Monthly Archives: August 2012

August 3, 2012 · 3:53 pm

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”–Jean Cocteau

Since a week or so ago, when I last wrote up some short reviews of other blogsites I’ve been following, it’s time to write up another 4 which have come to fill a good portion of my reading time during the day.  Though they all have some connection with writing, again they are individually very different in tonalities and voices, and I’ve been kept very busy watching some of the action on them.  Most if not all of them have been Freshly Pressed, so congratulations are in order, first of all.  Here’s hoping you find this list useful for your own blogging habits, and that you locate some here you’d also like to follow.  Also (vis-à-vis my title to this blog), I hope none of these gifted people feel misunderstood by anything I represent about their sites.

1).  NATASHA–at http://writerreaderbakerbride.wordpress.com/  .  This is obviously a site for varied (if related) creative interests.  Two are related because both writing (and getting published) and also getting married are validations of self that help to make life brighter; these are some of the things this writer has to report.  They are varied because the author seems equally well at home in passing on tips for several DIY wedding projects, dealing with the oral quirks of a new Nexus 7 program, and writing about editing and getting published.  Also (lest I leave the baker out), she has Scrummy Sundays recipes once a week, featuring sinfully rich and gooey treats which make me gain 10 pounds just in reading the directions.  The author (lest in all the flourish of topics we fail to emphasize this very important fact) has been given an ebook contract by HarperCollins and has what she modestly refers to as a “handful of short story publications.”  And, in the generosity which distinguishes her answers to her readers, she offers the first 4 chapters of her memoir-novel on site as a free read.  I’m very much enjoying this site, while hoping that the author’s many projects don’t drag her in too many different directions at once–but then, I’ve always been a greedy reader!

TheYoungPlum– at http://theyoungplum.wordpress.com/  .  This blog features a very talented young writer who’s soon off to a creative writing program to hone his skills, which are considerable already.  An ironic, wry voice with an appealing Cole Porterish ability with words is what is most consistent on his site, as he visits and re-visits such topics as coffeehouse customs, superheroes, product marketing, and racial profiling.  A word of warning to solemn folk:  this writer is both edgy and daring; make sure your sense of humor is functioning adequately before reading.  His badinage with his audience is also extremely winning, and his writing shows a certain effortless freedom which constitutes a new, fresh voice.  He’s been writing for years now while doing other things, and his proficiency shows.  His motto, placed in the header of his site, is “to be young, to be dumb, and as ripe as a plum,” a more than adequate self-advertisement for the written material and occasional cleverly manipulated photos he showcases.

Sheila Pierson–at http://sheilapierson.wordpress.com/ .  In an adaptation of Descartes, Sheila says in her blog “I write…therefore I am,” surely a claim every would-be writer would like to make for self-verification (sadly, one actually has to do the work to make the claim).  Sheila has clearly done the work.  She writes upon such topics as how two arts (for example, music and writing) can work together, as when one listens to and internalizes music while writing, with an effect on the writing itself.  She also has proposed to become a “certified yoga instructor,” and relates some of the difficulties of this ambition, while asking other writers to respond with what “centers” them in their work.  Just these two topics together show that one of her main interests is very likely the interfaces among writing, other forms of creativity, and finding one’s freedom.  Also, Sheila writes not only prose, but also poetry, and though I haven’t had a chance yet to go through all of her archives, she has been archiving since January 2012.  All in all, I would call this a site well worth keeping up with and researching further.

Annie Cardi– at http://anniecardi.com/ .  When I first checked on Annie’s site I thought, “This is not for me–I have no interest in writing YA fiction.”  Yet, as I idly scrolled down the page, I became more and more intrigued with what I saw.  Not only were favorite “reads” from my own childhood featured on her site, but also more adult novels were discussed, ones which she obviously feels (and says) that younger readers can enjoy, too.  The benefit of this “double whammy” of discussion is that one can trace a trajectory imaginatively and nostalgically not only between what one once read and reads now, but also between what one’s future readers (perhaps) are reading now and what they might like of one’s own.  Just today, I saw something new on her site, an article on The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  Plus, Sheila has included links to more than one very intriguing site on general literary questions.  One of my favorite off-site links was to a list of 10 issues about which some YA fiction leads young readers to have mistaken life expectations (I went through the list laughing ruefully; I had been one such YA fiction reader once upon a time, a topic I had included a few years ago in my third novel).  All in all, this is a very valuable website for writers of YA fiction, dealing with quality works and authors.  Whether you’re looking to write a young adult novel or wondering how you yourself developed as a reader (perhaps even from Burnett’s The Secret Garden to the feminist classic My Secret Garden), this is a site to be profited from.

And those are my reviews of other blog/websites for today.  Look around you (particularly in Freshly Pressed and the links these sites take you to) for other good reads!  More now than ever before the (literary) world is your oyster!

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August 2, 2012 · 7:32 pm

The mystery of the book(s)–“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”–Jorge Luis Borges

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a bibliophile only in the sense that I collect books rather indiscriminately as to edition and date of publication, and try to read as many of them as I can.  I also read ones from the library which I don’t have the means to collect.  So, many a bibliophile in the other sense (the person who acquires and hoards and buys and occasionally deals in rare books) would probably scorn my collection.  But I’d like to say for the record that even though I can’t collect rare books, I too have picked up an older book in my hands, one which perhaps someone in a bookstore has told me is a first edition by an author I like.  I too have gently turned through the pages, caressed them, pressed them toward my face and smelled the odor of old paper, even.  And whether you’re simply a read-a-holic like me or a more demanding collector of rare editions and old manuscripts and scrolls, I think you will find the book I am about to recommend entrancing; it deals with the romance and mystery of the book, and also with the topic of “demonic” possession, whether by a book or an author or a person.

The book is The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  It starts with the death by hanging of a bibliophile, who leaves behind him a partial manuscript, a possibly original copy of a chapter of The Three Musketeers.  The central character of the story (though not the initiating narrator) is Lucas Corso, a book finder who finds rare and unusual books for people with the money to pay for them.  He is asked to authenticate the chapter, and he also has another mission on hand:  to find out whether any or all of the periodically re-surfacing copies of a demonology text known as The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows (supposedly a manual for summoning the devil) are real, still exist, and are genuine.  He expects his investigations to take him from Spain to Paris and Portugal.  What he doesn’t expect is to be pursued and harrassed by a mysterious chauffeur in a Jaguar and others, and to be drawn into a web of deceit, crime and jockeying for position in a game he only half knows the rules of, but which is based upon the game he knows rather better:  i.e., negotiating, not always honestly or scrupulously, for special texts.

The author gives a picture of Lucas Corso through the eyes of Boris Balkan, who compares himself to the Doctor Watson figure of the story, and to whom Corso later reveals the whole story.  Corso is described thusly:  “Corso was taking notes.  Precise, unscrupulous, and deadly as a black mamba was how one of his acquaintances described him later when Corso’s name came up in conversation.  He had a singular way of facing people, peering through his crooked glasses and slowly nodding in agreement, with a reasonable, well-meaning, but doubtful expression, like a whore tolerantly listening to a romantic sonnet.  As if he was giving you a chance to correct yourself before it was too late.”  What a hero, right?  And also, as one reads later, what a female romantic interest:  he meets her on a train, and the first thing she says to him is “I know you.”  She is described briefly in this manner:  “Close up, her green eyes seemed even lighter, like liquid crystal, and luminous against her suntanned skin.  It was only March, and with her hair parted like a boy’s, her tan made her look unusual, sporty, pleasantly ambiguous.  She was tall, slim, and supple.  And very young.”  When he first asks her her name, she tells him it is Irene Adler, which of course is a reference to Holmes’s “woman that got away.”  This first chapter in which the two of them meet has a quote from a J. Cazotte:  “The truth is that the devil is very cunning.  The truth is that he is not always as ugly as they say.”  The problem is that nearly everyone in the book shows an abnormal amount of cunning, so that one really begins to feel that it’s a book itself on demonology.  Certainly, it has a series of prints in it from some of the texts Corso encounters which look like altered Tarot cards, and which bear a special significance to what he’s searching for.  He tries repeatedly to separate the threads he’s following with Dumas from those of the demonology he’s also trying to cover, while being both pursued and threatened (and mystified) by the pursuit.  The final lines of the book elliptically read:  “[Corso] was laughing under his breath, like a cruel wolf, as he leaned over to light his last cigarette.  Books play that kind of trick, he thought.  And everyone gets the devil he deserves.”  Don’t think that I’ve ruined your read, however:  in this case as in many another, “the devil is in the details.”

So, whether you yourself have ever been consumed as by a devil to find and purchase a particular edition of a book or manuscript, or whether you’ve previously thought such obsessions obscure or boring, you’ll surely find this book an exciting mystery:  whether you view Paradise as a library or take a darker view of being stricken with book fever, I feel certain this mystery/adventure will keep you reading steadily from start to finish.

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August 2, 2012 · 4:06 pm

“Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.”–Jose Ortega y Gasset

Today I’d like to air a few connected topics, such as the difference between what it is to love and what to own (and when there isn’t a difference); the implications of calling someone else a “primitive,” or a “savage” purely by force of where they come from in the world or what group they belong to; and the connection between my previous two topics.  This will in all likelihood be a sketchier post than usual, because these topics have been written upon by others with so much greater depth and skill that all I can do is point the way to writings other than my own meager post.

Perhaps it would be best to start with my first extensive intellectual exposure to one topic, which was an extremely readable and well-written book by Professor Victor Li entitled The Neo-Primitivist Turn:  Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity.  Alterity means something like “otherness,” as when we experience contact with someone from a society which we at least perceive to be unlike our own.  “Culture” is another term sometimes used to discuss perceived differences; and “‘modernity’ as a conceptual term can be shown to harbour a primitivist logic as well” (p. 153).  In the course of his thorough exploration of these terms, Li discusses the works of other theorists on the topics involved.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jürgen Habermas are treated in some detail.  But don’t let me scare you away with fears that this discussion is hard to follow:  Li is not only a scholar’s scholar, he is a writer’s writer, and discusses these topics in a manner to be understood by someone who has only previously encountered the above list of names on a syllabus, or perhaps some of them not at all.  Let’s hear Li in some of his own words, from his “Preface”:  “Knowing as we do today that there have never existed peoples untouched by history, why do we continue to believe that such groups of people, by-passed by modern history, still exist?  Why do we still believe in the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been increasingly withdrawn from circulation?  Why still harp on the primitive when we have been made aware that primitive society was an invention of the modern West?….We will no doubt notice, especially in these politically enlightened times, that the word ‘primitive’ does not appear in the description.  Instead, acceptable terms like ‘individual cultures,’ ‘ethnic groups,’ or ‘living tribes’ are used….[These] may just be euphemisms inasmuch as they are still employed as concepts opposed, as ‘primitive’ once was, to a globalizing modernity” (p. vii).  The terms of Li’s book are thus fairly easily inaugurated for discussion, and space requires that I leave you to discover on your own Li’s distinctive ability to follow all the ins and outs of his work.  He uncomplicates as much as possible such an innately involved discussion.  Lest we miss the point, however, he comments with wit and insight in the conclusion of his book on Will Self’s short story “Understanding the Ur-Bororo,” in which a fictional tribe is said to identify themselves as ‘”The People Who You Wouldn’t Like to be Cornered by at a Party” (this story can be found in Will Self’s collection of short stories The Quantity Theory of Insanity Together With Five Supporting Propositions).  In contrast with the usual fictions structured around outlandish and/or “colorful” and/or particularly “wise” tribes, the story about the Ur-Bororos is that not only are they a “boring” tribe, but “[t]hey also view themselves as boring.”  They are thus ultimately unsatisfying to theorizing.  Nevertheless, Li sees in Self’s story also the point that though the story “dispels the myth of primitivism…the reader still takes away from the story a sense of longing for the horizon of difference represented by the primitive” (p. 219).  This analysis of the story occurs in Li’s “Conclusion,” which has the accurately pointed sub-title “‘Theorizing always needs a Savage,'” a remark which Li cites as coming from Michel de Certeau.

With this excellent book in the back of my mind, I recently read Clarice Lispector’s short story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” in which an explorer actually locates a person, supposedly isolated by all but her immediate surroundings, from the rest of the world.  We are told that the tribe she belongs to will soon be exterminated:  “Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes….The Bahundes hunt them….they catch them in nets and eat them.”  The voice of the story is a primitivizing one, which compares the littlest woman (who is pregnant) to a “monkey,” and says “Little Flower [a name given her by the explorer who finds her] scratched herself where no one scratches.”  Of her picture in the Sunday Papers in several countries, we are told “She looked like a dog.”  But intertwined with this first voice, in the complexity of the narrative we soon hear a new voice, making comments about love, both about what so-called civilized people know of it and what Little Flower knows of it.  Some of the readers of the Sunday tabloids flatly refuse to extend empathy when they look at her; others picture only how she would fit into their own society for their own use, as when they imagine her waiting at table, or being a “toy” for the children.  One woman almost honestly considers “the malignity of our desire for happiness,” and “the cruel necessity of loving.”  She thinks of her child who wants Little Flower as a toy as “clever,” “dangerous,” and “ferociously…need[ing] to play”; yet, she loves him “obstinately,” and though she knows her thoughts about her child will haunt her, she decided to buy him a new suit.  In a switch back to the jungle picture, we see Little Flower rejoicing internally and falling in love with the strange looking white man, but not in any “me Tarzan, you Jane” fashion.  Rather, she is as much in love with his boots and his ring as she is with him, and the source of her joy is because she hasn’t been eaten.  “Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling.  Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life….one might even say [she felt] ‘profound love,’ since, having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity.”  She answer the explorer that it is “very nice to have a tree of her own to live in….because it is good to own, good to own, good to own.”  Here we see both the similarity and the difference between the two “different” cultures.  Both want to own, though because her difficulty of surviving is so great, Little Flower thinks of a tree home as something to own.  She is as greedy in her desire “to own” as the “cultivated” societies are to own her, whether by the invasion of her privacy, the imagining of her as a toy or servant, or the simple turning away from their common humanity.  Yet both share the same desire.  And the story makes it clear:  so often, when we think we love, we actually want to own a person or an experience, or what we think they symbolize.  These are only summary points of a really quite gifted short story, which has to be read to be fully appreciated.  I did, however, want to select not only short stories today but some intellectual background for them which if you take it slowly and carefully is just as good reading, and is very illuminating on its own.

So, to achieving a world of better understanding of each other no matter where we come from, and in favor of doing as little careless theorizing as we can, this is my post for today.  I hope you will enjoy reading these texts as much as I did.  shadowoperator

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August 1, 2012 · 3:10 pm

Albert Camus and the Existential Dilemma, in Two Texts

I recently decided to re-read Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which I first read years ago for a philosophy course, and which made little sense to me then because I had such difficulty identifying with the main character, Meursault.  It’s a classic of existential fiction, however, so this time I persisted in my efforts to understand.  I read the excellent 1988 translation of Matthew Ward, who translated the book following American standards of speech and writing, which was better not because of any political chauvinism, but because Camus himself suggested at the time he wrote it that he was intent upon following the American or Hemingwayesque model of fiction writing.

I started out, as I usually do, by reading the book blurb, to see if I could recall highlights from my previous reading.  I nearly always do this even when I know what the books are about.  In this case, though, I felt the blurb was a bit incorrect.  In order to emphasize the sense of an existential experience which could happen to anyone, the blurb writer speaks of the story “of an ordinary man who unwittingly get drawn into a senseless murder….”  In this same paragraph, there’s also a quote from Camus about “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

The fact is, however, Meursault is not exactly an ordinary man.  First of all, when the prosecutor at his trial accuses him of feeling no remorse for the murder he committed, he says of himself, “I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”  This is chilling.  This is surely more of a sociopathic reaction than an “ordinary” one.  Also, he feels no regret for being party to a casual acquaintance’s abuse of the other’s girlfriend.  Yet by ordinary standards, he is implicated in this too.  So he’s not really ordinary in the accepted sense.  As well, unusual atmospheric conditions pertain to his case:  though we are aware from statistics that more violent crimes are committed during excruciatingly hot weather, in Meursault this reaches an extreme–as he thinks just before he commits the murder, the heat of the day and “the sun [were] just the same as [they] had been the day I’d buried Maman….”  This may be the one way in which Meursault is ordinary, i.e., that a death of a near relative is the first (and perhaps not just correlative but also causative) event in the sequence which ends with his execution.  Even in the plain, unvarnished prose of the book, we perhaps can see it as a key precipitating event to his reaching out to other people around him, one of whom, Raymond, is not a good friend for him to have.  Rather, because he is full of “gentle indifference,” as he later says, he suddenly is accessible when Raymond randomly reaches out to him.  Expressions or states of being or mind occurring over and over begin to carry the emotive force of the book; we read of “no way out” (an expression much like Sartre’s “huit clos,” often translated as “no exit”).  Also, there are matters of “chance,” and the “dizziness” in Meursault’s head which causes him to be so bothered by the heat.  He even ends up saying in court that it was “because of the sun” that he committed the murder.  One might propose to oneself to ask what the mother’s death in cooler weather would have produced:  the same “gentle indifference” and submission to “chance,” or ordinary mourning behavior, which others see as lacking in him and which lack they say indicated ahead of time his clearly criminal nature.

It is also not “inadvertently” exactly that he is drawn into the excessiveness of Raymond’s life, but unresistingly, as if he has no limits within him which could be recognized as moral waystations.  He says of himself at the trial at one point, “for the first time I realized that I was guilty.”  Therefore, though the terms of existential and absurdist fiction have been applied to The Stranger, there are also clear signs that these terms don’t mean the same thing as they come to mean rather more directly in Camus’s short story “The Guest,” from his 1957 book “Exile and the Kingdom.”

In “The Guest,” a teacher, clearly not sociopathic but intensely kind in his regard for other people, treats a soldier and the soldier’s Arab prisoner alike with humanity and brotherhood, only to be “absurdly” put in the position to be judged at fault both by the soldier’s regime and by the prisoner’s society.  This story has another “surprise” ending, so for the benefit of those who haven’t read it, I won’t say more of the plot.  Again, however, the physical setting is very evocative of locale and weather conditions, though in this story it is winter which prevails.  To get my point, i.e., how much more truly absurd the fate of the teacher may turn out to be than Meursault’s, one has only to compare the two of them.

The juncture where the two tales meet, however, is at the fulcrum of choice.  For the true existentialist position is that one has an amount of choice (more or less limited by pre-existing circumstances), and one is responsible for that choice.   And this is an observation which holds true in both stories, whether as in the first we see a near sociopath–whose main excuse is the heat of the day–or as in the second we witness a person practicing human kindness, tolerance, and understanding.  As I once was told by an excellent teacher, “You are free, so make your choice.”  We all have a few pre-existing conditions to cope with; what matters is what we do with what we’ve got.

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