Tag Archives: quality

August 2, 2012 · 4:06 pm

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

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

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  Why do we still believe in the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been increasingly withdrawn from circulation?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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , ,

July 24, 2012 · 6:23 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Filed under What is literature for?

Tagged as ,

July 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

July 22, 2012 · 9:24 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , ,

July 22, 2012 · 1:35 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

July 21, 2012 · 1:58 pm

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”–Henry David Thoreau

Have you read the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford’s books The Sportswriter, Independence Day, or Women with Men (Three Stories)?  I haven’t.  And it’s a shortcoming I intend to rectify as soon as I can.  Sounds lame, doesn’t it, to start an article with what I haven’t read, and a promise to do better next time?  But perhaps you’d feel inclined to bear with me if I tell you that my sudden determination to read this fine writer comes from the encounter with my reading self (for that’s what this reading experience is, an encounter with the parts of oneself that read as much as with the text).  And the book he has written which calls into account my reading self is his new book, Canada (2012).

Though the book has this simple title, a good part of it is about the life and development (suddenly broken into by the crime of his parents) of an American boy, Dell Parsons, who lives in Great Falls, Montana in the Upper Northwestern United States.  The title may lead you to expect a sort of travelogue adventure, but unless you are prepared for the parallel trip through an interior space of mind, heart, and soul as it is taken by a teenage boy, then your expectations count for nought.  Dell’s growing up is a transmutation of materials in the human psyche basically reserved for gentle, slow changes, but in him they are propelled into a violent growth of his awareness of adults and of people in general.  Since he has lived the earlier years of his life secluded within his nuclear family (two parents, two children), travelling from army base to army base for his father’s job and making no friends, Dell is as close as can be imagined to a societal tabula rasa or “blank slate,” upon which something is to be written.  And his parents’ robbing of a bank and the later interaction with a mysterious Canadian who takes care of him when his parents go to jail jolt Dell into various interactions with the small number of people around him (and a few strangers); Dell learns some life lessons from these confrontations, and articulates them in the strangely adult voice of a young man who has been forced to grow up sooner than he is comfortable with, longing as he does for a regular school to go to, friends to play chess with, normal social interactions.  Even his twin sister, Berner, does not provide him with the closeness we feel him so desperately needing.

One of the most shocking things about the story is the very ordinariness of the characters.  Dell’s average parents decide to rob a bank to settle a debt threatening his father and the family, and threatening them not with foreclosure or shortage of supplies but with death if they don’t comply.  Dell tries to account for this strange action of his parents by attempting to figure out how they must’ve been other than the people he always imagined them to be, in fact to align them in his mind more satisfactorily with what becomes their new “fate.”  For that’s what one of the subjects of the book is, and not in any high-flown literary sense, but in a perfectly ordinary everyday sense:  what fate can be said to be when one didn’t see or feel it coming, even intuitively.

Over time, as Dell ponders and then puts out of his mind this original life-changing event, he learns to adjust his thinking to accomodate his parents’ change.  By then, he is up in Canada, having been whisked to safety from out of the hands of the U. S. juvenile authorities by a friend of his mother’s, who sends him to be taken care of by her own brother, Arthur Remlinger, the naturalized Canadian (originally from the U. S.) who gives him a job and largely ignores him until his own twisted plans for the boy mature.  Dell is precipitated into further strange events by Remlinger’s actions, and these events are the source of much of the life philosophy articulated in the voice of the older Dell near the end of the book, which he tries to pass onto his students without revealing the events in his own life which have led to this philosophy.  In an unusual gambit for someone addicted to reading and chess, Dell finally decides that there are few hidden meanings in life, that what is real is what one experiences outright.  This is what forces the reader into a conflict with his/her reading self:  the subject is not just how we read literature, but how we read life.  As a corollary of this theory of obviousness, Dell articulates what has by the end become one of the main themes of the book:  “Remlinger had told the truth when he said I would learn something valuable.  I learned that things made only of words and thoughts can become physical acts.”

In the lit. biz., these sorts of “words and thoughts” are known as “performative words” by some (like marriage vows), as “speech acts” by others.  But Dell’s “words and thoughts,” those foisted upon him by other people intent upon their own lives and seeing him only as a child to be discounted or used as the case commands, are more direct than marriage vows in that Dell is forced to take part in their fulfillment when he wasn’t party to their making.

I hope I haven’t made this book sound terribly dry with my own philosophizing and interpretation, for it is anything but dry.  It is 420 pages long in hardback, but I was able to read it in one week by setting aside about 1 1/2 hours a day for it, usually in the evening, or even breaking up the time over the course of a day.  It “reads” very fast.  None of the topics I’ve discussed here appear in the book overtly in the sense that the language is kept to the simple language that might be expected to be understood by an articulate if naive teenager; the understanding, it gradually becomes obvious, is that of the perspective of an older man.  Some of the time, there is comparison of how things have changed societally and politically in the U. S. and Canada since 1960 or so, how the mundane lives of the characters have been impacted by national events.  But this doesn’t become preachy or obscure, only matter-of-fact.  As well, Dell (and later on, Dell and other characters) discuss and debate how much and whether the U. S. and Canada are different, and this topic is one which is left to be judged by the reader (Ford produces the usual mention of his research books on the topic at the end of the book).

So, if you’re looking for more than just that ephemeral summer beach read, and want a book which will provide you with material to think about in the privacy of your own reading self (or in company discussion with your friends, the choice is yours), give this one a whirl.  I can almost promise you that you won’t be disappointed, unless you are very hard to please indeed.

2 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

July 11, 2012 · 10:27 pm

“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.”–Samuel Johnson

And so, how does one go about writing a good (and of course original!) novel?  The very word itself comes from a word meaning “a new thing,” related to the adjective we use when we say, “He has a novel approach to life” (this is a nice pun, of course, if we mean that he lives his life like a literary character!).

Still, after all, the novel’s sources come from earlier kinds of fiction anyway, such as medieval and early modern romances.  Some of the first romances of this sort were written in times when prose could only sometimes vie with poetic forms, and they appeared in the Romance languages of Southern France.  There was also Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which shared some of the same story elements.  From about 1532-1564, François Rabelais wrote his 5 books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in the 5th book of which the borrowings from other literature are so pronounced that some scholars have questioned whether or not the work was all his own (it was published posthumously).  Picaresque novels, in which a picaro, or lovable rogue/anti-hero, goes through a series of adventures that sometimes led to a conclusion of sorts and sometimes did not, became popular.  Don Quixote (1604-1614), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, was one picaresque novel with a difference, that difference being that the hero held impossibly high moral and spiritual values, thus parodying the usual picaro himself from a higher level, though it is still a comic masterpiece:  he is set off by his foil, his manservant Sancho Panza, who is a comic character on a lower social level.  Nevertheless, part of the main comic thrust of the novel is the way in which earlier literature has had an influence on the knight Don Quixote, through his readings of knightly romances.  Beginning to get the feeling that everything leads to something else, and everything already has sources written before it?   In 1727, the first edition of Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels appeared, followed soon after by Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela in 1741, a novel written as an series of letters in which a servant girl named Pamela details the lascivious conduct of an employer who is trying to “steal her virtue.”  If the man had only known how many followers he was to have with this plot line!  Not to be outdone, Henry Fielding wrote a travesty of the book the same year called Shamela, and followed it a year later with a novel called Joseph Andrews, purporting to be about the same situation reversed, in which Pamela’s brother Joseph is fighting off all and sundry to preserve his “virtue.”  Fielding chose to call it a “comic epic poem in prose,” having declared not entirely correctly that such a form had never been attempted before.  Perhaps he was prescient, though, in guessing that others than the historians would be evaluating him, or perhaps was being tongue-in-cheek about the likely criticism of the form (until about 1780, it was most usual for only historians to be critics).  Daniel Defoe was also prominent, with his adventure Robinson Crusoe and his tale of the loose woman Moll Flanders.  Lawrence Sterne’s quizzical novel about novel writing (Tristram Shandy) is a comic masterpiece which came along between 1759-1767.  A later picaresque novel was its close contemporary:  that book is Tobias Smollett’s book Humphrey Clinker.  Finally, with the upsurge of novels being written beginning in the Romantic period, the novel as we know it in all its lavish variety began to be evident (wikipedia notes that it was in the late 18th century that the term “novella” contributed the new term, “novel,” to the language.–Anyone wishing further easy access to these topics should consult Ian Watt’s book The Rise of the Novel:  Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, which was published back in 1957 but is still considered authoritative.  Or, if you want a more general summation, check out the wikipedia entry listed simply as “the novel.”  It has the facts basically straight and is full of information.).  During the Romantic period, “all hell broke loose,” so to speak.  There had been many comic novels before this date, parodies, picaresques, travesties, self-conscious travelogues.  Now, the novel deserted some of the “realistic debunking genres” (Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms) and headed for the heights of Gothic improbability (it’s likely, though, that in a similar way to Samuel Richardson, the Romantic Gothic writers were modestly unaware of a following which would cause new Gothics to be created even into the 21st century, still following some of the same formulae).  The Victorian era is the era which some people feel to be the true heyday of the realistic novel in a perhaps more sober-sided fashion than its other realistic predecessors, though such writers as Charles Dickens and his collection of eccentric characters added much to our comic heritage.

So, you ask, what does all this rehearsal of literary history amount to?  Well, to return to my title–how can one write something which is both good and original, after so much ink has already been spilt?  So many earlier writers felt both a need and an obligation to imitate still earlier authors, and there are times when this is appropriate without being unoriginal; for example, when one is imitating the genre specifications of a romance or a Gothic, or a mystery.  What about that Biblical injunction that “there is nothing new under the sun”?  And what about the obsession of these our later days, keeping things “original?”  It’s a relatively new concept, as one realizes when reading older authors.  It’s even begun to date as a concept with the full-blown arrival of the Internet, where people repeat and tweet and Facebook each others’ remarks sometimes without proper attribution or understanding of the issues involved for the person concerned.  We are all in such a hurry, how do we remain original in our work, and yet good?

Some writers have chosen to be write heavily autobiographical “fiction,” secure in the notion that we all lead such different lives (or so we think) that it’s possible to join the queue of original writers that way.  But how many times have you read an author of this kind, who publicly avows that his/her work is made up of his/her life in large part, and still felt that it was speaking to you particularly, of your own life?  I’ve had it happen to me very frequently, even when the physical settings of the novels involved had nothing to do with my daily grind per se.  Other writings are so contorted by improbability that they quite obviously have thrown their hat in the “original” category simply because it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to relate to them personally; and this doesn’t always have to do with a lack of literary quality, since such works sometimes provide an intriguing mental puzzle as you try to work out just what holds you about them.

So the question becomes:  what holds us spellbound about the works we like best and also respect as good writing?  I mean, I like potato chips too, but I know they’re not as “good” for me as vegetables and protein; in the same way, I know that I’ve read lots of cheap pulp fiction without a thought passing from one side of my head to the other, but I know it’s not a “healthy and profitable” reading experience.  This doesn’t mean that cheap pulp fiction doesn’t have its place, but that I have acknowledged I need something more sustaining to get me through my life and take the place of valued literary experiences.  And I like to do my best to provide at least some degree of nourishment for the spirit in my own writings, though the novels themselves are different forms of the comic urge, at least so far (as opposed to some of the short stories I hope to complete and my poetry, largely non-comic).  So, I’d like to lay claim for now to following “originally” at least some of the models I’ve mentioned today in my blog, since many of them are comic; the quality is something I leave you as my readers to judge.  What about you?  What are your models and methods?

Leave a comment

Filed under What is literature for?

Tagged as , , ,