Cosmopoetica

Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is structurally interesting— consider Little Chandler and Gallaher as parallel to Corley and Lenehan—and were I back in school writing post-structuralist criticism of the kind understandable only to a small inner-circle of other students of post-structuralist criticism, I could write a good 20 pages on the title alone.

I suspect most readers will find Little Chandler more than a little pathetic. I do too… in part. Chandler’s full of excuses for his failure to follow his ambitions. In the course of the story we can see his own rationalizations for that failure evolve as he tries to temper his jealousy of, and admiration for, Gallaher.

But where this story resonated with me was how much of myself I saw in the character of Little Chandler. I’ve wondered and doubted my poetic aspirations in ways very similar to Chandler:

He wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope.

[...]

There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.

I had children when I was young. It’s not an excuse for my lack of accomplishment, but it is a very relevant part of the context of my own failures. I could wholly identify with the “burden” of obligations entailed by family and children. When Chandler reaches the peak of frustration, I thought to myself “I’ve been there.”

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger

To my enduring shame, I’ve lashed out at my own children in just this way. But I’ve tried to do different. I’ve tried to do better.

Chandler’s internal monologue caused me to think of one of my favorite essays, “Fires” by Ray Carver, where we can see (in retrospect) the existence of a different path, a path that Chandler might still be able to walk. A path that might redeem his pathos. In the essay Carver tells the story of trying to do laundry at a laundromat with his children. He’s waiting and waiting for a dryer to become available, he’s already late, and when one finally does a woman swoops in and takes it. Carver goes on:

…I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing—and brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere as close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.

I’m talking about real influence now. I’m talking about the moon and the tide. But like that it came to me. Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open. Up to that point in my life I’d gone along thinking, what exactly, I don’t know, but that things would work out somehow—that everything in my life I’d hoped for or wanted to do, was possible. But at that moment, in the laundromat, I realized that this simply was not true. I realized—what had I been thinking before?—that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through. At that moment I felt—I knew—that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired.

The difference between a Chandler and a Carver comes finally in what they do with the voice(s) in their head telling them what they cannot do and what they cannot be. I don’t think Chandler is irredeemable. I sense that he has, obscured by frustration and envy and weariness, the heart of an artist, not just the pretention of being one. When Chandler thinks about his books of poetry, he does so in a way that shows a real love of poetry… and some understanding of one of the most intimate acts possible between two people, directly sharing a work of art one loves:

He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

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They call Mrs. Mooney, rather ambiguously, “The Madam.” A term of respect for making something of her shambolic circumstances, but also a none-too-subtle allusion to the fact that she is essentially prostituting her daughter. Polly wants a new life through marriage but is likely actively choosing the same kind of stultifying, empty existence that Eveline chooses through inaction. Unless she is as vapid as Joyce hints at toward the end of story, whether naturally or through being the subject of her mother’s manipulation for so long that she just doesn’t know how to think for herself.

The kind of love at the heart of “Araby” is nowhere in evidence here. Mr. Doran doesn’t seem a bad person, just one who can’t rationalize an enduring affection for Polly, for whom even his physical desire is already waning.

What a bleak picture Joyce has so far painted of relationships of every kind…

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“Two Gallants” didn’t do much for me… feels like a series of symbols in search of a story. So here’s a metrically challenged limerick (seemed like the appropriate form) in honor of the “The Two Gallants” and the two gallants:

In Dublin there wandered two gents
Who’d do anything for a few cents.
With the heat of their loins
They procured a few coins…
Let the symbolic readings commence

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There are a few things that strike me about this story, but I’m going to talk about just two.

First, the punny title. Yes, there’s a race. But isn’t Joyce also commenting on the Irish people and how they always seem to come in last?

Second, money, money, money… and all that comes from having, or more importantly not having, it. The myopia when it comes to your own potential. The constant tension of possible humiliation in the simplest transactions. The envy. The risks that come with the simplest activities that no one else sees.

I’m reminded of the scene in the generally horrible movie The Pursuit of Happyness when the rich CEO, in a hurry and without any cash on his person, asks the main character to borrow $5. To the CEO it’s a simple courtesy. To the person he’s borrowing from it’s his last $5. And more than that, the lender giving up the $5 knows it’s such a trivial sum to the CEO that he’ll likely never think to actually pay it back. So not only does he lose the $5 he desperately needs, but faces the humiliation of having to ask for repayment.

I’m reminded of an editorial I once read (I’m composing this offline so can’t find a link, but Google should reveal all) that was composed entirely in the form of a litany in the form of “being poor is” statements. Things like:

Being poor is hoping your toothache just goes away

Being poor is making excuses to go to the bathroom so your friends won’t hear you ask for the free lunch… or might not notice you aren’t eating at all

Being poor is being angry at your kids when they ask for all the things they see on TV

Being poor is having sheets for curtains

I can add one: being poor is feeling that moment of panic every time you go to the parking lot and for a moment don’t remember where you parked your car… because you know what it’s like to have your car repossessed and even many years later and for no rational reason you fear it’s happened again every single time.

The strain of living with the fear and constantly wearing a disguise lights a fire in some people, spurring them to greater achievement (the romantic and cinematic view), but it breaks most.

This is Jimmy’s existence. Living a life of pretense. Literally gambling away everything he had saved to make even a feeble attempt to break through the barriers of class and poverty… to the very group he wants so desperately to be part of.

At the end of the story: daybreak! But one whose light will reveal, once again and harshly, very different lives for the (foreign) well-to-do and poor, Irish Jimmy.

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A “creature” “burning with anguish and anger.” Wearing a straitjacket. “Passive, like a helpless animal.” Paralysis.

Eveline looks to God for an answer to what shouldn’t be any kind of dilemma but finds none. No surprise, this being Joyce. In fact, religious faith, often characterized by those who possess it as a distinction that elevates man as more than beast, has quite the opposite effect on Eveline:

“She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

Faith is the ultimate lever-and-pellet system: be faithful and receive the ultimate reward. Eventually. Eveline’s frantic pressing of the lever provides nothing except, perhaps, the hope that she’ll go to that reward someday.

Eveline is disappearing. She’s buried herself. Even when she’s trying to make this once-in-a-lifetime decision she wonders if she can turn back “despite all that Frank’s done for her.” Eveline doesn’t frame the question as one of what she can or should do for herself because she exists increasingly only in the eyes of others and in the work she does for them.

We possess an endless ability to rationalize decisions like Eveline’s. We stay together for the sake of the children. We bury ourselves in smothering relationships because we “made a commitment,” regardless of changes in context and ourselves. We accept financial stability over emotional health and rationalize the sacrifice of ourselves and our potential as a kind of mundane martyrdom. We make decisions in service of the fictions that are our lives, telling our story, which should be the most important story we make, as if it belongs to someone else, as if we are bit players. Until we disappear, ghosts haunting our own ongoing lives. Wraiths.

I don’t know how many opportunities like Eveline’s we get. More often we are left the even harder work of creating such opportunities for ourselves… if we dare. How many times have we passed on these opportunities, perhaps in less dramatic fashion (that’s part of Joyce’s genius, bringing forth the drama of the interior of the mind making this kind choice), perhaps less obvious even to ourselves?

Eveline. The diminutive of Eve. The evil she is tempted by is one of self-erasure and rationalization. Enabling her abusive father and passing the same traits on to her children. Stunted fruit from a withered tree.

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I’ve had The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my shelf since it was first released (a spontaneous purchase courtesy of a significant sale price and a prominent floor display). I’d tried to get into it at least three times before, but always stalled early and moved onto different things.

I only got around to finishing it because I listed “International Mystery” as a category in my 10*10*10 Reading project… proof the reading project works because it really is a pretty good read that I may never have otherwise experienced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a kind of open-air, closed-room, cold-case murder mystery involving a girl who goes missing from a small island while the only road in is blocked by an impassable traffic accident. After forty years of obsessive investigation into the case the girl’s grandfather and scion of one of the last of the family owned national companies in the country hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced financial journalist, ostensibly to write a family history about his complicated, bickering, conniving family but secretly to look into his granddaughter’s disappearance. Mikael comes to be assisted by Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social, punk-inspired hacker who possibly suffers from Asperger Syndrome—the girl with the dragon tattoo—who was first hired to investigate him.

Stieg Larsson, a journalist himself, was clearly comfortable with technology, leading to an odd dichotomy in the book: it’s a rare case of fiction that actually (and accurately) uses specific names of technology and software (including links to web sites in a few cases), but the technical wizardry displayed by Salander goes beyond the unbelievable and into the realm of the impossible. Being decidedly unfamiliar with Swedish politics, I can’t tell if Larsson’s characterization of them is similarly stretched. It’s certainly believable that the country’s financial system is as warped and corrupt as Larsson makes it out to be, but unlike the technical fantasies, I have no way of knowing. In life, Larsson was a well-known left-wing activist. Take from that what you will.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining. It strikes me as a product of its time, with a lineage that owes as much to television, movies and the Internet as it does the mystery fiction that Mikael Blomkvist reads and refers to throughout. It’s not, as a whole, particularly realistic, existing instead in the space of the cinematically unreal, where real pieces and parts are combined to create something no one would mistake for our reality. I’m not saying this to knock the book—I don’t demand true realism from mystery fiction—just to try to place it into context.

Though I still don’t quite have all the family connections and relationships figured out (even with the help of the family tree provided as part of the book’s front matter), that didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the simple pleasures of a well-crafted, thrilling story set in a foreign locale. I’ll certainly read the other two novels in the trilogy at some point…

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Matter, the latest novel in Iain M. Banks’s speculative fiction series (loosely defined) set in the far-future, inter-galactic world of the “Culture” is a glorious mess.

On the glorious side are all the things I’ve liked—and sometimes loved—about the other two Culture novels I’ve read: amazing, grand ideas of technology and culture set in a far future in which civilizations—human and machine–at various levels of advancement, from the primitive to the “sublimed” who essentially exist in pure information space, interact (control, manipulate, monitor, ignore)… sometimes within different levels of the same world.

On the messy side I would include: the too-leisurely pacing of the first half of the book, an on-going issue with characters who become cliches in their own stories (in this case, the central “bad guy” (Tyl Lausp) is as thin as they come), and an irritating manner of giving practically every character an irritating name. While Banks is a step above many sci-fi authors when it comes to creating fully-realized characters, it’s curious to me that his AI characters are often more entertaining than the “living” people and aliens that play such prominent roles in the story…

If you’re looking for Dostoevsky or Faulkner, the messiness might be a significant problem. But not for me. If you like speculative fiction rife with big ideas and a sprawling, complex conception of future worlds, a detailed outline of this novel would probably be more satisfying than a dozen of the run-of-the-mill sci-fi novels you’ll find browsing the shelves at your nearest bookstore.

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The language! On his deathbed, Jack Spicer’s last words were “My vocabulary did this to me!” I think Spicer meant vocabulary in the broadest sense, the way that those who possess (and obsess) over language are inhabited by it, the way it makes us radiant and burns us, the way language is always incommensurate with our ability to wholly make sense of the whole enterprise of experiencing and creating it. Language is the world… we make it and it does us in.

The third paragraph of “Araby” is a perfect exemplar of what I love about Joyce’s facility with the language (and one of the best paragraphs of any short story ever written):

“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”

This paragraph has it all—the poetry, the elegance, the burgeoning impact of each bodily sense—heightened all the more in contrasts with the bleak opening paragraph with the “brown imperturbable faces” on the “blind” street. I would sacrifice just about anything to be capable of paragraphs like that… and that’s a truth that fills me with excitement and despair.

Joyce writes “…her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” Is this any less true of language for devoted readers and writers?

***

“Araby” is a prototypical story of epiphany, an adolescent boy experiencing the sharp and blunt edges of love and, through that experience, the same qualities of “the world.” I feel this story. I’ve bled this story. Hasn’t everyone, at least when it comes to experiencing love? We each live our stories most keenly… one-upsmanship of experience is a fool’s game. But I wonder if someone who’s never experienced serious poverty can appreciate the awe and humiliation that the boy in “Araby” feels to quite the same degree as someone who has?

I ask because, to me, the epiphany here isn’t as much one of the feelings and reality of love, but that the outside world—even where its representatives are capable of understanding– really doesn’t care. It’s the narrator’s first significant experience of the phenomenon that he and his inner world are just a tiny—mostly un- or mis-perceived by others—part of the world in which he must find his way. It’s heartbreaking to discover this in the form of misunderstood or unrequited or impossible love, but it adds a whole new dimension to the experience when its wrapped up with the degradation and humiliation of poverty.

***

Religious symbolism (and confusion) run through this story like a spreading cancer. The boy lives in the house where Father Flynn died, a house still musty and littered with the priest’s papers.  Mangan’s Sister and the object of the boy’s intense affections is in a convent and thus essentially belongs to God. The boy desires the girl in suitably physical way, but he also feels adoration for her that is the thing of religious adulation and angels.

And, of course, the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the crusade or the quest, as manifested in another dream sequence, trying to safely convey a chalice through “a throng of foes,” which fits in perfectly with the title and theme of “Araby,” a name evoking a romantic land of myth. The boy’s attempt to find a suitable gift is itself a quest that is nearly stymied by religion when his attempt to get to the bazaar is nearly thwarted by the necessities of “this night of our Lord.”

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Joyce apparently said many times that Dubliners is meant to be more like a novel than a collection of individual stories. At the same time, he also spoke to the process of writing Dubliners as one of gnomon, which Wikipedia summarizes as “the whole of a person revealed by a single part” but which also refers to a parallelogram with two segments (aka a corner) removed. A curious conflict given that the former is about representation and the latter, arguably, about erasure, or what is held back.

This feels different to me than deliberate (or otherwise) ambiguity, even if the resulting effect on trying to “interpret” such stories is very similar. There’s a very clear instance of this erasure in “The Encounter” when the older man walks away after their initial meeting:

“… I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

–I say! Look at what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes, Mahony exclaimed again:

–I say… He’s a queer old josser!

I don’t need previous experience reading Ulysses to guess that the erasure here is the older man masturbating. This is not just a prudent elision given the time and context of publication, but also leaves open to question the narrator’s understanding. Does he know what’s happening and chooses to ignore it, is he simply otherwise preoccupied, or is he in some way protecting himself because of past experience?

As one part of a larger puzzle, “An Encounter” is significantly more complex than it might be in another context. We have to consider not just the events of the story, but how the story fits into the larger picture Joyce is painting. The most salient question: should we allow the obvious perversion of the older man in the story to color our interpretation of “The Sisters?” There’s ample potential evidence of a story of molestation in the first story, but too many ways to view how it might (or might not) be connected to the second. Joyce could be painting any of a variety of pictures, signaling to the reader to reconsider the first story or making it clear that he can very easily convey such events clearly if he wishes to.

If anything, the boy’s lack of reaction to the man in “An Encounter” makes me think that retrospectively assigning sinister meaning to the first story is a mistake…

***

Joyce gets into the darker heart of obsession and monomania. The way the man spoke as if “magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind … slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.” This is a condition I know. I’ve felt it. Anyone who suffers from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder certainly has.

Such obsessions can focus on many things. In this case, the older man is supremely creepy. The simple line “every boy has a little sweetheart” made me shiver. But there were two moments in “An Encounter” that really shook me, and one of them is tied to the man’s erotic preoccupation. It comes when Joyce so clearly lays out the older man’s obsession:

“… He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world…”

Chilling… yet the “unfolding of an elaborate” mystery precisely describes some of my most important experiences and engagements with the things that matter most to me.

***

The other shivery moment is the end of the story. Regardless of how much experience or knowledge of pedophilia we attribute to the narrator, he knows something is very, very wrong with the older man. The boy may not be mature enough to be a analytical about the aspects of Mahony he dislikes (in the weird world of Joycean narration, in which sometimes the characters sound like themselves and sometimes like some vastly older and more mature version of themselves—and this isn’t in any way limited to just the central character(s) we take to be representative of Joyce himself), but there’s no question in my mind that he not only feels the temptation to abandon Mahony, but actually does. Only belatedly calling out to him.

It’s a kind of immature (I assume, for most people, but not for me) attempt to both do a relatively wicked thing and absolve oneself of responsibility at nearly the same time. He doesn’t wholly leave Mahony to the older man, but neither does he go to him and escape the situation directly either. He leaves Mahony’s fate, for a few minutes at least, in the hands of fate… and than savors the feelings of penitence when fate is, apparently, on the same side as he:

“And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.”

***

I know almost nothing about Joyce as a person. Which is a distinct weakness when conversation turns—as it naturally does with a collection like Dubliners—to questions about autobiographical elements. Lanny raises some interesting questions about Joyce’s own personality, such as how Joyce’s own “bookishness” might have contributed to an anger at institutions that allowed, if not condoned, negative behavior toward him.

This is perfectly reasonable. The problem is I have no idea how autobiographical Dubliners is meant to be, nor which particular elements might be more so than others. Fresh Air broadcast an interesting interview with Woody Allen last year in which he talked about his childhood. Turns out Allen was, in fact, quite an athlete in multiple sports (track & field and baseball), was pretty happy at school, and was usually among the first picked for games. What is commonly attributed as autobiographical, his nerdy bookishness (and his sexual compensation, but that’s another thread altogether) and being such an outsider, isn’t true after all. Or at least not as reliably and predictably as it is usually treated.

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I have to remind myself that Dubliners was intended, as I understand it, to be closer to a novel than a collection of individual stories. It was certainly written to be read as a whole, which can make it problematic to discuss any single story in isolation. Not a lot happens in “The Sisters” in the same way not a lot happens when you hold a key in your hand… but it’s a necessary start to unlocking a door (or a treasure chest) and sometimes a key has interest in and of itself.

***

“The Sisters” isn’t just a setting of the stage, establishing the theme of paralysis, but one of the effects of paralysis: incompleteness. The boy’s education is incomplete as is most of the conversation between old Mr. Cotter and the boy’s uncle… not to mention that as a boy he is himself necessarily incomplete. Reverend Flynn’s faith is incomplete (and insufficient). The sisters’ lives, without the Reverend to take care of, are incomplete.

***

Barbara notes that an early draft of “The Sisters” was actually a poem. I didn’t know that. But the simple clarity and beauty of Joyce’s language—when he chooses to employ it that way!—is one of the aspects of his writing I enjoy most. Listen to Barbara’s reading of the first paragraph. Do you hear the muscular music of Joyce’s prose? Even with the mundane parenthetical aside (“it was vacation time”), the whole paragraph sings, but the latter third is most striking:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This kind of music is hard to explain. I run into the same kind of trouble I find myself in when trying to explain Jack Gilbert’s poetry, and often end up just thinking (and sometimes saying): I guess you either hear it or you don’t. Or, as Dick Hugo liked to put it, “I’m just lucky I guess.”

***

Joyce is a wellspring from which a wide variety of writers drink. You can trace Joyce’s stylistic DNA through writers as diverse as Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver.

***

What to make of the religious aspects of the story? As a representative of the Catholic church—of which Joyce was, to put it kindly, not a big fan—Reverend Flynn figures in the story mostly as a grotesque figure in his habits, in his possibly syphilitic demise, and finally in the form of his body, the morbid centerpiece of the story (despite the title).

Mr. Cotter insinuates there might have been more wrong with the Reverend than a simple nervous breakdown or even a loss of faith, but it’s never made clear what wrongs Cotter has in mind. I tend to think it’s merely the suspicions and cynicism of an old man when confronted by the precocious and preternaturally studious and serious young man, a common character for Joyce… but it’s easy to make a case otherwise considering the vision the boy has of Flynn attempting a kind of confession to him and the image of Flynn’s tongue lying on his lower lip. And once going down that path all kinds of hay can be made with things like the ambiguous story of the broken chalice (“…it was the beginning of it … it was the boy’s fault”), the fact that the boy is quite young yet the priest seems to have spent some time schooling him in minutiae of operations of the church and various kinds of sin, and Freudian objects like the “velvet curtains” and “swinging lamps.”

***

Am I the only one who figures Joyce’s opening line to be purposefully allusive to Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope ye who enter here”). On the other hand, perhaps speculation about potential priestly pederasty has started to warp my perception.

***

“No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

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While perusing the (only) local used bookstore I came across The Oxford Murders) by Guillermo Martínez, which fit nicely into my 10*10*10 Challenge (in "international mysteries"). Only when searching for the Wikipedia link I just used did I discover it was recently made into a film starring Elijah Wood & John Hurt).

Unfortunately, the serendipitous discovery was almost the best thing about my experience with the book, which isn’t very well written. Some of this could be due to being a translation, but the formulaic phrasing, odd pacing, and stereotypical characterization don’t bode well. As a Planeta Prize winner, it certainly supports the contention that the award is a self-aggrandizing and political, rather than literary, prize…

The only really interesting thing about the book are the mathematical clues sprinkled throughout. One, in particular, is left as an exercise for the reader and I’ve not been able to solve it: what comes next in the sequence "2, 4, 8, …" The obvious answer is 16, but in the novel Martínez writes (as part of the general idea that almost any sequence can be justified) that it could just as well be 10 or 2007. But how?

[side note: a very interesting, tangentially related mathematical puzzle for which I do know the answer is: how can you support 31 as the next in the sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16 ...]

I’ll trade the answer for my puzzle for either answer to that posed in the novel. I have a feeling the ‘10′ is going to make me smack myself on the forehead and think "of course!"

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There are few authors you can readily find in as many different editions as you can Shakespeare. As the first entry in the Shakespeare category of my 101010 Challenge, I’ve been reading the Arden Hamlet (3rd Edition), which is certainly the most comprehensive single-volume edition I’ve ever seen, not just in terms of annotations, but also featuring an extensive historical background, information on stage productions of the play since the 1700s, an intensely thorough explanation of the process used to make decisions on the text as presented, a thorough bibliography, etc. The annotations are exhaustive– often including notes about how actors have interpreted particular points or the approach of different productions– and exhausting:

For Hamlet, which I’ve read many times, the Arden is a great choice. I find myself underlining and commenting about the notes nearly as often as the text of the play! But for other plays, such as Julius Ceasar, which is next on my list and which I’ve only skimmed once in college, I’m considering an edition with fewer and shallower annotations. I find the notes, particularly as they are situated on the page and often taking up more space than the play itself, practically impossible to ignore… and in the Arden edition they are complex enough that sussing the annotations turns into a major distraction from the play.

I want an annotated edition because, though I’m not a half-bad reader, there are still many terms and allusions in any Shakespeare play that I know only vaguely, if at all, many of which are critical to understanding what’s going on.

So, I’m investigating other editions, including the locally available Yale Annotated Julius Ceasar, and Barnes & Noble Shakespeare series volumes.

At the price of most, I’ll probably end up buying a few different editions… any suggestions?

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It’s hard not to include the adjectives phlegmatic, tired, and brilliant to describe Inspector Martin Beck, the main character in Roseanna, the first of 10 Swedish detective novels written in the late 60s and early 70s. I get tired and fearful of catching yet another cold or flu just reading about him! But Beck– and the milieu of small-town Sweden– is intriguing enough that I plan to read more in the series.

The plot of Roseanna is simple: a dead woman is found in a lake in rural Sweden prompting a long, exhausting investigation led by Inspector Beck. The case proceeds over a long period of time– it takes months for the team to discover the victim’s identity and then, because she was an American visiting on a cruise, there are more than 80 potential suspects to consider, most of whom have long since returned to their distant homes– and is almost entirely without "drama."

The setting is a bit anachronistic, but the shape of the novel is familiar. Roseanna isn’t a whodunit– for a long time no one involved has any idea who the killer is and then suddenly it’s pretty clear– but a police procedural centered on the methods of investigation rather than, as has become so popular today, the technology used in that pursuit. The tools used are of some interest: the murder victim is an American killed while on a cruise in Sweden, so we as modern readers get a taste of the slow and pace (within a plot that is already intentionally slow) of communication, and the difficulties of simply sifting through– and sharing– evidence before the age of databases, digital photographs and email.

My understanding is that further novels in the series delve into the politics of the time, which I look forward to discovering.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics, reading log 1 Comment »

Picked this Japanese sci-fi novel up on a whim, inspired by the front-cover blurb that included the words and phrases: “poetic first contact,” “alien peril,” and “think Arthur C. Clarke meets Haruki Murakami.” Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is one of my favorite sci-fi books… and Murakami intrigues me. Sadly, Usurper of the Sun comes nowhere close to fulfilling the promise of the blurb. All of the elements are there, including a relatively original story of first contact and nanotechnology, but the writing is atrocious. Granted, the translation could be a serious factor (the novel did win the 2003 Seiun Award, a high honor), but the prose is pale and robotic.

I can forgive the poor prose for great ideas, but when the time comes to actually meet the alien beings, Nojiri let me down. The novel was on track to be one that might actually fulfill some of the promise of an encounter with truly alien beings—I was particularly intrigued with the idea that the contact might mean nothing to the aliens, who might just pass through our system and/or snuff us out without a hint of communication, but Nojiri seems to want to have it both ways, telling us how alien this life is but letting his story show us something else.

So much potential; so disappointing.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 1 Comment »

I "finished" "reading" Umberto Eco’s fantabulous essay/anthology The Infinity of Lists. The scare quotes are necessary because Eco’s 400+ page volume is two books in one: an extended essay on the idea and example of lists in art and literature and an accompanying anthology od excerpts and hundreds of color plates illustrating his points. I read (and in a few areas re-read) and marked up the essay but only read perhaps 1/4 of the anthology. I’ve read some of the work before… and trying to read all of the examples is just too much. I’ll be returning to the book many times!

The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book. It’s well designed and produced on quality paper. It features scores of full-page color plates in addition to at least twice as many smaller ones. The selections of art and writing encompass both the familiar and the unfamiliar– Eco strikes a nice balance between examples that readers will expect, which are nice to have close to hand, and examples that are sure to be new to even bibliophiles and visual art connoisseurs.

The fundamental premise of the book is to examine various ideas of the "list" as they play themselves out in art and literature. Taking on the topic of lists in visual art– and assuming one wishes to go beyond the obvious kinds of list in literature– presents a daunting task. As Eco notes in the Introduction:

…I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists (though names such as Perec, Prévert, Whitman, and Borges all come to mind right away). The result of this hunt was prodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even if I had wished to include all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousand pages long, and maybe even more.

Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative lists may be. The few books on the poetics of lists prudently limit themselves to verbal lists because of the difficulty in explaining how a picture can present things and yet suggest an "etcetera," as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige the picture to say nothing about an immense number of other things.

Among the kinds of list Eco describes are: referential & practical lists, poetic lists, assemblages, Vunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, curations, repertories, metaphorical alignments, chaotic enumerations, and lists of vertigos.

Eco first explores the contrast between referential lists (the non-infinite kind) which enumerate– or attempt to enumerate– everything in a domain, and infinite lists. A simple example of a referential list is a telephone book, which lists all phone numbers in an area at a particular point in time. The discussion gets more complex (speaking analogously: what of new and unlisted numbers, what of the series of lists exemplified by such directories, etc), but it anchors one end of the discussion.

The second kind of list is the infinite kind, the one created when the creator can’t possible enumerate all members of the set, but instead "proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest." Needless to say, "the rest" must be important enough that the reader wishes to– and can productively– imagine more. This kind of list explores the "topos of ineffability" (a phrase, I must say, I love).

I couldn’t help but think how apt the list is as a form and framing device and motif for writing in and with this now-newish media and platform of blogging. Many of my favorite examples in the medium demonstrate the richness of the list in a variety of forms, sometimes a stream of consciousness by an individual or this or that group; sometimes a curation; sometimes a new-media rich commonplace book. The constant flow of memes, almost all of which are lists of a distributed kind, has become closer to a living thing than it ever could in another medium. The ability to flow, reflow, browse and meander with tags, categories, search and link make for living, breathing lists.

I’m sure I’ll post some excerpts from The Infinity of Lists to my own commonplace book, but it’s really a book one needs to experience– as a well-illustrated essay, as an anthology, a fascinating "art book" or all three.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

[CC licensed photo by Assbach] 

After talking with some friends about the 10*10*10 reading project (in short: read and blog about 10 books in 10 categories in the year 2010), I’ve decided on the following 10 topic areas for my reading:

1. Books (chapbooks, collections) by authors who participate in the Cafe-Blue mailing list

2. Books (chapbooks, collections) by authors who participate in the NewPoetry mailing list

3. Shakespeare plays

4. Hard-SciFi and space opera

5. International mysteries
   Roseanna (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö)

6. Young Adult novels
   The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)

7. Ancient drama

8. Philosophy & Aesthetics
   The Infinity of Lists (Umberto Eco)

9. Poetry collections by authors new to me

10. Fiction in Translation
    Every Man Dies Alone (Hans Fallada)
    Usurper of the Sun (Housuke Nojiri)

The rules are pretty relaxed:

• Read the books
• Blog about each book, one way or another
• A single book can fill in multiple categories according to my whim
• All definitions (such as what: young adult, international, creative nonfiction, philosophy, aesthetics, and being "new to me" mean) are determined by me and subject to change without notice
• Regardless of the above rules I can do what I want

I’ll update this page with links to each book as I go, or you can browse the 10*10*10 Challenge tag…

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

[CC licensed images by Leo Reynolds]

Despite not quite reaching the final goal in my 999 challenge– I did read quite a few more volumes than I got around to noting here, but not quite all– I’m considering trying a 10*10*10 version this year: read and blog about 10 books in 10 categories in 2010.

This time around I’m going to relax my own rule and allow individual books to be listed in multiple categories (within reason, reason being defined by me at the time) and be a tad bit less ambitious in my categories. For example, given that I refuse to get too programmatic about it and thus "challenge reading" is only a part of my reading load, "Big Fat Novels" was a category that should have counted for 2-3!

So, this time around I’m contemplating a list that mixes shorter and/or easier reads with the heavyweights and one that poses some challenges but also recognizes reading for pure, sometimes disposable, pleasure. I’ll have to whittle it down to 10, but here are candidates for categories… and there may be more before I make my "final" decision this weekend:

1. "Young Adult" Novels
2. Hard Sci-Fi and Space Opera
3. "International" (Non-US/Canada/Brit) Mysteries
4. Robert B. Parker "Spenser" Novels
5. Ancient Drama
6. Shakespeare Plays
7. Books about Books, Reading, or Language
8. The Brain & Cognitive Science
9. Poetry Collections by Authors that are New to Me
10. Graphic Novels
11. Collections of Personal Essays/Creative Non-Fiction
12. Fiction in Translation
13. Award Winners
14. Myth & Folklore
15. Ancient Greek & Roman History
16. Philosophy "Proper"

Suggestions for interesting categories and/or good reads that would fit within any of these categories are welcome!

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 6 Comments »

You know all those adjectives people like to use in book blurbs, things like: tender, moving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud-funny? They actually apply to Sherman Alexie’s hilarious and powerful novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Here’s my blurb:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is not just a great "young adult" novel, but a great novel, in which Sherman Alexie combines the wit & timing of the best kind of stand-up comedian, the sensibility of language of a poet, and the captivating skills of a world-class storyteller.

I’ve long been a fan of Alexie’s fiction and poetry. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven will be found in any of my short lists of short fiction, and I eagerly await releases of Alexie’s all-too-infrequent collections of poetry. In the form of a diary kept by Arnold Spirit Jr.– aka just "Junior"– a young Spokane Indian who chooses to attend a nearby white high school (off "the rez"), The Absolutely True Diary captures everything I like about Alexie’s writing. I laughed out loud, with and at Junior. I cried… for Junior and for myself and for my dead father. I marveled at how true many of Junior’s experiences were to my own, both in the city and in small-town Bush Alaska (which shares much with the reservation), and both common and fantastic.

Junior is a cartoonist and I’d be doing a great disservice if I didn’t mention the pefectly-pitched cartoons that pepper the book, created by Ellen Forney. These are an indispensable part of Alexie’s creation, illuminating and expanding upon elements of the story, such as Junior trying to hide his poverty or remembering his estranged best friend.

Find this book. Read it. You’ll finish it in a day, but Junior and his spirit will resonate for a long time after.

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Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone crashed into my reading life like a bolt from the blue. I came across the book while randomly browsing through the thin selection of “literature” at our only locally owned bookstore (specified not to praise my local shopping emphasis, which is nearly non-existent, but to explain the odds of coming across the book in the first place). The title tinkled faint bells in my memory, confirmed by an entry in my wishlist. I don’t remember how Fallada’s final novel made its way onto my long list of books to read in the first place.

What a revelation! At the heart of Fallada’s novel are Otto and Anna Quangel, an older couple who have lost their only child on the German front lines, fighting what increasingly feels like a hopeless, useless war. Disillusioned but introverted– neither are the sort to join an active underground– the Quangels mount a quiet resistance to the irrational Nazi regime in one of the simplest ways possible: by anonymously dropping postcards with anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages all over Berlin. They drop hundreds of cards over a three year period from 1941-1943. The Quangels’ story is based on the story of Otto and Elise Hampel… reproductions of some of the cards they left– and the Gestapo files on them– are included in the book.

Intertwined within and around the story of the Quangels are stories of many other characters. There’s Inspector Escherich, assigned the task of tracking down the anonymous postcard author, who he’s nicknamed “the hobgoblin” and, through him, the entire, twisted mechanism of the Gestapo. In the Quangels’ own apartment building there’s another quiet resister, Judge Fromm, and the Persickes, a brutal family of Nazis, and Frau Rosenthal, one of the few remaining Jews, essentially trapped in her apartment with the remains of her former life. And there’s an assortment of petty thugs, postal workers, shop keepers, and factory workers, some good, some not. All of these together are the real main character in Fallada’s book– the character of a people in the midst of a brutal and increasingly irrational war, living together in a society of fear where anyone could be, and probably is, an informant, and where every bit of the baser nature of people who would in other circumstances be unremarkable have been drawn from them by the pressure of the totalitarian regime and the paranoia it instills in everyone.

Part of what’s fascinating about Every Man Dies Alone is what it is not. It’s not a story of Jews and Nazis, but of “normal” German citizens. Setting aside the philosophical import (or not) of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil,” Fallada’s novel inevitably brings it to mind. But the actions of Otto and Anna Quangel– particularly as they are implicitly contrasted with the limited view of an ineffectual and confused active resistance– equally inspire thoughts of a “banality of good.” Much has been written about the question of ordinary German people being warped by the war, and they are amply represented here, but in Fallada’s novel we see ordinary people who are elevated in small ways by their circumstance without becoming heroes in any ordinary sense.

Every Man Dies Alone, reportedly written in a “white heat” and completed in just 24 days, isn’t flawless. In attempting to distill a byzantine and bewildering structure of events and array of people into a single novel (dozens of novels could be written based on just the significant characters and events brought into play), Fallada chooses to intertwine and connect them in ways that defy belief. There are times when the story is dulled a bit by Fallada’s brief philosophical interjections. There were times Fallada’s serial changes in tense and point-of-view confused me. A few scenes are melodramatic in the manner of bestselling thrillers or soap operas. But taken together these are inconsequential flaws in a terribly important novel.

SPOILERS BELOW – SERIOUSLY

(more…)

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While cleaning out a closet yesterday, I came across my old, wrinkled, well-aged paperback copy of A Separate Peace. My copy has (well, had) the same cover as pictured above and dates back to my freshman year of high school. I can’t remember how I discovered John Knowles’s novel, but it wasn’t part of any official school assignment.

Discovering my much-read copy was serendipitous for two reasons. Just the day before I’d been reflecting in my journal on entertainments that made me cry… and A Separate Peace was on the list of books that came readily to mind. Then today I find an interesting article in Slate about “The Secret of A Separate Peace,” a (possible) subtext of homosexuality that I missed completely despite reading the novel multiple times between the ages of 15 and 20.

A Separate Peace is about love, of course. That’s why I—well—loved it. The friendship between Gene & Finny had a profound effect on my adolescent self. I was Gene—introverted, intellectual, and afraid. But I wanted to be Fin—I wanted to fully inhabit my body and just (seemingly) not care so much. I wanted to be, not think. And in no small part because of reading A Separate Peace (not mention The Lord of the Rings, middle Earth not that much more fantastic to me at that time than Devon, the Northeastern prep school where most of A Separate Peace takes place) I was able to capitalize on a chance I had to reinvent myself in, to some degree at least, Fin’s image. And who doesn’t wish for a friendship like that Gene & Fin shared, even if for a short time? I still want that kind of friendship today.

The existential questions Gene wrestles with are common to many intellectual adolescents… and mystifying to most of the rest. I wasn’t surprised to learn that A Separate Peace had been a best-seller when it came out—it is a story that many adults can understand and even identify with. But I was surprised to learn that Knowles’s novel has so often been part of the regimen of literary force-feeding that is the mainstay of too many high-school English classes, because many, maybe most, high school students aren’t interested enough in the questions that make up the heart of the novel to care much about the story.

In his Slate article, Metcalf surmises that if one doesn’t empathize with Gene’s admiration—and love—for Fin, much of the power of the novel is lost. That may be true… at the time I read and re-read A Separate Peace I had no experience with homosexuality beyond the crudest caricatures in the movies and ignorant, obscene locker-room jokes. It never occurred to me that there might be anything more than friendship and Platonic love between the two boys. But I think it’s at least as true that if one doesn’t grapple with the existential questions that Gene just can’t let go of—and I suspect this is the deeper source of intellectual alienation for many adolescents than the introversion, which is just a symptom—then the book isn’t going to have much power in the first place.

I also have to credit A Separate Peace with being a most memorable example of a Proustian theme that stood out to me even then: the power of a physical experience of place to trigger a torrent of essentially selfish emotion and recollection. When Gene thinks to himself that the stairs at Devon are hardly worn since he himself trod them and that he’d never really thought about how “unusually hard” they were with their “hardly worn half-moons,” he’s putting into words a connection of memory to place—the strange emotion of being at a spot, essentially unchanged, that his younger self (that cannot be reclaimed) once stood—that slaked, momentarily, a deep thirst for the permanence I never had in my childhood and adolescence.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »