Tag Archives: originality

August 20, 2012 · 7:19 pm

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”–Alexander Pope

There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing.  In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.

In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class.  In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England.  Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.

The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions.  The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of:  for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies.  We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud.  A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses.  But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.

So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems?  Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury.  His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too.  He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him.  And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems:  that is, he sees spirits.  He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest.  Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone.  The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.

Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids:  this last is the so-called “green man.”

The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world.  Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly.  His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination.  His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes.  Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another.  Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).

For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar.  James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man.  And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain.  After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul?  Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?).  This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.

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August 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.”–Menander

In Gertrude Stein:  A Biography of Her Work, the scholar/critic Donald Sutherland says, “Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the most complicated thing….[S]he uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has….one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics.”  This is certainly true of one of her early works, a collection of three stories called Three Lives, which is much more readable than her later more experimental works.  Still, even with this early work, the “repetitions and dislocations” of language would confuse an inexperienced, simple reader who was reading mainly for the story and who was also launching a fledgling attempt to get a sense of the English written language.  This would be true even were the reader going only for the story of the characters’ emotions and nothing else.

Thus it is that though I have routinely read very challenging poetry and prose both, I have no enthusiasm for the works of Gertrude Stein in general, except to view them as experiments, perhaps necessary stages the written English language had to go through (or perhaps “confront” is the correct word) in order to be renovated.  Something similar could be said of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in terms at least of what they have contributed in English translation:  they are amazingly like each other, and seem all to go about language developments in the same way.  Yet they were at the time they were written part of a focus to objectify the narrative voice or experiment with it in a way which was begun but not finished by people like Ernest Hemingway.  Still, Hemingway is readable, whereas often Gertrude Stein is simply difficult, mainly meant for people who like romans à clef, word puzzles, and guessing games.  One way around this difficulty with Stein, if you are determined to read things she has written other than Three Lives, is to look over a copy of editor Renate Stendhal’s biography in captions, short quotes, and pictures entitled Gertrude Stein:  In Words and Pictures, a thick photographic history of Stein’s life which enables the reader to see better the things and people Stein was referring to in her novels and poetry, and to get a better sense of the time in which she lived.  I looked at that, but I also read Three Lives, mainly because it was the one thing of hers I felt I could read well from start to finish.  Here’s what I found and what I feel I can honestly offer about the collection of stories:

The stories are three sobering portraits of three different women’s lives in America in the early 1900’s.  The first woman, who is the main character of “The Good Anna,” Anna Federner, is “of solid lower middle-class german stock” (the lower-case “g” in german is as Stein uses it throughout the book).  The entire story is concerned with incidents relating to Anna’s employers’ lives (she is a sort of housekeeper and a general factotum), her dogs’ lives, and her conflicts with the scheming and lack of generosity she sometimes encounters.  For, she is good to others; it is not just a title, it is her title, this is the source of what she is, some short-sighted errors aside.  She comes to a dismal but quite ordinary end and the story ends simultaneously.

“Melanctha,” the second story, while different from the first story in that it speaks of a young African American woman and her intrigues and relationships with men and with women, ends similarly.  Though more enigmatic in nature and more amoral, just as the prose about her is more enigmatic in its starkly expressed picture, without narrative sympathy or reserve, Melanctha too comes to a bad end, but without having noticeably distinguished herself by unmotivated kindness to others, as the first character, the “good” Anna did.  There is also a certain amount of dated treatment of black people’s issues in the book, for all that it is Gertrude Stein writing, and for all that she was in sympathy herself with the African American struggle for rights in her own time.

In the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” the shortest of the three stories, Lena is described as “patient, gentle, sweet and german.”  She too starts out life as a servant, brought over to the U. S. to serve.  Though her life is called “peaceful” by the narrative voice, her fellow nursemaids tease her, apparently because she is not intelligent or quick-witted and will believe anything they tell her.  Her basic incomprehension of what is going on around her is shown quite clearly in Stein’s recording style:  it isn’t a language barrier problem, because it persists even when she is with other German people.  For example, we are told that Lena did not enjoy her life in Germany, but that she herself is unaware of this.  Stein quite simply tells us why, with no preamble or laborious psychologizing to indicate special insight (and this is true though Stein herself was a gifted student of the American psychologist William James before she went to live in France).  Lena’s life only slightly improves materially when she gets married and has her husband’s three children, and it improves not at all emotionally, for after going into what used to be termed “a decline,” she too dies, with no moral to the story, in true Steinian fashion.

What can be said about these three lives?  First of all, that they are simply that:  three lives, varied in some specifics, but each of them ending where we all end.  Yet, they do so without the least fanfare or blare of symbolism, imagery, or obvious rhetoric.  And that they are no better, or happier, or more rewarded with heroic status is the point I believe we are meant to take away.  Since they are all three women, this can possibly be interpreted to be a feminist moral if one is so inclined, yet Stein doesn’t assign any moral at all.  The final point is perhaps that there are so many unremarkable lives, which so many of us live, and that we are lucky even to be as well-remembered as these characters are, either by the other “characters” in our lives or by writers like Stein.

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August 17, 2012 · 2:26 pm

“An evil mind is a constant solace.”–Unknown

Have you ever watched an anti-hero, whom you know to be an anti-hero if not an outright villain, get away with murder in a novel, and find yourself hoping that he will continue to do so for the pure (or not so pure) comic pleasure it gives you to see him go from incident to incident, triumphant but flawed?  And of course, because he is so flawed you can laugh at him freely, and not invest real sympathy in his travails the way you would for a noble hero or heroine.  In this case, the reader himself or herself becomes a receptacle of a certain sort of selfishness in allowing such sympathy to exist:  that is, while you don’t give the character any true respect or empathy, you can still enjoy the course of his actions and, if and when he meets his inevitable nemesis, have nothing to mourn for except perhaps in having to stop following an enjoyable read.  It is in this sense alone that the reader imitates sympathetically the character Michael Beard’s “evil mind,” a “constant solace” to Beard and one unknown to the other characters, whose misunderstandings of his actions are all fairly humorous.

Michael Beard is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 book Solar, and a literal murder is exactly what it looks like he will get away with, though his tribulations mount up in a very funny way as if he is being punished by fate.  Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist past his prime, is making a living through public speaking engagements, through a remote sort of participation in some corporations as an advisor, and lackadaisically through working along with a government project on global warming.  On the home front, Beard has freed himself time after time from his entanglements with women, until he one day wakes up to the fact that his latest wife has in fact turned the tables on him in this regard.  With murder in his heart Beard approaches the situation, only to be relieved of responsibility through a bizarre accident, for which the wrong man is later blamed and arrested.

It would appear through most of the novel that Beard has what is known as “the devil’s own luck”; all he has to do is resent someone or something, and bad things happen, but not to him.  And to counterpoint his involvement with the “dark side,” Beard has the satirical version of “the mark of the beast” on him, a melanoma on his hand that, were he sincerely concerned with solar problems and global warming and its after-effects, would have been dealt with safely.  Yet, he is also a figure of fun, just as the devil(s) in medieval morality plays often were:  for example, when Beard participates in a polar expedition to view a glacier, he makes a hilarious mistake.  Badly needing to pee while he is out on the iceberg on a snowmobile, Beard makes his typical error of being badly adjusted to his circumstances on earth by peeing in a sub-zero temperature, with comically disastrous results.  For as the saying goes among men, “it’s cold enough to freeze your pecker off.”

A more serious challenge to the comic devil known as Beard is the fact that he takes little care of his health in general and is obviously living on borrowed time, not only because of the events due to his bad actions, which are snowballing behind him, but due also to a mounting stress and heart condition resulting from the fact that he is monumentally selfish, even to himself.

The one love of Beard’s life is his little daughter, Catriona, who stands alone as a challenge to all that Beard is and has done wrongly.  Will Beard free himself from a life-long habit of cynicism and casual indifference to the rights of others, or will he get his just deserts just when he is close to redemption?  To some extent, the reader must figure this out.  One thing is certain:  Solar is a wonderful satirical masterpiece, and Beard is the traditional “satyr” at its center.

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August 15, 2012 · 9:10 pm

“….I look upon all men as my compatriots…making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.”-Michel de Montaigne

From the cave paintings of hunting scenes in French caves to hieroglyphs of planting and sacred rituals to tribal dances that tell stories, even to modern day poetry slams and support groups, human beings have always told stories about how we came to be or how we come to be who we are, or where we still plan to go.  One of the most essentially human things a person can do is to shape a narrative about an event or feeling and share it with other people.  It is therefore an especially touching tale that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has come up with in her 2009 novel One Amazing Thing, in which there are stories within the main frame story, stories which people not congregated around the age-old campfire or stove but trapped in a U. S. city passport office tell each other.  They do this not just in order to pass the time, but also to align themselves with each other as survivors, and to attempt to rejoin the human tribe from which they are separated, they hope only temporarily.

Uma Sinha is a graduate student studying Medieval Literature; Malathi is an administrative clerk in the passport office where the group is isolated by an earthquake sealing off the building section they are in.  V. K. S. Mangalam is her boss, an unhappily married man to and by whom she is alternately attracted and angered.  An older Chinese woman and her teenage granddaughter are also there, the grandmother trapped behind the barrier of language which she must rely on her granddaughter to translate (or at least so they think).  There’s also a mature Caucasian couple who are passing through the throes of an indifferent marital relationship; a young Indian Muslim man who to Uma seems to be “from one of the mountain tribes,” and a young African American man who has experience in the armed forces.

Uma’s voice is the main interpretative voice at first; then the story is seen as it progresses from several of the other characters’ perspectives, as they try to settle and soothe their wounds, get into conflicts over minor episodes between them, and finally give way to Uma’s suggestion.  For, Uma suggests that they tell stories to each other, each telling about “one amazing thing” in their lives, in order to keep the time they share humane and ethical.  They are all surprised when the first person amongst them to agree is the Chinese grandmother, Jiang.  Cameron, the young African American, is meanwhile the tribal leader for the “tribe” of story-tellers made up of people from all different nations.  He sets in motion the search for a safe way out, for adequate and clean water and sanitary facilities, and for a first aid kit.  He also uses his experience in disasters to monitor the risky behavior of some of the others (for example, of Mr. Pritchett, who must have a smoke in this dangerously inflammatory setting), and helps keep them as calm as possible while they wait for rescue.

One pragmatically valuable thing that happens later on in the story is that Uma’s idea of story-telling brings the group together closely enough in their shared values that they become also more generous with their hidden and hoarded foodstuffs.  Whereas before there had only been a small number of items to be shared out placed on the counter for food, suddenly previously unseen items begin to appear, and are shared out as well.  Their time is becoming shorter, however, and is threatened by at least two things:  Cameron, their “leader,” who has asthma, is running out of time on his inhaler; and water is climbing up in the room, leaking in from damaged pipes somewhere else in the building.  And some of their stories have been painful in the telling:  as Uma thinks to herself “on behalf” of one of them, “Hell is other people,” (the quote I cited a day or two ago from Jean-Paul Sartre).  Then they experience aftershocks, then more water–and not being a “spoiler” at least in this article, I leave you to find out not only the rest, but the key to the rest:  all the stories they have told together which have led them to their mutual conclusion.

The frame story here is only that, a frame story, like that of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales (the latter book of which Uma has with her at the beginning, which we may feel gave her the original inspiration for her story-telling idea).  For, these characters too, though not on a literal journey or at a wayside inn like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s collection of verse tales, are on a journey, a journey into each of themselves and sometimes through traumatic “moments of truth” or self-confrontation.  As a group, they learn from each other, and as individuals, they manuever themselves in other directions from those of the past.  Their challenges are not entirely internal, because they are fearful of the building’s collapse; rather the collapse of the building symbolizes the falling apart of old identities and the new ones rising from the dust of the city.  I hope you will read this book and appreciate how new and old are woven together in these tales from different cultures and age groups, and will agree with me that they make a very tender and feeling picture of what is known as “the human condition.”

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August 6, 2012 · 2:13 pm

“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”–Lena Horne

The French author Muriel Barbery’s highly acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (translated into English in 2008 by Alison Anderson) is a book for and about self-directed readers and smart people, particularly frustrated ones. In it, a hôtel building’s concierge, Renée Michel, unprepossessing physically and getting on in years, hides behind the concierge stereotype.  After all, this is all that is expected or wanted of her by the vast majority of the building’s inhabitants.  But behind her mask, she is a self-taught intellectual (an autodidact, to use the correct term) who reads and/or comprehends everything from philosophy to fine music and art, with a generous smattering of topics her employers are themselves too ignorant and worldly truly to understand.  The book goes a long way to prove that wealth is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, nor is intelligence an index to personal income and status.

The second heroine of the book is a pre-teen named Paloma Joss, who is also very gifted, and who understands too much to feel comfortable with her family’s privileged lifestyle.  Paloma lives in the hôtel, but isn’t planning to continue that way for long:  she contemplates setting things on fire, but then confusedly though valiantly decides to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.  She keeps a journal of “Profound Thoughts,” and some of them truly are profound.

The status quo and equilibrium of the building’s social system are disturbed, however, when a wealthy but unusually modest Japanese gentleman moves in.  For he sees through Renée’s cover almost at once, perceiving her as a kindred soul (he is not only wealthy but is also intelligent, educated, and genuinely well-bred).  He is clearly determined not to allow the concierge to continue to hide out behind her mask of dullness.  She and he and Paloma become acquaintances and then friends, all three of them joining to defy the class and age barriers that would keep them apart.

I won’t reveal the startling and moving ending except to quote Renée:  “The paths of God are all too explicit for those who pride themselves on their ability to decipher them….”  Paloma’s voice ends the novel, which is only fitting, especially since she is thought of by the concierge as “the daughter I never had,” and is at the ending a voice of hope.  She is thus a member of one of those human families we all make for ourselves, sometimes consisting partly of actual relations, sometimes not.  Amongst them, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (their new friend) have sketched out the parameters that bound what people, rich or poor, can aspire to achieve–the territory is boundless.

This book, lest you think it a solemn, preachy text, is constructed of many comic moments, both when sketching out characters through their dialogue, and in the actual events that happen to people when they least expect it.  One of my favorite moments occurs when Renée is shyly visiting Ozu, and makes a trip to his bathroom, only to find that his toilet plays music at top volume when flushed.

Barbery has in this book successfully mingled the nobler aspects of the human race with the humorous and the painful to show that everywhere a human being is, so there is a potential fellow just hiding and waiting to be found by an appreciator.  May we all keep this in mind as we meet other people, and may we hope to find in them something we can relate to, however sad, funny, ironic, or small.

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August 4, 2012 · 3:47 pm

“You will see something new./Two things. And I call them/Thing One and Thing Two.”–Dr. Seuss

Hello again, friends and readers.  And about Thing One and Thing Two….

Here’s Thing One–Since I first began blogging on July 4 (no significance intended; I wasn’t in revolution against anything in particular), I’ve been turning out slightly over a post a day if you average it all out.  My mind is aswim, of course, with all the good books and essays that still remain to be written upon.  Still, my thinking processes are also bogged down with what to say, as I ask myself how I remember the writing best from when I first encountered it, and try to compare that with how I feel now about the same material.  For, I think we have relationships with books the same way we do with people, or almost.  Just to support that contention, perhaps weakly, what about that friend or relative who’s been divorced from someone for 15 years or so, and yet who can still only dish about that one relationship, as if nothing else matters?  That relationship and divorce is clearly the “novel of life” they’re hooked on.  And whether we want to hear it or not, they go over it and over it and over it, still looking for clues as to what makes the other person tick.  There are books too which don’t give up their secrets easily, and which continue  to tantalize:  they’re just a lot more fun than a worn-out relationship, though I suppose we have to hope we can all learn both from books and from life, eventually.

So–and here’s Thing Two–since I’ve been writing and have written a little more than a blog a day (only about 4 of my topics previous to this one are non-literary), I feel that today I need a break from literature, to look around me, to (above all!) read and review more books.  Thus, without much–or at least extended–apology, I’m going to take today off, while I read some more of Daniel Heath Justice’s gripping fantasy novel trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  Though it may be a while before I will be able to do a review of this hefty read (and already, just 3 chapters in, I can tell that it’s one of those books you can’t help but read in large chunks because you just can’t set it aside), I hope to share it with you before October sometime.  Better yet, get a copy and read along:  the trilogy is available in its revised edition as a single volume from Amazon.com.  I promise, you won’t be disappointed.  It may be available on Kindle as well (I don’t currently have a Kindle), and I read on Google that it is available online.  Daniel Heath Justice is originally from Colorado, but is now a Canadian citizen and is a member of the Cherokee Nation.  Most recently, he has taught Aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto, and is going on to the University of British Columbia.  To follow his insights about Aboriginal literature and such modern related movie topics as “Avatar,” just  Google his name–there’s plenty there to keep an avid reader busy.

And this is my blog for today.  Keep reading, and please pass along any comments, questions, or recommendations for reading that you would like to share.  I hope to have another post up tomorrow or Monday (today’s Saturday in my part of the world).

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August 3, 2012 · 3:53 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 2, 2012 · 4:06 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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July 23, 2012 · 8:09 pm

Of a gripping medical science novel for laypeople (too), and of multi-talented individuals.

Recently, a dear new friend raved to me about a book called Cutting for Stone, by author Abraham Verghese; as with every book that receives very enthusiastic reviews from someone, I wondered if I had time to read yet another (longish) book, in the middle of what has turned out to be a very busy summer for me.  I cannot tell you how glad I am that I decided to follow my friend’s recommendation and read this one.  It has taken some time for me to cover it, but it wasn’t because of any inaccessible quality in the book; rather, it was a matter of having less time to expend.  I worked it in at every possible time, and unlike what often happens with books when you are forced to put them down and resume reading at a later day, I found that I did not lose track of where I’d been:  the events were that gripping.

There’s something for everyone here, all in one book.  It’s perhaps first and foremost a family drama, a saga of betrayal, anger, forgiveness, and sacrifice.  In this book, faith and science are not opposed, but operate together as the individual characters follow their destinies and achieve both professional and spiritual wholeness.  Though the story is set in another part of the world from the U. S. through much of the novel and begins back in time a number of years, it would be a mistake to assume (as Americans sometimes regrettably do) that the awareness of feminist issues is missing:  the author, both in the spirit of the novel and in the mechanics of writing has fully and richly merited the attention the book has received, as an exemplar of tolerance and societal love.

The story is a story of conjoined twins and their biological and adoptive parents, as well as the society(ies) in which they function and the happenings in those places.  For much of this fictional work, the historical and cultural backgrounds are Ethiopia, India, and Eritrea, with the latter part of the work comprising the characters’ presence in the U. S., tracing the natural comparisons made among the different areas, and showing what befalls the characters by force of their exposure to societal factors like revolutions and breakthroughs in medical science.  These issues are not dryly presented, however, but are interwoven closely with the characters’ lives and emotions, giving the changes in society an urgency which gracefully and passionately recommends itself for the readers’ attention.  As the author notes in his acknowledgments page at the end of the book, he has slightly revised the historical events by a few years to place his story within its fictional time frame, but I doubt that even a specialist in any of the myriad intellectual fields covered so easily and smoothly would feel this to be a jarring note.  The acknowledgement pages are even interesting to read, for they not only show the wide variety of sources the versatile Verghese has consulted and his generosity in attributions of help (which speak to his humanity very convincingly too), but they also provide useful resources for those wishing to follow up the fictional events non-fictionally, or for those who are interested, additionally or conversely, in literary ancestors of parts of this wonderful book.  One of the most critical and interesting thematic threads, which is here at once intellectual, literary and factual is the repeated use of the expression “cutting for stone,” which recurs a number of times in the book in various usages.  One has to follow this particular riddle to the very end to realize just how complex even such a simple bit of language can be in the hands of a true master of story-telling.

Which brings me to another issue.  How many times in your life have you envied those multi-talented individuals who master more than one vocation or profession easily and neatly, or who (like Abraham Verghese) can find an intellectual place in their lives even for a combination of the things they do?  For Verghese is a doctor himself, employed at Stanford School of Medicine where he has achieved outstanding status among his peers, and he is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  There have been other people something like him:  to name just two, there was William Carlos Williams, another doctor and a famous poet; or, Wallace Stevens, again a world-renowned poet and an insurance agent when he wasn’t writing poetry.  Where do these polymaths find the time, the energy, the talent?  For this, it’s necessary to read biographies, and even then often their life stories leave us a bit mystified.

I can tell you this, though:  you will not have read a better and more moving book in more than a decade than Abraham Verghese’s book.  And he has written others, at least two by now!  Are you worried or anxious that the book will be too technical for you?  Don’t be.  There are a few long medical terms thrown in, but as opposed to the sort of doctor none of us likes to find in our home court, Verghese does a very good, humane job of sketching out quick and understandable explanations for the terms concerning their significance to the story.  If you were a reader of the Encyclopedia Brown books when you were a child (and you may have noticed in the news that the author, Donald Sobol, sadly passed away a few days ago at the age of 87), in which that human compendium of facts the Brown kid solved mysteries because of all the facts and details he’d been able to master, then you certainly have a leg up in scientific terms, even though Verghese’s book is far more serious and emotive than those early childhood delights.  Or, if as a teen or an adult you had a look at Berton Roueche’s collections of medical mystery stories, then you will be well-supplied with an automatic enthusiasm for the explanations that occur in Cutting for Stone.  Neither of these preparations is essential, however, for reading one of the very best of the best novels to come out in recent years; I’m only sorry that I didn’t hear about it sooner.

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