Started my reading for the RIP Challenge with Virginia Woolf's A Haunted House. As this was only 3 pages (and my other selections had not yet arrived from Amazon) and a long holiday weekend, I culled my book stacks for other RIP candidates.
Turned out to be a grumpy weekend of reading. I guess I'll have to call myself the Persnickety Kitten this week. Anyway, here goes...
Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allen Poe. I assumed I've read this at some point, but couldn't recall so I dusted off a copy of Poe's short works and gave it a whirl. What a disappointment. A ridiculous ending, even accounting for the fact that it was the first of the detective genre. I'll be interested in what other readers have to say, see if I can muster some appreciation for it at that point. But for me, Cask of Amontillado is a better story by far.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson. Though Jackson's writing is, as always, fine, I really disliked living with the crazy narrator, plus I figured out whodunit early on. Had to force myself through it. And the ending went way over the top. I revisited The Haunting of Hill House, which is at least spookier (though oddly dated).
That leaves us with: A Haunted House, Virginia Woolf. A mere 3 pages, but the clear winner for weekend number 1. Not sure it really qualifies as a short story (sketch? vignette? pastiche?), but this of all this weekend's RIP readings offered up genuine atmosphere, provocative thoughts and complex texture. The stream of consciousness writing gives an idea of why the living fear ghosts -- They embody our regret for, longing of and reconnection to the past:
Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs.
Here's hoping that James, Irving or Wharton arrive at my doorstep by Friday!
9.05.2006
8.31.2006
RIP Challenge - life is now worth living
Remember that semi-awful Elton John song, Someone Saved My Life Tonight? Well, I feel that way about Carl V. over at Stainless Steel Droppings. Just when a stupid-ass work e-mail made me want to drink a bottle of Vitameatvegemin before ramming my head through my computer screen, Carl invented the RIP (Readers Imbibing Peril) challenge. Any daredevil readers willing to take up the gauntlet pick 5 books of chills and thrills to read from this weekend through Halloween. Irresistible!
My one dilemma is that I am committed already to Proust Vol 2 and three Middle East books, plus Henry James, before year's end. Still, I'm with Carl V. -- I never can pass up at least one spinetingler in autumn. I was going to make do with Virginia Woolf's The Haunted House, but this is too tempting. (Sorry, Marcel, I'm a fickle kitten.) So, I negelected my work e-mails temporarily, and drooled over countless titles before arriving at my selections: a little offbeat, very literary, with a smidgeon of humor. A lot like moi.
Now I can take up memos and brochures and PowerPoint slides for the rest of the day.
Thanks, Carl, for giving me something to live for.
LK's RIP Selections
My one dilemma is that I am committed already to Proust Vol 2 and three Middle East books, plus Henry James, before year's end. Still, I'm with Carl V. -- I never can pass up at least one spinetingler in autumn. I was going to make do with Virginia Woolf's The Haunted House, but this is too tempting. (Sorry, Marcel, I'm a fickle kitten.) So, I negelected my work e-mails temporarily, and drooled over countless titles before arriving at my selections: a little offbeat, very literary, with a smidgeon of humor. A lot like moi.
Now I can take up memos and brochures and PowerPoint slides for the rest of the day.
Thanks, Carl, for giving me something to live for.
LK's RIP Selections
- The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (okay, it'll count for my James book at least)
- Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (this is totally revisiting my childhood)
- A Haunted House, Virginia Woolf (is it a horror story? the title counts doesn't it?)
- The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (love Edith Wharton, love the fact that she couldn't sleep in a room with a ghost book even in it but managed to churn out some tales of her own)
THIS IS SORT OF LIKE THOSE BONUS TRACKS ON CDs, BUT MAYBE NOT SO MUCH, BUT JUST GO WITH ME--FINAL SELECTION WILL INCLUDE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING, BOTH IF I CAN MANAGE IT OR IF VIRGINIA TURNS OUT TO BE A RED HERRING:
- Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (a spoof on gothics by Jane Austen? if I can't squeeze it in this year, this is one I will definitely get to at some point)
- Dragonwyck, Anya Seaton (the dark horse, and fairly lengthy given my crunched circumstances, but in the spirit of the event [bad pun intended], I wanted to branch out into new territory)
Thoughts for Thursday - ramblin'
This week I woke up in the middle of the night with a complete blog entry formed in my mind. First thing next morning, I fired up the computer and typed it all in. And then I read it and thought, The only thing to save this from sounding completely moronic would be for CNN's Anderson Cooper to read it live from Bourbon Street. So all I have is this rambling post, powered by the final caffeinated fumes from my brain....So, does anybody really believe GW read The Stranger--at least, the version without pictures? I, for one, don't believe he's ever finished My Pet Goat. He said he was reading about "the battle of New Orleans," which I Googled. Apparently, he's referring to a book by John McPhee, The Control of Nature. Read more here. If you're ever looking for an engrossing book about the Mississippi and how it affected New Orleans and other cities, read John M. Barry's Rising Tide. I learned about Eads and his Bridge (I'm from St. Louis originally, so that was a revelation) and dredging the River and all sorts of terribly interesting, arcane facts about the Old Miss....I am loving In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdad Soueif. The reader in me, who just wants to enjoy the story, is battling the critic in me, which keeps asking WHY I'm enjoying the story. Hell, the reader is winning. Maybe I'll get a post in here replete with in-depth analysis about the book, but right now, I eagerly anticipate my nightly before-bed pages....Okay, back to the grind.
8.30.2006
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)
Naguib Mahfouz was not only one of the best Arab writers, certainly, but also one of the best writers of the 20th century.
I'm currently reading fiction of the Middle East, as a way of understanding what is happening there. In addition to 'In the Eye of the Sun' and 'Beirut Blues,' I am adding to the list Mahfouz's 'Children of Gebelawi,' in honor of his passing.
Rest in peace. Thank you for your wonderful books.
I'm currently reading fiction of the Middle East, as a way of understanding what is happening there. In addition to 'In the Eye of the Sun' and 'Beirut Blues,' I am adding to the list Mahfouz's 'Children of Gebelawi,' in honor of his passing.
Rest in peace. Thank you for your wonderful books.
8.29.2006
Hurricane Katrina
On this anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I was wracking my brain for New Orleans or Gulf Coast literature to quote, and then I came across this in a book I’m reading. It seems mysteriously apropos.
Listen, my heart, and bewail the fortune of thy land. Weep, O Heart, alone; for there is none to comfort you. Look, my heart, at the sun which is neither rising nor setting but hidden by clouds. Look at Egypt’s Nile, its waters shrinking. Look at the cattle roaming without a shepherd, and the ships no longer speed to the Phoenician shore. The scales of justice have been thrown out on the road to be trodden under the heel of every passer-by. Nothing remains of justice but the name, and in that name crimes are committed. The ululations of weddings have died down and in their place are wails and screams to be heard.
Is this not the land of Ra? When will the Good Shepherd rise to its rescue? He whose heart knows no desolation, He who spends His day gathering His stray cattle and leading them to water? When will he come to tear out evil by the root? To annihilate the seed of evil even before it takes root? Where is He? Where is He today?
Ab-U-Or (2030 BC)
Listen, my heart, and bewail the fortune of thy land. Weep, O Heart, alone; for there is none to comfort you. Look, my heart, at the sun which is neither rising nor setting but hidden by clouds. Look at Egypt’s Nile, its waters shrinking. Look at the cattle roaming without a shepherd, and the ships no longer speed to the Phoenician shore. The scales of justice have been thrown out on the road to be trodden under the heel of every passer-by. Nothing remains of justice but the name, and in that name crimes are committed. The ululations of weddings have died down and in their place are wails and screams to be heard.
Is this not the land of Ra? When will the Good Shepherd rise to its rescue? He whose heart knows no desolation, He who spends His day gathering His stray cattle and leading them to water? When will he come to tear out evil by the root? To annihilate the seed of evil even before it takes root? Where is He? Where is He today?
Ab-U-Or (2030 BC)
8.28.2006
Books on writing
I used to be a sucker for books on writing. Every time I’d see one in a bookstore, free box or bargain bin, I snapped it up, hoping I would come across that magical nugget of advice that will make writing easier than it usually is. And maybe more enjoyable in the process.
Most writers must be tortured in this way; otherwise, there would be no market for “how-to” books on writing.
Francine Prose apparently has tossed her hat into the books-on-writing ring. She offers “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.” (What is it about books on writing that makes the authors choose lengthy titles? It’s as if they have to clarify what they are trying to write about. Funny.) Emily Barton reviewed this for the New York Times. (Do read Conversational Reading's perceptive skewer on this review, plus the recommendations for books on writing.)
Barton says: “At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question — the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”
To me, that is not only an arrogant question for Prose to pose (how’s that for lousy alliteration?), but it misses the mark entirely. I really do not think anyone who is serious enough about writing to pick up the book believes for one second that it will teach the craft. Writers just want some reassurance that yes, writing is as horribly difficult for everyone else as it is for them, and that yes, the horrors can be overcome, even if only temporarily, by completing a silly exercise, practicing hypnosis, starting a journal, placing green apples on your desk, or downing a bottle of Scotch every morning.
Beyond the smug attitude Prose seemingly adopts in this book, carefully distancing herself from any suggestion that creative writing could possibly be a taught skill like forging anvils or building car chassis, she does have a point here, as Barton explains:
Prose also recommends savoring books rather than racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”
Reading for delight: This is ultimately the reason I gave up reading about writing, and moved to reading for reading’s sake and writing for the hope of connection. It’s a lesson struggling writers tend to forget. If you want to love to write, you must love to read.
Here are some of the many books on writing in my collection, in no particular order. I do like dipping into them now and again for inspiration, reminders, compassion and wit. Any favorites you would like to share?
Dorothea Brand, Becoming a Writer: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Oakley Hall, The Art and Craft of Novel Writing
Gail Sher, One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Anne Lamotte, Bird by Bird
Stephen King, On Writing
David Bayles, Ted Orland, Art and Fear (not strictly about writing, but the same principles apply)
John Gardner, Art of Fiction
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft
Eudora Welty, On Writing and One Writer’s Beginnings
Most writers must be tortured in this way; otherwise, there would be no market for “how-to” books on writing.
Francine Prose apparently has tossed her hat into the books-on-writing ring. She offers “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.” (What is it about books on writing that makes the authors choose lengthy titles? It’s as if they have to clarify what they are trying to write about. Funny.) Emily Barton reviewed this for the New York Times. (Do read Conversational Reading's perceptive skewer on this review, plus the recommendations for books on writing.)
Barton says: “At the start of her new book on writing, Francine Prose dispatches with The Question — the five words that inevitably confront writers who teach, writers who don’t teach, and possibly even nonwriters who do neither: “Can creative writing be taught?”
To me, that is not only an arrogant question for Prose to pose (how’s that for lousy alliteration?), but it misses the mark entirely. I really do not think anyone who is serious enough about writing to pick up the book believes for one second that it will teach the craft. Writers just want some reassurance that yes, writing is as horribly difficult for everyone else as it is for them, and that yes, the horrors can be overcome, even if only temporarily, by completing a silly exercise, practicing hypnosis, starting a journal, placing green apples on your desk, or downing a bottle of Scotch every morning.
Beyond the smug attitude Prose seemingly adopts in this book, carefully distancing herself from any suggestion that creative writing could possibly be a taught skill like forging anvils or building car chassis, she does have a point here, as Barton explains:
Prose also recommends savoring books rather than racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”
Reading for delight: This is ultimately the reason I gave up reading about writing, and moved to reading for reading’s sake and writing for the hope of connection. It’s a lesson struggling writers tend to forget. If you want to love to write, you must love to read.
Here are some of the many books on writing in my collection, in no particular order. I do like dipping into them now and again for inspiration, reminders, compassion and wit. Any favorites you would like to share?
Dorothea Brand, Becoming a Writer: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Oakley Hall, The Art and Craft of Novel Writing
Gail Sher, One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Anne Lamotte, Bird by Bird
Stephen King, On Writing
David Bayles, Ted Orland, Art and Fear (not strictly about writing, but the same principles apply)
John Gardner, Art of Fiction
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft
Eudora Welty, On Writing and One Writer’s Beginnings
8.25.2006
A link and a contest
Happy Friday, everyone! Just a few quick links for those interested....
Identity Theory started a new column about the publishing industry called "The Magic Bullet: Q&A for Writers." Send in a question that brings up anxiety about writing, and receive an answer from fiction editor, Jane Friedman (author of "The Beginning Writer's Answer Book). Go here: http://www.identitytheory.com/magicbullet/
The deadline for entering the Storyglossia Fiction Prize contest is October 1, 2006. First prize is $1000 and publication in Issue 16. All entries will be considered for publication. Click here for the complete guidelines. Not that we need competition (we think we can dust up something for an entry), but we like to support them.
Identity Theory started a new column about the publishing industry called "The Magic Bullet: Q&A for Writers." Send in a question that brings up anxiety about writing, and receive an answer from fiction editor, Jane Friedman (author of "The Beginning Writer's Answer Book). Go here: http://www.identitytheory.com/magicbullet/
The deadline for entering the Storyglossia Fiction Prize contest is October 1, 2006. First prize is $1000 and publication in Issue 16. All entries will be considered for publication. Click here for the complete guidelines. Not that we need competition (we think we can dust up something for an entry), but we like to support them.
8.24.2006
Thoughts for Thursday – one more for the TBR pile!
We’ve arrived, once more, at another Thursday, the day when the seemingly endless dark chasm of the Work Week opens to a tunnel ending in Light, offering a glimpse to a near future when time is again our own. Walk toward the Light! Walk toward the Light!
Today, we celebrate Thursday with an excerpt from a book review by Eric Ormsby over at the New York Sun. Now, we can’t vouch for Ormsby’s critiquing talents, but this particular book had LK’s whiskers standing at attention. It’s called: Edward Mendelson’s “The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life.”
According to the review, this book links seven stages of human life with seven classic 19th- and 20th-century novels, all by women: one each by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and three by Virginia Woolf. If that wasn’t enough, the book delves into topics many litbloggers have been discussing recently: how novels enlarge our lives and how our experience influences our reading of them.
Intrigued? Read more from the Ormsby review:
…It's a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of "theory" and its barbarous jargon. How refreshing then to read a study which dwells without apology, and with genuine insight, on the ways in which novels impinge upon our own experience.
Mr. Mendelson…shows not solely how these novels enlarge and illumine our own lives, but how our experience nuances and influences our reading of them. And though Mr. Mendelson is unflappably polite and even decorous in his discussions, his book is rather radical.
…The reason that women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries were more likely than men to write about the emotional depths of personal life is that they were more likely to be treated impersonally, to be stereotyped as predictable members of a category, rather than recognized as unique human beings—and a woman writer therefore had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing, by insisting that those values matter to everyone and that everyone experiences them uniquely.
…I don't think I'll read "Frankenstein" or "Wuthering Heights" or "Middlemarch" or "Mrs. Dalloway" in quite the same way again, thanks to his astute discussions….Of "Frankenstein," which he links to "birth," he writes that it "is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love." Or of "Wuthering Heights," he notes aptly that "Childhood, in this novel, is a state of titanic intensity, adulthood a state of trivial weakness."
…He notes…that in "Middlemarch" marriage is "a condition in which one partner lives in ignorance of the other partner's most intense thoughts and crucial acts, and knowledge always comes too late to be of use." All married couples will have experienced this dislocating insight at one moment or another….
We don’t know about you, but we’ve already reserved our copy!
Today, we celebrate Thursday with an excerpt from a book review by Eric Ormsby over at the New York Sun. Now, we can’t vouch for Ormsby’s critiquing talents, but this particular book had LK’s whiskers standing at attention. It’s called: Edward Mendelson’s “The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life.”
According to the review, this book links seven stages of human life with seven classic 19th- and 20th-century novels, all by women: one each by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and three by Virginia Woolf. If that wasn’t enough, the book delves into topics many litbloggers have been discussing recently: how novels enlarge our lives and how our experience influences our reading of them.
Intrigued? Read more from the Ormsby review:
…It's a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of "theory" and its barbarous jargon. How refreshing then to read a study which dwells without apology, and with genuine insight, on the ways in which novels impinge upon our own experience.
Mr. Mendelson…shows not solely how these novels enlarge and illumine our own lives, but how our experience nuances and influences our reading of them. And though Mr. Mendelson is unflappably polite and even decorous in his discussions, his book is rather radical.
…The reason that women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries were more likely than men to write about the emotional depths of personal life is that they were more likely to be treated impersonally, to be stereotyped as predictable members of a category, rather than recognized as unique human beings—and a woman writer therefore had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing, by insisting that those values matter to everyone and that everyone experiences them uniquely.
…I don't think I'll read "Frankenstein" or "Wuthering Heights" or "Middlemarch" or "Mrs. Dalloway" in quite the same way again, thanks to his astute discussions….Of "Frankenstein," which he links to "birth," he writes that it "is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love." Or of "Wuthering Heights," he notes aptly that "Childhood, in this novel, is a state of titanic intensity, adulthood a state of trivial weakness."
…He notes…that in "Middlemarch" marriage is "a condition in which one partner lives in ignorance of the other partner's most intense thoughts and crucial acts, and knowledge always comes too late to be of use." All married couples will have experienced this dislocating insight at one moment or another….
We don’t know about you, but we’ve already reserved our copy!
8.22.2006
I never read it...have you?
I got this bright idea from Yogamum at Yoga Gumbo.
She gives a lovely list of the Brit’s 100 best-loved books (many of which she has admirably checked off). It all reminded Yogamum of a drinking game she used to play in grad school called “I Never Read It.”
In this game, apparently, each player would name a classic “all English majors must read this” novel that he or she hadn’t read, and then the others would ridicule him/her for not having read it. If players had read it, they’d take a drink. Wow. That is so much more interesting a drinking game than quarters! (You know, bounce a quarter off the table into a beer glass and chug ‘til you choke on the quarter or puke, whichever comes first.) I wanna party with those wordsmiths! However, there are so many books I can be ridiculed for having not read, I would probably be the only sober one at the table.
I must forego the alcoholic chugs; however, I am going to add a twist to the game. First of all, I will admit to not having read any works by a major novelist. (I blame the American school system.) The admission makes me blush and groan, but I must confess. This is to rectify my having paraded myself in the blogosphere as The Literate Kitten, when all along I was merely A Literate Kitten.
The major novelist is…Henry James!
Before you cast any aspersions, please let me hasten to add that I have read Moliere and Balzac...in French. So there.
Regretfully (I say without conviction), I’ve managed to avoid the fiction of the great Henry James, and he is arguably the most important American novelist—unless you prefer to think of him as one of the better English novelists. And if you don’t count Faulkner, who lived in the South, which is a very different country than America. No matter, I’ve read very little of James’s work. An unpleasant short story or two and about one-fourth of “The Golden Bowl.” Although I did see the movie.
But, wait, there’s more!
I ask my dear readers to name the novel by Henry James they believe is his best. Whichever title receives the most votes will be read by me over the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Thus, having read at least one entire work by Henry James, I will be able to reclaim the mantle of The Literate Kitten, sans guilty chafing. And give myself indigestion on Turkey Day. All at the same time.
(No votes will automatically default to the shortest Henry James novel, “Turn of the Screw.” No person may enter more than once. Prizes are not transferable and must not be redeemed by cash. If there were prizes, that is. All entries become property of The Literate Kitten. You must be 21 or older to play.)
Oh, and while you're casting your vote, you might share a classic you've never read...just to make me feel a tiny bit less like a literary outcast.
She gives a lovely list of the Brit’s 100 best-loved books (many of which she has admirably checked off). It all reminded Yogamum of a drinking game she used to play in grad school called “I Never Read It.”
In this game, apparently, each player would name a classic “all English majors must read this” novel that he or she hadn’t read, and then the others would ridicule him/her for not having read it. If players had read it, they’d take a drink. Wow. That is so much more interesting a drinking game than quarters! (You know, bounce a quarter off the table into a beer glass and chug ‘til you choke on the quarter or puke, whichever comes first.) I wanna party with those wordsmiths! However, there are so many books I can be ridiculed for having not read, I would probably be the only sober one at the table.
I must forego the alcoholic chugs; however, I am going to add a twist to the game. First of all, I will admit to not having read any works by a major novelist. (I blame the American school system.) The admission makes me blush and groan, but I must confess. This is to rectify my having paraded myself in the blogosphere as The Literate Kitten, when all along I was merely A Literate Kitten.
The major novelist is…Henry James!
Before you cast any aspersions, please let me hasten to add that I have read Moliere and Balzac...in French. So there.
Regretfully (I say without conviction), I’ve managed to avoid the fiction of the great Henry James, and he is arguably the most important American novelist—unless you prefer to think of him as one of the better English novelists. And if you don’t count Faulkner, who lived in the South, which is a very different country than America. No matter, I’ve read very little of James’s work. An unpleasant short story or two and about one-fourth of “The Golden Bowl.” Although I did see the movie.
But, wait, there’s more!
I ask my dear readers to name the novel by Henry James they believe is his best. Whichever title receives the most votes will be read by me over the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Thus, having read at least one entire work by Henry James, I will be able to reclaim the mantle of The Literate Kitten, sans guilty chafing. And give myself indigestion on Turkey Day. All at the same time.
(No votes will automatically default to the shortest Henry James novel, “Turn of the Screw.” No person may enter more than once. Prizes are not transferable and must not be redeemed by cash. If there were prizes, that is. All entries become property of The Literate Kitten. You must be 21 or older to play.)
Oh, and while you're casting your vote, you might share a classic you've never read...just to make me feel a tiny bit less like a literary outcast.
8.21.2006
The thrill of books
Some people say books will go the way of dinosaurs. Supposedly, we will enjoy reading “War and Peace” or “Moby-Dick” on a computer screen. But, as a reader, I recently experienced the visceral delight of book ownership that I realize no computer can possibly replace.
It started with the tight cardboard package on my porch, emblazoned with the Amazon logo, heralding the arrival of a new book. A mini Christmas-thrill electrified my stomach: Which book was it? (I had ordered three.) I ran upstairs, shedding my burdens of purse and jacket, procured the kitchen scissors and sliced open the package. The wrappings fell away, I brushed back the advertising fliers, and there it was.
The scent of new paper with a hint of binding glue, mingled with the cardboard packaging, perfumed the air. The cover, to my delight, read: “In the Eye of the Sun” by Ahdaf Soueif, which meant I could begin my fiction reading of the Middle East (my latest literary quest). I balanced the book between both palms, noting the heft, the silken smoothness of its new cover, the soft edges of the pages. The exotic beauty of the woman pictured on the cover promised a rich, textured story. I peeked inside, comforted by the fact that the text was large and airy and serif-faced. (I’ve actually foregone reading books because of sans serif text type.)
Physically, this is an inviting book.
The presentation of a book has much to do with the reading experience. I found the Lydia Davis edition of “Swann’s Way” gratifyingly pleasant, with its rich foil-embossed cover (sturdy yet flexible) and coarse-edged, thick creamy paper which rather emulated Proust’s prose: elegant, dense yet rough about the edges. I started the second volume of Proust, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” but it’s not a friendly book that invites sinking into. Not only is the prose difficult, but also the book itself is unfriendly: Hard, heavy and awkward to hold, with a cover illustration that resembles a discontinued wallpaper pattern. I rather dread having to live with this monstrosity for weeks or months. I have the same reaction to hidebound library books stiff in their crackly plastic covers.
This is part of the reading experience, the physicality of books.
As a child, I enjoyed visiting libraries. I loved the church-like hush, silent sense of purpose and friendly, musty smell of many books on shelves. It’s the same reason I prowl bookstores now, especially the small local ones that mingle new books with used ones, integrating the importance of brand-new crisp books with the relaxed attitude of books already read and enjoyed (perhaps even marked) by a previous owner. My apartment is filled with books, six bookshelves and many piles atop dressers, end tables, bedside tables—even the coffee table. New books, old books, textbooks I saved from college, funky paperbacks with old-fashioned drawings, rare bound volumes fished out of a free box or bought for a dollar apiece at a garage sale. I feel protected and comforted when surrounded by books. They are like good friends, always there and full of secret knowledge of who you are.
Somehow, the cold blue glare of a computer screen doesn’t suffice.
It started with the tight cardboard package on my porch, emblazoned with the Amazon logo, heralding the arrival of a new book. A mini Christmas-thrill electrified my stomach: Which book was it? (I had ordered three.) I ran upstairs, shedding my burdens of purse and jacket, procured the kitchen scissors and sliced open the package. The wrappings fell away, I brushed back the advertising fliers, and there it was.
The scent of new paper with a hint of binding glue, mingled with the cardboard packaging, perfumed the air. The cover, to my delight, read: “In the Eye of the Sun” by Ahdaf Soueif, which meant I could begin my fiction reading of the Middle East (my latest literary quest). I balanced the book between both palms, noting the heft, the silken smoothness of its new cover, the soft edges of the pages. The exotic beauty of the woman pictured on the cover promised a rich, textured story. I peeked inside, comforted by the fact that the text was large and airy and serif-faced. (I’ve actually foregone reading books because of sans serif text type.)
Physically, this is an inviting book.
The presentation of a book has much to do with the reading experience. I found the Lydia Davis edition of “Swann’s Way” gratifyingly pleasant, with its rich foil-embossed cover (sturdy yet flexible) and coarse-edged, thick creamy paper which rather emulated Proust’s prose: elegant, dense yet rough about the edges. I started the second volume of Proust, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” but it’s not a friendly book that invites sinking into. Not only is the prose difficult, but also the book itself is unfriendly: Hard, heavy and awkward to hold, with a cover illustration that resembles a discontinued wallpaper pattern. I rather dread having to live with this monstrosity for weeks or months. I have the same reaction to hidebound library books stiff in their crackly plastic covers.
This is part of the reading experience, the physicality of books.
As a child, I enjoyed visiting libraries. I loved the church-like hush, silent sense of purpose and friendly, musty smell of many books on shelves. It’s the same reason I prowl bookstores now, especially the small local ones that mingle new books with used ones, integrating the importance of brand-new crisp books with the relaxed attitude of books already read and enjoyed (perhaps even marked) by a previous owner. My apartment is filled with books, six bookshelves and many piles atop dressers, end tables, bedside tables—even the coffee table. New books, old books, textbooks I saved from college, funky paperbacks with old-fashioned drawings, rare bound volumes fished out of a free box or bought for a dollar apiece at a garage sale. I feel protected and comforted when surrounded by books. They are like good friends, always there and full of secret knowledge of who you are.
Somehow, the cold blue glare of a computer screen doesn’t suffice.
8.17.2006
Thoughts for Thursday - wisdom from Cynthia Ozick
Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity
A bit of inspiration for a Thursday…here are two excerpts from Cynthia Ozick’s “Metaphor & Memory,” which helped further clarify the Chekhov reading on A Curious Singularity.
From A Short Note on “Chekhovian:”
...even when his characters strike us as unwholesome, or exasperating, or enervated, or only perverse (especially then), we feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity—his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite. At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below…He is an interpreter of the underneath life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.
From A Translator’s Monologue (Kate at Kate’s Book Blog has been mulling over some fascinating translation questions, which, of course, got me thinking. I think Ozick's points apply to prose as well as poetry.):
Translation is not only feasible, but inescapable—good translation, exact translation, superb translation: the entire carrying over from one language to another, from one society to another. But in order to believe in the real possibility of translation, the translator must believe in certain impossible theses.
The first false idea is the most indispensable. It is simply that the poem is not “translated,” but uncovered…just as the poem already exists, so does the right, faithful, and true translation already exist, needing only to be uncovered. The translated poem is inherent in the new language. It was be hewn out of the new language as…a figure locked in the recalcitrant rock is hewn out and revealed.
...There is another purpose in believing in the false proposition that a translation of a poem pre-exists. It touches on the mutual obligations of translator and poem. Is the translator the poem's tenant or its landlord? If the translator is the poem's tenant, the translator is obligated to the poem for its heat. If the translator is the poet's landlord, the poem is obligated to the translator for its shape. Now at this point one must stop and think sympathetically of the poet...Does the poet want to share ownership of the poem with the translator?
A bit of inspiration for a Thursday…here are two excerpts from Cynthia Ozick’s “Metaphor & Memory,” which helped further clarify the Chekhov reading on A Curious Singularity.
From A Short Note on “Chekhovian:”
...even when his characters strike us as unwholesome, or exasperating, or enervated, or only perverse (especially then), we feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity—his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite. At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below…He is an interpreter of the underneath life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.
From A Translator’s Monologue (Kate at Kate’s Book Blog has been mulling over some fascinating translation questions, which, of course, got me thinking. I think Ozick's points apply to prose as well as poetry.):
Translation is not only feasible, but inescapable—good translation, exact translation, superb translation: the entire carrying over from one language to another, from one society to another. But in order to believe in the real possibility of translation, the translator must believe in certain impossible theses.
The first false idea is the most indispensable. It is simply that the poem is not “translated,” but uncovered…just as the poem already exists, so does the right, faithful, and true translation already exist, needing only to be uncovered. The translated poem is inherent in the new language. It was be hewn out of the new language as…a figure locked in the recalcitrant rock is hewn out and revealed.
...There is another purpose in believing in the false proposition that a translation of a poem pre-exists. It touches on the mutual obligations of translator and poem. Is the translator the poem's tenant or its landlord? If the translator is the poem's tenant, the translator is obligated to the poem for its heat. If the translator is the poet's landlord, the poem is obligated to the translator for its shape. Now at this point one must stop and think sympathetically of the poet...Does the poet want to share ownership of the poem with the translator?
8.16.2006
Hear poets read (redux)
Neat-o, look what I found! Includes Tennyson reading The Charge of the Light Brigade! Plus, Auden, Plath, Heaney. And it's FREE! I love BBC.
8.14.2006
Surprise -- a book meme
Note to our faithful readers: From the end of July through September, LK’s crushing workload temporarily (we hope) drains IQ points from her wee brain. So, while we will always strive to be literate, we may post a few entries during this time that are regrettably on the “lite” side. Our apologies and kudos to those fellow litbloggers who continue to transmit complex, well-crafted essays out into Etherland (you know who you are!). LK will be treasuring your tomes during our crunch time.
The "liter side" can officially begin with this book meme, which has been making the blog rounds:
1. First book to leave a lasting impression? Little Women. It’s the first “serious” book I remember reading (I was in first grade, possibly even kindergarten – really, how precocious of me!). I loved the March family so much, I even started collecting the Madame Alexander dolls (which I still have, in mint condition, in the original boxes).
2. Which author would you most like to be? Me. Although I would prefer to be the type of author who other people know about. I guess we’re talking A Well-Known Author here, and I really don’t know enough of many authors’ lives to make a cogent choice. Of my same gender: Tough call, since many women writers led extremely difficult lives (and, for the most part, without being able to drink heavily or have access to Pamprin) – Lillian Hellman, strictly because of her relationship with Dashiell Hammett. As a male: William Shakespeare. He must have had lyrical dreams.
3. Name the book that has most made you want to visit a place. I want to visit practically every place there is, especially any with literary associations, so this is really impossible to narrow down. Some memorable places I’ve already visited: Algonquin Hotel in New York, Pushkin’s favorite restaurant in St. Petersburg, Mark Twain’s boyhood home (and Injun Joe’s Cave) in Hannibal, Mo., Globe Theater in London, and the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (where some anonymous soul regularly places fresh flowers on Colette’s grave).
4. Which contemporary author will still be read in 100 years time? Toni Morrison.
5. Which book would you recommend to a teenager reluctant to try ‘literature’? J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye.”
6. Name your best recent literary discovery. There are two ways to approach this question—naming contemporary authors whose work you stumbled on or naming a prominent author you just discovered. So, for Approach #1: Tie between a Polish writer, Antoni Libera (I would like to write the female version of his book “Madame”), and Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose “English, August” is a delight. Both of these books are sharp and funny, and I hope to read more of these authors’ works. For Approach #2: Paul Bowles. I recently read his short stories, and with his beautiful prose, I look forward to reading “The Sheltering Sky.”
7. Which author’s fictional world would you most like to live in? Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew’s world (me being Nancy, of course). Or Maud Hart Lovelace and the Betsy-Tacy world (I want to be Tacy, naturally, with her long ringlets).
8. Name your favorite poet. Oh, this is tough. All-time: Shakespeare. Of the moment: W.H. Auden.
9. What's the best nonfiction title you've read this year? David Maraniss, “They Marched into Sunlight.” This book intertwines two narratives, of events that occurred on Oct. 17, 1967: An ambush of American soldiers by the North Vietnamese and a protest by students at University of Wisconsin-Madison. An interesting take on the Vietnam War. (Also sheds more light on why the Iraq War is not winnable. And provides further proof that Dick Cheney’s heart was surgically removed, years ago, if you still need convincing.)
10. Which author do you think is much better than his/her reputation? What does that mean: literary critics who pan certain writers or top-notch authors without readership? To answer the former, I’m going out on a limb here with Stephen King. He is not lit-uh-rahry, true, but unlike, say, Michael Crichton, he does write well (if too much), and he does know how to spin a good tale, which I, as a reader, appreciate possibly more than many literary critics apparently do. To answer the latter, I’d like to see a John Dufresne novel hit the bestseller list. (Conversely, I think John Updike is waaaay overrated. Except for his short story “A&P.”)
The "liter side" can officially begin with this book meme, which has been making the blog rounds:
1. First book to leave a lasting impression? Little Women. It’s the first “serious” book I remember reading (I was in first grade, possibly even kindergarten – really, how precocious of me!). I loved the March family so much, I even started collecting the Madame Alexander dolls (which I still have, in mint condition, in the original boxes).
2. Which author would you most like to be? Me. Although I would prefer to be the type of author who other people know about. I guess we’re talking A Well-Known Author here, and I really don’t know enough of many authors’ lives to make a cogent choice. Of my same gender: Tough call, since many women writers led extremely difficult lives (and, for the most part, without being able to drink heavily or have access to Pamprin) – Lillian Hellman, strictly because of her relationship with Dashiell Hammett. As a male: William Shakespeare. He must have had lyrical dreams.
3. Name the book that has most made you want to visit a place. I want to visit practically every place there is, especially any with literary associations, so this is really impossible to narrow down. Some memorable places I’ve already visited: Algonquin Hotel in New York, Pushkin’s favorite restaurant in St. Petersburg, Mark Twain’s boyhood home (and Injun Joe’s Cave) in Hannibal, Mo., Globe Theater in London, and the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (where some anonymous soul regularly places fresh flowers on Colette’s grave).
4. Which contemporary author will still be read in 100 years time? Toni Morrison.
5. Which book would you recommend to a teenager reluctant to try ‘literature’? J.D. Salinger, “Catcher in the Rye.”
6. Name your best recent literary discovery. There are two ways to approach this question—naming contemporary authors whose work you stumbled on or naming a prominent author you just discovered. So, for Approach #1: Tie between a Polish writer, Antoni Libera (I would like to write the female version of his book “Madame”), and Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose “English, August” is a delight. Both of these books are sharp and funny, and I hope to read more of these authors’ works. For Approach #2: Paul Bowles. I recently read his short stories, and with his beautiful prose, I look forward to reading “The Sheltering Sky.”
7. Which author’s fictional world would you most like to live in? Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew’s world (me being Nancy, of course). Or Maud Hart Lovelace and the Betsy-Tacy world (I want to be Tacy, naturally, with her long ringlets).
8. Name your favorite poet. Oh, this is tough. All-time: Shakespeare. Of the moment: W.H. Auden.
9. What's the best nonfiction title you've read this year? David Maraniss, “They Marched into Sunlight.” This book intertwines two narratives, of events that occurred on Oct. 17, 1967: An ambush of American soldiers by the North Vietnamese and a protest by students at University of Wisconsin-Madison. An interesting take on the Vietnam War. (Also sheds more light on why the Iraq War is not winnable. And provides further proof that Dick Cheney’s heart was surgically removed, years ago, if you still need convincing.)
10. Which author do you think is much better than his/her reputation? What does that mean: literary critics who pan certain writers or top-notch authors without readership? To answer the former, I’m going out on a limb here with Stephen King. He is not lit-uh-rahry, true, but unlike, say, Michael Crichton, he does write well (if too much), and he does know how to spin a good tale, which I, as a reader, appreciate possibly more than many literary critics apparently do. To answer the latter, I’d like to see a John Dufresne novel hit the bestseller list. (Conversely, I think John Updike is waaaay overrated. Except for his short story “A&P.”)
The muse speaks
Just a short post to share a moment that other writers can experience vicariously: I've been working on a short story for two years, and it was perfect -- except for the ending. This weekend, as I was lolling in bed trying to remain asleep, the perfect ending came to me. Quelle relief. Guess my muse needed to sleep in for a day....But don't you love it when that happens?
8.10.2006
Thoughts for Thursday - Doctors who are writers
Doctors who are writers. (Or is it the other way around?) Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera and Ethan Canin. Pam Houston can keep her cowboys: these are my weakness.
I tell you, I always dreamed of opening the door to my Mystery Date to a guy with a stethoscope around his neck and a quill in his hand.
This is a man who can heal you physically and spiritually. A man who can take your pulse and raise it at the same time. A man who understands the intricacies of Celiac disease—and knows his way around a thesaurus.
You can keep your lawyer/writers, like Scott Turow, or your veterinarian/writers, like James Herriot. Give me the literary physician.
I tell you, I always dreamed of opening the door to my Mystery Date to a guy with a stethoscope around his neck and a quill in his hand.
This is a man who can heal you physically and spiritually. A man who can take your pulse and raise it at the same time. A man who understands the intricacies of Celiac disease—and knows his way around a thesaurus.
You can keep your lawyer/writers, like Scott Turow, or your veterinarian/writers, like James Herriot. Give me the literary physician.
Comments on The Lady with the Dog
Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity
Sorry I am not more discursive on this post, but I wanted to share, in light of our reading of The Lady with the Dog. Excerpted from “Chekhov: A Biography,” Ernest J. Simmons:
The Lady with the Dog is the first literary fruit of Chekhov’s Yalta life and the beginning of the tale is penetrated with the atmosphere of this resort—its sights and sounds, its dusty roads, eating places off the esplanade, the stately cypresses, the soft warm lilac color of the sea under the bright sunlight and the golden band of moonlight across it at night. Turgenev might have written a whole novel on this theme, in this story of adultery, which begins on a note of casual philandering and mounts through a series of intensifying emotional experiences to a crescendo of profound but hopeless love. Though the conclusion may be anti-romantic, Chekhov’s sympathy—as so often in his fiction—with these helpless, illicit lovers, whose star-crossed fate is not of their own making, is plainly apparent at the end. Gorky, with his characteristic ebullience, declared after reading the story that he wanted to change wives, and to suffer and swear in the same spirit. Everything else seemed written not with a pen but with a fencepost. “No one can write so simply about simple things as you can,” he told Chekhov. “Your tales are exquisite phials filled with all the smells of life…”
Sorry I am not more discursive on this post, but I wanted to share, in light of our reading of The Lady with the Dog. Excerpted from “Chekhov: A Biography,” Ernest J. Simmons:
The Lady with the Dog is the first literary fruit of Chekhov’s Yalta life and the beginning of the tale is penetrated with the atmosphere of this resort—its sights and sounds, its dusty roads, eating places off the esplanade, the stately cypresses, the soft warm lilac color of the sea under the bright sunlight and the golden band of moonlight across it at night. Turgenev might have written a whole novel on this theme, in this story of adultery, which begins on a note of casual philandering and mounts through a series of intensifying emotional experiences to a crescendo of profound but hopeless love. Though the conclusion may be anti-romantic, Chekhov’s sympathy—as so often in his fiction—with these helpless, illicit lovers, whose star-crossed fate is not of their own making, is plainly apparent at the end. Gorky, with his characteristic ebullience, declared after reading the story that he wanted to change wives, and to suffer and swear in the same spirit. Everything else seemed written not with a pen but with a fencepost. “No one can write so simply about simple things as you can,” he told Chekhov. “Your tales are exquisite phials filled with all the smells of life…”
8.09.2006
Ending Swann's Way
I finished “Swann’s Way” several weeks ago, reluctantly, as it was a great read. I loved it. I am eagerly awaiting a Proust biography now from Amazon.com, to supplement me as I go along, but I wanted to experience “Swann’s Way” without knowing much about Proust or without reading too much criticism. I’m glad I did. I feel I learned something valuable by reading the book “on my own,” as it were. I learned that I can take on a challenging read, even when working at a challenging job. I learned that a few pages each evening, regularly read, do miraculously add up. I learned that I bring a certain element of unique reading to a great book. And, perhaps most importantly, I learned I could again be excited, down to tips of my marrowed-bones and quiver of my soul, about words.
I rediscovered the thrill of reading, just as I did when I was a small girl who fell in love with the world of “Little Women” (the book that made me a lifelong reader). I feel as if I stumbled upon a secret, that was always there, out in the open.
Proust, in fact, has spoiled me permanently as far as junk reading is concerned. Not that I really ever read much trash. But, having read Proust, I am like a sensitized tuning fork and cannot tolerate the imprecision of mediocre writing.
“Swann’s Way” is a beautiful thing, though I find the experience of reading difficult to describe (especially now that my job is entering the proverbial busy season and my brain has tempered into the consistency of a three-minute egg cooked for 10 minutes). This terrible busy-ness is making it difficult for me to slow down and analyze, though I am dying to share some unique insight with other readers. For now, I simply say: Read.
Here are some impressions as I crossed the finished line:
Proust led up to the ending by indulging (inexplicably but enjoyably to me) in some extremely catty prose. Witness this quote from Mme. des Laumes, toward the end of Swann in Love, referring to Swann:
“I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting—because they say she’s an idiot,” she added with the wisom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.
Hoo-hah—there’s a bitch-slap heard across the century! Proust continues that kind of verbal whip lashing for a number of pages before he waxes prosaic over Swann, Odette and the musical phrase that so captures Swann. Here is a passage that took my breath away, describing “the beautiful dialogue which Swann heard between the piano and the violin,” which, of course, echoes Swann’s love for Odette and all romantic love by extension (and is an exquisite description of musical harmony to boot):
First the solitary piano lamented, like a bird abandoned by its mate; the violin heard it, answered it as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were only the two of them still on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, constructed by the logic of the creator, this world in which there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata.
In the third and final part of the book, Place-Names: The Name, Proust returns to the “I” narrator, back to the insomnia in the bedroom, and back to the boy walking with the family servant, Francoise, and then into his love for the girl Gilberte. Finally, using time compression, Proust moves the reader into the future, when the narrator is a man (clearly middle-aged or older) reflecting on his past, and all of the images harmonize, ending on a perfectly balanced and satisfying note:
They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
Ah.
I rediscovered the thrill of reading, just as I did when I was a small girl who fell in love with the world of “Little Women” (the book that made me a lifelong reader). I feel as if I stumbled upon a secret, that was always there, out in the open.
Proust, in fact, has spoiled me permanently as far as junk reading is concerned. Not that I really ever read much trash. But, having read Proust, I am like a sensitized tuning fork and cannot tolerate the imprecision of mediocre writing.
“Swann’s Way” is a beautiful thing, though I find the experience of reading difficult to describe (especially now that my job is entering the proverbial busy season and my brain has tempered into the consistency of a three-minute egg cooked for 10 minutes). This terrible busy-ness is making it difficult for me to slow down and analyze, though I am dying to share some unique insight with other readers. For now, I simply say: Read.
Here are some impressions as I crossed the finished line:
Proust led up to the ending by indulging (inexplicably but enjoyably to me) in some extremely catty prose. Witness this quote from Mme. des Laumes, toward the end of Swann in Love, referring to Swann:
“I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn’t even interesting—because they say she’s an idiot,” she added with the wisom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.
Hoo-hah—there’s a bitch-slap heard across the century! Proust continues that kind of verbal whip lashing for a number of pages before he waxes prosaic over Swann, Odette and the musical phrase that so captures Swann. Here is a passage that took my breath away, describing “the beautiful dialogue which Swann heard between the piano and the violin,” which, of course, echoes Swann’s love for Odette and all romantic love by extension (and is an exquisite description of musical harmony to boot):
First the solitary piano lamented, like a bird abandoned by its mate; the violin heard it, answered it as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were only the two of them still on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, constructed by the logic of the creator, this world in which there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata.
In the third and final part of the book, Place-Names: The Name, Proust returns to the “I” narrator, back to the insomnia in the bedroom, and back to the boy walking with the family servant, Francoise, and then into his love for the girl Gilberte. Finally, using time compression, Proust moves the reader into the future, when the narrator is a man (clearly middle-aged or older) reflecting on his past, and all of the images harmonize, ending on a perfectly balanced and satisfying note:
They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
Ah.
8.08.2006
Hear Whitman read (yeah, we mean Walt)!
A very quick post to steer anyone who is interested to this CD set, Poetry on Record. Naturally, I indulged, and I absolutely love it. I get chills listening to Walt Whitman's voice! And who would've thought we'd be able to hear Alfred Lord Tennyson reading The Charge of the Light Brigade?
8.07.2006
A mildewy armpit and other stinky prose
A plaintive mew from Ms. Kitten. Mew. Mew. Please read the following excerpt and tell us truthfully: Is this bad writing or what? I mean, if you are going to foist an armpit-smelling scene on the reader (especially on the first page), at least describe it accurately (when was the last time you smelled a mildewed armpit? After it sat out overnight in the rain?). Something stinks, all right, and it ain't just an armpit.
We are both irritated and despairing that this was a book highlighted by the Quality Paperback Book Club—irritated, because there are so many better books to highlight than this one, and despairing, because, well, frankly, how does such doo-doo get published anyhow? This woman came to the United States from India when she was 21, so perhaps English is her second language; however, that doesn’t excuse any editors who may have been working on this book (I’m sparing the author publicity, bad or otherwise, by not mentioning the title). We suppose it takes a village to publish crap.
Well, this excerpt is probably just what we deserve, since we joined this book club primarily to bait the Bush-supporters in the Speaking Out forum. All we can say is thank heavens for Rohinton Mistry—now there’s an Indian writer with chops!
From Chapter One
Although it is dawn, inside Bhima's heart it is dusk.
Rolling onto her left side on the thin cotton mattress on the floor, she sits up abruptly, as she does every morning. She lifts one bony hand over her head in a yawn and a stretch, and a strong, mildewy smell wafts from her armpit and assails her nostrils. For an idle moment she sits at the edge of the mattress with her callused feet flat on the mud floor, her knees bent, and her head resting on her folded arms.
In that time she is almost at rest, her mind thankfully blank and empty of the trials that await her today and the next day and the next . . . To prolong this state of mindless grace, she reaches absently for the tin of chewing tobacco that she keeps by her bedside. She pushes a wad into her mouth, so that it protrudes out of her fleshless face like a cricket ball.
Bhima's idyll is short-lived. In the faint, delicate light of a new day, she makes out Maya's silhouette as she stirs on the mattress on the far left side of their hut. The girl is mumbling in her sleep, making soft, whimpering sounds, and despite herself, Bhima feels her heart soften and dissolve, the way it used to when she breast-fed Maya's mother, Pooja, all those years ago.
Propelled by Maya's puppylike sounds, Bhima gets up with a grunt from the mattress and makes her way to where her granddaughter lies asleep. But in the second that it takes to cross the small hut, something shifts in Bhima's heart, so that the milky, maternal feeling from a moment ago is replaced by that hard, merciless feeling of rage that has lived within her since several weeks ago. She stands towering over the sleeping girl, who is now snoring softly, blissfully unaware of the pinpoint anger in her grandmother's eyes as she stares at the slight swell of Maya's belly.
We are both irritated and despairing that this was a book highlighted by the Quality Paperback Book Club—irritated, because there are so many better books to highlight than this one, and despairing, because, well, frankly, how does such doo-doo get published anyhow? This woman came to the United States from India when she was 21, so perhaps English is her second language; however, that doesn’t excuse any editors who may have been working on this book (I’m sparing the author publicity, bad or otherwise, by not mentioning the title). We suppose it takes a village to publish crap.
Well, this excerpt is probably just what we deserve, since we joined this book club primarily to bait the Bush-supporters in the Speaking Out forum. All we can say is thank heavens for Rohinton Mistry—now there’s an Indian writer with chops!
From Chapter One
Although it is dawn, inside Bhima's heart it is dusk.
Rolling onto her left side on the thin cotton mattress on the floor, she sits up abruptly, as she does every morning. She lifts one bony hand over her head in a yawn and a stretch, and a strong, mildewy smell wafts from her armpit and assails her nostrils. For an idle moment she sits at the edge of the mattress with her callused feet flat on the mud floor, her knees bent, and her head resting on her folded arms.
In that time she is almost at rest, her mind thankfully blank and empty of the trials that await her today and the next day and the next . . . To prolong this state of mindless grace, she reaches absently for the tin of chewing tobacco that she keeps by her bedside. She pushes a wad into her mouth, so that it protrudes out of her fleshless face like a cricket ball.
Bhima's idyll is short-lived. In the faint, delicate light of a new day, she makes out Maya's silhouette as she stirs on the mattress on the far left side of their hut. The girl is mumbling in her sleep, making soft, whimpering sounds, and despite herself, Bhima feels her heart soften and dissolve, the way it used to when she breast-fed Maya's mother, Pooja, all those years ago.
Propelled by Maya's puppylike sounds, Bhima gets up with a grunt from the mattress and makes her way to where her granddaughter lies asleep. But in the second that it takes to cross the small hut, something shifts in Bhima's heart, so that the milky, maternal feeling from a moment ago is replaced by that hard, merciless feeling of rage that has lived within her since several weeks ago. She stands towering over the sleeping girl, who is now snoring softly, blissfully unaware of the pinpoint anger in her grandmother's eyes as she stares at the slight swell of Maya's belly.
8.03.2006
Thoughts for Thursday - from Pepys
Work has been an utter hell of pointless yet time-consuming drivel. So for this Thursday, we'll let Samuel Pepys have his say. It is good to check his diary out from time to time and read about people mounting horses and drinking at taverns and suchlike.
7.31.2006
Name that guilty pleasure
I’m due for a long Proust blog, but as I’m only 16 pages into the second volume, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (the cumbersome title makes me grumpy), I will cheat with a Monday poll: Dear reader, do you have the literary equivalent to a Big Mac? What is the junky book you’ve perused more than once, the one you revisit when you’re simultaneously dipping into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey and checking out MTV’s Real World?
I’d have to admit to more than one, but as for lowbrow lit, my secret indulgence would have to be “Gone With the Wind.” While not total trash, it isn’t exactly great literature, and I’ve read it so many times, I can recite whole passages by heart. For utter, total, unequivocal trash: “Lucifer’s Hammer,” Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Brimming with misogyny, rife with stereotypes, and dangerously dated, this end-of-the-world novel has reeled me in on more than one occasion (nope, I won’t say how many times I’ve actually read it).
Anyone else out there ready to ‘fess up? Which guilty pleasure do you indulge in that you’d be embarrassed to be caught reading by anyone with a legitimate library card?
I’d have to admit to more than one, but as for lowbrow lit, my secret indulgence would have to be “Gone With the Wind.” While not total trash, it isn’t exactly great literature, and I’ve read it so many times, I can recite whole passages by heart. For utter, total, unequivocal trash: “Lucifer’s Hammer,” Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Brimming with misogyny, rife with stereotypes, and dangerously dated, this end-of-the-world novel has reeled me in on more than one occasion (nope, I won’t say how many times I’ve actually read it).
Anyone else out there ready to ‘fess up? Which guilty pleasure do you indulge in that you’d be embarrassed to be caught reading by anyone with a legitimate library card?
7.28.2006
Just finish off that damned mockingbird, will ya?
A few sentences in this review by Meghan O'Rourke of a new Harper Lee biography really bothered LK, and it’s time for a pouncing:
Even so, Mockingbird fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields… (gives) short shrift to complicated questions: Is To Kill a Mockingbird a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement?
This kind of criticism offers little in the way of discourse and dialogue, and much in the way of staking American literature through the heart. The so-called “complicated questions” she raises are masking her real intent; isn’t what she really asking is if “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its time? That is patently absurd (for one thing, “TKaM” is much better written, and for another, it did not inflame public sentiment the way “UTC” did) – and takes a short-view of literature, which so many critics (and writers) these days seem to do. The questions O'Rourke raises do not matter! What matters is the work, and what will count is how it stands the test of time. “TKaM” does not, in my view, work only as a commentary on mid-century American race relations; that is so reductive as to be provincial. A hundred years from now, readers will be able to take Scout’s journey and still relate to the grand themes of family and community, and the meaning of connection and honor and integrity. O'Rourke’s asking if the book is great or if Lee is a brilliant writer puts literature squarely into the marketplace as a mere product and authors centrally in the spotlight as sheer personality. (This is a parallel problem we had with Harper Lee contributing an essay to O Magazine recently; for an author who has remained shuttered, this was a brazen bow to the mass market.)
We will say it straight out: American literature is not a commodity.
LK, for one, is sick of critics and publishers alike reducing literature to a bear or bull market, to quarterly earnings and to trend. How much are we missing because editors, publishers and critics fail to see beyond the author’s bio, to read beyond potentially shocking subject matter, or to treat style as the literary equivalent of this season’s hemline length?
There, now, we can retract our claws.
Even so, Mockingbird fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields… (gives) short shrift to complicated questions: Is To Kill a Mockingbird a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement?
This kind of criticism offers little in the way of discourse and dialogue, and much in the way of staking American literature through the heart. The so-called “complicated questions” she raises are masking her real intent; isn’t what she really asking is if “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its time? That is patently absurd (for one thing, “TKaM” is much better written, and for another, it did not inflame public sentiment the way “UTC” did) – and takes a short-view of literature, which so many critics (and writers) these days seem to do. The questions O'Rourke raises do not matter! What matters is the work, and what will count is how it stands the test of time. “TKaM” does not, in my view, work only as a commentary on mid-century American race relations; that is so reductive as to be provincial. A hundred years from now, readers will be able to take Scout’s journey and still relate to the grand themes of family and community, and the meaning of connection and honor and integrity. O'Rourke’s asking if the book is great or if Lee is a brilliant writer puts literature squarely into the marketplace as a mere product and authors centrally in the spotlight as sheer personality. (This is a parallel problem we had with Harper Lee contributing an essay to O Magazine recently; for an author who has remained shuttered, this was a brazen bow to the mass market.)
We will say it straight out: American literature is not a commodity.
LK, for one, is sick of critics and publishers alike reducing literature to a bear or bull market, to quarterly earnings and to trend. How much are we missing because editors, publishers and critics fail to see beyond the author’s bio, to read beyond potentially shocking subject matter, or to treat style as the literary equivalent of this season’s hemline length?
There, now, we can retract our claws.
7.27.2006
Proust or Joyce: Who would be the better blogger?
I am inclined to imagine Marcel banging away at an iBook, with popcorn ceilings above and walls stapled with cardboard egg cartons. Somehow I feel Joyce would sneer at authoring a blog; too proletarian.
Any ideas on what Proust's blog would be called? Marcel More-So?
Any ideas on what Proust's blog would be called? Marcel More-So?
Thoughts for Thursday
And now, to elevate Thursday to the same status as other days of the week (many of which are featured in popular songs), LK continues to amuse the muse by musing.
What makes this Thursday different from any other Thursday?
Maybe if I was born on this date, or maybe if something traumatic happened, this day would snag in my memory.
I can’t remember details from any other particular Thursday from my past, which makes me very sad and a bit frightened at the ephemeral stuff of life.
I have gotten to wishing I could pluck one single Thursday, even the most boring one, from any of the Thursdays I lived when I was seven or 12 or 18. Such a revisit would hold such fascination, just by virtue of its being a past event. Maybe I could discover a key to how I have arrived at who I am at this point in my life.
I don’t care much about seeing into the future, a time when a sore ankle and bad back may very well be the least of my worries.
What makes this Thursday different from any other Thursday?
Maybe if I was born on this date, or maybe if something traumatic happened, this day would snag in my memory.
I can’t remember details from any other particular Thursday from my past, which makes me very sad and a bit frightened at the ephemeral stuff of life.
I have gotten to wishing I could pluck one single Thursday, even the most boring one, from any of the Thursdays I lived when I was seven or 12 or 18. Such a revisit would hold such fascination, just by virtue of its being a past event. Maybe I could discover a key to how I have arrived at who I am at this point in my life.
I don’t care much about seeing into the future, a time when a sore ankle and bad back may very well be the least of my worries.
7.25.2006
What do you do when you’re in the reading doldrums?
You know the feeling: You’re dying to get lost in a new read, have an author haul you by the roots of your hair into a universe far away from your own, find an un-put-downable tome that you keep at hand the way some people carry cell phones, lest you find yourself with a spare minute and nowhere in the vicinity of your dog-eared page-turner. But, lately, you pick up one book and it doesn’t quite grab you. You pick up another and lose interest after a few pages. You try another and the language or characters or plot don’t reel you in beyond page 3 or 4.
It seems a number of litbloggers are having a hard time focusing on or sustaining interest in what they’re reading. Maybe the heat wave is making bloggereaders sluggish. Maybe it’s midsummer burnout.
So I put it to you, readers: What do you do when you’re in the reading doldrums? Do you turn to a particular author or genre to gently jolt you back into a renewed passion for the written word? Do you switch media altogether, watching TV or movies for a while? What about pulling a beloved classic off the shelf? Maybe you grit your teeth and finish something, anything, just to keep going? Or do you simply put away books for a while?
It seems a number of litbloggers are having a hard time focusing on or sustaining interest in what they’re reading. Maybe the heat wave is making bloggereaders sluggish. Maybe it’s midsummer burnout.
So I put it to you, readers: What do you do when you’re in the reading doldrums? Do you turn to a particular author or genre to gently jolt you back into a renewed passion for the written word? Do you switch media altogether, watching TV or movies for a while? What about pulling a beloved classic off the shelf? Maybe you grit your teeth and finish something, anything, just to keep going? Or do you simply put away books for a while?
Perfect summer reading
A few days in the High Sierra…peace, quiet, nature. And now back to more than a hundred hideous work-related e-mails. So we’re taking a few moments to preserve the vacation mentality a bit longer.
Found the perfect book to take on a hike to the high camps and read by flashlight: “The February House,” Sherrill Tippins. This book details how, around the beginning of WWII, artists shared a brief moment of communal creativity. Picture a shabby Brooklyn brownstone with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles (possibly the most unpleasant couple in contemporary literary history) and Gypsy Rose Lee all composing various works, sharing meals and wine and prowling the rough city docks. Well-written, well-paced and a different take on the lives of these artists at a moment when the world went mad. Five out of five purrs from the Literate Kitten as the ideal summer read.
Yes, we finished “Swann’s Way,” and yes, we are preparing for “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” We avoided reading critical essays for the most part (with the exception of dipping into Roger Shattuck’s Field Guide) because LK wanted to read Proust with virgin eyes. But with Volume 1 complete, we are reading “Recovering Your Story,” Arnold Weinstein, which we’ll comment on in a future entry.
For now, we will share with you, dear reader, some voluntary memories we gathered during our three-day trip to Yosemite:
Caught mid-trail in a hailstorm…a man with Tourette’s syndrome who raised pet chameleons…a couple with 8 children between them who met on eHarmony…a 72-year-old naturalist who knew all the Latin names for the blooming wildflowers…fending off cumulus clouds of mosquitoes…hiking an unmarked trail once used by the 24th Mounted Infantry and the 9th Cavalry (Buffalo soldiers)…singing the theme to “Gilligan’s Island” with 5 new friends from Santa Cruz…two beautiful sunsets from the high ridges…listening to raindrops scatter on the canvas tent during an evening rainstorm…two marmots and a deer…a group of six men who visit the High Camps every year (playing a golf game before and after their trip)…finding the back trail around Tenaya Lake…
Found the perfect book to take on a hike to the high camps and read by flashlight: “The February House,” Sherrill Tippins. This book details how, around the beginning of WWII, artists shared a brief moment of communal creativity. Picture a shabby Brooklyn brownstone with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles (possibly the most unpleasant couple in contemporary literary history) and Gypsy Rose Lee all composing various works, sharing meals and wine and prowling the rough city docks. Well-written, well-paced and a different take on the lives of these artists at a moment when the world went mad. Five out of five purrs from the Literate Kitten as the ideal summer read.
Yes, we finished “Swann’s Way,” and yes, we are preparing for “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” We avoided reading critical essays for the most part (with the exception of dipping into Roger Shattuck’s Field Guide) because LK wanted to read Proust with virgin eyes. But with Volume 1 complete, we are reading “Recovering Your Story,” Arnold Weinstein, which we’ll comment on in a future entry.
For now, we will share with you, dear reader, some voluntary memories we gathered during our three-day trip to Yosemite:
Caught mid-trail in a hailstorm…a man with Tourette’s syndrome who raised pet chameleons…a couple with 8 children between them who met on eHarmony…a 72-year-old naturalist who knew all the Latin names for the blooming wildflowers…fending off cumulus clouds of mosquitoes…hiking an unmarked trail once used by the 24th Mounted Infantry and the 9th Cavalry (Buffalo soldiers)…singing the theme to “Gilligan’s Island” with 5 new friends from Santa Cruz…two beautiful sunsets from the high ridges…listening to raindrops scatter on the canvas tent during an evening rainstorm…two marmots and a deer…a group of six men who visit the High Camps every year (playing a golf game before and after their trip)…finding the back trail around Tenaya Lake…
7.17.2006
Thanks for the involuntary memories
Over at Involuntary Memory, Stefanie and Dorothy have engaged in a discussion over the madeleine scene in the Combray section of the book, which Stefanie cites as an example of involuntary memory. She goes on to say:
What I find most curious about Proust's idea is that he places the key to memory in objects. The taste or smell or feel of an object can unlock a memory in such a way that one is transported back in time to relive it.
Proust uses auditory memory in ISoLT, particularly with Swann and his musical phrase from the “Vinteuil Sonata.” I think, however, that with music Proust is not evoking a memory from the past (as he does with the madeleine); rather, he is illustrating how a sensation can link us to a feeling that we have once experienced, and possibly hope to experience again. In the case of the madeleine, the narrator is linked with a specific time and place in the past, with a sense of nostalgia at their passing. In the case of Swann’s violin notes, the music acts as a stimulant of sorts, opening an inner passage within the soul that responds to this stimulant in a specific way which is relived (versus recalled) the instant the music is played again. Proust goes into quite a lot of detail on how this sensation, linked to romantic passion, is evoked once again from the violin notes (quoted in part here):
What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come through, as one holds up a trapdoor that would otherwise fall back.
To me, this type of involuntary memory is a way of keeping the past alive, of being able to relive a joyous experience or transcendent moment. Thus, Proust offers multiple layers of memory and the sensory experience: anticipation (Swann’s music), association (Odette’s flowers and the cattleyas) and recollection (the madeleine). An interesting question to ponder is the nature of memory – is it transitory or permanent? Is it a way of fixing time, and if so, how successful is it?
Oh, I’d like to write something really profound, but we'll have to wait on that, as I am preparing for a short trip, where I hope to generate some of my own involuntary memories.
What I find most curious about Proust's idea is that he places the key to memory in objects. The taste or smell or feel of an object can unlock a memory in such a way that one is transported back in time to relive it.
Proust uses auditory memory in ISoLT, particularly with Swann and his musical phrase from the “Vinteuil Sonata.” I think, however, that with music Proust is not evoking a memory from the past (as he does with the madeleine); rather, he is illustrating how a sensation can link us to a feeling that we have once experienced, and possibly hope to experience again. In the case of the madeleine, the narrator is linked with a specific time and place in the past, with a sense of nostalgia at their passing. In the case of Swann’s violin notes, the music acts as a stimulant of sorts, opening an inner passage within the soul that responds to this stimulant in a specific way which is relived (versus recalled) the instant the music is played again. Proust goes into quite a lot of detail on how this sensation, linked to romantic passion, is evoked once again from the violin notes (quoted in part here):
What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come through, as one holds up a trapdoor that would otherwise fall back.
To me, this type of involuntary memory is a way of keeping the past alive, of being able to relive a joyous experience or transcendent moment. Thus, Proust offers multiple layers of memory and the sensory experience: anticipation (Swann’s music), association (Odette’s flowers and the cattleyas) and recollection (the madeleine). An interesting question to ponder is the nature of memory – is it transitory or permanent? Is it a way of fixing time, and if so, how successful is it?
Oh, I’d like to write something really profound, but we'll have to wait on that, as I am preparing for a short trip, where I hope to generate some of my own involuntary memories.
7.14.2006
The Long and Short of Short Stories
Over at Kate’s Book Blog, talk of a short story reading group has made me go all soft and nostalgic about the genre. While I love reading novels (and struggle to write one, as not one but two agents asked me if I had something to show them), I gravitate toward writing short stories. And I enjoy reading them – after all, short stories are to American literature what jazz is to American music. So, I thought I’d share American masters of the form who are favorites, for anyone caring to dip their toes into pithy prose.
If you aren’t acquainted with short stories, I recommend starting with the classics: collections by Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, and “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson. Or simply dive into any one of many available anthologies, such as “Great American Short Stories,” ed. Wallace Stegner. For contemporary classics, please don’t miss Tobias Wolff’s “Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories,” an absolute stunner.
Having cautioned you on beginning with the established greats, let me warn you about the current state of short story publishing: It's spotty at best, imitative and shallow at worst – lots ‘o drek. The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, former standard-bearers of quality fiction, should hang their heads in shame. Zoetrope All-Story is good, although it has settled into primarily a showcase for Big Names (this magazine started out as a stellar forum for new authors). Happily, online zines are filling the vacuum left by the print press; despite the uneven quality of work, something rich and new and strange will emerge, I’m sure.
And now, a drum roll, please, for the select few (in LK’s most humble opinion) must-read collections by some of the genre’s best current practitioners:
George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia”. Dystopian fantasy from one of the most imaginative and funny observers of American culture.
Charles D’Ambrosio, “The Point and Other Stories.” Okay, I haven’t yet read his latest, The Dead Fish Museum (waiting for softcover), but this is an author dedicated to the short story form who pays attention to craft. The quintessential short story writer’s writer.
Annie Proulx, “Close Range.” I am so glad I ran out and bought this book, in hardcover, before all the Hollywood hoo-hah about Brokeback Mountain and Shipping News. Sharp language, stunning metaphors, a tight grip on the American landscape – she’s a national treasure and to be fully appreciated, like Yellowstone, must be experienced in the real setting – that is, in the pages, not on screen.
Anthony Doerr, “The Shell Collector.” This guy uses nature and terrain like no one else, covering locales from all over the world. Evocative imagery, beautiful language. If he keeps up the quality of work that is found in this collection, Doerr has a shot at ranking as one of The Masters.
Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son.” His other writing hasn’t hit me that hard, but this tough, haunting collection of stories works as a unit, similarly to Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” Johnson may not ever rise to this level of writing again, but, as in Anderson’s case, maybe once is enough.
If you aren’t acquainted with short stories, I recommend starting with the classics: collections by Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, and “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson. Or simply dive into any one of many available anthologies, such as “Great American Short Stories,” ed. Wallace Stegner. For contemporary classics, please don’t miss Tobias Wolff’s “Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories,” an absolute stunner.
Having cautioned you on beginning with the established greats, let me warn you about the current state of short story publishing: It's spotty at best, imitative and shallow at worst – lots ‘o drek. The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, former standard-bearers of quality fiction, should hang their heads in shame. Zoetrope All-Story is good, although it has settled into primarily a showcase for Big Names (this magazine started out as a stellar forum for new authors). Happily, online zines are filling the vacuum left by the print press; despite the uneven quality of work, something rich and new and strange will emerge, I’m sure.
And now, a drum roll, please, for the select few (in LK’s most humble opinion) must-read collections by some of the genre’s best current practitioners:
George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia”. Dystopian fantasy from one of the most imaginative and funny observers of American culture.
Charles D’Ambrosio, “The Point and Other Stories.” Okay, I haven’t yet read his latest, The Dead Fish Museum (waiting for softcover), but this is an author dedicated to the short story form who pays attention to craft. The quintessential short story writer’s writer.
Annie Proulx, “Close Range.” I am so glad I ran out and bought this book, in hardcover, before all the Hollywood hoo-hah about Brokeback Mountain and Shipping News. Sharp language, stunning metaphors, a tight grip on the American landscape – she’s a national treasure and to be fully appreciated, like Yellowstone, must be experienced in the real setting – that is, in the pages, not on screen.
Anthony Doerr, “The Shell Collector.” This guy uses nature and terrain like no one else, covering locales from all over the world. Evocative imagery, beautiful language. If he keeps up the quality of work that is found in this collection, Doerr has a shot at ranking as one of The Masters.
Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son.” His other writing hasn’t hit me that hard, but this tough, haunting collection of stories works as a unit, similarly to Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” Johnson may not ever rise to this level of writing again, but, as in Anderson’s case, maybe once is enough.
7.13.2006
Thoughts for Thursday
In cultural and literary references, Thursday gets short shrift.
Think about it: Other days of the week garner a lot more attention. There's Monday, which everyone sings the blues about. Tuesday is, in our opinion, undeservedly popular: You’ve got Mardi Gras, for starters, and Ruby Tuesday and Tuesday afternoons and Tuesday Weld. Wednesday: Hump Day – ‘nuff said. Everyone thanks their god when it’s Friday. And then we have the crowning jewel of calendar days, The Weekend, of which Saturday and Sunday are held sacred in many contexts, including that ultimate bid for immortality, an Elton John song.
Thursday got a Last Supper. Two thousand years ago. No fries.
Clearly this is a day that needs to up its game in the annals of time. We think Thursday ought to be reckoned with for what it is, the day that kicks back the rest of the week like a stiff drink.
So, in our Literate Kittenish way, we will honor Thursdays with random musings and general observations (except when we’re out of town). Feel free to join in.
Any other thoughts on Thursday?
Think about it: Other days of the week garner a lot more attention. There's Monday, which everyone sings the blues about. Tuesday is, in our opinion, undeservedly popular: You’ve got Mardi Gras, for starters, and Ruby Tuesday and Tuesday afternoons and Tuesday Weld. Wednesday: Hump Day – ‘nuff said. Everyone thanks their god when it’s Friday. And then we have the crowning jewel of calendar days, The Weekend, of which Saturday and Sunday are held sacred in many contexts, including that ultimate bid for immortality, an Elton John song.
Thursday got a Last Supper. Two thousand years ago. No fries.
Clearly this is a day that needs to up its game in the annals of time. We think Thursday ought to be reckoned with for what it is, the day that kicks back the rest of the week like a stiff drink.
So, in our Literate Kittenish way, we will honor Thursdays with random musings and general observations (except when we’re out of town). Feel free to join in.
Any other thoughts on Thursday?
7.12.2006
Who put the O in pOp culture?
Oprah. There, we said it. We suppose Oprah is one of the less harmful of the dopiness pushers out there, but for the record, LK does not believe in the Mary Poppins of culture (“a spoonful of sugar makes the meaning of existence go down”). Nevertheless, we did procure a copy of the first-ever so-called reading issue (featuring a letter from Harper Lee, which we cited in a previous entry), filched (why fill Oprah’s bloated coffers any more than we need to?) from the waiting room tables of our local beauty salon, with the owner’s permission, of course (we’re not pirates).
In between the O list (her favorite things. As if her favorite things are even remotely related to our favorite things) and recipes for “ripe stuff,” (that would be fruit, for all you highbrow literalists), a few tiny nuggets of erudition emerged. All coated in blandness and read-at-the-beach grit. But usable when buffed up with a little elbow grease and a lot of Murphy’s Oil Soap. At least Grace Paley graces a few columns. From her poem “How to Tell a Story (My Method) (Most of the Time):
Find the paragraph to
hold the poem steady
for six or eight pages…
don’t let her lose the poem
in the telling of day by
day because the subject
is time the place is only
paper the story is still
a puzzle the teller
knows why
The issue includes a section on “How to Read a Hard Book.” Just in case any of Oprah’s faithful decide that upping the IQ points ranks alongside of attending little Kirsten and Kevin’s soccer games, or if they want to knock off a couple of pages of Moby-Dick during their next manicure. (Turn to page 81 for more tips on Spa Savviness!)
LK mentions all this because naturally one of the hard books mentioned is none other than Proust’s ISoLT. (We guess Proust is making a comeback…LK does so enjoy surfing the crest of a trend.) We couldn’t resist sharing the O secret to finishing ISoLT (from an author named Marcelle Clements):
Read fast. Read for plot – though you won’t understand what the plot is until the end. Don’t be frightened by the size of the novel….All you need to know to start is that this is, in Proust’s words, a story told by “a man who says ‘I.’”….You must do violence to yourself and keep going. Don’t forget: You can always return.
Uh-huh. Nice try, but we’re not so sure this will convince thousands of O readers to pick Proust’s tome up over, say, Love Smart by Phil McGraw. Even though Swann can provide a lot more insight about some of the swains over at Match.com than Dr. Phil ever could…
In between the O list (her favorite things. As if her favorite things are even remotely related to our favorite things) and recipes for “ripe stuff,” (that would be fruit, for all you highbrow literalists), a few tiny nuggets of erudition emerged. All coated in blandness and read-at-the-beach grit. But usable when buffed up with a little elbow grease and a lot of Murphy’s Oil Soap. At least Grace Paley graces a few columns. From her poem “How to Tell a Story (My Method) (Most of the Time):
Find the paragraph to
hold the poem steady
for six or eight pages…
don’t let her lose the poem
in the telling of day by
day because the subject
is time the place is only
paper the story is still
a puzzle the teller
knows why
The issue includes a section on “How to Read a Hard Book.” Just in case any of Oprah’s faithful decide that upping the IQ points ranks alongside of attending little Kirsten and Kevin’s soccer games, or if they want to knock off a couple of pages of Moby-Dick during their next manicure. (Turn to page 81 for more tips on Spa Savviness!)
LK mentions all this because naturally one of the hard books mentioned is none other than Proust’s ISoLT. (We guess Proust is making a comeback…LK does so enjoy surfing the crest of a trend.) We couldn’t resist sharing the O secret to finishing ISoLT (from an author named Marcelle Clements):
Read fast. Read for plot – though you won’t understand what the plot is until the end. Don’t be frightened by the size of the novel….All you need to know to start is that this is, in Proust’s words, a story told by “a man who says ‘I.’”….You must do violence to yourself and keep going. Don’t forget: You can always return.
Uh-huh. Nice try, but we’re not so sure this will convince thousands of O readers to pick Proust’s tome up over, say, Love Smart by Phil McGraw. Even though Swann can provide a lot more insight about some of the swains over at Match.com than Dr. Phil ever could…
7.11.2006
Swann, the Stalker?
I’m nearing the end of “Swann’s Way,” and am in the midst of the pages and pages examining Swann’s love for Odette.
Only Swann isn’t really in love with Odette. He suffers more from an obsession (borderline stalker by today’s standards), that kind of puppy crush that is bittersweet in a teenager, embittering in an adult. Swann’s love is not mature, selfless, giving. (And Odette is not an object worthy of mature love, which I’ll discuss in a future post.) Instead, his love objectifies Odette, so that she mirrors what he wants to see and feel – and when she doesn’t conform to this ideal, he feels contemptuous, both of her and himself. Throughout these pages, Swann vacillates between contempt and rationalization, for both his behavior and hers. (Actually, the prose is better than it was in earlier passages of this section – Proust seems to have hit his stride now.)
Then Swann detested her. “But also, I’m too stupid,” he would tell himself, “I’m paying with my own money for other people’s pleasures. All the same, she ought to take care and not pull to hard on her bowstring, because I might very well not give anything more at all.”…And because his hatred, like his love, needed to manifest itself and to act, he took pleasure in pursuing his evil fantasies further and further…
And a page and a half later:
Now that, after this oscillation, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann’s jealousy had for a time removed her, to the angle from which he found her charming, he pictured her as full of tenderness…How he must have hurt her! Of course he could not find valid reasons for his resentment against her, but they would not have been enough to make him feel that resentment if he had not loved her so much.
Still, Proust steers clear of stereotyping Swann as the mad lover because of his recording of every shade of Swann’s feelings. Readers simply can’t help but identify with Swann and his plight at some points because they had to have undergone some of these experiences themselves.
One passage I thought particularly humorous was Swann’s pursuit of Odette to Pierrefond, where he spent most of his time avoiding her, so as not to arouse her suspicions, but mooning over the places where she had been (how many of us have done this same thing in the first flush of a romance?).
Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance….
And, of course, the scene where he goes to confront Odette and her other lover but ends up knocking on the windows of the wrong house is priceless:
Because he was in the habit, when he came to Odette’s house very late, of recognizing her window by the fact that it was the only one lit among windows that were all alike, he had made a mistake and knocked at the window after hers, which belonged to the adjoining house.
If he had been indulging in this behavior today, he would be given a restraining order!
Only Swann isn’t really in love with Odette. He suffers more from an obsession (borderline stalker by today’s standards), that kind of puppy crush that is bittersweet in a teenager, embittering in an adult. Swann’s love is not mature, selfless, giving. (And Odette is not an object worthy of mature love, which I’ll discuss in a future post.) Instead, his love objectifies Odette, so that she mirrors what he wants to see and feel – and when she doesn’t conform to this ideal, he feels contemptuous, both of her and himself. Throughout these pages, Swann vacillates between contempt and rationalization, for both his behavior and hers. (Actually, the prose is better than it was in earlier passages of this section – Proust seems to have hit his stride now.)
Then Swann detested her. “But also, I’m too stupid,” he would tell himself, “I’m paying with my own money for other people’s pleasures. All the same, she ought to take care and not pull to hard on her bowstring, because I might very well not give anything more at all.”…And because his hatred, like his love, needed to manifest itself and to act, he took pleasure in pursuing his evil fantasies further and further…
And a page and a half later:
Now that, after this oscillation, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann’s jealousy had for a time removed her, to the angle from which he found her charming, he pictured her as full of tenderness…How he must have hurt her! Of course he could not find valid reasons for his resentment against her, but they would not have been enough to make him feel that resentment if he had not loved her so much.
Still, Proust steers clear of stereotyping Swann as the mad lover because of his recording of every shade of Swann’s feelings. Readers simply can’t help but identify with Swann and his plight at some points because they had to have undergone some of these experiences themselves.
One passage I thought particularly humorous was Swann’s pursuit of Odette to Pierrefond, where he spent most of his time avoiding her, so as not to arouse her suspicions, but mooning over the places where she had been (how many of us have done this same thing in the first flush of a romance?).
Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance….
And, of course, the scene where he goes to confront Odette and her other lover but ends up knocking on the windows of the wrong house is priceless:
Because he was in the habit, when he came to Odette’s house very late, of recognizing her window by the fact that it was the only one lit among windows that were all alike, he had made a mistake and knocked at the window after hers, which belonged to the adjoining house.
If he had been indulging in this behavior today, he would be given a restraining order!
7.10.2006
Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”
In between Proust pages and Bowles (Jane and Paul) short stories this weekend, LK managed to knock off Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.” A chillingly good read. If you haven’t read this author, by all means get your hands on one of his books. His most famous, “Remains of the Day,” would be a good place to start. Or this book, if you can face the bleak premise and near-monochromatic tone.
While LK begs off full-blown book reviews (we just want bragging rights to have finished another book), here’s a brief encapsulation:
Set in a parallel universe of England circa 1990, “Never Let Me Go” outlines the story of students from Hailsham, a rather unorthodox school by our standards. As the story unfolds, we learn that Hailsham is a place where cloned children are raised, by guardians instead of parents, until they are released to pursue their careers – first as “carers” of organ donors then as organ donors themselves, providing up to four donations for “normal” humans.
Kathy H. narrates the tale of her life and the intertwined tales of her fellow students, the tough-fibered Ruth and gentle, awkward Tommy. The three form a nuclear family of sorts, supporting each other as they awkwardly navigate their lives as social outcasts.
Ishiguro skillfully straddles fiction genres – this is neither science nor speculative nor pure mainstream fiction. The clinical detachment of Kathy H.’s voice, along with its spare language, give the novel a heartbreaking poignancy, and Ishiguro masterfully spins out facts about the true purpose of Hailsham and its students, one detail at a time, propelling us toward the book’s inevitable outcome. It seems Kathy and her friends never question their duty or their fate. By stripping the language of specificity, Ishiguro allows readers to buy into the students’ own sense of unreality and acceptance. Euphemisms do more than protect our psyche: they also sell unpalatable truths. Ishiguro never sinks into moralizing or didacticism; he allows the story and characters to raise weighty questions: about what constitutes morality, duty and family and social contracts.
Check out Slate for Margaret Atwood’s thoughtful take on this novel.
While LK begs off full-blown book reviews (we just want bragging rights to have finished another book), here’s a brief encapsulation:
Set in a parallel universe of England circa 1990, “Never Let Me Go” outlines the story of students from Hailsham, a rather unorthodox school by our standards. As the story unfolds, we learn that Hailsham is a place where cloned children are raised, by guardians instead of parents, until they are released to pursue their careers – first as “carers” of organ donors then as organ donors themselves, providing up to four donations for “normal” humans.
Kathy H. narrates the tale of her life and the intertwined tales of her fellow students, the tough-fibered Ruth and gentle, awkward Tommy. The three form a nuclear family of sorts, supporting each other as they awkwardly navigate their lives as social outcasts.
Ishiguro skillfully straddles fiction genres – this is neither science nor speculative nor pure mainstream fiction. The clinical detachment of Kathy H.’s voice, along with its spare language, give the novel a heartbreaking poignancy, and Ishiguro masterfully spins out facts about the true purpose of Hailsham and its students, one detail at a time, propelling us toward the book’s inevitable outcome. It seems Kathy and her friends never question their duty or their fate. By stripping the language of specificity, Ishiguro allows readers to buy into the students’ own sense of unreality and acceptance. Euphemisms do more than protect our psyche: they also sell unpalatable truths. Ishiguro never sinks into moralizing or didacticism; he allows the story and characters to raise weighty questions: about what constitutes morality, duty and family and social contracts.
Check out Slate for Margaret Atwood’s thoughtful take on this novel.
7.06.2006
Swann's Song
I must admit: The second half of “Swann’s Way” isn’t quite as engaging to me as the first half, perhaps because Proust has switched POV from the narrator/Marcel to a more omniscient third-person. The reader is distanced by being outside the characters looking in, as opposed to being in the head of the narrator/Marcel, which Proust used to such great effect in Part 1.
I can’t really comment on plot, as I find the plot almost incidental. (Consequently, the Roger Shattuck Field Guide irritates me, with its diagrams and plot lines. I don’t know if this will change as I further my reading…) The narrative movement is psychological, versus plot-driven. Or perhaps another way to look at it is that the plot is psychological movement, and discussion of fictional devices – character, POV, setting, dialogue – need to be considered in the context of furthering the psychological movement.
For example, I see that Proust is using a recurring device of a sensory experience or association to awaken a memory or longing.
In the first half of the book, there’s the famous tea-soaked Madeleine scene, of which I quote merely a portion below. (I vow to indulge in this experience, just to follow in the narrator’s footsteps – or in this case, taste buds. Though I don’t expect it to call up any childhood experiences of St. Louis. Perhaps I should eat a Kool-aid-infused Hostess Cupcake instead.)
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of Madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me (though I did not yet know and had to put off to much later discovering why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it…
Proust uses the same device (to less effect, in my first reading – for some reason, these passages strike me as forced or half-formed, almost as if Proust were struggling with a second draft, not quite articulating what he wanted to say) with Swann, who hears a musical phrase that ignites his longing for an idealized object of romantic love:
This time he had clearly distinguished one phrase rising for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had immediately proposed to him particular sensual pleasures which he had never imagined before hearing it, which he felt could be introduced to him by nothing else, and he had experienced for it something like an unfamiliar love.
And a page later:
Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme. Verdurin’s, suddenly, after a high note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring, and divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again.
I detect this with Odette and her flowers as well, which seem to call up in her an association of refinement:
“This one looks as though it were cut from the lining of my coat,” she said to Swann, showing him an orchid, with the suggestion of respect for this very “chic” flower, for this elegant and unexpected sister which nature had given her, so far removed from her on the scale of living creatures and yet so refined, more deserving than many women of being given a place in her drawing room.
I am not sure what to make of all this on my first reading, but I expect that these motifs (if that is the proper term) will recur and deepen my understanding of the characters, while expanding the role that memory and mind play in the novel.
I can’t really comment on plot, as I find the plot almost incidental. (Consequently, the Roger Shattuck Field Guide irritates me, with its diagrams and plot lines. I don’t know if this will change as I further my reading…) The narrative movement is psychological, versus plot-driven. Or perhaps another way to look at it is that the plot is psychological movement, and discussion of fictional devices – character, POV, setting, dialogue – need to be considered in the context of furthering the psychological movement.
For example, I see that Proust is using a recurring device of a sensory experience or association to awaken a memory or longing.
In the first half of the book, there’s the famous tea-soaked Madeleine scene, of which I quote merely a portion below. (I vow to indulge in this experience, just to follow in the narrator’s footsteps – or in this case, taste buds. Though I don’t expect it to call up any childhood experiences of St. Louis. Perhaps I should eat a Kool-aid-infused Hostess Cupcake instead.)
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of Madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me (though I did not yet know and had to put off to much later discovering why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it…
Proust uses the same device (to less effect, in my first reading – for some reason, these passages strike me as forced or half-formed, almost as if Proust were struggling with a second draft, not quite articulating what he wanted to say) with Swann, who hears a musical phrase that ignites his longing for an idealized object of romantic love:
This time he had clearly distinguished one phrase rising for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had immediately proposed to him particular sensual pleasures which he had never imagined before hearing it, which he felt could be introduced to him by nothing else, and he had experienced for it something like an unfamiliar love.
And a page later:
Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme. Verdurin’s, suddenly, after a high note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring, and divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again.
I detect this with Odette and her flowers as well, which seem to call up in her an association of refinement:
“This one looks as though it were cut from the lining of my coat,” she said to Swann, showing him an orchid, with the suggestion of respect for this very “chic” flower, for this elegant and unexpected sister which nature had given her, so far removed from her on the scale of living creatures and yet so refined, more deserving than many women of being given a place in her drawing room.
I am not sure what to make of all this on my first reading, but I expect that these motifs (if that is the proper term) will recur and deepen my understanding of the characters, while expanding the role that memory and mind play in the novel.
6.28.2006
Forget Atkins: Try the Diet of Worms
I've actually got a copy on my bookshelf. But I am still looking for an edition of Karl Marx's "Yes, Jesus was so an atheist."
Ten easy ways to kill that mockingbird!
Apparently, Harpo—er, Harper Lee wrote a letter for the current issue of “O, The Oprah Magazine. “
We ask: Is that really worth coming out of reclusion for?
Even if the magazine issue promotes reading, and even if Harper Lee gives the magazine a whiff of respectability (while clouding herself with the sickening sweet stink of pOp culture), we vote “No on O.”
We like this, though:
"…(I have) clung to books even when others carry laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms."
Hey, looking for something to do, Harper? Write a book!
We ask: Is that really worth coming out of reclusion for?
Even if the magazine issue promotes reading, and even if Harper Lee gives the magazine a whiff of respectability (while clouding herself with the sickening sweet stink of pOp culture), we vote “No on O.”
We like this, though:
"…(I have) clung to books even when others carry laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms."
Hey, looking for something to do, Harper? Write a book!
6.27.2006
Only Woolf can cry Woolf ... and other literary lessons
Once again, Daniel Green over The Reading Experience has done it! He gives a rousing good analysis of the yawns of psychological realism as practiced by too many (average? mediocre? mass marketed? insert adjective here) contemporary (usually American) writers. Four purrs out of five for this essay...
And now back to our regularly scheduled meowing
The Literate Kitten dusts off her critics cap (a darling black beret with a cherry-red bow set rakishly to one side), adjusts her rhinestone-encrusted glasses, and fixes a glare on the self-pitying author of the past several entries. No, no, no! That is the ego whining! (Freud or Jung or one of those white European men wearing monocles would be strutting about like ancient roosters about now.) Amazing as it may seem, we are not the center of the universe, stars in a perpetual movie, and gods and goddesses incarnate. Especially not if we wear GAP jeans.
This culture has long been confusing its ridiculous insistence on self with individual effort set upon a foundation of basic civil rights. That is where consumerism and mass marketing have gotten us. LK, for one, is sick of every shopper believing Wal-Mart was created just for her, that big cars were designed for those superior enough to rule the road, that a teenage kid’s personal freedom extends to the right to disturb an entire busload of people with an inane cell phone conversation, or that some privileged old white men don’t have to fight a war they start because they have somehow gotten the idea that they are God’s select. Like Grade AAA eggs.
This includes a virtual mewl, rather than cri de coeur, reflecting on how one person is just not good enough or adequate enough for reading, much less reading Proust. As if that was the point at all.
The ego should come with detailed instructions, we swear. And a warning label: Not for liberal use. And definitely not for children.
One point of this entire exercise, we remind ourselves, is to prove how effort, depth and the rigors of the long haul prove more satisfying and lasting than the instant gratification and self indulgence our society so wants us to buy into (at great profit to the few).
Our underwhelming confidence in our own capabilities notwithstanding, we will grit our pearly whites and continue our project, looking forward to such a time when reflexive belief in our own ideologies (read: navel gazing) no longer governs our world.
This culture has long been confusing its ridiculous insistence on self with individual effort set upon a foundation of basic civil rights. That is where consumerism and mass marketing have gotten us. LK, for one, is sick of every shopper believing Wal-Mart was created just for her, that big cars were designed for those superior enough to rule the road, that a teenage kid’s personal freedom extends to the right to disturb an entire busload of people with an inane cell phone conversation, or that some privileged old white men don’t have to fight a war they start because they have somehow gotten the idea that they are God’s select. Like Grade AAA eggs.
This includes a virtual mewl, rather than cri de coeur, reflecting on how one person is just not good enough or adequate enough for reading, much less reading Proust. As if that was the point at all.
The ego should come with detailed instructions, we swear. And a warning label: Not for liberal use. And definitely not for children.
One point of this entire exercise, we remind ourselves, is to prove how effort, depth and the rigors of the long haul prove more satisfying and lasting than the instant gratification and self indulgence our society so wants us to buy into (at great profit to the few).
Our underwhelming confidence in our own capabilities notwithstanding, we will grit our pearly whites and continue our project, looking forward to such a time when reflexive belief in our own ideologies (read: navel gazing) no longer governs our world.
6.26.2006
What it means to be a reader
Bloody hell. It is 5:42 p.m. Pacific time, I've got a short story class in 45 minutes, and I'm freaking exhausted. Mentally. Yes, I did manage to consume 4 glasses of chablis after seeing "An Inconvenient Truth" (drinking while chatting with a friend, not drowning my depression over global warming). Yes, I put in a full day of typing drivel about actuarials. Yes, I read 300 pages of a book this weekend...
What? you ask. 300 pages. With 100-150 yet to go. And a book I heartily recommend, "They Marched into Sunlight," by David Maraniss. Neglecting Proust, even, to meet the goal. Could that explain the mental exhaustion?
Well, possibly. But I admit more to twinges of desperation and depression at not having finished the damned thing. I mean, I tried. I devoted as much time and energy as I could in 3 days to putting this one behind me.
And I couldn't.
Motivated as I was -- and am -- I simply couldn't overcome physics, and the act of reading text, word by word, then manually turning a page and starting the process all over again, some 300 times. When I think about approaching Proust -- well, it's like facing the Mount Everest of literature clad in a pair of Tevah sandals.
Okay, I've got a short story class to attend now. Rumination central closed for now. To be coherent another day...
What? you ask. 300 pages. With 100-150 yet to go. And a book I heartily recommend, "They Marched into Sunlight," by David Maraniss. Neglecting Proust, even, to meet the goal. Could that explain the mental exhaustion?
Well, possibly. But I admit more to twinges of desperation and depression at not having finished the damned thing. I mean, I tried. I devoted as much time and energy as I could in 3 days to putting this one behind me.
And I couldn't.
Motivated as I was -- and am -- I simply couldn't overcome physics, and the act of reading text, word by word, then manually turning a page and starting the process all over again, some 300 times. When I think about approaching Proust -- well, it's like facing the Mount Everest of literature clad in a pair of Tevah sandals.
Okay, I've got a short story class to attend now. Rumination central closed for now. To be coherent another day...
6.21.2006
What it means to be a writer
One of the pleasures of reading Proust is that his prose allows you to sink in—one thought leads to another and another in an unbroken chain that reels you into the text. This type of lavish, complex writing makes it hard to stop reading. It also makes it hard to quote passages. Context is crucial to ISoLT.
But, as an aspiring writer (ridiculous to be aspiring at 40-plus, but alas, there it is), I had to quote a passage which brought a smile to my face, and that flash of comradeship with another human being, long gone from the face of the earth, which makes you feel kinship with all others who have lived before you. The everlasting appeal of art.
After painstakingly recording his impressions of passage along Guermantes way, the narrator says:
…Of course it was not impressions of this kind that could give me back the hope I had lost, of succeeding in becoming a writer and a poet someday, because they were always tied to a particular object with no intellectual value and no reference to any abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt each time I looked for a philosophical subject for a great literary work. But so arduous was the task imposed on my consciousness by the impressions I received from form, fragrance or color—to try to perceive what was concealed behind them—that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.
This bald-faced truth, stated after the narrator struggles with description of his surroundings and his sensations, is like a splash of cool water on the face after a long walk on a hot summer’s day. This exactly and unflinchingly describes the experience of being a writer (I daresay any artist), high or low, famous or not, talented or not. As a moderately talented, not famous writer, I was so relieved to read this from Proust (writers always want to know the great ones suffered, too), I could have cried. I wasn’t crazy or inadequate for being tired from simply observing (I have suffered this special brand of fatigue my whole life), from being the type of person who, on each inhalation, draws in the width and breadth and depth of her surroundings.
We are not alone. We are not alone.
Such are the pleasures of reading.
But, as an aspiring writer (ridiculous to be aspiring at 40-plus, but alas, there it is), I had to quote a passage which brought a smile to my face, and that flash of comradeship with another human being, long gone from the face of the earth, which makes you feel kinship with all others who have lived before you. The everlasting appeal of art.
After painstakingly recording his impressions of passage along Guermantes way, the narrator says:
…Of course it was not impressions of this kind that could give me back the hope I had lost, of succeeding in becoming a writer and a poet someday, because they were always tied to a particular object with no intellectual value and no reference to any abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt each time I looked for a philosophical subject for a great literary work. But so arduous was the task imposed on my consciousness by the impressions I received from form, fragrance or color—to try to perceive what was concealed behind them—that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.
This bald-faced truth, stated after the narrator struggles with description of his surroundings and his sensations, is like a splash of cool water on the face after a long walk on a hot summer’s day. This exactly and unflinchingly describes the experience of being a writer (I daresay any artist), high or low, famous or not, talented or not. As a moderately talented, not famous writer, I was so relieved to read this from Proust (writers always want to know the great ones suffered, too), I could have cried. I wasn’t crazy or inadequate for being tired from simply observing (I have suffered this special brand of fatigue my whole life), from being the type of person who, on each inhalation, draws in the width and breadth and depth of her surroundings.
We are not alone. We are not alone.
Such are the pleasures of reading.
6.16.2006
6.14.2006
Further Faulkner fodder
No sooner did I post my Faulker item, when I ran into this on The Reading Experience:
In last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin (who has, in my opinion, considerably improved this publication since taking it over several months ago) contributes a generally insightful review of the Library of America's collection of early Faulkner novels. However, in his conclusion, Ulin suggests that in Faulkner's fiction
The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it's a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner's genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist — his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation — the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action — becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That's an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of "Soldiers' Pay" to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In "Novels 1926-1929," we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.
That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism.
More ...
In last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin (who has, in my opinion, considerably improved this publication since taking it over several months ago) contributes a generally insightful review of the Library of America's collection of early Faulkner novels. However, in his conclusion, Ulin suggests that in Faulkner's fiction
The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it's a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner's genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist — his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation — the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action — becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That's an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of "Soldiers' Pay" to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In "Novels 1926-1929," we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.
That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism.
More ...
Faulkner and Proust
LK couldn’t help thinking of William Faulkner as we make our way through ISoLT. That’s because we’re enrolled in a short story class, which features two Faulkner stories. (Which, when combined with ISoLT, is a little like following up a seven-course meal with a snack of fruit and cheese. Nevertheless …) Faulkner and Proust each have a way of presenting the passage of time and also of wringing the most experience from even the smallest movements.
We Google’d to see if anyone else has made the connection, and naturally, our search turned up 397,000 pages containing the words “Faulkner” and “Proust.” Ever the slow-witted Googler, LK added the words “time” and “language” and trimmed our search to just over 80,000 pages. Now, that’s more like it.
Only a few glances at the deluge of essays on postmodernism, flotsammed with terms like “rhizomal structure” and “narrative design,” caused mouth-frothing and teeth-gnashing, whereupon our claws distended as if to rip out our own eyes. While that might relieve some readers, it wouldn’t help the LK quest of improving our intellect through challenging reading.
So, forget what all of the comparative lit profs have said about Faulkner and Proust. LK is simply going to give you a few tasty tidbits of both authors so you might enjoy their language, without an accompanying pile of dusty literary terms to clutter your brain.
From “Barn Burning”:
Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit as his father's hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him: "Go get in the wagon."
From “Swann’s Way”:
Sometimes we went as far as the viaduct, whose spans of stone like great strides began at the railway station and represented to me the exile and distress that lay outside the civilized world, because each year as we came from Paris we were warned to pay careful attention, when Combray came, not to let the station go by, to be ready ahead of time because the train would leave again after two minutes and would set off across the viaduct beyond the Christian countries of which Combray marked for me the farthest limit.
We Google’d to see if anyone else has made the connection, and naturally, our search turned up 397,000 pages containing the words “Faulkner” and “Proust.” Ever the slow-witted Googler, LK added the words “time” and “language” and trimmed our search to just over 80,000 pages. Now, that’s more like it.
Only a few glances at the deluge of essays on postmodernism, flotsammed with terms like “rhizomal structure” and “narrative design,” caused mouth-frothing and teeth-gnashing, whereupon our claws distended as if to rip out our own eyes. While that might relieve some readers, it wouldn’t help the LK quest of improving our intellect through challenging reading.
So, forget what all of the comparative lit profs have said about Faulkner and Proust. LK is simply going to give you a few tasty tidbits of both authors so you might enjoy their language, without an accompanying pile of dusty literary terms to clutter your brain.
From “Barn Burning”:
Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit as his father's hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him: "Go get in the wagon."
From “Swann’s Way”:
Sometimes we went as far as the viaduct, whose spans of stone like great strides began at the railway station and represented to me the exile and distress that lay outside the civilized world, because each year as we came from Paris we were warned to pay careful attention, when Combray came, not to let the station go by, to be ready ahead of time because the train would leave again after two minutes and would set off across the viaduct beyond the Christian countries of which Combray marked for me the farthest limit.
6.05.2006
Intimidated
Reading “In Search of Lost Time” is intimidating in more ways than the obvious one of the tome’s sheer length. As a first-time reader, one can’t help but be humbled by the thought of all the Proustians who have made the reading of this epic their life’s work. Thinkers of greater thoughts than LK! And, of course, the absinthe-tinged eyes of Marcel seem to follow a reader’s every move, exhorting one to Read! Understand! Pensée!
The authors of two field guides I’m reading (“Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time,” Roger Shattuck and “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” Alain De Botton) approach the work in grand sweeping themes or summarized chunks. I intend to look up the critical study by Howard Moss as well, but overall, I am not feeling satisfied by these so-called guides. Perhaps they best serve readers who have already finished In Search of Lost Time, providing snatches of insight they may have missed. For me, reading the guides is like reading a description of eating the most delectable crème renversee au caramel, at the same moment you taste a spoonful. No comparison between the recounting of the experience and the experience itself. It’s as if Proust has come as close as anyone to removing that filter lying between reader and author.
To me, reading Proust is like a dream. Every second explodes with texture, meaning, metaphor. But the minute you wake up, the dream recedes and the details can’t be recaptured in the fullness in which you experienced them.
Even the critics don’t seem to be able to discuss the text in the traditional fiction devices of plot and character. Rather, like describing a dream, they reach for theme and meaning.
I feel the same way doing this blog. How do I describe the experience, except in how it relates to the grander themes of life?
Why is that, I wonder? The main characteristic of Proustian prose is its extreme (some say excessive) details, which ultimately seem to bog down most readers. Paradoxically, it seems to me, these same minutiae propel readers past plot and character to the broader issues of theme, succeeding in making reading the experience in and of itself, with the reader an active participant rather than a vicarious looker-on.
The authors of two field guides I’m reading (“Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time,” Roger Shattuck and “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” Alain De Botton) approach the work in grand sweeping themes or summarized chunks. I intend to look up the critical study by Howard Moss as well, but overall, I am not feeling satisfied by these so-called guides. Perhaps they best serve readers who have already finished In Search of Lost Time, providing snatches of insight they may have missed. For me, reading the guides is like reading a description of eating the most delectable crème renversee au caramel, at the same moment you taste a spoonful. No comparison between the recounting of the experience and the experience itself. It’s as if Proust has come as close as anyone to removing that filter lying between reader and author.
To me, reading Proust is like a dream. Every second explodes with texture, meaning, metaphor. But the minute you wake up, the dream recedes and the details can’t be recaptured in the fullness in which you experienced them.
Even the critics don’t seem to be able to discuss the text in the traditional fiction devices of plot and character. Rather, like describing a dream, they reach for theme and meaning.
I feel the same way doing this blog. How do I describe the experience, except in how it relates to the grander themes of life?
Why is that, I wonder? The main characteristic of Proustian prose is its extreme (some say excessive) details, which ultimately seem to bog down most readers. Paradoxically, it seems to me, these same minutiae propel readers past plot and character to the broader issues of theme, succeeding in making reading the experience in and of itself, with the reader an active participant rather than a vicarious looker-on.
5.30.2006
Back to business
The Literate Kitten is up and meowing, once again, after an extended hiatus during which, we regret to say, we succumbed to the busy-ness of work and play in the modern world—to wit: We watched too much TV. We admit this as a way of reminding ourselves of how easily we can be lulled into lazy thinking and lazy living, even as we object to media saturation—the glib sound bite, the shallow summary of complex ideas, the unchallenged blurring of fact and opinion—exemplified, we think, by our illustrious elected CEO, George W. Bush, who, when asked about his reading habits, opined, “I read the newspaper.”—sloppy thinking, and the overall degradation of the English language. The Literate Kitten does not intend to consciously contribute to the growing tonnage of cultural crap, and we apologize in advance if we do not succeed. As much as anything else, this is an exercise in improving the intellectual process. We invite you along for the journey. —LK
Swann's Way: First impressions
As is my wont, I am reading several books, simultaneously. (One cannot live on Proust alone!) The list of recommended books that I'm reading appears after this entry. However, one of the lot in particular made me uneasy. Not because of its subject matter (9/11), but because the personal experiences recounted therein (the book’s raison d’etre, in fact) were so…well, ordinary. Bland. Even indifferent. Because the use of language in these first-person accounts was so…ordinary. Bland. Even indifferent.
The book I refer to is “Report from Ground Zero” by Dennis Smith. Admittedly, this book is not pretending to be literary or highbrow or anything close to that. But, as a reader and as a U.S. citizen who lived during Sept. 11, 2001, I had hoped to take some meaningful experience away from one of the nation’s most profound collective experiences in recent memory.
“Report from Ground Zero” makes for an odd corollary to “In Search of Lost Time.” Yet, a mere 100 pages into “Swann’s Way,” I cannot help but compare this rich reading experience to the paltry morsel passed along by Dennis Smith and his editors.
Take this "Swann's Way" passage, excerpted from a longer rumination about sleep:
“…But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; I had only, in its original simplicity, the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more destitute than a cave dweller; but then the memory—not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been—would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I would not have got out on my own; I crossed centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self’s original features.”
Compare that passage to this first-person account of events at the World Trade Center on 9/11 (excerpted from “Report from Ground Zero):
“When I looked at the carnage that was there, the devastation, and what had just transpired with the two collapses…I looked around, and my personal thoughts were that nobody survived this. This was not a six-story building coming down—this was the equivalent of an earthquake.”
Or this one:
“I knew I had the biggest event of my life when those towers came down. No one would ever, ever even dream about something like that. Marine 6 was transmitting over the air, and everyone started yelling, Urgent! Over the radio—tower 2 had just come down.”
Or this one, if you still don't believe me:
"Things were still raining down on the street, and it was an unbelievable, just an unbelievable sight, like a Bruce Willis movie. But this wasn't stopping."
The difference between Proust’s description of disrupted sleep and many (not all) of the firefighters’ ruminations in Smith's book illustrates the power of clear language combined with precision of observation, and the corresponding lack we feel when we do not pay attention to these things—an issue, I can’t help but surmise, that is an overarching concern of Proust in his work, “In Search of Lost Time.”
Time is elusive, ephemeral, Proust seems to be saying: Time does its work on us. Even in his opening pages, the author reminds us of death with the act of death we partake of each night, sleep. He infuses one ordinary piece of this action (waking up during sleep) with layer upon layer of detail, until the act is so particular, so grounded, that we cannot help but feel the immensity of even such a small experience as waking from sleep. Isn’t this a way of preserving what time takes away from us?
What can be immortal, in spite of us, are the words we set down on paper, is what I hear Proust whisper from between each sheet.
If Proust could immortalize the homely act of sleeping, what could (or should) author Smith have made of an unprecedented and catastrophic historical event? If nothing else, 9/11 exposed our mortality, point blank. What an occasion this would have been, to take back some of our ownership in eternity! What a way to pay homage to those who died, recording events to such a degree that all readers from that point on would experience each moment as if it were their own! What beauty could have been wrought from an ugly moment, had the eyewitnesses plumbed their depths for the most precise words, the most thoughtful reflections? Instead, a mighty chance was squandered by the low-level skills of an untrained author, by the carelessness of lackadaisical editors, by the greed of a publisher who rushed a sloppy manuscript into print, most likely to take advantage of a still-grieving population. This lost chance, this glut of imprecision, is a legacy of our fast-paced, media-saturated culture.
I suppose it is unfair to compare a firefighter’s words to those of a French literary genius. But is precise observation and exacting use of language the sole purview of the intellectual or academic elite, and if so, is that what we want them to be?
Thank you, M Proust, for at least raising the question.
Recommended reading from what I have most recently finished: "Down and Out in Paris and London," George Orwell and "My Century," Alexander Wat. More to come as I finish...
Swann's Way: First impressions
As is my wont, I am reading several books, simultaneously. (One cannot live on Proust alone!) The list of recommended books that I'm reading appears after this entry. However, one of the lot in particular made me uneasy. Not because of its subject matter (9/11), but because the personal experiences recounted therein (the book’s raison d’etre, in fact) were so…well, ordinary. Bland. Even indifferent. Because the use of language in these first-person accounts was so…ordinary. Bland. Even indifferent.
The book I refer to is “Report from Ground Zero” by Dennis Smith. Admittedly, this book is not pretending to be literary or highbrow or anything close to that. But, as a reader and as a U.S. citizen who lived during Sept. 11, 2001, I had hoped to take some meaningful experience away from one of the nation’s most profound collective experiences in recent memory.
“Report from Ground Zero” makes for an odd corollary to “In Search of Lost Time.” Yet, a mere 100 pages into “Swann’s Way,” I cannot help but compare this rich reading experience to the paltry morsel passed along by Dennis Smith and his editors.
Take this "Swann's Way" passage, excerpted from a longer rumination about sleep:
“…But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; I had only, in its original simplicity, the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more destitute than a cave dweller; but then the memory—not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been—would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I would not have got out on my own; I crossed centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually recomposed my self’s original features.”
Compare that passage to this first-person account of events at the World Trade Center on 9/11 (excerpted from “Report from Ground Zero):
“When I looked at the carnage that was there, the devastation, and what had just transpired with the two collapses…I looked around, and my personal thoughts were that nobody survived this. This was not a six-story building coming down—this was the equivalent of an earthquake.”
Or this one:
“I knew I had the biggest event of my life when those towers came down. No one would ever, ever even dream about something like that. Marine 6 was transmitting over the air, and everyone started yelling, Urgent! Over the radio—tower 2 had just come down.”
Or this one, if you still don't believe me:
"Things were still raining down on the street, and it was an unbelievable, just an unbelievable sight, like a Bruce Willis movie. But this wasn't stopping."
The difference between Proust’s description of disrupted sleep and many (not all) of the firefighters’ ruminations in Smith's book illustrates the power of clear language combined with precision of observation, and the corresponding lack we feel when we do not pay attention to these things—an issue, I can’t help but surmise, that is an overarching concern of Proust in his work, “In Search of Lost Time.”
Time is elusive, ephemeral, Proust seems to be saying: Time does its work on us. Even in his opening pages, the author reminds us of death with the act of death we partake of each night, sleep. He infuses one ordinary piece of this action (waking up during sleep) with layer upon layer of detail, until the act is so particular, so grounded, that we cannot help but feel the immensity of even such a small experience as waking from sleep. Isn’t this a way of preserving what time takes away from us?
What can be immortal, in spite of us, are the words we set down on paper, is what I hear Proust whisper from between each sheet.
If Proust could immortalize the homely act of sleeping, what could (or should) author Smith have made of an unprecedented and catastrophic historical event? If nothing else, 9/11 exposed our mortality, point blank. What an occasion this would have been, to take back some of our ownership in eternity! What a way to pay homage to those who died, recording events to such a degree that all readers from that point on would experience each moment as if it were their own! What beauty could have been wrought from an ugly moment, had the eyewitnesses plumbed their depths for the most precise words, the most thoughtful reflections? Instead, a mighty chance was squandered by the low-level skills of an untrained author, by the carelessness of lackadaisical editors, by the greed of a publisher who rushed a sloppy manuscript into print, most likely to take advantage of a still-grieving population. This lost chance, this glut of imprecision, is a legacy of our fast-paced, media-saturated culture.
I suppose it is unfair to compare a firefighter’s words to those of a French literary genius. But is precise observation and exacting use of language the sole purview of the intellectual or academic elite, and if so, is that what we want them to be?
Thank you, M Proust, for at least raising the question.
Recommended reading from what I have most recently finished: "Down and Out in Paris and London," George Orwell and "My Century," Alexander Wat. More to come as I finish...
1.12.2005
Yes, we have no WMDs
What do Weapons of Mass Destruction have to do with Proust? Nothing, except that his works do foreshadow the eventual demise of the aristocracy, and we can only hope that the lack of WMDs in Iraq foreshadow the eventual demise of the meritocracy. Namely, the Bush dynasty.
But let us back up a bit. It has been reported by the AP that the White House said the search for WMDs in Iraq has concluded without any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war. (http://www.boston.com/dailynews/012/wash/White_House_says_Iraq_weapons_:.shtml) Though the Literate Kitten is suspicious that this was not reported in The New York Times (at least, as of this writing), we have little doubt that this is the case.
Of course, anybody who did not buy into the cult of personality surrounding George W. Bush did not buy into the whole “imminent threat” or “Iraq is buddies with al Qaeda” kites that were flown out as possible reasons for the United States to invade Iraq.
We admit that the LitKit has no inside scoop on the Brad and Jennifer split much less knowledge of the White House’s inner machinations. But we read and reflect; therefore, we can come to reasoned conclusions. Not being terribly concerned with why the Pitts are heading for Divorce Court, we can speculate about why the White House chose to oust Saddam Hussein and fight insurgents and generally kill, and destroy Iraq and its citizens. First, the United States wanted the equivalent of a military Wal-Mart: a convenient, cheap location from which to gas up its tanks and send out its troops – not only to be able to readily incinerate any terrorists who act against us, but also to be a reminder to anyone contemplating such foolishness that we can readily kick butt. Iraq was the logical choice. Saddam was like the Martha Stewart of the Middle East – he was arrogant and secretly no one liked the way he decorated his palaces – and he was the most vulnerable to attack. Nobody wanted to take on the Middle Eastern equivalents of Skilling and Lay, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
So, in a way, the invasion did have something to do with the war on terrorism; Bush and his administration just weren’t honest about it, were they? Just as Martha wasn’t honest about her conversation with her stockbroker and just as Enron execs weren’t honest with their stockholders. And we know how equitably the justice system and the public treated them. Just as Bush and Saddam Hussein and the Saudi royal family are treated equitably for their lies and acts against humanity.
In America’s current mode of social Darwinism and meritocracy, fairness and justice are based on who likes you or who likes you and your money. And it helps if you have a cute butt.
Finally, having military bases in Iraq brings the extra bonus of shoring up our alliance with Israel. Hey, it’s a win-win for us-us.
Oh, but let's not forget reasons three through five as to why we went to war: Oil. Specifically, protecting oil interests for (in order of importance): investors, corporations and consumers.
Maybe democracy will take root and somehow rule the day in the Middle East. It’s the LitKit’s guess that this would have happened anyway, given the climate of globalization and the decline of the traditional state powers. In fact, the LitKit speculates that it is these twin threats which are the driving forces behind the fundamental Islamic terrorist movement – and that the domination of the United States in terms of determining the characteristics of the popular global culture is why we are the terrorists’ favorite target. Plus, they don’t want to listen to anything more about Britney Spears.
If democracy somehow manages to sprout in the Middle East in the next 10 or 15 years, Bush will certainly take credit, much as Ronald Reagan did with the fall of the Soviet Union, although both occasions have as much to do with U.S. influence as the fall of Rome had to do with the Battle of Mursa –certainly it contributed, but it wasn’t the sole factor for such a historic event.
Anyone could make an equally sound argument that the unilateral invasion by the U.S. of Iraq – with now-discredited reasons for doing so – will delay the adoption of democracy in the Middle East, which by natural events was already ready to take place. Wonder if W ever thought of that?
But let us back up a bit. It has been reported by the AP that the White House said the search for WMDs in Iraq has concluded without any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war. (http://www.boston.com/dailynews/012/wash/White_House_says_Iraq_weapons_:.shtml) Though the Literate Kitten is suspicious that this was not reported in The New York Times (at least, as of this writing), we have little doubt that this is the case.
Of course, anybody who did not buy into the cult of personality surrounding George W. Bush did not buy into the whole “imminent threat” or “Iraq is buddies with al Qaeda” kites that were flown out as possible reasons for the United States to invade Iraq.
We admit that the LitKit has no inside scoop on the Brad and Jennifer split much less knowledge of the White House’s inner machinations. But we read and reflect; therefore, we can come to reasoned conclusions. Not being terribly concerned with why the Pitts are heading for Divorce Court, we can speculate about why the White House chose to oust Saddam Hussein and fight insurgents and generally kill, and destroy Iraq and its citizens. First, the United States wanted the equivalent of a military Wal-Mart: a convenient, cheap location from which to gas up its tanks and send out its troops – not only to be able to readily incinerate any terrorists who act against us, but also to be a reminder to anyone contemplating such foolishness that we can readily kick butt. Iraq was the logical choice. Saddam was like the Martha Stewart of the Middle East – he was arrogant and secretly no one liked the way he decorated his palaces – and he was the most vulnerable to attack. Nobody wanted to take on the Middle Eastern equivalents of Skilling and Lay, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
So, in a way, the invasion did have something to do with the war on terrorism; Bush and his administration just weren’t honest about it, were they? Just as Martha wasn’t honest about her conversation with her stockbroker and just as Enron execs weren’t honest with their stockholders. And we know how equitably the justice system and the public treated them. Just as Bush and Saddam Hussein and the Saudi royal family are treated equitably for their lies and acts against humanity.
In America’s current mode of social Darwinism and meritocracy, fairness and justice are based on who likes you or who likes you and your money. And it helps if you have a cute butt.
Finally, having military bases in Iraq brings the extra bonus of shoring up our alliance with Israel. Hey, it’s a win-win for us-us.
Oh, but let's not forget reasons three through five as to why we went to war: Oil. Specifically, protecting oil interests for (in order of importance): investors, corporations and consumers.
Maybe democracy will take root and somehow rule the day in the Middle East. It’s the LitKit’s guess that this would have happened anyway, given the climate of globalization and the decline of the traditional state powers. In fact, the LitKit speculates that it is these twin threats which are the driving forces behind the fundamental Islamic terrorist movement – and that the domination of the United States in terms of determining the characteristics of the popular global culture is why we are the terrorists’ favorite target. Plus, they don’t want to listen to anything more about Britney Spears.
If democracy somehow manages to sprout in the Middle East in the next 10 or 15 years, Bush will certainly take credit, much as Ronald Reagan did with the fall of the Soviet Union, although both occasions have as much to do with U.S. influence as the fall of Rome had to do with the Battle of Mursa –certainly it contributed, but it wasn’t the sole factor for such a historic event.
Anyone could make an equally sound argument that the unilateral invasion by the U.S. of Iraq – with now-discredited reasons for doing so – will delay the adoption of democracy in the Middle East, which by natural events was already ready to take place. Wonder if W ever thought of that?
1.05.2005
12.20.2004
Purr-fectly Proustian
And the winner is…Proust, by a nose!
Yes, The Literate Kitten will cuddle up with Marcel in 2005, starting with volume one of his seven-volume tome, In Search of Lost Time: “Swann’s Way.”
We are already intrigued by the first sentence: “For a long time, I went to bed early.”
As to which translation we chose, well, it was a tough call. We considered the C.K. Scott Montcrieff version, which was first translated in the 1920s, or D.M. Enright’s 1993 version. But, being ever adventurous, we opted for the most recent translation by Lydia Davis. We’ll wing the remaining six volumes.
Other adulators of Marcel abound, as indicated by this short list of Proust-related books, which the LitKit hopes to explore along the way:
Alain de Botton, “How Proust Can Change Your Life”
Andre Aciman, “The Proust Project”
Roger Shattuck, “A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time”
Richard Bales (ed.), “The Cambridge Companion to Proust”
Yes, The Literate Kitten will cuddle up with Marcel in 2005, starting with volume one of his seven-volume tome, In Search of Lost Time: “Swann’s Way.”
We are already intrigued by the first sentence: “For a long time, I went to bed early.”
As to which translation we chose, well, it was a tough call. We considered the C.K. Scott Montcrieff version, which was first translated in the 1920s, or D.M. Enright’s 1993 version. But, being ever adventurous, we opted for the most recent translation by Lydia Davis. We’ll wing the remaining six volumes.
Other adulators of Marcel abound, as indicated by this short list of Proust-related books, which the LitKit hopes to explore along the way:
Alain de Botton, “How Proust Can Change Your Life”
Andre Aciman, “The Proust Project”
Roger Shattuck, “A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time”
Richard Bales (ed.), “The Cambridge Companion to Proust”
12.16.2004
Read 'n Rant: And a Merry Whatever to You, Too!
As this holiest of holy seasons approaches for 94 percent of Americans who say they believe in Christ (that's what the AP polls say), we are reminded by the Fundamentalist Ghosts of Christmas Present that there's no end to cashing in on Jesus' birth. Or to the vast intrepretations of the real meaning of Christmas: www.savemerrychristmas.org.
Now, speaking solely for herself, the LitKit has no desire to remove the C-word from the holiday season. We say: Bring on the babe wrapped in swaddling!
But to organize a boycott against department stores for not displaying Merry Christmas banners? Bah, humbug!
Oh, we sympathize. Christmas shopping just isn't the same without 20-foot vinyl green banners proudly proclaiming: "Merry Christmas! And save 20% on bath beads!" We need to be reminded that the reason we are purchasing Game Boys and Barbie Dolls and edible underwear is because the Lord was born unto us. In a stinky old manger. Without one person caring whether or not He would develop a hay allergy. All to save our miserable souls from eternal damnation (although, we observe, it didn't keep us from having to listen to Robert Novak). Well, when you put it that way: It makes the whole consumer experience pretty darn holy.
But...it isn't enough to boycott shops that don't take the Lord's name in vain. That's just a mere raindrop in the vast unholy ocean of atheism. Let's bring back the true meaning of Christmas. Like resting on the Sabbath. That means, no fair using credit cards on Sundays. Even during the holiday season. Even if you work full-time and have to drive Biff to soccer on Saturdays. Jesus would really like Sundays to be about reading The New York Times and eating blinis and sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. With some sort of church service squeezed in there.
While we're at it, why not wipe out every secular sign connected with Christmas Day? Yes, let's get rid of every smarmy smack of commercial consumerism associated with the blessed birth of Our Savior. Ban all radio stations that play any seasonal music that only addresses Santa and sleigh bells and grandmothers getting run over by reindeer! Ban cookies (particularly Pfeffernusse, which sounds fascist to us) and trees and lights and tinsel and Frosty the Snowman! And Rudolph (who not only sounds German but probably drinks). Above all, get rid of Santa Claus. Yup, let's give the boot to old Kris Kringle, Jolly Old St. Nick, Father Christmas. He has been demoted from a saint to a fat old pedophile in red jammies and must not be allowed to detract from the real reason we celebrate Christmas. Let us keep only that which invokes the Lord's birthday. Like cake and ice cream and a rousing game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-in-the-manger.
Conversely, why not support any institution promoting Christ, or has tithing gone the way of the Latin mass? What an example it would be for Joe Bob Jr. or Little Sissy if their share of Christmas presents was donated to their favorite house of worship! What a spiritual message it would send to the world if families gave money to the Church instead of buying season's tickets to the Dallas Cowboys' games! It would fight terrorism too. Don't ask us how, but terrorism and the lack of Christmas spirit are all wrapped up in the same thing: non-Christian values.
Or we could, you know, go back to wishing for peace on earth and good will toward mankind.
Now, speaking solely for herself, the LitKit has no desire to remove the C-word from the holiday season. We say: Bring on the babe wrapped in swaddling!
But to organize a boycott against department stores for not displaying Merry Christmas banners? Bah, humbug!
Oh, we sympathize. Christmas shopping just isn't the same without 20-foot vinyl green banners proudly proclaiming: "Merry Christmas! And save 20% on bath beads!" We need to be reminded that the reason we are purchasing Game Boys and Barbie Dolls and edible underwear is because the Lord was born unto us. In a stinky old manger. Without one person caring whether or not He would develop a hay allergy. All to save our miserable souls from eternal damnation (although, we observe, it didn't keep us from having to listen to Robert Novak). Well, when you put it that way: It makes the whole consumer experience pretty darn holy.
But...it isn't enough to boycott shops that don't take the Lord's name in vain. That's just a mere raindrop in the vast unholy ocean of atheism. Let's bring back the true meaning of Christmas. Like resting on the Sabbath. That means, no fair using credit cards on Sundays. Even during the holiday season. Even if you work full-time and have to drive Biff to soccer on Saturdays. Jesus would really like Sundays to be about reading The New York Times and eating blinis and sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. With some sort of church service squeezed in there.
While we're at it, why not wipe out every secular sign connected with Christmas Day? Yes, let's get rid of every smarmy smack of commercial consumerism associated with the blessed birth of Our Savior. Ban all radio stations that play any seasonal music that only addresses Santa and sleigh bells and grandmothers getting run over by reindeer! Ban cookies (particularly Pfeffernusse, which sounds fascist to us) and trees and lights and tinsel and Frosty the Snowman! And Rudolph (who not only sounds German but probably drinks). Above all, get rid of Santa Claus. Yup, let's give the boot to old Kris Kringle, Jolly Old St. Nick, Father Christmas. He has been demoted from a saint to a fat old pedophile in red jammies and must not be allowed to detract from the real reason we celebrate Christmas. Let us keep only that which invokes the Lord's birthday. Like cake and ice cream and a rousing game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-in-the-manger.
Conversely, why not support any institution promoting Christ, or has tithing gone the way of the Latin mass? What an example it would be for Joe Bob Jr. or Little Sissy if their share of Christmas presents was donated to their favorite house of worship! What a spiritual message it would send to the world if families gave money to the Church instead of buying season's tickets to the Dallas Cowboys' games! It would fight terrorism too. Don't ask us how, but terrorism and the lack of Christmas spirit are all wrapped up in the same thing: non-Christian values.
Or we could, you know, go back to wishing for peace on earth and good will toward mankind.
12.14.2004
A Daily Dose
Much crap is immortalized in ink, both online and in print. Some of it, we realize, is unavoidable.(We hope The Literate Kitten is not adding to the pile of stinky word-doo.) For a whiff of clean and unpolluted prose, check out this instead of (or at least in addition to) your daily horoscope:
http://www.pepysdiary.com
http://www.pepysdiary.com
12.07.2004
Set your own lit-worthy goals for '05
Now that the Literate Kitten has committed to a serious Literary Goal for 2005, it’s time to nudge her two or three faithful readers – and maybe some unsuspecting passersby – into the same.
Read a book – and thumb your nose at the dumbing down of contemporary American society while achieving an authentic Worthwhile Goal. (Not that having French nails and cutting carbs are equivalent to moral decrepitude or anything, but Worthwhile Goals? We think not.) Why not take the highbrow and impress your friends and family next Thanksgiving with some off-the-cuff references to the emergence of Russian formalism or the theoretical problems of Wittgenstein’s Usage Theory? Eh? Imagine your cynical siblings shaking their collectives heads at their wacky empiricist sister or Dadaist brother – instead of making fun of your excessive interest in Kabbalah bracelets and collagen.
So, without further ado, here are some recommended readings for those with prose issues:
For those who have…
…never read a book straight through (willingly):
Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”
Richard Russo, “Empire Falls”
John Irving, “A Prayer for Owen Meany”
Ken Kesey, “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”
…exclusively read Stephen King, John Grisham or Michael Crichton:
Jason Fforde, “The Eyre Affair”
Michael Chabon, “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay”
Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse Five”
Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”
…been seduced by romance novels:
Jane Austen, (with Jane, anything will do, but if you must have a title, try “Persuasion”)
Daphne DuMaurier, “Jamaica Inn”
Charlotte Bronte, “Villette” (unless you haven’t read “Jane Eyre”)
Alice Hoffman, “Seventh Heaven”
…been wanting to read something other than Harry Potter with your kids:
For girls: Maud Hart Lovelace, “Betsy-Tacy” book series, L.M. Montgomery, “Anne of Green Gables,” Anna Sewell, “Black Beauty”
For boys: Robert Lewis Stevenson, “Treasure Island,” Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King,” Jack London, “Call of the Wild”
Either/or: C.S. Lewis “Narnia Chronicles,” “Asops Fables,” Charles Lamb, “Tales from Shakespeare”
…been enshrouded by mysteries:
P.D. James, “Shroud for a Nightingale”
Dashiell Hammett, “The Glass Key”
James M. Cain, “The Postman Always Rings Twice”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Complete Father Brown”
…never read anything remotely adventurous or challenging but think that it is, like acting or hosting a game show, a snap:
William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury”
Feodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes from Underground”
James Joyce, “Ulysses”
Franz Kafka, “The Trial”
…never willingly read a short story:
Anthologies:
Tobias Wolff (ed.), “The Vintage Book of American Short Stories”
Milton Crane (ed.), “Fifty Great Short Stories”
James Moffett (ed.), “Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories”
Collections:
Ernest Hemingway, “The Complete Short Stories” (Finca Vigia collection)
Eudora Welty, “Collected Stories”
Anton Chekov, “Selected Stories”
Contemporary:
Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth”
George Saunders, “Civilwarland”
Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son”
…been looking for a classic you can actually read and very possibly enjoy (and still retain bragging rights for tackling a noteworthy novel):
Gustav Flaubert, “Madame Bovary”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
Pearl S. Buck, “The Good Earth”
John Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath”
Read a book – and thumb your nose at the dumbing down of contemporary American society while achieving an authentic Worthwhile Goal. (Not that having French nails and cutting carbs are equivalent to moral decrepitude or anything, but Worthwhile Goals? We think not.) Why not take the highbrow and impress your friends and family next Thanksgiving with some off-the-cuff references to the emergence of Russian formalism or the theoretical problems of Wittgenstein’s Usage Theory? Eh? Imagine your cynical siblings shaking their collectives heads at their wacky empiricist sister or Dadaist brother – instead of making fun of your excessive interest in Kabbalah bracelets and collagen.
So, without further ado, here are some recommended readings for those with prose issues:
For those who have…
…never read a book straight through (willingly):
Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”
Richard Russo, “Empire Falls”
John Irving, “A Prayer for Owen Meany”
Ken Kesey, “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”
…exclusively read Stephen King, John Grisham or Michael Crichton:
Jason Fforde, “The Eyre Affair”
Michael Chabon, “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay”
Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse Five”
Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”
…been seduced by romance novels:
Jane Austen, (with Jane, anything will do, but if you must have a title, try “Persuasion”)
Daphne DuMaurier, “Jamaica Inn”
Charlotte Bronte, “Villette” (unless you haven’t read “Jane Eyre”)
Alice Hoffman, “Seventh Heaven”
…been wanting to read something other than Harry Potter with your kids:
For girls: Maud Hart Lovelace, “Betsy-Tacy” book series, L.M. Montgomery, “Anne of Green Gables,” Anna Sewell, “Black Beauty”
For boys: Robert Lewis Stevenson, “Treasure Island,” Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King,” Jack London, “Call of the Wild”
Either/or: C.S. Lewis “Narnia Chronicles,” “Asops Fables,” Charles Lamb, “Tales from Shakespeare”
…been enshrouded by mysteries:
P.D. James, “Shroud for a Nightingale”
Dashiell Hammett, “The Glass Key”
James M. Cain, “The Postman Always Rings Twice”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Complete Father Brown”
…never read anything remotely adventurous or challenging but think that it is, like acting or hosting a game show, a snap:
William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury”
Feodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes from Underground”
James Joyce, “Ulysses”
Franz Kafka, “The Trial”
…never willingly read a short story:
Anthologies:
Tobias Wolff (ed.), “The Vintage Book of American Short Stories”
Milton Crane (ed.), “Fifty Great Short Stories”
James Moffett (ed.), “Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories”
Collections:
Ernest Hemingway, “The Complete Short Stories” (Finca Vigia collection)
Eudora Welty, “Collected Stories”
Anton Chekov, “Selected Stories”
Contemporary:
Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth”
George Saunders, “Civilwarland”
Denis Johnson, “Jesus’ Son”
…been looking for a classic you can actually read and very possibly enjoy (and still retain bragging rights for tackling a noteworthy novel):
Gustav Flaubert, “Madame Bovary”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
Pearl S. Buck, “The Good Earth”
John Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath”
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