October 3, 2013 · 2:24 pm

Cigars, port, and “First Love”–Perspective gained on youth

It has always seemed to be a staple of the traditional old-fashioned story (and some very good stories at that) that an assorted group of people have much to say to each other after dinner (usually a small group of men over their port and cigars, but sometimes in other tales a small group including women).  They sit together and suddenly a topic for stories comes up–and they all acquiesce in taking their turns at telling something that once happened to them, something they saw which seemed remarkable, something they’ve made up for the occasion, or something on a certain topic.  It happens so often that it seems likely people used to do this regularly, not just in fiction, but in real life, in the days before television.  Many writers have used this frame story convention to both good and poignant effect, among them a trio of writers  who were associated with each other during the mid- to late 1800s, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ivan Turgenev.  Today, my subject is a short, seemingly slight and negligible tale by Turgenev called “First Love,” which is as much a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of adolescent crushes in all their neophyte grandeur as it is an actual tale of a particular young man and his first love.

As Vladimir Petrovich–a middle-aged bachelor–tells it, he was but sixteen when his parents and he lived in the country in a villa containing a manor house with three wings, the other two of which were to be used by other people.  Rather, on the first night when the storytellers gather, Petrovich refuses to tell his story, but offers to write it out and bring it back in two weeks’ time:  this seemingly odd device underlines the whole question of perspective, and how time and distance from the topic leave their mark.  After orienting the reader to his setting, Petrovich tells how a shabby genteel princess, Princess Zasyekin, and her daughter, Zinaida Alexandrovna, come to live in the most run-down of the three house wings, and what the effect upon Valdimir’s youth and young adulthood was.

Zinaida and the young man are both described, the young man as the central character being described in his sometimes wild and heady moments of adolescent exultation, Zinaida in scenes with others, as she affects them by her quirks.  Petrovich describes his first night alone in his room after Zinaida has entertained him along with a group of other, slightly older men in her mother’s house (the reader gradually becomes aware that this is something unusual, a young girl entertaining a group of men alone, with only a casual sort of supervision from the next room by her negligent and debt-ridden mother, but the perspective of the story is angled so that the young man is shown accepting this as more or less normal for a young Princess).  Petrovich describes his sleepless night:  “I seated myself on a chair and sat there for a long time, as though enchanted.  That which I felt was so new and so sweet…I sat there, hardly looking around me and without moving, breathing slowly, and only laughing silently now, as I recalled, now inwardly turning cold at the thought that I was in love, that here it was, that love.  Zinaida’s face floated softly before me in the darkness–floated, but did not float away; her lips still smiled as mysteriously as ever, her eyes gazed somewhat askance at me, interrogatively, thoughtfully and tenderly…as at the moment when I had parted from her.  At last I rose on tiptoe, stepped to my bed and cautiously, without undressing, laid my head on the pillow, as though endeavoring by the sharp movement to frighten off that wherewith I was filled to overflowing….I lay down, but did not even close an eye.  I speedily perceived that certain faint reflections kept constantly falling into my room….I raised myself and looked out of the window.  Its frame was distinctly defined from the mysteriously and confusedly whitened panes.  ”Tis the thunderstorm,’–I thought,–and so, in fact, there was a thunderstorm; but it had passed very far away, so that even the claps of thunder were not audible; only in the sky long, indistinct, branching flashes of lightning, as it were, were uninterruptedly flashing up.  They were not flashing up so much as they were quivering and twitching, like the wing of a dying bird.  I rose, went to the window, and stood there until morning….The lightning-flashes never ceased for a moment; it was what is called a pitch-black night….I felt great fatigue and tranquility…but Zinaida’s image continued to hover triumphantly over my soul.  Only it, that image, seemed calm; like a flying swan from the marshy sedges, it separated itself from the other ignoble figures which surrounded it, and as I fell asleep, I bowed down before it for the last time in farewell and confiding adoration….Oh, gentle emotions, soft sounds, kindness and calming of the deeply-moved soul, melting joy of the first feelings of love,–where are ye, where are ye?”  This is the very stuff of adolescent emotion at first love, which both men and women can surely relate to.  Even the very elements of the heavens contribute to speak to the young man of love, as he stands by his bedroom window, taking in the stormy night.

As the young man is also aware of and relates a few pages later, Zinaida is a thoughtlessly cruel young girl at times.  “…I was not the only one who was in love with her; all the men who were in the habit of visiting her house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in a leash at her feet.  It amused her to arouse in them now hopes, now fears, to twist them about at her caprice–(she called it ‘knocking people against one another’),–and they never thought of resisting, and willingly submitted to her.  In all her vivacious and beautiful being there was a certain peculiarly bewitching mixture of guilefulness and heedlessness, of articifiality and simplicity, of tranquility and playfulness; over everything she did or said, over her every movement, hovered a light, delicate charm, and an original sparkling force made itself felt in everything.  And her face was incessantly changing and sparkling also; it expressed almost simultaneous derision, pensiveness, and passion.  The most varied emotions, light, fleeting as the shadows of the clouds on a sunny, windy day, kept flitting over her eyes and lips.”  The young man, Vladimir, being only sixteen to Zinaida’s twenty-one, takes her at her word when she tells him that he is a child compared to her:  but this very complex picture of her which the mature man reads out to his friends years later proves something that the character when younger did not have the perspicuity to see about the girl:  she too shows immature character traits, and childish whims rule her quite often.

This state of things goes on for some time, but gradually begin to change.  Zinaida hints to her admirers that she is in love.  She doesn’t say with whom, but one and all they are on tenterhooks.  Then, she excuses herself from receiving them for several days, claiming to be ill.  When Vladimir next sees her, she is different, somehow, calmer, older perhaps.  He is simultaneously becoming aware of gradual change in his parents also, in his mother, who mainly nags at him about visiting the Princess’s house too often, and who shows him no real affection, and in his father, who according to him has always been capricious in his affections for the boy, occasionally cosseting him but more often rejecting his overtures.  But the most startling change comes about as the boy slowly notices that his father is going about late at night in a cape in the garden, and then notices one day, finally, that his father is riding horses with Zinaida.  As it turns out, to his great disillusionment and surprise at them both, it is his father with whom Zinaida is in love, and as becomes apparent also in the story, the older Princess her mother benefits from their trysts financially, though there is no absolute indication as to exactly how far the relationship has gone.  One has one’s suspicions, however, just as Vladimir does.

The great searing of Vladimir’s soul happens one day when he happens to see his father strike Zinaida’s arm with a whip, and Zinaida accept this and kiss the mark.  And Vladimir thinks to himself that “The last month had aged me greatly, and my love, with all its agitations and sufferings, seemed to me like something very petty and childish and wretched in comparison with that other unknown something at which I could hardly even guess, and which frightened me like a strange, beautiful but menacing face that one strives, in vain, to get a good look at in the semi-darkness….”  He enters university, and soon after his father dies of a stroke, leaving behind these words for him:  “‘My son…fear the love of women, fear that happiness, that poison…’.”  Of course, it’s his father’s own nature which has created his own hell, and Vladimir dimly perceives this, but four years later, when Zinaida is married to a wealthy young man and dies in childbirth, Vladimir cannot forgive himself for seeming to shun her company and not visiting her before she died.

Vladimir’s final statement on young love and youth is rather a statement of the mature man, and by the flowing literary quality of it, one can assign a inter-fictional reason as to why the mature man Vladimir wanted to ponder and write out his statement to his two dining friends:  this statement has all the roundness and literary character of poetry and life philosophy:  “O youth, youth!  Thou carest for nothing:  thou possessest, as it were, all the treasures of the universe; even sorrow comforts thee, even melancholy becomes thee; thou art self-confident and audacious; thou sayest:  ‘I alone live–behold!’–But the days speed on and vanish without a trace and without reckoning, and everything vanishes in thee, like wax in the sun, like snow….And perchance the whole secret of thy charm consists not in the power to do everything, but in the possibility of thinking that thou wilt do everything–consists precisely in the fact that thou scatterest to the winds thy powers which thou hast not understood how to employ in any other way,–in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a prodigal, seriously assumes he has a right to say:  ‘Oh, what could I not have done, had I not wasted my time!'”  This is surely not only one of the most moving tributes to the vicissitudes of youth and young emotions and endeavors, but also one of the most accurate:  what young person, male or female, has not felt their own powers swelling and becoming great in them, only perhaps some years later to regret not having done all that they could to fulfill their early promise?

At the end of the story, the character relates how some time later he attended the deathbed of an anonymous old woman who had never had anything grand or costly in her life, and he ended with a deep desire to pray for both himself and his father.  And the question here is, why does he want to pray for them, rather than for the women in his life who have been mistreated or wronged, or who have suffered, like Zinaida, or Vladimir’s mother, or the old woman, or even the money-squandering old Princess, Zinaida’s mother?  Knowing Turgenev and his concern for unfortunates and humanity, the answer is probably that the men have been the source of some of the wrong done to the others, and so are “greater sinners” and need prayers more–if, in fact, one can do any such arithmetic with such a poetic ending.  But the story thus ends on a note of psychological depth and reality also, because often when people are too deeply moved by one situation to be able to let their feelings about it loose for relief, some quite unconnected tragedy or misfortune will free their tears and allow them to grieve:  and Turgenev was nothing if not a great master of psychology in his characters.

Though this is a story of a particular love relationship and its disappointments, the most evocative moments in the piece are built around what all young loves have in common, and thus the specific details are made extra convincing because they are supported by what we nearly all have known or experienced at one time or another in our youths.  And as I have I believe shown, Turgenev’s control of perspective, with the older man looking back and insisting on making a literary artifact of his tale instead of just telling it to his friends, then gradually developing the youth’s awareness of what is going on around him in a more adult, more cynical world, creates a masterpiece of world literature.  I hope everyone will have a chance to experience it for themselves, and perhaps to compare it with their own early experiences of love and youthful emotions.

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September 27, 2013 · 4:38 pm

What is it about opera? It’s so over-the-top!

And now comes the time for a full confession.  Recently (my last post, in fact) I wrote a bit about being away from home, travelling, and therefore not doing as much posting as usual.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a little post about Monsters’ Den:  Book of Dread and Monsters’ Den Chronicles, which was yet another of my excuses for not posting on my old regular schedule of once every three to four days.  Now is the time finally to make the third part of my tripartite revelation, and say what else I have been doing (partially on my summer vacation) that has taken me away from the posting screen on my computer at WordPress.com.  And that’s listening to opera (and watching it) on my computer on Met Opera on Demand, which is immensely good and more affordable than full stage or screen opera for someone of my limited income, and which fills my very heart with delight.

That is, sometimes my heart is filled with delight.  At other times, my heart is filled with angst, or with bitter remorse as I recall an old relationship in which I acted much as some opera character acts.  Or perhaps moments of fleeting and evanescent passion or joy take center stage, and I allow myself to be pulled along with them, on wings of song (as the saying goes), loving and hating and sympathizing (or empathizing, if the feeling goes deeper) with the characters I see before me.  Just yesterday, as Magda in La Rondine left her lover, Ruggero, I thrilled with response as the young lover repeated over and over again to her “Love!  Don’t leave me alone!  Don’t leave me alone!”  A couple of weeks ago, the Romany Carmen likewise rejected her lover José (who by chance was the same tenor as Ruggero in that later opera I mentioned a moment ago).  But what a difference in attitude the tenor assumed!  Whereas Ruggero was incapacitated with grief and wept what looked like real tears from a reclining position on the floor, when José was once convinced that Carmen meant it, he leapt to his feet and with a final roar of “Carmen!” stabbed her to the heart outside the bullfight ring in Spain, where Carmen had gone to join her new lover, a toreador.  Do I approve?  Do I acquiesce?  Does it seem like a good idea, to watch people behaving like children and barbarians, weeping at length over what can’t be avoided and killing people who fall out of love with them?  I would just ask, do we ever with any drama apply the same rules we do to life?  And the answer is, “No, we don’t.”  Even with comedy, when the Barber of Seville gets up to his pranks and plots for his favorite customers, do we question their morality, and his?  No, we don’t, because we’re too eager to see him succeed!  We love the characters he’s plotting on behalf of, and hope they get their way free and clear.  By whatever means necessary, as government spies are wont to say.

It’s not, of course, that we don’t apply some of life’s rules to drama:  after all, would there be any way of understanding why Azucena in La Trovatore becomes so overwrought with a desire for vengeance that by accident she throws her own child into the fire, intending this end for an enemy’s child?  Or how understand Rigoletto’s final belief in the curse supposedly hanging over him when he exclaims “the curse!” in the final moments of Rigoletto, unless we saw that, true to life, his own character had caused him, in combination with circumstances inflicted upon him, to fall victim to the curse?  How understand the whole concept of Fate as it rules so many of these strange and outré dramas, and how accept the twists and turns of characters not recognizing someone they know well because the person is wearing a new hat or a cape in the comedies, and the mistakes and hilarious happenings that occur because of these?  We have to see that some of these things have actually happened once upon a time in real life, and upon that tiny hinge of possibility, the much larger door of probability swings open for the composers’ and the librettists’ imaginations.  And of course, we make moral judgements, but these judgements are delayed or attenuated into a last-minute resolution only after we have been treated to a full-scale examination of all the passion and humor and exaggerated emotion which can be extracted.

Because, that’s what opera is about more than any other form of drama–exaggeration, going over-the-top, having the full experience of pain or joy or fun in a concentrated form.  And that’s why music is the central part of opera, why music is at the very heart of drama and why the sets are so lavish or at least emphatic even when minimal, why the costumes, even those of a beggar, are gorgeous and grand and picturesque, because the exaggeration of emotion is central here.  Music of all art forms touches us most intimately, and though we are visual creatures, we hear before we can see, and thus the stunning visual effects here play handmaiden to the ear and its domain.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing, and I intend to keep on doing it.  Obviously, the best place to see opera is the venue where it occurs, but not everyone can get to NYC or other famous opera locales, and not everyone can afford a season ticket.  If you’re interested in a huge inexpensive free catalogue of operas to watch and listen to, you can contact metopera.org and either opt for tickets for seeing some of the shows each season at selected movie theatres, or listening on the radio, or watching them on your computer, where as I can attest even those shows which are not in HD are of high quality.  As a novice at this form, however, having seen the occasional opera since my teens on PBS, but knowing little and only learning more now, I prefer to watch what operas I can in order to familiarize myself with the stories and to be able to visualize them; then, when I know what my favorites are, I can elect to hear certain artists I like especially perform on audio alone.  This season, I was able to obtain a subscribership to Met Opera On Demand (viewing and listening on the computer) for only $14.99 a month, and decided it was definitely worthwhile.  I hope you will be interested in doing the same, as opera is one of the few larger-than-life experiences guaranteed, like any art form, to supply drama and humor without personal pain.  I mean, you could be sniffing glue or blowing up buildings, but one would destroy you and the other would destroy other people and landscape, and who wants that, when they could watch Don Pasquale (in the opera of that name) try to work his way free of the toils his new “wife” is winding round him so that she can instead marry his nephew, and hear the nephew’s beautiful and evocative serenade to her from the garden?  There is a certain mercy obtained by living vicariously, and though opera among dramatic forms may not have a total corner on the market of vicarious blessing, it certainly is up there at the top.  What am I saying, though, it’s over-the-top, dramatic, larger than life, all the qualities I’ve discussed above (and now that like many an opera aria I’m beginning to repeat myself, I will just leave off with the coda and hope you may find your way to such pleasures on your own, leaving my recommendation to speak for me).

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September 21, 2013 · 4:32 pm

Sorry, no literary post this week….celebrating!

Yes, I know, I promised not so long ago to increase the number of my posts so that I was closer to my original blogging schedule of at least 2-3 posts a week.  But life intervenes, in that inimitable way it has, and right now, I am away from home, waiting for my close relatives to come back from family soccer morning, sharing my solitude with 3 cages full of 8 baby bunnies that my brother and his son–the unforgettable Charles, who earlier if you will recall compared me to “Aunt Josephine” from The Wide Window in A Series of Unfortunate Events because I worry about him–have adopted.  Sad to say, the baby bunnies had sores and worms when they were brought home, which is what occasioned their sympathetic adoption in the first place, but my brother and nephew have treated them and brought them nearly to full health, with only a bit more to go before they can be caged outside in a warm hutch for the winter.

When I was young, I also had a rabbit, and my brother had one, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, or else I’ve forgotten some of its habits.  “The habbits of rabbits,” to coin a phrase, are funny.  They clean their paws, ears, and bodies much like cats, but make a great deal of noise licking and biting the water bottles that are attached to their cages.  They also eat a lot, almost constantly, it seems, though whether this is from boredom or necessity I don’t know:  you’d have to ask the rabbits in question.  They have big appealing brown eyes, and mostly pale, orangish-fawn colored bodies with the usual little white tails, except for the mottled and speckled two of the litter, which have the fawn and dark brown-sepia colored markings.  For some reason, evidently companionable concerns (it can’t be for warmth, since they’re inside the house), they can have a whole cage for space and yet prefer to sleep and cozy right on top of each other when they’re not eating or drinking.  They aren’t big on manners, since often when they’re eating, one or more of them will place both paws in the food bowl, effectively blocking the access of others.

Right now, the males and females are in separate cages, but my brother and nephew aren’t ruling out the possibility of increasing the litter for sale later on.  One thing’s for sure:  rabbits don’t smell like cats and dogs in their “toiletry” habits, which is great, because as long as the cage is clean, they are pleasant animals to keep inside (always barring the noise of their water drinking, which if it weren’t water ingestion would make you think you’d taken in a host of dipsomaniacs).  Another certainly (which my nephew and my brother both assure me of) is that I’m going to have to read Watership Down to fully appreciate rabbit culture.  And there, it’s a literary post in its way after all, with a commitment to read and review later on.  For now, I’m going to celebrate the family birthday we’re here for, and wish you the best until such time as I post again.  Hoppy trails!

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September 13, 2013 · 8:15 pm

Joe Ponepinto’s “The Face Maker and Other Stories of Obsession”–A writer’s professionalism, generosity, and talent

For those of you who regularly follow blogs they’ve originally met up with on WordPress.com, the name of Joe Ponepinto, or “jpon,” as he is known on his site (The Saturday Morning Post, http://joeponepinto.com), will not be a stranger.  It’s one of the sites published at least once a week, on Saturday mornings, of course, and has an intelligent and loyal following of folks interested in the many and sundry questions and dilemmas facing the modern fiction writer and aficionado.  For those of you who haven’t met up with Joe yet, I would encourage you to visit his site and follow the dialogues thereon, because you are in for a treat.  Even more, I would encourage you to buy his new book, The Face Maker and Other Stories of Obsession, available from Woodward Press, LLC (and Amazon.com).  My post today is mainly to communicate my sense of Joe’s professionalism, generosity, and talent, in that order, with talent in the ultimate position for purposes of emphasis, as one puts the most overarching consideration or the most all-inclusive last.

I say Joe is a consummate professional because not only has he been the Book Review Editor of The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of The Delphi Quarterly, but he combines this with an additional career path of freelance editing.  Finally, and for many people the most important factor, he is a writer himself, and thus is emphatically not in the position generally reviled as “those who can’t do, teach”; rather, what he can “teach” us is derived from his own experiences with writing and submitting works, and he is both up-front and conversationally inclined when it comes to discussing the ins and outs of story and book publication and its rewards, woes, and pitfalls.

I say Joe is generous too, meaning it in more than one sense.  For starters, once he had given his time and energies to being instrumental in the formational and continued stages of the Woodward Press, he generously offered, if sent mailing addresses, to send a free copy of his book mentioned above to each person who had been following his site and commenting regularly for at least a year or so.  I myself was in doubt as to whether or not I qualified, because though I have commented regularly on Joe’s site, I have only been blogging since July 4, 2012 and began following his site sometime after that.  But never fear, Joe accepted my interest in his proceedings as valid, and sent me a copy of his book.  And what I was to discover therein made me feel that Joe is a generous person all around, with his characters as much as with his readers, and that’s a good feeling to have about a writer.  After all, his avowed subject was obsession writ large, and so many writers would have taken the easy path and created a collection of notable eccentrics and cranks and let that pass for an honest effort.  But Joe Ponepinto’s characters live and breathe both genuine feelings and heartaches and sometimes have tainted victories, and their obsessions are truly honestly come by in the course of their attempts to resolve their differing dilemmas.  We live with them through their trials and can see the sometimes twisted sense of the solutions they come up with, knowing even as we do that they are not twisted individuals except in the senses in which what they are going through could happen to any one of us, given the same pressures and incentives.

There is one issue I would like to address about Joe’s book which made me a little less than happy until I thought it through, but then I realized that it was almost certainly meant in a more traditional sense than it seemed.  As those of you who follow my own site probably know, I am an inveterate reader of blurbs on books.  Although I do sometimes pick up a book, take a look at the cover, the author’s name, heft it in my hand, and go by such tangibles and intangibles as linger in that process, I also always read the blurb and see what weight it carries in my mind.  Here’s what Kelly Davio, the Editor of The Los Angeles Review, had to say about the book:  “In stories that range effortlessly across time period and place, Joe Ponepinto delivers the kind of masculine character we crave in literary fiction; these characters wrestle with the most essential questions of morality, and they bare-knuckle box with their human frailties.  If the characters’ decisions are disastrous, they are passionately made.  If their fates are tragic, their efforts are heroic.  Ponepinto is unafraid to follow human nature to its final conclusions, no matter how difficult those conclusions may be.”  What could bother me about that?  you ask.  Here’s my quibble, and also my resolution:

There is a bit of an ambiguity in the expression “the masculine character we crave in literary fiction….”  Who craves masculine character?  Is this a reference to the fact that most of Ponepinto’s central characters are male?  But he does have female characters, and his touch with them is equally talented.  What, then, is “masculine character” in fiction?  (I would just interject here that in his posts as in his stories, Joe’s touch with women and female concerns and issues is both adroit and politically sensitive.  So, what does this remark of Davio’s mean?)  Traditionally (to take it that way, as I assume it is meant), when critics or scholars spoke of the “masculine character” of fiction or a writer’s touch of masculinity, an unintentionally backhanded compliment when not applied to men but which in that character was sometimes applied even to women writers, they usually meant that the writing topics in question had “rigorous thought structure” and were “gifted with creatively inspirational moments.”  By contrast, critics of bygone times meant by “feminine character” in writing to deny or negate in the topic treated strength and agility of composition, as well as indicating that there was a nebulous sort of “hands-off,” “squeamish,” or “lady-like” appeal to the fiction frequently but unfairly assumed to be the sole province of women writers.  Don’t get me wrong, some very fine fiction was characterized also in this light, such as the fiction of the literary craftsman Henry James, whose writings were sometimes spoken of as “feminine” and “too sensitive” (as indeed was Henry James himself, in half-earnest jest, by another writer).  In any case, Joe Ponepinto’s writing shows a great deal of “rigorous thought structure,” like the underpinnings or bones of a face, and a plethora of “creatively inspirational moments,” like the nerves and flesh.  (And here, I’m borrowing some imagery from his award-winning story in the collection, entitled “The Face Maker.”)  As well, none of it is “feminine” in the former pejorative sense, by which I mean that Ponepinto does not once in my reckoning shy away from a challenging fictional turn of events or become too “squeamish” or “lady-like” to give his characters (and his readers) their full due.  So, though I object to the characterization of fiction as masculine or feminine, in this case I can allow that the terminology, while slanted is, if correctly translated, just.  Joe Ponepinto is a very talented, accomplished, and mature writer.

Perhaps my favorite story in the whole collection is “Living in Dark Houses,” a story in which a troubled and abused teen finds a hero and unlikely mentor in another teen, slightly older, who has had his own childhood likewise taken away from him.  The surprising ending is one which I leave Ponepinto’s readers to discover, along with all the other fine fiction contained in the book.  It is a veritable treasure trove of perspectives, all of which overtly examine the topic of obsession while not obscuring the path to it, which we may find ourselves going down any day.  Ponepinto is not wincing away from the path that leads willy-nilly through it and to startling and marvelously evocative conclusions, true pictures of the human condition which make us wonder if we are really any of us free of eccentricity and oddness.  It is this ability first and foremost to connect with one’s fellows which characterizes the best and most talented achievers of all time in the field of fiction, and Joe Ponepinto is seemingly quite capable of laying claim in the course of time and further writings to be one of that august number.  Way to go, Joe!  You’re an excellent model to follow!  (And now, we’re all waiting for the next book to come out!)

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September 5, 2013 · 8:58 pm

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes.”–Adrienne Rich

Yes, my post today is about monsters.  Once again, monsters have solicited my attention (I actually went in search of some of the more literal ones, but more of that anon).  The first monster that I want to write about, however, is the monster of vanity.  As Adrienne Rich points out above, “a thinking woman” (which I like to believe I am) “sleeps with monsters.  The beak that grips her, she becomes.”  Having been gripped by the monster of wounded vanity (why is it, I asked myself, that so often when I write my little heart out fewer people read, and when I don’t write for a whole week, my stats go up?), in my injured pride I said, “Take a holiday from writing, you aren’t being appreciated anyway.”  (So as you see, from only being momentarily attacked by the vain impulse, I let it have its head and actually became that empty being for a week, one who could be writing but isn’t, out of a sort of misdirected, misbegotten spite.)

Then, I found yet another quote about monsters, also apropos of this situation:  as Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes said, “Imagination abandoned by Reason produces impossible monsters:  united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”  The fact of the matter is, I wasn’t being reasonable, but was indulging an overactive imagination.  What about the many times when I had written frequently, and been rewarded not only by readers on my stats, but also by “likes” and even more by comments in return?  So, even if sometimes people do seem to be reading more when I don’t write, they are at least reading, and my monstrous vanity should be restrained in its imaginative excesses by a dose of Reason, since I would like to be thought of as somewhat “artful” in my pursuit of literary topics and truths.  This is what I told myself, today when I checked my stats again and was once again puzzled, but decided to write anyway, because I have been busy off fighting game monsters for almost a week now, and felt it was time to stop sulking and do a post.  Maybe compare notes with others who’ve had the same experience?

As George Seferis (Giorgios Sefiriades) made clear in his speech for the Nobel Prize, “When, on the road to Thebes, Oedipus met the Sphinx, who asked him her riddle, his answer was:  Man.  This simple word destroyed the monster.  We have many monsters to destroy.  Let us think of Oedipus’ answer.”  So, it’s not necessary to be an absolute drudge in one’s keeping of a series of posts, only a thinking woman [I take it Sefiriades wouldn’t have excluded Woman from the universal expression “Man”] who says something when she has something to say, and leaves the readers to enjoy what’s there when and if they can get around to it, just as she posts when she can get around to it.  Without fancy excuse or offended rejoinder.  And if by being more a part of Humankind and admitting to some faults one can best slay them, then all to the better.

Finally in my pantheon of notable quotes for the day, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had this to say about monsters and mirror images:  “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”  I have been playing (for at least the last five days, off and on) the Monsters’ Den:  Book of Dread follow-up game Monsters’ Den Chronicles.  It’s a new offshoot of the original game and has such weapons as vampiric swords and armor which suck your enemies’ health or power (or both, if you get a really prime piece of equipment), and “shadow” warriors on both sides, who mimic the abilities of the main characters or suborn their powers as their own.  Nietzsche wouldn’t have been amused (or would he?).  In this game, a misguided group of negative religionists have founded a dungeon that the player’s characters must go through, “defeating”–the word “killing” is rarely used–the enemy as best they can.  It’s not a matter of simply having a different religious preference (thank goodness for that, or who in their right mind would want to play it and incur the self-reproach of not being tolerant towards others’ beliefs?); it’s a matter of fighting “real-life” monsters like vampires, nightmares, banshees, ghouls, the general undead, and the acolytes, neophytes, and armored beings who keep them going.  That makes it safe for everyone’s conscience.  Certainly, however, the combative edge one needs to maintain means being ruthless, and many of the weapons and skill sets encourage this.

Why do I play, and what is the main thing I feel this game gives me?  Strategic lessons.  It’s not a multiple explosion, car wreck, violent blood spatter kind of game, but merely a game which occasionally has some imaginative visual effects of spells and potions and hits on enemy targets, and which sedately shows a small pile of bones like the ones on a pirate’s flag when you finally beat each enemy.  It requires careful thought and negotiations between various pieces of equipment you find/purchase in order to get the best “bang for your buck,” and you must constantly be on your guard and calculating the best means of balancing four characters’ differing skills and talents against any number of from one to six opponents of sometimes quite a superior number of “hit points” (life expectancy, potency, abilities).  I feel that my strategic thinking about what weapons to use in life has improved (whether we’re talking about words or tactics for living):  quick calculations of possibilities and potential outcomes is a skill like any other, and while some prefer to work crossword puzzles, I find this game more compelling (at least for now) than the crosswords I used to work so frequently.  And that’s my say (now, Nietzsche might think I’ve looked too long into the abyss and given it a chance to peer too deeply into me in return, but I don’t feel I’m a monster yet, if ever.  I’m extremely unlikely to assault anyone or act out in strange ways, as is the effect of some other sorts of computer games of the more violent variety, and as a really keen incentive, this dungeon system has a shopping emporium!  Could anything be more appealing to your average peaceable warrior than a chance to buy and sell equipment, potions, and miscellaneous items and upgrade all at the same time?).  Seriously, though, having fought my demons (even the vanity one) by taking a few days off and trying not to worry too much about stats (except the gaming kind) has given me a much needed breather from end-of-the-summer doldrums.  I do hope to continue to post regularly, but I thought a small dose of honesty wouldn’t come amiss, just in case you thought I had given up the ghost (let’s see, now, how many hit points does the average ghoul have….?).

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August 29, 2013 · 6:39 pm

“I come from a set of storytellers and moralists….The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.”–Victor S. Pritchett

My first remark on the short story I’m writing on today, after such a title to my post, should and must be that it is the most beautiful, meaningful, and worthwhile story I have ever read, my constant favorite, and yet it has no overweening moral emphasis whatsoever (except perhaps that generosity is not wasted, and should never be regretted, which may seem weak to those who like conclusive statements of purpose, never mind those who like conclusive endings, who will likely be perplexed by this story as well).  The story furthermore will offend those who insist that fantasy fiction is not to be mingled willy-nilly with realistic fiction without a “signal” of some surreptitious and covert kind being passed between the writer and the reader, and this story plays fast and loose with this convention, giving no hint whatsoever for about 3/5 of its length that it’s going to concern a dalliance between a woman and a wonderful, sexy male djinn, or genie.  It is moreover also about the purposes of stories en masse with special reference made to Eastern European and Asian stories in particular, which to some people forewarned might seem a dry topic, as they want, or think they want, to read just a story, and not a story about stories, to have the original blinding experience and not the reflexive experience of hearing the why and how of the what.  But I am issuing my own kind of forewarning for my readers:  A. S. Byatt’s short tale “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (which is the longest story–a novella, really–in her fairy tale collection by the same name) is not to be dismissed as a story just for specialists in the field of narrative, or for those who are themselves storytellers or moralists with an axe to grind.  It is simply the most beautiful story I have ever read, and yet it leaves many stories within it incomplete, trailing bits and pieces of connected and disconnected tales “floating redundant” (to pull out an original inspiring bit of poetry quoted by Byatt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein it describes the way serpents like the Tempter originally stood on their coils instead of being doomed to writhe on the ground).

The story is “about” Gillian Perholt, a narratologist (or, a specialist concerning the mechanisms, structures, and meanings pertinent to and inherent in the study of narrative).  In this sense, as we are neatly informed in the story, narrative can be anything in our world from a tennis match, to an advertisement, to a fairy tale, to whatever creates a size and shape mentally for us to consider fictively, or in the sense of “as if.”  (For those who at this point are intrigued more by the idea of narratology than by the tale itself–and at this moment, since I am investing my energies on writing about the story, not the discipline, I would just say “shame on you!”–I’d like to direct them to Mieke Bal’s excellent and easily readable book Narratology:  Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.)  But more than that, the story is about Gillian Perholt the woman, a woman of fifty-five (not, one would think at first glance even a popular age for a fairy tale heroine, most of them being nubile, naive, and even if intelligent, sexually attractive young virgins and neophytes taking their first run at life).  She has been deserted by her husband for a younger woman, but instead of feeling misused–though we get the point that the sense of feeling misused wore itself out long ago through much of the same sort of thing–she feels free, suddenly.  And freedom and its lack are other main subjects of the story, along with the generosity I first mentioned as a sort of undeclared “moral.”  If there is a moral about having the traditional three wishes granted and freedom, it is that regardless of what one wishes for, “Fate is fixed,” as Gillian says in a talk she gives at a conference.  But, as she continues, “‘In fairy-tales…those wishes that are granted and are not malign, or twisted towards destruction, tend to lead to a condition of beautiful stasis, more like a work of art than the drama of Fate.  It is as though the fortunate had stepped off the hard road into an unchanging landscape where it is always spring and no winds blow.”

But I am getting ahead of myself, and telling my own tale of reading the book all out of order!  At a conference in Istanbul, with side trips to view sights in Smyrna and places round about in Turkey, Gillian Perholt (who occasionally sees visions she has told no one else about, particularly frightening images which she believes sometimes to be premonitions of her own mortality) spends time with her good friend, Orhan Rifat, a male Turkish scholar of narrative, who alike has much to say about how and why stories function as they do.  In this tale, the “frame tale” of the woman and the djinn contains numerous other stories which the characters tell each other in the manner of frame tales and inset stories worldwide, and many of these tales are intriguing enough, particularly as they are narrated briefly and in a somewhat sketchy manner by the “experts” intent on finding their meanings, to make the average reader want to follow up the tales someday and read them in the original texts.  There are also new insights reported by the characters on well-known tales like the tale of “Patient Griselda,” which was told first by Boccaccio, then by Petrarch, then by Chaucer’s clerk in “The Clerk’s Tale” portion of The Canterbury Tales.  Byatt has her character say, quite honestly, that it is a very well-known tale which no one much likes, apparently because of the elements of the gratuitous cruelty involved in the character Walter’s testing of his wife Griselda’s faithfulness and attention to duty (I can remember studying this tale in school and having a professor tell me that it wasn’t so much the clerk’s purpose to get his “listeners” to admire marital faithfulness as it was to point to humankind’s duty to be faithful and dutiful to God though tested as Griselda was tested by her husband Walter in the parallel case.  All I can remember feeling at that analysis is resentment of  Walter, the professor, and God all three!)

Belief is an important element which is examined in Byatt’s key tale of tales, and I find that I “believe” it (or most easily practice what the poet Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”) just because it makes no special territorial claims for itself.  The explanation for most of my lifetime of being impatient with Scripture and annoyed by Christianity (in which faith I was brought up) was given to me gratis in this story, and I will never forget the strength of the emotion with which I read this portion:  “Angels had made Gillian think of Saint Paul.  Angels had sprung open Saint Paul’s prision in Ephesus.  She had sat in Sunday school, hearing a fly buzzing against a smeared high window in the vestry, and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true.  She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare:  she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true.”  This echoes or at least mentions tangentially something which I’ve heard several people say before, which is that Milton’s Paradise Lost is so monumental and believeable a work of poetic art because the poet allowed himself to be a poet, (and by the way to make his Satan more poetically moving as a subject than his angels and holier characters), instead of trying to be a theologian and only secondarily a poet.

At the moment when Gillian first meets the djinn, she has already finished what she was there in Turkey for, and is in her hotel bathroom after having had a shower.  She bethinks herself of the dusty bottle she bought in the bazaar, and takes it to the sink to wash off the dirt, and out pops–guess what?  You know already.  I would not tell even this much of the tale, not wanting to ruin the story and the buildup, except that I want to point to another very significant element of this story:  Gillian expresses no surprise, horror, wonderment, in short, A. S. Byatt does not try to persuade the reader via emotional mimesis (mimicking of the character’s mental state for the reader to follow and “fall into” by that special “contract” or “agreement” I mentioned earlier).  Byatt simply recounts the logistics of trying to get out of one’s bathroom when a huge foot is blocking the way.  This makes it far easier for us to accept the story than if we had read any special pleading to do so.  Any consideration of the matter is handled after the fact, when the characters have already been making acquaintance for quite some time.  We are told of Gillian Perholt:  “She was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging Oriental daimon in a hotel room.  At the time, she unquestioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dream–that is to say, with a certain difference, a certain knowledge that the reality in which she was was not everyday, was not the reality in which Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism with a robust kick at a trundling stone.”  Instead, Byatt engagingly uses in her story the traditional formula by which stories are told in Turkey, “bis var mis, bir yok mis,” “perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t,” which works because it lets the reader have the choice of whether to continue reading and be enlightened and amused or to be a lug who insists on only absolute fact and thus misses all the fun and learning alike which can be derived from fiction (or what purports to be fiction!).  For fact-lovers, though, Byatt even lets us know how she is manipulating the reader’s perceptions and reactions by mentioning outright the formula bis var mis, bir yok mis,” rather like a conjuror showing us empty hands before performing a sleight-of-hand which will astonish and amaze us.

And Byatt, as usual, succeeds in astonishing and amazing, so enchanting and enlivening is the tale she tells us.  I definitely won’t tell you how it ends, except to say that it is a hopeful, blissfully and perennially youthful story without a perennial youth in it on the face of it, and the ending is sufficiently “open-ended” (as Gillian tells the djinn her century prefers in stories) to lend itself neither to authorial fudging and lying nor readerly despair.  But enough about my reactions to the book and my experiences of it:  why not read it for yourself?  (And after you read it, why not read the four other stories in the same volume?  Yes, it’s like letting a djinn out of a bottle, a totally magical experience!)

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August 26, 2013 · 5:17 pm

Keeping myself off the road to hell with an “Ave atque vale”

As my more than useful, indeed precious, Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Abbreviations tells me, I am following in Catullus’s footsteps if I take just a moment to say “ave atque vale” (hail and farewell).  Only, of course, as the book also says, the expression is “A Roman formula used at funerals when bidding farewell to the dead.”  So, this will tell you that though the sentiment is noble and arcane and resonant, it is not exactly “le mot juste” (the perfect expression) to use to my readers, for I hope they are all alive and kicking.    It would in fact be a “mauvaise plaisanterie,” or “bad taste in jesting.”  My joke is weak and slight, but I’m more obsessed with keeping myself off the road to hell (which as we know, is “paved with good intentions.”)  My good intentions originally were (as of a week or two ago) to keep up my posting schedule to make it a more frequent occurence than it has been lately.  But I’m finding this hard to do, partly because I’m in the middle of trying to read David Foster Wallace’s nearly 1000 pages novel Infinite Jest, not because I want to write a post on it (what a gargantuan task!), but just because.  If it weren’t for the crazy humor of the book which keeps me going, I would just throw up my hands and murmur in Latin (yes, at one point I was able to mutter in Latin) “Non omnia possumus omnes,” or as Virgil said in his Eclogues, “We cannot all do everything.”

Already, you are looking at this post, and if you are Italian, you are nodding wisely and saying to yourself, “Molto fumo e poco arrosto,” while if you are of the same mind but not Italian you are knowingly remarking “Much smoke and little roast meat,” or in more Shakespearean guise “Much ado about nothing.”  To which, in my desperation, I respond, again in my overwrought Latin passion for the clipped phrase, “Ex necessitate rei!” (“arising from the urgency of the case”).  After all, I would love to have something to say to you every day, and would willingly write a post a day as I originally started out doing, except that I can only read books, poems, plays, and short stories so fast, and as I’m sure you’re aware inspiration takes time, or to put it another way “Dal detto al fatto vi è un gran tratto”; but as many of my readers are English, French, or German speaking, perhaps I should just reveal again that this Italian expression means “It’s a long haul from words to deeds,” or to use the English turn of phrase, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.”  I feel uninspired; I feel dry and non-creative (or again as my Italian-speaking friends would say, “Dalla rapa non si cava sangue” (“You cannot get blood out of a turnip”).

There is, of course some benefit to being far from heaven’s inspiring touch, and that’s that one doesn’t become disordered in one’s everyday arrangements in order to pander to one’s creative whims, one doesn’t participate in the occasional craziness of being too near Mount Olympus (I know by now you’re expecting something in another language than English, and I’d hate to disappoint you, so I’ll just say that this sentiment can be expressed more succinctly as “Procul a Jove, procul a fulmine”–“To be far from Jove is to be far from his thunder”).  This is why, when “Ave atque vale” popped into my head this morning as all I really felt like saying for the moment (not speaking to the dead, but revising the significance of the saying to say “hiya; goombye for now” to people who might be expecting me to be coherent and lucid today), I thought that it must be fortuitous that the phrase had popped into my head, and were I an ancient Roman, would have said “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt,” or “The Fates lead the well-disposed; they drag the rebellious.”  Meaning that I would rather follow what tiny thread of inspiration had appeared than just come up with another “no post today, sorry,” which for some reason I don’t mind hearing from others when they have other obligations than posting, though I always feel different about saying it myself.

So, anyway, today I jumped into my post, determined to avoid the road to hell even in imagination, telling myself (and I don’t even speak German, but I swear I was thinking the exact thought):  “Wer gar zu viel bedenkt, wird wenig leisten.”  (What I actually said was, of course, “The man [or woman] who considers too long accomplishes little.”)  Therefore, taking a little while to type this post, I’ve told myself in relation to glancing through my little book to amuse and inform you a bit, “Sophois homilon kautos ekbese sophos,” as Menander said in his (Greek) Monostichs: “If you associate with the wise”–the book, not me–“you will become wise yourself.”  And now, my work of getting out a post today is done, though you may be a little disappointed at its flimsiness (“Was man nicht kann meiden, muss man willig leiden”:  “What can’t be cured must be endured,” at least if you’re German).  To end, I will leave you with this thought:  I’ve done, I can no more, because I hesitate “vouloir rompre l’anguille au genou,” as I rarely “attempt to break an eel on [my] knee,” or “attempt the impossible.”  Good day, I have said what I had to say, or to end in Spanish, “He dicho!”

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August 22, 2013 · 9:54 pm

A short post on an even shorter poem, and the resiliency of fleshly existence–Louise Bogan’s “The Alchemist”

As Louise Bogan both admits and examines in poem after poem, passion is a basic human need, an essential characteristic, the drive of the body (as it works out its contracts with spirit and mind) to survive and claim yet more and more territory.  As she writes in the later poem “Rhyme,” in speaking poetically to the ghost of a former lover, “What laid, I said,/My being waste?/’Twas your sweet flesh/With its sweet taste,–/.”  She progresses through the poem pointing verbally to the things which should be our meat and drink, such as the water of springs, or the bread we ingest.  She insists that “no fine body” “Should force all bread/And drink together,/Nor be both sun/And hidden weather.”  Her final conclusion to this poem, however, after she avows repeatedly the things that should content us with our lot, is “But once heart’s feast/You were to me.”  This is her usual emphasis on the things of the heart and flesh, which insist with us and have their own ways of forcing themselves into our awareness when we think we are most and best protected.

It wasn’t just in her late poetry, however, that Bogan explored this conundrum.  In her early poem “The Alchemist,” she speaks of the way in which we often isolate ourselves and explore our capacities for self-discipline, and the sometime failure of the effort, which ends in a strange contradiction.  As she relates in the first stanza, she follows what she regarded as the “science” of purification, attempting to conquer the pain and confusion of love and its frequent aftermath, grief:

“I burned my life, that I might find/A passion wholly of the mind,/Thought divorced from eye and bone,/Ecstacy come to breath alone./I broke my life, to seek relief/From the flawed light of love and grief.”

As often happened when the historical alchemists tried to transmute lead to gold, however, at least those who were making a literal attempt and not those who were attempting a change of the soul or being, the poet finds that flesh is stubborn, and has a firm reality perhaps as noble but certainly as constant as the mind.  As she concludes in the second stanza:

“With mounting beat the utter fire/Charred existence and desire./It died low, ceased its sudden thresh./I had found unmysterious flesh–/Not the mind’s avid substance–still/Passionate beyound the will.”

Thus, even though the poet figure is attempting the alchemical transformation of the life into a “passion wholly of the mind,” the natural physical world (and its concommitant reality, the “flawed light of love and grief,”) is too powerful to allow of its being dismissed and transmuted into something too ethereal, unrooted, or perhaps only insubstantial to feed the basic wholeness of the human being, the healthy whole that should be left to exist and engage in the interplay of its parts.

Though Bogan often poetically regrets love affairs and warns of the tangled emotions which result from the attempt either to subdue love or to hold onto love, sometimes, that is “scheduled to depart,” she participates fully in the consciousness that love and passion and the life of the flesh are more than just basic human experiences; more, the awareness of love, she seems to suggest, is at the very least a human obligation.  We refuse the obligation to submit our hearts to some form of love at our peril, she suggests, even though it is likewise at our peril that we do so.  It’s love’s trap that Bogan writes about in this manner most often:  we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t, to put it in the common colloquial.  For myself, I’d rather suffer from a “sin of commission” (from doing something that might cause pain to myself and accidentally and coincidentally to another) than a “sin of omission” (refraining from action and staying in a cowardly manner within supposedly “safe” bounds where while nothing is risked, nothing is gained either).  What is your view of Louise Bogan’s trap of fleshly existence?  Are you more likely to risk something and regret later, if necessary, or are you a “cowardy custard,” who likes to play it safe?  (Though I have expressed my own views, there really is no right answer to this question–the term “cowardy custard” can best be retaliated against, if you are of the “play it safe” persuasion, by referring to people of my ilk as “dangerous dipshits,” or “incautious idiots,” or other terms of abuse.)  One thing we can all be sure of, though:  Louise Bogan saw the issue from both sides, and would have appreciated the traumas (and dramas) inherent in both our perspectives.

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August 18, 2013 · 2:12 pm

My alter ego who apparently isn’t so alter, Aunt Josephine….

I have been told, by a child of ten named Charles who has every right to claim that he knows me well, that I remind him of Aunt Josephine, not as to the white bun on her head or in her manner of dress, but in her personality.  As I am the child’s aunt and my name is not Josephine, I took some exception to the remark, with apologies to all those out there who do happen to be named Josephine.  Charles made this observation to me in front of his parent, my brother, who grinned evilly and agreed with him.  Since Aunt Josephine is a fictional character in Book III of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (also known as Book III:  The Wide Window) it was agreed upon that I should read said book (and write a post on it) to see for myself whether or not I could recognize any of my own traits in Aunt Josephine, most especially my tendency to worry and to warn children of things they need to know for their own safety.

Always having been sensitive to the plight of fictional characters–you’ll remember that Barrie’s  Tinker Bell was in danger of disappearing unless readers said three times that they believed in fairies–I decided to give Lemony Snicket’s character a chance to entertain and enlighten me.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, or rather focusing solely upon myself.  Who is this Snicket?  I hear you ask.  To quote from the book’s biographical note itself, Lemony Snicket “was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well.  A studied expert in rhetorical analysis, Mr. Snicket has spent the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans.  His findings are being published serially by Harper-Collins.”  Short and succinct.  Next, you  probably want to know what the book’s about.  I had been told that the Snicket books were about the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, so I knew that, but gained further knowledge of this particular book from the book blurb as well.  You will notice the consistency of style with Snicket’s biographical note:  “Dear Reader, If you have not read anything about the Baudelaire orphans, then before you read even one more sentence, you should know this:  Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are kindhearted and quick-witted, but their lives, I am sorry to say, are filled with bad luck and misery.  All of the stories about these three children are unhappy and wretched, and the one you are holding may be the worst of them all.  If you haven’t got the stomach for a story that includes a hurricane, a signaling device, hungry leeches, cold cucumber soup, a horrible villain, and a doll named Pretty Penny, then this book will probably fill you with despair.  I will continue to record these tragic tales, for that is what I do.  You, however, should decide for yourself whether you can possibly endure this miserable story.  With all due respect, Lemony Snicket.”  What a way to write a blurb, with plenty of teasing clues and yet not one substantial spoiler or giveaway except the information that there are several of these books about, and that all of the adventures lack saccharine, which children don’t have much use for anyway!  You can easily imagine childish and childlike hands (of whatever age) grabbing this book eagerly off the shelf.

But back to Aunt Josephine (sort of).  In each book, the Baudelaire siblings (Violet, Klaus, and the baby Sunny) go to a different guardian or through a different situation trying to escape the plots of evil Count Olaf, who is attempting to obtain their fortune and then get rid of them.  In The Wide Window, they temporarily become the wards of their Aunt Josephine, who, like all their guardians, meets with an unsavory fate.  In each case, they have trials to contend with, which in this book include Aunt Josephine’s personality.  To give just a few instances, Aunt Josephine (and here is where I am supposed most to resemble her) greets the children with these words:  “‘This is the radiator….Please don’t ever touch it.  You may find yourself very cold here in my home.  I never turn on the radiator, because I am frightened that it might explode, so it often gets chilly in the evenings.'”  Aunt Josephine takes a similar line with other things:  she “so far appeared to be afraid of everything in [her home], from the welcome mat–which, [she] explained, could cause someone to trip and break their neck–to the sofa in the living room, which she said could fall over at any time and crush them flat.”  The telephone?  “‘It should only be used in emergencies, because there is a danger of electrocution.'”  But surely there could be no harm in a common doorknob?  “‘When you open this door, just push on the wood here.  Never use the doorknob.  I’m always afraid that it will shatter into a million pieces and that one of them will hit my eye.'”  Finally, there’s the question of what’s for dinner, and on a frigid evening you don’t like to find that it’s cold cucumber soup, but that’s inescapably what it is.  Why?  “‘I never cook anything hot because I’m afraid of turning the stove on.  It might burst into flames.'”  Taking yet another aspect of Aunt Josephine’s personality, there’s the question of correct English speech and grammar (those of you who’ve known me for a while or have read my bio know that I’m a former academician).  As Aunt Josephine says to her younger audience, which soon gets tired of having its speech and punctuation corrected, “‘I’m sure you all need some brushing up on your grammar….Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?'”

I hang my head.  I stand condemned in the tribunal of youth for resembling Aunt Josephine.  There’re only a few things that differentiate me from her, and prevent Fate from assigning me a grisly ending in Lake Lachrymose, which is adjacent to her home high on the cliff.  Let’s look on page 193, farther towards the end of the book:  “The Baudelaires had not really enjoyed most of their time with [Aunt Josephine]–not because she cooked horrible cold meals, or chose presents for them that they didn’t like, or always corrected the children’s grammar, but because she was so afraid of everything that she made it impossible to really enjoy anything at all.  And the worst of it was, Aunt Josephine’s fear had made her a bad guardian.  A guardian is supposed to stay with children and keep them safe, but Aunt Josephine had run away at the first sign of danger.  A guardian is supposed to help children in times of trouble, but Aunt Josephine practially had to be dragged out of the Curdled Cave when they needed her.  And a guardian is supposed to protect children from danger, but Aunt Josephine had offered the orphans to Captain Sham [the evil Count Olaf in disguise] in exchange for her own safety.”  No, I stand acquitted!  The only cold soup I’ve ever served my nephews and niece was one fierce hot summer when I served my famous gazpacho, and they ate it without complaint.  They’ve always liked my presents.  And they have accepted that I will occasionally correct their grammar, and that it usually keeps someone else from doing so later, though they still tease me about my verbal torment of them.  But of all the worst charges above, of deserting them in their hours of need or of being too afraid to protect them from strangers, they can’t justifiably accuse me.  So, all is well.  I’m merely being twitted by my nephew Charles about my personality, something he is acute enough to have noticed.  I do worry about the children, and I do warn them a lot about danger, and they find some of my danger bulletins and scenarios a little far-fetched.  But that’s what aunts are for (and they’ve even forgiven me for playing them as much of an opera as I could get them to sit through!).

And when all else fails, they have the marvelous Lemony Snicket to explain things to them:  “There are two kinds of fears:  rational and irrational–or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don’t.  For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them.  But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and has never hurt a soul.  Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors [one of Aunt Josephine’s fears] is an irrational fear.  Realtors, as I’m sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses.  Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, and so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them.”  You see?  It’s wonderful to know that even we antique Aunt Josephines of the world have found a children’s friend and ally so perfectly in command of all a child needs to know, and one who, as we will also admit if we are candid, is readable enough for us to enjoy as well, admitting us once again into that magical world of childhood where even “a series of unfortunate events” can be redeemed by authorial honesty and wit combined.  I’m very much afraid that I’m going to find myself borrowing the other Lemony Snicket books some day soon, the more especially because I hear that the last volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events has come out, entitled simply The End.  I predict, however, that just as these books have each had a number of readings-through by my nephew, who returns to them repeatedly, the books will have a long and happy life with children and their parents everywhere, regardless of their title or plot line.  Sadly, now, I have to give the book back; but now perhaps I will start with Book I and read through ’til the end.  Harry Potter, move over, you’re going to have to share center stage!

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August 16, 2013 · 9:03 pm

And now for something completely diabolical–The year without a summer (1816) and its monsters….

For the second time this summer, a reader and/or writing colleague has written something that struck a chord and gave me the subject for a post.  This time, it was my friend DJ (the writer of some fine fantasy/science fiction/historical stories), who is also a frequent contributor to my “comments” collection.  He implied that he didn’t see the attraction of vampires.  Now, I don’t know that I do either, but when I was a lot younger, Barnabas Collins on the television show “Dark Shadows” certainly had me going.  But Barnabas was what we regard now as a “typical” vampire, a sort of middle-aged, mysterious, tall, pale, and thin brunette with a forbidding manner and a compelling, hypnotic way with the ladies all the same.  He wasn’t a neophyte teenager or young adult with bulging muscles and sex, sex, sex oozing out of his every faithful word.  In other words, he wasn’t in any way related to Edward of “Twilight” fame.

But at one point, even that aristocratic middle-aged vampire was news, hard though it may be to believe.  And he had his genesis in an odd summer shared by some famous poets and their hangers-on during “the year without a summer,” 1816, when the weather in parts of Europe and North America was violently stormy, full of crop failures and famine, and ripe for tales of monsters and demons to be born.  The entire tale of that summer is longer, and you can find it elsewhere, for example in the background history of the tale of Frankenstein:  or, the Modern Prometheus, which had its genesis in the same famous group of writers.  Let me set the scene….

It’s 1816, at the Villa Diodati, on the wind-tossed, thundery, and lightning-struck shores of Lake Geneva.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has accompanied her new husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s step-sister, who is pregnant with Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra) to visit Lord Byron (currently at work on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) and his personal physician John Polidori.  They are isolated by the weather and decide after reading some ghost stories (including William Beckford’s fantastic Oriental tale “Vathek”) to write ghost stories of their own.  When during this time Lord Byron reads aloud from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s scare-fest of a poem “Christabel,” the poet Shelley becomes so frightened and disorganized in his thinking as a result that he needs to rush from the room, and they find him in a near-hysterical state.  They go off separately to write.

Though the Frankenstein tradition (author:  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) is the most famous to come out of this group reading, both Lord Byron and John Polidori elect to write about vampires, with Polidori’s completed story being inspired by Lord Byron’s “Fragment of a Novel,” never completed.   Several important things happen as a result of this collaboration.   First, the vampire, which was merely a form of monster in European and pre-European folklore, something like the werewolf, begins to have human characteristics and traits, and a standard personality.  In his “Introduction,” Polidori attributes the legend to the Arabians and the Greeks originally, possibly a reason that the vampire’s “death” (and subsequent return to life) take place when a young friend, at first perplexed and then appalled by sensing that a former friend is a vampire, and the erstwhile noble friend–or should that be “fiend”?– are travelling in the East.  In both Byron’s unfinished story and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” the seemingly cynical and yet dying nobleman makes the request of his young friend (in Polidori’s case, swears him to keep an oath) that he will not reveal the death for a certain amount of time.  In both stories, this is evidently intended to be a way of allowing the nobleman to come back to life and find a place in society again unimpeded, though that is only implied in Byron’s story and not written out.  In Polidori’s story as opposed to Byron’s, also, the connection of the vampire with night (and even with the moon, more traditionally associated with werewolves) is evident, as the nobleman asks to have his corpse exposed to the rays of the moon.  Both of the literarily famous vampires have strange burial requests, moreover, something that is carried over in the by now hackneyed notion of the vampire’s necessary tie to his coffin.  Even the name of one of the two original vampires owes something to other parts of literary history:  Lady Caroline Lamb, a former lover of Lord Byron’s, wrote the Gothic romance Glenarvon.  In it, she chose to put a Byronic figure named Lord Ruthven.  When Byron’s and Polidori’s stories were published, both were originally attributed to Byron, because not only was the author’s name of Polidori’s manuscript given as “Lord Ruthven,” but even the vampire in the tale was named “Lord Ruthven”!

So much for the background.  Do you know an aristocratic, cynical, not yet old but seemingly eternally young man or woman who frequents high life without seeming to gain much actual pleasure from party-going, though all the women (or men) in his or her life seem to be drawn thitherwards without being able to stop themselves?  Does this person go around at night a lot more than in the day?  In fact, when’s the last time you saw them during the day?  Do the victims of the opposite sex seem to wither away and die, and have strange marks on their necks that no one can account for?  (But they do look like bites, don’t they?  No, you’re being overly imaginative.)

If you’re the young hero, here’s what you’ve of course told yourself when you doubted your friend the nobleman, à la Byron from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:  “Yet must I think less wildly–I have thought/Too long and darkly, till my brain became,/In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,/A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:/And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,/My springs of life were poisoned.  ‘Tis too late!/Yet am I changed; though still enough the same/In strength to bear what time can not abate,/And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate.”

And I think that could the “vampyre” speak from the heart, he would utter another stanza from that long poem, to explain his fall from grace:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me;/I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed/To its idolatries a patient knee–/Nor coined my cheek to smiles–nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd/They could not deem me one of such; I stood/Among them, but not of them; in a shroud/Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could/Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.”  (Standing “among them, but not of them” is in fact exactly how Polidori first paints the picture of his “vampyre,” one who is in an earlier poet’s words both “daungerous” and “digne,” that is “high and mighty” and “overly proud.”)

Finally, the fact that Byron was also working on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” when he experimented with his vampirish “ghost story” is perhaps even indicated by a sort of cross-fertilization of topic and theme here.  For, unlike the proud nobleman, who continues the fatal course of holding himself apart from his fellows in a high-handed way, Byron in the very next stanza continues speaking of his character-narrator’s frame of mind:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me–/But let us part fair foes/ I do believe,/Though I have found them not, that there may be/Words which are things,/hopes which will not deceive,/And virtues which are merciful nor weave/Snares for the failing:  I would also deem/O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;/That two, or one, are almost what they seem–/That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.”  Perhaps having this in mind was what kept Byron himself from turning into a metaphorical “Lord Ruthven,” and certainly he went on in his next long poem “Don Juan” to parody the picture of the proud and distant Byronic hero who slays women’s hearts with a glance (never mind a bite), a sure sign of emotional health:  after all, when have you ever heard of a vampire making fun of himself?  (If Edward does it, be sure it’s only because he’s in his first reincarnation and still has time to get old and bitter–maybe we should look to Anne Rice for that chuckly innovation!)

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