavily on unofficial sources, but with the advent of glasnost an avalanche of new material became available. Conquest mined this enormous cache to write a substantially new edition of his classic work, with many of his most disturbing conclusions being verified under the light of fresh evidence.

The "re-assessment" was published in 1990. Incredible.

Very psyched to read it.

I made the mistake...

... of re-reading The Rape of Nanking on the train home today.

Isn't one time reading that book of horrors enough? I mean, I can't get the images out of my mind from the first time reading Iris Chang's book.

It's one of the most depressing brutal awful books I have ever read. Also one of the most important.

The descriptions of some of the rapes are ... I wince, personally, when I read that book. It all goes beyond words. You read, and you feel yourself going cold. You try not to identify, but you cannot help it. You cannot help trying to imagine yourself in that situation, what it would be like, what they went through. But the stories - you just can't believe it, even though you know they happened - the little girls hemorrhaging, and women tied to chairs, their genitals torn apart, the Japanese soldiers cutting open the vaginas of small girls so they could rape them - the horror that the family members went through.

And the men of Nanking went through their own horror as well. Not to mention being murdered, and tortured, and used for bayonet practice, and having to dig their own mass graves, and being buried alive ... they also were forced to watch Japanese soldiers rape their baby daughters, their grandmothers, their wives, whatever ... I mean, the mind just blanks out trying to contemplate it.

The whole thing is just ... beyond words. It leaves me speechless with horror. Man's inhumanity to man. Make that man's GLEEFUL inhumanity to man. The faces of laughing soldiers in the background, the pictures of naked raped women, with a leering soldier grinning at the camera ...

Iris Chang haunts me now. And I guess I felt like - ever since her suicide a month or so ago - that I owed it to her to read her book again. To not close my eyes, turn away. No. She didn't. She was courageous enough to LOOK. To try to LIVE with those images. To tell the story of the people of Nanking. To shine a spotlight on this "forgotten holocaust".

But the book leaves me with this blank awful SPACE in my brain.

The contemplation of evil. Trying to comprehend evil. The book is a catalog of monstrosity. Evil, violence, torture, brutality ...

I was on the train, reading it, reading about John Rabe (the Nazi who really is the hero of the story - they still call him "the Buddha of Nanking" in China for all that he did to stop the raping and killing). Rabe came back to Germany and basically was ostracized and fired and punished because of his role in protecting the Chinese (and going against Germany's ally at the time - Japan). Rabe's diary entries become a litany of poverty, feelings of betrayal, and illness. And apparently, word of Rabe's difficulties reached the people of Nanking, a couple of years after WWII ended - and these people, ravaged as they were by war and death, took up collections of money, and food - and sent them all to John Rabe in Germany. To help him in his time of need. Poverty-struck people from China, all the way across the world, remembering the man who strode through the corpse-strewn streets of Nanking, pulling Japanese soldiers off of crying Chinese girls and women, and dragging the women to safety. The people of Nanking remembered. Sent him bags of rice, as much money as they could send ...

I've read the book before, as I've said. But the horror of the photos and the descriptions of the rapes pretty much blotted out all else, in my time reading it before. This time, though, on the train - what struck me, like an arrow through my heart, was the people of Nanking sending John Rabe bags of rice 10 years after the war ended. I just ...

It's the blinding light of goodness, in the middle of such death ... it kills me. It is like an arrow through the heart. Such goodness, after experiencing what they experienced, is difficult to contemplate, difficult to understand. It cannot be explained. It just IS.

John Rabe died forgotten by the world at large. But not to the people of Nanking. Iris Chang said that people still talk of him in Nanking to this day. People remember. And now, because of Iris Chang's powerful powerful book, he will always be remembered.

But still.

The goodness ... sending him bags of rice ... which pretty much was all that these people had ... Thinking about that is just like an arrow through my heart.

I put my scarf over my eyes, as we sped past New Rochelle, and cried my eyes out until the train pulled into Penn Station.

I don't even know what part of the above tale I was crying about. Guess I was just crying about the whole damn thing, really. A catharsis. Necessary after reading, again, about such horror. I cried, silently, and REALLY HARD, for 35 minutes straight. I suppose I was shedding some tears for poor Iris Chang, too. Poor woman. She must have walked around in psychic agony ... too great to bear.

It's a brutal book. Brutal. I don't think I will subject myself to it again - but I certainly will never forget it.

More on "fairy in the prairie"

A spectacular review by Joseph Epstein of the recently-published collection of Truman Capote's letters, called Too Brief a Treat. Epstein can WRITE, I'm tellin' ya. Love his work. I especially loved this sentence, which is a perfect example of Epstein's sensibility, I think:

Not enough love in the home, the verdict is, and so poor little Truman sought it everywhere else. ("Too much love in the home," I long to write on papers by many undeservedly confident students.)

Heh heh "undeservedly confident" Perfect.

But here is where in the review I got chills - (my feelings about Truman Capote, and about In Cold Blood are obvious - I'm passionate about it!):

Without In Cold Blood, Capote's name would probably be forgotten today. Although his fiction is never less than skillful, with the element of charm bordering on sentimentality frequently coming into play in such stories as "The House of Flowers" and "A Christmas Memory," it often feels a touch insubstantial, derivative, fragile, and too brightly colored. When Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), George Davis, an editor of Mademoiselle magazine known for his lacerating remarks, said: "I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn."

In Cold Blood took six years to finish. Capote first heard of the murder of the Cutter family when he noticed a story in the New York Times of November 16, 1959, with the headline, "Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain," and he contracted with William Shawn to write about it for the New Yorker. From the outset, Capote felt he was sitting on a masterpiece. Complications of various kinds arose, chief among them lengthy appeals that delayed the execution of the two killers for years. A striking piece of hypocrisy in this correspondence is Capote's letters of friendship with the two killers, whom he also pumped for information--set beside letters to others expressing his impatience for their execution, so that he could complete his book at last. Writers, let us make no mistake, are swine.

It's quite true - that if all you did was read Capote's short fiction or novels, you would have NO IDEA that this writer had an In Cold Blood in him. It's a stunning transformation.

Capote always felt his masterpiece remained un-written. In Cold Blood perhaps was such a wrenching experience for him that he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Capote certainly did not lack an ego ... he was quite capable of informing others of his own genius ... but he still felt that his great book was still "out there".

The ending of Epstein's wonderful review is sad. I read Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote. The last couple of chapters are almost un-readably sad. You get the sense of this man's agony. He would literally toss and turn at night, crying, unable to find comfort, and fearful. Fearful. It's haunting. He died afraid, alone, and drug-addicted. Terrible.

Epstein closes with:

Capote planned, for a final act, to go out as the American Proust with a novel called "Answered Prayers" about the lives of the rich Manhattan women into whose confidence, through his charm, he had insinuated himself. When he published a chapter of the novel with the title "La Côte Basque" in Esquire in 1975, so damaging (if perhaps also true) was it to the people who had befriended him that he was ever afterward non grata in the chic social circles upon which he had come to depend.

THE FINAL DECADE of Capote's life, as one learns from Gerald Clarke's excellent biography of the writer, was a shambles of drugs and booze and law suits and ugly gossip and betrayals perpetrated both upon him and by him. This once delicately beautiful and richly talented young man became a talk-show buffoon, a booze-bloated bag of neediness, the subject of New York Post gossip headlines, and one of the first victims of the celebrity culture he had helped to create. It's a sad story--made sadder by the fact that he did not retain the lucidity to write it himself. Its theme might have been that charm is a gift that, when abused, can bring a man down hard.

It is true that, in a way, by publishing the two bitchy chapters of Answered Prayers, Capote planted the seeds of his own destruction. He had no idea that the response would be so violent, so angry (having read those two chapters, I have to say: Jesus, Truman, what were you expecting? That your rich friends would be pleased?? Amused? What were you thinking??) He had no idea that publishing those chapters would go off like such a bomb, and that he would then be promptly cut off from 90% of his dearest friends. He was ignorant to some degree - he also didn't realize how much these rich folks liked having him around for one reason only: because he entertained them. He didn't realize how fragile the connection was - and that the second he was no longer entertaining, like a cute little dog, they would cut him OFF. He was a very self-destructive individual, but that doesn't make his end less sad. It is mostly how AFRAID he was that really touched my heart. After the disaster of Answered Prayers, after people erased him from their lives, after people stopped returning his phone calls ... leaving him all alone ... he said to the couple of friends who still hung around: "I'm so scared at night ... I'm so scared..." The loneliness. The loneliness killed him.

I have great compassion for that, great understanding.

Book Recommendation Written in an Absolute Frenzy

I just realized that a movie has been made of Sébastien Japrisot's international bestseller A Very Long Engagement.

I feel a bit frantic with exuberance about this book (Carrie - that one was for you - ha!!) - and I just MUST get the word out to everyone:

No matter how good the movie may be (and it's been directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who did Amelie) - I must just pass on the word how WONDERFUL the book is.

Here's the set-up:

Most of the action of the book takes place in 1920, in France, directly following WWI.

There is a teenage French girl (Mathilde), in a wheelchair, waiting for her boyfriend (no other word for it, really) to come home. They were childhood sweethearts, with a deep and tender relationship, both country kids, innocent and loving ... and then off he goes. He does not return. Mathilde (who is one of my favorite fictional characters I have ever encountered) sets out to find out what happened to him.

The book is basically a mystery - clues coming out - whispers that something went wrong, that there was perhaps some kind of court-martial involving the other guys in his regiment and him - but no one is talking -- what happened to them? There's a mystery surrounding it. Mathilde, a teenager, was told her boyfriend died in early 1917. But she (like any good heroine) thinks something else happened, something far more sinister. She smells something off, she knows she is being lied to. And so she starts to try to put together the last days of that particular regiment. Very difficult because nobody wants to talk to her, everyone is obviously hiding something.

The investigation makes up most of the book - clues are revealed to us in documents, in pasted-together letters, in coded messages sent home to wives of the soldiers in his regiment ... And gradually, as time goes on, as the years pass, as her resolve grows ... she starts to gain clarity, she starts to see the events, a picture emerges. It is an absolutely riveting read. A fantastic book about World War I, yes ... one of those great war novels ... but even more so because of the unforgettable characters you meet.

You get pictures of the guys in the regiment through their scraps of letters, there are 5 or 6 main characters who may hold the key to what happened to her lover ... You read a coded message, and then Mathilde, through cutting and pasting, and rearranging, tries to figure out the REAL messages behind the code ... etc.

All of this is great mystery-novel stuff - but the book does not sacrifice the heart. The emotion. First of all, there's the devastation wrought upon Europe from trench warfare. There are scenes in the book that I wish I could forget. But at the heart of this whole story - is Mathilde, this incredible character, a paralyzed teenage girl with a huge heart, a great mind, growing stronger and stronger and stronger, as she tries to figure out what happened to her missing lover.

FANTASTIC book.

I definitely want to see the film - it's getting pretty good reviews - but so much of the book is about putting-together-clues using your MIND - code-breaking, essentially, and it is very hard to get across the excitement of something like that, something cerebral and mathematical, on film.

But the book is a page-turner of the first order. With an ending I never saw coming. Took my breath away.

Sorry to be boring and everything ...

but Don Delillo's writing in Underworld is practically giving me a heart attack.

Ever read a writer who does that to you? I don't even know WHAT THE HELL THIS BOOK IS ABOUT YET ... but I can tell it is about something BIG ... and it's in the writing.

I can't believe it. I'm going to have to post some excerpts ... just to share some of it.

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it"

Sylvia Plath killed herself in February, 1963. In the months previous, her writer's block had vanished with a ferocity that frightened her friends - Was this manic episode the precursor to some huge crash? In those last months before she died, she wrote sometimes 3 poems a day. And these weren't crappy poems, these were arresting terrifying works - works that made her name, works that are now taught in English classes across the land. Some are sheer genius. If you read them in order (the way Ted Hughes placed them in the original version of the book Ariel - published after her death) - you feel her marching towards that oven. You feel her, in poem after poem, dig deeper and deeper into her psychic despair. Plath, recently separated from Hughes, her husband, had their two children in her flat with her, and because of her maternal duties, the only time she had to write was at night, or in the hours before dawn. She would sit up, at 3 am, 4 am, and churn out such poems as "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "Ariel", "Contusion", "The Munich Mannequins" ... and many many more. These are great poems. Each poem went through multiple drafts, too - so the pace at which she worked must have been extraordinary.

Before she died, she collected all of these frightening poems into a binder, and left express instructions of the ORDER in which they were to appear when published. (This was explained in the Introduction to her Collected Poems, compiled by Ted Hughes). Ted Hughes, however, felt that it would be better to put them in chronological order. And so they were.

And that is the version of Ariel that was published, that was read feverishly and picked apart, that was held up as a pure work of suicidal art, etc.

Hughes has suffered enough. His decision to re-order the poems has been criticized by shrill ninnies who can't stand the man, and who hold him responsible for everything that went wrong in Sylvia's life. They would hold him responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Ted Hughes is evil incarnate to these cultish Plath wackos.

Anyway, all of this is just a preface.

Thank you, peteb, for sending me the following news - Ariel is now being re-issued, in the order Sylvia Plath suggested. Plath liked HER order because the first word of the volume would be "love" and the last volume would be "spring". To HER, the volume of poems was a redemptive story, a story of hope (which is hard to believe, when you read these poems all in one sitting - it's one of the bleakest most upsetting books I have ever read) - But that's neither here nor there. To Plath, she was hopeful that she was starting up a new and good life without Hughes, that she would be entering "spring" again.

Frieda Hughes, Sylvia and Ted's daughter, now a grown woman, has written an incredible article about this re-issuing of her mother's book - and she beautifully defends her father from the Sylvia Suicide-Cult crowd who thought he was Satan Incarnate. Beautiful. I felt like cheering.

Criticism of my father was even levelled at his ownership of my mother's copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me. Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise.

After my mother's suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruel things were written about my father that bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought me up - later with the help of my stepmother. All the time, he kept alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so I felt as if she were watching over me, a constant presence in my life.

It appeared to me that my father's editing of Ariel was seen to "interfere" with the sanctity of my mother's suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous. For me, as her daughter, everything associated with her was miraculous, but that was because my father made it appear so, even playing me a record of my mother reading her poetry so I could hear her voice again. It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father's more temperate and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father's work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. I'd been aghast that my perfect image of her, attached to my last memories, was so unbalanced. But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me. The outbursts were the exception, not the rule. Life at home was generally quiet, and my parents' relationship was hardworking and companionable. However, as her daughter, I needed to know the truth of my mother 's nature - as I did my father's - since it was to help me understand my own.

Wow. I read Ted Hughes' book of poems The Birthday Letters - published just before his death. In that book he broke his long long silence about Sylvia - and addresses her in all but two of those poems. It is an extraordinary book. To anyone who thought he was the bogey-man of poetry, and the eeeeeeevil misogynist who ruined Sylvia Plath's life, that book should have been a harsh reminder that we can never know the truth about what goes on between two people behind closed doors.

I love Sylvia Plath's poetry. I find it disappointing that her suicide has overshadowed her art. Her work is so deep, so exciting, that I keep going back to it - at different points through my life, and I always see new things. Sometimes I read her stuff and feel filled with rage, other times I go back and I see her humor, or I am just awed at her sheer verbal skill. Her early poems are stiff, self-conscious, and pretentious. I can feel her checking her Thesaurus every other word. She's showing off, she's stiff, she's coy, she's a prodigy. They're boring. If you only read them, you would have no idea the POWER that this woman had. And when she let her hair down, woah did she let her hair down.

Nobody expected it of her. The "Ariel" poems were a terrifying revelation to all.

I love Ted Hughes' poetry too. I have always thought he got a raw deal.

I have my Hughes-version of Ariel. Of course I do. I've had it since high school. I can recite most of the poems therein by heart.

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it ..."

"Stasis in darkness"

and my personal favorite line:

"the blue pour of tor and distances".

I mean, you just MUST say that out loud. It's stunning language! "The blue pour of tor and distances ..."

But I will definitely be getting this new edition of Ariel. It seems only right.

And so the books can sit side by side on my shelf - his version, and hers.

Because what really matters is the words. Her language. The poems themselves. THEY are what compel me.

It's nice to hear from Frieda Hughes. I often think about those two children, and what became of them.

New book

Today I started Underworld by Don DeLillo. I've read some of his earlier stuff - White Noise, etc. But this book seems to far surpass his others, in terms of its scope.

The opening scene is riveting. A Giants game. 1951. A little black kid leaps over the turnstiles. Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover are in the stands. They appear to be characters in the book. We go through the game, play by play. But there are other events afoot ... the little black kid hides in the stands, he really wanted to see the game, he is afraid of being busted ... Because of his "crime", and because the only other black person around appears to be a peanut-vendor, he feels that his blackness radiates out from him.

But it's really how Don DeLillo paints the scene that gives it its scope ... It's odd - he just tells about night baseball games or people getting off subways - and he makes it seem like he is describing some universal truth.

For example, this is the third paragraph of the book:

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day -- men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

And here is his description of a night-game:

The arc lights come on, catching Cotter by surprise, causing a shift in the way he feels, in the freshness of his escapade, the airy flash of doing it and not getting caught. The day is different now, grave and threatened, rain-hurried, and he watches Mays standing in center field looking banty in all that space, completely kid-size, and he wonders how the guy can make those throws he makes, whirl and sling, with power. He likes looking at the field under lights even if he has to worry about rain and even if it's only afternoon and the full effect is not the same as in a night game when the field and the players seem completely separate from the night around them. He has been to one night game in his life, coming down from the bluff with his oldest brother and walking into a bowl of painted light. He thought there was an unknown energy flaring down out of the light towers, some intenser working of the earth, and it isolated the players and the grass and the chalk-rolled lines from anything he'd ever seen or imagined. They had the glow of first-time things.

Now, excuse me, but that is some damn fine writing.

"The glow of first-time things" ... to describe a baseball field under the lights.

I'm excited to delve in. I love books with SCOPE.

I don't know what the hell to do

I finished Brothers Karamazov last night.

I stretched it out as long as I could. Normally, I read apocalyptically fast. And so it was unnatural, to only read a couple pages a day, but I forced myself.

The book unfolds like a grand mystery.

When you get right down to it, it is a court-room drama. You've got the witnesses for the prosecution, you watch them build their case, you hear the conversations of the spectators ... then the defense puts up ITS case ...

You hear the speech of the prosecutor - the speech of the defense lawyer.

And because it's Dostoevsky - both of these speeches are panoramas of polar opposites. Dostoevsky was all about opposites. We hear about "parricide" - what on earth is Russia coming to when children murder their own fathers? Where is the soul of Russia? Where is their moral compass?? But then we hear the other side of the argument: Just because someone beget someone else in a moment of passion, doesn't mean that he deserves the name "father". The moment of having sex with someone is long past ... how about the "father" who shuns his responsibilities, who doesn't feed his kids, clothe them, give them guidance ... Does that person also deserve to be called "father"? And what kind of society is Russia that it keeps creating these monster-fathers?

Dostoevsky gives BOTH sides equal time. Brilliant man, that one.

I became convinced by both sides. I read the speech of the prosecutor and was completely on his side. It made me think, it made me reflect ... It was all so well-put, so argued. Then I read the speech of the defense lawyer and had to re-think my position. Because that, too, was so well-put, so passionately argued.

Dostoevsky does not let you be comfortable, in a nice neat little black and white world.

Obviously, he believes that there is something purifying in suffering. Without suffering, a man cannot really join the human race. You can only have compassion if you, too, have suffered. This is the fire Dmitri MUST go through. Come hell or high water - Dmitri MUST suffer - because it is only through suffering and sacrifice and pain will he be able to give up his former selfishness and violence - and join the ranks of good and honest men.

That's where Dostoevsky's genius lies, in my opinion. And why, too, he was so controversial (and probably still is).

The universe he creates in his books is indeed a moral universe. There is a God. There is a right and there is a wrong. Yes. HOWEVER - all of that is meaningless if you do not dip into your own wrong-ness, if you do not experience your own capacity for sin, if you do not indulge the dark side.

Ivan. The brother Ivan. The torment he experiences is because of this. He is the one, the only brother, who pretty much straddles both sides. Alyosha is a good person. He sees the darkness, he knows darkness exists, but he always chooses the lit path. Dmitri is the opposite. He is appetite run riot. He lives in a world where all the dark stuff and vices are given complete freedom. He sees the light, he knows that light exists, but he always chooses the darkened path.

But Ivan? The brother who represents the intellect, the thinking man?

He is the one who truly suffers.

He is the one who ends up being unable to tell what is real and what is not. He wants so badly to believe in God, he is terrified by the darkness, by night, by the devil ... It drives him mad. He almost dies from it.

This is the price you must pay for being a thinking man, a rational logical man.

It is a tremendous book. There are a couple of digressive chapters which I fully resented while I read them. Ie: Jesus, why do I care about Father Zossima's 30 page long death-bed advice? Also: What the heck do I care about the little consumptive boy?

But at the end ... it becomes clear. It becomes clear why those chapters were there in the first place.

And so there is a huge payoff.

The last chapter is so FULL of emotion, so JOYOUS, so ... redemptive.

That's what I mostly remember about the ending of Crime and Punishment, too. I was moved to tears by the fact that Dostoevsky, of course, had to have Raskolnikov punished ... Raskolnikov had to pay for what he did ... BUT ... at the end ... you get the sense that through paying for his crime, through suffering so deeply, through intense guilt, etc. ... Raskolnikov is going to get better. Raskolnikov will no longer live a life of cynical isolation and distance from his fellow human beings. He has joined their ranks.

For some people (like Alyosha Karamazov) - joining the ranks of humanity, and having compassion for others, is easy. It is the only logical thing to do.

But to others ... like Raskolnikov, like Dmitri Karamazov ... it is NOT so easy. It takes tremendous suffering to come out on the other side.

I'm very sad I finished the book. I knew as I was reading it that it was one of those "epochal" reading-experiences.

Book Notes: The Brothers K

I'm almost done. This book is blowing my mind. The final third of it is entirely made up of a criminal trial - it almost reads like a true crime novel. I cannot put it down. It's a total page-turner, I can't wait to get back to it.

His comments on tabloid journalism, and the spectacle of high-profile criminal cases, and the propensity of females to fall in love with murderers (I bet there are some chicks out there right now swooning over Scott Peterson) - It's all so familiar, it feels like he is critiquing Court TV, etc. Like one of the witnesses starts weeping about how some Russian magazine called "Gossip" printed untrue things about her ... and one of the other witnesses makes the observation that while, yes, as a moral society, people do abhor crime and punish it - blah blah - but on a deeper level, people LOVE crime. They LOVE disorder, and they LOVE to watch the spectacle.

Fascinating.

Poor Ivan. Poor Ivan. I knew there was a reason I liked him the best. Because, in a way, (with his night-time visitor - anyone remember?) he is the most tormented.

Great damn book. It's not ponderous at all. I am flying through it. Now we are into the witnesses for the prosecution and defense chapters ... Brilliant.

I still have no idea how it will all turn out.

I read the chapter about Ivan's night-time visitor 3 times. Terrifying.

The Brothers K

OH. MY. GOD.

It's kicked in now. It's finally kicked in. I am impatient to get back to the book when I am not reading it. For example, I am thinking about it right now. There are certain passages which are so ominous, or so insightful, so PERFECTLY put, that I have to put the book down, and just sit there for a while, thinking about it.

Yes, there is a long boring-ass chapter about the dying Father Zossima and his death-bed words ... (which went on for 35 pages) ... This was in the middle of the growing suspense, you could feel the forces gathering, you could feel some terrible event approaching ... and then suddenly, boom, we have to hear Father Zossima ramble on for hours on end.

I know Dostoevsky does nothing on a whim, though. So I knew that the chapter did indeed have a "point". I would say that the "point" of that chapter (I'm just guessing - and please don't reveal what ends up happening in the book - I haven't finished it yet ...) is to set up the opposing mindset that the world is a God-given place, something to be reveled in, that everything on the planet is given by God. The leaves, the sky ... So never be sad. Fill your heart with love. Be grateful, be hunble ... be glad. This is Zossima's message.

The Karamazovs are dark, brutal, earthy ... there is a big deal made of their "sensuality". They are all about the pleasures of the earth. Or the brutality of the earth. Zossima's death-bed soliloquy is there as a contrast - that there is something more to strive for. There is the possibility of love, of hope, of purity.

It also sets up the contrast to Ivan's viewpoint (which is just fanTAStic. Not that I agree with him, exactly, but I could read about Ivan forever - he's the most interesting brother to me, so far) Ivan is cynical - and more chilling because of it. But there's something very compelling there. He is obviously going to THINK about life. There is no such thing as received wisdom, as far as Ivan is concerned. Ivan's the one who tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor. Which blew my socks off, frankly. Can't get more of an opposite viewpoint from Father Zossima than the Grand Inquisitor!

But I'm not ready to really post my thoughts on all of this yet - what it all adds up to - because I haven't finished the book yet.

I am now at the part where Dmitri (the pleasure-seeking sensual brother - engaged to Katerina, and messing around with Grushenka) is kind of slipping off the rails ... He needs 3000 roubles. He has become absolutely convinced that if he can only get 3000 roubles, then Grushenka will run away with them, and they can start "fresh". But ... his schemes to get the money are ... frankly ... insane. Dostoevsky writes about his racing around in such a way that gives you the necessary distance. You can look at Dmitri's behavior and think: "Wow. This guy is completely losing it." We are not totally inside Dmitri's head, we have a tiny bit of distance, so we can be afraid ... and we can also have NO idea what he will do next. Also, the way the narrator describes to us Dmitri's schemes to get the roubles, we are able to get the sense that: This will not work out - he is flailing about - he is desperate - none of this will work. We, however, the readers, are a couple steps ahead of Dmitri ... so it's upsetting. It's upsetting to read about a man who is still back in the dark tunnel, when you've emerged a tiny bit into the light. You want to reach in and stop the catastrophe, whatever it is ... but you know you can't.

My favorite parts of the book - and this was true of Crime and Punishment as well - are his brief piercing psychological insights. So spot on that they are SCARY. This man could see all sides of humanity. This man could see the flaws, the fears, the hopes - and not only could he see them all - but he could describe in writing how the brain operated in those revealed moments. He can take us, the reader, step by step through a tiny epiphany (tiny, and yet earth-shaking). The tiny moments in life, tiny, not big, when we are faced with a fork in the path ... it could go this way or that way. Dostoevsky writes about big things, too, obviously - love and sex and murder and God and politics - and all of that is very interesting, too - but what is the stand-out for me are the very small moments when a human being looks into his own soul, sees something there, and then makes a choice. He chooses to go either this way or that way. And of course, this seemingly tiny choice usually has enormous consequences.

The insights into how the human mind works, and how it can unhinge itself, are literally beyond compare. Freud should hang his head in shame!! I wonder if Freud ever referenced the superior nature of Dostoevsky's psychological analysis.

I have moments when reading this book when I almost feel pissed off. Like Dostoevsky has been peeking into my journal or something. No, that's not it, either - because the moments Dostoevsky describes are things I wouldn't write about myself, I barely recognize these things in myself ... They are in my unconscious. Dostoevsky, in those teeny moments, shows the hidden side of my own heart to myself.

I think: Ohhh, so THAT'S what was going on with me in that moment!!

Or ... Wow. I remember feeling EXACTLY like that that one time but I had no idea WHY ... I think that here is why ...

It's quite astonishing.

My fingers itch to pick it up again. Tonight.

There's no game tonight, so I can get some reading in.

Anthony Hecht, RIP

Anthony Hecht, American poet, has died. If you are unaware of Hecht, or his work - I highly recommend you check him out. I've been into his poems for years, and go back to them often. I find them frightening. They're very melancholy (he was famous for his "melancholia"), and he often turns his microscope (or telescope, however you want to put it) onto the horrors of the world. Cruelty, war, genocide ... they're tough poems. But also - it's the TONE of the poems which make them frightening (in my opinion). He speaks in the overly formal tone of someone who has seen too much, who battles great demons, and who is doing his damndest to keep himself together. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, I think.

He described his work as "formalist ironic" (a sort of inside joke), and modeled his poetry after WH Auden.

Enormously successful in his own lifetime, he used a very formal almost old-school type of poetry (regular meter, etc.) to write poem after poem on the chaotic terrible events of the 20th century. He was an infantryman in WWII and witnessed, firsthand, the concentration camps, etc. He put all of that stuff into his poems. He wasn't exactly a happy man (what poet is?) but he was able to express all of it ... in sometimes startlingly beautiful poems.

Here's a great New Criterion article about Hecht (written when Hecht's Collected Poems came out - Hecht was still alive at the time). In this article, David Yezzi takes on the "charge" that Hecht is a "formalist" poet. I like what he has to say:

He is one of our most laureled poets. But the way that critics celebrate Hecht often strikes me as both backhanded and wholly typical of the current climate in American poetry. “An accomplished formalist” recurs as the standard tag, the phrase meant as qualified praise, like complimenting someone’s calligraphy —very pretty, no doubt, and once valued, perhaps, but rather too precious for anything today beyond addressing wedding invitations. Elegant but irrelevant.

The ineptitude of this kind of grudging appreciation is not the worst of it. One pities those who feel that a given age can accommodate only one kind of poetry (free verse these days, presumably), as if important work by both Eliot and Hardy, for example, did not issue from the 1920s, or from Larkin and Bunting in the 1960s, or from Geoffrey Hill in both free and metered verse throughout his career. No, the real downside to the appellation “formalist,” more damning than the taint of fustiness, is the way it precludes poems from being anything other than formal. A good formalist, the epithet suggests, is one who produces exquisite verse, period.

No one, I think, disputes Hecht’s command of English verse, but, because prosodic skill is a rare and useless talent in this free-verse age, his work sometimes arouses the same admiration lavished on a bipedal poodle. Labeling Hecht a formalist, while undeniable in the most obvious sense, misses the point. If anyone puts paid to the notion that metrical skill cancels passion, it’s Hecht. What’s more, if form and subject matter may be seen as complementary and interdependent, the opposite point better characterizes his work: Hecht may be the foremost “matterist” of his age, a feat more brilliant and difficult, in the end, than the mastery of traditional forms that he so abundantly displays.

Hecht is often lumped in with the category "Poets of World War II" (I think he's even included in a book on the subject) - and judging from his dark and terrified subject-matter, dealing with the horrors at the heart of the Holocaust, it seems very a propos.

His poem "Rites and Ceremonies" is pretty much the poem that announced his entry onto the "important poet" stage. It's a frightening poem - difficult to read, actually. How does one adequately face (and deal with) evil? How does one actually deal with seeing the walking skeletons at Buchenwald? That generation of men came home forever changed from what they had seen. Consider this stanza (I have a book of his poems - unfortunately it is at home ...) Anyway - here is a stanza from "Rites and Ceremonies":

And to what purpose, as the darkness closes about
And the child screams in the jellied fire,
Had best be our present concern,
Here in the wilderness of comfort
In which we dwell.
Shall we now consider
The suspicious postures of our virtue,
The deformed consequences of our love,
The painful issues of our mildest acts?
Where is there one
Mad, poor and betrayed enough to find
Forgiveness for us, saying,
“None does offend,
None, I say,
None”?

The child screaming in the jellied fire. I find that image almost unbearably painful.

Hecht's topic: Man's capacity for evil. Man's inhumanity to man. In this great review of a book of Hecht's poems, (note the date of the review - sheesh) - Kirsch, to my taste, describes what is special about Hecht:

Yet this theme has a double irony in Hecht's poetry, for at the same time as he reflects on the shattering of humanism, his own language continues to pay homage to it. Hecht's regular meter and rhyme, his formal diction ("Much casual death"), and his clear expository sentences betray none of the hesitation that his subject seems to demand. The means of expression are not called into doubt by the horror of what must be expressed. Quite the contrary. Hecht insists on still greater decorum and rigor when his theme is darkness and chaos. He is like the courtier of a deposed monarch, punctually attending the shrunken levees of reason.

Through seven books and nearly five decades, Hecht's poetry has maintained this disciplined disjunction between form and subject. He writes very often of the forces of dissolution — evil, chaos, lust, slovenliness — but always in a decorous style, as though these subjects were explosive chemicals that can only be handled with tongs.

Exactly. I wouldn't have been able to figure out how to say just that. His subject matter is the darkness at the heart of man. And yet the voice he uses is formal, cold, clear. It's terrifying.

Anyway, he was a great poet, a master of the craft ... and I am sorry that he has died. I hope that his passing was peaceful, and I thank him for his long long years of devotion to his work.

And now I leave you with my personal favorite Anthony Hecht poem - it's called "The Dover Bitch", an obvious parody of "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. It's another side of Hecht - funny, biting, cynical, smart.

His voice will be much missed.

The Dover Bitch
by Anthony Hecht

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

I know plenty of people hate JD Salinger

but I most definitively am not one of those people. (What's Up Doc nod: "I don't know who he is, but she is deFINitely not herself.")

That's fine - to each his own. I don't need to convert people, or try to insist that their perceptions are wrong. As a matter of fact, I can't stand that attitude - especially when it comes to something like taste in art, or novels, or whatever.

Just because I love JD Salinger doesn't mean ... well, it doesn't freakin' mean anything, frankly. It just means I love JD Salinger.

During my Bloomsday extravaganza this past year - which a ton of people seemed to really enjoy, actually - I got a couple of comments in emails, and also a couple of cowards posted stuff about me on OTHER people's blogs (but didn't have the balls to come to me themselves) ... The comments were full of the misguided feeling that somehow I was trying to say I felt I was BETTER than other people because I loved James Joyce. There were comments like: "Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't think there's anything wrong with loving Robert Ludlum." Er - can you say: PROJECTION??? I know you can! Come on, say it with me: I AM PROJECTING MY OWN ANXIETIES ONTO SHEILA, WHOM I HAVE NEVER EVER MET.

I never said, "To all you idiots who love Robert Ludlum, let me show you what REAL literature is like."

I would never ever do that. And if you think I would, you don't know me at all.

These people imagined I was saying things I did not. They were intimidated by Joyce (and so am I, frankly) and so they needed to negate him, and make it seem like I felt superior to them. Whatever.

So, as a JD Salinger lover, I was interested and annoyed in Jonathan Yardley's column about re-reading Catcher in the Rye. It's a part of that awesome Washington Post series, re-reading old classics, taking a new look at them. I read all of Yardley's columns, I love them, and will continue to do so even though I disagree with him wholeheartedly on this one.

I recently re-read Catcher, and found myself, one night, laughing out loud like a hyena on a silent bus - I was snorting, cackling, etc. I love it! It's the PROSE I love. I can't explain it further than that - it makes me laugh. Yardley finds the prose manipulative (which, for me, is a rather meaningless word ... what does he mean by it?) That Salinger wants to make us feel things? Well, what author DOESN'T want that?

Yardley writes that the book "touches adolescents' emotional buttons without putting their minds to work." I totally disagree with that.

Mr. Crothers (my great 10th grade teacher) taught the book - and yes, indeed, the book "touched emotional buttons" - but there was quite a BIT to think about as well. I remember almost word for word Crothers' discussion on the whole "where do the ducks go when the ponds freeze" conversation that Holden has with the cabbie and various others ... This was not about emotional manipulation, this was a book like any other, a book of puzzle pieces - and for ONCE it was fun to try to put them together. (Unlike putting together the boring symbolic puzzle pieces of Billy Budd - now THAT book is manipulative!!)

Additionally: I have to say to Yardley: Er - why do you have contempt for something that wants to "push adolescents emotional buttons"? It's that kind of hostility towards outright sentiment, or emotion, that I don't like. It's the kind of attitude that thinks Notting Hill is a shitty movie because it wants to make you feel something. There might be a better example than Notting Hill, but whatever. I don't have a problem with sentiment, with open emotion, or with the simple beautiful love expressed in the book between Holden and Phoebe. I LOVE it, as a matter of fact. I don't think Holden is a "saint" with Phoebe. I think he's all messed up with Phoebe. It's a perfect description of the kind of codependent worried vibe that goes on between siblings. I LOVE Phoebe.

Back to "manipulation": I find books like Bridges of Madison County to be manipulative. I found The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks to be so manipulative that I couldn't even finish it, and left it in a drawer in my youth-hostel room in Galway. Now THAT book was going for the emotional jugular without touching your brain ONCE. In that mawkish book I can look right through the prose and see the puppet-strings. And I can tell that the author is aiming right for the lowest common denominator.

Yardley is obviously entitled to his opinion, but this is just my counter-opinion, I suppose. I don't find Catcher manipulative in THAT way at all. The book certainly makes me feel things - and I've read it multiple times. As an adolescent, I read it, and fell in love with Holden. As a young woman I read it, and perceived other depths in it - the love of siblings, the need to have a meaningful life, the unresolved issues of Allie's death. And recently, I just read the damn thing and found a great story. Funny, sad, chaotic, mysterious - I don't know. To me, it's a great story. Even though nothing really happens. It's like a Cassavetes film - an exploration of a state of mind, a minute description of 48 hours.

I don't think a book that wants to make you feel something and ACHIEVES IT is anything to be ashamed of.

A book that desperately wants to make me feel something and FAILS to achieve it, on the other hand, is a blight upon this earth. I can't stand books like that. Or movies, for that matter.

But I've got no problem with emotion, honestly asked-for and honestly-earned. I love books that make me love them. There aren't many. Catcher in the Rye is one of those books for me. I can't say why, because it seems to be a different book every time I read it.

Perhaps it is the fact that there is some mystery at the center of the book - something UNdescribed, UNexpressed - that makes it such a classic. Actually, "classic" is the wrong word. The better word is "beloved".

To me, that book is a beloved book. I grew, when I read it for the first time. Soul-growth, whatever you want to call it. Yardley may look down his nose on the soul-growth of a 14 year old, but I think it's the most important kind of growth. I will always be glad I read the book when I did. It made a huge impact ... and now, when I pick it up again, I'm not looking for insight, or for the answer to the meaning of life ... Usually, when I pick it up now, I'm just looking for a good laugh.

In that respect, Salinger always delivers.

And lastly: Yardley puts down some of the aspects of the book that would only appeal to teenagers (all grown-ups are phonies, etc.) I think THAT, actually, is a snobby attitude. "It can't be a classic if teenagers love the book in droves." Personally, I think that The Pigman, by Paul Zindel, is one of the best books I have ever read. Hands down. It was assigned to my 8th grade English class ... and it's about two teenage misfits who find each other ... and it's full of humor, and pain, and rebellion ... and it continues to be a favorite of mine to this day. I tip my cap to Paul Zindel. I tip my cap to Salinger. I don't think there's anything "lesser" about their books, just because teenagers "get" them.

Update: Erin at Critical Mass weighs in.

Oh, and one other thing...

I am finally reading The Brothers Karamazov which I started this week. I had a rough time with those first two chapters ... as usual. Those Russians with their similar names ... Alexey, and Alyosha, and the vitches added to last names ... I YEARNED for a family tree in the front of the book. Dostoevsky is like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in that respect. I remember when I first read 100 Years of Solitude, Mitchell gave me a tip. "The beginning is really confusing ... because people in different generations all have the same name ... but don't give up ... Stick it out, because then - you're 100 pages in, and you understand everything, and then it is AMAZING." I have found that to be the case with Brothers K. I stuck out the first two chapters, which were sheer drudgery ... but now? I cannot put the dern thing down. It's a page-turner. It's rich, it's dense, it's thought-provoking - but it's also funny, lively ... and it's mostly conversation. Not just narrative.

GREAT stuff. My dad has been telling me to read this book for years, and I'm finally doing it. Crime and Punishment is one of my all-time favorites, so I'm very pleased to be tackling this book as well.

Haven't gotten to the famous "Grand Inquisitor" chapter yet - although it's coming!!!

Here's a random tidbit:

When Marilyn Monroe fled Hollywood, basically on her own personal strike from the horrible material she was being offered, she disappeared for a while - and finally emerged, in New York - where she was taking classes at the Actors Studio. She wanted to develop her own projects, and so she formed a production company. (Hello. Nobody did that then. She was a rebel, a renegade). One of the projects she wanted to do was to put Brothers K on the screen - with herself as Grushenka. She held a press conference announcing her plans, and the hostility of the press is kind of amazing to contemplate in this day and age, when even no-talent whores like Paris Hilton have books published, etc ... It would be hard to imagine a star of Marilyn's magnitude being treated with such contempt and condescension now. One of the reporters asked her, "Do you even know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?" I would like to see that reporter now and punch him in the nose. And obviously, very few of the reporters there had even read the book ... and so scoffed her "hoity-toity" choice of project. Everyone thought she was illiterate. Marilyn said to them, sweetly (she was always sweet): "Actually, have you read the book? There's a wonderful character in it named Grushenka ... she's a real seductress ... I think it would be a good part for me."

Having read the descriptions of Grushenka, I have to say Marilyn was right on the money. Dostoevsky describes her "ample" hips, her soft hands ... but more than that- her noiseless way of walking. She didn't really walk - she glid, she slithered ... and she had a kind of girlish sweetness about her which hid a rock-hard steely broad underneath.

Marilyn would have been great as Grushenka. So there, condescending snobs.

National Poetry Day

I didn't realize it was National Poetry Day, but apparently it is. (I found about it from Norm Geras.)

I'm greedy, I've got a couple of things I would like to post.

1. "The More Loving One", by Mr. Auden
2. "In Blackwater Woods", by Mary Oliver
3. A great excerpt from Michael Schmidt's terrific book Lives of the Poets. The book is a sweeping look at English poets from the very beginning of the language. In the excerpt I'm posting, Schmidt compares (realizing that it is unfair) Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Great stuff!

Competing for my "favorite poem", in a constant tug of war, are probably the two I post below. My criteria is, as usual, what I call soul-growth. These poems have been WITH me, in times of trouble, they have taught me things, they are always changing ... I always learn from them. So - here they are:

The More Loving One by Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now i see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

And then this one:

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

And here is the excerpt from Lives of the Poets, on the poetry of Jonson and Shakespeare - it's filled with juicy good stuff:

Ben Jonson -- another man described as "the first poet laureate" -- compares with any poet of his age and the next. He can almost out-Campion Campion and he fathers Robert Herrick's lyrics and those of other "Sons of Ben," Jonson's followers, who climb nearly to Campion's heights:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did'st only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

He can set himself on a par with the satirists of the generations that followed his own, with a greater fluidity in his use of the couplet:

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman; as I near it came,
It made me a great face, I asked its name,
A lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none: and as little ill,
For I will dare none. Good Lord, walk dead still.

Or he writes "On English Monsieur":

Would you believe, when you this Monsieur see,
That his whole body should speak French, not he?
That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither,
And land on one, whose face durst never be
Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?
That he, untravelled, should be French so much,
As French-men in his company should seem Dutch?
Or had his father, when he did him get,
The French disease, with which he labours yet?
Or hung some monsieur's picture on the wall,
By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all?

The common elements in these poems and the epistles, elegies and plays are balance, construction and proportion (except in flattery). Even at his most intemperate, his art brings disparate elements into tight control. The fireworks hang suspended in the air, a promise, a pleasure even at their harshest.

And since our dainty age
Cannot endure reproof,
Make not thyself a Page,
To that strumpet the Stage,
But sing high and aloof
Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull
Ass's hoof.

His epitaph in Westminster Abbey reads: "O rare Benn Johnson." Cutting the stone, Aubrey tells us, cost 18d., paid by Jack Young, later Sir Jack. He also tells us that the living poet had a certain peculiarity of face: "Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t'other, and bigger, like Clun the Player; perhaps he begott Clun." If there is dirt to be dished, and even if there isn't, we can trust Aubrey to dish it.

Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare. Alexander Pope underlines the point in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725): "It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything."

In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson the most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend's that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson's poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson's art is normative, Shakespeare's radical and exploratory. In Jonson there's structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth. Coleridge disliked the "rankness" of Jonson's realism and found no "goodness of heart". He condemned the "absurd rant and ventriloquism" in the tragedy Sejanus,staged by Shakespeare's company at the Globe. At times Jonson's words, unlike Shakespeare's, tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to every single word. His mind is busy near the surface. He is thirsty at the lip, not at the throat.

It's true, but it is not the whole truth.

Jonson's attitude to the very sound of language can seem casual. Except in songs from the plays ("Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair," for instance) and a few lyrics, words are chosen first for their sense and accent, second for their sound value: meaning is what Jonson is about -- not nuance but sense. So there are clumps of consonnts and a sometimes indiscriminate collocation of vowels. Swinburne called him "one of the singers who could not sing." Dryden pilloried him as "not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all others; you track him everywhere in their snow."

It is the kind of poetry Jonson writes that irritates his critics: they disapprove of what he's doing. When he isn't singing, he speaks, an art Swinburne never learned. If his poetry is "of the surface", he has made his surfaces with a special kind of care, and to effect. If he borrowed from classical literature, he was no different from his contemporaries, except that he had a deeper knowledge of what he was quarrying than many did (and did not always acknowledge the debt --though this was not yet the custom). He translated Horace's Ars Poetica. He is of a stature with Martial and Juvenal: collaboration, not plagiarism, is the term for what he doese. Eliot concedes that Jonson and Chapman "incorporated their erudition into their sensibility". So, too, did Eliot.

Dryden's criticism is telling at one point: Jonson "weaved" the language "too closely and laboriously" and he "did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them." Dryden ends with the inevitable verdict: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

Re-discovery

The Washington Post occasionally runs a series called "Second Reading" which I love. "Second Reading" is about going back and re-discovering books from the past ... either books that were neglected and did not get the props they desired the first time around ... OR books beloeved by the book critic as a child, books now being given a "second reading".

Wonderful!

Here's a great column by book critic Jonathan Yardley on Washington Irving's Sketch Book. Beautiful.

What I love about this column, in particular, is his description of how that book is completely wound up in his childhood, in the memories of his father, in the landscape where he grew up (very near to where Irving's stories took place). I love that - it's how I feel about the books I loved as a kid, too. They have merged with my life. There is no difference between a "real-life" out-in-the-world event and the soul-growth I experienced when I first read Charlotte's Web, or Harriet the Spy. Same thing. Books wrapped up with life.

Lee Strasberg, the great acting teacher, used to say: "Sometimes you pick up a pair of your shoes, and in them you see your whole life."

Books are like that, too.

A brief excerpt from this lovely little column:

The point is proved by "The Sketch Book" itself, which has survived the years with remarkable resilience and undiminished pertinence, notwithstanding Irving's sentimental streak. But it is for the two great short stories that we are still most likely to read it, and in which we are still most likely to detect "the diligent dispensation of pleasure." Both are believed to be based on German folk tales, relocated by Irving to the Hudson Valley he loved and knew so well. The stories of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane are as deeply ingrained in American mythology as those of George Washington and the cherry tree, Ben Franklin and his kite, Abraham Lincoln reading by firelight.

I am psychic or something

Not only that - but I am SO HAPPY, and so TOUCHED.

Today, I received (just now) a gift of 2 books from one of you people out there. (Unfortunately, because of screen names, etc., I don't know who my benefactor is!! So I am going public with my thank you note.) Sometimes it's the random kindness of strangers that really stabs you in the chest. (In a positive way, I mean.) I opened the gift and tears flooded my eyes. I am so TOUCHED!

I am also, frankly, psychic.

The first one I opened was John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. The only reason I know the principles therein is because the Founding Fathers used his ideas so extensively - so I put the book on the Wish List, just so I could have the actual SOURCE material around.

Thank you, thank you!

And secondly, I am so THRILLED - but the second book was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World.

Whoo-hoo! I just mentioned it earlier today and then 2 hours later, it arrived. I felt like I was an 8 year old on Christmas morning opening up these gifts.

I cannot WAIT to dig in.

And to the reader kind enough to think of me, and to send me these gifts: thank you, thank you, thank you.

It's put a huge goofy smile on my lips!!

The traps in Shakespeare's sonnets

Yet another good review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a new literary analysis of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, which has been getting universally interesting reviews. I am very excited to read the book. I linked to another great article about it a while back.

I especially found this section of the Chronicle review interesting, the one that discusses how Greenblatt deals with those pesky sonnets people have been speculating about for centuries:

Though Mr. Greenblatt's carefully argued suppositions bridge many gaps in his narrative of Shakespeare's life, his approach to Shakespeare's 154 sonnets is more restrained. These poems have aroused the most fevered speculation about Shakespeare's life for centuries, as literary sleuths have attempted to glean Shakespeare's sexual preferences and the identity of his lovers from the poems.

"I'm reckless in many places in the book," says Mr. Greenblatt. "But I'm careful with the sonnets because that's where I think he's setting the most traps." Some of the sonnets, he says, may have been written to persuade Henry Wriothesley, the young earl of Southampton, to marry against his personal inclination not to do so. The story behind other sonnets remains hidden behind what Mr. Greenblatt calls "a translucent curtain."

Mr. Greenblatt says that reading the sonnets as sexual autobiography is "the great temptation. This is the place in Shakespeare's work in which he uses the word 'I' and uses the word 'Will.' But it's precisely here that Shakespeare is at his most elusive, guarded and cunning in terms of how much he's willing to reveal and how much he's holding back. The closer we get to the word 'I,' the more concealed he appears to be."

Mr. Wells [Stanley Wells, another Shakespearean scholar and author]also points to the dangers of reading too much of Shakespeare's life into the work. "In the absence of some of the documents we would like to have" in writing about Shakespeare's life, he says, "we turn to the work to try to discover things."

The problem is trying to grab hold of biographical certainties in works of art that are so creatively oppositional. "Shakespeare had, supremely, the ability to hide himself," says Mr. Wells. "To enter into the minds of the persons in his plays and to present, sometimes, absolutely conflicting points of view."

Fabulous. Shakespeare had the ability to hide. To reveal as well as obscure. To grab hold of "certainty" seems pointless - can we not just revel in what he accomplished with his pen?

MUST. READ. THIS. BOOK.

Don't read Where's Waldo. It is an extremely subversive book.

It's Banned Books Week. Otherwise known as: The Week That Reminds Us of How Great it is to Read What We Like When We like, and How Sad It Is That There Are Such Fearful Boneheads In the World.

Below, find a list of "the The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000".

I do have some questions: challenged from where? To be in a school curriculum? Why would Nancy Friday's book about women's sexual fantasies be on a school curriculum? Or - do certain groups want these books to be banned everywhere? Public libraries, book stores, etc.?

Many of these books are old favorites of mine, life-changing books, books that are almost like old friends, as opposed to the printed word. I'll bold the ones I read. (Thanks for the idea, Llamas...)

[Heads up: I don't even think Mein Kampf should be banned. I am against banning books. Completely. Normally I don't do this, but I'll say it now: If you are pro-banning-books in any way, please don't comment. I don't want to hear it.]

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier GREAT book. Robert Cormier is scarily good. I'll never forget reading After the First Death - I probably read it too soon, it's an upsetting book - but I experienced true soul-growth reading it. Soul-growth doesn't always feel GOOD. Robert Cormier's a great writer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Fantastic book. One of my all-time faves..
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Oooh, what a scary dangerous book.
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger grrrrr
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Dieby Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna (I actually agree that this book should be banned. Heh, heh. No, just kidding. The book, however, sucked, and the production values were absolutely amateurish. The damn thing fell apart almost immediately. However - the crappy book is obviously for ADULTS. Not kids. Why be so afraid of it?)
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle One of my favorite books ever written.
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (an anonymous diary of a drug-user. I read it waaaayyyyy too early - I was probably 12, or 13 - there's a lot of sex in it, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. And she ends up dying in the end. The book BURNED itself into my brain. I probably shouldn't have read it, but it sure made me fear hallucinogenic drugs and getting in with the wrong crowd and succumbing to peer pressure. It served its purpose.)
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak Why on earth would this lovely crazy book be banned?
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras (Now I haven't read this, but it pisses me off that it's on here. I'm seeing red right now. God forbid pre-teen girls should find out what is happening to their bodies.)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel One of my favorite books ever written.
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) (This is pornography, erotica. I've read it. But ... it's obviously an adult book. It has nothing to do with kids. Why would anyone want to keep an ADULT from reading it? Grrrr)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest what????? This is a lovely book, heartfelt, well-written. Is it because it deals with suicide? Why? But also - this is a book for ADULTS. Why ban it?
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras (Again: see my comment above about the same book only for girls. GRRRRRRR)
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume This book is a great book, a classic of childhood. Not only is it a good story, but it prepared me, emotionally, for getting my period. I think it prepared millions of girls of my generation for the transition into adulthood. When my period came along, I knew what was happening to me not only because of my mother telling me about it, but also because Judy Blume wrote a whole book about it. God bless Judy Blume.
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday Yeah, I have a copy. A lot of women I know do. It's just one of those books passed around - a classic of the genre. Again - this is obviously a book for adults. Why ban it? What is WRONG with these people?
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume Wonderful book. My favorite book of Judy Blume's actually.
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford Uh - what?? Could someone please explain to me the rationale here?
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell Bwahahahaha! I LOVE this book! It was actually read to us in 4th grade. Guess we couldn't get away with that now!
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

The worst job ever

Joseph Epstein on the poet laureate-ship. If you love poets and poetry, you've got to read this piece.

Joseph Epstein's an idol of mine. For more reasons than one.

A paragraph like this is only one example of why I love this guy:

I think it fair to say that one of the first qualifications of an American poet laureate is that he not in any way be dangerous. Amiri Baraka, the former LeRoi Jones, was recently canned as poet laureate of New Jersey for writing some fairly insane anti-Semitic verse; and rightly canned, in my view. Let Mr. Baraka write all the anti-Semitic verse he wishes—may he find joy in his Jew-hating, as my people say—but he ought not to be permitted to do so while on the payrolls of the great state of New Jersey.

Allen Ginsberg is a stellar example of someone who could never have been poet laureate. Some years ago I was told about an official award given to Ginsberg in which the master of ceremonies took time out to thank Ginsberg for his courage in coming out so early and so openly as a homosexual at a time when it took real courage to do so, making the way easier for men like him, the master of ceremonies, who wished on this occasion to thank him for all he had done for the cause of gay liberation. Ginsberg, in dinner clothes for this grand occasion, rose to the podium and said, “Thank you, but, after that introduction, I’m not sure whether I am getting this award for my poetry or my cocksucking.”

Any Philip Roth fans out there?

I admit. I've never read any of his stuff. I know people who think he is God's gift to literature, who own every one of his books, who look forward to his new books the same way I look forward to a new AS Byatt or Richard Powers.

His new book Plot Against America sounds fanTAStic!!! It's a book showing an alternate history: Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 election - running on a platform of anti-Semitism.

It sounds amazing.

To the Philip Roth fans out there: would it be okay to just start with this latest book? Or do you recommend I go back to some of his others?

What is his best, you think?

"this rough magic"

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers out there. His latest review, on display here, is a perfect example why. Granted, the topic (Shakespeare) is near and dear to my heart - but it's the WAY he writes, his style, what he reveals, and how he reveals it.

First off - I have GOT to read the book being reviewed: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World. It's now on my Wish List. Not that that's a hint or anything.

I needed to be convinced to want to read this book, basically because I dislike postmodern criticism so much it makes my teeth itch - so I usually stay away from more recent critics. Gopnik convinced me.

Gopnik does a great analysis of what is wrong with much criticism these days - I found myself nodding enthusastically as I read this:

The point, as Greenblatt emphatically argues, is “not to strip away the reimagining, as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses but, rather, to enhance a sense of wonder at Shakespeare’s creation . . . that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature.” One need not accept the identification to value the discovery. Biographical criticism may be a practice without certainties, but it is not a game without rules. Each time we come closer to Shakespeare’s life, we escape from the aridity of formal criticism or the cheap generalities of social history into a recognizable world of real experience. When A. L. Rowse insists that Emilia Bassano Lanier, the tempestuous, adulterous, musical, poetic wife of a court musician, was the original “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets, we can buy it or not, as we please. But the very existence of a woman like Emilia demonstrates that the clichéd images of Elizabethan women, as subservient wives or unruly whores, are too grossly tuned to capture the reality of Shakespeare’s world. Whether she is the Dark Lady or not, Emilia is a dark lady. Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms, and replaces them not with gossipy puzzle-solution certainties but with glimpses of life as it is lived, and art as it is made. Criticism is always a map of possibilities, roads taken, neglected, and cut fresh, and the map of art is never more vivid than when the possibilities of a period are incarnated as the people in a life.

God. YES. "Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms" ... Isn't that the truth?

Also: "as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses" - In a nutshell, that's most of my problem with current lit crit. I prefer the "rough magic" of the art - and theories on how the "metamorphoses" came about ... rather than the obsessing on the "life sources" of the artist.

Sylvia Plath's poems have suffered from that kind of too-literal biographical analysis.

Don't ONLY look at biographical details. Don't just look at the timeline of a person's life! You've got to try to get into their subconscious mind, too!

Gopnik discusses Greenblatt's conclusions, in regards to Shakespeare's influences, and where certain characters may have come from. Again: MAY have come from. Greenblatt's guess at the origin of Falstaff is positively thrilling.

One other part of the article which I thoroughly DUG is the section on the soliloquies in Hamlet - what sets them apart from all soliloquies written before, the evolutionary leap taken by the playwright. Thrilling stuff.

What makes “Hamlet” different from Shakespeare’s previous work is the way it brings out a complete inner life. Before Hamlet, soliloquy is mostly just exposition of motive. (“Why am I acting this way? Well you may ask. I’m doing it because . . .”—as in “Richard III.”) With Hamlet, as Greenblatt very neatly puts it, we get “an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision.” ... Shakespeare, by compressing the plot into a matter of days, making Hamlet full-grown, and having the murder a secret known only to Hamlet, through the Ghost, makes Hamlet’s show of madness not just superfluous but truly self-destructive—it does nothing but draw suspicious attention to him. In any case, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is half-crazy and suicidal before he even sees the Ghost, and most of his soliloquies, instead of furthering our understanding of the action, are at direct cross-purposes to it. (Hamlet knows very well that a traveller has returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns.) What Hamlet says replaces the clear exposition of motive with a kind of chattering, compulsive, image-chasing interior monologue of dreads and desires.

And the following observation too (which is why I love Gopnik so much):

The questions forced on every screenwriter—where is the character’s motive? what does he “want”?—are exactly the questions Shakespeare ignored. (When Hollywood melodrama does touch the edge of the tragic, it is nearly always through the removal of motive: Why does Michael ruin his own values and dearest hopes by shooting the policeman and Sollozzo? Why does Gittes pursue Noah? All that keeps “Citizen Kane” from tragedy is Rosebud.) With Shakespeare, the inner life is no longer a condition of narrative but one of existence. They are, therefore they think.

Now criticism like THIS exhilarates me. I hadn't ever thought of it in quite that way - the "removal of motive", and how effective that can be. It is why we continue to discuss certain films years after they were made. We know WHAT Rosebud is, but we still don't know WHY. Etc. etc.

Lewis Carroll

In light of the post below, here's a couple excerpts from the fantastic biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodson (Lewis Carroll) I read a while back by Morton Cohen - great book. Great book not only because you get to know every teeny detail of Carroll's life, but you also get literary analysis. Yum!!

First of all - Dodson/Carroll himself describes where "the Alice books" came from. So that's a big ol' raspberry to the jackass in the post below. Here are Dodson's words:

Many a day we had rowed together on that quiet stream - the three little maidens and I - and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit - whether it were at times when the writer was "i' the vein" and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say - yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards ... In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication. Full many a year has slipped away, since that "golden afternoon" that gave thee birth, but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday - the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said "nay" to: from whose lips "Tell us a story, please," had all the stern immutability of Fate!

Beautiful, eh?

And below I've excerpted part of Cohen's in-depth analysis of the Alice books. He analyses the content, but he also analyzes their unprecedented appeal:

…Neither Alice book has ever gone out of print; both are, in fact, firm bulwarks of society, both in the English-speaking world and everywhere else. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, they are the books most widely and most frequently translated and quoted. Over 75 editions and versions of the Alice books were available in 1993, including play texts, parodies, read-along cassettes, teachers’ guides, audio-language studies, coloring books, “New Method” readers, abridgements, learn-to-read story books, single-syllable texts, coloring books, pop-up books, musical renderings, casebooks, and a deluxe edition selling for 175 pounds. They have been translated into over 70 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish; and they exits in Braille… Critics have pondered the books’ magic and tried to explain it. What are they all about, they ask, and why so universally successful? What is the key to their enchantment, why are they so entertaining and yet so enigmatic? What charm enables them to transcend languages as well as national and temporal differences and win their way into the hearts of young and old everywhere and always?

Commenting on Alice, Charles himself wrote: “The ‘Why’ of this book cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child’s smile, would read such words in vain … No deed … I suppose… is really unselfish. Yet if one can put forth all one’s powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child’s whispered thanks and the airy touch of a little child’s pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.”

Charming as that comment is, it does not help us grasp the meaning of the books. We must go beyond Charles’ reflections. The critiques, commentaries, exegeses, and analyses that have appeared during the past hundred years and more – some profound and interesting, some absurd – offer many bewildering theories. Recalling a few simple facts, however, helps.

To begin with, Charles wrote both books with Alice Liddell and, to a lesser degree, her sisters and Robinson Duckworth in mind. All the occupants of the boat who first heard the tale of Alice are characters in the first book. The Dodo is Charles, the Duck is Duckworth, the Lory is Lorina, the Eaglet Edith. But they play hardly more than walk-on parts. The book is about Alice, the middle sister; it is she, and she alone, who stands at center stage throughout.

The actors in both Alice books are transplants from real life, as are the episodes, and those who sat in the gliding boat recognized them as Charles related them, just as they would later experience flashes of memory reading Looking Glass. The landmarks, the language, the puns, the puffery – it was all rooted in the circumscribed enclave of their Victorian lives. Oxford provided the landscape, its architecture, its history, its select society, its conventions. In Under Ground and in the additions that Charles later made to the tale and in the sequel, his listeners (and readers) would have instantly picked up on the references, to the Sheep Shop on St. Aldate’s, the treacle well at Binsey, the lilies of the Botanic Gardens, the deer in Magdalen Grove, the lion and the unicorn from the royal crests, the leopards from Cardinal Wolsey’s coat of arms that graces the fabric of Christ Church and are known as “Ch Ch Cats”. Charles parodied familiar verse and songs, some of which they sang together as they rowed up or down the river: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat”; “Salmon come up” in “The Lobster Quadrille”; “Turtle Soup”; “How doth the little crocodile” and more. They would readily penetrate the thin disguises of John Ruskin as the conger eel, Bartholomew Price as the Bat, Humpty Dumpty as some egghead don pontificating, the Caterpillar as another conducting a viva. The Mad Tea-Party as a parody of Alice’s birthday party would have elicited howls of laughter. A good many of the references are lost to us, so localized they were.

Underlying the characters, however distorted and exaggerated, is the cast-iron foundation of Victorian society, its shibboleths, class hierarchy, manners, conventions, proprieties, taboos, and, perhaps most of all, its foibles and follies. The Victorian idea – or, in Charles’ terms, the misconception – of the child is at the heart of both stories, as are the child’s observations of the adult world and the adult world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child. We also have a running commentary on the human condition and especially a catalog of human weaknesses – sliding away from rectitude, succumbing to frailties, escaping responsibilities, imagining infirmities.

Although the heroine is still young and learning, she is old enough both to reflect her training and to criticize it. She mirrors her society by showing that her sensitivity has already been blunted and that she has learned to mimic the haughty stance, the rude rebuke common in her social milieu. Her indelicate treatment of the Mouse and the birds in the early chapters of Wonderland are a mere prelude to the insolence and arrogance she herself encounters and criticizes. Almost everyone she meets mistreats her: the rabbit mistakes her for his housemaid and shouts orders at her, the caterpillar cross-examines her, the Duchess berates her, the Hatter criticizes the length of her locks, the March Hare lectures her on her use of language, the Gryphon chides her and tells her to hold her tongue, the Queen of Hearts shouts, “Off with her head!”

Bad behavior is one thing, but violence is something else, and it too occurs in these books, some of it initiated by our heroine. Alice’s fall dwon the rabbit hole is in itself not violent, but it certainly carries with it the fear of a violent crash. When Alice is jammed into the Rabbit’s house, she kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney like a skyrocket. In Looking-Glass, there’s the Jabberwock with jaws that bite and claws that catch, the oysters are all eaten, the Lion and the Unicorn engage in battle, and the red chess pieces are threatening.

The books reflect England’s rigid social scale more than they criticize it. Charles has a good ear and captures the speech and manners of several social grades.

The characters behave according to their stations, but a good many Victorian bromides transcend class, and Charles deals them out mercilessly. “I’m older than you, and must know better,” says the Lory to Alice. When Alice asks exactly how old the Lory is, she vainly refuses to tell. Group games are the target in the Caucus-race, with its solemn prize-giving ceremony. When the Mouse goes off in a huff after reciting its tale, the old Crab admonishes her daughter: “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you to never lose your temper!” Then the Caterpillar orders Alice to “keep your temper”. Similar rebuffs and platitudes occur throughout.

What, then, does it all add up to besides art? The answer surely is a double-layered metaphor. The more obvious one, not much disguised, is the child’s plight in Victorian upper-class society, which the Liddell sisters would easily recognize. But that same metaphor goes far beyond Charles’ original purpose: it reaches beyond Victorian Oxford into the wide world. For Charles, intentionally or not, got at the universal essence of childhood and captured the disappointments, fears, and bewilderment that all children encounter in the course of daily living. He wove fear, condescension, rejection, and violence into the tales, and the children who read them feel their hearts beat faster and their skin tingle, not so much with excitement as with an uncanny recognition of themselves, of the hurdles they have confronted and had to overcome. Repelled by Alice’s encounters, they are also drawn to them because they recognize them as their own. These painful and damaging experiences are the price children pay in all societies in all times when passing through the dark corridors of their young lives, and Charles miraculously captures their truth.

The second metaphor lives in Charles’ own life. He could not have written about Alice’s adventures had he not himself experienced the indignities that Alice suffers and the fears she feels. The Alice books become, in this metaphor, a record of Charles’ childhood, the shocks dealt him by parents, teachers, all his elders. Bad manners and violence were commonplace in Victorian days, but their emphasis and frequency in these books, while capturing the ethos of the age, also tell us that Charlese must have stored up an amount of hostility as he grew up, at home, at school, and at Oxford. At home and at school, he very likely smarted under innumerable commands from above, unreasoning and unreasonable, and as a sensitive observer, he saw and deplored society’s artificial and meaningless minuets. The spare-the-rod philosophy was still dominant; whippings and beatings at school were customary. The bullying he witnessed, the knockabout games on the sporting fields, surely weighed on him. Accumulated resentment seeks outlets, and Charles took this opportunity to get even with the past.

In the end, however, the books are not mainly about fear and bewilderment. Once readers have associated with Alice and wandered with her through Wonderland, they are together on a survival course. They are thrown back upon their own inner resources, determining whether their resources are strong enough to get them through. Does Alice have the wit necessary to master the maze of childhood and emerge a tried and tested teenager? Charles’ answer is affirmative. He endows his heroine, and by extension all children, with the means of dealing with a hostile, unpredictable environment. At the close of both books, we have a catharsis, an affirmation of life after Wonderland and life on this side of the looking-glass. Although unconventional, the endings are happy, as fairy-tale endings should be. In both cases, Alice should meet a strong male rescuer, a Prince Charming, and they should fall in love and live happily ever after. But she does not. She succeeds, but not through the formula of grand romance. Instead of honeyed happiness, she gains confidence, a way of dealing with the world; instead of love, she finds advancement, recognition, acceptance. It is a reasonably happy ending for Charles himself, for he is at the heart of the tales.

The Alice books affect all children of all places at all times in a similar way. They tell the child that someone does understand; they offer encouragement, a feeling that the author is sharing their miseries and is holding out a hand, a hope for their survival as they pass from childhood into adulthood.

But this discussion sounds too serious, really, because Charles’ most successful device is laughter. Anyone who abhors a pun does not appreciate its usefulness as a tool to exercise the mind, to urge the growing child to wed sense to sound … When, in reading the Alice books, the child sees and gets the pun or some other joke all on his or her own, the child suddenly senses an awakened pride in his or her ability and, at least for a moment, laughter replaces a troubled emotion.

Many of the critiques of the Alice books seem to have been written by people who seldom laugh.

Children’s books had existed for centuries before Charles came along. He did not invent the genre. But he did something significant. He broke with tradition. Many of the earlier children’s books written for the upper classes had lofty purposes: they had to teach and preach. Primers taught children religious principles alongside multiplication tables. Children recited rhymed couplets as aids to memorizing the alphabet – A: “In Adam’s fall we sinned all”, F: “The idle Fool is whipped at school.” Children learned their catechism, learned to fear sin – and their books were means to aid and abet the process. They were often frightened by warnings and threats, their waking hours burdened with homilies. Much of the literature of Charles’ day, the books he himself read as a boy, were purposeful and dour. They instilled discipline and compliance.

The Alice books fly in the face of that tradition, destroy it, and give the Victorian child something lighter and brighter. Above all, these books have no moral. About a year after Wonderland appeared, when Charles sent a more conventional book to a young friend, he wrote (January 1867): “The book is intended for you to look at the outside, and then put it away in the bookcase: the inside is not meant to be read. The book has got a moral – so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll.”

Perhaps the most important difference between the Alice books and more conventional children’s stories of mid-Victorian Britain is a difference in the author’s attitude towards his audience. For a middle and upper class child, growing up in Victorian times may have been something less than a happy experience. It was an age of the nanny and the governess; children were shunted off to the nursery, brought out to spend an hour with their mothers in the late afternoon, and then whisked off again. When they reached school age, they were packed off to preparatory and then public schools, where they learned to fear schoolmasters and mistresses, and even more, one another. School was too often the arena of the bully: violence was rampant. To survive at the English boarding school, one had to be strong and resourceful enough to outwit one’s classmates.

By a magical combination of memory and intuition, Charles keenly appreciated what it was like to be a child in a grown-up society, what it means to be scolded, rejected, ordered about. The Alice books are antidotes to the child’s degradation. Like Dickens, Charles knew that when harsh reality becomes unbearable, the child seeks escape through fantasy. Charles also knew how to make the adult reader sympathize with the child Alice, the victim of the unpredictable, undependable world of adults into which she has accidentally fallen. Charles champions the child in the child’s confrontation with the adult world, and in that, too, his book differs from most others. He treats children, both in his book and in real life, as equals. He has a way of seeing into their minds and hearts, and he knows how to train their minds painlessly and move their hearts constructively.

The theme of survival echoes all through Charles’ work, just as it is a major concern in his life. If the Alice books are symbols of his own struggle to survive, they are also formulae for every child’s survival: they offer encouragement to push on, messages of hope in the wilderness of adult society. Time and again, Charles articulates that message, through his works and in his personal relationships. Ethel Rowell, a child friend, recorded her debt to him for teaching her logic and compelling her “to that arduous business of thinking.” And she added: “He gave me a sense of my own personal dignity. He was so punctilious, so courteous, so considerate, so scrupulous not to embarrass or offend, that he made me feel I counted.”

The element of respect and the absence of condescension are crucial, and Charles’ acceptance of the child as an equal makes all the difference, for it is these components that render the books timeless. Despite the Victorian furniture built into the tales, they do today for young people what they did for Ethel Rowell and other Victorian children. A 17 year old student of mine confirmed this notion, writing in a paper on 19th century fantasy: “Lewis Carroll gives equal time to the child’s point of view. He makes fun of the adult world and understands all the hurt feelings that most children suffer while they are caught in the condition of growing up but are still small. I find myself constantly identifying with Alice as I move through this bewildering world of ours. The Alice books help the child develop self-awareness and assure her that she is not the only one feeling what she feels. Maybe they even show adults how to be more aware of the child and the needs of children. They really made it easier for me to grow up.”

Charles does not play jokes on children – he shares jokes with them and, in doing so, gives them the self-confidence they need, the extra boost to make them take another step forward in the often precarious process of leaving childhood and entering adulthood. Along the road he makes them laugh without requiring them to pay for their laughter.

Even today the formula works: Charles helps children see themselves anew and to like what they see. That is why the Alice books have been translated into practically every language that children speak and why Charles commands an audience in every new generation.

Maybe I'm a bitch

Maybe I'm a purist, but I hope this book fails miserably. I mean, with advance reviews like "This is the worst book I've ever read", I don't think I have to worry, but still - I will kneel by my bed tonight, praying fervently for this author to CRASH. Everything he says rubs me the wrong way.

Lewis Carroll does not need your improvements, sir.

Yup. I'm a bitch. I'm a purist. No apologies. Something about this whole thing, the TONE of his comments ... I don't like it. Don't like it at all.

Huh?

This ravingly positive article on the perfection of Madame Bovary makes me wonder: What on earth does everyone see in that book? What the hell am I not seeing??

I read it in high school, but that doesn't really count. Tried to read it again this summer, and ... just couldn't make it through. Perhaps it was an awkward translation (and not the new one, described in the article linked to above). I understand the themes of the book, and why it was seen as so controversial, and what Flaubert was doing, what he was criticizing, etc. All of that is quite obvious. But ... I just don't care for it. It bored me. I don't see it as a novel of genius, not at all, and I certainly don't see it as superior to The Scarlet Letter - I guess I don't get what the fuss is all about.

The book is filled with sensory details. And yes, those are very very well drawn. You see the candlelight, the black beams of the ceilings, the lilac hedges, Emma's white forehead ...

But I don't get the depth. I don't feel that the book lets me IN. Like other books do.

Anyone read it and love it? Tell me what I'm missing, please. I've got to be missing SOMEthing.

East of Eden re-visited

Erin talks about East of Eden here in this wonderful post . She's re-reading it "with immense satisfaction".

The first time I read this magnificent book was when I was in high school, I think I was 15. I read it because I had seen the movie, and loved it so much I wanted to crawl into my television screen. Of course. I tried so hard to peek through that willow tree, which obscures Cal and Abra's kiss ... I wanted to sneak in the bushes to see it ... I wanted to be in that ferris wheel with him ... etc. etc. (Some things never change.) The movie only portrays the last section of Steinbeck's book, that describes the latest generation, the WWI generation, and the tormented relationship of the "Cain and Abel" sons. I forgave Steinbeck for not writing the movie, exactly, (heh) and forgave him for making Cal (ahem Jimmy Dean ahem) a relatively minor character in the book. It didn't really matter, because the book sucked me into its vastness, its majesty ... There's SO MUCH in it.

To me, the real revelation was Cathy, the mother, with the terrifying past, who became the whore-mistress. I mentioned her in this post on the Manson murders. Cathy is the vehicle for Steinbeck's musing on evil, and the nature of sheer pure evil. She's a terrifying construction, supremely evil yes, but still completely believable, not at all a cipher. That is why she scared me so much. She's not just a symbol. You can tell that Steinbeck is actually getting at something here, he's looking at a type, a type of person who really does walk the planet. There are some people who are un-redeemable. At least that's how I remember the Cathy sections.

The second time I read East of Eden was years later. My boyfriend and I read it together. The first time around, I was really just aching for the Cal scenes - because, after all, Jimmy Dean played Cal, and I was in love with Jimmy Dean.

But the second time around, I really got the scope of the book.

It's nothing less than encyclopedic. Reading Erin's post has made me think I should read it again.

More on Capote

Only this time, 2 posts from Erin at Critical Mass. Very good stuff.

Erin responds to my Capote post with this great essay on In Cold Blood

And now ... Erin is reading The Grass Harp, one of my favorite pieces of Capote writing. It HURTS, though! Reading The Grass Harp HURTS! It has the beauty of life, and the sorrow of life, and the yearning for life ... woven into its every word. Beautiful.

Reading Lists

Dan has posted his list of what he has read this summer. I'm such a snoop. I love to know what people are reading at all times.

My summer has gone this way and that, in terms of what I've read. I've been a big juggler this summer, keeping a bunch of books going at all times - which is rather unusual for me. But I've been moody these last couple of months - and not consistently in the headspace for the same book, day after day, or even hour after hour - Hence. I carry a huge backpack everywhere I go, filled with "toooo many books".

So let's see.

All along, I have been working on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. I read about a chapter or two every morning, although I did take a break from it for about a month. The book is not something I just want to barrel through, because it's so damn long! It's also the kind of read where it is okay to put it down, and then pick it up again. The story does not depend on momentum. I just picked it up again this morning. So that's been a constant for me, this summer.

Other books read:

Under the Banner of Heaven - by Jon Krakauer

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Carnage and Culture - by Victor Davis Hanson (not finished with that yet - It's another book which I don't feel the need to barrel through. I'm also DEFINITELY not always in the mood to read about war. So when I'm in the mood for some vigorous challenging reading - where I am in the headspace to learn about hoplite maneuvers and the invention of the stirrup and what it all means, then I'll pick that one up)

My Dark Places - by James Ellroy

Black Dahlia Avenger - by Steve Hodel

Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790 - Edmund Burke

Winner of the National Book Award - Jincy Willett

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Book of Abigail and John - John & Abigail Adams

Founding Brothers - by Joseph Ellis

Evenings with Cary Grant - by Nancy Nelson

Cary Grant - by Graham McCann

Cary Grant - by Richard Schickel

(I tore through those last three books in a feverish 48-hour period.) I don't think I'm missing anything else there.

Books I began this summer but eventually put down because of sheer lethargy and crushing boredom:

Madame Bovary - uhm, yeah, I read it before, but ... well. WhatEVER!!

The Whistling Woman - AS Byatt (what a huge bore.)

Er - Edmund Burke and Evenings with Cary Grant?? Okay, Sheila, you're a freak.

VC Andrews fans...

Here, at last, is the essay about Flowers in the Attic.

Great essay, filled with very funny quotes from people who had devoured the books as pre-teens. Heh heh. One of the quotes:

"These books really got me tingly, and they made me feel like my parents and teachers were oblivious fools," a novelist friend says. "I read the damn things in class and in carpool and at Christian summer camp and no one ever thought to ask what the basic premises were. Also, they addressed two troubling issues that all teens struggle with, namely, incest and arsenic poisoning, which really helped me to feel a little less alone in the world."

Ha! I know I struggled on a daily basis with arsenic poisoning when I was 13. Didn't we all?

Mead writes:

Even now, I am powerless to resist Andrews. I know that Grandma will sedate Cathy one night and tar her flowing, tempting tresses; that Momma will fail to tell her new, much-younger man-friend that she's got an anemic brood stashed away in the attic; and that Cory will die after eating one too many arsenic-powdered donuts. But she has me in her bony-fingered grip — again — anyway.

Jeez. What sick trashy addictive books. I should read them again. I bet there are entire passages I remember word for word. However, the tar-in-the-platinum-hair debacle had most definitely slipped my mind.

"Bony-fingered" grip indeed.

(via Book Slut)

Fairy on the prairie

Truman Capote freely referred to himself, throughout his life, as a "fairy".

If you remember his frequent appearances on Johnny Carson, then you will remember his flamboyant character, his high lispy voice, the drawling Southern accent ... He never tried to hide who he was.

Capote was hired in the 50s as a replacement screenwriter for the Bogart film Beat the Devil. It was being filmed in Italy - it starred Bogart, Gina Lollabrigida, Peter Lorre - and others. Capote arrived, and worked his ass off. Churning out pages on a daily basis. The movie is quite fun, if you've never seen it. You can hear the Breakfast at Tiffany's voice of Capote in much of the dialogue. Humphrey Bogart didn't know what to make of this self-proclaimed "fairy" at first. Bogie kept his distance. Capote finally broke through with Bogart when he challenged Bogie to arm-wrestle. Bogart laughed in his face, and then promptly lost the wrestling-match to Truman. Instead of being a bad loser, Bogart clapped Truman on the back, congratulating him. Truman had won his trust, by beating his ass. Bogart later wrote to Bacall, "Wait until you meet our screenwriter. You have never seen anything like him. At first, I didn't think he was for real - but he grows on you, and now I'd like to carry him around in my pocket, and take him out whenever I need a laugh."

Gerald Clarke wrote a biography of Truman Capote which is a classic in the genre. I read it years ago, but it is one of my cherished books, and I dip into it often.

A couple days ago, I picked it up again, to read the whole section on the writing of In Cold Blood. I had forgotten much of it.

Truman Capote said later that if he had known what he was getting into, when he traveled down to Kansas ("a fairy down on the prairie - who'd have thought?") to write a piece on the murder for The New Yorker, then he never would have gone. He went to Kansas only 2 weeks after the murders took place. The killers had still not been found, the community was in an uproar of suspicion and paranoia. Capote's main interest was to do a long profile of the townspeople, how regular church-going farmers handled such a disaster. Little did he know what the book would eventually be! The project took up years of his life. He had to wait for the executions of the 2 murderers, in order to complete his book. So he waited, and waited. Appeal after appeal ...He was unable to write anything else. Nothing else interested him. He was a man obsessed, in the grip of his obsession for years. His health was ruined. His friends were sick of hearing about the Clutter family. He tried to take vacations with his long-time partner, and would just drink, and try to sleep, and have fits of despair. He thought those boys would never be executed, he thought he would be in limbo forever. Yet - the morbidness of his entire life being on hold because of commuted death-sentences in Kansas - the morbidness of trying to go on, when really all you want is for those 2 boys to be killed - so that YOU can go back to YOUR life ... This paid a huge toll on him.

Finally - there were no more appeals and Capote traveled to Kansas, to watch the execution. Hickock and Smith had asked him to be there. In the intervening years, he had interviewed the 2 killers numerous times. Their first-person descriptions of their own sorry lives make up important parts of the book. Capote became their conduit to the outside world. Hickock would draw self-portraits of himself and send them to Capote. Capote was playing a double-edged game here. He became "the listener", the one who would sit and ask them questions, and nod understandingly. The 2 of them got addicted to his concern. Yet Capote was horrified by most of what he heard. He wasn't without pity for these men, who had pretty much been beaten like dogs from the second they were born - and yet Capote hadn't had an easy road either, and HE hadn't killed anyone in cold blood. He had grown up with alcoholics, he had been abandoned by his father, his parents were ashamed of having a "fairy" for a son, he was sent to military school - can you imagine how awful that must have been for him? Capote may have acted like a cream-puff but that man was cold and hard as steel inside. He had to be.

Capote needed quotes, he needed access, he needed to enter into the psychologies of these 2 men. He was able to paint the graphic picture of the Clutter family through interviews with people who knew and loved them. But the Clutters were no longer around to speak for themselves. Hickock and Smith were alive for a couple of years, so he visited them often. On his way out of Death Row, he would feel the urge to vomit. It would take him days to recover, emotionally, from these macabre "visits". And he said, later, that he never recovered from the "shattering" experience of watching the two men hang. The letters he wrote to friends afterwards are nearly incoherent. Watching how hard the hanging body clings to life, watching the kicking feet, the flailing, the letting-go of bodily functions ... Capote was really never the same man again.

And he then sat down and wrote the book like a bat out of hell.

Truman Capote always thought that he had a "great book" in him. This mythical "great book" haunted his dreams, he would lie awake at night aching with ambition, dreaming about this great book ... He never thought In Cold Blood was it. He looked back on the experience of researching that book and writing it as a grim one, an almost universally unpleasant and grueling experience. I've read all of Capote's books. I love that guy's writing style. I even read his unfinished work - the 2 chapters of the novel he was working on when he died. He claimed to have it almost finished, but the rest of it (if it even existed) was never found. The 2 chapters are okay - it's a gossipy bitchy look at high-class New York society. It's merciless. It's very funny. Nobody is spared. Human beings are seen in their worst lights. Everyone is selfish, cynical, out for themselves ... It is quite funny, but it's very very mean. He was nearing the end of his life, and he had been abandoned by most of his friends. His outlook was not good, he was addicted to drugs, filled with anxiety and loneliness ... The 2 chapter are his way of lashing out at all those people who left him, who tossed him out with the trash. Hence, the mean-ness.

The thing in the rest of Capote's writing that, for me, sets him apart is his undeniable love of humanity. His tenderness. His ability to SEE people, with all their flaws - and to see them as beautiful. Much of his best writing is all about nostalgia, wistfulness, yearning for childhood ... Yes, it is sentimental, but it also has a depth of sadness beneath it, a grief ... which elevates it from mawkishness.

In Cold Blood taps into something else. In Cold Blood doesn't fit into either of the Capote categories: the bitchy mean queen telling all the nasty secrets of his high-class friends, or the lonely sweet man filled with hurtful nostalgia for childhood.

It was something completely new. For him, and for us. I don't even know if I can describe it. All I can say is - he never accomplished such a thing again. His writing never seemed so effortless again. You read that book and you feel like if you cut ONE WORD, the entire thread will unravel. It is so tight.

The other thing I had forgotten from the biography is Capote's personal experience leaving his home-environment of ritzy New York City (where there were lots of "fairies"), and venturing into the Kansas prairies to investigate a murder. Capote was openly gay. He wasn't a macho gay, either. He didn't try to blend in, or act straight, or hide his gayness. He was a small rotund man, who wore wide white hats, spoke with a lisp, fluttered about like Blanche DuBois, and literally said things like, "I declare!"

He took one of his best friends, Harper Lee (yes - THAT Harper Lee) as a co-researcher. She was much more "normal"-acting, and was able to blend in a bit more. She could get people to talk to her, because she seemed like one of them.

But Truman Capote was so relentless, and not only so relentless, but so committed to justice, so committed to discovering what had happened in the Clutter household, that people started opening up. The people in the town started competing about who had had him over for dinner the most times. Alvin Dewey, the head of the investigation, a tough gruff 3 pack a day smoker, eventually counted Truman as a valued partner. Truman was there when Dewey got the call that the 2 murderers had been picked up in Las Vegas, AND that they were still wearing the boots with the distinctive soles (that had left footprints - If the 2 hadn't confessed, the boots alone would have convicted them). Truman was standing right there, with Dewey's wife, listening to Dewey hear the news.

The people of Kansas, who had never met a person like Capote in their lives, who were Bible-Belt ranchers and farmers, took him into their homes, their hearts, their families. Without them, the book would not be what it is.

It is a massive accomplishment. The power of his personality, the depth of how he listened, and sympathised - must have been extraordinary.

I know that Truman Capote always thought that his "great book" remained unwritten ... but I beg to differ.

Juvenilia

Emily talks about some of the early stories of Dylan Thomas.

The stories are experimental, not all that successful apparently ... but interesting nonetheless because of what it reveals about the author and his work.

Reminds me a bit of reading Seymour: An Introduction by JD Salinger. It was the last thing the man wrote. (Or, I should say, the last thing he published.) It is a rambling run-on sentence, filled with so many parentheticals that you get lost. It becomes apparent why he stopped writing: he could no longer make any statements with any authority. Parentheticals had to follow everything, exceptions, asides ... It is an arduous read, with moments of such brilliance, such clarity and insight, that it leaves me breathless. It also leaves me sad. Because his voice is no longer with us. And it also makes me sad because - you can FEEL as you read that piece: Wow ... this is like he is tearing out parts of his heart, his soul ... I suppose he was no longer willing to pay that price, no longer willing to share those pieces of himself, it was too high a price to pay.

RIP, Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz has died, at the age of 93. Strange, but my eyes filled up with tears when I heard. His poetry has always meant a great deal to me - and I am thankful to my sister Siobhan for introducing his work to me.

Known for his poetry, yes, he also is known for his continuous and courageous denunciation of evil, and of telling the truth about communism, and dictatorships. His life is a tale of inspiration, and bravery. He grew up in Poland, and lived under first the Nazis, and then under communism - before finally fleeing to the United States. He had seen it all. After Poland wrenched itself free in 1989, he moved back to Krakow. God. To wait that long to go home. His poetry, then, is the poetry of persistent exile. Maybe that's why it has such sweet melancholy, such clarity. He was always known as an "intellectual", whatever that means. To me it means a certain kind of writer, usually of the Eastern European variety. Writers who write with a certain abstract distance, perhaps because they have seen so much tyranny, they feel an urgency to try to describe it - writers who contemplate the big questions, and try to find new forms with which to express themselves - writers like Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Kafka, Czeslaw Milosz.

Yet somehow - these "intellectual" writers do not sacrifice the heart. Their writing does not come off as cold. Or clinical. On the contrary. It pulses with life, humanity, compassion.

For example, here is Milosz's poem "Encounter". I cannot read it without feeling a lump rise in my throat, and I have read it countless times. Notice the sparseness of the language (which may be due to it being a translation, not sure - he wrote in Polish, it was almost a political act for him to do so) - notice the cold clarity of the images ... and then notice how he bursts forth into warmth in the last lines.

Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Here's another extraordinary poem. I'm no literary scholar or anything, but the images in this poem terrify me - and I can guess why. There's a sense of human beings being ground up, chewed up - a monster from the deep rising to engulf us all ... We are all 'so little'.

The poem is called "So Little".

So Little
I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know
What in all that was real.

Maybe the writers trapped in Eastern European countries, or living in exile, felt too much, and yet they were determined, above all else, to describe the tyranny under which they lived, the double-tyranny actually: the tyranny of fascism or communism, and the tyranny of being an artist in such societies. Artists were usually the first ones attacked - most of all, the writers. Writers are dangerous, after all!! Most had to flee in order to continue writing. Others, like Havel, stayed put - and lived a life of persecution and constant imprisonment, refusing to shut up - and a life where his plays would never be produced in his own country, and yet were huge successes the world over. Like Havel said, "I decided to behave AS IF I were free."

So the poems, the plays, the books of these writers - are much more than what is on the printed page. They are affirmations of the human spirit. They are a testament to the difficulties inherent in even getting the damn thing published in their own country. They are EVIDENCE that you can NOT hold people down forever. You may control a person's movements, a person's ability to travel ... but you can NOT control what goes on in that person's head. No matter how hard you try.

I am grateful to Czeslaw Milosz, for his courage, his gift, and his persistence. He's an inspiration.

If you're interested - here is the speech he gave in 1981, accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature. It's a doozy - I highly recommend it. This is a man, a Polish man, in exile - it is 1981 - the Solidarity movement was just heating up, things were starting to shift, crack, break apart ... Milosz had lived long enough to see it. Freedom was still almost a decade away, but the spirit of that exhilarating time in history is in his speech.

In it, Milosz says, "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."

He was that pistol shot. It was his destiny to be so.

Rest in peace, sir.

A treasure trove of poems

has been discovered. Incredible.

Now if they could only find Sylvia Plath's missing journals too ...

Style or Voice

Great article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about "style" in writing - trends in style, movements - were Strunk and White correct in what they deemed to be good style, in their classic (and still best-selling) book?

"Omit needless words", to me, is one of the best pieces of advice a writer could ever listen to.

But there are other issues in The Elements of Style to be discussed, and this has to do with a writer's individuality, the specific "voice" of the writer.

Very interesting piece.

Speaking of "tooooo many books"

...my results to the "What Kind of Elitist Are You?" quiz are no surprise, whatsoever.

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves.
What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.


What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I hope I would never insult your paperbacks. At least not to your face.

via Kerry.

"Tooooo many books"

First, a quick story. It is a brief moment between my sister Jean and I ... which has gone on to become O'Malley folklore. She and I were flying to Ireland to visit my sister Siobhan. Now - for whatever reason - I really can't remember - I hadn't packed any books (this is shocking) - or maybe I had forgotten the books I wanted to bring. Whatever the case was - I ended up buying 3 or 4 "airport books" at JFK Airport. Being "airport books" they were crap. One was The Notebook which was so bad that I ended up leaving it in a drawer in a Galway hostel with a note: "This book is really bad."

I had them in a plastic bag. Which I put under my seat on the plane. Or maybe I stuffed them in my backpack.

As we were preparing to land in Dublin, I reached down to re-arrange my bag - and suddenly was confronted with the lunacy of my own behavior. Buying 4 books in the airport BEFORE I LEFT? Also ... do other people bring bags of books when they go on a giddy trip with their sisters?

I murmured, into my knapsack, in a flat tired voice, "Toooo many books."

Well. That's it. That's the big story. But Jean lost it. We both did. It struck as insanely funny. We could not stop laughing about it. I was BURDENED by my own books. Also, my idiocy struck us as insanely funny. And now we ALL say it. All the time.

"What'cha reading now?"

"Oh, the usual. Toooo many books."

When we go on our yearly family trip: "I have to pack my toooooo many books."

Speaking of tooooo many books, here is what I am reading now.

I am almost done with Farenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. A lightning-quick read. Very good. I love stories likethis one: Semi-futuristic, where humanity's human-ness is crushed by some overly mechanical society ... and one anti-hero bucks against the system. Sometimes to disastrous results, sometimes to happy results. 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World. The writing is very good in this book too. I'll finish it today.

I continue to plow through Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It is one of the best books I have ever read. I read a chapter every morning. The prose is so rich, so layered, you want to savor every moment. I don't want it to end.

I am also reading Madame Bovary. I seem to recall I read it in high school, but I am giving it another go. So far .... zzzzzzzzz.

Oh, and Bill, I meant to blog about this: On my vacation, one of the "tooooo many books" I brought was the book you gave me for my birthday: a novel called Winner of the National Book Award by a Jincy Willett. I started it on the train-ride home. I had no idea what to expect. I had read a very good review of it in The New York Times. I knew it was a first novel, it took place in Rhode Island - and it had a funny premise. Twin sisters whose ancestor was the only person who went back to England with the Mayflower. He took one look around and said, "Nope. Not for me."

Anyway. I almost had to stop reading it on the train because I was laughing so loud. I COULD NOT STOP. There were certain images she put in my brain that I could not get out. One of the characters is this "local poet" - and if that conjures up any images for you - great - but they can't be as hilarious as this character study. He is a vile and despicable character, and I was laughing until the tears rolled down my face.

I love a funny book. A wonderful read!

What are you all into at this moment, in terms of tooooo many books?

One of my favorite annual "literary events"

is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Thanks to Mr. Z for forwarding the results of this year's contest to me.

So what is this contest? And who the hell is Bulwer-Lytton? I actually have a vast store of useless knowledge about this man, because he was the favorite writer of Lucy Maud Montgomery, when she was a kid. Because of my obsession with HER, I actually read some of Bulwer-Lytton's stuff.

His is the purplest of purple purple prose. LM Montgomery later looked back on his stuff and thought, "What was I THINKING?" and yet she always defended him, because in doing so, she honored how much she had loved him when she was young.

Now - onto the contest-description:

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

And here are the 2004 winners and runners-up. These are CLASSIC!!

The winner, Dave Zobel, came up with this bad opening sentence:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.

But all the entries are hysterical.

This one, sent in by Siew-Fong Yiap of Hong Kong might be my favorite:

The legend about Padre Castillo's gold being buried deep in the Blackwolf Hills had lain untold for centuries and will continue to do so for this story is not about hidden treasure, nor is it set in any mountainous terrain whatsoever.

HA!!

This one, though, is pretty damn good, too - It's a parody of Bulwer-Lytton's "dark and stormy night" line:

It was a stark and dormy night--the kind of Friday night in the dorm where wistful women/girls without dates ovulated pointlessly and dreamed of steamy sex with bad boy/men in the backseat of a Corvette--like the one on Route 66, only a different color, though the color was hard to determine because the TV show was in black and white--if only Corvettes had back seats.

Jesus. "Ovulated pointlessly" ... ha ... sounds like my life!

Anyway, read them all, and laugh!!

I would add ...

to the list below the following titles:

Sheila's List of Contemporary Must-Read Fiction - with the understanding that I am a bit confused as to what they mean by 'contemporary' - when is the cut-off date? Slaughter-House Five was published in the 60s ...

1. Mating, by Norman Rush
This is # 1 on the list, forever.

2. Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley
If anyone ever really wants to understand, on a cellular level, how I see the world, and humanity's place in it ... I wouldn't be able to describe it myself probably. This book is the closest expression of it yet.

3. The Goldbug Variations, by Richard Powers
I do not know how to describe this book without making it sound boring. It's NOT! Its theme is life itself - the search for DNA, mixed in with the Goldberg Variations ... the connections found between these two ... and the meeting-up of 3 very different people: a librarian, a crazy-boy nighttime computer programmer, and an ex-scientist - one of the guys who had been on the forefront of the search for the "code" of DNA in the 50s ... their paths meet in the 1980s. And how the Goldberg Variations fit into all of this is anybody's guess ... this book is HUGE. All about math, and music, and humanity. A great achievement.

4. Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore -

this woman is tremendous. One of my writing idols.

5. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle.
Enough said. One of the greatest books ever.

6. Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood.
An unbelievable achievement. This book haunts me. Here's a wee story I told about it.

I'll probably think of more - but these are the ones that came immediately to mind.

Here are a couple more:

The Bone People, by Keri Hulme.

Thanks, Fee. I don't know how I could have forgotten that one. The only novel this woman wrote. The story of a Maori woman who is a hermit and lives in a stone tower. Isolated. And then into her life comes the battering-ram of a man Joe and his little beaten-down son. The book is a 3-way dance. It's tragic - and Fee's right: it was a painful read, although completely unforgettable.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn

I finished this book, sitting on my porch when I lived in Philadelphia (Germantown, to be exact) - My boyfriend was going for a run, and when he returned home I was curled up on the wicker couch bawling my eyes out for poor "Olympia". Great book, people - about a family of circus freaks. Indescribable. Unforgettable.

Atonement, by Ian McEwan

Going After Cacciato, by Tim O'Brien
The great novel about Vietnam. National Book Award winner - writing beyond compare. The Things They Carried, a collection of short pieces by O'Brien, is also unbelievable - all stories about Vietnam.

50 essential reads by contemporary authors

Brought out by the Orange Prize for Fiction. This list was "compiled by public vote". Authors were also asked (later) to give their input.

I'm not big on contemporary fiction - my taste is mercurial, and rather improvisational.

But let's take a look at the list. I'll bold-type the ones I have read.

THE LIVING LIBRARY OF TOP 50 ESSENTIAL CONTEMPORARY READS are (in alphabetical order by title):

1. A Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving - one of my favorite books ever. I can count on one hand the books which made me dissolve into weeping at the very end. Owen Meany is one. The other two are: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn and Atonement by Ian McEwan.

3. A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth

4. American Pastoral Philip Roth

5. Atonement Ian McEwan Hello!! I've written about the impact this book had on me before here, here, here, and here. One of the saddest books I have ever read, and also one of the most masterful.

6. Being Dead Jim Crace

7. Birdsong Sebastian Faulks

8. Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres

9. Cloudstreet Tim Winton - haven't read it - but my friend Ted gave it to me a while back for a birthday. It's on the "list".

10. Disgrace JM Coetzee

11. Enduring Love Ian McEwan

12. Faith Singer Rosie Scott

13. Fingersmith Sarah Waters

14. Fred and Edie Jill Dawson

15. Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels

16. Girl with a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier

17. Grace Notes Bernard MacLaverty

18. High Fidelity Nick Hornby Love it.

19. His Dark Materials Trilogy Philip Pullman

20. Hotel World Ali Smith

21. Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides

22. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie

23. Misery Stephen King It's not my favorite Stephen King - but it's up there! My favorite of his, hands freakin' down, is It.

24. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow Peter Hoeg

25. Money Martin Amis

26. Music and Silence Rose Tremain

27. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Jeanette Winterson I've written about her before, too. (She's also included in my Commonplace Book, a couple of times over. Her writing is very quotable) I will read anything this crazy writer has ever written - even though her books over the last 10 years have descended into parody. But her early stuff: Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion are among my favorite books. Oranges are not the only fruit is her memoir - one of her first books. (It tells you something about this writer's massive EGO that her first book is a MEMOIR!!) Winterson is a lesbian, and she grew up in a cult of missionaries. It's a very interesting story.

28. Riders Jilly Cooper

29. Slaughterhouse-five Kurt Vonnegut

30. The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood Two thumbs down. Hated this book. Love Margaret Atwood, hated this book.

31. The Corrections Jonathan Franzen - haven't read it, but it's on the "list".

32. The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing Oh gimme a BREAK

33. The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood Now this is more like it. Margaret Atwood at her creepy best. Cat's Eye is still my favorite Atwood novel - but The Handmaid's Tale is a modern-day classic - I bet it will still be read long after her passing.

34. The House of Spirits Isabelle Allende

35. The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco

36. The Passion Jeanette Winterson One of my favorite books ever. I put it onto my list of "top historical fiction". Adore this book. It's Winterson at her virtuoso very best.

37. The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver I read it. Couldn't get into it. The story of the 1959 war for independence in the Belgian Congo? Should be right up my alley. Couldn't get into it. Disappointment.

38. The Rabbit Books John Updike I am embarrassed. I have never read the Rabbit books.

39. The Regeneration Trilogy Pat Barker

40. The Secret History Donna Tartt

41. The Shipping News E Annie Proulx One of my favorite books ever written. (The last paragraph is here. It makes my heart ache.) This book is in my heart forever. For many many personal reasons. I didn't read this book. I LIVED it.

42. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass

43. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami

44. The Women's Room Marilyn French

45. Tracey Beaker Jacqueline Wilson

46. Trainspotting Irvine Welsh Heh heh. Lots of fun.

47. Unless Carol Shields

48. What a Carve-Up Jonathan Coe

49. What I Loved Siri Hustvedt

50. White Teeth Zadie Smith

(found this list via Book Slut)

6 words

Thanks to CityIslandMichael - I came across this in the New York Post:

ERNEST Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words. The result: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." It's rumored that Hemingway thought it was his greatest work, and it's invariably offered as the standard to which micro-fiction should aspire.

So - other writers have taken up the challenge and have come up with their own 6 word stories.

Read them here (I can't stand Rick Moody - what an over-rated nitwit) - and see what you think. Hemingway, in my opinion, towers above them all. He evokes an entire WORLD of loss in his, don't you think?

Now, of course, I'm trying to think of my own.

Once Upon a Time. The End.

My reading list

Very very very important choices had to be made this morning: Which books should I take on vacation?

A week is a long time. Especially if your days are free, and more time can be given to reading. I can't just bring one book. I need many.

I thought about finishing off Reflections on the Revolution in France but then thought to myself: Sheila. It's a VACATION. LIGHTEN UP.

I decided to move back into the realm of fiction.

The books I have packed are thus:

Notes from the Underground - by Dostoevsky. (I know, I know, this contradicts my 'LIGHTEN UP' comment ... but what the hell. I have no consistency whatsoever. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)

That'll be a quick read.

I also have brought AS Byatt's latest novel The Whistling Woman. Love AS Byatt, primarly because of Possession, and her short stories. We'll see how this latest one is.

I'm bringing Winner of the National Book Award, a novel (that takes place in Rhode Island and sounds HILARIOUS) - it was given to me for my birthday by Bill - and I am finally getting around to reading it!

And lastly, I am bringing My Dark Places - by James Ellroy. This one's a true crime book, not a novel. James Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was 10, the murderer was never found, the case remains open to this day - and in this book he teams up with a retired homicide detective to see if he can resolve the case.

Very excited for that one.

What are you all reading this summer?

Atonement - bah, humbug!!

Last night, I finished watching Arsenic and Old Lace (YUM) - (I especially enjoyed Cary Grant's pratfall over the chair) - but anyway, idly, randomly, I picked a book off the shelf - Ian McEwan's Atonement - which I had already read (and was greatly affected by) last year - and I started flipping through it.

My first reading of the book was one of those addictive page-turning experiences. But as the book went on, I felt a growing sense of unease. Something bad was coming. Something very bad. I tried to comfort myself that the title actually might mean something GOOD - but this was basically whistling in the dark. The word "Atonement" takes on all kinds of implications, through the reading of the book. It's a complex word. Seen in different lights, it could mean different things.

Ian McEwan is an extraordinary writer - and I had read some of his other novels - but they seemed a bit cold and shallow to me, although filled with startling sentences. It is with Atonement that he really found his voice.

I read a lot of books, as is apparent. I also love a lot of books. But I can count on one hand (okay, maybe two) the books which moved me, surprisingly, to tears. And I'm not talking about desultory tears, streaking down my cheeks gently - I'm talking about bursting into SOBS.

It's a rare book, indeed, that can bring on THAT.

Atonement was one of them. The ending is such a ... well, it's not a shock ... there is something inevitable about it. But - it had this impact like a dull enormous thud in my stomach. It's one of those books where, until the very last page, literally, you can't see the whole picture. And then in one devastatingly simple sentence, you can see everything. So I sat with it for a second, stunned - and the implications just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger ... and then I burst into STORMY tears. I cried myself to sleep. Like a little girl. I cried about all the lonely people in the world, I cried for my own loneliness, but I cried most of all - for those characters. The people I had come to love. And also despise, actually. But even the despised characters had their frailties - even they were doing their best - despite the fact that so much of their behavior was hateful and blind.

After my stormy-tear-fest - Atonement has seemed a bit radioactive to me. Although it's one of the best reading experiences I've ever had, I have shied away from picking it up again. Just because. Have you ever read a book like that? That had such a deep impact that either you don't feel the need to pick it up again, because you SO got the message - or you are AFRAID to pick it up again, because the implications are too huge and painful to live with in normal every day life ...

Atonement had the second kind of impact on me. The truths revealed are too painful to be dealt with in normal life. You would have to deny it all, push it back - in order to get through the day.

I forgot all of that last night, and picked it up again. I flipped through it, randomly, looking for scenes where I had liked the writing.

The making-love scene in the library ... an absolutely masterful piece of writing. One of the best descriptions of love-making (not sex) I have ever read in my life. I read that again.

I kept flipping. I had underlined certain sentences I liked. I re-visited them.

The descriptions of London in the days just before World War II - as the menace was growing - is so real, you feel like you can smell the fear and uneasiness in the streets.

Then I read the end. Felt the same dull thud inside of me - but it was more like an echo.

You can't ever re-create the first time.

I didn't cry or anything like that. Just re-read some of the sections of the book.

Then went to bed and had TORMENTED dreams all night long. I kept waking up, trying to stop the dreams, and then the same dream would start up again when I went back to sleep. It was an onslaught. Floods rising up 10 stories high - people snorkeling through the choppy grey flood - I was trying to swim fully clothed - I knew I was going to die - the waters rising, rising - above the roofs of the buildings - the current sweepingly strong - the entire world being destroyed ...

That was pretty much the dream I had all night. I woke up and I had kicked off all of my covers - including my contour sheets - which - must have taken some doing. I was probably thrashing about like a lunatic. I mean ... the contour sheets were in a crumpled heap on the floor.

I COMPLETELY blame Ian McEwan for this. I don't think Arsenic and Old Lace was to blame. I randomly flipped through McEwan's book, that was all I did, and then proceeded to have apocalyptic dreams for 6 hours straight. Thanks, dude.

That book is radioactive.

And, of course, because of that - I highly recommend it.

A challenge

Please try and work as many of these favorite words as possible into a paragraph. Let us HOPE that hilarity will ensue.

Update: Hilarity has most definitely ensued.

Do not miss the brilliance in the comments. They are precious!

Some excerpts:

To this day, dad swears (usually with a glass of scotch in hand, or some other elixir) that his fondest memory is the conflagration which resulted from the school’s not-so-solid decision to combine a fireworks display with their annual scrimshaw festival.

Another one:

It is still difficult at times for me to leave my bungalow, but through modern telephony (with a focus on judicious use of the octothorpe) my existence can be justified. Much like a schwa, I am unstressed.

Excuse me, but I just find that scary brilliant.

More:

"Level with me", Karen requested the next day "Was there any nookie between you too?" It being technically her bailiwick, I was obliged to admit it. But I wasn't the murderer. My finding the body was mere serendipity!

"I know you didn't.", Karen informed me. "Her real name was Mary; she was from Oklahama. She's essentially one of Octothorpe's sluttish molls."

More:

She was into Hedonism and god bless her for that. It kept me warm on the coldest Vladivostok nights. We had a bungalow on the outskirts of the city. It was an abysmal place, one end sinking like that leaning tower. She taught math at the Progressive Institute; chisenbop for physics majors, while I stayed home laboring through my doctoral thesis on the phenomena of flux creep to speed scotch distillation. Barbarism, sure, but you try getting through the Vladivostok winter after the single malt elixir has run out.

Shaking with laughter.

Alexander listened to the crepuscular goings-on of the monastery while he mixed the grain. The prayers, in the distance, were a symmetrical nonsense, not distinct enough to make out. "Ah, it is done, an elixir fit for the King’s horse."

Oh. My. God.

The patient was a sluttish louche, overly fond of hedonism. He had sullied his reputation beyond repair, and gradually made his descent into madness. Nookie had ruined him. When he discussed the creature, he would start to gesticulate wildly, and the electroencephalograph readings showed dangerous excitations of the humours. He would also repeat the phrase: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtan" which I mistakenly believed was nonsense.

And:

I'd spent the night in my bungalow attempting to coax some nookie out of a sluttish girl I'd met at the bar at Siro's who'd gone all flibbertigibbet when she noticed the scrimshaw around my neck sporting a horse head and deduced I was in racing.

You people are BEAUTIFUL.

Favorite words

Read this whole thread. People are posting their favorite words.

I mean, you just have to love a thread where the word "bumbershoot" comes up.

Now reminder - because this always happens when any "word" thing comes up: This is about favorite WORDS, not favorite CONCEPTS.

It always annoyed me at the Inside the Actors Studio seminars when people were asked in the questionnaire at the end "what is your favorite word" and their answer would be "love". Or "courage". Or whatever. Concepts. These are concepts. The word encompasses the concept, yes, of course. But word??

Your favorite word may be "muck", because you like the sound of it - but you may find that muck itself is kind of a gross thing. One person on the thread I link to says their favorite word is "syphilis" - and then hastens to add: "For the sound of it, not the meaning!"

It was refreshing when Holly Hunter came to do the seminar (on my birthday, as I recall) and she thought about it for a long long time, and then said, "Portentous. I just like saying it. Por-ten-tous."

My kind of chick.

My favorite words?

Elixir
Evensong
Nonsense
Symmetrical
Mash
Bailiwick

Bailiwick. Yum. I love that.

I also like crepescular.

(via Book Slut)

Tooo many books

Fun!! What kind of book reader are you? Kevin wants to know.

Here are my answers. (It's a multiple-choice thing.)

1) What is your favorite type of bookstore?
A. A large chain that is well lit, stuffed full of books, and has a café.
B. A dark, rather dusty, used bookstore full of mysterious and vaguely organized books.
C. A local independent bookstore that has books by local authors and coffee.

Well, I'm gonna have to go with A, as much as I don't want to. I like the atmosphere of the dark dusty places, but I like knowing that I can get what I need in the big chain.

2) What would excite you more?
A. A brand new book by your favorite author.
B. Finding a classic you've been wanting to read.
C. Receiving a free book from a friend in the mail.

A, most definitely. Jeanette Winterson hasn't written a good book in years, but I still buy them all because of how I felt about The Passion. I keep hoping! Any new book by A.S. Byatt is greeted by me with a shiver of excitement as well.

3) What's your favorite format?
A. Novel
B. Short story
C. Poetry

A. Strangely enough, I think a good short story is far more rare than a good novel. It's an incredibly challenging form - very few people are good at it. So I'm going with A.

4) Favorite format, part II.
A. Contemporary fiction.
B. Classic novels.
C. Genre (mystery, espionage, etc.)

I'm going with B.

5) Favorite format, part III (none of the above) Fiction or non?
A. Almost entirely fiction.
B. Almost entirely non-fiction.
C. A mix of both.

C.

6) Does the design and condition of the book matter?
A. Yes, I love a well designed book and keep mine in mint condition.
B. No, the words are what matter.
C. Yes and no, I appreciate good design and treat my books with respect but I am not obsessive about it.

I'm gonna go with C on this one.

I have had to buy different versions of the same damn book because I found the typeface grating, or too small, or whatever. Some books just feel good in your hands.

And, fortuitously, I bought what has ended up being one of my favorite books OF ALL TIME (Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley) - without knowing a THING about it - because I liked the design of the book. Shallow? Perhaps. But in that particular case, SUCH good fortune. I should send the book designer a card.

7) On average how many books do you read a month?
A. I am lucky to read one.
B. I am dedicated. I read 4 or 5.
C. I am a fiend. I read 10 or more!

In between B and C.

8) Do you prefer to own or borrow?
A. There is a particular joy in owning a book. I have a large library.
B. Why spend money when you can read it for free? I use the public library.
C. Different tools for different job. I do both.

A. Sadly.

9) Where do you get (the majority) your book news?
A. Newspapers.
B. Magazines.
C. TV
D. Blogs.

A. I read the Sunday Book Review and the NY Times Review of Books religiously.

10) Are books a professional obsession?
A. Yes, I work in the field (writer, reviewer, publisher, teacher, etc.).
B. No, I do it for fun.
C. Kinda, I write the occasional review but have a regular job outside of books.

I guess I would say A. Not paid for writing as of yet, but I will be.

(via Dean)

Downsized works of literature

Heh heh heh

If Charles Bukowski had written children's books

... these would be some of the titles.

Shaking with laughter over some of them.

Writer's block

Great article in The New Yorker about writer's block - the modern conception of it, the misconceptions about it, the developing understanding of the art of writing itself - the changing of styles.

I was especially struck by the part where Joyce Carol Oates (whom I love) - who is very prolific - she's written 38 novels, countless essays, short stories - the woman is non-STOP - Anyway, I was very struck by the fact that many critics view her very speed of output as indicative that her work and her thought must be shallow.

[Oates] has had to answer rude questions about her rate of production. “Is there a compulsive element in all this activity?” one interviewer asked her.

Very interesting.

I've never really had writer's block. I can always pick up a pen and just go. Whether or not the writing is GOOD is another story.

I've got other kinds of blocks, but not that one.

I remember reading Sylvia Plath's journals (long ago - before they were re-issued in the un-edited version after Ted Hughes' death) - She was one of those people in college who always has her eye on the ball, she kept obsessive reports on where she sent her poems out, how much magazines paid - She wrote gushing letters home to her mother (sometimes 3 or 4 letters a DAY) - telling her that this magazine published that poem, and on and on and on ...

Her work was ever-flowing. She was an unbelievably driven individual, perfectionistic, and ambitious. Her early poems are a bit stilted - she hasn't broken free into her own form yet - and you can FEEL, while reading her early stuff, that she composed them with a Thesaurus nearby.

Plath gets a Fulbright. Moves to England. Meets Ted Hughes. Bites him on the cheek at a raucous party of poets. They are married 4 months later. He was already considered a genius in many circles, his poems vibrant, mythical, filled with nature, and the smell of mud.

Hughes had a very craftsmanlike approach to his work. He sat down and he wrote everyday.

But from almost the moment Plath got married, her process shifted. She stopped being able to write. She tried. But it was a struggle. She looked up to Hughes, who was already on his way to becoming famous. Perhaps she looked up to him too much and that stifled her own voice. Who knows.

In 1959, the 2 of them left England - and both got teaching jobs at universities in Massachusetts.

And that's where her real writer's block began.

Ironically - it was being close to her mother (the very mother whom she used to write to obsessively about her writing - The ink was barely dry on the poem before she sent it off to her mother) that really stopped up Plath's voice.

She didn't write anything (besides her journal) for a year and a half. The journals of that time are agonizing to read.

Plath started to put it all together - over that terrible year and a half: She would offer up her poems to her mother, because she was desperate for approval. It was like getting an A on a pop quiz. Poetry wasn't really art yet, to her - at least not in anything but an abstract art-appreciation kind of way. Her process was facile, the results a bit shallow - and poetry was way too connected to getting her mother to approve of her life.

Once she moved back to England with Hughes - her work took a turn. I have read the collected work of Sylvia Plath from beginning to end, and you can almost feel when she uncorks the bottle. The voices are as different as night and day.

Poets who had only known her as Hughes' American wife, who knew her only from her stilted sonnets published in literary magazines, were shocked - that these rageful evocative funny MEAN (God, is she mean!) poems were written by the same woman.

Plath's descriptions of her writer's block - that time living in America - are painful, she felt like she was dying. Like her life had added up to nothing. Without her voice, she had nothing.

Maybe, though, it took that long dormant time of misery and living under some kind of self-imposed gag rule - to help her eventually bust out with such force.

Of course, she ended up committing suicide - so there is that element of her art to contend with as well - but I still find the entire topic very interesting.

Long tangent - didn't mean to go off like that. If you're interested in writers, here's the article. Lots of good quotes.

Bloomsday background

What is Bloomsday?

On June 16, 1904, James Joyce first went walking, in Dublin, with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

Years later, Ulysses was published. Ulysses, of course, an 800 page book, takes place all in one day. And what day does it take place on? June 16. Clearly, Joyce saw meeting Nora as a seminal event and he said that on that day "she made a man of me". I'm not sure if it has been nailed down, without a shadow of a doubt, what happened on that day. But everyone (all biographers, I mean) agrees that something sexual happened on June 16, 1904. You can tell from how Joyce talked about that day later.

At that time, of course, there was nowhere to go in Dublin, for a "date". You didn't "date". It was a rigid Catholic country, with rigid separations of the sexes. James Joyce wanted freedom, yearned for a free and open life - where men and women could live together and actually "touch one another" - He meant more than sex.

He considered it one of the greatest blessings in his life that he ran into Nora one day on the streets of Dublin.

Nora was basically running away from her Galway past (and the boy she had loved who had died - Joyce used that as his plot for the exquisite The Dead). Nora was working as a waitress in Finn's Hotel.

Joyce met Nora on the street, on June 10, and asked if he could meet her.

Eventually, after a blow-off or two, Nora agreed. The two of them walked through the streets of Dublin, on June 16, 1904.

And 3 months later, in September of 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle fled Ireland - He got a job teaching in a Berlitz school on the continent somewhere - and she decided to come with. They fled Ireland without getting married, leaving a wake of scandal (and debt) behind them.

And except for one or two visits, they never returned to Ireland.

They lived in Trieste, and had two children - Giorgio and Lucia.

They got hitched, officially, in 1931.

They remained steadfastly devoted (albeit in a stormy Irish-passion kind of way) to one another for the rest of their lives.

Ulysses - considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century - is James Joyce's tribute to Nora Barnacle, the wild Galway girl who took a risk on this nearly-blind always-poor writer, the Galway girl who threw away respectability to take on a life with him.

In a way, she saved him. It is hard to imagine him writing Ulysses without Nora.

She was the catalyst, the inspiration. He said often that he only knew one woman, he could only write about one woman. Nora, to him, represented the mystery of ALL women - and through studying her character, and stealing the experiences from her own life, and how she would express them - he was able to delve into the relationship between the sexes in this grandly universal way.

I don't want to say that Nora is the REASON for Joyce's genius, because I don't believe that at all. Joyce was a genius, regardless.

But she ended up being the galvanizing force, the illuminating candle in the darkness - from which he would begin to write his best and his most personal work.

Without Nora confessing to him her old and painful love affair with the boy who had died (after standing beneath her window in the rain) - James Joyce never would have written The Dead - which I believe (and obviously I'm not alone) is the greatest short story ever written.

The Dubliners is a very interesting book - because in it, you can see Joyce's development as a writer. The Dubliners is a series of short stories, all taking place (duh) in Dublin. It was considered very scandalous at the time. The book told the truth about Ireland, about Dublin - about the kind of life it offered its people (its young men, in particular). I've read it tons of times, but the most interesting way to read the book is to read it from start to finish - first story to last story. Don't skip around.

The Dead is the last story.

And that's where Joyce's genius, in my opinion, suddenly floods out of him.

The rest of the book is filled with great snippets of writing, interesting images, Irish humor - but it's kind of bitchy, it's a book of gossip - it is a book meant to HURT. Joyce wanted to hurt Ireland - he wanted to force them to look in the mirror, and see themselves. This is his motivation with 95% of the stories in Dubliners. And that's cool, a lot of the best books in the world have been written out of rage, out of a desire for revenge, as an "I'll show them"...

Most of the book has that tone.

And then in The Dead ... suddenly ... like a magician ... in one motion - Joyce draws back the curtain, and there you see what is behind all the bitchiness. You see tenderness, ineffable tenderness, unbearable loss, and a sweet sweet (bittersweet) love. Oh, how he loves Dublin, oh how he loves Ireland, and Dubliners ... how he loves it all ... and yet ... he cannot live there, he cannot live in Ireland. He could not have lived there without experiencing a kind of soul-death.

However - he never could write about anything else. All of his books are about Ireland, and he wrote not one of them on his native soil.

So.

There's a bit of background for you.

Ulysses - an encyclopedic book which takes place on one day - June 16, 1904 - and takes place on the streets of Dublin (to a microscopic level ... you actually could construct a map, just from how Joyce writes about the city) - It's a book of redemption (it begins with a character shaving at his mirror, and intoning something in Latin - which is the beginning of the mass) - and it ends with the 60-page-long unpunctuated interior monologue of Molly Bloom, adulterous lonely wife of the lead character ...

Reading Ulysses - under my father's tutelage - was, hands down, the most exciting reading experience I have ever had in my life.

Truly life-changing.

And so ... Bloomsday approaches ...

James Joyce: this is my thanks to you.

Rejoyce, rejoyce

For the next 24 hours, it's gonna be all Joyce all the time around here.

Take note of the quote below my blog-title:

""This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am." -- from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Getting my act together now for the bombardment. Whoo-hoo!

100th anniversary of Bloomsday...

is Wednesday.

Crowds are already gathering in Dublin.

I'm glad I'm not there, frankly. Especially because, judging from the quotes in the article, many in attendance have not even read the book. Or they couldn't get past page 25.

Dilettantes.

You gotta be with true Joyce freaks on that day, and I will be. So I'm glad I'm not in that crowd in Dublin - although someday I'd love to spend Bloomsday there.

I've got other plans. Much cooler plans.

History List

Taking my cue from Critical Mass, here is my compilation of favorite history, biography, and historical fiction. Criteria for books chosen is thus:

The books chosen must be well written, and one does not need to have a lot of prior background in order to enjoy them --

History

The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski
This book is a journalism classic. Kapuscinski was a foreign correspondent from Poland during the 60s and 70s, their only foreign correspondent at the time, and he reported on 3rd world revolutions, which are all compiled in this book: Africa in the 60s, Latin America in the 70s. Ethiopia. Angola. Liberia. He used his stories about other totalitarian systems as indirect criticism of the Soviet Union, under which Poland suffered. A great book.

Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940, by Wendy Smith
This is a well-researched, highly readable, and also pretty damn accurate (according to the various characters involved) story of the formation of the extremely influential (short-lived) Group Theatre, in New York City, during the Great Depression. It's a sweeping look at the history of New York theatre in the early years of the 20th century. One of my favorites.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West.
Haven't even finished it yet - but I don't need to to put it on the list.

Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, by William Shirer
I mean. Come on.

All the President's Men, by Woodward, Bernstein
I have no idea how many times I have read this book, but it's a lot.

Biography

James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann
I agree with Erin. Biographies don't get much better than this one.

John Adams, by David McCullough
Basically: believe the hype. The book really is that good.

Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
by Lyle Leverich
Fantastic biography of HALF of Tennessee Williams' life. Sadly, Leverich (the author) died before he could complete the other volumes. This one ends with the opening of Glass Menagerie in New York - the beginning of Williams' fame. Beautifully written and researched book.

Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg
My obsession with Charles Lindbergh came through my love of his wife's writing. I had read all of her journals, and I still read them. Berg's biography of Charles Lindbergh, which set a new high-water-mark for biographers everywhere, is a stunning accomplishment.

Historical Fiction

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
A crazy story set in the time of Napoleon. The 2 main characters are a young innocent French peasant boy, who finds himself, out of nowhere, in the position of personal waiter to Napoleon - and Villanelle - a flaming red-headed Venetian woman, who cross-dresses as a man so that she can work in the casinos. French-boy and Villanell's paths cross. I love this book - it's poetic, it's funny, it's frightening - it is filled with arresting prose. Winterson has been imitating herself every since and her books are the worse for it.

Going after Cacciato, by Tim O'Brien
I know it's Vietnam ... but that counts as history now, doesn't it? How far back do you have to go to have it be considered "historical fiction"? Regardless. One of the best novels I have ever read.

Possession, by AS Byatt
I know, I know, half of the book takes place in modern times ... but the Victorian era sections are heart-rendingly well done. You are not looking in from the outside. It feels like you get into that world. LOVE. THIS. BOOK.

I'm sure I can think of more.

In regards to the below post...

Here's the actual poem. I remember actually memorizing it in 10th grade, just for the hell of it. The lines filled me with a rapture and a fear I couldn't really understand. The last stanza freakin' kills me.

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Morning Reading

I am juggling about 5 different books right now - but that's okay because two of them I can only take in small doses. So it's not a full-time commitment.

Right now, I am reading Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790, and quite frankly, it is blowing my brain right out of my head. A lovely image. Yes.

Thoughts and extensive quotes to come, once I finish the book. (Oooh, you must be thinking, lucky us!!)

Damn. Damn, he's good. I absolutely adore articulate outrage.

Question for fun Part 1

There are many authors out there who just wrote one book. And sometimes that one book is an absolute knock-out. Like: a knock-out beyond belief.

And either that author did not follow up on the promise of the first book, and their other books are not as good - OR - they never wrote another book again.

Anyone have anything to say about that?

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind. I mean, if you're only gonna write one damn book, then you might as well write To Kill a Mockingbird!!!

One of those questions:

-- this time suggested by a reader.

You are on a desert island. You can only have 5 books. What books would they be?

Mine would be - and these are not necessarily my favorite books - but more like the books I never get tired of:

-- Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley

-- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

-- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

-- Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi

-- House of Leaves, by Mark Danielwski (or something like that - fascinating book.)

Bridget Jones' Al Qaeda Diary

Sounds like Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget Jones books, has made an enormous miscalculation in what people will find amusing.

"The bluebird in my heart"

Bukowski, a documentary about the rowdy unconventional gutsy barfly poet, opens today in New York.

I want to see it. Bukowski was beaten regularly, as a child, by his father, with a strap. He says, in an interview in the documentary, that when you are beaten that regularly, "You say what you mean." His writing is a testament to that legacy.

Here's one of his poems:

THE BLACKBIRDS ARE ROUGH TODAY

lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.

I am the only person who has read Hopeful Monsters

Dean Esmay has a great conversation going on:

Do you have books that you love which nobody else appears to have read?

As I said in his comments over there: the only other people I know who have read "Hopeful Monsters" by Nicholas Mosley, one of my favorite books of all time - are people who were forced to read it by me. They may have come to adore it - my friend Ted comes to mind - but I was the one who got there first.

Any books you LOVE - that nobody else seems to love or even have heard of?

Great Expectations

Thought-provoking post on Critical Mass about the evolution (or de-volution) of the high-school literature curriculum.

I always enjoyed the challenge of reading, and the challenge of meeting up with characters who had next to nothing to do with my life. Hester Prynne, and Madame Defarge and Huck Finn and Atticus Finch, etc. I read all of those books in between the age of 14 and 18. What does my life have in common with Madame Defarge? Nothing. We're both chicks. Big deal.

It was not assumed that I, a teenager in Rhode Island going to public school, needed to "identify" with the characters in order to be interested. It was just that these were the great books, and so we read them.

Plain and simple.

It is quite quite true, however, that my reading experience was significantly different when I read Billy Budd (which I hated and dreaded) and Catcher in the Rye - which I felt like came from out of the depths of my own psyche. (Join the club, Sheila. But whatever - everyone needs to experience that book for the first time, and discover it for themselves.) So yes: the power of IDENTIFICATION is immense, and very important. I devoured Catcher in the Rye. I devoured Wuthering Heights - it appealed to some wild tragic strain in my adolescent nature. I felt like: I could love a man like Heathcliff ... and I identify with Cathy ... I do! She's a wild woman, like Kipling's cat, walking in the "wild lone" and "waving her wild tail". Tragic! Love it! That book captivated me.

But that was just a byproduct of me being forced to read those books in the first place.

"Identification" was not the primary reason to read.

I was lucky, though. I grew up with literate parents in a house full of books. I was reading before I could walk, basically. I would rather read than do most anything else. I am very fortunate.

Others - who did not grow up with such support, such reinforcement - perhaps need to "identify" first, and then discover: Wow! Reading is so cool!!! (This story of my friend Mitchell, is, perhaps, a case in point. Not sure ... he can speak to that himself.)

I feel extremely fortunate that intellectual rigor was encouraged in my household. I read stuff before I was ready to really digest them. I could feel when I read "Oliver Twist" at the age of 11: "Hmmm. I ... am going to have to come back to this one ..."

I could tell that it was great, I could tell that it was a classic ... but I couldn't get it. It was too soon. But still - I read every word.

I am not sure what I think about the theory that reading lesser works (yes. Lesser. Do not freakin' put Tuesdays with Morrie on the same level as Scarlet Letter. Do. Not. Do. It.) makes you want to read the great stuff, the challenging stuff.

And maybe the point is - no matter what it is, no matter what book it is ... if you are a discerning individual, and there is a message to be had, or some joy to be had from the printed word ... then it is a worthwhile endeavor. But all of this assumes that you have already learned how to read. (And I don't mean knowing your ABCs, I mean - having some critical facility - having some way to interpret what you read, having some sense of context - in terms of literature ... People who can barely make it through magazine articles do not know how to read, in the way that I mean)

Reading challenging books which had nothing to do with my own life, and before I was ready to digest the messages (Tale of Two Cities comes to mind) - taught me how to read.

Charles Dickens (and my English teacher, I suppose) expected me, a 14 year old, to rise to the level of the material.

And so - with much hemming and hawing - and support from the 'rents - I did.

Sometimes under great protest, I might add. And I still hate Billy Budd, but I'm not sorry I read it.

I have no idea what I just wrote, by the way. My high school composition teacher would be horrified. Where's that thesis statement, Sheil-babe?

Ah well. Food for thought. Still thinking about it myself.

Just thought of something else:

I also enjoy a good trashy novel. I don't think that gorging on Victorian erotica, or an Oprah book turns your mind to mush. I think that's a stupid attitude.

I read VC Andrews' trash, and I also read Charles Dickens.

Sometimes you just need a little filth to clear the air!!

With everything turbulent in the world -

- it is time to ask the really important question:

VC ANDREWS - Classic, Dud, Or Criminally Insane?

VC Andrews wrote a series of nasty little sexy dark books - starting with Flowers in the Attic, then moving on to Petals in the Wind, Seeds of Yesterday, and If There Be Thorns. These semi-pornographic and WEIRD WEIRD books were passed around in my junior high the way Fanny Hill was probably passed around a century or two ago.

Everyone read them.

It might be more of a girl thing, than a boy thing ... not sure. These books were read, at least in my school, during that awkward junior-high moment - when girls are like little women, with budding bodies and sex drives, and the boys still have high voices and have no interest in girls.

Of course, it takes one summer vacation to change all of that - but that seems to be (in my memory) when you would look around the cafeteria, and see every 13 year old girl, hunched over Petals on the Wind - while the boys all sat together, trading baseball cards, reading comics, and showing no interest in any of us. So we had to let the frustration out somehow!

I cannot stress enough how weird these books were. So weird that I felt guilty when I bought them for myself.

The covers were always of "scary" children - who always seemed to have a spotlight shining up at them from below, which put enormous shadows under their eyes.

The books were filled with greedy EVIL adults, and pale washed-out children who had swirling sexual feelings ...

I remember LOVING them, but ... with an almost unhealthy addictive feeling. I remember not feeling comfortable reading them in front of my parents. They were a secret. I loved how she wrote, and I loved the main character (a ballerina) ... a ballerina with deep dark haunted shadows under her eyes.

Dan? Emily? We discussed these books before, I believe. In the comments to this post here.

Anyone else out there remember these creepy dark sex books, marketed to kids??

One of the commenters in the thread I link to says:

I remember reading Flowers and one or two other books by Andrews, some 15 years ago. I know I became engrossed in them. There's no doubt about that. However, it seems that I was traumatized by them. At some point, I started thinking "There is something very wrong with this person." And now, when I see one of the books I actally recoil from it.

I have no idea why that is. Maybe I am the one who is criminally insane.

God. EXACTLY. When I looked over them again - after my tortured adolescence - I had the same thought, in re: VC Andrews herself: "There is something seriously wrong with this person."

VC Andrews died years ago ... and yet books "by" her still come out. "Based on her outlines". Yeah, right. And each book still has the same motif:

A small haunted-looking child peeking out of a peephole in the cover, with dark shadows under their eyes, from the spotlight below.

CREEPY.

Anyway. Long tangent over. Like I said: in today's chaotic violent world, it's important to ask the important question from time to time:

VC ANDREWS - Classic, Dud, Or Criminally Insane?

UPDATE: The frightening (and relatively universal) role that the VC Andrews books played on Blind Cavefish's sex education.

Laugh-out-loud funny

There's a contest called "Worst Romance Novel Covers of the Year".

10 terrible romance-novel-covers are chosen and posted - and then a panel of romance-novel-readers analyzes why each cover is so horrendous.

I was SNORTING reading some of these.

Wait until you see some of these creepy covers. And read all the comments.

Madeleine L'Engle demonstrates why ...

she has always been an idol of mine.

The movie of Wrinkle in Time (a precious book to me, DO NOT MESS with my precious books) airs next Monday.

Madeleine is asked in the interview: Have you seen the movie? Madeleine answers, "Yes."

She is asked: And did it meet expectations?

Madeleine answers, "Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is."

She is a true goddess to me, someone I have always looked up to, strived to be like.

I wrote her a letter once, when I was in my early 20s, and life was feeling pretty tough, pretty hard. I basically asked her, "How do you keep going? How do you read Anne Frank's diary and not just hate everybody in the world?" (Something along those lines. I was in despair, and she seemed like she might have some answers. And I sent the letter to her publisher.)

Months later, I got a reply.

It was on a pale pale grey stationery, and across the top was emblazoned in a simple font: "MADELEINE". I loved that. The informality of that.

And she wrote me just the most wonderful and encouraging and beautiful letter, it was only a paragraph long. All she said was:

"As long as there have been and continue to be people like .... (and she listed about 20 names, half of whom I had never heard of - but I remember Bach was on there) ... on this earth, I find the strength to go on, and I am able to believe that people are good inside."

She's 85 years old. She's a radical. She reminds me of my Great-Aunt Joan, in some respects. A courageous mind, a fearless intellect, excited to ask the tough questions, and face the mysteries of existence. The only thing there is to fear is rock-hard certainty, and, like Madeleine says about the ignorant fundamentalist Christians who want to ban all her books, they "want a closed system, and I want an open system."

I own every one of her books. So good to "hear" from her, on occasion. So good to know she's still out there.

(via Book Slut)

Update: Anne has some very interesting thoughts on L'Engle, and working out certain hostilities through your fiction. Good stuff.

Another snippet of wisdom - I love this:

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."

-- Duke Ellington

Amusing non-advice for writers

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

- W. Somerset Maugham

And finally -

one of my favorite poems ever. It seems a bit a propos today.

The More Loving One
by Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Some poetry

Because I don't want the post below to be my last post. I just don't.

Lunchtime in the Kingdom of the Subjunctive
by Suzanne Wise

A spoon propels itself out of its soup
as a bone sprung free of skin

or a tuning fork
trembling into the background,

then arcing and returning
as a boomerang.

Meanwhile, the glass of milk glides up and out
of your hand, quietly streaking a gloss

of stars through your suddenly glowing hair.
Meanwhile, toast combusts in a golden dust.

Butter drops from clouds that release an ochre rain.
You grow misty-eyed, nostalgic.

This feeling is alleviated by a sense of dread
and instability as the tabletop turns metallic,

tips and revolves as a chain-saw blade
slicing the floor into windows

you slowly and gracefully crash through.
Splintered glass sequins your skin.

Your hands reaching for the doorknob
sharpen to cones. The door soars.

Your legs run too fast, lose their feet
to curls of smoke drifting up the stairs.

You spend hours, or possibly years, floating around like this—
light-headed, fuzzy-brained,

cotton-mouthed. You have fallen in love
with the way light refracts in impossible ways.

Later darkness barges in horizontally,

It is night without shadows
and everything is way too shallow.

You are too close to the picture
to see if you're included.

You fall headfirst down the drain
sucking the bright out of colors.

You become somber, colder, a kind of high-quality vinyl,
and, in some places, an old damp velvet.

Meanwhile your head continues to plummet,
has become a potholed highway

splitting into stalks, going to seed
as you talk yourself into the distance.

You are telling yourself: Do not be afraid.
You are begging: God help me.

You are whining: If only

If only I had some kind of anchor
in here. If only I could disappear.

You know you should be ashamed.
This is the kind of compulsive behavior

you are always being criticized for.
It's that soup bowl,
and singing, sparkling like a god and spitting
its empty refrain in the faces of all your best selves:

If only ______, then ______.
If only ______, then ______.

Re-reading...

Okay, so this topic interests me quite a bit, and I have a lot to say - but can't write about it right now.

Here's the deal:

Which books do you compulsively re-read? Like: what are your "forever" books, books you go back to again and again, through different phases of your life?

I'll write more about this later when I have a second - but I'd love to hear from everyone: the books which you do not really look upon as books - but as life companions.

Oh, and please, tell me why. What is it in the book that you find so compelling, so un-answered, so satisfying? What has the book given you?

That Book List going about

I've seen it on a couple different blogs. I got it here. If you want to play, just post the list on your own site, putting the titles you have read in bold.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I thought I would be embarrassed, but it turns out I've read many. A couple of blanks in my reading list I need to rectify:

Eudora Welty. My dad gave me her collected stories for Christmas one year, and she was highly influential on many of my favorite writers (Nancy Lemann being one of them) - so I need to check it out.

I need to read War and Peace, but quite frankly, the time-commitment is daunting.

I've never read Faulkner. Go ahead. Heap scorn upon my brow.

I've also never read any George Eliot, although I am sure I would absolutely fall in LOVE with that woman. How could I not?

Questions to those of you who have read some of my un-bolded books:

-- What is the big deal with "Tom Jones"? I mean, honestly: tell me. What is the big deal. Should I read it? Can you recommend it?

-- Who the hell is Chinua Achebe?

-- I can tell you right now that I will probably never read The Last of the Mohicans and Don Quixote. Is this really bad?

-- Please talk to me about Ford Madox Ford. His name comes up all the time. Never read a word. Any good?

Update: And here is Dan's list. He adds his own spin to it: Which of these books do you Never plan to read?

Crowds and Power

I am continuing to read Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. I find that I can only read 3 or 4 pages at a time. (Dave J: For me, that was true with the Silmarillion too). The prose is so specific, every sentence has such weight, and what he calls up in my mind is so powerful - that if I read too much in one sitting, it all starts to blend together. I lose the sharpness of what is going on, what he describes.

He writes about crowd behavior - in every single permutation you can imagine. He leaves no stone unturned. I pretty much think about crowds in terms of either urban areas, or in terms of revolutions, and historical upheavals. Storming the Bastille, the Nazis, the genocide in Rwanda, countless other examples. The crowd mentality obviously plays a huge part in such events.

But Canetti uses a wide wide lens. He doesn't just focus on the "mobs" storming the palace gates. He talks about religion. He talks about the "crowd of the dead", which pretty much every society and every civilization has. The relationship that the living have with their ancestors. He talks about women and men. The symbiotic nature of these two crowds, and how - even in groups widely divergent and separated by continents - similar rituals evolve. He talks about religion a lot. He talks about war. The crowd mentality in wars.

I am now getting into what he calls "crowd symbols", a term made up by Canetti - He describes "crowd symbols" thus:

Crowd symbols is the name I give to collective units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds.

He has come up with 11 such symbols: Corn, rivers, forest, rain, wind, sand, fire, the sea, the heap, stone heaps, treasure. I'm just at the beginning of this section, but I can imagine that these crowd symbols become crucial later in the book. For example, Canetti briefly posits that we can fully understand the nation of Great Britain if we fully understand that their "crowd symbol" is the "sea". It is a certain kind of nation that would have the "sea" as its symbol, an island nation perhaps, an adventuring nation. Canetti goes deeper into the collective metaphors for all of these concrete objects, metaphors which are common to all humanity.

Canetti talks about such "symbols" as indicative of the different aspects of crowd behavior. Like: Rivers are like crowds as the crowds are gathering, as the crowd is converging, from many streams into one current. Rivers are relatively static, they rarely jump their banks and flood over, the way is clear, everyone is one, and the crowd is moving together as one.

Canetti makes an enormous distinction, by the way, between "crowds" and "packs". Packs have their own section. "Crowds" are a completely different phenomenon.

(See why I can only read a couple pages at a time?)

For those of you who are interested (and maybe I'm nuts, but this kind of shit is unbelievably fascinating to me), here is a brief excerpt, where Canetti describes the attributes of every crowd.

Every crowd has these attributes, only some in a more obvious way than others.

The Attributes of the Crowd
Before I try to undertake a classification of crowds it may be useful to summarize briefly their main attributes. The following four traits are important.

1. The crowd always wants to grow. There are no natural boundaries to its growth. Where such boundaries have been artificially created - e.g. in all institutions which are used for the preservation of closed crowds - an eruption of the crowd is always possible and will, in fact, happen from time to time. There are no institutions which can be absolutely relied on to prevent the growth of the crowd once and for all.

2. Within the crowd there is equality. This is absolute and indisputable and never questioned by the crowd itself. It is of fundamental importance and one might even define a crowd as a state of absolute equality. A head is a head, an arm is an arm, and differences between individual heads and arms are irrelevant. It is for the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it. All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experience of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd.

3. The crowd loves density. It can never feel too dense. Nothing must stand between its parts or divide them; everything must be the crowd itself. The feeling of density is strongest in the moment of discharge [Ed: This is the moment when, in Canetti's theory, a crowd actually coheres into a crowd. Once there was nothing, now there is a crowd. "Discharge" is the moment when that happens.] One day it may be possible to determine this density more accurately and even to measure it.

4. The crowd needs a direction It is in movement and it moves towards a goal. The direction, which is common to all its members, strengthens the feeling of equality. A goal outside the individual members and common to all of them drives underground all the private differing goals which are fatal to the crowd as such. Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd. It's constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal. A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.

There is, however, another tendency hidden in the crowd, which appears to lead to new and superior kinds of formation. The nature of these is often not predictable.

Ezra Pound fans - help me out

"Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose." -- Ezra Pound

Now: Do I have any Pound fans out there?

I know Pound through his reputation for being extremely generous and supportive of up-and-coming artists - he was like a relentless bull-dog manager for people he thought were talented. He had a very controversial life. (Or, huge chunks of it were controversial) I know that he defended fascism, and was very much anti-war. When World War II broke out he was arrested in Rome and incarcerated. I also know that he pled insanity and was locked up in a mental institution in the US for over 10 years. I believe he was paraded in a cage through the streets of Italy.

But besides all of that - I know that he was instrumental in nurturing young up-and-coming poets and authors (not even nurturing - more like bullying other people to read the works of the likes of Joyce and Eliot...He was their first champions)

But I don't know much about his actual poems. Who he was as a writer.

Is anyone out there a Pound fan? Who can start me in the right direction? What should I read? The "Cantos"?

I fully admit that I am intimidated by Ezra Pound, and I don't know where to start.

Hooray for me

I actually got some work done yesterday. After all of my procrastination activities. Once I actually get going, I know exactly what I am doing, where I am going, and how to work.

It's just the getting started ...

Oh, and for you other writers out there - I learned (for myself) one of Billy Wilder's 9 rules for writers.

Billy Wilder (and if you don't know who he is ... I just don't know what to say.) He wrote numerous screenplays, directed some of the most popular and successful films of the 20th century - Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment ... and on and on and on ...

He is such a good writer that he is studied.

He has these 9 rules for writing (focusing on screenwriting, of course, but it could be relevant for writers of other genres).

And one of them is this:

"If something's not right in the third act, then look for the problem in the first act."

I can't stress how important and how true this is. I mean, it SOUNDS true - but I figured it out for myself this weekend.

Crowds

Here is the first little section of Elias Canetti's book Crowds and Power. It may not be everybody's taste - but within a paragraph or so, I felt this weird bottoming out inside of me, and I thought: "Okay. This is why people revere this book. This is why he won the Nobel Prize."

The first section is when he sets up his theme: the crowd. He starts with universals, generalities - and then, as the book goes on, gets more and more specific, giving examples from life. But here is how the book starts:

The Fear of Being Touched
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.

All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

The repugnance to being touched remains wiht us when we go out among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can. If we do not avoid it, it is because we feel attracted to someone; and then it is we who make the approach.

The promptness wiht which apology is offered for an unintentional contact, the tension with which it is awaited, our violent and sometimes even physical reaction when it is not forthcoming, the antipathy and hatred we feel for the offender [Ed: He is perfectly describing a rush-hour subway ride], even when we cannot be certain who it is - the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch - proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. Even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by a touch.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.

More on Saint-Exupery

An aritcle in the WSJ about Saint-Exupery's writing - which has kind of a hostile tone, in my estimation. Still - definitely worth a read. Definitely worth a read.

Granted, I am biased. Totally biased! Which is why the article may sound more hostile than it actually is. (I use the term "hostile" in a very mild way - I don't mean active violent hostility. Perhaps "gentle contempt" is a more appropriate term.)

To call Saint-Exupery's observations in Le Petit Prince "murky"! Murky? What the hell book were YOU reading, dude? Yeah, Le Petit Prince is one of the most successful and long-running best-sellers of all time because of its "murky observations".

Benjamin Ivry, the author, chooses the following Saint-Exupery sentence as an example of "murkiness": "Friendship is born from an identity of spiritual goals--from common navigation toward a star".

Uh ... sounds crystal-clear to me. Not only do I understand that with my head, but I understand it from my own experience of friendship. Hence: the universal appeal of the book. Ivry sounds hostile to the sentimentality and philosophy of Saint-Exuperty. And, as is probably obvious by now, I enjoy sentiment. I'm a little bit sentimental. (I'm a little bit rock 'n roll). At least, I enjoy sentiment if an author knows how to write it. And Saint-Exupery most certainly does.

One of Saint-Exupery's descendents has apparently just published a book entitled: "L'Inavouable: La France au Rwanda" - which is described as "a bold and courageous indictment of French foreign policy in Rwanda".

Having read Philip Gourevitch's absolutely phenomenal book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (and if you haven't read it - I literally cannot recommend it highly enough) - I agree that there is quite a lot to indict. And good for Patrick de Saint-Exupery for being brave enough to indict his country's policy.

But something about this article left a sour taste in my mouth.

It's the phenomenon (phenomena?) I see so often these days - but I don't know how to name it. Perhaps it can be encapsulated thus:

"Oh my goodness, I totally agree with everything you say - and therefore I LOVE you." (The person may be an absolute moron, but if you agree with his opinions, then he is your dearest brother.) Or, on the flip-side: "Hmm. I really don't agree with a couple of things that you say. Therefore I regard you with suspicion." (The person may be an absolute gem, a beautiful human being, but you happen to differ with them on important issues - therefore the person is written off.)

That's how the article in the WSJ read to me. Am I wrong? It's highly possible. I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet. It reads to me like this:

Oh, so we AGREE with Patrick Saint-Exupery - so he should be commended. We think Antoine is a bit "murky" and "swimmingly vague" - perhaps a bit too touchy-feely New Age ... and so we end the entire article with praise for Patrick, as opposed to praise for the gentleman who wrote a book that has (the article informs us) sold over a million copies every year, from the time it was published. NO books do that. Or only the big ol' famous books. The Road Less Traveled, for example. These books transcend genre, these books will never stop selling. The authors have tapped into something, something primal, something eternal.

It is interesting to contemplate, however, the source of Saint-Exupery's appeal. And again, I am totally biased, because I love his writing (and therefore I submit to the same mentality that Benjamin Ivry displays - except that I am on the opposite side.)

Is it the age-old fascination with flight? And some pilots, while perhaps brilliant technicians, cannot write well? So the pilots who are able to actually write about their experiences will, inevitably, find an audience?

Is it because he disappeared so mysteriously?

I guess for me it is the power of his writing, and also the whimsy of his writing. Basically, I just enjoy reading his prose (although, as I have said before - it's so much better in the French. French translated into English can read quite choppily.)

The study of crowds

I have already begun to read Elias Canetti's book Crowds and Power - it is dense, and rather slow-going, and yet - I can see why he is so influential, I can see why people who are interested in culture, civilization, war, humanity (Robert Kaplan cites Elias Canetti on almost every other page of Balkan Ghosts) - find him to be so useful.

This is a man who, like other great philosophers and scientists and thinkers, has raised himself above the horde. He has raised himself above enough to describe the way the horde behaves.

It's a book of philosophy, I would say.

The purpose of the book is to investigate the nature of crowds - how they form, how they behave, how they respond to panic, how they respond to a threat ...

I don't know much about Canetti's background. I know he was German, and I know he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. He was also a novelist, quite a successful novelist - but Crowds and Power is his main accomplishment.

I'll post some excerpts so you can see how he writes, what he is about. The book, obviously, has a lot to say about the times we are living in, with crowd mentalities cropping up like brush-fires across the planet. A couple of passages resonated with: "Wow. He is describing NOW".

He takes crowds of all kinds, and dissects how they behave. The crowds who gather in churches, how those crowds are different from the audience at a play, how the audience at a play differs from the audience at a cello concerto - and then he goes further, into a geo-political mode - describing revolutions, crowd mentalities ...

I cannot tell you how gripping this book already is. By the second paragraph I was hooked.

So again: I want to thank the reader who sent it to me. It is a wonderful gift.

Oh, by the way: do I have any readers who speak German? Or who can read German enough to translate it into English?

Passing on the game

I picked it up from Emily, who picked it up from others. (Uh oh, that sounds like we have the Black Death or something.)

No, it's just a game to be passed on:

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Turn to page 23
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here is mine. Tis from George Washington, by Willard Sterne Randall:

"Partly because of unhealthy conditions in the Tidewater, where undrained swamps produced malaria and where medicine was exceedingly primitive, few people reached old age."

Guidance counselor from Hell

If any of you are as overly familiar with every single film in the John Hughes canon as I am, then I am sure you will find this amusing: a piece imagining John Hughes as a high school guidance counselor.

A couple of excerpts from Hughes' advice to his students:

"Do you have a best friend you can lean on? Maybe a quirky guy friend that is secretly in love with you but you've overlooked until now?"

Also:

BT [student]: I've gained early acceptance to Harvard and have been the first ever to be pre-selected as a Rhodes scholar.

John Hughes: It really angers me to see you throw your young life away.

BT: Did I mention that I will be the first teenager to fly in orbit on the shuttle?

JH: Let me ask you this. Have you ever posed as a food magnate to get a table at a fancy restaurant? Have you ever climbed a float during a parade and lip-synched to Wayne Newton while five nubile young women in Bavarian costumes danced around you like cheap strippers?

More on Theory

Robert, from Llama Butchers (who links to me all the time, and I really should just take a moment to thank you, Robert!) responds to my post about criticism/Camille Paglia with his own post.

He writes:

How well I remember arguing with a junior assistant professor over whether Jane Austen's works should be interpreted as closet lesbianism! The difference here is that a reader of average intelligence can simply ignore the criticism and get straight to the art itself.

Yeah, man. Let's just get "straight to the art". The thought of searching through Pride and Prejudice - one of the greatest novels ever written, in my humble opinion - for evidence of closet lesbianism, as opposed to reveling in her incomparable prose ... is ... it makes me sick to my stomach, frankly.

How utterly boring.

Book-shelf spying

The first thing I do when I go into someone else's house for the first time is peek at their book shelves. If they HAVE no book shelves or books, this is immediately obvious to me. It's on the same level of obvious-ness that, say, black-painted window panes or Christmas decorations in August would be.

But it is true that books can tell you more about a person than a rambling "this is my life-story" monologue from that very same person.

I went on 3 dates with a guy last summer who had only one book in his sprawling ridiculous bachelor pad: The Art of War. (He's the one I considered using for his air-conditioning during the heat wave.) There is nothing wrong with having The Art of War. I have read excerpts of it myself. It is fascinating. But it was the only book he had EVER OWNED. Call me a snob. I admit it freely.

To me, it SAID something about this person that that would be his only book, the only book he ever needed to own. He said he liked to use the precepts in business (again: there's nothing wrong with that - but titles like Catch 22 and Confederacy of Dunces floated through my head, helplessly. I didn't know how to talk to this person about one of my greatest passions - reading. He didn't get it.)

Obviously, I called the thing off with him for reasons other than The Art of War, but that was a definite contributing factor.

If you think I'm an elitist snob, I have nothing to say to defend myself, and I basically freely admit it.

I like people who read. There. I've said it.

All of this was brought on by this post - compiling reading lists, listing the last 20 books you have read.

It reminds me of John Cusack's monologue in High Fidelity about - the NON-trivial nature of knowing what someone likes, in terms of books and music.

Cusack says something like, "It is more important to know WHAT they like than what they ARE like."

I very much agree. How many friendships have begun because of a shared love of certain bands, or certain authors? I became friends with Meredith, one of my best high school buddies, because of a shared love of this kind of stuff: Star Wars, What's Up, Doc, Steve Martin, etc.

Erin lists the last 20 books she read in reverse chronological order. Much Dickens!

Here is my list of the last 20 books I have read (I think - this is off the top of my head):

-- Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington
-- H.W. Brands, Ben Franklin: The First American
-- Nancy Lemann, Malaise
-- Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life
-- Willard Sterne Randall, Alexander Hamilton: A Life
-- John and Abigail Adams, The Book of Abigail and John
-- Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths
-- CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
-- Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
-- Henrik Ibsen, Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People (I'll count those together.)
-- Stella Adler, Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov
-- JRR Tolkien, The Letters of JRR Tolkien
-- Humphrey Carpenter, JRR Tolkien: Biography
-- JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
-- JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
-- Stephen Lowenstein, My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film
-- Tennessee Williams, Collected Letters, Volume I
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (re-read)
-- Can't remember author - he writes for "The New Yorker", Dot Con - the story of the dotcom internet speculative bubble
-- Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture

Damn. I have certainly moved away from fiction. Gotta get that going again.

What are the latest books you all have read?

Against Interpretation

I am too young to remember living in a world where critics of art, literature, theatre, were giants of the form. I come from a post-post-post world. I can read their works in anthologies, etc., and am continuously breath-taken by how well they write, and how DIFFERENT they sound from critics today.

It is astonishing. It almost doesn't seem like the same genre.

Here is an extensive article on this very decline. The typeface is a bit too small for comfort, warning!

Susan Sontag wrote a formative book on the topic, called Against Interpretation, which was completely revolutionary at the time. She writes that the critic must describe the object of art (the play, the poem, whatever) - without interpreting it. A daunting task, indeed. We all interpret. We read stuff, we hear music - and we make up meanings for it all. Based on our own personal experiences and our own baggage. Moby Dick is not the same book to two different people.

The current trend of criticism (and who knows, maybe it's changing - I can't tell) - is that we, the public, need these hoards of interpreters. Art is WAY too loaded with meaning for us to understand without their translations. Hence, the almost unreadable prose of criticism these days, of "theory". With all its "isms" and long long long words - paleocriticalanthropologicalblahblah blah.

The interpreters have lost the meaning. Their language has tipped off the deep end. They now are imitating themselves. They are writing for one another, not for us.

Camille Paglia sees herself as an avenging angel in this regard. She hates "theory", she hates postmodernism, she hates isms in general. Her scholarship is a bit shaky and people rightly laugh at some of it. I read Sexual Personae, her runaway hit on the history of art. It's completely enjoyable in a kind of high-school-rebel "Hey, look at me knocking over all the traditions!" kind of way. She goes from the statues of Nefertiti to the poems of Emily Dickinson. It is an amazingly ambitious and arrogant book. I loved it. She draws connections between Roman friezes and Led Zeppelin. Which is ridiculous. She's a wacko! And yet - her knocking over of the chess pieces, while somewhat messy, was welcomed wholeheartedly by many.

A quote from the article:

For Paglia and critics like her, a poem or story (or piece of art or other artifact) is less object than touchstone in the vast cultural subconscious, and she takes advantage of this to push her readings beyond traditional limits of authorial intentionality or historical chronology. Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humour of a Camille Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance seems, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humour is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal. How sad, by comparison, is the critic who seems unaware of the inner workings of his own profession, who acts as if he is the only one who sees Waldo in the picture and can point him out to you.

It is that last attitude - the critic who thinks "he is the only one who sees Waldo" - is why criticism has lost its broad appeal. Who wants to be condescended to like that? I don't!

Any genre goes through phases, any genre worth its salt evolves and morphs over time. Like the novel-form, or poetry ... Criticism is the same. I get the sense that the tide has begun to turn, and I'm quite glad about that.

Michael Frayn

Awesome in-depth interview with Michael Frayn, one of my favorite playwrights.

It's hard to believe that the man who wrote the genius slapstick farce "Noises Off" is also the author of "Copenhagen" - the brilliant play about the meeting of Niels Bohr and Heisenberg in Copehhagen in 1941.

Frayn wrote one of my favorite plays - a very little known play called "Here" - which is never done. It has never been done in the States. There was a production of it in London, I believe - and I don't think it went over very well. It's a play that takes place in one room, with two characters (well, actually three - There is a landlady who comes in and out) - But the main characters are a man and a woman, who are in a relationship. They have no names. I believe they are called She and He. The dialogue is very Pinter-esque, repetitive, mysterious, very British - It's all about what is going on underneath. I LOVE this play. The play was introduced to me by a very good friend of mine, a wonderful director, who wanted to do a production of it. We had a couple of readings of it, I fell in LOVE with it - and then he and I tried to get the rights to the play a couple of years ago - but this was at the time that "Copenhagen" was taking the world by storm - and the rights were denied. Perhaps Frayn did not want any of his earlier works to compete with his newer works. Don't know.

But "Here" is still one of my favorite plays.

Any playwright or screenwriter should read this piece. He's a novelist, as well as a playwright and he has much to say about "form" - and how content dictates the form.

Here's a couple of great excerpts:

The first one is about character development in his plays. How does it come about? Does he plan it all out ahead of time? Does he know where the play is going when he sets down to write it?

Frayn:

When I start I like to know in advance where the story is going, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the story before I begin writing it. Some writers claim that they start not knowing where the story is going to go. Muriel Spark says that she starts with nothing in her head except the title. This is very dramatic—and she has very good titles. One of my predecessors as a reporter at the Manchester Guardian was Howard Spring, not remembered now but an immensely successful popular novelist in his day. Well, he says in his memoirs that his book, called Shabby Tiger, began simply with the first sentence: “The woman flamed along the road like a macaw.” So he wrote it down, and then other sentences followed and so on to the end of the novel. I can't work like that. I do have to know where I think the story is going to go. However, then complications arise. It is like an industrialist setting up a new industry: He has this idea for a wonderful new product he wants to produce and it's going to be of great value to the world, and all he has to do is build a factory, take on the staff and things will be fine. Then as soon as he starts to build the building, and as soon as he starts taking on the staff, problems arise: They make difficulties, they bring in the union, and so on. As soon as you involve other people in your schemes you get into difficulties. It's like that with the characters. It sounds a bit whimsical but it does feel like that; as soon as characters come into the story, they begin to take on a life of their own, and they don't always want to work the plot that you've so laboriously provided for them. It irritates me that they are so ungrateful! One has given them life, existence, and they won't fall in with one's plans. And just as in life the factory owner has to negotiate with the striker, and say, Alright I'll pay you more if you do this or change your practices on that, so you have to negotiate with your characters, go along with some of their ideas hoping that they'll go along with some of yours. And the whole story begins to change.

St.-Exupery's Plane Discovered

Wow.

Antoine St.-Exupery's plane disappeared on July 31, 1944 - and nobody knew what had happened - until now. He vanished off the face of the earth, leaving not a trace of himself behind. (They still don't know why, exactly, his plane went down - but at the time, it was as though the author of Le Petit Prince had flown off through our outer atmosphere, and into the galaxy - not too difficult to imagine, considering the interests of the author. The melancholy and yearning of the author - encapsulated in his little book Le Petit Prince.)

The strange thing for me (and for others) about his disappearance was its correspondence to what happened to The Little Prince in the book.

The Prince appears, randomly, from outer space, from his teeny little planet which he shares with one rose. He appears in the middle of the Sahara Desert and befriends a pilot, sitting beside his plane in the desert. And then - after a relationship develops, the Prince disappeared again - after being bitten by a serpent. Obviously allegorical. But heart-wrenching and simply told. It is not idealogical, or brow-beatingly obvious. It's a fairy tale.

The last line of the book - (I first read it in the original French in high school, and am so grateful that I did - it's meant to be read in French):

"Ne me laissez pas tellement triste: écrivez-moi vite qu'il est revenu... "

"If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

Send me word that he has come back.

St.-Exupery's missing plane has been found, missing for all of these years.

The Writing Process

Emily Jones has a great post up at the moment about "writer's block and procrastination" - in the form of "Notes to Self".

I know I certainly recognize myself in her words.

It just made me think of the myriad ways writers procrastinate. Ohhhh, we go to great lengths to put off work - and then - we put in place elaborate justifications -

"I absolutely MUST re-arrange my underwear drawer, color-coding everything, and folding everything perfectly - because if that is not done - I will not be able to write anything of value. And I must spend 2 hours doing this. And after I finish color-coding my undies ... then I really MUST blast Metallica and do my own music video in my living room ... just to let off steam, you understand ... get relaxed so that I will be able to sit down and write ... And after the music video, I really MUST make myself a small snack ... because writers need to feed the belly as well as the mind ... and then after THAT, I really MUST take a nice refreshing 3 hour walk ... because it is very important for writers to keep active, and a walk is a good way to stay active but also meditate on what I want to write about ..."

Before you know it, an entire week has passed in this manner.

Procrastination starts to feel endless, and also like an essential part of work.

Actually - this is not entirely untrue.

Like Mike Nichols always said: "In general, the most important day of rehearsals is the one day off a week." By that he means: it is in our down-time when inspiration is more likely to come. If you are straining for success, if you are trying to get it right - the muse tends to laugh in your face and disappear.

But it's when you're - playing Frisbee - or lying about on your couch watching a movie - and feeling like you are procrastinating - when suddenly the muse will appear - and you will solve the problem you had been putting off handling - etc etc etc etc.

Emily's post made me smile.

Er ... Emily Post?

TS Eliot knew of what he spoke

April is the cruelest month.

Bitter rain, bitter wind in the face, grey skies obliterating the spire of the Empire State Building.

It's the weather where I feel most like myself. I wake up, hear the rain on the window, and think: Ahhhh. That's more like it.

None of this harassing sun. None of this tormenting brightness. Wrap me up in grey and I feel like a million bucks. Perhaps it's a leftover, or a cultural memory, or something like that ... ancestors from County Mayo, a land of brown and grey.

I love this - this is comedy

Patrick Belton at Oxblog links to a BBC Magazine piece, calling upon its readers to write an entire short story (tag-team style) using only cliches.

The BBC provided the first line which was:

Giles flew in on the red eye from the Big Apple, knowing he was caught between a rock and a hard place.

Go there - NOW - and read the rest of the tale.

I love it when people just run with a joke. As I kept reading, each sentence provided by different readers all over the UK - it got funnier and funnier.

Hush'd

Hush'd Be the Camps Today
May 4, 1865
by Walt Whitman

Hush'd be the camps today,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander's death.
No more for him life's stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat -- no more time's dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him -- because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.
As they invault the coffin there,
Sing -- as they close the doors of earth upon him -- one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

"They also serve"

John Milton wrote the sonnet "On His Blindness" to himself, to his own encroaching blindness.

I have a fear of going blind myself. (My eyesight is phenomenally bad). My fear of blindness verges on the phobic. It is usually at 3 am, on a sleepless night, when I become CONVINCED that I am going blind, and I will have no one to take care of me, and I don't know how I would survive, and I'm all alone in the world, and I'm going blind, I'm going blind ... You know. The 3 am panic-cycle. Or who knows - maybe you DON'T know about the 3 am panic-cycle, but I definitely do.

John Milton, going blind himself, had to dictate his writing to his daughters, his relatives at the end of his life. ... Some say he did his best work after he became blind. He kept every word he had written in his head, he could see it on the page. Such genius is hard to imagine, hard to comprehend.

Jorge Luis Borges said in a lecture on Milton: "He sacrificed his sight, and then he remembered his first desire, that of being a poet." Blindness catapulted Milton's work to a new level. Similar to what happened to Beethoven's composing, following going deaf.

I think the following poem, "On His Blindness" is one of the best poems ever written.

On His Blindness
by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bar his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

One can only hope

"Postmodern theory presents itself as a way of thinking that exists by itself, and not the product of personal choices. Most people outgrow it when they stop feeling insecure or threatened."

- Edward Mendelson

Speaking of Wild Geese

Here's one of my favorite poems. It's by Mary Oliver.

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Quote for Emily

I'm sure, as a fanatic poetry lover, Emily, you have heard this quote, but I post it for you anyway:

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, 'Admire me I am a violet! Dote upon me I am a primrose!'

--John Keats

"This bird had flown"

Norwegian Wood
I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.
I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine.
We talked until two and then she said, "it’s time for bed".
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.
And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood.

Okay, so there are the lyrics. The interpretation I am about to put out may have already been made 5,000 times over - but I haven't read any doctoral dissertations on "Norwegian Wood", so I wouldn't know. Forgive me if I am stating the obvious here.

I always saw the story of this song as ending in an act of arson, not quiet contemplation by the fireplace in her empty apartment.

I pictured him setting a fire in the middle of that empty room, and walking out, letting the whole place go up in flames. Arson as revenge for being "had" by her. Arson as revenge for her laughter at him, for making him sleep in the bath.

Opinions needed.

The Death of Freud

Great piece in the LA Times about the death of Freudian analysis, and the increasing lack of faith in his theories. Major debunking going on, and it is about time.

The year 2000 — the centenary of "The Interpretation of Dreams" — should have been a triumph for Freudians. Instead, amid the celebrations was a funereal whiff of defeat: The psychoanalytic century was over before the 21st century had begun. Everyone knew the answer to Time's rhetorical question. Psychoanalysis was indeed dead.

Well, almost everyone knew. You can always count on intellectuals to keep a candle burning for whatever idea they've invested long years, enormous sums of money and, perhaps above all, limitless ego promoting.

I'm a fan of the cognitive therapy school, having read every word Martin Seligman has said on the topic - especially in his ground-breaking book Learned Optimism. He veers off, spectacularly, from Freud - and creates an entirely different paradigm.

The article in the LA Times details the myriad issues with Freud, issues that have been "whitewashed" by his followers:

We also know that Freud never seriously dealt with the problem of "suggestion," which totally compromised his clinical findings and, by extension, his theories. Already, by the 1890s, few believed in Freud's convenient claim that suggestion — the undue influence of the psychoanalyst over the patient — was possible only in the biologically predisposed and was thus of no consequence to his findings. Amazingly, these critical insights were buried under Freud's rhetoric of denial and by his growing fame. Now we've come full circle. Today we know better than to trust in memories, or in free associations, that supposedly issue from the "therapeutic alliance" between analyst and patient.

This is not an anti-psychiatry screed - not at all. But there is no need for orthodoxy in a field as muddy and difficult to understand as the human mind. Freud has dominated for far too long. Freudian analysis, in the end, is meant to perpetuate itself. Patients are not meant to stop therapy, they MUST continue - because the analyst has the key to the patient's unconscious.

This is nonsense.

Seligman very simply, in Learned Optimism lays out a course of recovery for people troubled by depression. (Clinical depression, I mean.) There are, obviously, those people who need to be medicated. Medication should not be shunned. William Styron, in his great and tormented book Darkness Visible, where he describes his own clinical depression, continues to say over and over again, like a mantra, "If I had been put on some kind of anti-depressant or anti-psychotic years before - instead of struggling my way through therapy - I would have been able to recover." Depression is not a feeling of sadness. Depression is a feeling of lethargy, a grey fog laid over the entire world. Depression is exacerbated by its own symptoms: One cannot sleep, one cannot eat. If you attack the SYMPTOMS (give a person a sleeping pill, as opposed to trying to delve into WHY that person can't sleep), then the crisis period may pass. And with much more velocity than if you spend hours and hours in therapy, trying to figure out why you are depressed.

Clinical depression is just that - it is clinical. Freudian analysis cannot, and should not, touch it.

Seligman believes that if you transform the way you actually think about things, if you transform the "story" you tell yourself about yourself when bad things happen - you can conquer depression, without being in analysis for years.

By 'story' I mean: If something bad happens to you (let's say, someone breaks up with you...) what do you tell yourself about the event?

Some people face life's hard knocks with: "This always happens to me. I am cursed by God. Nothing good will EVER happen."

These people, with their sense of pervasiveness and permanence, are more prone to long bouts of clinical depression.

And then some people, when faced with life's hard knocks, say, "Ah well, better luck next time." Or someone breaks up with them, and they say to themselves, "Man, that person doesn't know how much they're missing out!"

Seligman has found a way to help those with a pessimistic outlook change their way of thinking. He calls this "Learned Optimism".

This is completely anti-Freud. Seligman is not interested so much in the WHYs, except in how it might explain a person's pessimism. He is not interested in the workings of the subconscious. He is interested in helping people become more consciously competent in how they negotiate their way through the shoals of life.

The LA Times article ends, with a kind of elegy for Freudian psychoanalysis:

Of course, as with exorcism, the psychoanalytic "cure" hinges upon belief in mysterious entities such as the unconscious. For with belief we are back in the realm of suggestion and, at its best, the placebo effect. True, that's not nothing. But the cult-like exigencies of psychoanalysis dictate that normal human suggestibility be exploited for the cause of conversion. As Karl Kraus put it many years ago, psychoanalysis itself became the poison it purports to cure. Another way to put it is that it is psychoanalysis itself that has infected the Western soul with penis envy, Oedipal conflicts, death drives and so on. For these ideas are not given to, and cannot be found in, the world. They must be created. Consequently, the death of psychoanalysis is itself the only cathartic event psychoanalysis was ever designed to deliver.

Yes!!

(Full disclosure - sort of: I was in therapy for years. And - for all practical purposes - my depression got worse, as my therapy continued. I'm not saying this would be true for everyone, but it was true for me. The "episodes" of depression got longer, and more intense as time went on. I wasn't depressed all the time - there were just 3 or 4 month bouts when I was out of commission. Therapy could not touch whatever it was that was ailing me. It took me a while to put it all together, it took me a while to realize that I had come to rely on therapy - as opposed to relying on myself. I don't mean to paint this with too broad a brush - because I know people whose lives were saved by therapists. But this was not the case for me. Reading Seligman's book did for me in one month what my therapist was unable to do for me in 6 years.)

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"You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fucking hole, but you can’t tell me who shot Tupac?"

-- Chris Rock

The Peewee Hockey League Disclaimer

I don't check in with what is going on on McSweeney's enough - I love those guys.

Today's piece of writing is a disclaimer for parents to sign - before their kids will be allowed to play in the "Laurienzo Peewee Hockey League".

One excerpt, and then you'll have to go read the whole thing:

I realize that at some point during my child's affiliation with LHL hockey, I will most likely be forced to defend the honor of my child, my spouse, or my family by fighting with an opposing fan, another LHL parent or family-member, the referees, or the coaches, particularly if a coach does not play my child enough, if the referee penalizes my child too much or disallows one of his/her goals, or if my child is insulted because he/she has several bad games, one bad game, one bad play, one poor defensive maneuver, one missed centering pass, a missed shot on goal, a missed goal on a break, a missed pass on a break, or a failure to find and pass the puck to another parent's child who was wide open, goddammit!

Uh-Oh

I can feel a new obsession coming on. (Thank you, Oxblog Patrick, for pointing to it).

Michael Quinion, writer, cidermaker, entrepreneur, (take your pick) is also a contributor of citations for the Oxford English Dictionary.

And on this page, he fields questions from readers on the derivations of too many words and phrases to even count. I feel like a kid in a candy store - I don't even know where to begin.

Blue Plate Special. Where did that term come from?

The first example in the big Oxford English Dictionary is from a book by Sinclair Lewis dated 1945, but it is also the title of a story by Damon Runyon published in 1934. We have recently learned, because the digital complete text of the New York Times has become available, that it’s recorded in that newspaper as far back as 1926, and is probably older still.

A good description of the way the term was used is in an issue of the periodical The Restaurant Man for January 1929 under the title Quick Lunchplaces Have Own Vernacular. In an attached glossary, the writer wrote that: “A ‘blue plate’ is the label given a special daily combination of meat or fish, potatoes and vegetables, sold at a special price, and is ordered with the words, ‘blue plate’ ”. (My thanks to Barry Popik for finding this.)

So far so good, but finding out where the phrase comes from is rather more difficult. Though blue ribbon or blue riband, as a badge of honour that implies distinction and excellence, dates from early in the nineteenth century, it’s very doubtful whether it had any link to inexpensive restaurant meals, however good their value. The idea that it comes from a real blue plate on which the meal was served seems to be the right one. The Random House Webster’s Dictionary says of blue plate: “a plate, often decorated with a blue willow pattern, divided by ridges into sections for holding apart several kinds of food”. The Dictionary implies that the inexpensive meals were served on such plates.

Daniel Rogov, in the online Culinary Corner, recently provided an answer that may clear the whole thing up, though I’ve not been able to confirm what he says. He claims the first use of blue-plate special was on a menu of the Fred Harvey restaurants on 22 October 1892. These restaurants were built at stations to serve the travelling public on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad and it seems the blue-plate set meal was designed to rapidly serve passengers whose trains stopped only for a few minutes. He went on to say, “As to why the term ‘blue plate’—no mystery here. Fred Harvey bought nearly all his serving plates from a company in Illinois. Modelling their inexpensive but sturdy plates after those made famous by Josiah Wedgwood ... these were, of course, blue in color. Thus, quite literally, the ‘blue plate’ special”.

I could read shit like that ALL DAY. But I have a LIFE, and I must RESIST.

Boycott. How 'bout that one? The question is asked: I searched for the word boycott on your site but could not find anything. A television program recently said, I believe, that it was about the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British taxes.

Quinion's reply:

Wrong period and wrong country, I’m afraid. No one who organised a boycott at that time could have used the word, because it only appeared in the language in 1880. It’s an excellent example of an eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellington boots, garibaldi biscuits or the mackintosh.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord Earne. This was the time of the campaign organised by the Irish Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September 1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a substantial reduction in their rents. He refused. Charles Stuart Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of nine hundred soldiers.

The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant byword. It was first used—in our modern sense of collective and organised ostracism—in the Times of London in November 1880, even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French, German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain’s death in 1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.

More answers:

Crocodile tears

Through the grapevine

Peanut gallery

I may never return from reading this site.

"Reality unhinged"

"It is, I think, true to say that the [British] intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the offiials of the MOI issued "as background" a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -- still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function."

-- George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism", May 1945

"What - did you grow up in Chad?"

Frank J. has a post up right now addressing one of my favorite questions:

Why are certain things funny? Why is it funnier when a certain word is used as a punchline, when a synonym just would not work as well?

This is obviously a topic for people who are not tone-deaf when it comes to comedy.

He uses this as one example:

There was a radio ad for Steven Wright who is appearing at a local auditorium. If you don't know Steven Wright, he's a comedian who speaks in a monotone, bored voice and makes a number of funny statements instead of doing a coherent routine. One of the sound clips in the radio ad was of this joke of his: "Do you think when George Washington was asked for ID, he'd just pull out a quarter?" Now, you could replace "quarter" with "dollar" and the joke would still work, but why is quarter funnier?

For the sake of debate - let's all agree that quarter is funnier. (I do agree with that, by the way.)

You could insert a million other jokes in for that one, and still have the same question. Some things LAND, in terms of comedic potential - other things do not.

I was hanging out with my friend Ann Marie who is, to put it mildly, NOT tone-deaf when it comes to comedy. If there is a comedic moment hovering at the edge of its potential somewhere, she will leap in, pull it out, and make it far funnier than you could ever have conceived.

Anyway - we were talking to someone - some random person - and this person divulged that he had never seen "Willy Wonka".

Ann Marie said, point-blank, "What - did you grow up in Chad?"

Now:

The point is not whether or not there are movie theatres in Chad. Okay? Let's not be literal here. We are talking about comedy.

Ann Marie got an ENORMOUS laugh for that line, and rightly so. Why is "Chad" funnier than ... say ... Angola? Or ... Burma?

Basically, the point was - she randomly chose a 3rd-world country - which brought up all kinds of associations in all of our minds (a desert land, cut off from modern society) - and everyone ROARED.

In my opinion "Chad" is funnier than "Angola" because it is a funnier-sounding word to begin with, with its blunt one syllable. "Chad" lands, in a funnier way, to sensitive ears. The punchline of the joke was just that - a punch.

This is just my opinion, though - the whole thing is a never-ending mystery - and it is a GIFT. People who can make you laugh like that have a GIFT. Nathan Lane came and did a seminar at my graduate school - and it was like he had super-natural powers, in terms of comedic sensitivity.

My stomach ached for 2 days afterwards.

Every joke was explored. If one fell flat, he then would find, in the next moment, a way to make it land. He was like a scientist, a well-tuned instrument, a MACHINE. He was a comedy machine.

But he did it all with fluidity, grace, and a measure of desperation. Comedians NEED to make you laugh.

I find that to be one of the most beautiful things about them. 80% of the guys I have dated have been stand-up comedians or improv comedians for that very reason. It can get a bit old, at times, true. You want to say, "Okay, champ, drop the routine. Let's talk seriously." But for a girl of my sensibility, that rarely occurs. I am more interested in laughing for 3 hours straight than sitting down and having a heart-to-heart.

And so: Why do you think "quarter" funnier than "dollar"?

Quote

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is akind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

-- Einstein

I like that - that "striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation".

Success is impossible, but it is the striving that matters.

I am reminded of Rilke's words to the young poet: "Live the questions now."

Ouch

I always remember your beautiful flowers.
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.
What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind.
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

-- Stevie Smith

Postmodernism on the decline...

At least according to this wonderful article in the CS Monitor.

The article, written by David Kirby, not only talks about what is happening at the moment in literature/humanities departments - but also how "theory" came to take over in the first place.

I know books have been written on this topic, but frankly I don't have time to read them.

Literary theory, like so many other theories, began with good intentions:

The idea was to move away from viewing literature as having any innate "truth" of its own, and rather to study it in relationship to larger schools of thought.

From this I understand that theory was formed to question things, to investigate things, to not just passively accept the canon, but to dig deep. A lovely idea.

Kirby goes on:

But the approach left many students complaining they spent more class time with dry theoreticians than with the great authors they had hoped to encounter.

Sounds pretty dreadful.

Kirby discusses the birth of theory, and Derrida - we can probably blame Derrida for most of this - but Kirby widens his scope, and looks at the tenor of the times:

But if theory is so profoundly flawed in its inability to address the ideas and emotions that not only make us individual but also allow us to marry, build communities, and undertake the countless transactions that would be impossible without basic shared assumptions, how did it ever become so popular in the first place? How did the notion that There Is No Truth become The Truth?

Postmodern literary theory is rooted in mid-century European philosophy, though it didn't begin to catch on in America until the late '60s; the Johns Hopkins University conference on "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" which featured Jacques Derrida and other master theoreticians took place in 1966 and is generally regarded as the theoretical equivalent of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock.

These were, of course, revolutionary times: The initial phase of the civil rights struggle was peaking, and serious opposition to the Vietnam war was getting underway. College students were chucking out their parents' ideas about race, class, patriotism, sex, music, and recreational drugs the way they might toss a faulty toaster oven out an open dorm window: If it doesn't work, ditch it.

Theory played right into this mind- set; it challenged lazy notions about what's right and what isn't and brought fresh air into a classroom full of mildewed literary practices.

Kirby addresses the ugly rigid "fundamentalism" of many of the theorists themselves. It is as though the theorists are such unattractive personalities that they have been turning people off of their own field. Single-handedly.

And here, I think, is the most brilliant point - and why I have been so pissed off about theory:

Fundamentalism is always ugly, and many of the secondgeneration professors who followed famed theoreticians like Derrida merely applied their ideas dogmatically, thus guaranteeing that theory would became static and stale. Eventually, theory's freewheeling skepticism became as one-dimensional as the celebrations of objective truth it sought to replace.

That's it. That's it. What originally began as a "skeptical" discovery process, a commitment to reading the great works as living breathing documents, as opposed to etchings on tablets of stone - degenerated into fundamentalist dogma.

The article is extensive, so if this subject interests you at all, I suggest you give it a read.

"It makes us more human"

"The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato's downwards, have deeply distrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking."

-- WH Auden

"So I keep writing...

"I'm very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don't permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O'Neill -- he had to die to make 'Moon' successful. And to me it has been providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity -- my sister Rose did not manage this. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do -- for me, that's enough."

-- Tennessee Williams, interviewed in 1981

That is one of my favorite quotes. Words to live by:

So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do -- for me, that's enough.

Quote

"A great writer within any culture changes everything. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce, and Ireland fifty years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and changed."

-- Seamus Heaney

For Mike R -

A conversation sprang up (sprung up?) in an email exchange with Mike R, one of my regular (and wonderful) readers. Moby Dick was the topic. I said something about how I was made to read that book in high school, for our summer-reading list. I hated every second. I remember me and all my friends - Kate, Beth, Betsy - all of us sitting at the beach as the summer wound down, a week left until school began, and we had to read Moby Dick in a week's time. We sat at the beach, occasionally going swimming, or occasionally going up to the concession stand for popsicles - but mostly, we sat, in the sunlight, grimly, tearing through the book. It was a chore. We were MAD about it. Why do we have to read this book? What is the big deal? Who CARES??

Additionally, except for the blowsy woman who serves Ishmael chowder in the 2nd or 3rd chapter, there are NO women in this book. NONE. There is the memory of Captain Ahab's new bride at home, her head denting the pillow - but other than that - NO GIRLS. Although, if you look at the book in another light (as Camille Paglia does so brilliantly and so bizarrely in her chapter on it in Sexual Personae) - the whale could be seen as the "spirit" of female energy in the world. It is pretty obvious that the great white whale is a male, although it is never specifically said - but Paglia made me see something else going on. Whaling boats were 100% male, they lived out on the ocean for 3 or 4 years at a time - There were no women. None.

Melville himself was an unrepentant and vicious misogynist - He tried to kill his wife - She would flee from the house in the night, screaming, etc. It is well-known that he had many homosexual experiences during his time at sea. Many whalers did.

Paglia believes that Melville was writing out his anxiety and his anger towards women, in general. But not just 'women' as in 'a person who happens to be female' - but on a larger level: Woman as nature, woman as chaos, woman as the uncontrollable force running the universe.

Paglia feels that the entire book, with not one woman in it, is actually haunted by this spectre of female-ness.

HOWEVER - back to my tale - me and my grumpy friends reading it on the beach did not care about any of that.

We hated the book and we hated reading it.

Another book on the summer reading list was A Tale of Two Cities - and we all completely LOVED that one. We had no problem reading it, we couldn't put it down. I remember me and a good friend roaring with laughter about Madame LaFarge, putting her evil little gossip into the garments she was knitting.

A couple of years ago, I picked up Moby Dick again. This was in the beginning of my phase where I gave myself the assignment to re-read all of those books we were forced to read in high school. I went through them all. I re-read Gatsby, I re-read The Scarlet Letter, I re-read Madame Bovary. And I re-read Moby Dick.

The book so blew me away the second time I read it that I honestly felt as though I had never read it before.

It's a big mess of a novel - I wouldn't even call it a novel, actually. It's more of a spontaneous outpouring of Melville's subconscious. We have 20 chapters which are basically marine biology. The point of view switches inexplicably. The first line of the book "Call me Ishmael" sets it up that this is a first-person narrative.

But there are private moments of Captain Ahab and Starbuck described - moments Ishmael could never have witnessed. During the entire breakdown of the whale chapters - where we learn about blubber, and the spout, and their mating rituals, etc. - the voice changes from first-person to omniscent. For no reason. And the "I" in the beginning of the book, Ishmael's "I", does not seem to be the same "I" who gives us marine biology lectures throughout the middle of the book. It is not the same voice at all.

In the end, none of that matters.

It is an unconventional book, with its own narrative rules. Once you succumb, you will not have a better reading experience. The same could be said for Joyce's Ulysses. If you just trust the author, even though they seem to be off on their own personal jaunt, just writing to please themselves, not giving a shit about whether or not you follow, they will take you places you could not even imagine.

The "interminable" chapters on whales, the chapters which I found so unbearable in high school, are what make the book so stunning, so bizarre. What is Melville's genius here is that - he starts out telling you, "Okay, so let's talk about the spout-hole ..." And he takes you through it, telling you how it works, what it is, blah blah blah. But throughout this, somehow, he elevates each part of the whale into something almost allegorical, or spiritual. A spout-hole is not just a spout-hole. Blubber is not just blubber. Blubber can actually teach us something about ourselves. We all can learn a lot about ourselves from studying the different parts of whales.

My favorite chapter, in these sections, is the one on the skin of the whale. It is called "The Blanket".

I read it, and it seems relatively informational, matter-of fact, and then by the end, Melville does a little jujitsu move in his prose - and I found myself in tears.

This happened to me time and time again when I re-read this great book. I would have a momentary thought, "Jesus, this chapter on the sperm in the sperm-whales is freakin' long, and i wish he would just get back to Queequeg, and the plot ... Dammit, this is so LONG..." And then suddenly, with a few simple phrases, Melville will draw back the veil, and show you the underbelly, give you the real GUTS of what he is saying.

Here's what I mean. This is an excerpt from the stunning chapter "The Blanket" - and look out for the jujitsu move at the end:

The Blanket

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. The blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin...

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland Whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies.

How wonderful it is then - except after explanation - that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peters, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

Famous Epitaphs/Last Words

Famous Epitaphs

John Keats, great poet, who died in 1821, wrote his own epitaph, which is as follows:

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

But actually, the full epitaph reads like this:

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone
"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

"the Malicious Power of his Enemies" ... Woah.

So this got me to thinking about epitaphs in general. As a kid, me and my siblings had to memorize William Butler Yeats' epitaph, in order to get our allowance of 50 measly cents. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, could knock that epitaph out of my brain.

It is:

Cast a cold eye
On life On death
Horseman pass by

Damn. Now that is something. I could ponder that forever.

There are a couple of other relatively famous epitaphs I am familiar with - (I used to plan out, as a teenager, what I wanted on my tombstone - Finally, I settled on "After life's fitful fever, she sleeps" - Shakespeare - I was insane. I was 15 years old, picking out the best epitaph for myself.)

Anyway, speaking of Shakespeare, here is his epitaph, written on his grave in Stratford-on-Avon:

Good friend for Jesus's sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones

Got it, Bill. We won't move your bones. We promise.

Other epitaphs I know by heart - I don't know if any of my readers out there also have an interest in this kind of thing - but if you do, feel free to pipe up.

Jack Dempsey's epitaph was (and I LOVE this):

A Gentle Man and a Gentleman

Robert Frost has as his epitaph (and this is certainly something to keep me up at night, pondering):

I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World

Me too. Me too.

Emily Dickinson, like Keats, wrote her own. It says it all:

Called Back

F. Scott Fitzgerald has, as his epitaph, the famous last line of Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

(Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind having that as my epitaph either ... Hm. Must make a note of it.)

Thomas Jefferson wrote his own:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of American Independence,
of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom,
and father of the University of Virginia.

And of course, the epitaph of the Unknown Soldier, which everybody knows:

Here Rests in
Honored Glory
An American
Soldier
Known But to God

And finally - Jack London - who has this mysterious phrase as his epitaph:

The Stone the Builders Rejected

Famous Last Words

John Adams - died July 4, 1826 "Thomas Jefferson--still survives..." (He didn't know Jefferson had died earlier the same day - They both died on July 4?? I mean - come ON)

On the exact same day, Thomas Jefferson died. He began slipping in and out of a coma. At one point, he woke up and said, "Is it the Fourth?" Then he died. I have tears in my eyes. I have no idea if that is actually true - or just a rumor - It is reported in his biographies, with caveats - "Rumor has it..." etc. But I choose to believe it.

Ethan Allen, American Revolutionary general, died in 1789, and was told by his doctor, "General, I fear the angels are waiting for you." Ethan Allen responded, "Waiting are they? Waiting are they? Well--let 'em wait." Those were his last words.

Lady Nancy Astor, fell very ill, and woke up, to find her entire family standing around her bed. She said, "Am I dying or is this my birthday?" These were her last words.

James Joyce apparently said, as his last words, "Does nobody understand?" I don't seem to recall this fact being told in the Ellmann biography, though, so it may not be true. No, Jim, nobody really does understand - but your work will live on regardless. Genius lives. Understanding is over-rated.

Tallulah Bankhead, wild-woman actress, died in 1968. Her last words were, "Codeine . . . bourbon."

P. T. Barnum, died in 1891. His last words were, "How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?"

I think my favorite might be Beethoven's last words: "Friends applaud, the comedy is finished." Jesus. Amazing.

Humphrey Bogart's last words are almost TOO perfect. "I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis." Classic.

Napoleon died, murmuring, "Josephine ... Josephine ..."

Oh, and the following was a contribution from the man I met at the party. It is so damn funny.

Dominique Bouhours, who was one of those strict hard-nosed French grammarians, died in 1702. Last words were: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct."

Tacitus tells us that Caligula, who was stabbed to death by his own guards in 41 AD, had as his last words the following scream: "I am still alive!"

Louise, Queen of Prussia, who died in 1820, faced the harsh realities in her last moments, and said, before dying, "I am a Queen, but I have not the power to move my arms."

Chekhov's last words are also a personal favorite of mine. They seem to encapsulate exactly what I love about his writing, his outlook on life: "I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time."

Chopin's last words are horrific. He died of tuberculosis. His last words are: "The earth is suffocating . . . Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive." A terrible death.

Very different from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last words. Her husband asked her how she felt. She replied, "Beautiful" and died. You couldn't ask for a nicer death.

Winston's Churchill's last words before slipping into a coma were: "I'm bored with it all." 9 days after saying that, he died.

Joan Crawford, the old bitch, was on her death-bed. Her housekeeper started to pray out loud to God. Joan Crawford snapped, "Damn it . . . Don't you dare ask God to help me." Then Mommie Dearest died.

Karl Marx died in 1883. As he lay dying, his housekeeper apparently raced in with a pad of paper, and hovered over him, waiting, literally waiting for him to die, so that she could write down his last words for posterity. Marx barked at her, "Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

Teddy Roosevelt said, bluntly, "Put out the light." and then died.

Charles Darwin, unsurprisingly, stated, "I am not the least afraid to die." And then promptly died.

(It's incredible how people reveal themselves so completely in these intimate vulnerable last moments.)

I find Edison's last words so comforting, so mysterious. I wonder what it was he saw: "It is very beautiful over there."

Eugene O'Neill's last words, which hold a world of grief and loss, and he's also PISSED, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room."

Edmund Gwenn, an actor in the 30s and 40s (Miracle on 34th Street, Life with Father, a couple of Lassie films) said, when someone asked him if it was "tough" facing death: "Yes, it's tough, but not as tough as doing comedy." Then he died. God bless him.

Victor Hugo said, as his last words before death, something which chills me, "I see black light." Maybe he saw a "darkling plain".

Boris Pasternak died saying the following, and I know it's uncompassionate of me, but I find his last words rather comical: "Good-bye . . . why am I hemorrhaging?"

Anna Pavlova, one of the most famous ballerinas who ever lived, said before she died, in 1931, "Get my swan costume ready."

General John Sedgwick, Union Commander in the Civil War, was killed in battle in 1864, saying, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist. . . ."

A relatively famous (and comi-tragic) one is the last words of Dylan Thomas, who reportedly said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record . . ."

This next one cracks my heart in two. Jesus. If he only knew. Leonardo DaVinci's last words were, "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have."

Oscar Wilde's might be the most famous of all, and for good reason. "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." Clearly, the wallpaper stayed.

Favorite Poem

Like Dave J said in the comments below - choosing a favorite line from Shakespeare is like choosing your favorite parent - it's wrong! I do agree - and my changes will fluctuate on an almost daily basis, but I do love hearing everybody's choices.

So - how about just favorite poems, in general? What are your favorite poems?

I have so many - Yeats' "The Second Coming" is surely one, Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" is another. I love Mary Oliver's poems.

But I think, hovering over all of these, is the following poem by Auden. It's one of the few poems I know by heart.

It's another one of those pieces of writing which has followed me through my life, showing up at different moments, providing different insights. It almost doesn't seem to be the same poem, from day to day.

On a personal note, too, this poem, along with the Hail Mary, was almost a mantra during the crazy day of September 11 - and the chaotic days following. I saw the towers fall with my own eyes. My sister Siobhan who worked down there was out of communication and missing for 3 hours. The air was literally filled with the sound of screaming. I saw grown men in suits fall to their knees and scream, "NO" up at the sky.

Later that night, raw and still stunned, I lay in my bed, sleep was months away, and said Auden's poem to myself in the dark.

I still couldn't cry - it was WEEKS before I would shed a tear - but there was something comforting and eternal in Auden's words. I cherish this poem because of what it meant to me during those terrible days. It's that last line, man ... It's the very last line that makes this poem great. And true.

The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now i see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

So - I told you mine, now you tell me yours - Favorite poem?

Favorite line from Shakespeare...

I know ... how can one choose, right?

With all that he wrote, and all of the genius phrases, I think this might be my favorite:

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

-- Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Sc. 1

I remember when I first heard that line, I was a kid ... and at the word "naughty" this strange chill went up my back. A chill of fear, and foreboding ... "Naughty" is such a potent world to a child. To think of the entire "world" as naughty ...

As I have grown up, that line has taken on different meanings for me, it has different impacts at different times ... but it's always with me, for some reason.

What are your favorite lines from Shakespeare? Who cares if it's paraphrased ... tell me the lines you love, the lines you carry with you.

The Best of Betty

I am reading a very funny book of short stories right now, by a Jincy Willett (she just came out with her first novel which Bill McCabe gave me for my birthday - thank you!) Haven't read the novel yet but I am tearing through her short stories. The collection is called Jenny and the Jaws of Life.

Oh, how I love writers who can make me laugh. It is such a gift. A precious gift. So rare.

One of the stories is called "The Best of Betty" - and it is a series of letters to an Ann Landers-type columnist - named Betty. We read the questions, and Betty's responses. And throughout the story, we watch as Betty goes off the rails. Her letters become more and more hostile, she has less and less tolerance for her readers, she loses her mind. It's hilarious. And the majority of the letters are written by the same group of people, her regulars, so you get to know their wacked-out issues, their hostilities, their complexes ... All of them are obsessed in finding out what Betty thinks.

A couple of my favorite letters and response are as follows:

Dear Betty:
Lately, at parties, my husband has started calling me "Lard Bottom". I know he loves me, and he says he doesn't mean anything by it, but he hurts me terribly. Last night, at the bowling alley with some of his trucker buddies, he kept referring to me as "Wide Load". Betty, I cried all night!

We're both big fans of yours. Would you comment on his cruel behavior? He'd pay attention to you. Tell him that I may have put on weight, but I'm still a

Human Being

Dear Human:
Yes, a human being with an enormous behind. Sorry, Toots. If I read correctly between the lines, hubby's worried sick about your health. Try a little self-control. Quit stuffing your face.

Dear Betty:
Do you believe in God? I don't. Also, do you ever sit in front of a mirror and stare at your face? My face is so blobby that I can't figure out how even my own parents can recognize me. Lastly, do you think we should be selling weapons to Jordan?

Fifteen and Wondering

Dear Fifteen:
Take five years off after you graduate from high school. Move away from home, get a menial job, fall for as many unworthy men as it takes to get all that nonsense out of your system. Don't even think about college until your mind is parched and you are frantic to learn. Don't marry in your twenties. Don't be kind to yourself. Keep in touch.

And lastly - this one is my favorite:

Dear Betty:
You hear from so many unfortunates with serious problems that I feel a bit ashamed to take up your time this way. I am an attractive woman of 59, my thighs are perfectly smooth, my waist unthickened, I still have both my breasts and all my teeth in fact. I am two dress sizes smaller than I was at eighteen. My three grown daughters are intelligent, healthy, and independent. My husband and I are as much in love as when we first were married, despite the depth of our familiarity, and the, by now, considerable conflation of our tastes, political beliefs, preferences in music and art, and, of course, memories. He still interests and pleasures me; miraculously our sex life remains joyous, inventive, and mutually fulfilling. I continue to adore the challenge and variety of my career as an ethnic dance therapist. We have never had to worry about money. Our country home is lovely, and very old, and solidly set down in a place of incomparable, ever shifting beauty; our many friends, old and new, are delightful people, amusing and wise, and every one of them honorable and a source of strength to us.

And yet, with all of this, and more, I am frequently very sad, and cannot rid myself of a growing, formless, yet very real sense of devastating loss, no less hideous for its utter irrationality. Forgive me, but does this make any sense to you?

Niobe

Dear Niobe:

Certainly. You're lying about the sex.

Put away childhood things? Never

As discussed today - I have come up with my favorite childhood reads. I can't wait to read Dan's and Emily's. I look forward to hearing everyone's comments on this, additions, etc. Hopefully, you will look at some of my titles and remember books you once read, authors you once loved.

Update:
This is great. Here is Dan's list. I love his description of Harriet the Spy as a "proto-blogger". I loved Rikki Tikki Tavi, too. That book haunted me.

Also - kudos to your dad for not getting you the early "horrible Bakshi film" of Lord of the Rings, but telling you he wanted to "get you the real thing" instead. Meaning: THE BOOK. Yeah, man, good stuff.

And here is the list of Miss Emily. As she pointed out, conversations about deadly heat waves usually turn to conversations about favorite childhood books - so it all makes sense.

I read her list and thought: HOW could I have left Charlotte's Web off?? I also loved EB White's Trumpet of the Swan - a wonderful book about a swan who is deaf and learns how to play the trumpet in order to communicate. But Charlotte is the best of all. I still remember how the last sentence went - and again, this is a paraphrase: "It is not often that one comes into contact with someone who is a good friend and also a good writer. Charlotte was both." Tears! I'm in tears!

Here's my list...

Favorite Childhood Books

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh - This has got to be number one on my list. It had such a huge impact I can't even start to talk about it. I would say that Harriet, with her obsessive journals and people-watching notes, is why I'm a writer. Or one of the reasons. This book didn't just draw me in - this book scared me. People were REAL in this book. They were HUMAN. Harriet's parents - upper class Manhattanites - were REAL - and there was Harriet - 10 years old, roaming the streets, breaking into other people's houses basically so that she could then write about them - and who was looking after her? Ole Golly, of course ... but Ole Golly was a wack-job as well (and looks NOTHING LIKE ROSIE O'DONNELL, WHAT AN OUTRAGE.) This book is up there with Catcher in the Rye for me, in terms of its importance. It's also laugh-out-loud funny.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis - Sheer magic. I lived this book. I wanted them to make it into a movie, and I wanted to star as Lucy. I wanted to live it, I wanted to find that world beyond the wardrobe. CS Lewis made it REAL. I still can remember some of his descriptions. The taste of the Turkish taffy - the "thick green ice" around the home of the Beaver couple - I so wanted to be there.

Little Women - Come to think of it, I need to read this book again. Of course I related to Jo March the most - the rebellious independent tomboy of the family - Jo March is a FANTASTIC character. Absolutely flesh and blood. But all of them definitely have their moments. When Mr. Laurence gives Beth the piano - what a scene! And then when Beth almost dies, and they are waiting for Marmee to return, and Jo and Laurie watch over Beth in the night, and Laurie (who is a man, God bless him, an amazing character) gives Jo a sip of wine to calm herself down ... and then Marmee arrives at dawn, just in time ... It is a great story, and I lived it. I read this book constantly. I wanted to slip between the lines and enter that family.

The entire Beezus and Ramona series by Beverly Cleary - These books were staples of the O'Malley household. Beezus (Beatrice) was the older sister, Ramona the younger. These books are the kind of books not safe to be read in the library because you will start to guffaw with laughter and then be asked to leave. I should read them again.

Alice in Wonderland - I don't even know what to say. This book wasn't even a READING experience. I LIVED those books (Looking Glass too). It was a window into some other realm - a glimpse of something else - something completely undefinable - but also totally real, compelling, frightening, interesting. I STILL do not understand Alice in Wonderland. I hope I never will.

Ballet Shoes This was a book by Noel Streatfield - and part of a series of books (Circus Shoes, Tennis Shoes, etc.) They were all books about little girls who ended up being very good at something - ballet, tennis, whatever. This sounds so pedantic and so stupid but they are really quite wonderful - Ballet Shoes, in particular. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series. 3 orphan girls - unrelated - are adopted. And somehow - I forget how - they get accepted to this school of dramatic arts in London. It's really a fluke ... they don't know yet what they are good at. And one ... one of them ends up being what they would call a genius ballerina. At the age of 9 years old. This book was not just a book to me - It was a guide-book - It was instructions to me, at age 8, of how I wanted to live my life. I was going to devote my life to my art. Just like Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I still own this book.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, a personal idol. GREAT BOOK. Can't describe it. But GREAT BOOK. A new way to look at the universe. And at love. A ground-breaking book. Also, it's always on the Top 100 Banned Books, along with Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn - so that must mean it's REALLY good.

Anne of Green Gables, and all the sequels - by Lucy Maud Montgomery. When it first came out, in 1906, Mark Twain wrote a review and called Anne "one of the immortal girls of literature". And he was right. This is an indelible character, a character who will NEVER leave you once you have met her. Lucy Maud Montgomery herself wrote in her journals, years later, and I paraphrase, "Sometimes I walk through the woods and I wish that I could come upon Anne Shirley - I wonder what she would say to me, and I to her." These books cannot be overpraised.

The Diamond in the Window - by Jane Langton. I don't even know if this is in print anymore, but DAMMIT what a book. It's about a brother and sister, who live in Concord Massachusetts, with their crazy uncle and weary aunt - The uncle is an Emerson freak. One day, when looking up at their house, the brother and sister notice a window shaped like a keyhole. A window they have never seen before even though they have always lived there. They do a bit of exploring and discover a secret room in the attic, filled with old treasures - but no one will explain what it means to them. Both of them start having dreams - dreams which become increasingly real. Emerson shows up in the dreams. Louisa May Alcott does too. All the Concord stars of old. It is an extraordinary book - It doesn't talk DOWN to kids. I LEARNED stuff when reading this book. I read Emerson because of this book. But it is, indeed, a kid's book. Magical. Completely magical.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by EL Konigsburg. Another brother and sister having adventures on their own kind of story. I could not even tell you the plot now. Does anyone else remember? All I can recall is that they run away, and they camp out in the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, hiding in the bathrooms until the janitorial staff leaves, and then they have the run of the entire place. They take baths in the fountain, and gather up the pennies dropped at the bottom, so that they have funds. I guess I loved books about orphan kids - kids who are orphaned even though they have parents (like Harriet) - kids who have to survive by their wits.

The All-of-a-Kind Family series - I don't even know who wrote it. It was a story about a Jewish family who lived on the lower east side of Manhattan at the turn of the century. The all-of-a-kind part of it referred to the fact that there were 5 GIRLS in the family. No boys. I think in one of the later books in the series they finally had a boy. All of the sisters are fully fleshed-out characters (and I, of course, related to Henny the most - the wild rebellious one who was always getting into trouble). The book is filled with the rhythm of Jewish religous rituals, which I found fascinating, magical. Every holiday celebrated had a story to it - stories foreign to me - and yet I could relate. After all, how different was the ritual of the Advent calendar in the O'Malley family from the rituals I read about in the book? They didn't seem so far apart. I LOVED these books. And it was a series - so I read them as I grew up. When I hit puberty, so did the 5 Jewish girls. When I started being interested in boys, so did the 5 Jewish girls.

-- Other favorites:

I LOVED Carolyn Heywood. But I can't remember any of her titles. She's a wonderful story writer for children.

I LOVED this one story called The Lonesome Manor, which took place in Quebec. A little Quebec-ian girl, with 8 brothers and sisters, befriends a lonely mysterious woman in a "lonesome manor" down the street. What I loved about it primarily was its glimpse of a different world - little girls who filled up wash basins to clean their faces and then put on snow shoes to get to school.

I LOVED Oliver Twist. I read it in 6th grade. It tormented me. It was challenging. I didn't understand half of it. But I loved those people. I loved Fagan. I loved Nancy. I loved the Artful Dodger. This is an example of reading something beyond your abilities and what GOOD it can do you. I read that book - and I think that somewhere I thought, "Hm. Gonna have to come back to this one."

Spontanaeity

Going to a movie tonight in Times Square - and I will see whatever film is playing closest to 7 pm.

Even if it's "Paycheck".

Stay tuned.

Benign poets

"The poet in our current time is complacent, maintaining an air of respectability or is the creator of outrageous manifestos -- in either case is benign. In times past poets were leaders and creators of reality; they were respected and entrusted with the keeping of cultural inheritance. Somehow this has changed, and poets now are non-entities for the most part; sure, they are politely applauded by small audiences, they sell a few volumes; they put their private lives on display to make others feel human. But this is all 'culture', a word which now seems to mean, not the whole of society, but entertainment for the few -- dividends received for living in a 'civilized' society. Furthermore, poets generally believe that they are effective, believe they make an impact on society; and who is responsible for this misconception is a great mystery -- some influence outside the poetic community, or worse yet, the poets themselves -- an important question that will not be answered here. This, for us, is the important fact: the poet has somehow been marginalized, and there is no sense that our society would die without the presence of poetry or poets. Perhaps this is the gravest sign of cultural coma."

- Brad N. Haas

Quote

"The great poets have nearly all been conservatives, even if, like Wordsworth, they took a little time to recognize the fact. It is not surprising. Their task, since the composition of The Iliad, has been to encapsulate emotions, stories, and myths as they fade from consciousness: an essentially conservative exercise."

-- A.N. Wilson

Sadness

I finished The Ring Trilogy last night.

JESUS. What a BOOK.

It is rare that a book can make actual tears well up in my eyes, and this book did so many many times.

The ending is beyond brilliant.

Tolkien doesn't miss a beat.

But I literally do not know what to read now.

Maybe Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. I need to read something of substance, something BIG.

The so-called villainy of Ted Hughes

I need to write a post about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - it's been a long time coming - and I have much to say. But first - I have got to point you over to Emily Jones' new blog ("It comes in pints?") - to read her post on the subject.

I couldn't agree with her assessment more. Ted Hughes has suffered enough to appease the gods of angry feminists - He has suffered MORE than enough. Well, he's dead now - so his suffering is over - and I hope he was able to find some peace at the end. Judging from the tone of The Birthday Letters, (the book of poems he published right before he died - poems in which he broke his long long silence about his marriage to Plath) he did not. He was a tormented man. He could not save her from herself. He would not sign up to be her Living God, the Ghost of her father come back to redeem the world of Men to her ... But so soon after leaving her, she committed suicide. And for this - he has been blamed for her death for 40 years.

Like I said, I have a lot to say. Let me formulate my thoughts a bit more.

But additionally - I must add, on a side note: Emily Jones is hilarious. The title of her post is Je n'accuse pas Ted Hughes. I can't explain why I think it is so funny, so a propos - but it is perfect. Je ne'accuse pas Ted Hughes.

ONE LAST THING: I write this post as a lifelong fan of Sylvia Plath's poems. I have gone through many phases of Plathian response - but what it really comes down to is - she's a frightening writer, a possessed writer - Something seems to be speaking through her. In high school, I was very angry with Ted Hughes. My anger came merely from reading her journals, and knowing that she would end up killing herself. How could he leave her?? How could he betray her?? I was in high school. I didn't really get, yet, that things are not foreordained. Ted Hughes could not have known she would take that step. He may have feared it, he may have tried to stop it ... but he is not to blame.

Like I said - I need to sit my ass down and write an essay.

Personal ads for Intellectuals

I love to read the personal ads in such publications as The Times Literary Supplement - it is highly entertaining. You should definitely check it out some time, if you remember to. My friend Ernie was the first one to turn me on to how well-written, how specific, and how bizarre these ads are ... These are definitely not your "I'm looking for a soulmate. I would love to walk on the beach with you" ramblings of the idiots on Match.com.

Anyway, here is an article about personal ads. It's very funny.

Catherine Keenan, the Australian author, lists ads from literary and academic journals - such gems as the following came from The London Review of Books:

Some chances are once in a lifetime. Not this one, I've been in the last 12 issues. Either I strike gold this time or I become a lesbian. Man, 43.

And:

67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur, jacked-up on Viagra and looking for a contortionist trumpeter.

See what I mean? They're addictive.

The article analyzes the difference between personal ads in America, and those in England. The people who place the ads in England, apparently, (and not too surprisingly) are much more willing to be self-deprecating about themselses:

Public school failure. Insipid, directionless, probably poor in bed. Looking for M or F reason to take life seriously.

or to use wit as the primary attraction (with an underbelly of twisted sexuality, as seen in this ad):

Must enjoy computer battleships, segregated bathrooms and respect my mother by wearing clothes just like hers (cavalry twill, mainly.)

The people who place the ads in America are much more positive and cheery, much more willing to sell themselves ("I'm a good-looking guy ... women tell me they like my eyes ... I have a good sense of humor") - and also are very very specific about the appearance of the mate they seek.

Examples from the article:

Resembles a petite Julia Roberts.

...the sophistication of Diana Rigg combined with likeness to Lady Diana (cheekbones, eyes, hair)

A piecemeal woman. Just what the doctor ordered.

Anyway, though - it is worth it to read the entire article.

I'm scared

I am re-reading The Ring Trilogy at a feverish rate - and today, I found myself poring through all of the Appendices in the back of the book - where all the language information is, and the calendar information, and the lines of kings, etc. and I found myself staring at a Dwarf family tree, and I completely understood it.

Intuitive understanding has arrived. I'm a bit scared.

For 2004

So I'm not big on celebrating New Year's. Maybe I'm superstitious. Or maybe because I know what horrible things a new year can bring.

Ah, a cheery thought.

Anyway, I thought I would post some Mary Oliver poems here - in honor of the new year. Mary Oliver's work touches me. Keats used to talk about how poetry would "call him out of thought". I read Oliver, and I think I know what Keats meant. Wherever it is that she gets to me, it's not really in my brain. It's my spirit.

The second one, "In Blackwater Woods" is one of my favorite poems of all time. I know it by heart.

And to my childhood friend who gave me Checkerboard for comfort after 9/11 -- if you're reading this - I am posting "The Journey" for you. I love you.

And the last one - "Wild Geese" - has been a huge gift in my life. I come back to this poem again and again. I hope you like it too.

Hope you all have a great night, whatever you end up doing. And, in the words of the Sergeant in Hill Street Blues: "Let's be careful out there."

And now - Mary Oliver:

When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Christmas Eve

Last year, my sister Jean kept badgering me to read Pearl S. Buck's short story Christmas Day in the Morning. "It'll take you five minutes, Sheila! You HAVE to read it!" In typical big-sister fashion, I kept saying, "Yeah, I'll read it... I will ..."

It wasn't until last night that I finally got around to it.

Waterworks. From almost beginning to end.

So - in the hopes that I can make all of you cry on Christmas Eve - here is Pearl S. Buck's beautiful story.

Christmas Day in the Morning

He slipped back in time, as he did so easily nowadays. He was 15 years old and still on his father's farm. He loved his father. He had not known it until one day a few days before Christmas, when he overheard what his father was saying to his mother.

"Mary, I hate to call Rob in the mornings. He's growing so fast and he needs his sleep. If you could see how he sleeps when I go in to wake him up! I wish I could manage alone."

"Well, you can't, Adam." His mother's voice was brisk. "Besides, he isn't a child anymore. It's time he took his turn."

"Yes," his father said slowly. "But I sure do hate to wake him."

When he heard these words, something in him woke: his father loved him! He had never thought of it before, taking for granted the tie of their blood. Neither his father nor his mother talked about loving their children - they had no time for such things. There was always so much to do on a farm.

Now that he knew his father loved him, there would be no more loitering in the mornings and having to be called again. He got up after that, stumbling with sleep, and pulled on his clothes, his eyes tight shut, but he got up.

And then on the night before Christmas, that year when he was 15, he lay for a few minutes thinking about the next day. They were poor, and most of the excitement was in the turkey they had raised themselves and in the mince pies his mother made. His sisters sewed presents and his mother and father always bought something he needed, not only a warm jacket, maybe, but something more, such as a book. And he saved and bought them each something too.

He wished, that Christmas when he was 15, he had a better present for his father. As usual, he had gone to the ten-cent store and bought a tie. It had seemed nice enough until he lay thinking the night before Christmas, and then he wished that he had heard his father and mother talking in time for him to save for something better.

He lay on his side, his head supported by his elbow, and looked out of his attic window. The stars were bright, much brighter than he ever remembered seeing them, and one was so bright he wondered if it were really the star of Bethlehem.

"Dad," he had once asked when he was a little boy, "what is a stable?"

"It's just a barn," his father had replied, "like ours."

Then Jesus had been born in a barn, and to a barn the shepherds and the Wise Men had come, bringing their Christmas gifts!

The thought stuck him like a silver dagger. Why should he not give his father a special gift, too, out there in the barn?

He could get up early, earlier than four o'clock, and he could creep into the barn and get all the milking done. He'd do it alone, milk and clean up, and then when his father went in to start the milking, he'd see it all done. And he would know who had done it.

At a quarter to three, he got up and put on his clothes. He crept downstairs, careful of the creaky boards, and let himself out. The big star hung lower over the barn roof, a reddish gold. The cows looked at him, sleepy and surprised.

"So, boss," he whispered. They accepted him placidly, and he fetched some hay for each cow and then got the milking pail and big milk cans.

He had never milked alone before, but it seemed almost easy. He kept thinking about his father's surprise. His father would come in and call him, saying tha the would get things started while Rob was getting dressed. He'd go to the barn, open the door, and then he'd go to get the two big empty milk cans. But they wouldn't be waiting or empty; they'd be standing in the milk house, filled.

The task went more easily than he had ever known it to before. Milking for once was not a chore. It was something else, a gift to his father who loved him. He finished, the two milk cans were full, and he covered them and closed the milk-house door carefully, making sure of the latch. He put the stool in its place by the door and hung up the clean milk pail. Then he went out of the barn and barred the door behind him.

Back in his room, he had only a minute to pull off his clothes in the darkness and jump into bed, for he heard his father up. He put the covers over his head to silence his quick breathing. The door opened.

"Rob!" his father called. "We have to get up, son, even if it is Christmas."

"Aw-right," he said sleepily.

"I'll go on out," his father said. "I'll get things started."

The door closed and he lay still, laughing to himself. In just a few minutes his father would know. His dancing heart was ready to jump from his body.

The minutes were endless - ten, fifteen, he did not know how many - and he heard his father's footsteps again. The door opened and he lay still.

"Rob!"

"Yes, Dad--"

His father was laughing, a queer sobbing sort of a laugh. "Thought you'd fool me, did you?" His father was standing beside his bed, feeling for him, pulling away the covers.

"It's Christmas, Dad!"

He found his father and clutche dhim in a great hug. He felt his father's arms go around him. It was dark, and they could not see each other's faces.

"Son, I thank you. Nobody ever did a nicer thing--"

"Oh, Dad, I want you to know -- I do want to be good!" The words broke from him of their own will. He did not know what to say. His heart was bursting with love.

"Well, I reckon I can go back to bed and sleep," his father said after a moment. "No, hark-- The little ones are waked up. Come to think of it, son, I've never seen you children when you first saw the Christmas tree. I was always in the barn."

He got up and pulled on his clothes again, and they went down to the Christmas tree, and soon the sun was creeping up to where the star had been.

Oh, what a Christmas, and how his heart had nearly burst again with shyness and pride as his father told his mother and made the younger children listen about how he, Rob, had got up all by himself.

"The best Christmas gift I ever had, and I'll remember it, son, every year on Christmas morning, so long as I live."

They had both remembered it, and now that his father was dead he remembered it alone, that blessed Christmas dawn when, alone with the cows in the barn, he had made his first gift of true love.

Lewis Carroll

One of my favorite biographies is Morton Cohen's extensive biography of Charles Lutwidge Dodson (Lewis Carroll). If you are a fan of Lewis Carroll, if you loved the Alice books, you should definitely check it out. A fascinating tale - complex - the virginal Oxford mathematician and preacher, writing a book for children which broke all the rules, a book he wrote for his special friendship with a little girl named Alice - having no idea that it would still be around a century and a half later.

In this small anecdote, Dodson describes the impetus for the Alice books. He had taken three small children (the daughters of the don of Oxford) on a rowing expedition. Here is how he tells the tale:

Many a day we had rowed together on that quiet stream - the three little maidens and I - and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit - whether it were at times when the writer was "i' the vein" and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say - yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards ... In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication.

Full many a year has slipped away, since that "golden afternoon" that gave thee birth, but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday - the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said "nay" to: from whose lips "Tell us a story, please," had all the stern immutability of Fate!

Fabulous. Here follows, for any Carroll fans out there, a long excerpt from Cohen's biography about the Alice books. Dodson had a long life, with many chapters, a lot to focus on ... but it is, of course, the Alice books which make all the rest interesting to us.

Here is Cohen's analysis of those wonderful books - and his guess at why they have endured so long and so well. He falls into the biographers trap of assumption a couple of times. (Look for the words "must have..." and "very likely".) There are a couple of other examples. But never mind. It's all very interesting anyway.

…Neither Alice book has ever gone out of print; both are, in fact, firm bulwarks of society, both in the English-speaking world and everywhere else. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, they are the books most widely and most frequently translated and quoted. Over 75 editions and versions of the Alice books were available in 1993, including play texts, parodies, read-along cassettes, teachers’ guides, audio-language studies, coloring books, “New Method” readers, abridgements, learn-to-read story books, single-syllable texts, coloring books, pop-up books, musical renderings, casebooks, and a deluxe edition selling for 175 pounds. They have been translated into over 70 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish; and they exits in Braille…

Critics have pondered the books’ magic and tried to explain it. What are they all about, they ask, and why so universally successful? What is the key to their enchantment, why are they so entertaining and yet so enigmatic? What charm enables them to transcend languages as well as national and temporal differences and win their way into the hearts of young and old everywhere and always?

Commenting on Alice, Charles himself wrote: “The ‘Why’ of this book cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child’s smile, would read such words in vain … No deed … I suppose… is really unselfish. Yet if one can put forth all one’s powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child’s whispered thanks and the airy touch of a little child’s pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.”

Charming as that comment is, it does not help us grasp the meaning of the books. We must go beyond Charles’ reflections. The critiques, commentaries, exegeses, and analyses that have appeared during the past hundred years and more – some profound and interesting, some absurd – offer many bewildering theories. Recalling a few simple facts, however, helps.

To begin with, Charles wrote both books with Alice Liddell and, to a lesser degree, her sisters and Robinson Duckworth in mind. All the occupants of the boat who first heard the tale of Alice are characters in the first book. The Dodo is Charles, the Duck is Duckworth, the Lory is Lorina, the Eaglet Edith. But they play hardly more than walk-on parts. The book is about Alice, the middle sister; it is she, and she alone, who stands at center stage throughout.

The actors in both Alice books are transplants from real life, as are the episodes, and those who sat in the gliding boat recognized them as Charles related them, just as they would later experience flashes of memory reading Looking Glass. The landmarks, the language, the puns, the puffery – it was all rooted in the circumscribed enclave of their Victorian lives. Oxford provided the landscape, its architecture, its history, its select society, its conventions. In Under Ground and in the additions that Charles later made to the tale and in the sequel, his listeners (and readers) would have instantly picked up on the references, to the Sheep Shop on St. Aldate’s, the treacle well at Binsey, the lilies of the Botanic Gardens, the deer in Magdalen Grove, the lion and the unicorn from the royal crests, the leopards from Cardinal Wolsey’s coat of arms that graces the fabric of Christ Church and are known as “Ch Ch Cats”. Charles parodied familiar verse and songs, some of which they sang together as they rowed up or down the river: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat”; “Salmon come up” in “The Lobster Quadrille”; “Turtle Soup”; “How doth the little crocodile” and more. They would readily penetrate the thin disguises of John Ruskin as the conger eel, Bartholomew Price as the Bat, Humpty Dumpty as some egghead don pontificating, the Caterpillar as another conducting a viva. The Mad Tea-Party as a parody of Alice’s birthday party would have elicited howls of laughter. A good many of the references are lost to us, so localized they were.

Underlying the characters, however distorted and exaggerated, is the cast-iron foundation of Victorian society, its shibboleths, class hierarchy, manners, conventions, proprieties, taboos, and, perhaps most of all, its foibles and follies. The Victorian idea – or, in Charles’ terms, the misconception – of the child is at the heart of both stories, as are the child’s observations of the adult world and the adult world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child. We also have a running commentary on the human condition and especially a catalog of human weaknesses – sliding away from rectitude, succumbing to frailties, escaping responsibilities, imagining infirmities.

Although the heroine is still young and learning, she is old enough both to reflect her training and to criticize it. She mirrors her society by showing that her sensitivity has already been blunted and that she has learned to mimic the haughty stance, the rude rebuke common in her social milieu. Her indelicate treatment of the Mouse and the birds in the early chapters of Wonderland are a mere prelude to the insolence and arrogance she herself encounters and criticizes. Almost everyone she meets mistreats her: the rabbit mistakes her for his housemaid and shouts orders at her, the caterpillar cross-examines her, the Duchess berates her, the Hatter criticizes the length of her locks, the March Hare lectures her on her use of language, the Gryphon chides her and tells her to hold her tongue, the Queen of Hearts shouts, “Off with her head!”

Bad behavior is one thing, but violence is something else, and it too occurs in these books, some of it initiated by our heroine. Alice’s fall dwon the rabbit hole is in itself not violent, but it certainly carries with it the fear of a violent crash. When Alice is jammed into the Rabbit’s house, she kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney like a skyrocket. In Looking-Glass, there’s the Jabberwock with jaws that bite and claws that catch, the oysters are all eaten, the Lion and the Unicorn engage in battle, and the red chess pieces are threatening.

The books reflect England’s rigid social scale more than they criticize it. Charles has a good ear and captures the speech and manners of several social grades.

The characters behave according to their stations, but a good many Victorian bromides transcend class, and Charles deals them out mercilessly. “I’m older than you, and must know better,” says the Lory to Alice. When Alice asks exactly how old the Lory is, she vainly refuses to tell. Group games are the target in the Caucus-race, with its solemn prize-giving ceremony. When the Mouse goes off in a huff after reciting its tale, the old Crab admonishes her daughter: “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you to never lose your temper!” Then the Caterpillar orders Alice to “keep your temper”. Similar rebuffs and platitudes occur throughout.

What, then, does it all add up to besides art? The answer surely is a double-layered metaphor. The more obvious one, not much disguised, is the child’s plight in Victorian upper-class society, which the Liddell sisters would easily recognize. But that same metaphor goes far beyond Charles’ original purpose: it reaches beyond Victorian Oxford into the wide world. For Charles, intentionally or not, got at the universal essence of childhood and captured the disappointments, fears, and bewilderment that all children encounter in the course of daily living. He wove fear, condescension, rejection, and violence into the tales, and the children who read them feel their hearts beat faster and their skin tingle, not so much with excitement as with an uncanny recognition of themselves, of the hurdles they have confronted and had to overcome. Repelled by Alice’s encounters, they are also drawn to them because they recognize them as their own. These painful and damaging experiences are the price children pay in all societies in all times when passing through the dark corridors of their young lives, and Charles miraculously captures their truth.

The second metaphor lives in Charles’ own life. He could not have written about Alice’s adventures had he not himself experienced the indignities that Alice suffers and the fears she feels. The Alice books become, in this metaphor, a record of Charles’ childhood, the shocks dealt him by parents, teachers, all his elders. Bad manners and violence were commonplace in Victorian days, but their emphasis and frequency in these books, while capturing the ethos of the age, also tell us that Charlese must have stored up an amount of hostility as he grew up, at home, at school, and at Oxford. At home and at school, he very likely smarted under innumerable commands from above, unreasoning and unreasonable, and as a sensitive observer, he saw and deplored society’s artificial and meaningless minuets. The spare-the-rod philosophy was still dominant; whippings and beatings at school were customary. The bullying he witnessed, the knockabout games on the sporting fields, surely weighed on him. Accumulated resentment seeks outlets, and Charles took this opportunity to get even with the past.

In the end, however, the books are not mainly about fear and bewilderment. Once readers have associated with Alice and wandered with her through Wonderland, they are together on a survival course. They are thrown back upon their own inner resources, determining whether their resources are strong enough to get them through. Does Alice have the wit necessary to master the maze of childhood and emerge a tried and tested teenager? Charles’ answer is affirmative. He endows his heroine, and by extension all children, with the means of dealing with a hostile, unpredictable environment. At the close of both books, we have a catharsis, an affirmation of life after Wonderland and life on this side of the looking-glass. Although unconventional, the endings are happy, as fairy-tale endings should be. In both cases, Alice should meet a strong male rescuer, a Prince Charming, and they should fall in love and live happily ever after. But she does not. She succeeds, but not through the formula of grand romance. Instead of honeyed happiness, she gains confidence, a way of dealing with the world; instead of love, she finds advancement, recognition, acceptance. It is a reasonably happy ending for Charles himself, for he is at the heart of the tales.

The Alice books affect all children of all places at all times in a similar way. They tell the child that someone does understand; they offer encouragement, a feeling that the author is sharing their miseries and is holding out a hand, a hope for their survival as they pass from childhood into adulthood.

But this discussion sounds too serious, really, because Charles’ most successful device is laughter. Anyone who abhors a pun does not appreciate its usefulness as a tool to exercise the mind, to urge the growing child to wed sense to sound … When, in reading the Alice books, the child sees and gets the pun or some other joke all on his or her own, the child suddenly senses an awakened pride in his or her ability and, at least for a moment, laughter replaces a troubled emotion.

Many of the critiques of the Alice books seem to have been written by people who seldom laugh.

Children’s books had existed for centuries before Charles came along. He did not invent the genre. But he did something significant. He broke with tradition. Many of the earlier children’s books written for the upper classes had lofty purposes: they had to teach and preach. Primers taught children religious principles alongside multiplication tables. Children recited rhymed couplets as aids to memorizing the alphabet – A: “In Adam’s fall we sinned all”, F: “The idle Fool is whipped at school.” Children learned their catechism, learned to fear sin – and their books were means to aid and abet the process. They were often frightened by warnings and threats, their waking hours burdened with homilies. Much of the literature of Charles’ day, the books he himself read as a boy, were purposeful and dour. They instilled discipline and compliance.

The Alice books fly in the face of that tradition, destroy it, and give the Victorian child something lighter and brighter. Above all, these books have no moral. About a year after Wonderland appeared, when Charles sent a more conventional book to a young friend, he wrote (January 1867): “The book is intended for you to look at the outside, and then put it away in the bookcase: the inside is not meant to be read. The book has got a moral – so I need hardly say it is not by Lewis Carroll.”

Perhaps the most important difference between the Alice books and more conventional children’s stories of mid-Victorian Britain is a difference in the author’s attitude towards his audience. For a middle and upper class child, growing up in Victorian times may have been something less than a happy experience. It was an age of the nanny and the governess; children were shunted off to the nursery, brought out to spend an hour with their mothers in the late afternoon, and then whisked off again. When they reached school age, they were packed off to preparatory and then public schools, where they learned to fear schoolmasters and mistresses, and even more, one another. School was too often the arena of the bully: violence was rampant. To survive at the English boarding school, one had to be strong and resourceful enough to outwit one’s classmates.

By a magical combination of memory and intuition, Charles keenly appreciated what it was like to be a child in a grown-up society, what it means to be scolded, rejected, ordered about. The Alice books are antidotes to the child’s degradation. Like Dickens, Charles knew that when harsh reality becomes unbearable, the child seeks escape through fantasy. Charles also knew how to make the adult reader sympathize with the child Alice, the victim of the unpredictable, undependable world of adults into which she has accidentally fallen. Charles champions the child in the child’s confrontation with the adult world, and in that, too, his book differs from most others. He treats children, both in his book and in real life, as equals. He has a way of seeing into their minds and hearts, and he knows how to train their minds painlessly and move their hearts constructively.

The theme of survival echoes all through Charles’ work, just as it is a major concern in his life. If the Alice books are symbols of his own struggle to survive, they are also formulae for every child’s survival: they offer encouragement to push on, messages of hope in the wilderness of adult society. Time and again, Charles articulates that message, through his works and in his personal relationships. Ethel Rowell, a child friend, recorded her debt to him for teaching her logic and compelling her “to that arduous business of thinking.” And she added: “He gave me a sense of my own personal dignity. He was so punctilious, so courteous, so considerate, so scrupulous not to embarrass or offend, that he made me feel I counted.”

The element of respect and the absence of condescension are crucial, and Charles’ acceptance of the child as an equal makes all the difference, for it is these components that render the books timeless. Despite the Victorian furniture built into the tales, they do today for young people what they did for Ethel Rowell and other Victorian children. A 17 year old student of mine confirmed this notion, writing in a paper on 19th century fantasy: “Lewis Carroll gives equal time to the child’s point of view. He makes fun of the adult world and understands all the hurt feelings that most children suffer while they are caught in the condition of growing up but are still small. I find myself constantly identifying with Alice as I move through this bewildering world of ours. The Alice books help the child develop self-awareness and assure her that she is not the only one feeling what she feels. Maybe they even show adults how to be more aware of the child and the needs of children. They really made it easier for me to grow up.”

Charles does not play jokes on children – he shares jokes with them and, in doing so, gives them the self-confidence they need, the extra boost to make them take another step forward in the often precarious process of leaving childhood and entering adulthood. Along the road he makes them laugh without requiring them to pay for their laughter.

Even today the formula works: Charles helps children see themselves anew and to like what they see. That is why the Alice books have been translated into practically every language that children speak and why Charles commands an audience in every new generation.

Lifetime reading plan

How many of these have you read? I am pleased to say that I have read most ... although there are definitely some gaps. Would you add any to the list? I'll add my own thoughts in the comments.

The Lifetime Reading Plan, 3rd ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. (c) 1960, 1978, 1988 by Clifton Fadiman.
See also the 1997 4th Edition .

The Beginning

Homer. The Iliad.
Homer. The Odyssey.
Herodotus. The Histories.
Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Plato. Selected Works.
Aristotle. Ethics; Politics.
Aeschylus. The Oresteia.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone.
Euripides. Alcestis; Medea; Hipploytus; Trojan Women; Electra; Bacchae.
Lucretius. Of the Nature of Things.
Virgil. The Aeneid.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations.

The Middle Ages

Augustine, Saint. Confessions.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.

Plays

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works.
Molière. Selected Plays.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Ibsen, Henrik. Selected Plays.
Shaw, George Bernard. Selcted Plays and Prefaces.
Chekhov, Anton. Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard.
O'Neill, Eugene. Mourning Becomes Electra; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Krapp's Last Tape.
Watson, E. Bradlee and Benfield Pressey. Contemporary Drama

Narratives

Bunyan, John. Pilgrim's Progress.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal; Meditations upon a Broomstick; Resolutions when I Come to be Old.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice; Emma.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Bleak House; Great Expectations; Hard Times; Our Mutual Friend; Little Dorrit.
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass.
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo.
Forster, E, M,. A Passage to India.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; The Waves.
Lawrence, D. H.. Sons and Lovers; Women in Love.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World; Collected Essays.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial; The Castle; Selected Short Stories.
Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Voltaire. Candide and Other Works.
Stendhal. The Red and the Black.
Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot; Eugénie Grandet.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past.
Malraux, André. Man's Fate.
Camus, Albert. The Plague; The Stranger.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Short Stories and Other Works.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter; Selcted Tales.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; Bartleby the Scrivener.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn.
James, Henry. The Ambassadors.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying.
Hemingway, Ernest. Short Stories.
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humboldt's Gift.
Saavedra, Miguel de Cervantes de. Don Quixote.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths Dreamtigers.
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich. Dead Souls.
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich. Fathers and Sons.
Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov.
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. War and Peace.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich. The First Circle; Cancer Ward.

Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty.
Engels, Karl Marx and Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra; Selected Other Works.
Freud, Sigmund. Selected Works.
Macchiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Selected Essays.
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method.
Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts (Pensées).
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Works.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Civil Disobedience.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology; Pragmatism and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth; The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct.
Santayana, George. Skepticism and Animal Faith; Selected Other Works.

Poetry

Donne, John. Selected Works.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost; Lycidas; On the Morning of Christ's Nativity; Sonnets; Areopagitica.
Blake, William. Selected Works.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude; Selected Shorter Poems; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Ancient Mariner; Christabel; Kubla Khan; Biographia Literaria; Writings on Shakespeare.
Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems; Collected Plays; The Autobiography.
Eliot, T. S.. Collected Poems, Collected Plays.
Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems; Democratic Vistas; Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855); A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems.
Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair.

History, Biography, Autobiography

Basic Documents in American History, edited by Richard B. Morris
The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Confessions.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century.

Annex

McNeill, William H.. The Rise of the West
Durant, Will and Ariel. The Story of Civilization.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People
Smith, Page. A People's History of the United States.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World.
Whitehead, Alfred North. An Introduction to Mathematics.
Gombrich. The Story of Art.
Adler, Mortimer J.. How to Read a Book (co-authored with Charles Van Doren)

(Here's an excerpt from one of Charlotte Bronte's letters - I love it. In it, she answers a friend's request for a reading list.)

New Book

Don DeLillo's White Noise has been sitting un-read on my shelf for 2 or 3 years now. Occasionally, it shows up on those "greatest novels of the last 27 and a half years" lists which are done from time to time. And a couple of people whom I trust have said, "Oh man, you've gotta read it."

Anyone out there read it?

I know the premise. There's some kind of industrial accident (this has not yet occurred in the book, which has a very benign almost pastoral beginning) - and a black cloud floats over the university town where the main character lives. But worse than the black cloud is the "white noise" which takse over their lives - the air around them pulsing, constantly, with "white noise".

I don't know what it all will mean, and what conclusions DeLillo will draw - but the premise definitely intrigues me.

And good Lord can this guy write. His prose is startlingly good. Some of his paragraphs are masterful constructions, like a piece of music - and occasionally - one sentence will stand out of the entire page, glowing like a gem. Startling sentences.

Here DeLillo (or the narrator) describes going food shopping with his wife and kids in the suburbs:

It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls - it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.

And the narrator describes Babette, his wife -

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

The narrator describes the university, where he is on the faculty:

The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York emigres, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe-shadowed childhoods - an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles. The department head is Alfonse (Fast Food) Stompanato, a broad-chested glowering man whose collection of prewar soda pop bottles is on permanent display in an alcove. All his teachers are male, wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, cough into their armpits. Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.

The God Who Loves You

Carl Dennis won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and judging from the following poem, it is not hard to see why. DAMN. (Although - not sure, altogether, if it is actually "poetry". It reads a bit more like prose to me - with line breaks.) But still - love the language, and ... for some reason ... the first time I read this poem (last year sometime) - it struck a huge nerve in me. It resonated.

The God Who Loves You
Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week --
Three fine houses sold to deserving families --
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

Confession

I am pre-emptively terrified of the scene in Return of the King involving a giant spider.

I read the book when I was a kid and had to skip over that part - due to the dread of shrieking nightmares. Same with Stephen King's It. I LOVE that book, but I literally found the final confrontation with "It" too terrifying to even read.

Finished 1984 last night.

The last section of the book - where Winston is being tortured - involves O'Brien, the guy running the torture, explaining, rationally, some of the principles behind state-organized torture. It's a terrible scene. It is impossible to not put yourself in Winston's shoes. It is impossible to not imagine what you would do, how YOU would handle torture.

O'Brien explains that everybody has "something" which they cannot face. Everybody has a fear which is irrational, and beyond the touch of the mind. When faced with this fear, all rationality flies out the window. It is different for everybody. For some people it is death by fire. For others it is heights. Others death by drowning. (For Billy Bob Thornton, apparently, it is antique furniture.)

I have a friend who literally gags (gags! Reflexively!) at the thought of snakes.

Snakes don't bother me. Neither do little rodents, although I certainly wouldn't want them crawling all over me. But still - the sight of them does not send a convulsion of horror shrieking thru my soul. Yes - my SOUL.

But spiders bother me so much (or - even just the thought of them) that ... I dare not even speak their name. In MY house, they are always referred to as "s", or (horrors) "s"s (plural!!). And when I refer to an "s", it is usually in this panicked context, "Okay, there's an S in my closet. Could someone please come and deal with it?"

It is irrational. It is not based on anything psychological. I didn't have a bad experience with an "s" once upon a time. And my New Age friends reassure me that "s"s mean "creativity" in Native American religions - and this does not matter to me at ALL.

It is a deep-down primal horror which I cannot explain and cannot even THINK about long enough to TRY to explain.

That's what I thought of when reading that section last night in 1984. For Winston, that "something" was rats.

When confronted with the threat of having a box of rats dumped all over his head - he betrayed his lover, he gave up his contacts, he confessed to everything. (All lies, of course!)

Anyway.

I am going to have a difficult time with that scene in the movie. I will not watch a second of it, and this is non-negotiable.

Any other primal irrational fears out there?

Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I hated thee, fallen Tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, should dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer
A frail and bloody pomp, which Time has swept
In fragments towards oblivion. Massacre,
For this, I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith, and foulest birth of Time.

Don't miss...

Auden's original New York Times review of "The Return of the King".

A notable excerpt - but read the whole thing (also, check out the original reviews of every book in the trilogy):

Mr. Tolkien's world may not be the same as our own: it includes, for example, elves, beings who know good and evil but have not fallen, and, though not physically indestructible, do not suffer natural death. It is afflicted by Sauron, an incarnate of absolute evil, and creatures like Shelob, the monster spider, or the orcs who are corrupt past hope of redemption. But it is a world of intelligible law, not mere wish; the reader's sense of the credible is never violated.

Even the One Ring, the absolute physical and psychological weapon which must corrupt any who dares to use it, is a perfectly plausible hypothesis from which the political duty to destroy it which motivates Frodo's quest logically follows.

And this:

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one - it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil - hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring-but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.

Other reviews:

Auden reviews The Fellowship - October 31, 1954

Donald Barr reviews Two Towers - May 1, 1955

A Memory

My father's name is Bill.

The Hobbit, I recall, was a very big book in our household. One of the many well-thumbed children's books lying about.

My mother began to refer to my father as "Bilbo Baggins" on occasion. Sometimes she would shorten it to just plain "Bilbo." (My mother, like Tolkein, has created her own language - or maybe I should call it a dialect.)

And somehow - through the morphing of time - "Bilbo Baggins" was shortened once again to: "Bo-Bags."

Bo-Bags.

It makes no sense. Really.

She still calls him "Bo-Bags" if the whimsy hits her.

"Bo-Bags - want to take a walk on the beach?"

I think Tolkein would be pleased.

It's all downhill from 1066

This is a long excerpt from a wonderful book Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt.

It seems appropriate to post this today - it's finally December 17! It's an excerpt having to do with the birth of the English language (I mean - as a legitimate way to express oneself in writing - as opposed to Latin or French).

It's long, folks! But endlessly interesting.

Where do we first experience formal language? In lullaby, nursery rhyme, street rhymes, popular songs, anthems. In church, synagogue, mosque or temple, in hymn and scripture and sermon; in graveyards, on tombstones.

English poets at the start of the fourteenth century were sung to by their mothers or - orphaned by the plague - by foster mothers or relations. They were dragged to church, through churchyards full of individual and mass graves, many inscribed with scripture, others with Latin verses; inside they heard Latin intoned, and sang English, French and Latin. There were sermons in English, the priest pointed to bright paintings of religious events on the walls, or in the stained glass windows, or at statues and images - aids to make visible the truths of faith. Those images expressed a long tradition of symbolism and composition to feed the imagination. Incense clouded from the censers, spreading over upturned faces. The bright images hovered, as if removed, in another, an ideal and lavishly illuminated, sphere, above the reeking congregation.

In such polyglot churches, where shreds of paganism survived in elaborate ceremonial, the children who were to be poets learned that things could be said in quite different languages, and that the language they spoke at home or in the lanes always came last. They learned that there were parallel worlds, the stable Latin world of the paintings, windows, statues, and the world in which they lived, where plagues and huge winds and wars erased the deeds of men. Obviously the earth was a place of trial, hardship and preparation. They wrote out of this knowledge. Knowledge, not belief. Belief came later, when knowledge began to learn its limitation. Belief is an act of spiritual will, born of the possibility of disbelief, born with the spirit of the Reformation. That spirit was just beginning to stir.

Our starting point is fourteenth century England, a "colonial" culture subject to Norman rules if not rule, with a Catholic spiritual government answerable to Rome. The people accept the ephemerality of this world and an absolute promise of redemption for those who practice the faith. They know that the language of learning is Latin, that the language of power and business is Norman French, and that their English is a poor cousin. When the Normans took England they saw no merit in the tongue: an aberration to be erased, just as the English later tried to erase Irish and Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Cornish, or to impose English in the colonies. They succeeded rather better than the Normans did.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the time for English had come, with the poetry of Sir John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain poet and the balladeers with the dew still fresh upon it, with an oral tradition alive in market towns, provincial courts and manor houses. It took most of the century for this to happen, and by the end some high poetic peaks rose out of a previously almost entirely flat landscape.

The turbulent middle of the fourteenth century broke the prejudice in which English was held; it began to flex its muscles. Calamity was its patron. The Black Death first reached English shores before John Gower turned twenty, in the twenty-first year of Edward III's reign. In August of 1348 it arrived from France at Weymouth. It devastated Bristol, and in the early part of 1349 overtook London and East Anglia. It was still at large in Scotland and Ireland in 1350. Consider what it was like, to learn each day of dead or dying friends, to see bodies carted through the streets or heaped in a tangled mess at corners. It was an especially disgusting illness that started with hard lumps and tumors, then scalding fever, gray patches on the skin like leprosy. Then the cough, blood welling from the lungs. A victim had three days: terror, agony, death.

Langland describes it in a passage that the eighteenth-century critic Thomas Warton says John Milton may have stored away in his mind (in Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 475ff). Langland says:

Kynde cam aftir, with many kene soris,
As Pockes and Pestilences and moch peple shente.
So Kynde thorgh corruptions, killid ful manye:
Deeth cam dryvyng aftir, and al to dust pashed
Kings and knyghttes, Kaysours, and popis
Many a lovely lady, and lemmanys of knyghttes,
Swowed and sweltid for sorwe of Dethis dentis.

All at once there were not enough peasants to work the soil, servants to tend the house, or priests to administer unction and conduct funeral services. No one was immune. Three archbishops of Canterbury and in Norwich eight hundred diocese priests, and half the monks in Westminster, all died in one year. Eight hundred priests. The Church was big; the Black Death was bigger. Women toiled in the fields, harvests were left to rust. Parliament was suspended, courts of law were not convened. It was a time of too much loss for sorrow, too much fear for civil strife. There were more dead than graves to put them in: they were piled in plague pits and covered with lime. If the plague made feast of the poor, it was at least democratic. The powerful were not immune: the king's own daughter perished.

Another victim was a big-hearted anchorite who wrote verse, Richard Rolle of Hampole. "Full dear me think He has me bought with bloody hands and feet." He was a man of soul. A poet-martyr. Perhaps he translated the Psalms. It is hard to establish authentic "texts" by an author unless a number of similar manuscripts survive. Most medieval writers formed schools, their works were copied, added to and altered. Much has been assigned to Richard Rolle that may not belong to him. Why was he such a bad poet, with only some occasional astonishing lines?

...His verses - if they are his - express personal feeling simply. He began in the old alliterative tradition but progressed to rhyme. What is his, what did he borrow or translate, and what belongs to his follower William Nassyngton? When we think we're admiring Rolle we may be admiring Nassyngton's imitation; but then there is not much to admire in Rolle or his followers. Already poets - even holy poets - are practicing techniques of false attribution: getting their work read by borrowing the authority of a revered name. Publishers began to practice this subterfuge two hundred years later, but it's as well to remember that they learned that deception, and others, from religious poets.

Rolle especially loved the Psalms: "grete haboundance of gastly comfort and joy in God comes in the hertes of thaim at says or synges devotly the psalmes in lovynge of Jesus Crist." He wrote a Latin commentary; then another followed by English versions...

Miracles occurred at Hampole when the nuns tried to have Rolle canonized. His fame revived just before the Peasants' Revolt, when Lollard influence was increasing. (Lollard, from lollen, to loll or idle, was applied to street preachers.) His writings were exploited by reformers. Around 1378 his commentary on the Psalms was reissued with Lollardish interpolations. No one knows who revised it: some point the finger, implausibly, at John Wycliffe. Though not a poet, though his works are as confused in attribution as Rolle's, though exploited, celebrated and reviled for centuries after his death, Wycliffe is one of the tutelary spirits presiding over our history. He made it possible not only for King David to sing in English - there were English versions of the psalter before Rolle - but for Moses and Jesus and God to use our vernacular, for the Bible as a whole to land on our shores in our own language. Suddenly English is good enough for Jesus. It has become legitimate.

The Black Death returned again and again...Church corruption is attacked by Chaucer, by Langland, and (more gently) by Gower; but Wycliffe drives it home from the pulpit and in his writings, forcefully to the lay heart, and to the very heart of the Church. The Church is no more corrupt than other institutions, but its corruption is privileged, sanctioned and directed from abroad. The laity is more educated than in the times of Anselm and Thomas a Becket. The Church all the same prefers to ignore discontent and keep its monopolies and privileges intact.

...When the plague returned in 1361, it was a plague of children. That year cattle suffered a new disease as well. The fever touched souls: many thought God spoke through that fire.

Reformers found a voice. Some spoke English. Before then, nobles and merchants had taught their children French from the cradle: "And provincial men will liken themselves to gentlemen, and strive with great zeal for to speak French, so as to be more told of" - a kind of social bona fides. But under Edward III change began, accelerating under Richard II. "This manner was much used before ... and is since then somewhat changed. For John Cornwall, a master of grammer, changed the lore in grammerschool and construction of French into English ... so that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three hundred four score and five, of the second kyng Richard after the Conquest nine, in all the grammerschools of England children leaveth French and construeth and learneth in English, and haveth thereby advantage in one side, and disadvantage on another. Their advantage is that they learneth their grammer in less time than children were accustomed to do. Disadvantage is that no children of grammerschool conneth no more French than can their left heel, and that is harm for them if they should cross the sea and travel in strange lands."

The plague was a catalyst. But transformation was not easy. One version of English could be more remote from another than French was. A northern and a southern man, meeting by chance or for business, would resort to French because their dialects were mutually incomprehensible, as much in diction as in accent. English, a bastard tongue, starts to move in the other direction from Latin. Latin broke up, but English began to coalesce. Dialects started to merge into an English language when scribes and later printers got to work and London usage became the idiom for written transcriptions. Those who made language public and portable, in the form of broadsheets and books, brought it, and eventually us, together. After a hundred years a young maid of Dundee and an old man of Devizes could hold a kind of conversation, not necessarily in limericks.

Much more than half our vernacular litetrature was northern before that time. Perhaps it still is, except the north has learned to parler more conventionally. English in its youth was hungry. The Normans imposed French but English was voracious even before they came, and in the courts of Cnut and Ethelred, when the Conquest was some way off, adjustments took place, influences from the Continent resolving the knot of a congested Old English idiot. We swallowed French (digestion altered us). The Conquest meant that English in its various forms had to gobble up faster. Written texts can be more conservative than speech: there is authority in formality. It is a risk to use the language of the day for important matters because it's in flux and you never know which dialect, which bits of diction or patterns of syntax, will prevail.

Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon reflects how "it seemeth a great wonder how English, that is the birth-tongue of Englishmen, and their own language and tongue, is so diverse of sound in this land," while Norman French, a foreign idiom, is the lingua franca of the islands. In Trevisa's own translation, which makes sense when read aloud, Higden writes: "For men of the est with men of the west, as hyt were vnder the same party of heuene, acordeth more in sounyng of speche than men of the north with men of the south. Therefore hyt ys that Mercii, that buth men of myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners if the endes, vnderstondeth betere the syde longages, Northeron and Southeron, than Northeron and Southeron vnderstondeth eyther other." But it's the "Southeron" language that prevails. The "Northeron", Higden says, is scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng - harsh, piercing and grating. The birthplace of a prejudice.

Foreign affairs continued to be conducted during the plague as if there was no crisis at home. Skirmishes, battles and wars in France, Spain and Scotland, cruelty and piracy on every side. There was death by disease and on the field. England was certainly part of Europe. Sick at home, Englishmen went abroad to bring back wealth; they were preparing for their defeat. Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by Richard II, a boy who grew to a colorful, corrupt majority. Demands on poor and common people grew: demands for tax, service, subjection. The Peasants' Revolt had urgent causes, though it was too early in history for the masses to rise successfully against a king. It was high time - Richard II knew it quite as well as Gower - for the court and the masters to learn to speak and sing in the language of their people.

Fortunately there was more to build on than Richard Rolle of Hampole. There was Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, the English ballads and dozens of vulgar translations of French works. There are poems the scholars will never find, ballads and lyrics, elegies, poems of moral precept, religious meditations, lives of saints ... Were they lost because they weren't worth keeping, or because they were so constantly used that they were thumbed to pieces? Parchment wasted with the hungry love of reading eyes, recitation, with handing back and forth between poets and scholars and minstrels. Were they lost when, at the Reformation, great libraries were burned, or emptied out and sold to the local gentry - as the wicked and wonderful biographer and gossip John Aubrey remembers with pain - to be twisted into plugs for wine casks, sliced into spills to start fires, or cut in convenient sheets as bog parchment?

Reading English in the first half of the fourteenth century was a furtive activity, frowned on by authority. When Edward III came to the throne English was revalued; from being the underdog's tongue it became the chosen instrument of Geoffrey Chaucer.

A quote... for Patrick Prescott

"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

-- Edward Tufte

Summer Storm

Summer Storm
by Dana Gioia

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm --
A gesture you didn't explain --
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn't speak another word
Except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening's memory
Return with this night's storm --
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won't stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

Down with Theory

Roger Kimball addresses the debacle which is now art history.

The situation he describes (the hijacking of actual art history by political academic theorists) is one which enrages me, frustrates me, makes me want to pull my hair out.

Today, the study of art history is more and more about subordinating art—to “theory,” to politics, to just about anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing art natively, on its own terms. This is accomplished primarily by enlisting art as an illustration of some extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic narrative. Increasingly, art history is pressed into battle —a battle against racism, say, or the plight of women or on behalf of social justice. Whatever. The result is that art becomes an adjunct to an agenda: an alibi for … you can fill in the blank by consulting this week’s list of trendy causes.

In a word, what we are witnessing is the triumph of political correctness in art history. Political correctness operates by transposing life to an alien jurisdiction, judging our endeavors by the peremptory diktats of presumed virtue. It is worth stressing that the chief issue, the chief loss, lies not in the particular program being espoused: the war on patriarchy, the struggle against capitalism, the march against “formalist values” or “bourgeois ethics.” Whatever one thinks of those campaigns—love them or hate them—the chief diminishment lies in the displacement of art, its relegation to the status of a prop in a drama not its own.

This kind of thinking will be the death of culture. It is happening. AS WE SPEAK.

More from Kimball (this is one of my own personal pet-peeves):

You hail the mediocre as a work of genius, for example, or pretend that what is merely repellent actually beneficently transforms our understanding of art or life. If art is no longer to be judged primarily in terms of aesthetic achievement, it is vulnerable to usurpation by any importunate bandwagon: the one marked “egalitarianism” just as much as the one marked “anarchy,” “opportunistic nihilism,” or “fatuous revolutionary politics.”

Oh, how I despise the trend of "hailing the mediocre as works of genius".

You're fooling nobody. Mediocre is mediocre. Anyone can tell the difference. This is not subjective.

Do not argue.

I want all the politically correct NONSENSE dominating any discussion of art and literature to just END. I want people to come to their senses and realize how SILLY they are. I want them to lose their fucking jobs. Because they are incompetent - and not only are they incompetent, but they cannot write a sentence that anyone would ever want to read. (Says I, who just utilized a profanity.)

But listen to these bonehead self-important pretentious idiots writing about art:

[Winslow] Homer’s ironic tone carries with it the masculinized aura of the Victorian male who admired risk-taking situations remote from the realm of “ladies,” but it also signifies the opposite of what he stated… Homer’s black man is both hero and victim, collapsing the old categories of triangular formalism into a powerfully condensed metaphor of implicit power blocked.

That's from Albert Boime's "“Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters", an article written on Winslow Homer's rightly famous "The Gulf Stream".

And here's another bonehead:

Gauguin, like Picasso, is regarded as a major father of modern art, a term rich in both reproductive and sexual connotations.

That's Griselda Pollock. Griselda, indeed.

Kimball makes a good point after the quote above:

Thanks for that gloss on the word “father”! Would Professor Pollock be happier if Gauguin were described as “a major mother of modern art”?

No doubt she would be.

Kimball excerpts more of Pollock, and is something wrong with me, but I literally do not recognize her language as English:

[I]n Gauguin’s work as it circulated in Paris, the body of Teha’amana [the woman depicted in the painting] is a fetish doubly configured through the overlapping psychic structures of sexual and racial difference. In art, as the nude, the female body is refashioned fetishistically, in order to signify the psychic lack within bourgeois masculinity which is projected out onto the image of “woman.” The culturally feminized and racially othered body also carries the projected burden of the cultural lack—the ennui—experienced by some of the Western bourgeoisie in the face of capitalism’s modernity.

If I squint I can get her point - although I have to admit, I don't really want to do the work in order to "see where she is coming from". She sounds like the kind of woman who would hate a woman like me. Women like that bring out the most politically IN-correct Sheila imaginable. I do it just to piss them off. I do it just to mess with their preconceived notions. I say random stuff like, "God, I just love men, don't you??" Thankfully, I don't meet many Griseldas.

But the excerpt above tells me more about HER than it tells me about Gauguin. I'll just go to a museum to look at the painting myself, and leave the "over-interpretation" of everything up to you, Griselda.

It is these disgusting "theorists" who are stars of the field, who are emulated - these people are not marginal, or fringe-dwellers - These are the ones leading the discussion. These are the people responsible for how curricula is designed.

They are dangerous. And they are STUPID.

But dammit - they are everywhere.

(Camille Paglia is the master commentator on this issue - she's the one to read. But Roger Kimball ain't so bad himself. Roger Kimball describes the current trend of art history theory, rightly, as "an assault on art".)

Theory is designed to keep you from actually encountering the art. It is designed to make you feel insecure - insecure that your own gut-level response is enough. You need them to "interpret" it for you. You need them to tell you what is "correct", what was not "correct". All the masters come with caveats now - as though their art cannot stand alone.

Everything - whether it be Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the Mona Lisa, is seen through a political filter - Our present-day notions of prejudice, equality, gender roles, are projected backwards through time - Nothing can be appreciated for what it actually IS.

Let's over-praise mediocre work because it was done by limping Inuit dwarfs, and let's draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

It makes me sick.

Thank God there are those out there like Kimball and Paglia who can be articulate about such enraging topics. I certainly can't.

McWebster's

Jim Cantalupo, CEO of McDonald's, is pissed that "McJob" has made it into the dictionary, with an unflattering and negative-connotation definition. Here's a great article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Dennis Baron about dictionaries - and poor Mr. Cantalupo.

I ranted about the slanged-up new dictionaries a while back (cannot find the post - did I delete it?) and was definitely re-educated by my readers (my father #1 amongst them) about how I was way off-base .

My position was elitist. I did not want "McJob" to be in the dictionary. It's a stupid word. A "made-up word". Ah, but Sheila - that's true of all words. At one point or another, they ALL were made up. It is not the dictionary's job to judge. My dad said - the job of dictionaries are not to choose the "good" words, the words approved of by some elite - but to put everything in there.

Point TOTALLY taken.

A great quote from the article:

Although many people look to dictionaries for guidance in proper word use, these essential reference books aren't regulatory mechanisms as much as they are compilations of language practices. Dictionaries don't tell us how to use our words, they describe how we use them.

The article is really about the fluidity of language, really, and also - how dictionaries face pressure from certain groups, trying to get them to omit words, or omit negative definitions.

Dennis Baron writes:

As someone whose heritage is both Jewish and South Asian, I'm particularly sensitive to the negative racial and religious vocabulary that gets tossed around both casually and vindictively. But it's not the job of dictionaries to root out offensive language or to change social attitudes, and most lexicographers are careful to warn readers when words are venomous and demeaning.

Ah, the good old Language Police busy at work, as usual. It's touching, really (/sarcasm), the faith they hold in the power of language: If you control the words available to the poor unenlightened populace, you can control how they think, you can control what they think.

Sorry to break the news to you, Mr. Cantalupo: McJob is gonna have a negative connotation whether or not it is immortalized in the dictionary.

That's the deal. Live with it.

More from the article:

Manufacturers want the names of their products on everybody's lips, but they don't want those names to become everybody's property, so like McDonald's they try to regulate the way we use those names. The Xerox Corporation still takes out ads, including one in The Chronicle of Higher Education last month, admonishing readers that Xerox with a capital X can only be a proper noun (Xerox machine) or proper adjective (Xerox copy). Book and journal editors usually pay attention to these warnings, but people have been using "xerox" (lowercased) as a noun or verb -- regardless of the brand of photocopy machine they're using -- since the 1960s.

Like Coke, Xerox, and zipper, McDonald's is a victim of its own success: The world's largest fast-food chain is seeing its trademark adapted into ordinary, noncommercial language, often in an unflattering way. We've gone way beyond McJob: There's McPaper, a designation for USA Today that's been around since that newspaper made its debut (the oldest OED citation for McPaper is a 1982 New York Times article). Other Mc- derivatives include McDonaldize, McDoctors, McTherapy, McWorld, and McMansion, as well as McDonald's itself, defined positively by the OED as "any service, organization, etc., likened to the McDonald's chain in some respect, esp. in operating in a highly efficient, standardized manner."

Jonson vs. Shakespeare

My post on Doug Moston earlier today got me to thinking, again, about Shakespeare.

There is an absolutely wonderful book for all you poetry-lovers out there, called Lives of the Poets. It's by Michael Schmidt, who is not a poet himself, who is not even a critic. He doesn't write like a critic - he writes like a FAN of poetry.

The following is a great excerpt from this book - and it has to do with Ben Jonson - a great poet who had the unfortunate "luck" of being born at the same time as Shakespeare.

(Reminds me of a funny quote, from Bing Crosby: "A singer like Frank Sinatra comes along once in a lifetime. But why, oh why, did he have to come along in mine?")

Excerpt from Lives of the Poets, by Michael Schmidt:

Ben Jonson -- another man described as "the first poet laureate" -- compares with any poet of his age and the next. He can almost out-Campion Campion and he fathers Robert Herrick's lyrics and those of other "Sons of Ben," Jonson's followers, who climb nearly to Campion's heights:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did'st only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

He can set himself on a par with the satirists of the generations that followed his own, with a greater fluidity in his use of the couplet:

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman; as I near it came,
It made me a great face, I asked its name,
A lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none: and as little ill,
For I will dare none. Good Lord, walk dead still.

Or he writes "On English Monsieur":

Would you believe, when you this Monsieur see,
That his whole body should speak French, not he?
That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither,
And land on one, whose face durst never be
Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?
That he, untravelled, should be French so much,
As French-men in his company should seem Dutch?
Or had his father, when he did him get,
The French disease, with which he labours yet?
Or hung some monsieur's picture on the wall,
By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all?

The common elements in these poems and the epistles, elegies and plays are balance, construction and proportion (except in flattery). Even at his most intemperate, his art brings disparate elements into tight control. The fireworks hang suspended in the air, a promise, a pleasure even at their harshest.

And since our dainty age
Cannot endure reproof,
Make not thyself a Page,
To that strumpet the Stage,
But sing high and aloof
Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull
Ass's hoof.

His epitaph in Westminster Abbey reads: "O rare Benn Johnson." Cutting the stone, Aubrey tells us, cost 18d., paid by Jack Young, later Sir Jack. He also tells us that the living poet had a certain peculiarity of face: "Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t'other, and bigger, like Clun the Player; perhaps he begott Clun." If there is dirt to be dished, and even if there isn't, we can trust Aubrey to dish it.

Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare. Alexander Pope underlines the point in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725): "It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything."

In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson the most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend's that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson's poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson's art is normative, Shakespeare's radical and exploratory. In Jonson there's structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth. Coleridge disliked the "rankness" of Jonson's realism and found no "goodness of heart". He condemned the "absurd rant and ventriloquism" in the tragedy Sejanus,staged by Shakespeare's company at the Globe. At times Jonson's words, unlike Shakespeare's, tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to every single word. His mind is busy near the surface. He is thirsty at the lip, not at the throat.

It's true, but it is not the whole truth.

Jonson's attitude to the very sound of language can seem casual. Except in songs from the plays ("Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair," for instance) and a few lyrics, words are chosen first for their sense and accent, second for their sound value: meaning is what Jonson is about -- not nuance but sense. So there are clumps of consonnts and a sometimes indiscriminate collocation of vowels. Swinburne called him "one of the singers who could not sing." Dryden pilloried him as "not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all others; you track him everywhere in their snow."

It is the kind of poetry Jonson writes that irritates his critics: they disapprove of what he's doing. When he isn't singing, he speaks, an art Swinburne never learned. If his poetry is "of the surface", he has made his surfaces with a special kind of care, and to effect. If he borrowed from classical literature, he was no different from his contemporaries, except that he had a deeper knowledge of what he was quarrying than many did (and did not always acknowledge the debt --though this was not yet the custom). He translated Horace's Ars Poetica. He is of a stature with Martial and Juvenal: collaboration, not plagiarism, is the term for what he doese. Eliot concedes that Jonson and Chapman "incorporated their erudition into their sensibility". So, too, did Eliot.

Dryden's criticism is telling at one point: Jonson "weaved" the language "too closely and laboriously" and he "did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them." Dryden ends with the inevitable verdict: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

Confession

My anticipation for next week (guess why?) is so intense that I am barely enjoying the wait.

7 more days ...

I want it NOW.

Quote

From George Orwell's 1984, which I am now rereading:

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion or deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot track wandering across it and a molehole here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

The girl with dark hair was coming toward him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him; indeed, he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips.

Jesus, that is good stuff.

Norman Rush

I was thinking the other day about Norman Rush - a man who wrote one of my favorite books of all time - Mating - a highly celebrated and award-winning first novel published in the 1980s. Rush's story is one of those dream-come-true stories for would-be writers. He publishes a couple short stories here and there - nothing major, no attention given them - and then - with his first novel hits a major jackpot.

I have read Mating probably 5 or 6 complete times over the years.

And earlier this year - suddenly - after never publishing ANYTHING after Mating - suddenly Rush came out with a second novel.

I have written quite a bit about Norman Rush in the past. Mating is a book which has engaged my imagination and intellect to a degree that few other books have ever reached. I cannot give you an easy explanation why - and I believe that that is one of the major strengths of the book.

It is a book I can keep re-visiting. It never appears to be the same book twice. I see different things in it each time I read it. Only great books can follow you through your life like that.

Here are some of my experiences with Rush and his writing. The first piece below tries to describe what it is about Mating that means so much to me - and how I felt when I realized Rush had published something else. The second piece describes my response to that long-awaited second novel called Mortals.

Norman Rush's MATING

Today, that book is dog-eared from use. The cover is taped on. The pages are filled with underlinings. And in the back, on the couple of blank pages, I have crammed up that blank space with as many dictionary definitions of words found in this book as I could. The vocabulary in the book is, as my friend Allison called it, "daunting". I agree, and I have a pretty good vocabulary.

ressentiment: rancor expressed covertly against benefactors
proleptic: the anticipating/answering of objective/argument before it's put forward
omphalog: the naval/a center
copula: a verb that identifies the predicate of sentence with subject -- usually a form of 'to be'. "The girls are beautiful"
syncretist: attempt/tendency to combine or reconcile differing beliefs (philosophy or religion)
bolus: a small round mass. Greek: lump/clod

WHAT? Expanding my vocabulary was part of the fascination of the book.

But the hold Mating had, and still has on me, goes way deeper than that.

The characters in the book (mainly the two leads: Nelson Denoon and the unnamed female narrator) live on in my mind, the way characters like Holden Caulfield do. Or Captain Ahab. Or Anna Karenina. Their life, their potential life, does not stop with the words "The End". You cannot tell me that Holden does not live. It seems an insult to Salinger's creation.

There must be an alternate plane out in the ether, with fictional characters wandering about. Not every fictional character, because not every author manages to create a living, breathing, human personality. Actually, "human" is too limiting as well. Because, to my mind, Charlotte the spider (from EB White's Charlotte's Web) lives on. She exists on that alternate plane. As does Wilbur the pig. It's sort of like the plot of The Velveteen Rabbit. Once the rabbit is loved, and loved deeply, it becomes real.

I love all of these fictional characters in that way.

Mating is, on the surface, the story of a love affair. Other themes are: what to do about Africa, the problems with "development projects" and do-gooders in Africa, socialism in Africa, differences between men and women, competition between females for males (hence, the title) - and then, more specifically, an in-depth description of the world of Botswana: the diplomatic community in Gaborone, the issues with "villagization", the issues with development, how the development community lives high on the hog in Africa - etc. It's a BIG book, with BIG themes.

The main theme is something the author/narrator calls "intellectual love". Rush describes a very specific kind of love, and because he did so, and took such care with it, the concept became real to me. He articulated one of my deepest longings in a way I had never before encountered. It was like his words illuminated my own needs. Very interesting. Some quotes from the book in this vein:

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn't gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

More:

He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can't every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.

A couple of people I recommended this book to were extremely annoyed by the writing-voice, as evidenced in the passage above. I, however, LOVE the voice: cerebral, obsessively psychological, yearning, illogical -- It comes from right out of me. I relate. Here's more. The book is encyclopedic on love.

If I overdwell on this it can't be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term "great love" to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous. What I say is if you find yourself condemned to wanting love, you have to play while you can play. Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that as not actually painful in feeling-tone. there is some contradiction here which I can't expel. What was moving me was the feeling of being worth someone's absolute love, great love, even. And to me this means male love whether I like it or not. C'est ca. Here I am, there I was. I don't know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It's hideous. It's an ordeal beyond speech. When I'm depressed I feel like what was meant by one of his favorite quotations: A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it. Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention. And we know that this sometimes does happen for one of our sisters, or has happened. This comes full circle back to my attitude about kissing, which he never adjusted to. You want kisses, obviously. But you want kisses from a source, a person, who is in a state. This is why the plague of little moth kisses from men just planting their seniority on you is so intolerable. Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburb of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still applicable.

And now, here is Rush's (or his nameless female narrator's) treatise on intellectual love. Obviously, this page in my book is covered in notes, and underlines. Oh, and I don't agree with every sentiment here, but that doesn't matter. I don't read books to meet people just like me. But it is the concept articulated here, the concept of 'intellectual love' which, for me, when I first read it, was like a lightbulb going on, or a door opening. I saw something new. I recognized the longings of my own heart when I read the following passage:

Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I've raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.

Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone -- I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial -- who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover someone, however smart, is -- he has neglected to mention -- a Thomist or in Baha'i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.

What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you.

Mating was the context in which I went through the major "love affair" in my past, with a man who shall remain nameless. My friend Mitchell, who also read and loved the book Mating , referred to this man as "your Nelson Denoon". The similarities were arresting. And when everything fell apart with "my Nelson Denoon", leaving a nightmare in its wake, that book became even more of an anchor.

In the past couple of weeks, I took Mating out to read again.

It is a first novel, and what a first novel. He has not published anything since. There was a book of short stories called Whites which came out years ago, but besides his magnum opus, Norman Rush has been silent.

Mating was a huge hit, financially and critically, it won the National Book Award in 1991. Rush clearly put everything he knows about everything into that book. It's about love, obviously, but it's also about Africa, and politics, and socialism, and the position of women in Africa, and religion. It's a book dedicated to taking a large view of the issues in Africa - and yet it is still an extremely personal story.

And the ending. The last section, a kind of epilogue, is called "About the Foregoing". It is very mysterious. It ends on a very ambiguous note.

She has left Africa, and has left Denoon, her great love. Things have fallen apart. She is now trying to get her life together when suddenly she gets a mysterious message, telling her to come back to Africa. It is not Denoon who calls her. It is a woman. She does not know who this woman could be. Or why she has been summoned. She obsesses about it, wondering what to do. Should she return? What would be waiting for her in Africa? If Denoon did not summon her, then perhaps she would not be welcome anymore? The book ends with these two lines:

Je viens. Why not?

So, the book leaves you knowing she is going to return, but you do not know the outcome.

I have been haunted by this. Then what? Then what? It has been so long since Mating came out. I have tried to reconcile myself to the fact that I need to, a la Rilke, "live the questions".

The fact that the book ends mysteriously, that it could go either way, confirms for me one of the essential tenets of my life:

You just never know what will happen. Things can always go either way. Also: Things never really end. Not really. They transform, they morph. Love never dies. Ever. I'm not an "I love you I love you - oh you don't love me back anymore? Then I hate you I hate you" kind of girl. Sometimes I wish I were. It might be easier if love turned readily to hate, but for me, it does not.

So alongside my relatively quiet life now are the vibrant exciting love affairs of my past. They make me who I am today. They do not go away, or submerge into the past for good. They are still very much with me, late and soon.

Literally last week, I became obsessed again by the up-in-the-air ending of Mating. What does it signify? What is the message?

And more than that, on a more literal level, on a more literary level: What happened when she returned to Africa? Are they together now? Out on that alternate plane for fictional characters? I always liked to imagine that they were. It made me happy to imagine so. It made me happy to fantasize that on that alternate plane, all turned out well. Eventually.

It's a sort of "Somewhere over the rainbow" sentiment. Things may be lonely here on this plane, but somewhere -- even if it's just for characters in a book -- things might work out. And this alone gives me reason to hope. Things just might work out -- because the ending of Mating doesn't make it clear whether they do or no. This is the degree to which this book affected me, and the degree to which these characters LIVE on in my imagination.

On a personal note: I used to have these old crazy fantasies about "my Nelson Denoon", fantasies which felt more like getting a glimpse of a never-before-seen alternate path. I comforted myself, after it was all over, by imagining that on that other plane, down that other path, things might have worked out. Or in another lifetime, although reincarnation and alternate lifetimes are not quite in my belief system.

However, I became convinced that this was not the first time around for me and "my Nelson Denoon". I would obsess about it. "Were we married in another life? Or ... with each successive lifetime, are we coming closer to one another? It just so happens that I am stuck in the lifetime where it doesn't work out..." I was blithering like that to my patient friend Kate. She listened. And then she said, "Actually, I bet that your Celtic tribe probably slaughtered his Celtic tribe." We roared.

So I digress. All of these crazy thoughts are very tied up, for me, in Norman Rush's book.

All of this came up to the foreground again, in the last week, (it all began dovetailing), and I thought, impulsively: "I should just write to Norman Rush and ask him what he's up to ... if he's working on anything ..." He hasn't published anything else since Mating, so -- I wondered --- is he chugging away at a sequel? Is he dead? I needed to know desperately.

"Mr. Rush -- are you just going to leave me hanging with the end of Mating? Do you know how important it is, how essential it is in terms of my understanding of how the world works, that I know what happened with the two of them? Will I ever know the outcome?"

Wanting to write to Norman Rush was a random fleeting thought. I have written to authors before, so it wasn't too far-fetched.

Then, a couple of days ago, I stopped off at a computer place to check my email. While there, I visited my SiteMeter for this blog, to check in on my traffic. I saw that someone had gotten to me by typing "Norman Rush" into Google. It led this person to that excerpt. And this piqued my interest. Somebody else is looking for Norman Rush right now? Why? Is something going on?

So I blatantly Googled the man.

The first thing that came up was a Village Voice article dated May, 2003. I opened it, and lo and freakin' behold, it was a review of his new book. The man has a new book out. Mortals.

I hope I have conveyed how important this is to me. But I am having a hard time finding the words.

It would be like hearing that JD Salinger had suddenly come out of hiding and published a new novel. While Salinger is still alive, there is still hope that he may write again. He just might. And the book might be crap, but that wouldn't matter. At least not at first. It would be a miracle. To hear from that writer again.

So Rush has a new huge novel out. And again, it takes place in Botswana, Africa. Botswana! The country that Rush made live for me.

Mortals (and I just skimmed the article feverishly ... I didn't want to read any spoilers, no give-aways, nothing that would ruin the experience) is NOT about Nelson Denoon and our beloved unnamed narrator. It is another couple altogether, although Rush again tackles man/woman relationships, only time in the context of marriage. It doesn't seem to be so much about finding the right mate, and how arduous that process is, how it can break your heart. Rush now goes into the realm of established intimacy, and ... what happens then?

And here's the thing: (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT)

I raced through the book review excitedly and could not believe my eyes: Nelson and "she" DO show up in this new book, peripherally. They ARE characters on the outskirts. And, oh so casually, Village Voice reviewer states: "We learn that they have married."

What? They married?? I almost shouted out loud for joy.

I didn't read the rest of the review, I signed out immediately, paid my bill, and hustled my ass down to Barnes & Noble to find the book, which had been published THAT WEEK.

(Okay, let's just take a moment to reflect on how weird that is. I contemplate writing to Norman Rush, pestering him to write a sequel, and dammitall if he doesn't have a new book published on almost that same exact day.)

And there it was. A huge book. Hardcover. With a map of Botswana inside. I got a chill of excitement. I felt voracious. Almost sick to my stomach, actually. I wanted to download the entire book into my brain immediately. I glanced through and saw that there was a chapter called "The Denoons", and I had to restrain myself. Prolong the anticipation, more pleasure that way.

And as I was walking down the street, with my booty in my bag, I suddenly got weirdly emotional.

It was as though I had heard that real friends of mine had finally gotten married after much strife.

It would be like if me and "my Nelson Denoon" ever got hitched (not a possibility anymore). But let's just say he and I got hitched - my friends, who went through the whole thing with me, would probably jump up and down for joy, yelling, "At last!" Okay? This is the power this book has for me. I felt -- well, it's a bit embarrassing to admit, but I was almost in tears, truth be told.

There have been times in the past couple of years when life has been the cliched howling wilderness. "My Nelson Denoon" remains a kind of monument, a sort of goal. I have tried to knock him off that pedestal, but I have finally accepted the fact that he actually deserves to be up there. Whether I am with him or not. This is a bit more personal than I normally write, but this is my blog, and this is what is going on with me right now.

When things did not come to fruition between us, my baffled thought was: If that didn't work out, that which seemed so damn right, then what the hell will work out? For quite a long time, my answer to that question was: Nothing. Nothing.

But then ... here ... years later ... walking down the street, knowing that she and Nelson got married -- after all that --

I suddenly felt an upsurge of hope. Not for me and "my Nelson Denoon", because like I said earlier: that is no longer possible. But what I mean is: hope in general.

A word on hope:

Hope for me, now, always goes hand in hand with a bittersweet and rather vague pain. Hope never ever comes by itself anymore. The way it used to when I was a little kid, or a teenager. I suppose that's indicative of age and experience. It seems so to me anyway. That's life. I am not saying this exactly as I wanted to. Basically: Hope no longer comes alone.

The sadness and hope I felt, walking down the street, wasn't about Nelson and the narrator of Mating being married... at least, not only about them. The sadness and hope was also from how I see life now. In terms of mating. I feel like I had my run. It was a good run. I had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. But that all has stopped now. And that's why hope never comes alone anymore.

I still feel hope, occasionally, but never ever by itself.

So I got overwhelmed by this weird sense of sad hope --- a feeling that STILL, after all THAT, "things" might "work out". For me, in my life. It's awful when one becomes afraid to feel hope anymore, protecting oneself against the inevitable disappointment. This is a constant balancing act.

I am not a young girl of 22, with a couple of disappointments in my past (like David W. saying no to being my date at the junior prom, etc.) ... I am in my 30s, and I've been through a lot. Not all bad. Of course not all bad. Like I said: a lot of laughs. Much fun. But now, I just find it easier not to hope ... at least in that arena ... and focus on other things. My work. My ambition, my plans.

But ... but ....

They got married. They got married. What does that mean? For me?

(This is the level to which literature can affect me - if I let it! The Shipping News had a similar impact.)

I am so used to the state of affairs I live in now, since I have lived there now for about a decade. I mean, I have changed and grown, of course, I have moved from city to city, I got my Master's, I've made new friends, it has been a very full existence. But I have been alone the entire time. THAT has not changed. Not even close.

Perhaps a breakthrough is approaching. A breakthrough in how I see all of this. And the appearance of Norman Rush's Mortals is the harbinger of something good. Or, something different. Something exciting, unforeseen, challenging. That's what I was feeling as I walked down the street, too. I'm scared of it ... and yet. Perhaps it is time. I don't know. Even as I write that, the logical side of my brain, the side that has all the experience, that knows the let-downs, etc., says: "Yes, but you have felt this before. You have felt this so strongly before. And you were never right."

But maybe ... maybe ... Maybe this is it.

There is SOMETHING weird about how all of this has come about:

Mating
The book being wrapped up with "my Nelson Denoon"
Wishing the main characters well -- hoping they are happy in another reality
Holding onto a weird strange hope that things worked out well, at least for them
Wondering if a sequel was coming
Studying the book over the last couple of weeks
That book, for me, is the monument, the goal
Wanting to write to Norman Rush
Someone coming to MY blog, through Googling Norman Rush ...during the very week I was obsessing about Rush, and where he was, and whether or not he was writing
Finding out that Rush has written a new book ... published last week ... in which we discover the Denoons have married

And so:
Things are not what they seem.

Back to the old painful belief: You never ever know what will happen. You can never tell what the future will hold. Your predictions will all be wrong.

I have tentatively and slowly begun Mortals, forcing myself not to browse ahead, looking for references to the Denoons. I want to savor every word.

I have waited for this day for so long.

Norman Rush's MORTALS - a sequel to the above

I am having a very hard time getting through it. As a matter of fact, I have stopped reading it completely.

Mating is a special book. Mortals is not. By page 100 I was sick of the two main characters. Norman Rush obviously finds them both very fascinating, and endearing. So every single tangent in the minds of the characters needs to be drawn out for sometimes THIRTY PAGES ...

If I had a marriage like those two do, I might have to slit my wrists. Just to escape and get some peace and quiet, for God's sake.

It is so self-conscious. So pleased with itself. So obsessively analytical. Do these two people ever just sit on the damn couch and NOT talk to each other?? That is my ideal relationship. One that is filled with an inordinate amount of comfortable shared silence.

Another thing Rush does is continuously assure us of how funny Iris (one of the boring main characters) is. He fetishizes her humor. He gives us glimpses of it (or tries to). But mostly he just repeatedly states it, as though it is an indisputable fact. "She was such a funny woman." "He loved her humor." "He was going to be losing a funny woman."

The problem with this goes back to one of the first rules of writing: SHOW. Don't TELL.

I don't think Iris is funny. She never made me laugh. And you can't keep just re-assuring me: "No no no, wait, she is a DAMN funny woman! You have to see her when she's had a couple of glasses of wine! She is a riot!" That doesn't work in a book. It doesn't work in life either. Either something IS, and you know that it IS because it can be SEEN and ACKNOWLEDGED by more than one person, or it ISN'T. Iris ISN'T funny, in my book.

Just saying it is so, Mr. Rush, does not make it so.

He gives us examples of her humor, but ... to my mind, it's all coy stupid little puns. Now I know some truly funny people, people who you describe as "Oh my God, he is so funny" if you are asked "What is that person like?" Humor is undeniable. It's not like being sensitive, or being kind, or intelligent. You cannot fake humor. Some people THINK they are hilarious, but no one is laughing.

I think I have made my point here.

The good parts of the book are when it goes into the life of a CIA agent ... how they live, their relationship to "the agency" -- what it meant for the CIA when communism fell apart. What that event did to the psychology of the agency, etc. What it is like to have a job which is, for the most part, invisible. You will never be acknowledged publicly for your work. You cannot talk about it with your wife. All of that, so far, has been very interesting.

There's also a long sequence where Ray, the main character, is being held prisoner in this warehouse in northwest Botswana. The Boers are involved. He is being held hostage with this other man, an African, who is a psychiatrist, and very anti-Christian. His name is Morel. Morel has lived in England for years and has returned to Botswana on a mission to rescue Africa from the yoke of Christianity. He thinks organized religion is designed to keep people passive, to keep people in a state of waiting, etc. Morel is an African. Morel believes that what Africa needs is common sense, industry, and people willing to invest in THIS life. It's an interesting question - which is also brought out to interminable degrees in Mortals, but I actually have learned a lot, and it made me think.

Ray is obsessed with the poet Milton. Which is understandable - fine. I am relatively obsessed with Milton myself.

But what I am picking up on, somehow, in the writing of this book, is that it is RUSH who is obsessed with Milton, and has tried to wrestle Milton into this story, in order to express how he, Rush, feels about Milton. And because of that, it doesn't really work. It reads as very self-indulgent.

An interesting contrast: June 16 is Bloomsday (the day to celebrate James Joyce and Ulysses - which all takes place on June 16).

The entire summer of 2002, for me, was taken up by James Joyce. Joyce Joyce Joyce.

Now you kind of cannot find a more subjective writer, a person more fascinated with his own obsessions, a person who can go off on a tangent for thirty pages just because the subject matter interests him.

June 16 came smack in the middle of my struggling with Mortals, and there are some vague similarities between the books. And yet Ulysses captivated me, challenged me. One author (Joyce) goes off on tangents, and I suddenly find myself looking stuff up on the Internet, calling my dad for information, trying to understand what exactly he is getting at ... what is REALLY going on in the book. The other author (Rush) goes off on tangents, obsessed with his own obsessions, and I get increasingly annoyed, thinking to myself: "Shut UP! You're not the first freakin' person to discover Milton ... Get OVER it...Shut UP! Get to the friggin' point, man."

So here's the difference, the undeniable difference:

James Joyce is a genius.

You should not attempt such a book unless you are CERTAIN that you yourself are a genius.

Here's where I stopped reading Mortals, and I will eventually finish it, because I still feel a certain amount of obligation toward the writer who brought Mating into my life.

Okay: So Ray (the CIA agent) and Morel (the African crusader) are being held in this warehouse, and are pulled out separately by these Boer thugs to be tortured, on occasion. It is a bad situation. The two of them are enemies, for a very boring reason. It is a plot device, rather than a reality. So they are forced to deal with each other. There is a bucket in the room for them to use as a toilet, and there are two pages, two pages which took two years off my life, years I can never get back, where Morel goes to the bathroom, and he is constipated, so it is difficult for him, and Ray, to relax Morel and also to distract himself from the shitting going on across the room, recites Milton outloud.

I read those two pages. And then I put the damn book down and have not picked it up since.

When I pick the book up again, I am going to have to skip the Milton-recital-during-Morel's-"evacuation" (a word Rush actually used, and which, quite frankly, grossed me OUT.) and pick up from after that episode. Evacuation? I'm sorry, but that is NASTY.

Now, when we first meet Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, he is eating breakfast with his wife Molly before leaving for the day. He is inwardly anxiously, thinking she has cuckolded him. But before he leaves, he goes into the bathroom and shits. It was hugely shocking at the time ... you don't usually follow characters into the bathroom like that, but Joyce did.

I read the whole sequence, and laughed out loud at the audacity of it ... the reality of it ... and the thing is about it: there was a POINT. He is bringing us all down to the human level. It may be pedantic to say to ourselves, as a way of reassurance, "Everybody has a crack in their ass." Or: "Yes, he may be Secretary of State, but he goes to the bathroom like everybody else." But it is the human condition. It's the truth.

That's what I got when Joyce followed Bloom into the bathroom like that. I became overwhelmed by humanity. The tragi-comic nature of our existence.

There was a higher point to the scene. Not to mention Joyce's desire to really stick it to the priggish censors, and to really tell the truth about Ireland. There is a POINT.

In Mortals, there is no point. And the scene goes on FOREVER.

In Mortals I just got grossed out and now I cannot get the image of Morel squatting over the bucket out of my mind. I wish I could. I need that brain space for other things.

I need to take a break from boring old Ray the CIA agent and his un-funny wife Iris, and the African Morel going to the bathroom in the corner, while Areopagitica is being recited. Jesus. Spare me.

What a disappointment.

My love for the book Mating is untouched, however. Perhaps that was Norman Rush's one story. Some writers only have one tale in them. They may try to do more, tell other stories - but they fail.

Perhaps Rush is one of those writers.

Quote

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

-- W.E.B. DuBois

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. I love that.

Biographies

I am now reading Savage Beauty, the most recent biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford, the same author who wrote the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald I referenced a couple weeks ago.

I enjoy Milford's biographical writing style very much. The style is not completely objective, which I found a wee bit difficult to get used to. Her style assumes some things. Which, perhaps, is not the style for everybody - and I have read biographies (eg: the massive one on the Bronte sisters, which kind of raised the bar for biographers everywhere, published about 10 years ago) which assume NOTHING.

There is definitely something to be said for only letting the facts, whatever facts may remain once a person has passed on, tell the story.

Juliet Barker's biography of the Bronte sisters is a towering achievement in this regard. It weighs 20 pounds. The footnotes take up 1/4 of the text. It is breathtaking in its insistence on only relying on the facts. To not contribute to the Bronte myth, in any way, shape, form.

Milford takes a different tack. Her writing is very emotional - she obviously feels passionately about her subjects - She gets into Millay's writing style, her writing breakthroughs - which, so far, have been my favorite parts of the book. A literary biography that does not analyze the writing style of the subject is crap, in my opinion.

That's why I ate up the Ellmann biography of James Joyce. Not just because it was such an interesting life, and I loved hearing about it ... but also because Ellmann made sure to get into Joyce's prose, Joyce's archive of symbols, Joyce's driving force, Joyce's metaphors ... Reading that biography helped me to get through Ulysses.

However, I must mention my father. My father was my true "coach" through that book. He gave me the context, he would point out what Joyce was "doing" in passages which confused me ... and with a couple of simple words from my father, Joyce's prose cracked open, revealing vistas beyond. That was half the fun and exhilaration of that book. It is a club, a secret club ... you have to figure out the "open sesames" along the way.

Here's a perfect example of an "open sesame", provided to me by my father.

I was reading the "Cyclops" chapter.

One potentially infuriating thing about the book is: Joyce does not label them as chapters, there is not even a delineation to guide you along, ie: Chapter 1, Chapter 2. And he certainly doesn't toss you the bread-crumb of letting you know which episode of Homer's Ulysses each chapter parallels - You have to figure that out yourself. Or buy one of the myriad guide-books available. So I had no idea I was reading the "Cyclops" chapter, at first.

All I knew was this: Leopold Bloom finds himself in a pub, where there is a character named only "The Citizen", who pontificates his views loudly, and obnoxiously. "The Citizen" is an Irish nationalist ... The energy in the pub is unfriendly, tense. Leopold Bloom seems to just look on, as an outsider.

I understood, sort of, what the hell was going on ... but like with the rest of the book, I needed to know WHY. I needed the underbelly. I needed to figure out what Joyce was up to, because without Joyce's intentions ... you cannot understand Ulysses. It is a mystery, it seems like an exercise in style ... It can be annoying, purposefully vague.

Why is this episode in the book? Why is it told in the way it is told? It is told in retrospect, by some other bystander, not Bloom, describing the encounter with "The Citizen" to members of ANOTHER pub, hours later.

Like: what the HELL IS GOING ON HERE?

I blundered my way through the prose, reading on, not getting it ... I was sitting on the porch of our rented summer house in New Hampshire.

I finally just had to call my Dad, because moving on with the "chapter", or "episode" or whatever, was pointless.

"Dad: could you come here a second?"

Here comes the dad.

"Okay - I'm reading the part where Bloom sits in this pub, and it's all tense and weird - and I just don't get it."

Dad took the book. Looked at the page and said immediately, "This is the Cyclops episode."

"How did you know that?"

"Look at the page. It's filled with the letter I."

Amazed, awe-struck, I looked at the page, and yes, indeed, all you could see was the letter "I". That is the only clue he gives, in the language, that we are now in the Cyclops episode.

See, that's the kind of stuff that makes the hairs rise up on my arm.

Here is how the chapter begins:

I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes. -- Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?

-- Soot's luck, says Joe. Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?

-- Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I'm on two minds not to give that fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and ladders.

-- What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.

-- Devil a much, says I. There is a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken Lane-- old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him-- lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a hop of my thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury street.

-- Circumcised? says Joe.

-- Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny out of him.

-- That the lay you're on now? says Joe.

-- Ay, says I .

Now: what I LOVE about this ...

Well, I love a lot about this.

I love James Joyce for being such a genius. For making reading such a game, such an exhilarating ride. Where you can feel like you are not just an observer, but a participator. You must participate actively - you MUST accept him as your leader - and then try to figure it all out.

I love that he never spells things out.

But what I love most of all - what I find so awe-inspiring - is that you can tell what episode you are in, merely by LOOKING at what the text looks like on the page. My dad didn't even read a WORD of it. He just saw "I I I I I I I" when he glanced at the page, and knew. So many "I"s must mean Cyclops.

Isn't that brilliant?

The Ellmann biography spends as much time on the origins of Ulysses, and analyzing each episode, as it does on James Joyce's childhood.

That is really what I am talking about here.

A biography which gets to know its subject through his or her art, rather than just snooping through letters and diaries - now that is a beautiful thing.

Nancy Milford, author of Zelda and now Savage Beauty is all about that.

I grew to trust Milford's gift as an author during the sections in Zelda, where Milford discusses Zelda's attempts to write.

Milford did not fall into the trap of many people (mostly women) who write biographies about "the woman behind the man". She did not try to raise Zelda up to Scott's level. She did not try to unearth a hidden genius. She looked at what Zelda wrote, her stories, her failed novel, and came to the conclusion: "Obviously, whatever was inside of her, whatever was expressed so brilliantly in her letters, was not accessible to her when she sat down to write fiction." Milford would look at an unedited passage from one of Zelda's stories, and then compare it to the version after Scott took his editing pen to it ... and, hands down, Scott made it better.

I am not interested in someone trying to convince me that the world is a less vibrant place because nobody appreciated Zelda Fitzgerald's art, and because her husband got all the glory.

Please don't make me read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and try to convince me that it is AS good as Moby Dick or Madame Bovary.

F. Scott Fitzgerald deserved all the glory, because he was a writer, a glorious writer, and she was not ... at least not outside of her letters to him, which are, actually, breathtaking. In the letters, the personality of Zelda leaps off the page, she pulses, she is vibrant, real, funny, tragic, heartfelt ... all those things. But letters are different from being a craftsman. Sitting down, and choosing how to tell your tale, and finding the right way to do it ... is quite a different matter. Zelda could not marshal her forces in that direction, which was a tragedy for her. She went mad because of it.

Zelda had quite enough an interesting life as it is - without some author trying to re-dress a grievance - ie: ZELDA was the true hero, SCOTT just sapped her dry ... Zelda could not write fiction to save her life. The excerpts in the book are hideous. Stilted. Ridiculous. Un-readable, actually.

Milford, by recognizing that, even though the book was ABOUT Zelda, a woman who, obviously, she had enormous sympathy for ... made Milford into a "reliable" narrator, in my eyes.

So back to Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I did not know much about her. At least not about her life. I know she wrote sonnets. I know her face, I know she was very beautiful, and very celebrated, as a poet, DURING her lifetime. A very rare thing, especially for women, at that time.

One of her sonnets has always been a favorite of mine, although sometimes I forget about it.

It usually unearths itself in my consciousness (I know it practically by heart) when I am very very sad, and finding myself trying to get over someone with whom I was once in love.

It takes me forever to get over someone, if I once was in love with them.

And this sonnet, more than any other poem I've read, expresses that sentiment so perfectly, so well, that it seems to come FROM me:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

For some reason, that poem just gets to me. Like a lance through my heart.

I know that feeling. I know that feeling. Being dogged at every step by the memory of the loved one ...

Her language - so formal and yet so passionate, too - appeals to me on a very deep level.

It is clear, from what I have read so far, she led an extraordinary life. An unexpected life. Men fell in love with her and never got over her. Women fell in love with her and never got over her.

I am just at the part where she gets into Vassar - being ushered into that world by powerful friends who decided to give this little red-headed self-educated poetess from Camden, Maine a shot at greatness.

Terrible writing

A great piece on bad academic writing (which is, perhaps, an unnecessary redundancy). Camille Paglia has been bitching about this for years - the primacy of "theory" in universities - and how it is killing adventurous thought, and any kind of honest intellectual inquiry.

Ophelia Benson, in this blistering piece, calls a spade a spade.

...Another benefit of talking about theory-disparagers' being frightened off is that by implication it makes the theory-lovers seem brave, daring, butch, risk-takers, rebels. Or at least that's what it's meant to do, but the trouble is of course it doesn't. The whole maneuver is so transparently self-flattering that you would think such a knowing, hip, wised-up, rhetoric-conscious crowd would notice the fact, blush violently, and delete that bit of text. But no. Perhaps they think we don't notice? Perhaps they think that because the non-theory team is by definition and invariably so frightened off by questions about language that we are entirely blind deaf and stupid about rhetoric? Perhaps, but sadly for them, we're not, and we can see perfectly well what they're doing.

And the same goes for the 'difficulty' ploy. That's also a popular one, of course. Theory isn't gibberish or vacuity dressed up in resounding neologisms appropriated from Lacan and Derrida - no, it's difficult. It addresses subjects so complicated and arcane and profound that a special new language is required in order to deal with them at all.

It's ridiculous - truly.

I'm a big fan of Dennis Dutton's yearly "Bad Writing Contest" , hosted by Arts & Letters Daily - which exposes these academic buffoons for what they are. Uh ... buffoons.

The winning entries are always laughably impenetrable.

The only people who read that stuff are ... other people who write like that. It's like a strange doomed contest to see who can write in the most incoherent way.

How in the world has this occurred?? I have a feeling it all goes back to post-modernism, and de-constructionism - a worthy pursuit in the abstract - but when you get right down to it: dammit, is a poem good to read? Does the language sweep you away? As a whole, what does it say to you?

All of this "theory" takes the juice out of ANY writing. It tries to make language manageable, understandable, easily broken down into components. The theorists can then be Masters of the Universe - they can translate everything for the un-washed masses.

I can hear the cackles of Shakespeare and Chaucer and James Joyce now.

"De-construct ME? You must be MAD! Just read it out loud - just hear the sounds - do I not amaze you?"

Just for a joke - here is one of the winning entries in the Bad Writing Contest:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Woah.

I can only look at that sentence and think: Such language only emerges from a very confused and unorganized mind.

100 Greatest Novels of All Time

... as chosen by The Observer.

I have read 37 of them.

But, of course, being obnoxious, I have a couple of comments about some of the books:

The Executioner's Song??? What? To have THAT book be on there and not In Cold Blood (Truman Capote invented the genre, and Norman Mailer stole it) is very bizarre. I didn't think The Executioner's Song was THAT great a book - definitely not one of the greatest novels of all time. That seems baffling to me.

Second of all: neither of those are novels. They are true-crime books. They are dressed up as novels, which was the whole "gimmick" of them - but Truman Capote got there first, and In Cold Blood is a much better book. Please don't even argue.

I was completely gratified to see Charlotte's Web on there.

I have huge gaps in my reading - stuff which must be rectified.

I haven't read any Paul Auster. I haven't read any George Eliot (which I know is completely shameful - she is DEFINITELY on my list).

I have read Pilgrim's Progress of all things, but I haven't read any Philip Roth. Please don't kill me.

I have not read David Copperfield, strangely, although I have read Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Christmas Carol and Bleak House. How did I read all of those and miss David Copperfield, which everybody talks about as his best?

I have never heard of the book Sybil, by Disraeli. Sue me.

I haven't read any Trollope, and I haven't read any Wilkie Collins.

I have read all of the Bronte books numerous times. I have read all of James Joyce.

I, somehow, embarrassingly, have not read any Faulkner. This is horrifying, I know. Faulkner is on my eternal list - I own all his books, but I haven't read them.

I have read Crime and Punishment, but I have NOT read The Brothers Karamazov - which, I believe, is one of my dad's all-time favorite novels.

Glad to see Catch-22 on there. In my opinion, it should be #1.

I have read Portrait of a Lady but it left me cold. I mean ... I liked some of it ... I liked how much of it was conversation - not a lot of description, but just long long passages of people talking to each other - fighting, jostling for position ... But it certainly didn't strike me as one of the "greats".

I like the passionate wild books better. The Wuthering Heights. The Anna Kareninas.

I have never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and yet I HAVE read Three Men in a Boat, which I thought was abysmal, but that is probably only because I was in a dreadful musical adaptation of the book, described in this post here. The production was so awful that one critic started off his review with the following words: "Not since the Titanic has there been such a nautical disaster..." So I despise Three Men in a Boat. I think it's a stupid book.

I have only read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - have not read Nostromo, which appears on the list, and is called Conrad's "masterpiece".

Never read any Ford Madox Ford.

I've read all of DH Lawrence and I know this is sacreligious - but ... I guess I didn't get it. Perhaps I was too young when I read them. Maybe I should go back and try them again.

I think Howard's End is a far superior book to Passage to India, but I could be persuaded otherwise.

I have had Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum sitting un-read on my bookshelf for nigh on 15 years now. My best friend Mitchell read it and it blew his mind - He could not stop talking about it. But it's one of those books I haven't gotten around to yet.

And puh-leez: Housekeeping??? Gimme a break.

I need someone out there to enlighten me on the slant of this list. Am I missing something?

Oh, and one other subjective comment: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey has no business being on that list, in my opinion. I had to force myself to finish that book. I know everybody fawned over it, and loved it, and praised it, but I thought it was over-praised. Some of the writing was okay - and the plot itself was fascinating (carrying a glass church over hundreds of miles) but ... whatEVER. The book didn't work for me.

Oh, if you haven't read Primo Levi's The Periodic Table - you really must. However: it's a memoir. It's not a novel. So ... why is it on this list?

Please comment on the list freely ... want to hear everything from everybody.

(got the list via Red Ted)

More from Ernie O'Malley

Loving the book On Another Man's Wound.

Basically, O'Malley just describes traipsing by bicycle through the Irish countryside, in the wake of the Easter Rising, training farmers and others in the ways of munitions and organized rebellions. Trying to motivate them, after a long hard day in the fields, to march in line, to be dedicated, to focus ...

So far, there is a repetitive quality to each chapter, although different events continue to move them all forwards.

Again and again, we find ourselves back with Ernie on his bicycle ... moving forwards, onwards ...

Michael Collins is a character. De Valera takes on a kind of mythical glow.

And throughout it all, is Ernie O'Malley, riding his bicycle in the rain to the next town.

Many descriptions of storytelling evenings round the peat fire, etc. But there is indeed a magic in this man's prose.

It's rich. Rich with history, with detail - with SENSORY detail - which is really the only way that people can enter stories, and be made to feel like they are actually there.

To my taste, Ernie O'Malley is a master at sensory detail.

I was enraptured, in particular, with his long chapter in the second section ... describing the people he met, and the seasons as they passed. I'm a sucker for that kind of detail. Having been to Ireland - he does capture the spirit of the place in many ways.

Read an excerpt:

On the food he was served:

The food was good, but rough and badly cooked. Bulk seemed to matter most. Tea, eggs, bacon, stirabout, potatoes and cabbage were the usual food; tomatoes, lettuce, celery, beans, and fruit in general were unknown. The lack of green vegetables was said to be due to the famine years when the people ate nettles and grass...I gave a tomato to a man I knew at a fair. He eyed the shining scarlet. "What kind of a thing is this?" He bit into it, then spat out the pulp in disgust. "Man, dear, do you want to poison me?"

On staying with families in the country:

I slept in huge four-posters with canopies; often there was a series of feather mattresses and a covering of reddish quilts, whole or patch-worked, with an oppressive sense of weight. Often I was given the best room in the house, but generally I slept with some of the family, or lay on a settle, in a warm kitchen. In places the boys dressed in front of their mothers and sisters. This to me was an ordeal. I had not their natural outlook. Furtive attempts to pull on my shirt and trousers, hasty dives back to bed, whilst the women of the house, or the girls, without concern, went about their business filling huge black pots with vegetables and mash for the pigs and hens, or baking cakes in the round flat-bottomed ovens.

On sitting by the peat fires:

More than often I sat in the kitchen on a sugan chair; my back to the lamp which stood on the window sill. I could then listen to the talk when I tired of reading. I joined the groups around the fire. Talk and stories were punctuated by draws from clay pipes and by spits. The pipes had once been white; but use had turned them a shiny brown black, and their stems had broken off; sometimes just the bowl and a short toothy stump remained. They smoked heavy strong cut plug tobacco; it was pleasant when one got used to it. 'Baccy during the European War was scarce and precious. The blasts out of the pipe were a great solace after the day's work; they were lost without a good draw. The pipe might pass from mouth to mouth around the fireplace. Once in a smithy I saw a blacksmith hand his pipe to a man who had asked for a draw; he cracked off the tip with his red hot pincers when the pipe was handed back.

From the nook alongside the fire I watched the turf blaze and glow. Shadows and patches of light were thrown up on faces. Often I stared into the rosy red core of the embers watching the figures; and traced them running from one fantastic form to another.

The life was hard and close to the soil.

I remember the years during my childhood when my father smoked a pipe. Even now, if I get a whiff of pipe-smoke, wherever I am, I am transported back in time to when I was a wee one.

And here, to my taste, is a perfect description of the Irish. The blackness of the humor, the "taking a piss out of someone" energy ... The Irish are a tough crowd. I loved this:

There was a love of discussion and argument that would take up a subject casually without belief and in a searching way develop it. That might mean a pleasant joking or an ornate, shrewd and enjoyable development for him who sustained his unbelief and heated words from his opponents; or anger from all in the end as the baiter was drawn into the net of his own words. Anger they played on often as on fiddle-strings. Deferential to a stranger, they evoked in themselves a sympathetic mood, changing gears in conversation to suit his beliefs and half believing then through sympathy whilst he was present. Afterwards when they checked up on themselves it might be different; they would laugh at the stranger's outlandish opinions when their mood had hardened.

Always for me there was the relish of a phrase; they were conscious of it also. Acute, natural observation was converted into shades of meaning; some improvised as they talked, they became more extravagant, and delighted listeners helped them over appreciative stiles. Proverbs were many, even in the English-speaking districts, but the Gaeltacht alone kept the richer anthology, remembered from old literature; quotations from poets and stories, sayings of ollaimh, and their apt use.

I shall continue reading on ...

A Must-Read

Do not miss, whatever else you might read, this article on Reason, by David Barash in The Chronicle Review.

I have goosebumps. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Barash takes on the primacy of reason.

What is reason? Is un-reason always destructive?

He takes examples from literature, from poetry - he poses "logic" problems, which the reader must try to figure out.

Very eye-opening.

Listen:

To be sure, excessive reason is easy to caricature. Thus, at one point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, our hero journeys to Laputa, whose male inhabitants are utterly devoted to their intellects: One eye focuses inward and the other upon the stars. Neither looks straight ahead. The Laputans are so cerebral that they cannot hold a normal conversation; their minds wander off into sheer contemplation. They require servants who swat them with special instruments about the mouth and ears, reminding them to speak or listen as needed. Laputans concern themselves only with pure mathematics and equally pure music. Appropriately, they inhabit an island that floats, in ethereal indifference, above the ground. Laputan women, however, are unhappy and regularly cuckold their husbands, who do not notice...Thus presented, to reject reason seems, well, downright reasonable.

That, basically, is the entire premise of the book Catch-22!

The only "reason"able thing to do in certain circumstances is to reject "reason".

As an artist, with a tumultuous psyche, and high emotionality, and yet also - as a cerebral book-worm woman, a person who must think things through on her own to come up with her own conclusions about things, I loved this section:

We may speak admiringly of Greek rationality, of the Age of Reason, and of the Enlightenment, yet it is far easier to find great writing -- and even, paradoxically, serious thinking -- that extols unreason, irrationality, and the beauty of "following one's heart" rather than one's head. Some of the most "rational" people have done just that.

Barash goes on to give many examples: Pythagoras, Issac Newton ...

And this quote from Rebecca West's astonishing encyclopedic book about the Balkans (if you ever have a free three months, you should check it out!!):

Anyway, West's quote really spoke to me:

"Only part of us is sane. Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our 90s and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves..."

Damn, Rebecca, I hear what you're saying, girl.

FanTAStic essay, all and all.

Don't miss it.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

I am a Man

So I have done this Gender Genie thing, like most other bloggers, and no matter what I do, no matter what post I enter, the Gender Genie guesses that I am a man. And it's not a close tie, either. It is overWHELMingly in favor of the Male.

I not only put in my rant-y pissed-off posts, but more personal stuff.

It didn't matter. Political or personal, the Gender Genie thinks that I am MALE.

Very interesting. I wonder what it is. Syntax? Grammar choices, sentence structure? Lack of qualifiers?

"Curse the Pope of Rome"

Extended post on Oxblog by Patrick Belton about Paul Muldoon, specifically, and Irish poets in general.

I love Paul Muldoon, as well.

I've seen Seamus Heaney a couple of times, when he gives readings at NYU. You just fall in love with him. You just have to.

And I heard Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill read her work at the Ireland House, here in New York - which was an extraordinary experience. She only writes in Irish. "I can't hear the poetry in English." So Nuala talked about her process, she described what was going on with her when writing each poem, she gave a brief synopsis of the poem, all in English - and then she launched into the Irish language for the poem itself. And dammitall, if you couldn't get her exact meaning.

Anyway -

Patrick at Oxblog: You must ask Muldoon out for a pint, and then tell us all how it goes.

Thanks for a very unexpected post - a topic which is very dear to my heart.

Here's a bit of Paul Muldoon:

"The Sightseers"

My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford

not to visit some graveyard -- one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly --
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.

Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle

and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.

Zelda

My latest read has been Zelda, the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, written by Nancy Milford.

Allison recommended it to me - Well, that is an understatement. Basically, Allison said to me, "Until you read this book, we don't have anything to talk about." So I picked it up - and had to call Allison this morning to tell her how I could not put the damn thing DOWN.

I have so many thoughts about Zelda - so much to ponder - I am early on in the book. Fitzgerald is already famous, but has not written Gatsby yet. They just had a little girl, and they have just moved to Paris. Basically to escape the financial wreck they had made of their lives in New York.

There is, as of yet, no real intimations of Zelda's madness - although she was certainly a wild woman, and completely devoted to the cultivation of her own personality. She invented the personality cult! So I suppose in her intense narcissism there are some warning signs of how she would end up. Which already makes me very sad. That vibrant life - that child of the jazz age - a woman of uncommon gifts, with nowhere to focus them - The only place she could focus all of her talent was on the "spectacle" of her own life, which she consciously created.

All of this is endlessly fascinating.

I like the book because it is not too Freudian, like so many biographies are. It does not attempt to "explain" Zelda, which I find a highly condescending way to treat a human personality, it does not attempt to find root causes -

Milford describes events - Milford, whenever she can, lets the Fitzgeralds speak for themselves - excerpting from their journals and letters. This is the best part of the book.

Yeah, F. Scott Fitzgerald can write - but you know what? So could Zelda. He would put her letters word for word into his own stories and novels, and would not let her pursue publishing her journals (people offered her money to publish them) - because then it would have been revealed that This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned (and others) owed enormous debts to the scribbling talent of his wife.

In the book, at this moment, this kind of sucking-the-muse-dry aspect of their relationship has not yet caused any problems. But you can feel the battle that is to come.

Here is an amazing letter Zelda wrote to Scott, during their whirlwind courtship. In it, she presciently describes exactly what their relationship would become, and who the two of them, as a couple, would come to respresent to all the "children of the jazz age":

Scott - there's nothing in all the world I want but you - and your precious love - All the material things are nothing. I'd just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence - because you'd soon love me less - and less - and I'd do anything - anything - to keep your heart for my own - I don't want to live - I want to love first, and live incidentally - Why don't you feel that I'm waiting - I'll come to you, Lover, when you're ready - Don't - don't ever think of the things you can't give me - You've trusted me wiht the dearest heart of all - and it's so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had -

How can you think deliberately of life without me - If you should die - O Darling - darling Scot - It'd be like going blind. I know I would, too - I'd have no purpose in life - just a pretty - decoration. Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered - and I was delivered to you - to be worn - I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a button hole bouquet - to the world. And then, when we're alone, I want to help - to know that you can't do anything without me.

Zelda also wrote him letters such as this one - which obviously pushed Scott over the edge, already jealous of her wild ways:

Scott, you're really awfully silly - In the first place, I haven't kissed anybody good-bye, and in the second place, nobody's left in the first place - You know, darling, that I love you too much to want to. If I did have an honest - or dishonest - desire to kiss just one or two people, I might - but I couldn't ever want to - my mouth is yours.

But s'pose I did - Don't you know it'd be just absolutely nothing - Why can't you understand that nothing means anything except your darling self and your love -

Not quite a letter to soothe the savage beast, eh?

I don't know - there are times when I really can understand Zelda. I told Allison this morning that there are moments, reading letters such as that, that I feel as if Zelda is my most-secret ID self. She IS an Id. She lives to please herself. We all have that desire to be happy, to only please ourselves, within us. Or maybe I shouldn't presume to speak for those of you out there who will deny this, and who will only admit to the highest core values of self-sacrifice and doing the right thing? Well, for me, a lowly sinner down here, I have an enormous desire to only please myself, to live only for me, to never give a damn about what anybody thinks, to never ever ever be cooped up, fenced in, pinned down - to never ever accept any obligations that will infringe upon my ability to do what I want to do and go where I want to go -

This is the raging Id. This, I believe, is also the side of me that is the artist, the dreamer.

I put a tight lid on this Id. I rarely let her out. I am afraid of her. I am afraid of the damage she would wrought.

But in reading Zelda's words, I think: Woah. I know that girl. I know that desire. I just do not act upon those desires. She does.

And you know what? I know the end of the story. I know what happens to Zelda. I know her breakdown, her descent into madness, a descent from which she never recovered, and her horrible horrible end. It makes me shiver with the cruelty of it, the - awful-ness of it - That such a bright and hopeful spirit, that a woman with such potential - would die like that - (she died locked up in her room in a mental institution, when the institution caught on fire) ... is tragic. Just ... fucking tragic.

If she had been born at another time ... who knows what she might have become?

Listen to this excerpt of her writing, describing a summer dusk in Montgomery Alabama, where she grew up:

There exists in Montgomery a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the great incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called into bed from the dusty streets ... The drug stores are bright at night with the organdie baalloons of girls' dresses under the big electric fans. Automobiles stand along the curbs in front of open frame houses at dusk, and sounds of supper being prepared drift through the soft splotches of darkness to the young world that moves every evening out of doors. Telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one. Nothing seems ever to happen.

And here is an excerpt from a review Zelda wrote of Scott's book The Beautiful and the Damned. Gloria, in that book, is based entirely on Zelda - on Scott's understanding of her, as well as taking the words right out of Zelda's mouth and putting them into the character. Kind of like what Joyce did with Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses.

To Scott, there was only one woman on the planet who could hold his interest - and that was Zelda.

To Joyce, Nora was the woman who taught him about women. After their first "date", walking through Dublin, June 16, 1904 (the day he later chose to make the entirety of Ulysses take place on, in honor of Nora) - Joyce wrote, "She has made a man of me."

Amazing. These symbiotic relationships - between artists and their partners - artists and their muses -

Anyway, here is Zelda's insouciant review of her husband's book:

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald - I believe that is how he spells his name - seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

And here, finally, is an excerpt from Zelda's essay "Eulogy on the Flapper". As the "original" flapper, the woman who invented the role, it's great to see what she has to say about it - (and again, when I read this, I felt an odd jolt of recognition - I feel that way! I know what she is talking about! - and it's not a part of me that I am overwhelmingly PROUD of - not a part of me that ever has been given free reign, except for a couple of months in the fall of 1993 - but damn, she is there, inside of me):

How can a girl say again, "I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive," and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that "boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most," and that "men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?" Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends - it needs only crowds ...

A couple years ago, I had an obsessive Fitzgerald phase. I had read Gatsby in high school, obviously, and not much else. I don't think any of his other stuff can really compare, but still - the books, even the earliest stories, are filled with arrestingly good prose - sentences which one MUST stop and relish - He was something else.

And so was Zelda.

Beyond Borders - "a liberal video game"

As anyone who reads me knows, I love well-written scathing movie reviews. There is nothing that pleases me more.

I haven't even SEEN "Beyond Borders", starring the luscious Angelina Jolie, and I wasn't planning on seeing the film, but after reading this review, I will definitely not go to see it.

I think my favorite part of this review is the "warning" they put at the end of every review, letting you know if it's violent, if there's sex in it, whatever. The New York Times always puts pretty funny warnings at their reviews - the review for the universally panned "Battlefield Earth" said in the warning at the end:

"Battlefield Earth" includes astonishingly loud violence and intimations of alien sexuality.

That just makes me LAUGH.

Anyway, at the end of the "Beyond Borders" review, the warning goes:

It has strong language, sexuality and shameless and scandalously cynical re-creations of third world suffering and violence that aren't even relieved by on-screen alcohol consumption.

HA!

A couple of good quotes from the review:

That's when the dashing Dr. Nick Callahan (Mr. Owen) invades the fund-raiser she is attending with her new husband, Henry (Linus Roache). A band has slammed through the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" The song's title asks a spiritual question that will soon come to haunt not only Sarah but also the audience.

And:

Then they finally tryst. The sweat beads seductively on their skins while they expel plumes of cigarette smoke that accentuate their glamorously gaunt jawlines.

And this:

Sarah and Nick shoulder all the pain of the world and barely have time for themselves; isn't it awful? The director, Martin Campbell, an accomplished action filmmaker, must have forgotten that in the 1940's "Casablanca" had the good sense to have Rick note that the troubles of two people don't amount to a hill of beans.

I don't even have to see the movie to know that that is a great point.

Top 50 Irish Novels

The James Joyce Center co-sponsored a contest with The Irish Times voting on the best Irish novels. They had a predetermined list of books which the voters could choose from.

So while the outcome may be a bit predictable - it's also a cream-rising-to-the-top list, which pleases a literary elitist such as myself.

I haven't read a lot of these books. I have read most of the Top 10 -

The only exceptions are:

John McGahern's "Amongst Women" (great title, huh?) which my father assures me is tremendous.

I also haven't read Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman", although I adored "At Swim-Two-Birds", which was the URL of my old blog. That signifies nothing, just thought I would mention it. "At Swim-Two-Birds" is a classic.

I also haven't read any John Banville - which will probably shock my father - who is a huge fan. Am I right about that, dad?

Patrick McCabe's "Butcher Boy" seems misplaced on the Top 10.

I read it. Whatever. It was interesting and all - but to beat out other Irish books, such as "Lion, Witch and Wardrobe" or Francis Stewart's "Black List Section H"??

WhatEVER.

William Trevor is another author I've never read.

Here's the list of the Top 50:
James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
John McGahern Amongst Women (1990)
Flann O’Brien At Swim Two Birds (1939)
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)
Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman (1967)
Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)
John Banville The Book of Evidence 1988
Patrick McCabe The Butcher Boy (1992)
James Plunkett Strumpet City (1969)
C. S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)
Edna O’Brien The Country Girls (1960)
Samuel Beckett Molloy (1951)
Patrick Kavanagh Tarry Flynn (1948)
Brian Moore Judith Hearne (1955)
Elizabeth Bowen The Last September (1929)
Lawrence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1760)
Jennifer Johnston How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974)
Kate O’Brien The Land of Spices (1941)
Samuel Beckett Murphy (1938)
John McGahern The Barracks (1963)
Maria Edgeworth Castle Rackrent (1800)
Roddy Doyle The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996)
Seamus Deane Reading in the Dark (1996)
William Trevor Felicia’s Journey (1994)
Jennifer Johnston The Captains and the Kings (1972)
William Trevor Fools of Fortune (1983)
Molly Keane Good Behaviour (1981)
Colm Toibin The South (1990)
Sam Hanna Bell December Bride (1950)
Somerville and Ross The Real Charlotte (1894)
Brian Moore The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965)
Eugene McCabe Death and Nightingales (1992)
James Stephens The Charwomen’s Daughter (1912)
Keith Ridgway The Parts (2003)
J G Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
Aidan Higgins Langrishe Go Down (1966)
Francis Stuart Black List, Section H (1971)
Charles Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Christopher Nolan The Banyan Tree (1999)
John Banville Birchwood 1973
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas (1864)
George Moore A Drama in Muslin (1886)
George Moore Esther Waters (1894)
Thomas Kilroy The Big Chapel (1971)
William Carleton The Black Prophet (1847)
Deirdre Madden The Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988)
Hugo Hamilton Surrogate City (1990)
Sean O’Reilly Love and Sleep (2002)

Another perfect paragraph

Again, from Mystic River.

Brendan didn't know who to fear more. Mr. Marcus was just a regular guy, owner of the corner store Brendan had been going to for half his life, but there was something about the guy -- more than just his obvious hatred for Brendan -- that could unsettle people, a capacity for something, Brendan didn't know what, but something, that made you lower your voice around the guy and try not to meet his eyes. Bobby O'Donnell was one of those guys nobody knew exactly what he did for a living but you'd cross a street to avoid him in either case, and as for the Savage brothers, they were a whole planetary system away from most people in terms of normal, acceptable behavior. The maddest, craziest, most dyed-in-the-wool, lunatic motherfuckers to ever come out of the Flats, the Savage brothers had thousand-yard stares and tempers so hair-trigger you could fill a notebook the size of the Old Testament with all the things that could set them off. Their father, a sick chucklehead in his own right, had, along with their thin, sainted mother, popped the brothers out one after another, eleven months apart, like they were running a midnight assembly line for loose cannons. The brothers grew up crammed and mangy and irate in a bedroom the size of a Japanese radio beside the el tracks that used to hover over the Flats, blotting out the sun, before they got torn down when Brendan was a kid. The floors in the apartment sloped hard to the east, and the trains hammered past the brothers' window twenty-one out of twenty-fours each and every goddamned day, shaking the piece-of-shit three-decker so hard that most times the brothers fell out of bed and woke in the morning piled on top of one another, greeted the morning as irritable as waterfront rats, and pummeled the piss out of one another to clear the pile and start the day.

"thousand-yard stares..."
"midnight assembly line for loose cannons"
"bedroom the size of a Japanese radio"

DAMN!

A Perfect Paragraph

This is the first paragraph of the book Mystic River - a perfect paragraph:

When Sean Divine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean's kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.

I don't know about you, but I HAVE to keep reading, after a paragraph such as that.

Recommended Reading: Fiction

And now for the Fiction recommendations. (See the Non-Fiction ones below)

Choosing books out of all the books I love is rather torturous for me. So this is an impulsive, scanning-the-bookshelves-with-mine-eyes and writing titles down spur-of-the-moment kind of list.

Here we go.

FICTION

1. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
One of the creepiest weirdest most subversive books ever written. It stands alone. A century ahead of its time. This is one of my favorite books. The characters live on in my mind.

2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001. I loved Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which he wrote at 22. But Kavalier and Clay is a tour-de-force. The story of two comic-book creators in 1930s New York ... but God. It is so much more than that. It's a love story dedicated to New York City, to comic books, to America. The characters, again, live and breathe. I did not want this book to end. I dreaded saying good-bye to these people. And holy crap, can Chabon write. Don't miss this book.

3. Possession, by A.S. Byatt
I have recommended this book to friends before, and none of them could get into it. But that does not dim my recommendation! I have read it 10 times, maybe more. And I will read it again. Literature and poetry buffs will love it. But it's also a mystery. And not until the very last sentence of the book (which is a KILLER - if you pick up this book, do not peek ahead at the last page -- DO NOT) do you understand the full story. Byatt's a great writer, in an old-school kind of way. I read one great review of her stuff, "Byatt writes as though James Joyce never existed." I laughed out loud when I read that. It's true. Additionally, and on a personal note, this book makes me believe in the kinship of Intellect and Love. For those of us who live primarily in the mind, love - passionate love, being "possessed" by another human being -- can be daunting and difficult. I mean, love is difficult, anyway! This book gives me hope.

4. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I came to this book late, reading it for the first time a couple years ago. I literally could not believe how good it was. The writing brought me to tears at times. The insights into psychology, crime, the MIND (all before Freud, before self-help, before feng shui) are breathtaking. Dostoevsky is a genius. If you have a question about crime that is not answered by this book, then my guess is that it is a stupid question and not worth asking. Just my opinion. Great book.

5. The Dead, by James Joyce
As a Joyce FREAK, I would add "anything by James Joyce" - but The Dead is the place to start. The Dead is, indisputably, the greatest short story ever written. End of conversation.

6. Atonement, by Ian McEwan
I read this one recently. I can't really speak about it articulately because it is one of the most tragic books I ever read. It affected me almost physically. I finished it, and sat still, stunned. I could feel myself trying to block it out IMMEDIATELY, I could feel myself trying to talk myself out of the implications of the book. So all I can say is: this book had an enormous impact on me. Also: The man can write. He is one of the best there is. I consider this one a Must-Read.

7. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
Oh, what an incredible book! Tim O'Brien also wrote the famous Going After Cacciato - another amazing book - but I read The Things They Carried first, so I have a soft spot in my heart for it. It is a book of short "stories" about Vietnam. I put quotation marks around stories because that is not exactly the correct term. I kind of don't want to boil this book down. It's too BIG for that. It's too GOOD. Let's just say that it is emotional, very well-written, angry, insightful - It's a perfect book. And the title-essay, "The Things They Carried" is heart-wrenching.

8. Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
A life-changing book. The "Smells like Teen Spirit" of literature. I try not to think about this book too much.

9. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Yes, I know, I know, the book, on some level, is a big mess. The narration starts out first person: "Call me Ishmael." But somewhere in the middle of the book, Melville switches to omniscent narrator. We are privy to Captain Ahab's private moments, his private thoughts, which Ishmael could not know. We get 30 separate chapters on every different part of the whale. You start off the book with a normal plot, and somewhere along the way, you find yourself in a marine biology class. YES, I KNOW ALL THAT. But still: this BOOK! Oh my GOD! This BOOK!! You just have to GO with it, you have to give up your expectation of a linear plot, and just let Melville take the wheel. I read it in high school and grumbled my way through it, and read it again, a couple of years ago - and found it to be, second only to Ulysses, the most exciting book I had ever read. Not because of the plot. But because of the un-touched mastery and brilliance of the writing. My favorite chapter? "The Whiteness of the Whale". Oh, this book! This is one of those books, like Catcher in the Rye, where I felt like my soul actually grew, during the reading of it.

10. Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh
Harriet was my idol when I was 10 years old, and Harriet remains an idol today. She is why I first took up a pen and paper. She's as immortal a literary character as Anna Karenina. This book is one of my all-time favorites, ever, always.

Recommended Reading: Non-fiction

A new reader of mine has made a request of me, which I gladly take on:

He asked me to post a list of recommended books, but he had a couple of specific requirements of the list, which has helped me to narrow it down:

1. Don't make it TOO long
2. Pick only books that you have re-read

I have had a great time compiling this list, and hope it generates some good discussions.

I have chosen 10 non-fiction books, and 10 fiction. My reader did not specify which genre he was interested in, primarily, so this was my solution. I will keep my discussions of the books brief. (Yeah, right! I'm a blabbermouth) Let's just say, I will attempt to tone my blabbermouth tendencies DOWN.

The books within each list are not placed in any particular order.

Oh, and I started to link to Amazon for all these books, but something is up with that stupid site, I keep getting "cannot find server" messages, so I gave up in the middle. You are on your own, tracking these books down.

I will post the NONFICTION books first.

NONFICTION

2. The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Any time great "war journalism" is discussed, or compiled, this book is on the list, and usually it's in the top 5. For good reason. Kapuscinski was a foreign correspondent from Poland during the 60s and 70s, one of their only foreign correspondents at the time. (Or maybe he was their ONLY foreign correspondent ... not sure). He reported on 3rd world revolutions, and they are all compiled in this book: Africa in the 60s, Latin America in the 70s ... He wrote about Iran. Ethiopia. Angola. Liberia. He used his stories about OTHER totalitarian systems as an indirect way to criticize the Soviet Union, under which Poland suffered, obviously. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Kapuscinski was finally able to write about that, as well. He's a great writer. Soccer War is his best.

3. Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, by William Shirer
A towering achievement. Still unmatched. Masterful. And to have written such a book without decades of perspective is even more astonishing. I also recommend (I know I'm cheating by listing two books here) Shirer's diary of his time in Berlin called Berlin Diary. I like that book almost as much as Rise and Fall. It is his personal account of living in Berlin from 1934 to 1941; he describes his growing horror, as he watches Germany and fascism spiral out of control. It's the observation-on-the-street thrust of the book which gives it its power. I have read Rise and Fall numerous times, and there is still a certain mystery to WHY. HOW could this have happened? WHAT was going ON? Berlin Diary is an answer (sort of) to some of those questions.

4. Colin Thubron's "Russia" trilogy.
Now I'm really cheating, listing 3 books under one heading, but they go together and are all quick reads, too. They are travel journals, covering 3 separate journeys through the Soviet Union and its conquered territories. But, as with all good travelogues, they touch on the character of the countries traveled thru, by using personal anecdotes, man-on-the-street comments about what is going on. If you hate this kind of writing, then these books are not for you. The titles of the books, in order, are: Among the Russians (his tale of traveling through "White Russia" in 1980), In Siberia (taking the train across Siberia, directly following the collapse of the Soviet Union), and The Lost Heart of Asia, which is my personal favorite. If you only want to read one of those books, then I recommend The Lost Heart of Asia. Thubron travels through all the "stans" in 1991 or 1992, soon after the USSR meltdown, and observes stuff like growing Islamic fundamentalism, growing totalitarianism in their own bogus leaders, resurgences of long-buried nationalisms hinting at coming dangers...But really, the reason to read these books is that Thubron is a marvelous writer, a marvelous collector of anecdotes. You will not forget the characters you meet. I think The Lost Heart of Asia is a minor masterpiece.

5. Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
I know everyone probably read this book already, but that will not stop me from putting it on this list. A terrifying read, heart-wrenching.

6. I Will Bear Witness, by Victor Klemperer
This is a 2-volume journal, written by a German Jew during the 1930s and 40s, who lived in Dresden. To be honest, I have only read the first volume more than once. These journals are so valuable, priceless accounts of the day-to-day tightening of the noose for the Jews. At what point do you realize that the water is boiling and you will be scalded? When do you decide: Okay, NOW things are really bad, and now I must leave? Klemperer was tormented by these questions. My favorite part of these books is his analysis of the Language of the Third Reich. He analyzes what fascism does to language. He analyzes it AS it is happening, as he fears for his life every day, as he watches all of his Jewish friends, one by one, disappear in the night for ... nobody knows where. One caveat about the book: In the paperback version, the typeface is so small that it is a bit difficult to read.

7. The Book of Abigail and John
The compiled letters of Abigail and John Adams, who, as a married couple, spent more time apart than together. Such was the price Abigail paid for marrying a Founding Father. Oh my God. These letters, these letters. They give me goosebumps. First of all: it's a great love story. They are passionate letters, lonely letters ... John says stuff like, "Your letters are like laudanum". She moans, "I am living like a nun." But alongside of that, is John's firsthand accounts of the Second Continental Congress, the signing of the Declaration of Independence ... Abigail chiding him, "Do not forget about the ladies!" An absolutely exhilarating read. And MAN, could people write back then!

8. An Unexpected Light, by Jason Elliot
This is Jason Elliot's first book. It came out in 1999. It is his chronicle of his decades-long love affair with Afghanistan. The book is one of those right-time-right-place stories. He had never written a book before, and suddenly, after September 11, you COULD NOT get this book. Bookstores could not keep the book on the shelves, you had to order it. He was in Kabul when the Taliban took over. He traveled with the Mujahidin during their war against the Soviet occupation. He obviously romanticizes Afghanistan, he writes so lyrically of the place, the landscape, the people, the famous hospitality of Afghans, and the "unexpected light" in the air. This is the book which taught me the long long history of that country (besides what I already knew) - going back to Alexander the Great. Again, though, the real strength of the book is not its topic, but the WRITING. I have read this book again and again, savoring Elliot's prose.

9. All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
No lie, I probably have read this book every other year since my first time reading it, which was in junior high. I read it because I had seen the movie, which I find quite amusing, in retrospect. One of my first memories as a child is seeing Nixon on TV, sweaty and grumpy and obviously very important. I remember saying to my mother, "He always looks so mad." Anyway, tangent aside: This is one of my favorite books. I love every page. I love every word. I will read it over and over again. It is a great who-dun-it, a real page-turner. I can't get enough.

10. Scott Berg's biography of Charles Lindbergh
My obsession with Charles Lindbergh came through my love of his wife's writing. I had read all of her journals, and I still read them. I got to know him through her eyes. Berg's biography, which set a new high-water-mark for biographers everywhere, is a stunning accomplishment. Scott Berg won the trust of Anne Lindbergh, a famously reticent woman (except for those journals!) - and she opened up her life to him. She gave Berg boxes of unpublished letters, her unpublished journals, Charles' unpublished notes for his speeches, his own books. It is a dense book, a wealth of information. It is tremendously well-written. The Prologue, a description of Lindbergh's landing in Paris, and what it was like that day, and what it meant, gives me chills every time I read it. It's an unflinching look at Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, but it does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is a full look at the life of this extraordinary man. I can't recommend it highly enough.

AND LASTLY:

The following book is usually placed under "Fiction", but it's a true story and therefore deserves to be counted here as well.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
You know how there are entire sections in book stores devoted to "True Crime"? Capote invented the genre. This is a phenomenal book. If you have not read it, then all I can say is: RUN, do not WALK, and pick it up. It's one of my all-time faves.

Pip speaks

So at the moment, I am reading Great Expectations for the first time, believe it or not! I've read a ton of other Dickens, but for some reason, missed this one.

It is so obvious how writing serially, publishing chapter by chapter, served Dickens. Each chapter is gripping, with mini beginning, middles, and ends. The characters are drawn in large brush-strokes, and are set up to be met again - they are unforgettable. I mean, Jesus: Miss Havisham! Try as I might, I cannot block my own picture of that cobwebbed old woman in my mind's eye!

Anyway, every sentence is sheer joy. I laugh out loud. This morning, on my commute, I read Chapter XIV. Right after Pip becomes an apprentice to Joe, the poor sap who married Pip's shrewish sister.

The writing took my breath away. Or ... I don't know what it was that so struck me. The writing is amazing, yes. It's like in all of the hub-bub of the preceding chapters, you feel like you are in a raucous free-for-all, but suddenly, in Chapter XIV, Dickens draws back the drapes, to reveal the true heart, the soul of his story. I mean, the title of his book isn't "A Comedic Romp" or "Let's Dance About Like Lunatics" or even "The True Story of Pip and All the Crazies Who Try to Tell Him What To Do". The book, after all, is called GREAT EXPECTATIONS (goosebump territory there ... ) and in Chapter XIV, you see why.

It's a short chapter. I will post it here. And then I'm off ... to go see a matinee. I have no idea which one. I will just walk up the street, and see whichever movie is playing closest to the time of my arrival at the box office window.

So without further ado, the exquisite Chapter XIV of Great Expectations:

CHAPTER XIV

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a pleasant place to me, because of my sister's temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I believed in it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not unmagnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now, it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves and go into the force, Joe's 'prentice, I should be distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of the small coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my "time", I used to stand about the churchyard on Sunday evenings, when night was falling, comparing my own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indenture lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out in the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restless aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought of how we used to sing it at Miss Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in the fire, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me, -- often at such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than ever, in my own ungracious breast.

Sheila's comment: To me, what that chapter really says is: "I DARE you not to read on. I DARE you to resist." I know that I, for one, am unequal to the task. I must read on.

"These are not novels"...

I found a review of Alan Lightman's new book on the indispensable Arts and Letters Daily.

Lightman also wrote Einstein's Dreams, one of the 3,000 books I own ... (see entry from yesterday). Einstein's Dreams is interesting, as an exercise. It's a teeny little book, filled with dream-like (duh) explorations of time. It's cute. It's interesting. But that's it.

So the review of his new book, where a guy goes back to his high-school reunion, hoping to see his lost love, is pretty bad. Obviously. Judging from the first blunt paragraphs of the review:

Man goes to 30th college reunion. Remembers girl who got away. Feels sad. The end.

You just got five hours of your life back.

The only reason I bring this review up (of a book I will never read!) is because of the points made at the end of the piece. Marta Salij, after talking about Lightman's new oeuvre specifically, backs up a bit and talks about the new trend in fiction, altogether. Very insightful:

Pretty sentences, all dressed up with nowhere to go. That's what I think is ailing fiction, has been ailing fiction for some time. I get no points for noticing. Better minds than mine have complained.

Lightman's Reunion falls into the category of wistful musings on the sadness of life, dressed up in novel form. Another category is snarky commentary on the shallowness of modernity, dressed up in novel form: Key practitioners are David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, et al. There are other categories, but it fatigues me to list them.

Here's what I do want points for: These are not novels. They are essays, maybe even newspaper columns, sometimes glorified diary entries, stretched out to unconscionable length and price.

How about a novel dressed up in novel form, huh? With characters who face conflicts (you remember those from ninth grade: Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, etc.), who act, suffer and grow. I could really sink my teeth into one of those right about now.

Yeah.

This is very important

All I can say is: Read it.

It's about language, it's about censorship, it's by Ray Bradbury.

I don't ever want authors to stop shouting out against the current nonsense. And not just authors. But book-lovers, educators, parents ... This situation MUST not be allowed to continue. It MUST be a passing phase, an insane burst of puritanism ...

How can a child learn to love to read if every book is hacked up so that nothing in it could ever possibly ever offend anyone?

Thank you, Dean, for pointing to this incredible piece.

Cherished Books

Oh, I LOVE this post from Acidman.

I just moved myself, hired a company to do it for me because ... well, because I just have too many damn books to move, and there is nothing heavier than a box of books.

My former apartment was a 5th floor walkup, as well. I had 22 boxes of books to be moved!

The moving guys were great. Filled with good-humor. But they also worked their asses off. When they saw the stack of boxes with "BOOKS" written on the side of each box, they knew it would be a long tough day. One guy, Victor, (who was very amusing, we pulled up in front of my new apartment, and he informed me, rather cheerfully, "I lost my virginity in an apartment right across the street!") - but anyway, Victor kept teasing me, saying, "Go to the LIBRARY. Read a book and then GIVE IT AWAY!"

The other mover, Bill, a big burly redheaded cutie (had a bit of a crush on him, I must admit) - heaved two of the boxes up onto his meaty shoulders, with this beleaguered look on his face, then he turned to me and said flatly, "Just tell me that at least SOME of these books are Stephen King."

Thank goodness I was able to answer in the affirmative. Then followed a very interesting conversation (he standing there, with two huge boxes on his shoulders) about It versus The Stand versus Salem's Lot.

Anyway. One of my more constant activities in my life is weeding through the stacks of books I own, and getting rid of non-essentials. You may be surprised at how difficult this is. I have to get into a very cold-hearted mood. Turn a deaf ear to all of the instincts rising up in me, shrieking: "You might read this book someday! So-and-so LOVED this book!"

But there are the tried-and-true favorites, books I will never discard.

I'm one of those people who loves to underline passages that catch my fancy, (not just philosophical passages, but descriptive passages, humorous passages) - so my copy of Catcher in the Rye is literally falling apart at the seams, held together with tape, with little underlines and asterisks in the margins throughout. It's like a code to decipher. These are markings from various times in my life, since I've probably read the book 5 or 6 times, and each time I do, I find something new, another door opens, my understanding is a bit deeper. So I can't get rid of that dog-eared copy! It means the world to me!

Other cherished books:

-- my hard-bound ancient copy of Alice in Wonderland. Red leather cover, with a gold stamp of the white rabbit checking his watch on the front. The pages are smooth, almost shiny, and thick - obviously a quality book, made a long time ago.

-- my dog-eared taped-together copy of Mating by Norman Rush - so written on and worked over that I could never lend it to someone. I have read that book 10 times probably. The notes I have scribbled in the margins or in the blank pages in the back are like stepping-stones through time.

-- my falling-apart copy of Catch 22. Only read that awesome book once, and I think it's time I took it up again. One of the best books ever written, in my opinion. What an achievement.

-- my taped-together copy of Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley, another all-time fave. I just don't want to go and get a spanking new copy ... That book, with coffee stains on some of the pages, underlines, notes to myself ... is precious.

-- my 4 Nancy Lemann books: Ritz on the Bayou, Lives of the Saints, Sportsmans Paradise, and The Fiery Pantheon. She is a wonderful writer, so funny, so terrific - and her books are very hard to find. I got half of those for half-price at The Strand, and I fear that if I lose them I will never track them down again. Happily, she just came out with a new book called Malaise, which is due out in paperback sometime next month. Love her.

-- all my Lucy Maud Montgomery books. I probably have 40 of them. From the entirety of the Anne of Green Gables series all the way down to her recently-unearthed TERRIBLE short stories. Cannot get rid of one of those little books. It would hurt too much.

-- all my Madeleine L'Engle books. I have every single one the woman ever wrote. From her phenomenal fiction: Wrinkle in Time, plus the many many many others - to her non-fiction memoir-style books (total favorites of mine), down to her theological writing, which sometimes goes off the deep end for me, but I don't care. If Madeleine L'Engle wrote it, I want it.

-- my massive Collected Works of Jane Austen - all her novels in one volume. A huge tome. Also kind of falling apart, but beautiful, old-fashioned-looking.

-- my copy of Moby Dick, another one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. The book was almost TOO dense, TOO rich, TOO good. I could barely deal with it. Every sentence coming at me was so brilliant, so unbelievable ... I felt like I needed a break, a break to just deal with the brilliance. It's like how my cat Sammy used to eat sometimes: he would get so overwhelmed at all the goodies put before him, so discombobbled, that he would sink into a state of paralysis - staring at his bowl of food with intense anxiety. Reading Moby Dick was like that for me.

-- my collected poems of Sylvia Plath. Had since I was in high school, when the Plath mania began. The Plath mania has calmed down, thank the good Lord, but I still love her poems, and love to read through them from time to time. I know a couple by heart. That book, again filled with my high-school-age jottings, is a piece of my own personal history.

I guess that's what I'm trying to describe here. These books are not just books to me. They have become part of my own biography.

A book that can do that is a great book indeed.

Acidman: I sure hope you get a Norton's Anthology of Poetry again sometime in your life! And a library of your own.

Cheaper by the Dozen re-visited

This book-review in the Washington Post has brought joy and nostalgia to my heart. Jonathan Yardley reviews Cheaper by the Dozen - one of the favorite books from his childhood.

It was also one of my favorite books as a child.

Actually, now that I think about the impact of the book, it wasn't just a favorite. I didn't just "love" the book.

"Rabid obsession" is probably more along the lines of my sentiments towards it.

The book is a memoir, co-written by a brother and sister of the famous Gilbreth family.

One would look long and hard to find two more remarkable people than Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Married in 1904, when he was 36 and she 26, they soon became partners in the management consulting firm Gilbreth Inc. Frank was the pioneer in motion study -- if you work in an office or on an assembly line you almost certainly are the beneficiary of, or slave to, his discoveries -- but his career was cut short by his sudden death in 1924, a month before his 56th birthday. Lillian, undaunted, picked up where he left off. In a man's world, she eventually became even more widely respected and known than her husband had been -- herself a pioneer, in motion study and workplace psychology but also in feminism.

To readers all over the world -- readers in English plus 53 other languages, to be precise -- the Gilbreths are known not for their prodigious professional accomplishments but for their even more prodigious parental ones. Between 1905 and 1922 the Gilbreths produced 12 children, a phenomenon that was immortalized by two of them, Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, in "Cheaper by the Dozen."

Fantasies of being part of the Gilbreth family filled my mind when I was young. The oldest Gilbreth children were teenagers during the roaring 20s, and I remember, specifically, the crazy chapters when the oldest girls were trying to go out on dates with slick jazz-era guys ... and Frank Gilbreth was trying to keep everybody from screaming out of control. Guys hiding in the bushes, waiting for the Gilbreth girls to climb out the windows, etc. It all seemed very romantic and hilarious.

The intense humor of the book comes from many sources, but the main thing is how Gilbreth uses his family as a built-in assembly-line for his motion-study experiments.

I remember being 10 years old and laughing hysterically at the image of these children (all redheads, by the way) racing about, washing dishes, throwing linen on the line, cleaning the living room, all as their father stood by with a stopwatch, monitoring the seconds flying by. Then he would make suggestions as to how they could do the same tasks, only in 13 less seconds, if they would cut this extraneous movement out, if they would break up the tasks a bit better ... Meanwhile, though, he is talking to CHILDREN. Little redheaded four year olds, racing around in the experiments.

I must read it again. The book gave me so much joy. Every page a gem. Every story memorable.

The reason it is called "Cheaper by the Dozen" is that Frank Gilbreth soon learned that having 12 children (as opposed to 2 or 3) was the surest way to get free stuff. He would drive up to the movie theatre, in his big honking car, filled with twelve children, and make a big display of taking out his wallet to pay for 13 tickets, when the ticket-taker would say, "Oh, don't worry about it ... just go on in." This happened on ferry rides, amusement park entries, etc. He never had to pay for the 12 redheads tagging along behind him. If you have a family, it is better to go large, because everything is cheaper by the dozen.

The other thing I remember from the book is that dinner time in the Gilbreth family was never a free-for-all. Actually, nothing was a free-for-all! But conversation was managed, everyone had to eat the same way, nobody could interject their own thoughts ... because Mr. Gilbreth would listen for a few seconds and then state, "Not of general interest."

"Not of general interest" was taken on by own family, at dinner times, and is still used in jest.

Like one of us will be ranting about something that means the WORLD to us: co-workers we hate, dramas we are involved in, or one of us will make a blanket meta-statement like: "I hate my life right now." and somebody, invariably will say, "Not of general interest."

It makes me laugh. It's so obnoxious, but still, it makes me laugh.

Great book. A sheer joy. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

Martin Amis

I've never been a big Martin Amis fan. I read 3 chapters of London Fields and that was enough for me. My brother loves Martin Amis, so I figured I should give it a shot, because Brendan has good taste. Brendan insisted I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example. Brendan is no dummy. But I could not get into Amis. It's not that I don't enjoy satire. I do. But - there was something too mean-spirited, too nihilistic for me, in Amis' prose. I could recognize his skill. I just didn't feel like reading any more.

But again: my opinion means nothing. It's just a taste thing.

This article in The Times about Amis' new book is quite interesting. Apparently, it is not as good as it should be (one critic, a huge fan of Amis, wrote that reading it was akin to "your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating" - Jeez, dude, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel!). But Amis has been so highly praised (perhaps over-praised), his advances have been so enormous, that he is a huge target. The word "schaudenfraude" is used.

The critiques have caused a brou-haha in the British literati - and the book hasn't even come out yet. British novelist Tibor Fischer was the catalyst for this whole thing. He said: "The way British publishing works, you go from not being published no matter how good you are to being published no matter how bad you are."

Martin Amis has not responded to the firestorm, as of yet.

Jonathan Burnham, the president and editor in chief of Miramax Books, which is publishing "Yellow Dog" in the United States, said that Mr. Amis seemed to provoke idolatry and envy in equal doses.

"One thing that drives everyone crazy is that Martin doesn't really care about the storm he creates around him," Mr. Burnham said. "He doesn't consciously seek to generate all this heat, and it just adds to all this madness."

Oh, and one last note...

Atonement, by Ian McEwan, which I mentioned yesterday, gets better and better. I read 150 pages last night, or something ridiculous like that. I didn't want to put it down.

The writing continues to amaze.

And yes, I was right to feel uneasy. Something terrible was approaching.

I have no idea what will happen, but oh, I take comfort (weirdly) from the fact that the name of the book is ATONEMENT, and not SHRIEKING REVENGE or HATRED FOREVER or YOU RUINED MY LIFE. Through all the chaos, and pain, with characters lives being ruined, literally, I hold onto the fact, "Okay, hold on, hold on....McEwan called this book Atonement ... Hang on, hang on."

So far, one of the characters already has a lot to atone for, although she does not realize it. Or doesn't want to realize it. The word could be taken many different ways.

The writing is exquisite.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Page after page after page I turn ... unable to say to myself, "Okay. Here is a good place to stop."

And now for something comPLETEly different

I just began Ian McEwan's Atonement. At long last.

I am eight chapters in, and ... I've never read any McEwan before. The man is masterful. Masterful. Although I can't say why yet. All I know is ... he creates a world. An outer world, yes, England in the mid 1930s, a family house ... but he also creates all these inner worlds, of all the different characters. HOW exactly he does this remains mysterious. The writing is gripping. Gripping.

Over and under everything is this deep sense of unease, or dis-ease, perhaps is the better word. Something terrible is going to happen. I have no idea what.

And if you have read the book, DON'T tell me.

Here is an example. I read the following excerpt and had to put the book down for a minute, just to absorb it. Not just to absorb the extraordinary writing, but also: I sat there in awe at ... HOW he actually attempted (and succeeded) to describe such a moment. Perfect. A perfect moment of writing. I have had such moments, as he describes, in my life (moments of becoming conscious of being conscious) ... and ... when they occur, they always seem WAY beyond words. McEwan proves me wrong.

Each chapter, so far, is from a different point of view. The writing style undergoes a subtle shift with each character-change. The following excerpt is from the eyes of Briony (a scarily vulnerable 13 year old girl, who is obsessed with becoming a writer, and ... well. Something is UP with that girl. There's something not right about her, but McEwan, so far, isn't revealing whatever it is that might be missing in Briony).

Read:

She should have changed her dress this morning. She thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But what an effort it was. The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly distorted -- her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self -- was it her soul? -- which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.

The Myth of Muslim Tolerance

Muslim apologists make a huge deal about how "tolerant" and how "egalitarian" the religion of Islam is. This is propaganda.

Besides, "tolerance" is an obnoxious and condescending term to those of us under the category of "people to be tolerated". Don't TOLERATE me. I don't want you to TOLERATE me. I want the same rights as eveybody else, under the law. That's all. One of my friends, who is gay, has the same response to the concept of "tolerance". It makes him NUTS. "I don't WANT you to 'tolerate' me. And I don't want to congratulate you on your 'tolerance' of me. Screw that!!"

We have been fed a line of propaganda about how tolerant Islam is.

Now it is quite a different thing ... what a religion SAYS about itself, and how it BEHAVES.

Think about the actual teachings of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Christ's temper tantrum in the temple, throwing the money-changers out. This is what the doctrine SAYS. But how often do Christians ACTUALLY behave like that?

Especially with that last one ... the money-changers being expelled by Jesus out of the temple. The only time Jesus flipped out.

I go into St. Patrick's Old Cathedral occasionally, down in lower Manhattan, because it's a massive historical structure, they still conduct some of their masses in Latin, and there is a huge Irish congregation. I enjoy all of that. However, you walk in, and it is like you can HEAR the cash registers clinking. You are physically unable to light a candle without paying for it. They have rigged up the candles somehow so that you MUST pay for it.

I find that disgusting. So if you're poor, and you want to light a candle for your grandmother, you are up shit's creek. I mean, it's not like you have to pay 5 dollars to light a damn candle, but the price doesn't matter. It's the principle of the thing, the blatancy of the materialism, blah blah.

It's unfortunate, because it is obviously a holy space. I walk into that huge stone space and immediately feel like praying, or contemplating, or meditating. It is that kind of church.

Anyway. Tangent over. Back to the doctrine of Islam and the practice of Islam. They deserve all the scrutiny they are getting right now.

A quote from Bernard Lewis' indispensible book (read it, if you have not already) What Went Wrong? :

In most tests of tolerance, Islam, both in theory and in practice, compares unfavorably with the Western democracies as they have developed during the last two or three centuries, but very favoriably with most other Christian and post-Christian societies and regimes. There is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the emancipation, acceptance, and integration of other-believers and non-believers in the West; but equally, there is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe's, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence. There were occasional persecutions, but they were rare ...

Within certain limits and subject to certain restrictions, Islamic governments were willing to tolerate the practice, though not the dissemination, of other revealed, monootheistic religions. They were able to pass an even severer test, by tolerating divergent forms of their own. Even polytheists, though condemned by the strict letter of the law to a choice between conversion and enslavement, were in fact tolerated, as Islamic rule spread to most of India. Only the total unbeliever -- the agnostic or atheist -- was beyond the pale of tolerance ...

NOW: Listen up. Here is where Lewis is really onto something, I think:

In modern times, Islamic tolerance has been somewhat diminished. After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam was a retreating, not an advancing force in the world, and Muslims began to feel threatened by the rise and expansion of the great Christian empires of Eastern and Western Europe. The old easy-going tolerance, resting on an assumption not only of superior religion but also of superior power, was becoming difficult to maintain. The threat that Christendom now seemed to be offering to Islam was no longer merely military and political; it was beginning to shake the very structure of Muslim society. Western rulers, and, to a far greater extent, their enthusiastic Muslim disciples and imitators, brought in a whole series of reforms, almost all of them of Western origin or inspiratioin, which increasingly affected the way Muslims lived in their countries, their cities and villages, and finally in their own homes.

These changes were rightly seen as being of Western origin or inspiration; the non-Muslim minorities, mostly Christian but also Jewish, were often seen, sometimes also rightly -- as agents or instruments of these changes. The old pluralistic order, multidenominational and polyethnic, was breaking down, and the tacit social contract on which it was based was violated on both sides. The Christian minorities, inspired by Western ideas of self-determination, were no longer prepared to accept the tolerated but inferior status accorded to them by the old order, and made new demands -- sometimes for equal rights within the nation, sometimes for separate nationhood, sometimes for both at the same time. Muslim majorities, feeling mortally threatened, became unwilling to accord even the traditional measure of tolerance.

By a sad paradox, in some of the semi-secularized nation-states of modern times, the non-Muslim minorities, while enjoying complete equality on paper, in fact have fewer opportunities and face greater dangers than under the old Islamic yet pluralistic order. The present regime in Iran, with its ruling clerics, its executioins for blasphemy, its consecrated assassins, represents a new departure in Islamic history. In the present mood, a triumph of militant Iislam would be unlikely to bring a return to traditional Islamic tolerance -- and even that would no longer be acceptable to minority elements schooled on modern ideas of human, civil, and political rights.

Emphasis mine ...

It's a no-win situation. There must be a transformation. And we cannot engineer their transformation. They have got to do it on their own.

Catharsis through Auden

I am having an Auden phase at the moment.

One of my favorite poems of all time is The More Loving One. It is one of the handful of poems that I know by heart.

At some point, maybe a month or so after September 11, 2001, when I was still in shock, still running on adrenaline, still trying to get used the new awful skyline across the river, nothing was normal again, nothing was gotten used to … I picked up my book of Auden's collected poems. (Which was odd, because for about 3 months after the disaster, I was unable to read anything but newspapers and history books. Leisure reading seemed completely ridiculous). But for whatever reason, I saw the dark paperback spine on my shelf, drew it out, and started reading. The More Loving One was the first poem I read.

The Greeks had it right. One of the redeeming purposes of any kind of art is that it provides the audience with a necessary catharsis. Catharsis is extremely important for communities. Especially communities who have experienced some kind of disaster.

New York City was in a state of mourning, agony, grief. It was crazy. Awful. Beyond belief. It could not be gotten used to. I still miss those damn towers.

Auden's poem cracked the surface for me, when I read it that day. His poem allowed me to begin to truly grieve what had been lost. Grieve the new skyline, grieve all of the people lost, grieve the old world which had disappeared forever. We were in a new world, an unfamiliar world, and a huge part of me wanted to go BACK. I could not remember life on September 10.

And the last line of the poem is, for me, the most healing of all. Especially as a New Yorker who was here that day, and has no interest in anyone who says "Get over it…" He says it perfectly. There is such sadness in the poem: having to get used to this new and awful world, but there is also such hope. It can be done. Eventually. Not now. But eventually.

Okay, enough prologue. Here is Auden's beautiful poem.

The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now i see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

A New York love moment

This is from one of my favorite essays of all time: Goodbye to All That, by Joan Didion. If you like what you read, definitely go out and read the whole thing (it's in her compilation of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem). The whole essay is maybe 7 pages long, but it captures an entire world, an era, a feeling. I love it. Here's a quote from it:

...I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peace and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peace and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later -- because I did not belong there, did not come from there -- but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month...

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never seen before or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what he called "the Big C," the Southampton-El Morocco circuit ("I'm well-connected on the Big C, honey," he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and lost two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.

Charlotte Bronte's reading list

This is from a letter of Charlotte Bronte to a friend of hers, who asked for book recommendations. It's one of my favorite quotes. The advice still holds.

"You ask me to recommend you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting; you will never wish to read them over twice. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain, of Byron, though the latter is a magnificent poem, and read the rest fearlessly; that must indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII, from Richard III, from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Scott's sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm. Nor can Wordsworth's, nor Campbell's, nor Southey's -- the greatest part at least of his; some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can; I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's Life of Nelson, Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Life of Sheridan, Moore's Life of Byron, Wolfe's Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audobon, and Goldsmith, and White's History of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, adhere to standard authors, and avoid novelty."

Living between two poles

I was clearing out my AOL Filing Cabinet today (long story), and came across an email I sent to a dear friend this summer. I read it, uneasy, with an odd feeling of nostalgia. It was only two months ago. Why this yearning sensation? I had forgotten, almost, the Joycean obsession which fired up my June and July. So much has happened in the intervening months, so much personal and world-events darkness, that the innocent burbly ramblings in this email seem as though they were written by another woman.

Here it is:

James Joyce has ruined other writers for me. I am reading Ulysses for the first time aided by my dad and 2 literary guidebooks -- without which the damn thing would be impenetrable But once I cracked Joyce's code just a little bit, the book would suddenly, oddly, open up to me. Showing me only glimpses of the genius, but glimpses nonetheless.

It's like those moments I used to have in math class, where I would be completely confused, all the numbers blending together on the board, having no idea what was going on, what I was supposed to be doing, how to do it...and then, in a flash, out of nowhere, the concepts made sudden breathtaking sense, and I could "see" exactly how I was supposed to get the right answer. That's what reading Ulysses has been like for me: slogging through seemingly meaningless stream-of-consciousness prose, when suddenly...light breaks in and I realize that NOTHING is random in the book. There are connections and inter-connections EVERYWHERE.

It is, hands down, the most exciting reading experience I have ever had.

And it is KICKING MY ASS. It is hard hard stuff. (James Joyce said to a friend who complained to him about how difficult the book was: "Well, it took me 7 years to write it. It should take you 7 years to read it.")

Reading it has brought me and my dad even closer together. I call him up and read him one sentence, asking for clarification. One sentence out of a 900 page book and he will automatically say, "Ah yes. That's from the Cyclops episode. Joyce is referring to the editor of The Irish Times at the time." My dad is a lunatic, and I couldn't get thru Ulysses without him.

I'm becoming a lunatic myself. I am living more and more completely in my mind.

A stranger on the street saw Ulysses under my arm and stopped me to have a conversation about it. "So are you reading it unaided, or are you following the guidebooks?" So funny. It was like we were 2 members of some weird cult. Huddled away in a thatched hut, drinking Guinness, reading Joyce. Thinking to ourselves, "Jesus, what the hell is Joyce going on and on about?"

And on the flip side, in the physical side of my life which I pretty much willfully ignore: I went out with Jen last night to a club in the village, to hear an absolutely phenomenal cover band of all things, and danced like a complete and utter maniac until 4 in the morning. 4 in the morning??

They did a cover of "Lithium", my favorite Nirvana song, and I basically felt as though Kurt Cobain were ACTUALLY there. We all did. Everyone was screaming and thrashing like complete banshees, losing their friggin minds. I haven't slamdanced in 10 years. There was an exhilaratingly cosmic element to the group-dance-fest. For one bright moment, we felt that Cobain had not died. He LIVED in that song. I lost myself in it. Everybody did.

Today I am exhausted. Hence this long bizarre monologue.

James Joyce and Kurt Cobain. The two poles of my life.

Revisiting Gatsby

The last time I read The Great Gatsby was in 10th grade. We had to read it. This book did not go the way of some other books I had to read in high school (Red Badge of Courage is one example that comes to mind): books which I read merely because I had to, and have not retained one single word of said books.

I was always a huge reader. So being introduced to great books was not a daunting prospect. I was also an advanced reader. I read Oliver Twist at the age of 10. I read All the President's Men at the age of 11. In looking back, even I can recognize that that last example makes me seem a bit loony. But I loved that book then, and I love it now.

Anyway: other books I was forced to read in high school, books which ended up changing my life, books I still own to this day:

Catcher in the Rye
Tale of Two Cities
Moby Dick
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby

Rant following:

(WOW. They're ALL BY MEN!! I feel so oppressed!! I wish that my teachers had forced me to read books of lesser stature, merely because they were by women or Native Americans or deaf-mute Eskimos ... I'm kind of kidding ... but it is amazing to me: I didn't go to high school in the dark ages, but the difference between what is going on now and what went on during my formative years is astonishing. Do people even read The Catcher in the Rye anymore in high school? Or Huck Finn? Or are they too busy reading the doodlings of a 17th century housewife and calling it literature and "forgotten genius"? Thank God they made me read those classic books, Thank God I missed the politicization of literature. Thank God. What a waste.)

Rant over.

I just picked up The Great Gatsby again and read it in three days. (It felt much much longer in high school.) I was shocked and moved by how much I had remembered. The huge eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg ... I remember the intense class discussion about what those eyes symbolize. The green light at the end of the dock, obviously. And there were parts that I actually remembered word for word, because of how, exactly, Mr. Crothers (my teacher) taught the book.

I remember the huge discussion about the following part of the book:

Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet.

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now -- isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once -- but I loved you too."

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.

"You loved me too?" he repeated.

I remember Mr. Crothers pointing out that section to us, and talking about how that was the snap in Gatsby, that was the dream dying in Gatsby, that was the inner conflict of the entire book encapsulated in two sentences:

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. "You loved me too?" he repeated.

Fitzgerald does not describe the snap. He does not have to. Fitzgerald does not talk about Gatsby's dream of Daisy, his fantasy of Daisy, at least not in that pivotal moment. All he does, all he does, is tell us that Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. And in that moment, a man's dream dies.

Phenomenal.

I would have missed that, in high school, if Mr. Crothers hadn't dwelt on it so specifically, and it all came back rushing back when I re-read it.

I might say that Mr. Crothers was the best teacher I have ever had. Period. He taught me how to write. Plain and simple. And you know how he taught me? I wrote a paper in his class. I got a D. My first D in my whole life. Panic ensued. Deep depression. Writer's block. I wrote another paper. I got a D+. Next paper: C-. Next paper: I got a straight C. It was a very proud moment. And with every paper, agonizingly, I got better and better and better. Until finally, light broke through, and I was able to construct a damn paper. I wrote consistently A-level papers in college directly because of what Mr. Crothers taught me.

This post is a ramble. Mr. Crothers, if he read this, would be thinking: "Sheila, where's the thesis statement??"

So here it is:

I had forgotten the stature of Fitzgerald's opus. I had forgotten how superb it was. Or: if I remembered it, it was in a taken-for-granted kind of way. Like: "Oh yeah, that's a great book. One of the best books of the 20th century. Whatever." I had forgotten the level of the accomplishment. I had forgotten how moving it is.

Reading it as an adult gave me a whole new perspective on it as well.

When I read it at age 15, I was completely on the side of Nick, the narrator: The relatively innocent and honest bystander, looking on at the decadence of Daisy and Jordan and Gatsby, trying not to judge (like he says on the first page of the book), and trying to come out of the situation unscathed. But by the end of the book, Nick is changed. And so are we, whether we like it or not.

But now, reading it as a grown woman, with a couple of failed love affairs in my rear view mirror, I found myself entering the story through the eyes of Gatsby. I could see myself in parts of him. It KILLED me. I understood Gatsby, suddenly. Carrying a torch for years, infusing everything with significance, poetry, choosing the dream-world over reality.

It is only NOW, after reading it from an adult perspective, that I can truly understand why the book is seen as such an epic human tragedy. An American tragedy.

Now I understand. Now I understand.

Those first pages are so extraordinary, so exquisitely written, they cannot be improved upon.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that any intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" -- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

HOLY GOD.

Reading that makes me want to put down my pen forever.

Finished it on the bus this morning, and spent the rest of my commute acknowledging the ghost of Fitzgerald in my mind, over and over and over:

You're amazing, what a book, man you can write, just beautiful, unbelievable, your words live, your characters live, you're amazing you're amazing you're amazing ...

until the bus pulled into the fumey garage of the Port Authority and I got off and began my prosaic day.

Alex Beam: This op-ed is hilarious

Via my dad, I came across Alex Beam's latest in The Boston Globe.

Beam tackles what he calls a "wool-gathering essay" he came across in Utne magazine, an essay by Leif Utne, who is from Minneapolis, an essay where Leif debates with himself, ad nauseum, about whether or not he and his Swedish wife should move to Sweden.

Let me just give you a taste of how Alex Beam basically crucifies Mr. Leif, by making fun of him (and Sweden, and a bunch of other things) mercilessly:

Utne lauds the beguiling one-size-fits-all-ness of Sweden. There are only two car manufacturers, and only two low-flow toilet makers. Because in Sweden, it's not about consumerism; ''Sweden is a far more relationship-oriented society than the United States,'' he writes. ''Although a Swedish grocery store may only carry four brands of soap, Swedes have far more political choices than we do,'' e.g. seven political parties for 9 million people.

You would think that Sweden's liquor monopoly, known as ''The System,'' and the fact that it is the world's single largest wine buyer, and that waiting in line there ''on a Friday afternoon is a shared national ritual'' might alert Mr. Utne that all is not copacetic in the land of sex, suicide, and socialism. But no matter; he plans to move -- ''I am certain of it.''

You should read the whole thing.

The Declaration

And here is Johnson's discussion of the Declaration itself in A History of the American People (see other Independence Day-related excerpts below). It is my favorite passage in the entire 1100 page book. I think I like it so much because Johnson doesn't just deal with the facts, what the Declaration meant, how it came about. He also analyzes Thomas Jefferson's writing skills.

It's exhilarating.

Read on, Macduff.

The creation of the Declaration of Independence:

At this point [early 1776] an inspired and rebellious Englishman stuck in his oar. Thomas Paine [1737-1809] was another of the self-educated polymaths the 18th century produced in such large numbers. He was, of all things, a customs officer and exciseman. But he was also a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler, what was termed in England a "barrack-room lawyer". In a later age he would have become a trade union leader. Indeed, he was a trade union leader, who employed his fluent and forceful pen on behalf of Britain's 3,000 excisemen to demand an increase in their pay, and was sacked for his courage.

He came to America in 1774, edited the Pennsylvania Magazine, and soon found himself on the extremist fringe of the Philadelphia patriots. Paine could and did design bridges, he invented a "smokeless candle"- like Franklin he was fascinated by smoke and light – and at one time he drew up detailed topographical scene for the invasion of England. But his real talent was for polemical journalism. In that, he has never been bettered. Indeed it was more than journalism; it was political philosophy, but written for a popular audience, with a devastating sense of topicality, and at great speed. He could pen a slashing article, a forceful, sustained pamphlet, and, without pausing for breath, a whole book, highly readable from cover to cover.

Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was on the streets of Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, and was soon selling fast all over the colonies. In a few weeks it sold over 100,000 copies and virtually everyone had read it or heard about it.

Two things gave it particular impact.

First, it was a piece of atrocity propaganda. The first year of hostilities had furnished many actual instances, and many more myths, of brutal conduct by British or mercenary soldiers. Entire towns, like Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) and Norfolk, had been burned by the British. Women, even children, had been killed in the inevitable bloody chaos of conflict. Paine preyed on these incidents: his argument was that any true-blooded American who was not revolted by them, and prepared to fight in consequence, had "the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant." Crude though this approach was, it went home. Even General Washington, who had read the work by January 31, approved of it.

Second, Paine cut right through the half-and-half arguments in favor of negotiations and a settlement under British sovereignty. He wanted complete independence as the only possible outcome. Nor did he try to make a distinction, as Congress still did, between a wicked parliament and a benign sovereign. He called George III "the royal brute". Indeed, it was Paine who transformed this obstinate, ignorant, and, in his own way, well-meaning man into a personal monster and a political tyrant, a bogey-figure for successive generations of American schoolchildren. Such is war, and such is propaganda. Paine's Common Sense was by no means entirely common sense. Many thought it inflammatory nonsense. But it was the most successful and influential pamphlet ever published.

It was against this explosive background that Thomas Jefferson began his finest hour … On June 11 Congress appointed a committee of [Benjamin] Franklin, [John] Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Jefferson so draft a Declaration of Independence "in case the Congress agreed thereto."

Congress well knew what it was doing when it picked these able men to perform a special task. It was aware that the struggle against a great world power would be long and that it would need friends abroad. It had already set up a Committee of Correspondence, in effect a "Foreign Office", led by Franklin, to get in touch with France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other possible allies. It wanted to put its case before the "court of world opinion," and needed a dignified and well-argued but ringing and memorable statement of what it was doing and why it was doing it. It also wanted to give the future citizens of America a classic statement of what their country was about, so that their children and their children's children could study it and learn it by heart.

Adams (if he is telling the truth) was quite convinced that Jefferson was the man to perform this miracle and proposed he be chairman of the Committee, though in fact he was the youngest member of it (apart from Livingston, the rich son of a New York judge.) He recorded the following conversation between them.

Jefferson: "Why?"
Adams: "Reasons enough."
"What can be your reasons?"
"Reason first: you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of the business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspect and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: you can write ten times better than I can." All this was true enough.

Jefferson produced a superb draft, for which his 1774 pamphlet was a useful preparation. All kinds of philosophical and political influences went into it. They were all well-read men and Jefferson, despite his comparative youth, was the best read of all, and he made full use of the countless hours he had spent pouring over books of history, political theory, and government.

The Declaration is a powerful and wonderfully concise summary of the best Whig thought over several generations. Most of all, it has an electrifying beginning. It is hard to think of any way in which the first two paragraphs can be improved:

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The first [paragraph], with its elegiac note of sadness at dissolving the union with Britain and its wish to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by giving its reasons; the second, with its riveting first sentence, the kernel of the whole: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." After that sentence, the reader, any reader – even George III – is compelled to read on.

The Committee found it necessary to make few changes in Jefferson's draft. Franklin, the practical man, toned down Jefferson's grandiloquence – thus truths, from being "sacred and undeniable" became "self-evident", a masterly improvement. But in general the four others were delighted with Jefferson's work, as well they might be.

Congress was a different matter because at the heart of America's claim to liberty there was a black hole. What of the slaves? How could Congress say that "all men are created equal" when there were 600,000 blacks scattered through the colonies, and concentrated in some of them in huge numbers, who were by law treated as chattels and enjoyed no rights at all? Jefferson and the other members of the Committee tried to up-end this argument – rather dishonestly, one is bound to say – by blaming American slavery on the British and King George.

The original draft charged that the King had "waged a cruel war against human nature" by attacking a "distant people" and "captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere". But when the draft went before the full Congress, on June 28, the Southern delegates were not having this. Those from South Carolina, in particular, were not prepared to accept any admission that slavery was wrong and especially the acknowledgment that it violated the "most sacred rights of life and liberty". If the Declaration said that, then the logical consequence was to free all the slaves forthwith. So the slavery passage was removed, the first of many compromises over the issue during the next eighty years, until it was finally resolved inn an ocean of tears and blood. However, the word "equality" remained in the text, and the fact that it did so was, as it were, a constitutional guarantee that, eventually, the glaring anomaly behind the Declaration would be rectified.

The Congress debated the draft for three days. Paradoxically, delegates spent little time going over the fundamental principles it enshrined, because the bulk of the Declaration presented the specific and detailed case against Britain, and more particularly against the King. The Revolutionaries were determined to scrap the pretense that they distinguished between evil ministers and a king who "could do no wrong", and renounce their allegiance to the crown once and for all. So they fussed over the indictment of the King, to them the core of the document, and left its constitutional and ideological framework, apart from the slavery point, largely intact.

This was just as well. If Congress had chosen to argue over Jefferson's sweeping assumptions and propositions, and resolve their differences with verbal compromises, the magic wrought by his pen would surely have been exorcized, and the world would have been poorer in consequence.

As it was the text was approved on July 2, and on July 4 all the colonies formally adopted what was called, to give it its correct title, "The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America". At the time, and often since, Tom Paine was credited with its authorship, which did not help to endear it to the British, where he was (and still is) regarded with abhorrence. In fact he had nothing to do with it directly, but the term "United States" is certainly his.

On July 8 it was read publicly in the State House Yard and the Liberty Bell rung. The royal coat of arms was torn down and burned. On August 2 it was engrossed on parchment and signed by all the delegates. Whereupon (according to John Hancock) Franklin remarked: "Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Leading up to the Second Continental Congress

Another excerpt fromA History of the American People . This is one of my favorite parts of the whole story of 1774-76. I wish I could have been there. I remember watching on television the demostrations in Tienamen Square, years ago, and taking note of the countless signs reading "Give me liberty or give me death." It brought me to tears. An American revolutionary's words held up by a Chinese college student.

Excerpt describing the lead-in to the Second Constitutional Congress:

Next to religion, the concept of the rule of law was the biggest single force in creating the political civilization of the colonies. This was something they shared with all Englishmen. The law was not just necessary - essential to any civil society - it was noble. What happened in courts and assemblies on weekdays was the secular equivalent of what happened in church on Sundays. The rule of law in England, as Americans were taught in their schools, went back even beyond Magna Carta, to Anglo-Saxon times, to the laws of King Alfred and the Witanmagots, the ancient precursor of Massachusetts' Assembly and Virginia's House of Burgesses.

William the Conqueror had attempted to impose what Lord Chief Justice Coke, the great early 17th century authority of the law, had called 'The Norman Yoke'. But he had been frustrated. So, in time, had Charles I been frustrated, when he tried to re-impose it, by the Long Parliament. Now, in its arrogance and complacency, the English parliament, forgetting the lessons of the past, was trying to impose the Norman Yoke on free-born Americans, to take away their cherished rule of law and undermine the rights they enjoyed under it with as much justice as any Englishman! Lord North would have been astonished to learn he was doing any such thing, but no matter: that is what many, most, Americans believed. So America now had to do what parliamentarians had to do in 1640. 'What we did,' said Jefferson later, 'was with the help of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for revolutionary precedents of those days.' So, in a sense, the United States was the posthumous child of the Long Parliament.

But Americans' fears that their liberties were being taken away, and the rule of law subverted, had to be dramatized - just as those old parliamentarians had dramatized their struggle by the Grand Remonstrance against Charles I and the famous 'Flight of the Five Members'. Who would play John Hampden, who said he would rather die than pay Ship Money to King Charles?

Up sprang Jefferson's friend and idol, Patrick Henry.

As a preliminary move towards setting up a united resistance of the mainland colonies to British parliamentary pretensions, a congress of colonial leaders met in Philadelphia, at Carpenters Hall, between September 5 and October 26, 1774. Only Georgia, dissuaded from participating by its popular governor, did not send delegates. Some fifty representatives from twelve colonies passed a series of resolutions, calling for defiance of the Coercive Acts, the arming of a militia, tax-resistance. The key vote came on October 14 when delegates passed the Declaration and Resolves, which roundly condemned British interference in America's internal affairs and asserted the rights of colonial assemblies to enact legislation and impose taxes as they pleased.

A common American political consciousness was taking shape, and delegates began to speak with a distinctive national voice. At the end of it, Patrick Henry marked this change in his customary dramatic manner: 'The distinctions between Virginians and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American.' Not everyone agreed with him, as yet, and the Continental Congress, as it called itself, voted by colonies rather than as individual Americans. But this body, essentially based on Franklin's earlier proposals, perpetuated its existence by agreeing to meet again in May 1775. Before that could happen, on February 5, 1775, parliament in London declared Massachusetts, identified as the most unruly and contumacious of the colonies, to be in a state of rebellion, thus authorizing the lawful authorities to use what force they thought fit. The fighting had begun. Hence when the Virginia burgesses met in convention to instruct their delegates to the Second Continental Congress, Henry saw his chance to bring home to all the revolutionary drama of the moment.

Henry was a born ham actor, in a great age of acting - the Age of Garrick. The British parliament was full of actors, notably [William] Pitt himself ('He acted even when he was dying') and the young [Edmund] Burke, who was not above drawing a dagger, and hurling it on the ground to make a point. But Henry excelled them all. He proposed to the burgesses that Virginia should raise a militia and be ready to do battle. What was Virginia waiting for? Massachusetts was fighting. 'Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we her idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?'

Then Henry got to his knees, in the posture of a manacled slave, intoning in a low but rising voice: 'Is life so dear, our peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!' He then bent to the earth with his hands still crossed, for a few seconds, and suddenly sprang to his feet, shouting, 'Give me liberty!' and flung wide his arms, paused, lowered his arms, clenched his right hand as if holding a dagger at his breast, and said in sepulchral tones: 'Or give me death!' He then beat his breast, with his hand holding the imaginary dagger.

There was silence, broken by a man listening at the open window, who shouted: "Let me be buried on this spot!'

Henry had made his point.

Envy revisited

So yesterday I linked to an article on envy by Joseph Epstein. Joseph Epstein is quite a good writer, and I keep my eyes open for his essays. I have yet to read his book Snobbery, which I am looking forward to delving into sometime in the next ten years when my schedule clears up.

But anyway, the always-awesome Ben Kepple also linked to the Epstein piece, and after reading Kepple's words, after diving into his analysis, his discussion-points, his disagreements with some of Epstein's theses, here is how I feel like my original post read:

Me like Epstein.
Epstein good.
Read Epstein.
Yum yum.

Robert McCloskey

A beautiful bio of Robert McCloskey, who died yesterday.

I loved the quote from him, where he talks about how he started out wanting to do "great art", but "great art" has a way of not paying well, so he ended up bringing some of his work to be evaluated by an editor for children's books:

I never sold an oil painting, only a few water colors at the most modest prices, and financially my art career was a bust. I went to call on an editor of children's books in New York. I came into her office with my folio under my arm and sat on the edge of my chair. She looked at the examples of "great art" that I had brought along (they were woodcuts, fraught with black drama). I don't remember just the words she used to tell me to get wise to myself and to shelve the dragons, Pegasus, and limpid pool business and learn how and what to "art" with. I think we talked mostly of Ohio.

That one quote alone makes me think that I would have liked the man, had I met him in person. "Shelve the dragons, Pegasus, and limpid pool business" -- a smart woman, that editor! There is also a beautiful story of how he brought ducks home to his apartment, so he could draw them, in preparation for what would eventually be the classic children's book Make Way for Ducklings.

I have tears in my eyes ... I must admit.

Robert McCloskey's books were the first to hypnotize me. The first in a long long line of books which captivated my heart, my mind, cracked open a door inside me, showing me other worlds, other lives, setting my imagination on fire. He was the first. He was the first.

30 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do Before Turning 30

A friend of mine, Siobhan Adcock, has just published her first book: 30 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do Before Turning 30. Yay, Siobhan!! I am basically announcing the release of the book, and if I have any readers who have yet to turn 30, and feel they need some of this essential information, I highly recommend the book. It is on display at my local Barnes & Noble, so I assume you can find it near where you live as well.

Some of the things Siobhan says you should know how to do before turning 30:

Keep a plant alive for over a year

Hold your liquor

Parallel park

Send a drink to someone’s table

Clean your place in under 45 minutes, when friends, relatives, or prospective lovers are coming by unexpectedly, and soon

And much much more. She tells you what you should know how to do, WHY it is a good skill to have, HOW to do whatever it is you should know how to do (how the hell does one learn how to hold one's liquor - well, Siobhan tells you how) and then gives trouble-shooting pointers should you run into roadblocks. Her prose is so amusing that it made me laugh out loud.

It's getting good reviews, she's been appearing on radio shows, and everything is looking very well for her. I'm very excited and proud!

Full disclosure: My name is listed on the Acknowledgements page. Heh heh

The deadliest sin of them all

Joseph Epstein (a personal fave of mine) has a new essay out on envy.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. You should read the whole thing, it's fascinating, and he is also a terrific writer.

Here are some choice quotes;

"Apart from Socrates, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and only a few others, at one time or another, we have all felt flashes of envy, even if in varying intensities, from its minor pricks to its deep, soul-destroying, lacerating stabs. So widespread is it--a word for envy, I have read, exists in all known languages--that one is ready to believe it is the sin for which the best argument can be made that it is part of human nature."

"Most of us could still sleep decently if accused of any of the other six deadly sins; but to be accused of envy would be seriously distressing, so clearly does such an accusation go directly to character. The other deadly sins, though all have the disapproval of religion, do not so thoroughly, so deeply demean, diminish, and disqualify a person. Not the least of its stigmata is the pettiness implicit in envy."

Ouch! So true! Envy, for me, has always gone hand in hand with terrible shame.

And one more quote to whet your whistle:

"On the international scene, many if not most wars have been fought because of one nation's envy of another's territory and all they derive from it, or out of jealously guarded riches that a nation feels are endangered by those less rich who are likely to be envious of their superior position. In this connection, it is difficult not to feel that, at least in part, much of the anti-American feeling that arose after September 11, 2001, had envy, some of it fairly rancorous, at its heart. In the magazine Granta, the Indian writer Ramachandra Guha wrote that "historically, anti-Americanism in India was shaped by an aesthetic distaste for America's greatest gift--the making of money." But can "aesthetic distaste" here be any more than a not-very-well-disguised code word for envy?"

Oh, sadness

Robert McCloskey, author of "Make Way for Ducklings", "Blueberries for Sal", "One Morning in Maine" and many others, has died.

In the blunt words of my nephew Cashel: "I'm sad."

McCloskey's books are absolutely beloved by the O'Malley family. We grew up on them. We memorized parts of them ("CLAM CHOWDER FOR LUNCH"), and I obsessed over the illustrations. They were absolute magic for me. I wanted to creep through a crack in the atmosphere, and be in that big windy house in Maine, digging clams with Sal and her father. Also, both my parents are from Boston-Irish families, so "Make Way for Ducklings", taking place in Boston's public gardens, with the swan-boats, felt, somehow, when I was little, that it was written FOR me. I rode in those swan-boats! I rode in those swan-boats! I know that place! That book is about me!

He is a treasure. His books are classic.

His books, for me, contain my entire childhood. And now he is gone.

Thank you so much, Mr. McCloskey, for your books. I never wrote you a letter or anything, and now it's too late, but wherever you are, I want you to know that your books meant, and still mean, the world to me. If I ever have children, I will continue the tradition, and read all of your books to them.

Writers like you (writers who not only are talented, and good story-tellers, but who somehow create stories that enter people's personal landscapes, writers who somehow get into the hearts of their readers forever) are a rarity. So rare.

MORE:

Here's the "obituary" piece in The New York Times, honoring this man.

"The Truth of Death"

Yesterday, McSweeney's (an awesome literary journal, if you have not encountered it yet) featured a short piece entitled:

NOTES SCRIBBLED BY A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR ON A STUDENT PAPER ENTITLED "THE TRUTH OF DEATH".

It's hysterical.

Reminds me of that old Woody Allen quote: "I cheated on my metaphysical exam in college. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

More from Robert Evans

Here's how his relationship began with Ali MacGraw, whom he ended up marrying (not to mention making her a star).

But needless to say, from the following excerpt, things did not begin well. He had to wine and dine her to get her to agree to do Love Story, and she wasn't a star yet, it was Love Story which catapulted her into mega-mega stardom. At the time of the casting of the film, she was a hippie model, living in New York City. Yet her ego was enormous, and she told Robert Evans she wanted to approve her co-stars, and was also furious about the director Evans had chosen.

Here's the story of their lunch:

I set up a lunch date with Love Story's mentor and star, MacGraw, at La Grenouille. By the time dessert was served, I would have made the phone book with her. Would you say she got to me? I sure in hell knew I didn't get to her. With all my props, my position, my "boy wonder" rep, she was as turned off to me as I was turned on to her. My competition was a model/actor she had been living with for three years, sharing the bills in a 3 1/2 room apartment on West 77th Street. Almost purposefully, she kept on interjecting how in love she was. Leaving the restaurant, I hailed a cab. As it pulled up she gave me her last zinger.

"Hope we shoot in the summer. Robin and I are getting married in the fall. We plan to spend October in Venice. Ever been there?"

"Nope."

"Then wait. Only go there when you're madly in love."

That's it. I grabbed her arm, whispering, "Never plan, kid. Planning's for the poor."

She tried to snap back. "No way--"

"Let me finish, Miss Charm. An hour ago, Love Story was even money to end up in the shredder. You win, I lose. Got it? Stop being Miss Inverse Snob, will ya? It doesn't wear well. Don't turn your nose down to success. If anything goes wrong with you and Blondie between now and post time, I'm seven digits away."

Uh ...

What?

I love it: "Never plan, kid. Planning's for the poor."

He is an insane personality, and catapulted American films into the stratosphere.

Robert Evans

The Kid Stays in the Picture, written by maverick film-producer Robert Evans, the man responsible for Harold and Maude, Love Story, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, is absolute sheer liquid pleasure. I am tearing through it.

The writing style of the book is hysterical.

Here's an excerpt:

Let's get down to facts -- like agents, managers, lawyers, money. Writing about where it's at is easy pocket money; about how it feels, that's different. Not only does it take talent, which most of these penholders don't have, but writing about feelings takes a helluva lot more time. We're in the business of deals, not excellence. The ten percenters know their clients can write three concept scripts a year. To write texture takes time; time is money and money is what pays their light bills.

See what I mean? I love it. He's such a tough guy. He also knows everybody, has had lunch with everybody, has slept with everybody, and has lived to tell the tale. It's the kind of book where he was supposed to be hanging out with Sharon Tate at the Polanski house the night everyone was butchered by a bunch of wild lunatics. Sharon had called Evans and invited him over, and he said something along the lines of, "Listen, baby, I gotta work."

It's all: "Lemme tell ya somethin', baby..."

I love it.

And the stories are priceless. Let me dig some up and share them here. There's a lot to learn from his tale.

Show, don't tell

The theme of my writing group last night was the Writing 101 lesson of Show Don't Tell.

Don't say "Margot was very neurotic". Describe what Margot does, and then let the reader think, "Wow, Margot is neurotic."

This is a simple lesson, obviously, and yet it comes up over and over again.

The "Show. Don't Tell" dictum also applies to acting. If you are commenting on the character, trying to let the audience in on something, "acting" neurotic, or "acting" psychotic ... then you are telegraphing something out. You are "telling".

One of the main things which Stanislavksky and then Lee Strasberg taught incessantly is that acting IS behavior.

What do we remember about Travis Bickle? Not what he says about himself, not a thesis-statement on his relevance to today's society. We remember him with a mohawk, talking to himself in the mirror. That is a classic example of "acting is behavior". All Robert DeNiro had to do, to "tell" us who Travis was, was to DO what Travis Bickle DID, to OBEY the script ... and obviously, the man is a massive talent, so that helps. But the behavior of the character tells the entire story. The behavior is the thing. Not the words said.

Each piece worked on last night at our Writing Group had a "show, don't tell" lesson attached to it.

It was a theme.

Stephen King

There is a story by Stephen King in the latest New Yorker.

On the Web version of the story, they also link to an archived piece, from 2000, when Stephen King describes, in horrific detail, being hit by the car in 1999 ... and the writers block which ensued. Or, if not writer's block, exactly, the terrific challenge of getting back down to work, in his new life. A life filled with physical pain. And pain-killers.

As a writer, I found the whole thing intensely moving.

Anyone who wants to be artist, or who already is an artist, should read this piece.

It is inspirational. Not because Stephen King is in an inspirational mood, or writes it to be inspirational. The inspiration of the piece comes from the exact opposite objective, to my mind. I found it inspirational because King is writing from the STRUGGLE, the pain, the loss. King was hit by a car, while he was taking a walk ... the bones in his legs were crushed ... the doctor described them as "marbles" ... Etc. etc. A devastating blow. His life will never be the same.

And he writes about trying to sit back down at his desk, and create again.

A great piece. I highly recommend it.