Category Archives: What is literature for?

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  Why do we still believe in the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been increasingly withdrawn from circulation?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

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

July 29, 2012 · 7:20 pm

“It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself.”–Second Maccabees

My title quote aside, I often find myself making a lengthy introduction to something I mean to discuss which is sometimes only slightly longer than the “prologue” itself.  And there have been times when I’ve just outright broken the above rule and abided by the old formula whereby one first embarks upon a long explanatory bit and then stops, draws breath, and says to one’s audience (who are perhaps getting more and more exasperated by the minute), “To make a long story short.” Then one gives the “punchline” or gist of one’s tale, which could’ve been handled in a much shorter form.  My excuse today is that not too long ago I ran across an appealing story about a story-teller which made me think of one of the most gifted story-tellers I ever knew myself (a junior high school history teacher of mine), and I wanted to intertwine the two subjects, or at least to present them together in a series of thoughts about story-telling, both oral and written.

In both cases (one case drawn from J. D. Salinger’s short story “The Laughing Man” and the other from my personal recollection), the story-teller was an older person, in both cases a man (though it might equally well have been otherwise), and one who was employed in the education or development of a much younger group of human beings.  In Salinger’s story, “the laughing man” is the hero of a set of tales told by a sort of camp counselor or after-school activities teacher, a hero whose rollicking career goes from episode to episode for quite a long time, each episode having a cliff-hanger ending, and inspiring a group of young boys to feel a strong personal connection with both the teacher and the hero of the stories.  It apparently matters not how unlikely and incredible the adventures are, the hero is believable to the boys’ hero worshipping attitude (and of course, it’s clear from the way the narrative is structured that in some interior, subconscious way they associate the hero with the teacher, believing incoherently almost that the fortunes of one rise and fall with the fortunes of the other).  When the teacher suddenly “breaks” the story-telling “contract” with the students, they are easily able to assign a cause from his personal life, and there’s a fine and singular sort of imagery at the very end of the story which, though it’s not a surprise ending in itself, signals the end of an era in a boy’s life just as readily as if it were an action.  A veil or curtain has been drawn aside, not only about the teacher, but about the story-telling process itself.  And I’m not going to spoil the story for you by telling you any more about it (just in case you either haven’t read it ever, or haven’t seen it recently).

In my own case, the story-teller was a man with a life which was better shielded from us as students.  He was a great humorist in his own right, was a good teacher, and was  (as I later learned) well-versed in literature in some respects, even though history was his field of work.  Here’s how it went:  we were in a state history course.  It was dull and slogging enough as subject matter to us, because even a good teacher could only do so much to “kick against the pricks,” as the expression goes, and teach it separately from the way most history classes were taught at that time, with lots of memorization of names and dates, and battles and generals and all that “stuff.”  He did his best to highlight the facts with us to inspire our memory abilities, and it was probably the best a history class could be for its time.  But what really was inspiring, especially to incipient English majors like me, were the stories he told us, one per week on Fridays, after our weekly state history test.

Somehow, my teacher always made the story last just exactly the same time as the class period.  He always finished on time.  The most interesting thing I found out about his surprise ending story choices, which had us hanging onto our seats until the very last moment, however, was that most of the stories he re-told came from written literature!  He spoke in a slow, suspenseful drawl–punctuated with little leaps and bounds of words at exciting junctures in the story–and he always managed to catch us off-guard at the end, whether with laughter, gasping, or awe.  When I got a little older and more mature, I discovered that our story-teller had been an enthusiast of the short story form from mostly American sources, both male and female, though he had a slight preference for the male writer.  I later identified his story “friends” in such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Anne Porter.  There were even stories such as Katherine Anne Porter’s “He,” in which much of the drama relies upon the literary qualities, and upon conversations and voices of the characters–in their clutches and grabs at their mutual history (and which involves a developmentally disabled child, a subject needing delicate handling and a sure touch for junior high school students, especially when it’s Friday and they’re feeling the exuberance of release from an exam).  He “re-told” the story by inventing his own lines of narration and dialogue, getting the serious issues and themes across to us without moralizing, keeping the story on its real and essential track, modifying for our understanding without talking “down” to us.  In short, he became a performer himself, playing upon our minds and hearts and human qualities and teaching us to extend ourselves imaginatively to others through an experience of fiction.  And the best part at the time was that we didn’t have to do anything but listen; we didn’t have to write a paper on the stories, we didn’t even need to crack a book open.  It was a shared experience, one that often had us grinning and exchanging glances across the aisles at the startling conclusions of the stories, or perhaps even raising hands and asking questions as we almost always failed to do in English classes, where “this stuff” was paramount.  It was a wonderful experience, one which affected my own desire to become a writer just as much as anything I then or later encountered in print.

And that’s my re-told story for today.  Though it’s not much of a review per se, if you’re interested in looking up J. D. Salinger’s story, you will find it to be told in his usual matter-of-fact, apparently-uninterested-in-details stark manner, one which makes much more significant the final imagistic summary in the story.  You can find the story in a collection known as Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, issued (and probably re-printed or re-issued by now) by Bantam Books (the original copyright was put through by Little, Brown, and Co.).   Today is the end of my weekend, and tomorrow I will be once again in the midst of myriad reading and writing chores.  I hope you all enjoyed the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, and are finding time to watch the competitions that interest you the most.  Ciao for now!

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , ,

July 28, 2012 · 4:40 pm

“Hope is the thing with feathers.”–Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson wrote:  “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers–/That perches in the soul–/And sings the tune without the words–/And never stops–at all–“….  This is a very well-known quote, to which even Woody Allen felt the need to respond (by titling one of his comic books Without Feathers, for example).  We all feel hope for one thing or another, aspirations of one kind or another, desires that we cannot perhaps meet in the present, but which we hope to fulfill in the future.  In the nature of the thing itself, it matters not whether it’s a hope for a particular education, kind of job, one specific individual to share our life with, or our poetic “muse”: whatever may be the inspiring element of our own hopes, it reaches fulfillment because of some of the same characteristics, which might be called “persistence towards the elusive future, capitalization on the possible present.”  (That last phrase is just something I made up for lack of a better one, it’s not a quote.)  First of all, we have to persist in hanging on to the future, which seems to be trying just as stubbornly to elude us at every turn.  Secondly, we have to capitalize on anything good in the present which might lead us to that ever receding goal.  We all face these challenges, and it’s in the documents of our successes, failures, and survival on the path that we enrich and entertain and inspire each other.

One writer who has composed for us a story very much of this encouraging and rugged nature is the Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, another graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, who has written several books and volumes of poetry about her experiences, somewhat fictionalized but always true-to-life.  The book of hers about which I want to comment today is the book of short “vignettes” (as the blurb writer denominates them) composed around the life of Esperanza (a word for “hope,”) who doesn’t like her own name and would prefer to be called “Zeze the X.”  The book is entitled The House on Mango Street, published some time back, in 1984 (this is the paperback date; the hardback date may well have been earlier.  The story appears in a slightly different form in the anthology I mentioned in an earlier post a day or two ago).

In the autobiographical note in the anthology, Cisneros is quoted as saying that she has discovered for herself a way to write stories “that were a cross between poetry and fiction….[I]  wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after.  Or, that could be read in a series to tell one big story.  I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with reverberation.”  (The only other writer I am aware of who has written by a similar method is the writer Julio Cortazar, who wrote a book named Hopscotch, of which the chapters can be read in any order.)

The House on Mango Street opens with a terse, tense, though melodic relation of all the many houses (and streets) Esperanza has lived in (and on) with her family during their urban migrations from apartment to apartment building.  Esperanza first becomes aware of her own and her family’s poverty when a nun from her school points to the apartment from the sidewalk and says “You live there?”  Esperanza remarks only, “The way she said it made me feel like nothing.”  But true to the nature of her being (and living up to her name and her quality of mind) Esperanza relates, “I knew then I had to have a house.  A real house.  One I could point to.  But this isn’t it.  The house on Mango Street isn’t it.  For the time being, Mama says.  Temporary, says Papa.  But I know how those things go.”  Thus, Esperanza’s dreams are at variance with her worldly wise awareness of the things adults say and do, even though she herself is still a child.  Her experience and attitude are much the same regarding the friends she sometimes hopes to have.  Other incidents and conversations which are well-imagined and which are perhaps remembered concerning the writer’s comrades and friends are told in a lyrical style all their own, achievning what Cisneros herself aspires to do in her work.

In the penultimate story in the book, entitled “A House of My Own,” Esperanza adds evocative details to what she wants in a house:  “Not a flat.  Not an apartment in back.  Not a man’s house.  Not a daddy’s.  A house all my own.  With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias.  My books and my stories.  My two shoes waiting beside the bed.  Nobody to shake a stick at.  Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.”¶  “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”  Here, the rhythmic flow of the sentences creates the “space” for the readers to dip into Esperanza’s world imaginatively, adding their own like feelings and experiences of being crowded/longing for release, with the final line of “clean as paper before the poem” being the line that vindicates both Esperanza’s desire to escape and the reader’s persistence in following the writer’s exploration of the nature of hope.  Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own, move over (or at least make room!):  Sandra Cisneros and her whole house are coming through!

(Today’s a short post, but I hope a worthwhile one.  I’m having a great time with my family members who’re visiting, and I hope your weekend is going well too.–Cisneros’s book is available from Vintage Contemporaries of Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.  Get it soon, and enjoy the fine combination of poetry and prose which is a goal well-realized by Cisneros.)  shadowoperator

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , ,

July 25, 2012 · 12:45 pm

“Imagination is a good servant, but a bad master.”–Unknown

Before starting on my topic for today, I’d like to ask anyone who knows where this quote comes from to respond with the author’s name.  I couldn’t find the source of the quote after a lot of looking, so I’d like to be able to attribute it to someone specific (it’s one of my favorite quotes).

Now then, down to business.  A few days ago, I wrote a post headed by a quote from Herman Melville which read, “Dream[ing] horrid dreams, and mutter[ing] unmentionable thoughts….”  Those of my friends who read the post commented to me in private (why, oh why, didn’t they post a comment, to open this issue to discussion?).  They said that in showing a sense of humor about women possibly being buried under the floorboards of a castle by men, a scenario which might well occur in a Gothic novel (I deliberately said “castle”–after all, how many of us ever do more than tour in one of those?), I was being too “glib” about some of the truly dreadful things that happen to women at the hands of men.  I was merely trying to make the point that in ordinary day-to-day life, too much imagination or imagination ill-used can lead us to view our loved ones askance unfairly (chances are if either men or women find themselves imagining too much too often, there’s something wrong in the relationship–at least one side of the equation isn’t happy).

The friend who was the main instigator in challenging me about this pointed out that with the recent shootings in Aurora, CO and all the other gun-related crimes that have occurred in recent history, as well as all the times in the late 20th-early 21st century when men have been known to abuse/do away with their wives and girlfriends, I should’ve shown more restraint in my sense of humor about Gothic notions.

First of all, these are two separate issues unless you’re firm and sure in your mind (as I can’t say I am yet) that things are totally worse now than they ever have been.  As to all the mass shootings which have occurred in the time span I’ve referred to, yes, I do think those are worse, and I can only recommend Diane Feinstein’s point, that we urgently need more and better gun control.

About the second issue, however, I would ask whether we really have more instances of abuse/killings of women by men than we’ve ever had, or whether it’s simply a matter of the men being oftener discovered and, one hopes, prosecuted for their crimes.  While this view of the crime passionnel, as it’s called, takes a dimmer view of men’s goodness in the first light (that is, men are doing nothing new), it takes a more hopeful view of the penalties men must pay for their criminal excesses these days.  Better investigation means more correct arrests (aided of course by the press when it is a responsible one), which means more adequate prosecution (again, one hopes.  My discussion lacks statistics, but where would we look, exactly, for reliable statistics on sexual savagery down through all of history?).

And it is in this light of the whole discussion of the issue that I raise the thought that both humor (taking things less seriously because one winces at them) and heightened Gothic horror (taking things at a fever pitch of seriousness because one shivers at them) are both defense mechanisms against what is too dreadful actually to be taken lightly in any real sense.  So, I like to think that in the space of a post I have dealt squarely with the issues my friend(s) raised.  I do, however, reserve both the right to joke about things that make me (and possibly you) uncomfortable–and by this means perhaps to relieve some of the tension–and the right and obligation to take things seriously when requested to do so.  Here’s to my friends and readers, for their forbearance and this topic for discussion.  Please leave a comment at any time:  your input is valuable.

6 Comments

Filed under Other than literary days...., What is literature for?

Tagged as

July 24, 2012 · 6:23 pm

“They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.”–Oliver Goldsmith

Though I don’t pretend to be able to talk about these topics listed above in any comprehensive sense (not even Shakespeare, because I haven’t read as widely in him as I would like to), there are a few other topics I would like to get to today.  It’s a sort of miscellanous day because I’m covering more than one topic, but I would like to be understood as saying that the topics themselves are individually important, and have only been covered in this way because I like to give my readers a good longish chunk of text for each day, to offset the disadvantages of some of the arrangements I’ve made for my site so far, such as the fact that due to financial obligations elsewhere I haven’t yet gotten around to buying various helpful upgrades which could improve my site.  I could do with a lot more widgets, for one, and though the Pilcrow theme arrangements are very varied, I needed not to use too many sidebars because of the way I wanted my posts and pages to appear.  So, I’ve made a few concessions.  Maybe in time I will think of a better arrangement, but for now, I don’t mind taking a day now and then (for example) to cover in positive critical fashion other websites which due to my not having a “blogs I follow” link for readers can’t been seen from my site; nor do I mind commenting on revisions made to my posts which you may have seen/missed.

First things first:  let’s get to the other websites.  Since I last wrote about the first 5 websites I’ve been following, I’ve found 2 others which are valuable to me, and which are also different from each other and from the other 5.  An embarrassment of riches, as it’s known!

The first of the 2 new blogs I’d like to mention to my readers is one showcasing a new book which has come out on the market in etiquette (and lest you assume that this is etiquette only for those born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths, you should know that this presentation of highlights from the book gives tips not for setting a table for 100, but pointers for keeping one’s own family and friends satisfied and happy with one).  So commonsensical and thoughtful is this production of advice that anyone might wonder why he or she didn’t think of it first; yet  these are some of the points most often overlooked in a sort of affectionate myopia when family and/or friends are expected for a visit or plan to visit.  The blog is entitled “The Art of the Visit,” and takes its title from Kathy Bertone’s new book–(she pronounces her name correctly as “Ber-town,” in case you want to recommend the book to all of your dear ones)–The Art of the Visit:  Being a Perfect Host, Becoming a Perfect Guest.  As you can see from the clips from some of Kathy’s television and radio appearances, she really has the jump on projecting a warm and welcoming personality.  She puts her points forward clearly and concisely with a minimum of straying from her topic.  Kathy shows both realism and a sense of humor in her remarks about why you should follow one path and not another in your dealings with family and friends, and keeps always in sight as her goal getting along with family and keeping (and gaining) friends.  In a few years, I can easily see Kathy Bertone writing yet another book with the same universal appeal this one has, perhaps entitled “Good Manners for a Shrinking Planet,” or something of that sort.  After all, keeping in mind always the dictates of generosity in dealings with others is just as good for the world family as it is for your own, a point Kathy herself makes.   I urge you, go to Kathy’s blog and see her presentations–you have nothing to lose but potential quarrels and animosities with those you love, and you have much to gain.

The second site I’ve also begun to follow is elliptically named “TheElephantHouse,” and it is at first distinguished by a fine array of cartoons and quips about elephants in all their shapes and forms (which are always recognizably elephantine, of course).  My favorite quip from this site reads something like, “If it doesn’t have to do with elephants, it’s irrelephant!”  Very cute.  I can’t wait to try to trip up my constantly punning brother with that one so that he will be forced to make the “buh-bump!chhh!” sound he makes (like drums and cymbals) when I make a successful joke.  I know one thing:  this time he can’t give me the gradually descending “wahn, wahn, wahn” failure-of-joke sound he makes (like a trumpet with a Harmon mute).  This blog is one that has a few grammatical mistakes/omitted words, but the writer gives the impression of being fluent in another language, and we all learn by doing:  I’m not worried, I plan to keep following the site.  For one thing, I listened to a truly moving and clever discussion on it from someone named Kathryn Schulz, on the topic of “Don’t regret regret.”  As Kathryn points out, the philosophical currents of our time sometimes try to teach us that regret is a waste of time and thought; actually, regret is a humanizing influence that we need to pay attention to in ourselves and others.  She notes that sociopaths feel no regret.  From this platform or taking off point, the blogger of “TheElephantHouse” launches a discussion entitled “Non, je ne regrette rien,” contributing to the thought on the subject.  As to how it affected me as a person?  It not only made me feel less regret about feeling regrets in the past (a meta-philosophical state if ever there was one), but it encouraged me to feel no regret at all for having gone to look at “TheElephantHouse” (and I think that sociopaths wouldn’t get the point of myriad decorative elephants anyway).  I hope to see more on this site which is as important and considering as what I’ve seen so far.

My second major topic for today is really a bit of a minor confessional note.  I do go back sometimes and re-read what I’ve written (and already published the day before) because something suddenly pops into my brain from the work of the day before (that’s called really being self-obsessed!) which doesn’t sit quite right with me.  Sure enough, in yesterday’s post on Cutting for Stone, for example, I found an awkward sentence and went ahead and revised it this morning, a day later.  That’s why I think writing and composition is made for natural and non-clinical obsessive-compulsives.  And to take a note from the paragraph just above, it’s because I “regret” having made the mistake.  “Well, don’t you use the copy-checking option in your program?” some may say.  My answer is, “No, I don’t.”  I took typing classes (way back when they were called that) in high school; I’ve spent years revising my own writings and helping students revise theirs:  shame on me anyway for letting a mistake get past me!  So, as a sort of practice, I do re-draft, but I don’t rely on the editing program on the computer; I do it laboriously myself.  We all have our forms of (non-literal) self-flagellation.  So if by chance (and I’m flattered even if this has happened) you have looked at a post one day and then seen it the next and think something looks a little different, this is why.  Let’s toast to some regrets and losses that it’s possible to change!  Shadowoperator

Leave a comment

Filed under What is literature for?

Tagged as ,

July 22, 2012 · 9:24 pm

Five blogs I follow regularly now, and what I have found there so far.

I know, I originally said that I was going to do this post tomorrow, but I found myself with a lusciously free Sunday afternoon, before time to have my afternoon coffee or go for my walk (I hate vigorous exercise, but you just gotta do something, right?).  It seemed the right time to honor that old saw, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” so here I am, writing about the 5 blogs I’ve started following since my site first went up on July 4, and what qualities I go to those blogs for (and I don’t go to them all for the same thing, by a long shot).  My interests are perhaps a bit narrow, but I like to read and talk about books and ideas from books more than about fashion, or gardening, or sports, for example.  I’m willing, however, to extend myself to other topic areas in which I have no particular expertise, upon occasion.

The first blog I went to was “Truth and Cake,” because I saw it on “Freshly Pressed” and just had to tell people about the picture in the header–it’s so half-retro/half-nouvelle!  The site immediately attracted me with its discussion of “Selective Truth and Social Media,” a thought-provoking and wise article by a woman only a few years more than half my age (I’ve come to computers late in life, and really admire not only her grace and fluidity with her written topics, but her practical skill in getting it on the Internet).  The topics and links of hers that I’ve investigated so far are well-covered, perspicacious, just plain smart articles and evocative pictures in words and images.  Her topics are strongly on target (she seems to have her head on very straight whether she’s writing about personal issues or societal ones).  Last but not least, I really appreciate the amount of careful editing that’s gone into making her blog as well-written as it is.  Some people blog with the apparent impression that getting things down in a hurry is the most important point on the Internet at least, and while there’s a certain amount of truth in this, neatness counts, too.  A basically good strong post or blog that’s riddled with spelling/grammatical errors or errors (worse) of fact is not only hard to follow and distracting, it’s less appealing.  I’m happy to say that hers has none of these faults, but is regularly quite well-edited.  Her most recent post, “Crow, Baby, Crow” is an encouraging and uplifting message to all who are inspired to follow her in their efforts to make good as bloggers, and it has justifiably drawn a lot of hits since I’ve been following it (I’m sorry to say I was out of contact with her post for a day or three, but luckily found it again, just in time to read “Crow, Baby, Crow”).  It’s no wonder that she’s been “Freshly Pressed” now two times (I’m waiting for the third).

My second-selected blog was “Jessica Stanley,” and I follow her also on Twitter at @dailydoseofjess .  She is another very talented younger person (I’m getting to be an old fart, so everyone looks younger to me some days).  I was first attracted to her site when I saw her regular post (with links) on “Freshly Pressed”:  it’s called “Read.Look.Think”.  I saw it first when she covered Hila Shachar and feminism.  There’s usually more than one post or link that I find stimulating, and quite a large number of absolutely marvelous bits of photography from Jessica herself, who has covered her own recent vacation in Italy with beautiful scenic photos and quite talented blog posts that explain some of the things (and people) in the photos.  She too is a careful editor, which gives old windbags like me hope that civilization hasn’t yet thrown in the towel.  Her personal story (of having recently relocated from Melbourne to England) has given her a valuable perspective on things, which I hope she will share more of when she has had a longer span of time in England.  As a person who once lived 6 years in another country myself, I can speak for the fact that even when you’re going to a country where the same language (you think!) is spoken, it’s not always the same language.  So far, however, she seems to have largely escaped any unflattering culture shock.

The last three blogs I need to mention (starting with this one) are all ones I’ve begun to follow in the last day or so; therefore, I can only speak to how they have struck me so far, and cannot predict even at my witchiest what their trajectory will be, though the fact that I’m still intrigued and following a day or two later will vouch for something, certainly a strong interest in how they develop from here on out.  The blog “Becky Hutchinson” is one which I located yesterday or the day before on someone else’s post, and her blog has continued to get mail all day today on the topics she raised: (1) about the differences between movies and the books they are made from, and (2) about the notorious trilogy of  the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books.  Her ability to attract many readers and many enthusiastic post-ers has been the main thing I’ve noticed so far, and I have to say that this is a quality not to be underestimated, since we are all in this together, and an intelligent remark some one person makes may well lead to stimulating discussions on more than one blog.  I think she is inspired and generous towards her readers, and she also has generally respected the good editorial practices that may seem negligible to some, but that make the reading experience so much more enjoyable when they are present.  I look forward to seeing much more of her blog when it gets published.

“ohdizzle” is a blog that rather unusually has stricken me to the core of my guilty fiction-lover’s heart with its recent post on the importance of non-fiction books.  My sneaking know-nothing position has always been that though non-fiction may spill the beans about someone or something in a fashion calculated to arouse interest and speculation, I really preferred my facts about life to be presented via fictional characters because fiction writers tell universal truths whereas non-fiction books just tell about a particular place and time.  This is a debatable issue (and I do recall more than one English or composition or history professor throwing this issue open for debate, but I was smug in my fiction heaven, what can I say?); I will say, however, that now that I’m older (don’t automatically assume wiser, except under persuasion such as “ohdizzle”), I can see a purpose to all those great non-fiction books that everyone reads.  First of all, as “ohdizzle” has comprehensively proved, there is still an amount of fictionalizing that goes on in writing even the most starkly addressed issues of fact.  For one thing, the author has to imagine and conjecture about events a certain amount of the time.  Secondly, how is it going to hurt me to imagine that maybe all object lessons don’t come just as fiction, but may be drawn from life?  Didn’t Henry James, the great author and literary theorist of the late 19th-early 20th century say that all fictional “fruit” that wasn’t plucked from the garden of life was “stale” and “uneatable,” or words to that effect?  So, I’ve learned my lesson (finally) from “ohdizzle” .  I don’t know which non-fiction book I will feel most drawn to yet, but the exploration of some titles I read on “ohdizzle’s” site gives me a wide list to choose from, with entertaining editorial comments.

Finally, and also recently, I’ve started to follow “Forever – More Reviews”.  For this blog, I have a different principle of inclusion for myself.  First of all, I’m up early in the morning, so in order to get the requisite number of hours of sleep that we are all being preached at to get these days, I go to bed surprisingly early (9:30-10:30, with the last hour reserved for reading whatever print book or Internet text I’ve currently got my hands on).  This means that I’m often in bed or doing other things in the evenings when television shows like “Glee,” “Revenge,”and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” (which “Forever – More Reviews” engagingly assesses) are on.  And, I’m a little too old (though not too mature) to be sighing over the characters from “Vampire Diaries” or “The Twilight Saga,” upon both of which the blogger exercises a vital wit.  I do know about these things, however, from hearing younger and/or more involved viewers talk about them.  I like to feel that though I’m asleep and antiquated, I’m not entirely out of the know and can perhaps carry on a five-minute conversation about some aspects of these shows for other people.  And as to books like “Fifty Shades of Grey” and its sequels, from the blogger’s warnings I’m beginning to think that forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes.  The blogger has advised me (on another site where our discussion of the series first emerged) that the books are a disappointment, and she (I want to say “she” is the blogger) has nevertheless encouraged me to see them for myself, always a good quality in a reviewer.  After all, even when a reviewer solidly pans a book or movie, it’s important to feel that that reviewer isn’t trying to censor or block your access to something you might like (though in the case of “Fifty Shades,” many other voices have also spoken against it already, and for what seem like cogent reasons).  “Bared to You,” which “she” also reviews, is another story.  I may very well enjoy what seems (in the blogger’s take on it) to be an agreeable and informative experience of delving into the screwed-up characters’ psyches to see what makes them tick.  I plan to put it on my reading list anyway, on her recommendation.  If there is any way in which I was made uncomfortable by the blog, it was by the discussion of why other women “hate on whores,” which took up a lot of space and was somewhat repetitive and filled with what seemed like a lot of run-on sentences.  The blogger had a number of good points to make on this subject, among which were those that excessive promiscuity isn’t good for anyone, male or female; nor is it a promising introduction to a serious relationship.  All well and good, so far.  As a serious feminist myself, however, and yet one who tries to retain a sense of humor about sex and sexual mores, I found the discussion a bit off-putting because it seemed to encourage women to accept the double standard, while admitting that it is unfair.  If it’s unfair, then we as women should be the first ones attempting its abolishment.  Still, I know that this blogger has a lot of talent and some serious things to say, and I look forward to continuing to follow the blog.  For one thing, I think she(?) shows a certain ability to deal with the very modern contemporary novel which shouldn’t be slighted, and I can say that I really appreciated what she had to say about  the  series beginning with “Fifty Shades of Grey,” to name only one thing she did well.  I feel sure there are more good reviews to come.

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, Full of literary ambitions!, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

July 22, 2012 · 1:35 pm

“Dream[ing] horrid dreams, and mutter[ing] unmentionable thoughts.”–Herman Melville

As Hermann Melville wrote in Pierre, “One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.”  I’m accessing this quote not to discuss Melville and his works, but instead to highlight what it is about the Gothic novel (when it is good) which keeps devoted readers following the form.  I hope my readers will stick with me while I discuss this issue (men as well as women; guys, you may learn something about your near and dear).  I’m centering my discussion on one particular modern example which I in my own mind keep reverting back to ever since I read it.

So, let’s get down to it.  In every Gothic worthy of the name, there is of course some sort of mystery.  As with any mystery, the mind of the young (usually) heroine (almost always) in Gothics reaches out in summaries and hypotheses to account for the unusual happenings of the book, whether they are the sinister machinations of a villain or villains or whether they are more supernatural in nature.  A really great Gothic is one which amasses a goodly number of surmises and conjectures, only to top them all with a conclusion which is even more unusual.  It’s also a great book (not only a great Gothic) when the conjectures we have been encouraged to make have been good clues, with the true answer (as it turns out) always niggling at us just outside the range of conscious awareness.  Lastly, a good book of this sort may well leave one or more minor details of the overall conundrum unresolved, which doesn’t detract from the overall performance, but may actually add to its believeability (incredible as it seems), since life is not neat with all the strings well tied up.

One such book, one of the best books I’ve read in the last 5 years, is Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, which centers around a famous and reclusive author’s collection of stories, supposed to have 13 parts, in which however the 13th tale is missing.  This is the slender thread which leads into the labyrinth of mystery and out again for Margaret Lea, a young biographer who goes to write the much awaited biography of the reclusive author Vida Winters, old and frail at the time the story opens.

The blurb on the book jacket, otherwise so tantalizing, starts out disappointingly enough:  “When Margaret Lea opened the door to the past, what she confronted was her destiny.”  How many times have you read something very like this generalization in the opening blurb of a Gothic or–I hate this term–“chick lit”–novel?  Yet, it goes on far more promisingly:  “The enigmatic Winter has spent decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself–all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret.  Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life.  She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain.  Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter’s story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.”  The blurb goes on to itemize some of the characters and things that appear in the novel:  “a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire”–these last four items are your reassurance that yes, it is in fact a Gothic novel in the classic tradition that you’re reading.

And as has been established and rung changes upon by the long Gothic tradition, family relationships and mysteries of identity and selfhood are articulated.  The story behind the story (as with any good biographer’s work) is uncovered, and the eerie becomes a daily routine (rather, the daily routine becomes eerie).  This novel is superlative in that not one but at least three characters’ entwined life mysteries are maintained and only gradually exposed to the light of day, holding off until almost the very last page.

One of the main ways in which this novel is different from so many run-of-the-mill romance-Gothics (written since the heyday of the great Gothic writers in the Romantic period, when happy endings and weddings weren’t the sole mainstays of the tradition) is that it functions without the typical boy-meets-girl love sequence which is usually worked in as a major element:  this is a Gothic that can stand on its own without the sugar coating.  That’s not to say there are no characters who “match up,” but these are either in the past or at a distance as subsidiary characters.  The most this author will contribute in this way (and I think this is a good choice) is hinting that the cat, Shadow, caught between two owners, may in fact have a happy ending, which one may take either as a literary promissory note or not, as one chooses.  This departure from what has become a somewhat predictable, boring, slogging sort of tradition is immensely more interesting by its very difference.

And now the guys (assuming there still are some guys reading this) are beginning to clamor, “Yeah?  So what’s in it for me?  What do I get out of this?”  And I reply, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Well, first of all there’s some great girl-on-girl psychic action that has nothing to do (at least not overtly) with sex.  How’s that?”  They look at me (I imagine) with suspicion.  But especially if they’ve often wondered why their girlfriends/wives/female partners take advice so willingly from mothers, aunts, and other older women, they might refer to the budding and troubled friendship of Margaret Lea and Vida Winters, in which two women learn to trust each other and exchange friendship of a non-sexual kind.  Also, guys, and especially if your woman has read a lot of what passes for good Gothic fiction (not this book, which actually is good Gothic), the next time you surprise that funny, frowning, puzzled look on her face when she looks at you, you should know that she may not be wondering if you would mind if she changed the drapes.  In fact, she may be wondering if you buried your last girlfriend or wife under the floorboards of a castle somewhere “romantic” (in other words, far away and inaccessible) and whether the attractive young delivery man Ernie might not burst in and save her from you if you try the same thing with her.  It only means that she’s in the process of self-discovery and exploration of her identity that philosophizing about men brings out in women, and if you’re smart, you’ll get on the right side of the “who-I-actually-am-and-what-he-brings-out-in-me” equation).

And that about wraps up my post for today.  People wanting to comment, please do so outright on my “comment” box for each post or page.  I’m also on Twitter (and Twitter is enabled on my posts).  I welcome all helpful suggestions.  If you have a book you’d like to recommend for review, I’d be glad to know about it.  It may take me a while to read it, but I’ll try my best to give it a fair shot.  My sidebar unfortunately doesn’t have a “Blogs I Follow” link, because I’m using the Pilcrow theme from WordPress.com which has the best form for what I have to offer (there are six variations of content and sidebar on Pilcrow, and this makes it truly versatile); I don’t have the extra link space right now.  But next post, I will mention the names of 5 blogs I follow and what I especially like them for, for they are all very different.  Until tomorrow!  shadowoperator

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

July 19, 2012 · 11:33 pm

“The more he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or, as the American poet Emily Dickinson has it, “He preached upon ‘Breadth’ till it argued him narrow–/The Broad are too broad to define/And of ‘Truth’ until it proclaimed him a Liar–/The Truth never flaunted a Sign–/Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence/As Gold the Pyrites would shun–/What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus/To meet so enabled a Man!”

Or, how about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his reference to Ophelia’s protestations?  “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”?

All of these quotes are ways of saying the same thing in different circumstances, which is basically that when someone boasts, brags, or repeatedly or emphatically states that something is so, the human mind cannot help but swing to the opposite statement, by way of balance.  This may be part of our self-protecting sense that nobody is perfect, nor is any stance or thing in our ordinary lives, and so we long to restore the equilibrium with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Yet what do you do if and when you are aware that someone doubts your probity unjustifiably, that in fact you are suspected of a fraud or a lie?  What do you do?  If they question you, the matter can be set right as long as you keep your head and answer them as truthfully as possible, at least so it would seem.  Yet if they look askance at you but say nothing, your case is much harder to bear:  you know you are suspected unfairly, yet cannot speak because it would seem more surely to involve you in knowledge of a crime, misdoing, or shortcoming.  The best thing (as far as I have seen, having lived through this sort of thing more than once in a life that so far I like to think has basically been a truthful one) is probably just to grin–only figuratively speaking, of course–and bear it.  People will think what they will think, and more often than we are perhaps aware of, either friends or acquaintances speak for us in a voice of moderation, or the suspicious themselves get tired of what they’re thinking and change their minds for the better, if only we keep a straight course, and refuse to let ourselves be shaken by their doubt (we’re not all hapless Billy Budds, after all!).

In the spirit of honesty, then (and I have been asked this question by a reader, a personal friend who was too shy to leave a recorded comment) I answer the question, “How can you remember so many quotes, and who said them?”  And my answer is, “I don’t.  There are myriads of reliable quotation books out there, of which I’ve seen a few.  My favorite one is Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations, edited in the sixteenth edition by Justin Kaplan, though I think there are now later editions of this famous work out.  Another fine guide organized in a friendlier and less formal way is Robert Byrne’s The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said.  The quote from Emily Dickinson comes from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.  The latest edition I have of this is from 1960, though for all I know now, other additional poems attributable to ‘the Belle of Amherst’ may have surfaced since then.  This information would be something a specialist could provide.  Finally, the remark about Billy Budd is a reference to Herman Melville’s work Billy Budd, Foretopman, a work which can make anyone who feels paranoid about being misunderstood feel even more so, and for this reason I’d advocate reading it when you’re in an optimistic mood about your place in the world.”

And this is my post for today!  Late in the day, I know, to be doing a post, but the topic came to me ready-made by the friendly enquiry, and my feeling that I should probably not lay claim to being a human quote source.  Until tomorrow, keep your hat on the hook, and your shoes under the table (whatever that expression means–I know it’s meant to signify good advice back in the country, but why I don’t know).  shadowoperator

1 Comment

Filed under What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

July 17, 2012 · 9:16 pm

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”–Derek Bok

“The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things….”  So Lewis Carroll noted, and so it is today.  Yesterday, I wrote a blog which featured the word “kill” in the title quote; it was from Mark Twain, the well-known, no, the famous American humorist (1835-1910).  One of his comic remarks about duelling was this, and I quoted, sure that no one would miss the point:  “I thoroughly disapprove of duels.  If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”  My point (and one of his, about duelling) was this:  when people conventionally fought duels, they followed a strict formula of challenge, acceptance, making nice formally through seconds until it was time (usually the next morning or at another set time and place, by a river, in a park, in a “quiet place” where they were unlikely to be disturbed), and then shooting at each other, often with the intention to kill.  (I’m the one who feels really ignorant, explaining Twain’s joke!)  Twain’s remark was a sort of funny tautology, meant to be appreciated for its apparent contradiction which led to precisely the same result:  that is, a corpse.  At least, a verbal one.

Now to the result of my post on WordPress:  it was accepted by WordPress, but when it went through to Twitter, the joke and my (not totally dry) philosophical examination of the issue were not properly listed.  Of course, the title was too long for an average tweet, but the whole thing could’ve been properly featured if only it had said, “Show summary,” where the rest of it could’ve been given.  Conversations with various people, however, have given me to understand that part of the problem may’ve been that Twitter has an automatic filtering procedure for the length of the tweet, and that possibly the word “kill” set off alarms.  But why?  Is it because these days so many people are busy actually killing each other than they have no time to read the real sense of the essay I wrote, and missed Twain’s humor (and the little modest bit of my own that was included)?  And that the rest of us have to police ours and others’ remarks so thoroughly that a witty remark can no longer function as what it is?  Or am I just an over-educated blob who has no sense of what real life issues are?  (I obviously hope you won’t conclude this last to be the real answer.)

Just ask yourself, though, was I on a plane, threatening myself or someone else, or trying to interfere with a train’s safe departure, or in a public place waving a gun?  No, I was not.  If the pen truly is mightier than the sword, then I would just like to stand up for people’s rights to read and make their own decisions, and furthermore, the necessity of educating people adequately so that no one becomes so austere and humorless that they can’t distinguish between a well-meant and (I thought) properly provocative essay or article and a violent manifesto.  Mark Twain did, and wanted us to share in his perceptions.  Remember Mark Twain–The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Pudd’nhead Wilson, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Letters from the Earth, and other works?  That’s the Mark Twain we’re talking about.  If you haven’t read him yet, don’t let me scare you away with the thought that he’s troublesome–of course he is, as any true humorist can be.  But he’s also well worth the trouble of acquaintance.  Shadowoperator

Leave a comment

Filed under What is literature for?

July 17, 2012 · 1:05 am

I may or may not be in WordPress and Twitter both–just testing system (for second time)!

Leave a comment

Filed under What is literature for?