A Momentary Taste of Being

What "The People" Means

2012-01-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

from "The People"
in China in Ten Words
Yu Hua

This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed the light carried farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized that it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry--Kathleen Flinn

2012-01-17T16:14:00.000-08:00

In a word, not to keep you in suspense, charming. A memoir cum travelogue cum cookbook, Ms. Flinn tells the story of leaving corporate America and pursuing her dream of a degree from one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world.

Ms. Flinn tells her adventures while attending all three courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris--basic, intermediate, and superior. Along the way we learn about the Chefs, their moods, their modes, their recipes, their haunts. We also learn a bit about Paris, a good deal about the school, and a great deal about Ms. Flinn, who sounds like a wonderful person--one both interesting and entertaining to be with.

Living in Paris Ms. Flinn plays host to any number of visitors--from one young man who bursts into her apartment to find the bathroom and spend much of the rest of his stay with her recovering from food poisoning picked up in London, to the visitation of two extremely trying young women who allow Kathleen and her husband to foot the bill for much of their stay.

Along the way, Ms. Flinn cooks, cringes away from some of the darker moods of some of the chefs, gets married, worries over her newly-wed husband. She also tells us something of the history of the school, of cuisine, of Paris itself.

And it all reads like one long love story--for Ms. Flinn gets married in the middle of it, but obviously loves Paris as much as Hemingway, though in a very different way.

Ms. Flinn, despite her high-flying career and her success at Le Cordon Bleu comes off as genuine, interesting, fun. She offers to her readers this wonderfully considered piece of advice:

As in cooking, living requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along--you can't wait until the dish of life is done. In my career, I always looked ahead to the place I wanted to go, the next rung on the ladder. It reminds me of "The Station" by Robert Hastings, a parable read at our wedding. The message is that while on a journey, we are sure the answer lies at the destination. But in reality, there is no station, no "place to arrive once and for all. The joy of life is in the trip, and the station is a dream that constantly outdistances us."

Highly recommended--*****

House of Silk--Anthony Horowitz

2012-01-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, I thought to myself as I glanced at the book, Anthony Horowitz, isn't he the author of a whole bunch of YA young spy kinds of things? And here he is continuing the Sherlock Holmes Opus?

It's scary enough when great, well known writers of mystery decide to continue the opus--few of these are entirely successful--most are marginal. And here is a person I know little--indeed next-to-nothing about presuming to tread on this sacred ground.

Well, I'm here to tell you that House of Silk is among the very finest continuations of the Holmes saga. Perhaps a bit too much Elephants Can Remember, Sleeping Murder, or Curtain--but that's rather a matter of taste. And to my taste, this was superb. We start with a mysterious stranger, evidently a Boston thug threatening an Englishman who had only just recently returned from America--and we move on into murder, mayhem, opium dens, and conspiracy in high places to keep entirely hidden the secrets of the House of Silk of the title.

Mr. Horowitz deftly captures the spirit and even to some extent the language of the original. His smooth, well-informed writing is such that it made reading a novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure a real pleasure. If you are a fan of the great one, you would do yourself a favor by reading this book!

****1/2

Later--Another view of the same--even more favorable than my own. And I agree with the reviewer--the book is quite a stunning achievement--nearly as good as Doyle himself. A truly seamless addition to the canon.

2011 Reading in Review

2012-01-01T08:30:00.000-08:00

Adiga--Last Man in Tower--12/16/11 *****
Bell--The Reapers Are the Angels--2/10/11 *****
Bennett--Pay Me in Flesh--9/12/11 ***
Berry--The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford--7/21/11 *****
Blackthorne--Edge--5/6/11 ***
Bohjalian--The Night Strangers--11/15/11 ***
Boyle--When the Killing's Done--4/29/11 ***1/2
Brockmeier--The Illumination--5/22/11 ****
Castro--Z is for Zombie--2/4/11 ***
Cline--Ready Player One--8/21/11 *****
Connolly--The Gates--10/27/11 *****
Dashner--The Death Cure--12/20/11 ***
Eugenides--The Marriage Plot--11/23/11 ****1/2
Fisher--Shockaholic--12/28/11 ****
Flew--There Is a God--1/8/11 *****
Grann--The Lost City of Z--12/07/11 *****
Hearne--Hammered--8/15/11 ****
Hearne--Hounded--6/25/11 ****
Hearne--Hexed--7/5/11 ****
Henry--Lime Creek--11/26/11 ***1/2
Hemingway--The Green Hills of Africa--1/18/11--abandoned
Johnson--Train Dreams--11/27/11 *****
Kadrey--Sandman Slim--3/16/11 ****
Keilson--Comedy in a Minor Key--2/1/11 *****
Kerouac--On the Road--10/7/11 ***1/2
Lawrenson--The Lantern--10/26/11 ***1/2
Lianke--Dream of Ding Village--3/15/11 *****
Littlefield--Aftertime--10/10/11 ****
Maberry--King of Plagues--4/4/11***1/2
Maberry--Rot & Ruin--2/3/11 *****
McEuen--Spiral--5/1/11 *****
Mann--The Affinity Bridge--2/7/11 ****
Martinez--Gil's All Fright Diner--6/21/11 ****
Maugham--The Painted Veil--6/13/11 ****
Moser--Washington's Lady--8/12/11 ****
Mullen--The Revisionists--11/8/11 *****
Palma--The Map of Time--11/2/11 *****
Parks--On the Banks of the River of Heaven--4/16/11 ****1/2
Preston and Child--Gideon's Sword--10/1/11 ***
Pym--Excellent Women--1/26/11 *****
Ross--Listen to This--2/7/11 ***1/2
Ruden--Paul Among the People--1/11/11 *****
Scherman (ed.)--Artscroll English Tanach--3/14/11 *****
Soseki--Kokoro--1/16/11 *****
Stegner--Crossing to Safety--12/16/11 ****
Straub--The Special Place--4/22/11
Thompson--The Killer Inside Me--7/8/11****1/2
von Le Fort--Song at the Scaffold--12/26/11 ***
Weisel--Rashi--11/29/11 ****
Wells--Variant--11/20/11 ****1/2
Williams--This Is Not a Game--2/12/11 ****
Williams--Muzzled--abandoned
Wilson--Jack: Secret Histories--4/17/11 ***1/2
Wilson--Jack: Secret Circles--4/21/11 ****
Wilson--Midnight Mass--3/28/11 ****
Wilson--Soft and Others--4/29/11 ****
Wodehouse--The Mating Season--6/26/11 ***1/2
Zadoorian--The Leisure Seeker--12/29/11 *****
Zeltserman--A Killer's Essence--11/19/11 ****1/2

Last Man in Tower--Aravind Adiga

2012-01-01T08:23:00.000-08:00

One of the blurbs on the back of Mr. Adiga's latest book compares him with Charles Dickens--and perhaps this comparison is more apropos than might seem at first glance. The White Tiger, Mr. Adiga's first book, won the Man Booker Prize the year it came out. It was a savage indictment of the current regime in India with a sharp look at the cost and benefits of "outsourcing." One might think about it as the inside story of outsourcing. Between the Assassinations, a kind of novel in short stories, I have not read. This third work, is larger in volume and yet somewhat smaller in scope than either of the first two.

Mr. Adiga takes us into the lives of the residents of an apartment house that comes to the attention of a building constructor who wants to place on the site new luxury apartments. The developer offers the people in towers A and B a princely sum for their houses. Almost all of the residents want to take him up on it. But there is a single hold-out--Masterji.

The story charts the early benevolence/indifference of the residents and their gradually increasing concern as Masterji's reluctance to leave his home endangers the deal for everyone.

Adiga gives us a story of corruption, greed, desperation, poverty, family, and friends. It is exemplary of the adage that "The Love of Money is the root of all evil." For in this book it is the deep love of money that drives the residents to their actions, which include all manner of inducements and punishments to force Masterji to change his mind.

Adiga obviously loves his native India and is rightfully concerned about what is happening there--to the culture, to the people, to the city. His story is Dickensian, as I said above, because his chief concern (other than telling a fantastically good story) is to address the evil rife in India and in the hearts of all of those who choose to value the material at the cost of the human and the humane. Just as Dickens looked with mordant eye upon the morals and mores of the straight-laced but sometimes conflicted Victorian society he was part of, Adiga does the same for the society of India right now--and by extension through out-sourcing and other connections for the world at large. As with The White Tiger, Last Man in Tower is an often savage indictment of society and an intimate portrait of the human heart.

*****

Song at the Scaffold Gertrud von Le Fort

2012-01-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that this short novel came as something of a disappointment. Perhaps my expectations were set much too high by so many reviewers.

Ms. von Le Fort tells the story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne--seventeen Carmelites who were executed just before the end of the Terror. She tells the story from the point of view of one who, while desiring most of all martyrdom, is trapped in the martyrdom of the one who escaped.

Short, easy to read, but not at all what I expected from a book so highly praised. It suggests that I need to go back and reread. Or perhaps better, return to the short opera by Fracois Poulenc which the work inspired--"Dialogue of the Carmelites."

***

The Leisure Seeker--Michael Zadoorian

2011-12-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you're browsing through the fiction in the library and for no reason at all a book falls off the shelve and into your hands. You look into it, evaluating, wondering. You're caught by a sentence on the first page, or perhaps your eye crosses a paragraph further on in the novel and you're caught.

I have many such experiences, but, like most blind dates, they don't work out. You take them home for a leisurely read and you wonder, "Now what exactly did I see in this book?" I bring home piles of books every week. In fact, I am single-handedly responsible for keeping the library funded in my county--I keep those books and other materials moving in and out at a pace defying imagination. Bring home two bags with thirty potential candidates and wind up returning sixteen of them the next week. The others age well on my to-be-read shelf, but eventually they too make it back to the library--mostly unread.

Michael Zadoorian's book was one such blind date that worked it--spectacularly. I found something of interest while at the library--got the book home and devoured it in one evening. It just worked for me.

The story of an older couple--the woman with metastatic cancer and the man with Alzheimer's, but not completely lost to it yet. The woman decides against conventional wisdom, doctor's orders, and pleading children that what she and her husband need is a break--so John and Ella load up the Leisure Seeker and set out from Detroit to explore what is left of route 66--heading from its starting point to its end in California.

So yes, it's a geezer's road-trip novel and despite all that is working against it, it succeeds, beautifully. You become involved with John and Ella and you recognize that some of the heartbreakingly beautiful things that Ella realizes along the way would serve us well in life today. The novel is about love, about the extremes of love and hope, and about coming to terms with who you are and where you are in life. There is so much that is so beautiful about the novel that I can even forgive the ending--which actually surprised me--surprised me so much that I had to wonder whether or not it was true to the characters themselves. It was certainly true to explicitly stated intent, but. . . I'm not quite certain about whether or not these characters would do that.

That said, the problem I have with the end of the novel did not undo the delight I discovered in the rest of it. Join John and Ella on their many adventures through the American West and see if they aren't delightful if somewhat curmudgeonly and occasionally quite disagreeable companions.

*****

Shockaholic--Carrie Fisher

2011-12-28T12:04:00.000-08:00

I've read the previous memoir, Wishful Drinking and. . . well. . . I suppose enjoyed is not quite the right word for my experience with it--although my recollection of it was enough to make me pick this up when in the library.

This continues the story begun in Wishful Drinking and the title refers directly to Carrie Fisher's treatment for near suicidal depression and related psychiatric problems. While the book does talk about and illuminate this aspect of her life, it doesn't stop there and dwell on things. Indeed, the most substantial part of this book is a loving and in many ways compassionate memoir of her later life with her famous father Eddie Fisher.

I don't follow celebrity news or entanglements, so it came as something of a revelation to me (not of the fireworks and sudden dawn variety) that Elizabeth Taylor was, for some small part of Ms. Taylor's life, the step-mother of Carrie Fisher. And you all say, "Well, duh!" Told you I wasn't connected.

One point I did want to make about the book comes from a cover blurb, as this says it far better than I could:

"[Fisher] has a talent for lacerating insight that masquerades as carefree self-deprecation. . . The effect, ultimately, is extraordinarily painful while being extremely entertaining."

I enjoyed this book as well--though I'm not certain that enjoyed is again the right word. I learned from it--I learned from it something about what it means to be famous, something about what it means to travel in the circles of the famous, and something about what it means to be human--especially a human being in pain. Whether she intended to do so or not, Ms. Fisher's observations in the book can teach each of something about what it means to love and to be loved.

Funny, biting, tender, forthright, utterly fascinating, truly, deeply, compassionately human and humane--the book is all of these things. I wish Ms. Fisher health, well-being, and a continuation of the ability to inform and enlighten.

The Death Cure--James Dashner

2011-12-27T06:32:00.000-08:00

Mr. Dashner rounds out the trilogy begun in The Maze Runners and continued in The Scorch Trials. These are of the YA genre that seems to have escalated in popularity in recent days--bad adults put young people in serious danger for some perceived good or order in society. It is understandable why they appeal to young people, because we all remember the times when the adult world was out to subvert us and to harm us "for our own good." But it does become a trifle tiresome after a while, and this third book of the series bears this out.

While the series ends, it doesn't seem finished. This last book seemed somewhat overlong and rambling without really getting to a critical point. Mr. Dashner seemed not to know where he wanted to be with the book--Teen Angst or ZA (Zombie Apocalypse--for those not up on the terminology). As a result, the book seemed a bit of a muddle to me.

However, if you've read this far, you'll want to finish out the series, so enjoy. A light enough read with a few annoying aspects (language and plot) but it completes the story.

***

Crossing to Safety--Wallace Stegner

2011-12-27T06:24:00.000-08:00

I should preface the bulk of my comments by saying that I finished this book on the way home from a trip to Austin. When I completed it my initial impulse was to hurl it across the room. My secondary impulse was to want to shred--eviscerating it, destroying it page by painful page--to inflict upon it some of the relentless damage it inflicted upon my psyche in the reading of it. All of which is to say I had a very personal and substantial reaction to it. If one follows Harold Bloom's notion that great literature "reads the reader" then I am left with the interesting quandary of wondering whether I want to know what it found out in the reading.

Crossing to Safety is the chronicle of two couples. They meet in depression era America in a university setting and the story follows them as one couple, affluent and gracious, welcomes the other couple into their family circle. We see the couples in good times and in bad for each of them--through loss of job and success as a writer.

The book is at times over-written, as though the author is striving much too hard to pull from the reader some emotion. But for the vast majority of the book, it is extremely well-done and hits the notes just perfectly. They recall the time in the lives of each one of us when we've shared a closeness with our friends that can only be state simply--for to do more is to overstate.

So--why my reaction to the book? Well, to say the full extent of it would be to tell too much of the story--but let it stay at the fact that one of the characters isn't merely a control freak--she is the template of all such. There is much good about her--but this one flaw is so vast and so all-encompassing that the entire story was darkened for me.

On the basis of reading this work, I am convinced that it will take an army to make me pick up another work by the same author. Nevertheless, I recognize this as a personal reaction and can nevertheless highly recommend the book to people with broader tolerances than my own.

****

The Lost City of Z--David Grann

2011-12-08T06:10:00.001-08:00

I had read about this book last year when there was a huge amount of hype. I'm highly allergic to hype--I break-out in all sort of unpleasant spots and rashes. I stayed far, far away for fear of the hype-allergens.

Strolling through the Library looking for books to support my son in his study of the civilizations of Peru, I saw this. The hype had died down, everything was safe for approach, so I grabbed it off the shelf opened it up and fell in.

Fell in completely--so much so that midway through reading I went out and purchased the book. For those of you who as children read the "lost worlds" novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and most prominently H. Rider Haggard, this is a treat beyond imagining. It tells the true story of a Amazon explorer who was dedicated to the task of finding the legendary lost city of Z. Sometimes called El Dorado, sometimes thought to be completely impossible, the Lost city of Z became the personal obsession of Percy Harrison Fawcett and his family.

Fawcett had spent many years and had taken many trips to the Amazon river basin--one to map the boundary between Bolivia and Brazil. In the course of his explorations he encountered all of the horrors of exploration (something often glossed over in the more romantic versions we're used to)--insects, predators, disease, and near starvation.

I think if anything came as a kind of ah-ha moment to me (though given my training it shouldn't have) it was the paucity of food available in the green darkness. It is a kind of anti-paradise--so much so that many anthropologists concluded that no sophisticated civilization could have taken root in the hostile environment.

Normally I read non-fiction exceedingly slowly and in measured amounts so as to take notes and fully absorb what I am reading. I read this one in big gulps and relished every moment.

In this case, the hype was right--good writing, good adventure, remarkable conclusion--satisfying all round.

***** Highly, highly, highly, highly recommended to everyone who has enjoyed a lost-race novel and who has relished the thought of being an explorer themselves.

Great Consolation from the Jewish Tradition

2011-12-03T17:04:00.001-08:00

from Seven Prayers That Can Change Your Life
Leonard Felder

If you look underneath the cumbersome English phrase "gratefully acknowledge" and just focus on the feeling of the Hebrew words Modeh/Modah, it's almost like the sensation of kvelling, a Yiddish word that means "to feel joy in your entire being." Kvelling expresses a sense of fullness or completeness because something wonderful is happening or because you feel loved and connected to a best friend, a beloved partner, or a child whose joyfulness makes you feel alive.

Tonight I am kvelling, and I don't know why.

Rashi--Elie Weisel

2011-11-30T04:51:00.001-08:00

In Rashi, Elie Weisel gives us a very brief overview of the life, times and works of one of his spiritual guides and mentors and one of the great Jewish thinkers of all time. It really is nothing more than a tantalizing glimpse, enough to whet one's appetite for more. Or, if you're of a mind to become acquainted with a great thinker and scholar, perhaps enough. Myself, I'd like to read and understand more about this thinker's influence on Judaism and ultimately the world at large, because much of his work was translated into Latin and influenced Medieval thought about the Old Testament.

Recommended--**** minus one star for extreme brevity.

And for Those Who Prefer to Hear Their Books. . .

2011-11-29T04:52:00.001-08:00

An audio excerpt of The Marriage Plot

A representative of Macmillan audio was kind enough to send me a link so you can enjoy the opening (perhaps much of the first chapter--I don't recall division) of the book.

A great Christmas gift for those interested in serious literature but without as much time as they might like to read--but be warned--very adult content. You can find it here.

I only suggest it because I think this may be one of the books to read this year (please see my earlier review below).

Amusing Moments

2011-11-28T17:40:00.001-08:00

I'm not certain if I will launch seriously into this book, but these two moments only a little apart are amusing.

from The Banquet Bug
Geling Yan

He tries to describe the texture of the delicate flesh, the subtle contact between the meat and this palate and tongue, the slippery sensation it gives when it passes the entrance of the throat, leaving the oral organs in such wonder. But he has no vocabulary for it. Putting together his education with hers, they can barely write a decent letter to their parents without checking a dictionary.

****

A neighbor woman yells outside the plastic curtain, asking what's taking them so long and whether they shower hair by hair. Laughing Dan Dong yells back that he has twelve toe to scour.

The New Mass Translation

2011-11-28T05:01:00.001-08:00

So, those of us in the States were exposed (and I use the word with all of its implications) to the New Mass Translation. For the most part the changes were largely inconsequential--intellectually accurate, but without art--resulting in a Mass that sounds a bit like two lawyer magpies discussing some pretty bauble. This is directly the result of the usual tin ear demonstrated by the American Bishops in any translation they put foward.

I judge the language of the mass by the ability of those serving to read everything as it should be and there are some tortuous and awkward constructions that everyone I saw tripped over.

However, there are some very nice restorations. What I do wish had been restored along with "And with your spirit" is the return of the Priest standing at the head of the congregation and facing the altar with the rest of us. As it stands now, the way we celebrate mass, the altar stands between the people and the priest and it seems less like the Priest is presiding than that he is talking at us. Additionally without the change in position, the "and with your spirit," sounds rather like an "isn't that nice, he gets something special for all that he's given up" rather than an acknowledgment of the unity of the people under one Head standing in persona Christi. While possibly true, in the instance, it is irrelevant.

I was mercifully spared the new language around consecration (for a week--which, even so, I view as a spiritual balm and vindication) because the elderly Priest we had serving could not read the new sacramentary well and so used the words of institution, at least, as they were before. (He stumbled through much of the rest of the altered and very cerebral and thorny Eucharistic prayer, but I guess just finally gave up.)

I am a little worried about the change to the Credo (which largely I find one of the less clunky things done in the new translation) because of the use of "consubstantial." While highly technical and accurate it has two problems that I can see. The first is that its meaning is more elusive and diffuse than the former "one in being." Even so, it is more technically accurate (and that is why I have the impression of magpie lawyers--one can't quibble over the technical accuracy of the language, and yet is sounds much less like a form of worship and much more like the initiation of a contractual agreement) and therefore not really problematic in that sense. Where I see serious problems is with its striking similarity to the Lutheran "consubstantiation." But perhaps I worry too much over so small a point because many Catholics haven't a clue about transubstantiation and I get the feeling have a system that is perhaps closer to Lutheran than to Catholic anyway.

One other major problem occurs with the "worthy that you should come under my roof," while awkward enough and entirely unnecessary (explain the substantive difference between "come under my roof" and "receive" the latter having a rich resonance in light of what is about to happen), I'm puzzled by and disturbed at the limitation of the healing power attributed to the Eucharist, "my soul will be healed." Am I to understand by this that the Eucharist would have no efficacy with regard to emotional, psychological, or physical healing? It certainly does severely limit God's purview, and, I might add, unnecessarily. If "I shall be healed," then that includes, in pride of place. "my soul" as well as every other aspect of my being.

Anyway--the new mass translation is predictably ugly, clunky, technical, and in a few weeks our ears will get used to hearing it and it will all seem like that's the way it has always been. Unfortunate--with each new turning into English the Mass become less exalted and less the language of worship and more the language of technical philosophers--not much to encourage the spirit here.

However, I was spared the worst of these degradations for a week and for that I can truly praise God.

Train Dreams--Denis Johnson

2011-11-28T04:57:00.001-08:00

In Train Dreams Denis Johnson takes us through the life of a man from near its beginnings until its end--all in less that about 100 pages.

The novel is told in a series on non-chronological vignettes and includes things like seeing Elvis Presley's train stopped in its tracks--build the (at the time) largest railroad bridge in the world, having everything one possesses destroyed in a wildfire, and being cursed by a Chinese man who was on his way to a lynching.

The novel bears repeated reading to get a sense of the time and the person. But narrated as it is, it is very much dreamlike in quality--floating, anchored only here and there by incident and event. The lack of chronological narration is an interesting and effective device for this story. The language is beautifully wrought and brings the reader very much into the mind of the main character and into the spirit of the time.

Highly Recommended *****

Lime Creek--Joe Henry

2011-11-28T04:52:00.001-08:00

In a series of connect short stories and vignettes, Joe Henry invites us into the lives and times of a family living in Montana (I think--throughout most of the collection it sounded as though they were perched out on the vestibule to the 9th circle of Hell).

There is some gorgeous langauge--some interesting juxtapositions, and a really deft handling of all of the novelistic elements. However, I found that at times I just didn't get it. In a couple of cases it was all about horses and the man-horse link which I lack entirely. In another case it was some confusion over a high-school football game.

So while there is much to savor here and those closer to nature will probably get more out of it, I have to admit that at times I was stymied by the subject matter.

Nevertheless, highly recommended for those who want to read something that is at times exquisitely beautiful.

***1/2

On Deck

2011-11-25T05:10:00.001-08:00

Aramind Aviga's Last Man in Tower

The Sharper the Knife the Less You Cry

Eoin Coffler--Plugged

Joe Henry--Lime Creek

Dennis Johnson--Train Dreams

Elie Weisel--Rashi

Alexi Zentner--Touch (Seems reminiscent of Gilead, Home, and Peace Like a River, we'll see how it actually plays out.

Oh and Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety

The Marriage Plot--Jeffrey Eugenides

2011-11-25T04:54:00.001-08:00

Let me start out the review by saying that I enjoyed this book very much. I found some of the incidents and thoughts enlightening, some aggravating; some of the characters endearing, some annoying; in short, it was a good blend of event and person. While nothing much really happens in the book, everything possible important happens. And that is, perhaps, the source of my greatest disappointment--the ending. I don't get Portrait of a Lady, which, it seems, is what I was heading for. But nowadays, Portrait of a Lady is impossible because divorce is not so unthinkable--indeed, divorce appears to be the first recourse when anything gets to be a little difficult. I did not get Anna Karenina (although I'm sure that Eugenides referred to it more than obliquely in more than one scene). No, I got what seemed to me like a lame sort of Casablanca ending. You know, "We'll always have Paris. . ."

And that's a shame because otherwise this was a compelling, interesting, fascinating look at very intelligent people making mostly very poor choices. Three post college students form a romantic triangle. One of them a manic-depressive, two of them children of privilege--one of whom is a seeker, the other of whom aims to become a Victorianist even though that would exclude from her realm of study her favorite author--Jane Austen.

Our heroine falls in love with the manic-depressive and so the story unwinds as she determines the path she must take. This, my friends, is the downside of Beauty and Beast. The belief that we can take the intractably ugly and transform it into something lovely through love. (The upside of Beauty and the Beast is that ugliness is merely surface and if you can see below that surface, then it is possible to bring out the loveliness intrinsic to all things.) But the harsh reality is that one can't help whom one falls in love with and if that whom happens to be a manic depressive who has a cruel streak a mile wide, you're in for one unpleasant ride.

What then is the end of it? Well, you'll have to read to discover that. Eugenides makes reference to and mines classic works of literature throughout. Some references oblique, others quite clearly pointing to forebears. Expect to see the panoply of novels that deal with the married state and living in that state.

The prose of the book is, at times, quite lovely. The story itself compelling up until its entirely unsatisfactory end. To be honest, it was very clear throughout that this end was coming; however, it still did not seem inevitable. That is, I was not convinced by the plight of the heroine nor by the choice made, at least in the near term. I didn't make logical or emotional sense in any clear way--at least not to this reader.

So, the disappointing ending aside, the book was an interesting study of what it means to be in love, what it means to have a passion, and what it means to have all of the options open to us today.

Highly recommended--****1/2

Considering a Little Classic Reading?

2011-11-23T09:19:00.001-08:00

Dwight shares his experience reading Arrian and encourages up to take Reading Odyssey up on some future courses.

A Gift from a Catholic Friend

2011-11-23T05:52:00.001-08:00

The Divine Office Online

Happy Thanksgiving!!

2011-11-23T04:55:00.001-08:00

As no one will read this long post on facebook, it seemed wise to repeat myself:

While I agree with much that people have posted on the usurpation of Thanksgiving, I note that we are in a time in which the lyrics of this song are most germane:

Mame:

Haul out the holly;

Put up the tree before my spirit falls again.

Fill up the stocking,

I may be rushing things,

but deck the halls again now.

For we need a little Christmas

Right this very minute,

Candles in the window,

Carols at the spinet.

Yes, we need a little Christmas

Right this very minute.

It hasn't snowed a single flurry,

But Santa, dear, we're in a hurry;

So climb down the chimney;

Put up the brightest string of lights I've ever seen.

Slice up the fruitcake

It's time we hung some tinsel on that evergreen bough.

For I've grown a little leaner,

Grown a little colder,

Grown a little sadder,

Grown a little older,

All:

And I need a little angel

Sitting on my shoulder,

Need a little Christmas now.

And so, I've noted, my neighbors have rushed the decor into their yards and onto their houses--think of this seasonal rush as the equivalent of the Busby Berkeley musicals in their time. Everything its due celebration but in times of stress we reach out for the nearest reason to be happy, to be entranced, to be reminded of what it is to see the world as the wonder it is.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Being and What It Entails

2011-11-21T16:25:00.001-08:00

from The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides

For thirty-five years she'd been inspecting her corn with Mendelian patience, receiving no encouragement or feedback on her work, just showing up every day, involved in her own process of discovery, forgotten by the world and not caring. And now, finally, this, the Nobel, the vindication of her life's work, and though she seemed pleased enough, you could see that it hadn't been the Prize she was after at all. MacGregor's reward had been the work itself, the daily doing of it, the achievement made of a million unremarkable days.

This is how a life means--not in the light of the expectation of others or of our own unreasonable expectations of ourselves, but through following a passion that allows us to BE in a way that no other thing can. A million unremarkable days that may lead to an overwhelming question--or it may lead to silence.

We fail to understand that meaning isn't something you make by willing to make it, but meaning is something that is found in the quotidian, in the every day, in the counting and recording of grains of corn, thousands and thousands of ears of field corn over years and years and years of observations leads eventually to an essential understanding--transposons. MacGregor in the book is McClintock in real life and Eugenides makes of the life a kind of memorial of work.

Too many spend too much time "protesting too much." We make meaning that is meaningless--we study only ourselves in the mirror and mourn at the discovery that there is nothing left to discover. But if we learn simply to be, to live each moment as that moment allows and make of it what it can be, then all the rest of this worry and fret falls away from us and we become something different than what we would be. The urge to meaning is not meaning in itself, and when we leave it behind, like all the other desires that point the way home, we learn to be and become as we can be and the acceptance or rejection of the world becomes an after-fact--another datum that may accumulate given enough time into a meaning, but will more likely crumble away along with all the other daily idiocies we allow to derail us.

Variant--Robison Wells

2011-11-21T04:39:00.001-08:00

The latest contribution in what is becoming a well-worn track in teen fiction. Epitomized by Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series and continued in a myriad of others such as James Dashner's The Maze Runner series, the teens-in-danger zeitgeist recurs here. But it is also very much part of a newer genre--the teens without guidance, the teens without adults, and the teens threatened by adults (see Dashner).

A troubled teen who is shuttled from foster home to foster home applies to attend a very elite school in the wilds of Northern New Mexico. He is dropped off by a woman who zooms away, pursued by two of the school inhabitants, but only after they have given our hero a mysterious message.

It doesn't take long to discover that there is something very wrong about this school. There are no adults. None. No one to do the teaching except other students, no one to do the cooking, maintenance, etc. And from there, the story becomes one long attempt to escape from this place.

The book is well-written with compelling characters and an interesting rhythm. The final "revelation" will not come as much of a surprise to those who are paying attention, but then the fact that the book ends up where it was clearly pointed to go all along speaks well for the author.

Robison Wells is brother to Dan Wells who is an author in his own right. Dan Wells writes about another kind of trouble teen, young adult in his I Am not a Serial Killer series. A series which is surprising in the turns it takes.

As to the present book--it is both interesting and compelling. I would advise any parent thinking to give it to a child to read it themselves to determine whether or not it is entirely suitable. There's nothing here that isn't in dozens of other quite similar books, but it is, at times, quite strong stuff.

And finally, I'm intrigued and perhaps a little worried about this trend in teen fiction. It strikes me as a little bit symptomatic of the times (and I do mean symptomatic as in indicative of an illness). But perhaps this is just another more concrete expression of the alienation that we see in Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace--in other words, very much a teen-theme in new drag.

****1/2--recommended with cautions for younger teen readers

A Killer's Essence--Dave Zeltserman

2011-11-19T18:34:00.001-08:00

I last had the pleasure of reviewing Mr. Zeltserman's work with the really creepy and wonderful The Caretaker of Lorne Field. That book was superb, readable, in all ways truly a fine example of the type of work it was.

I'm pleased to say that this book was also rewarding and entertaining, although I must say that it didn't quite hold together as well as Lorne Field. Mr. Zeltserman has a strong prose style that draws the reader in and holds his or her attention until the book has ended. His characters are interesting and the plot--a serial killer loose--was sufficiently interesting to hold our attention.

In addition we are introduced to a character with a very special and very rare ability--a fascinating ability that I am certain shall play an important role in the books to come. And it seems fairly clear from this one that there is at least one more book to come. This is certainly a welcome note for me.

I think my biggest quibble with the book is that it straddled genres to such an extent (noir, mystery, serial killer detective fiction) that as a result, hewing closer to the conventions of mystery than perhaps intended, the ending was a disappointment in that it failed the central rules of a "golden age" mystery. I'll let others decide whether that is a detriment for them. For me it did not sufficiently harm my enjoyment for me to do more than make this passing note.

Mr. Zeltserman is an author to watch--I encourage those who have not yet done so to pick up one of his novels and admire the sheer craftsmanship of the prose. Truly, very nicely written--tight, to the point, clear. I might object to the plotting and the resolution, but never to the writing itself. I'll be picking up other novels as I can.

I suppose the last thing I should mention is that I took a short break from Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot to fit this book in. That's as high a compliment as I think possible to pay an author.

Highly recommended for those interested in the suspence/noir/thriller genre ****1/2

A Salutary Reminder

2011-11-18T05:34:00.001-08:00

--Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp_sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Apollinaire

2011-11-18T05:19:00.001-08:00

An intensely tricky poem to translate--see one translator's struggle here.

Le Pont Mirabeau

Guillaume Apollinaire

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante
L'amour s'en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l'Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure
Les jours s'en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Why I'm So Glad I Missed Deconstruction and Post Modernism

2011-11-17T14:17:00.001-08:00

The tyrrany of the deconstructionists/semioticians as evinced by Jeffrey Eugenides:

from The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides

He flipped the pages until he found the one he wanted. The he returned to the bed and handed the book to her.
I Love You
je-t'aime/I-love-you

As she read these words, Madeleine was flooded with happiness. She glanced up at Leonard, smiling. With his finger he motioned for her to keep going. The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry. Sudeenly Madeliens happiness diminished, usurped by the feeling of peril. She wished she weren't naked. She narrowed her shoulders and overde herself with the bed-sheet as she obediently read on.
Once the first avowal has been made, "I love you" has no meaning whatever. . .
Leonard, squatting, had a smirk on his face.

Utter foulness. Those who would say that words have no meaning or have meanings that are infinitely mutable do not understand the harm they do to themselves, to others, and to the language. Words do have definitive meaning even when repeated.

Fortunately, the mere assertion does not make a thing so the burden of such a claim falls on the claimant as is always the case in those who would compromise meaning and accept anything less than the fullness of the truth. Language is not a humpty-dumpty construct in which any given word has the meaning I want it to have at any given time. It is not infinitely malleable--as malleable as it is. Nor is it infinitely empty, regardless of those who would elevate the reader to the status to the writer and who would proclaim loudly, in academic purple, the death of the author.

The Shock of the New in the 16th Century

2011-11-16T07:00:00.001-08:00

from When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?

Saul Frampton

Around this time a fog descended over northern Europe. It covered the Rhine, merging with the reed beds and sea mists. It cloistered the churchyards of France. It slipped inside books, it tarnished sword blades. It scaled the high walls of Oxford and surrounded Aristotle. It seems to enter flesh itself, and confuse the identities of thins and the very boundaries of mater. And then it settled in men's minds. . . .
Scepticism arrived as a new and intoxicating intellectual force in the sixteenth century.

The Night Strangers--Chris Bohjalian

2011-11-15T18:40:00.001-08:00

Warning: Anything I write about this book will tell those extensively read in the literature much of what to expect. While I don't want to interfere with your enjoyment, still I must tell what I have seen.

Ah, revisit Harvest Home and add a large dollop of Bethany's Sin and then stir in more than a little Rosemary's Baby, and then perhaps more than a little of Conjure Wife, and you will have a very clear sense of Mr. Bohjalian's book.

ONe interesting, though not entirely successful aspect of the book is the author's choice to narrate a portion of it in second person. I can recall offhand only two other such works--Carlos Fuentes's Aura which also had the distinction of being the only book I've read that was written entirely in the future tense and Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City in which the second person narration was like a driving hammer through the entire work. In this book the device came off as a kind of authorial experiment--I could not determine what real purpose it served other than as a sort of compass--when you were in second person you knew immediately who was narrating. On the plus side, it was sprinkled here and there and didn't annoy me a some cute and cloying ploy on the part of the author. The worst that could be said of it is that its purpose was not entirely clear.

While derivative, the book has its own interest and originality. But it is definitely a return to the land of the lost--where there really isn't any way for good to fight evil and the better part is simply to give in and take from it what one can.

Supernatural thriller and fast read. ***

Marginalia

2011-11-11T04:30:00.001-08:00

I was reminded this morning of a blog that I much enjoy--(Really Mr. Jurek) that features thoughtful posts about fantasy, science fiction, writing, and other concerns of those who write and are interested in the literature of the fantastic.

Marginalia

My Focus Needs More Focus

2011-11-09T05:03:00.000-08:00

Flitting like a bumblebee from blossom to blossom--my reading flung wide over the entire field, I'll never make it back to the hive:

from When I Am Playing with My Cat How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?

Saul Frampton

But with the hardening of religious attitudes that inevitably resulted, Stoicism began to snowball, almost in a kind of ideological feedback loop. For what made is so difficult to displace as an attitude was the fact that it was seen to be quintessentially noble, honourable--male--and no self-respecting sixteenth-century man who called himself a man would beg to differ, as is affirmed in an emblem from Henry Peacham's Minverva Britannica (1612):

Amid the waves, a mightie Rock doth stand,
Whose ruggie brow, had bidden many a shower,
And bitter storme; which neither sea, nor land,
Nor JOVES sharpe-lightening ever could devoure:
This same is MANLIE CONSTANCIE of mind,
Not easly moov'd with every blase of wind.

And if so, it speaks volumes as to the state of men today because this is the formation of the modern era. But the question is begged--is this necessarily true of men and thus an observation about intrinsic character and build, or does it become true because we have uttered it. Are there places and times in history where this ideal was not honored nor did it have meaning? Does it matter? Does the attitude persist today under other guise? (I think so) And is it, in general, helpful or harmful to society and to the advancement of humanity? So many questions from so short a passage. Well worth one's time for no telling what might be uncovered to pique one's interest and curiosity.

The Revisionists--Thomas Mullen

2011-11-08T04:44:00.000-08:00

It is a positive thrill to be able to review a book as interesting and profound as Mr. Mullen's The Revisionists. Time travel, or its near facsimile must be this season's zeitgeist, because both The Revisionists and The Map of Time have it as a central core.

For long-time fans of science fiction, Mr. Mullen doesn't really pull out any new stops in his story as far as the SF elements go. If you take an pound or so of Leiber's Change Wars and mix liberally with the paranoia/schizophrenic world you find in Philip K. Dick, you'll have a good sense of the novel. Oh, and add in a little C. L. Moore as in "Vintage Season."

Our hero--known to us as Troy--travels in time to preserve the Perfect Present in which he lives. His job is to preserve the disasters of the past that have ultimately led to the wonders of the future. Right now he watches over the series of events leading up to The Great Conflagration--the event immediately prior to the establishment of the perfect world in which he lives. His previous stint was preserving the integrity of the holocaust.

Battling and besieging him all around are the hags who have plotted to destroy that future society in which everything is so perfect. Truth to tell--the future perfect is quite Orwellian and Troy is trying to understand his place in events and what it means to be an actor in them. The questions he asks are germane to each of us as we try to understand how our single action compile into history.

In addition, Troy is really the name of the person in the near future whose identity he assumes to watch over the Great Conflagration. His real story and Troy's story are very, very similar and so we get the mind-bending rush of Philip K. Dick as we follow the author through the story and try to puzzle out what reality is.

The story is great, the characters well-drawn, but more importantly, as fun as the roller coaster ride is, Mr. Mullen uses it to ask serious and important questions and as in any great work of literature, he doesn't always provide answers nor even good clues as to what the answers might be.

This book is a treat for both SF aficionados and connoisseurs of fine, literary writing. Put this book on your reading lists--you'll be glad you did.

*****

"To Autumn"

2011-11-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

The most anthologized poem in the English language, but worth another look anyway.

TO AUTUMN.

John Keats

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

A Map of Time--Félix J. Palma

2011-11-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

Jack the Ripper, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Her Majesty the Queen with a Squirrel Monkey, and the end of the world in the year 2000. Those are only some of the delights that await the intrepid reader willing to enter the metafictional world Mr. Palma has created for the reader in this novel.

The novel consists of three interlaced stories all of which center around time travel and its possibilities and all of which involve that foremost inventor of time machines. Because the jacket copy is so vague I hesitate to provide any additional information that might detract from the readers' enjoyment of this marvelous book.

I'm not sure how I felt about the metafictional element and the occasional authorial intrusions. They didn't particularly bother me, but I'm not certain I have enough distance to understand how they enhance or alter the work. They were, at times, quite amusing and generally were not enough to get in the way of the determined reader. (Let's face it, any person who picks up a six-hundred page novel in translation is likely to be a determined reader.)

Well-written, well-paced, fascinating in its intricacy, delightful in its surprises--while it took me some time to get into it the finish was worth the effort. For fans of science fiction, adventure, metafiction, and just plain good reading.

Highly recommended--*****

Ignorance of Faith

2011-10-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

While I am interested in and sensitive to Mr. Juan Williams's plight in having be chastised for stating an opinion that has crossed the minds of most thinking American's even as they did not allow it to become the signpost and guide for their thinking, such profound ignorance as is expressed in the passage that follows cannot be allowed to pass without comment:

from Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate
Juan Williams

Catholic leaders threaten to deny politicians the right to communion if they disagree with the church hierarchy, without acknowledging that there is a major divide on the issue of abortion among the most faithful Catholics.

There are several disturbing points in the passage most of which stem from the fact that I sincerely believe that Juan Williams thinks he understands Catholicism, the faith, and what Church Leaders are and do.

Let's start with the simplest--there is no "right" to communion. Indeed the word implies that one is united with the body that one is sharing and partaking of. There can be no communion, even if it is taken, if one is not united with the teachings of the body one is said to be in communion with. Communion is, among other much more important things, a sign of unity. If one dissents vocally and unequivocally from a fundamental teaching of the Church one simply isn't in communion with it and one should absent oneself from communion.

Second, Catholic leaders threaten nothing whatsoever. They simply declare what has been from time immemorial the teaching of the Church. Should you choose to dissent from these teachings in a fundamental and public matter, you have excommunicated yourself from the Church. You have taken the step to leave. It isn't the declaration of a Priest, Bishop, Cardinal, or even the Pope himself--it is your own declaration--no one else need say it. And having made that statement, why on earth would you think yourself entitled to rejoin on your own terms?

Finally, teachings of a faith are not based on popular vote. It would not matter if the entire world decided that black is white--that simply doesn't make it so. Neither does any disagreement with Church teaching necessitate that the Church is required to change the teaching.

The saddest point of all is that Mr. Williams's ignorance expresses the ignorance of most people outside of the Church and many within.

Go Read It!

2011-10-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

from "The Whisperer in Darkness"H. P. Lovecraft

I hope--devoutly hope--that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider. . . that hideous repressed buzzing. . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf. . . poor devil. . . "prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill" . . .

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance--or identity--were. . .

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the greats. This is one of the four or five major canonical stories--but each tale has its own compelling interest. And if only for his influence on major writers of our own day, one should take time to peruse the occasionally florid, sometimes purple prose of HPL and get a glimpse of the cosmic horrors he made his metier.

The Gates John Connolly

2011-10-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Our intrepid 11 year old protagonist, Samuel Johnson and his faithful dog Boswell are our guides for this spooky-funny trip to the End of the World as we know it.

Using the energy of the High-Energy Hadron Collider at CERN, some not so nice denizens of another world break through and begin to prepare to make Earth quite literally Hell on Earth. Samuel Johnson (who brings in the Angels dancing on the head of a pin for show-and-tell), his dog, his mother, some of the feistier denizens of his village, and a few other friends are all that stands in the way of the plans of the Great Malevolence.

A fun, light-hearted, amusing (in a Dennis Adams sort of way) romp through our childhood fears and some very real evils.

*****

On the Strength of the Inclination to Bad

2011-10-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

from When I am Playing with My Cat, How Do I know That She Is Not Playing with Me?

Saul Frampton

Our zeal performs wonder when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. But moved. . . toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless by miracle some rare disposition prompt us to it, we stir neither hand nor foot. Our religion is intended to eradicate vices whereas it covers, nourishes, incites them. (Quoting Montaigne)

All too true and frightening, and so how much more frightening, then, when words, spoken innocently enough and without guile or intent to deceive can be used to foment division and unrest. Words of faith, rightly used and wrongly construed still result in the negative that Montaigne conceives here. So our doctrine must not only be sound, but soundly worded so that there can be nothing within it that can be taken to detract from the value of another human being--nothing that can be interpreted to mean that one person is necessarily less than another--nothing that can give one profound believer cause to harm or rise up against another either literally or figuratively.

Quotation of the Day

2011-10-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

I wanted to preserve this random Quotation that showed up on the site because, while I may not necessarily agreed with all that it entails, I think it captures a sense of mystery perfectly. Oh, and it is lovely, absolutely lovely.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

The Lantern--Deborah Lawrenson

2011-10-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

First the good news--Deborah Lawrenson gives us a remarkable and well-written first novel. I was a little afraid upon reading the first twenty or so pages that I had stumbled into another example of borgeous writing--but it was not so. The writing is superb, beautifully balanced, well-handled. The descriptions both germane and adding to the overall effect of the book. It really is a delightful novel.

Ms. Lawrenson gives us a gothic in the fashion of Daphne DuMaurier (whose Rebecca is mentioned by name, and who is further honored by the name of our hero's first wife--Rachel). We have a house in Provence that may be haunted, a romance doomed by an impassioned first marriage and divorce, perhaps a few ghosts--although it takes a long while for this element to be resolved, a nosy neighbor constantly issuing cryptic warnings, and a serial killer in southern France. At least these are the elements on the surface. They are brought together into a confection that makes for delightful hallowe'en season reading, even if the chills are few and some of the elements perhaps a little overworked.

And in that we come to the main weakness of the novel, a weakness that should not come as any surprise given that it is a FIRST novel that we are perusing. The story elements just don't quite jell. They try to, they obviously want to, but Ms. Lawrenson has taken nearly every element of the gothic and attempts to juggle them all in a remarkable instance of literary prestidigitation. But a few of the balls do seem to either disappear in the air or drop to the floor. For example the whole plot seems to reflect Rebecca with a handful of Suspicion thrown in. Were I casting the film, Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine would be obvious candidates for the denouement. Additionally, the first wife story and her researches and the serial killer--well, let's just say that it is like trying to add fresh pineapple to your jello salad.

But you know what--it just doesn't matter. The writing is pitch perfect, beautifully done, and I'm convinced that Ms. Lawrenson is a writer to watch--perhaps the next Daphne DuMaurier or Mary Stewart--whose jewel-like phrasing and exotic locales this writing more resembles. I heartily recommend this novel to all who are looking to have a good, enjoyable, relatively undemanding read, and I look forward to Ms. Lawrenson's next book. May it arrive soon--I can't wait to see how much tighter and more controlled it will be. Ms. Lawrenson is a writer to read now and to watch in the future.

Recommended--***1/2

On Homosexuality (Incidentally)

2011-10-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

One issue I never tire of tiring of is the question of homosexuality whenever a relationship, of whatever sort, occurs between two men. The latest example to tweak me in this way is from a very fine (so far) study of Montaigne--the second in as many years.

from When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing With Me: Montainge and Being in Touch With Life
Saul Frampton

Montaigne's letter is clearly a moving testament to his friend. But the question that inevitably raises itself is to what extent was there more than friendship at stake--that is to say, was it a platonic relationship or a romantic one?
The idea that the two men's relationship was a homosexual one is by no means implausible, but neither is it necessarily the case: Montaigne later adds to his essay a reference to: 'that other Greek licence . . . justly abhorred by our conscience', meaning homosexuality, a crime one of his schoolmasters, Marc-Antoine Muret, was accused of, for which he was forced to flee France. And Montaigne talks about friends as holding everything common: 'wills, thought, opinions, possessions, wives, children, honour, and life'. So his conception of friendship was not necessarily inimical to marriage, and La Boétie was married at the time that they were friends (although, of course, this in itself doesn't rule out a relationship between them, even an unconsummated one.)
But what we modern readers perhaps fail to recognize in the intensity of Montaigne's friendship with La Boétie is the influence of classical ideas of friendship, which descended from Aristotle and Cicero which saw friendship as a relationship of distinct significance--in the words of Aristotle, the existence of 'one soul in two bodies'.

What the heck is "an unconsummated" homosexual relationship? This sounds to me like any friendship between two men--any form of admiration, any form of fondness other than perhaps familial. It so dilutes the meaning of the word as presently employed as to make it meaningless. An unconsummated homosexual relationship has no real meaning.

And why must every relationship come under this scrutiny? Have we swung so far into the realm of gender studies that every friendship between two persons of the same sex is a homosexual relationship? It is true enough so far as the etymology of the word is concerned--but does it tell us anything of vital importance about the relationship? Or does it rather charge everything with a sexual undercurrent that may or may not be present? If so, what service does it give to the topic at hand? How does it lead to deeper understanding?

The friendship between men, in particular, is already burdened enough with societal debris and idiotic rules of comportment--we need not add to it the extra burden of having "unconsummated homosexual romances" to shadow it. Is it not possible to have 'one soul in two bodies' without necessarily bringing those two bodies together to become one in themselves? If not, then friendship has no real meaning or integrity--friendship becomes merely a pale shadow of a homosexual romance--a tepid, feeble, unrequited bit of foolish schoolgirl (or schoolboy) nonsense.

Would that scholarship would focus on what is evident before them, rather than rooting around in the closet to support one or other agendas. Every friendship isn't fodder for the gender mill--even close friendships are not necessarily subject to this form of scrutiny. Or if so, the scrutiny will reveal little more than what is already known--people have relationships with each other that does not necessarily result in sexual activity--even intense, deep, passionate relationships that still amount to enduring friendships. How does focusing on the fact that it is between the same sex really shed light on the relationship? Where it does, and where that is evident and reflected in the text at hand--it is certainly germane to talk about--otherwise it is arrant nonsense.

(Please note--I do not intend to criticize this author, who, after all, is merely addressing the scholarship that he is aware of--but perhaps those scholars should look for more interesting, more fruitful ground for speculation.)

Aftertime--Sophie Littlefield

2011-10-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

Aftertime is an interesting, powerful, and confusing book. It is published by Luna Press which is a division of Harlequin Romances and this occasionally shows, though not to the detriment of the work overall. Aftertime is an apocalypse-quasi-zombie novel. Note, I have deliberately avoided saying a Zombie Apocalypse novel because in fact, that is the innovation Ms. Littlefield has introduced. The plague of horrific zombie-like creatures is a result of the actions that bring about the apocalypse in the novel. To say more would be to detract from some of the more interesting revelations along the way.

Ms. Littlefield has served up several variations on the typical zombie novel. The creatures in this book, called beaters, are, in fact, not dead. They are victims of a fever induced by. . . well, that would be telling. They retain human characteristics but have acquired a taste for human flesh. Because of the effects of the fever, they are largely helpless at night, but powerful and frightening predators during the day.

Our heroine, Cass, has been subject to an attack by these creatures, remembering at first very little of it. We learn more about Cass as we go along, but suffice to say that her principle quest is to find her little daughter who was with her on the day of the attack and seems to have survived. Cass takes up with a character named Smoke and they go on a journey through the devastated country--the most difficult part of which is making it through the two or so miles that lay between the school in which one groups of survivors live and the library in which a group led by Rebuilders lives.

The Rebuilders are, of course, their own brand of badness, but from one of them Cass comes to know that her daughter is alive and has been taken to live at the Convent. Now the journey continues to seek out the convent.

The story is filled with action, some Zombie-related stuff--although I have to say overall, these creatures are in many ways worse that the Zombie norm. They have some human understanding still and require that their victims remain alive during consumption.

Perhaps my one complaint about the book are the two more-or-less gratuitous sex scenes between Cass and Smoke, providing substantiation, I suppose, for their growing romance. While not necessarily forced, they are both explicit and not particularly compelling in comparison to the surrounding writing. But then, I need to remember, I'm probably not the target audience for this work.

Which leads one to wonder who, precisely, is the target audience. Women who want hot romance don't usually seem to want it mixed in with zombies and zombies seem to be the very antithesis of romance entirely.

It little matters--the reader inclined to these tales of apocalypse and zombie doings could do far worse than Ms. Littlefield's opus, which is both well written and well constructed. There is obviously room left at the end to continue the series and I have already seen the next book Rebirth on the shelves.

Recommended to ZA fans and those curious about SF/Paranormal Romance. ****

Octoberation

2011-10-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

H. P. Lovecraft--the open of "The Call of Cthulhu"

On the Road--Jack Kerouac

2011-10-07T04:57:00.000-07:00

I have long avoided On the Road--for a variety of reasons. For one, there is Truman Capote's famous gloss, "That's not writing, that's typing." Second, there has been entirely too much said and written about the work so that it is nearly impossible to read without all of the baggage. And third, the several times I tried it, I simply wasn't hooked, I found it overwritten and simplistic.

Now I've attempted the work and I have to say that there is the phantom of my third reason lingering in my head. The prose is hopped up, perfervid, and overdosed. There are entire passage in which it is nearly impossible to make out what Kerouac is trying to convey--and I get the suspicion if I could make it out, I probably wouldn't care for it any more than I do the surrounding prose I comprehend.

On the Road is a nightmare of a book--four interminable trips with people who don't know what they want, don't know how to get it, and don't know where to look for it, so they try looking everywhere. In the course of criss-crossing the country, Kerouac and team leave devastation in their wake--destroyed cars, destroyed homes, destroyed lives. All in search of some salvation that seems, for Kerouac, to come out of the end of the horn, and through benzedrine, the effects of which are prominently displayed in the writing here.

There are moments of poetry, quiet, and beauty. There are moments of great prose and insight. But frankly, it just isn't worth sifting through the tons of overwrought prose to find them.

The work is a milestone in literature--it might be worth reading for that alone. It was the bible of those who caused a sea-change in American culture--both for better and for worse--so it may be worthwhile to understand one of the mainstays of that group. However, as a standalone work of literature--as a piece of rewarding reading in itself, I would probably say that it is very much a matter of one's taste--I could see some people really, really enjoying this. I will say that despite what I found lacking in it, I did not have difficulty finishing the work--it just isn't much to my liking.

***1/2

Marginalia

2011-10-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

I am so remiss. Notice of this blog came to me ages ago and I have neglected to post it. But there is some very fine stuff at

Marginalia

University of Chicago Press--October Free E-book

2011-10-04T05:09:00.001-07:00

Rebel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America

Can You Forgive Her?--Anthony Trollope

2011-10-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Can You Forgive Her? is the first novel in the "Pallisers" series. I'm not certain whether this series of novels was ever known in Trollope's time under this name; however, ever since the BBC production of the entire series, they have become known as such to us. The Pallisers is a series of six novels that center around Platagenet and Glencora Palliser--although in this novel the couple is hardly at center stage. Or, if at center stage they share it prominently with one other trio and are shadowed by yet a third trio.

Indeed the novel is a novel of twos and threes. There are three groups of three people--Glencora, Plantagenet, and Burgo Fitzgerald; Alice Vavasor, her cousin George Vavasor, and John Grey; and Mrs. Greenow (an Aunt to Alice Vavsor), Captain Bellfield, and Mr. Cheesacre. The first two listed are the centerpieces of the novel, the last trio is present largely for broad comic relief--the poor Widow Greenow besieged by suitors on all sides while still in weeds. (In thinking about Widow Greenow, one imagines the type of operatic soprano who might play Brunhilda--not one might consider retiring and helpless.) It is interesting to note that in the televised series, this element of the novel is left out entirely.

So now a moment with the other two groups. They are built to be almost perfectly in balance. As the novel begins Lady Glencora is forced into a marriage with Platagenet Palliser even though she is impassioned about Burgo Fitzgerald. Also at the beginning Alice Vavasor is embroiled in an engagement (one likely to be of considerable duration) with John Grey (who is made out by Alice to be a near-perfect avatar of his name). This is after a lengthy relationship with her cousin George Vavasor, broken off for reasons that are never made explicit.

It is the troubles, turmoils, and trials of these two couples that are balanced and reflect off of each other. Alice is free to choose, Glencora is--after a fashion--if she wants to assume the mantle of a woman who has disgraced herself for love. But it is this essential dilemma that is being explored in the course of the book--how one makes a choice and whether one who really has no choice can be reconciled to that decision. To say more about this point would likely give away too much of the story.

Another interesting theme in the novel is introduced by the title: Can You Forgive Her? There are quite a few "hers" in the novel in need of forgiveness. Indeed, there are probably more "hims" in need of forgiveness than "hers." And what we see consistently throughout the novel is that those who are able to forgive often have a better time of things than those who hold on to their grievances. One can contrast George Vavasor with Alice Vavsor as one example--but there are a great many throughout the book. If one contrasts Mr. Cheesacre with either George Vavasor or Burgo Fitzgerald, the end result is instructive.

This is a massive novel, stuffed with people, events, ideas, themes, and concerns. It is easy to read (as Victorian novels go) but consumes a huge amount of time if read properly. This is a novel for a leisurely, careful read. It rewards the person who commits the time and energy to pursue it to its richly satisfying conclusion.

*****

Gideon's Sword--Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

2011-10-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

First of a new series featuring a new hero Gideon Crew. As such, is a guaranteed fast and amusing reading. It is also guaranteed to be notoriously sloppy when authors want to get around certain inconvenient problems---like people revealing secret information. Crew manages in nearly every case to draw out secrets that no sane or awake person would ever tell. The plot and action here as usual--fast paced, the reading light. The story--the barest traces of one, whisked away from one's memory almost upon turning the last page. Not that that is a problem--these books are not meant to be immortal, they are meant to help one pass a few pleasant hours, and this indeed allowed for that.

***

Pay Me in Flesh K. Bennett

2011-10-03T04:45:00.000-07:00

You've heard of bloodsucking lawyers--well, welcome to their ranks the living dead. Only the heroine of our particular tale is an interesting hybrid--she combines the raised from the dead Haitian Voodoo Zombie with the lover of cranial contents so much enshrined in modern cinema. Her task--to defend a recently-made vampire against charges for a crime that the lawyer knows the vampire didn't commit. How does she know? Well, that would be telling wouldn't it.

Very light fare, but some fun for those into courtroom drama and zombies.

***

Kerouac's Novel as Religious Revelation

2011-09-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

From very early on in the novel:

"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

Kerouac argued that his novel was not an encouragement to much of what followed him, but rather a quest, a quest for a kind of religious salvation.

Kerouac Sketching Out America

2011-09-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

from Book of Sketches
Jack Kerouac

Ah Neal--the shaggy
whiteface cows are
arranged in stooped
dejected feed, necks
bent, upon the earth
that has a several
mood under several
skies & openings--Ah
the sad dry Land ground
that's open between
grasses whip't bald
by the endless Winds--
the clouds are bunched
up on the Divide of
the horizon, are shining
upon they city--the
little fences are lonely--

The commentary made in a journal entry on an earlier passage works as well for this:

There is about this a poetic
naivete that is endearing because
it is undemanding. The lines break
where the lines break without much
thought of rule or order or consequence
or meaning or rhythm or any of the other
guiding lights of well-considered
poetry--and yet because it lacks
these almost by design, it has an
kind of swinging, free and open
rhythm--a movement all its own and
not replicable without trying
and trying would lose the naivete
of the whole. I don’t know if
the whole book will flow that way
if the whole book will say things
in ways that make perfect sense
and do not ask you to strain
beyond the break of lines to
understand what the poet has in mind.
I would not say they are without depth
but I would say that they are depthless
and inspiring--words that capture
the quotidian and real--neither
insulting it by raising it falsely to
the level of poetry nor denigrating it
as unpoetic in itself. The details
of a day unwrap their own poetry.

I do not know if Kerouac is a "great" writer. I've come to think that the phrase has little or no meaning. A great writer for any person is the writer who speaks to that person and summons them up to a higher level of experience and performance--be that St. John the Divine or Rod McKuen. We have writers we prefer and we tend to think of them as great, largely because we prefer them. But greatness is a kind of moot and unnecessary point. What matter is how I allow the reading to change my life or if I allow it to do so. Do I allow it to broaden me as a person so that I come to know and understand things differently--or do I allow it to pass by, with me as passive observer. With most of my "candy" reading it is the latter. There is nothing wrong with candy, but a steady diet of it palls. And sometimes even so-called "greats" are little more than candy.

Sighing as She Passes By . . .

2011-08-26T04:33:00.001-07:00

Saying so long to Irene with a sigh of relief and a prayer for those in the path--especially family members and Jane

A poem

Beach Reading in Boston and Beyond--Part II--Ready Player One--Ernest Cline

2011-08-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

Ready Player One is light science fiction romp through the pop culture--movies, games, and music of the 1980's. It seems that in the post energy crisis world, the only way to get away from the poverty and nastiness that is living in the "stacks" (think trailer park piled vertically) is to slip into the OASIS--an immersive virtual reality experience that is the place most kids get their education. Our hero, 18 at the start of the story is about to graduate virutal high school and spends most of his life wrapped up in the realities created by the OASIS mastermind.

But the mastermind has died and he has left behind a fortune to go to the lucky gamer who can find the "easter egg" embedded in his most elaborate game. The world is full of skilled gamers, all of whom work toward the prize. And among these gamers are a group of corporate stooges who want to seize the OASIS and start charging a monthly fee for its use--a fee most present users can't afford to pay. "It's never been properly monetized," is the explanation.

From there on it is a race through the games, music, and movies of the 1980s. Filled with Geekdom's favorite pass-times from D and D and Zork! through to the Plimsouls and War Games. Many reviews have claimed that the story doesn't really go anywhere and that the character arc is either not pronounced or non-existant. But then, to those poor lost souls, I would politely suggest, read the cover copy--it's clear you're not entering the world of Dostoevsky with this novel.

For fun, fast, light, exciting, interesting reading this is your book. For deep, thoughtful insights on the human condition, you might want to consider Henry James.

Highly recommended to Geeks and SF freaks. *****

Beach Reading in Boston and Beyond--Part I--Hammered--Kevin Hearne

2011-08-22T04:45:00.000-07:00

Hammered is the third in the Iron Druid series, and as with others in the series presents a lively fast-paced story featuring everyone's favorite druid, his disciple, a vampire, a wereworld, and the Russian Thunder-god. Yep--Russian thunder God, along with the Finnish national hero and several others.

The story this time around. Well, there was this werewolf and this vampire see and they had a thing about the Norse Thunder god and wanted to get back at him for having been wronged so very many years ago so they got together with this druid who rode on the back of the squirrel that runs up and down the world tree. . .

No, you just have to read it. A light, bright, quick afternoon indulgence.

****

In Boston

2011-08-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

A Week in Boston--and it appears I am in luck. The Isabel Stewart Gardner museum has extended hours on the third Thursday of each Month, so I may be able to get there this trip. We're heading out for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts after work this evening.

Washington's Lady--Nancy Moser

2011-08-17T03:59:00.000-07:00

I must start by admitting a terrible prejudice. I came to this book half in dread--part of which was caused by the cover--which, as you can see bears the mark of a period romance. And I suppose that there is that element of the book as we shall discover. But a further, and far more terrible strike against it (in my fevered imagination) is its publisher Bethany House--renowned as a Christian press and purveyor of the most vapid and terrible fiction imaginable--all in the name of Christian art.

Well, yes, I did read one bad book from Bethany House before I picked up this one. And yes, it was so terrible that I picked this one up three times before I committed to it. But the subject matter of this one was so compelling, so utterly interesting and involving, that I was compelled to pick it up. No matter how terrible, no matter how fierce-bad, I had to read it because it is about one of those fascinating figure in history--half hidden and fully revealed--a person about whom there is more myth than reality--Martha Washington.

I'm glad my compulsion to read all things colonial/revolutionary America overcame the hesitation caused by my misinformed prejudice, because overall, this is a really fine historical novel. Are there elements of romance? Absolutely--but they are few and far between and mostly center around Martha's perfervid language regarding the troops that she visits in several winter camps. There is also the brief courtship and romance before she marries George Washington. But that, dear reader, is really all. None of the purple language, none of the impassioned heartstrings and throbbing interiors so dear to the writer of the second-rate romance. Indeed, Ms. Moser's book struck me as much more like Georgette Heyer than it did Barbara Cartland. And even the Heyer comparison does justice to neither author because this book is emphatically NOT a romance in any defined sense--it is the story of a person.

Told in the first person, the book traces the life of Martha Washington from the death of her first husband Daniel Custis (or thereabouts) to her own death, two years after that of the General. There is a certain risk in this--for while the book is told in the first person, there are definitely elements of the telling that have a modern twang as modern vernacular is used to convey some of the thoughts. (I'm thinking particularly here of an intrusion of the word "norm" in one passage.) But overall, the telling is effective. More than that, Ms. Moser looks admiringly, but unsparingly at the career of George Washington from the travesty of Ft. Necessity to the decidedly skewed win/loss record of George Washington's military career.

While much of the book gazes lovingly and admiringly upon the General, as one hopes that Martha may have done in real life, there is much here that is Martha's alone--from her defense of her son Jackie from the disciplinary measures that George wished to administer, resulting in making Jackie a largely useless person and afflicting the entire family line with the same sort of self-indulgent/self-destructive streak, to taking care of the countless guests who dropped into Mount Vernon without so much as a by-your-leave.

What is particularly heartening is the frequency with which Ms. Moser gets everything right. Indeed the minor downgrading of the rating below is based on the repetition of an error that so annoyed me the first time that I thought perhaps Ms. Moser was merely reporting an error of the paper of the times. But unfortunately, the error--saying that Mr. John Adams was a Continental Congress representative from Pennsylvania--is later repeated. That all of the details around the Washington family should be so carefully and lovingly reported and this is allowed to sneak in is somewhat dismaying.

In sum, if you tend to like history, and if you like fiction, and if you like fiction that hews close to historical fact and yet remains sprightly and lively, and if you like to see truly admirable historical figures take on life and be fallible and frail, and yet remain truly admirable--then you will find this book much to your liking.

Highly recommended--****

Free University of Chicago Book

2011-08-02T06:39:00.000-07:00

This month's free book promises to be quite interesting:

Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the America WestEric Hogan

I stopped at one tourist attraction, Hole n” the Rock, about fifteen miles south of Moab. Though its curious punctuation might suggest that it boasts both a hole and a rock, the site is actually a hole in a rock, excavated by its owner in the 1940s and 1950s. Albert Christensen—painter, sculptor, taxidermist—sandblasted and carved his way into the rock, eventually building a five-thousand-square-foot home for himself, his wife Gladys, her doll collection, and his taxidermy menagerie. It took him twelve years, from 1945 to 1957, to move about fifty thousand cubic feet of sandstone for their cozy lair. The result is an appealing—albeit dark—suite of rooms that stay cool during the summer and warm during the winter. Albert also found the time to carve the smiling face of fdr into the side of their home (visible in the photo, outlined in white beneath the o and c of “rock”).

I found myself captivated by the entire venture. Walking through the dank and faintly musty rooms, I pondered the bemused complicity of a wife living with and in her husband’s grand dreams. I saw that peculiar American insanity that holds that anything goes as long as you don’t hurt anybody. I saw a quiet couple living far from anywhere, slowly building their cave, populating it with dolls and frozen, bucking, wild-eyed donkeys, yet still maintaining a bourgeois domestic front with guest towels and shaped soaps and, next to the seizing donkey, Albert’s dresser.

Request your free e-book.

Reading through my Backlog

2011-07-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

at Shirt of Flame, I came across this woman who deserves to be remembered and imitated:

Irene Sendler

Salvidor Dali's Disney Film

2011-07-29T07:33:00.001-07:00

From earliest youth I have loved the work of Salvidor Dali. Here is a film started in 1946 and finished . . . later.

The continual chain of transformation is just gorgeous. What a fascinating specimen of mind gives rise to so interesting a series of transformations.

Stolen from Books, Inq.

2011-07-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

Stolen, not borrowed, because it struck me as powerful, meaningful, and useful.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
- Dag Hammarskjöld, born on this date in 1905

Books inq.

Nouvelles, Nouvelles

2011-07-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not starting my caroling in July; however, it seemed appropriate for the news I'm about to share: recently I received word that a collaborative novel we had been shopping around for some time has sold and should be published about the middle of next year. Needless to say, I am utterly delighted having long relegated this novel to the ranks of those that would be published upon the advent of my next, more successful endeavor!

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford--Wendell Berry

2011-07-29T05:16:00.000-07:00

Literary criticism is the sincerest form of fiction. It wasn't actually this book that inspired the thought, but it helped to carry the thought to its fruition--I was reading a book on Ulysses by one of the great Joyce scholars and thought what an elaborate array of fictive devises had been invented to explain what essentially needs no explanation. Literary criticism was the predecessor (and now shares the domain with) fan fiction.

I'll elaborate more on that point at another time--but for now let's consider Wendell Berry's book on William Carlos Williams. What I profoundly admired in this book was not so much the image of Williams or of Williams's poetry that comes forth (upon reading the book I did not/do not feel inspired to run out and try to push myself--once again--through the book-length maundering Paterson) but some of the observations about literature, life, and writing that occur along the way. For example

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

Wendell Berry

Dante, as Williams would have known, put the usurers in Hell among the violent, because in defiance of Genesis 3:19, which requires us to live from nature and our work, they took "another way" (altra via). the other way is abstraction breeding on itself, increasing without connection to work, nature, or God. Inflation is a destabilized relation between money and goods, manipulable by the wealthy against the less wealthy, leading to an economy of "bubbles" exactly analogous to the abstract language that is manipulable by the powerful against the weak: political bubbles. (p. 49)

Berry uses the themes of the Williams books to reinvestigate some of the concerns he has expressed in other essays and in his own works of poetry and fiction. Here we see the agrarian economist. Here we have his view of poetry as art:

But of course everybody's brains, by nature and circumstances, are scattered aimlessly; if the mind is to be orderly it must be made orderly. Williams' reply, "Of necessity," is at once personal and cultural, and also deliberately ambiguous. Poems worthy of the name and of the effort to make them, are made of necessity by inspiration and because they are needed. But if we are to have them, we must have a way of making them: an art. (p. 60)

Poems are "made of necessity by inspiration" which seems an odd way of looking at a poem. Is necessity itself an inspiration--perhaps. And what is the necessity of poetry? How does this necessity come about? Is it a necessity like that of food? Or is it a necessity of mind--poems exist because the mind exists. In which case they are less a necessity than they are a concomitant. But the point is interesting, and I do not mean to imply that it is any way wrong--just through provoking.

The following passage I preserve largely for the power of the last sentence:

But because of the complexity of its relation to its origin, its subject, every good poem has its own perimeter of obscurity. Within a somewhat larger perimeter this obscurity may be clarified by insight and discussion, but at a boundary still further the obscurity becomes authentically mysterious, and there inquiry needs to stop.An indispensable propriety of explanation is in knowing when to stop.

And this is something the literary establishment, and more particularly the peculiar institution that is our high-school and college education systems have failed to understand. There is a limit to explanatory capability--a right, just, and reasonable limit. There is a perimeter of explanation beyond which we have mere authorial assertion and ones own ideas layered over the work under discussion. Whether or not Joyce actually put all that material that Stuart Gilbert asserts in his study--we now have to spend time tossing it aside because it has been slathered on as though originally there--even if not.

Perhaps my favorite passage of the book:

What does this passage mean? I have so far avoided any direct dealing with the word "meaning" because, though I can't always avoid it, I don't much like it. "Meaning belongs to the same family of words as "environment." It is a distancing word of abstraction and displacement, seeming always to refer to an idea that is separable and separate from any thing. If you say, "The poem means. . . ," you are about to say something in a language different from that of the poem, and also something similar to the "meaning of any number of other poems.

In the passage at hand, as I think in all of Williams' poetry, there is no difference between what the lines say and what they mean. Their meaning is incarnate in what the poet has imagined and made, and what they say could have been said only in this poem. (p. 119)

My paraphrase--to state the meaning of a poem in anything other than the poem itself is not to state the meaning of the poem for a poem ceases to mean when taken out of itself. I have contended this from my high-school days (at which time I was roundly chastised for the assertion that the meaning of poetry was implicit in the joy of reading it). I continue to assert it. The first and only meaning of the poem is whatever the reader obtains from reading the poem and not from trying to pick it apart symbol by symbol, strophe by strophe, word by word. If the meaning that one derives from "The Wasteland" is that the world is a difficult, complex, perhaps incomprehensible place full of the half-formed and the ugly--well then, that is the meaning of the poem whether or not that is was T.S. Eliot wrote. Does authorial intent mean anything? Or is authorial intent another form of fiction? It is my contention that most authorial intent is expressed and described ex post facto and is therefore part of the metafictional aura that the author has painted over the experience of writing--in short another act of fiction itself.

Another favorite passage for what it has to say about the post-modernist movement and the vast majority of highly touted fiction today.

The imagination may show us Hell, but not Hell alone. It shows us, beyond Hell, the beckoning light, to be reached even by descent. And thus the literature of unrelieved pain and horror is wrong. It is neither reality nor imagination but a strange nihilism of the modern mind that cherishes and dwells upon whatever is worst, "the death of all/that's past//all being" that Williams openly mocked. . . ( p. 120)

Whereas Ulysses is or seems to me to be a celebration of life in all of its messiness--most post-modern fiction is so terrified of life that the fiction itself never lives.

And lastly the "regional" poet speaks--he speaks as he always has done, of the concerns deeply rooted in his heart.

In fact, we have always needed distinctly local arts of poetry, storytelling, painting, and music in America, just as we have always needed distinctly local arts of agriculture fishing, and forestry. Without such rootedness in locality considerably adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half destroyed, toxic, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealth; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin. (p. 176)

Whether regional poetry and art are needed--I cannot say--but Wendell Berry makes a good case for them--for poetry rooted in real place and real things--for poetry that has escaped from the horrid halls of academia where it has been corrupted to the purposes of those who really haven't a notion about what poetry was supposed to be.

I don't know that I came out of this book with any better understanding or appreciation of Williams, but I did leave refreshed and revived from having spent some time with someone who is a deep thinker and a passionate person--a person of his own profound convictions.

Highly recommended, even, or perhaps especially, to those who have no interest in Williams as a poet--*****

The Killer Inside Me--Jim Thompson

2011-07-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

Jim Thompson is king of the boozy, bleak, late noir. I thought I had read this one before, but nothing about it seemed familiar even while all of the tropes of the noir genre and particularly of the provocative pulp noir raised their unholy heads in the course of the story.

Lou Ford is a deputy sheriff with a secret--a bunch of secrets. And he spends the book accumulating more--a lot more. He is the essence of the smiling sociopath blithely plotting his way to freedom even though he knows, as one of the characters says, "It's always lightest just before the dark."

His smiling persona has leaks--people see past the mask frequently. As brilliant as he thinks he is, he can't keep what he does hidden and the story reaches exactly the type of noir climax you would expect.

Taut, terse, in parts brilliant--written in a cool, clear voice that at once plays on one's nerves and shows the bumpkin leading the yokels. In short, a powerful noir work from a powerful noir writer. Amoral, intense, studied, and clever. Short, it pull the reader through it by the electric tension of the prose and the inevitability of the events.

One of the best reads in a while.

Recommended *****

Hexed--Kevin Hearne

2011-07-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

Another frothy, light excursion into Celtic (and other mythology). Interesting takes on appearances of the Blessed Virgin--a fight with Nazi-witches and with Bacchants--and if you aren't familiar with the latter, let me tell you--not a group to tangle with. Our intrepid hero battles to keep Tempe, Mesa, and Phoenix a Fae-free zone as well as to preserve the indigenous supernatural life against attempted invasions from outside.

A lark and a fast read. So nice that now I find myself waiting for the third--Hammered in which our hero battles Thor. (Practically the only thing nearly everyone in any patheon agrees upon is that Thor is definitely the worst of the worst.)

Recommended--****

Little Posting

2011-07-08T14:16:00.001-07:00

Little posting--vacationing in one of the loveliest areas of the Eastern Seaboard--the Shendandoah valley about 15 miles from Harper's Ferry. But two books reviewed--perhaps in a moment.

Exciting News--Free E-book

2011-07-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

The University of Chicago Press is publishing more e-books--this time a group of mysteries about which I had been wondering just recently. You can get Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders for free. To call van Gulik's mysteries concerning the apparently real Judge Dee magisterial is a gross understatement. They are unmatched for their sheer interest and oddity in the annals of crime.

I am, however, puzzled by the match in cost between the paperback edition and the e-book. I do understand that there is a price point below which e-books are not viable--but there must be a substantial cost differential between supplying the ephemeral e-book and supplying the permanent paper, ink, and glue book. This saving should, in part be passed on to the consumer. However, I also recognize that here are hidden costs, especially with DRM deliveries. What I would love to see is cost analysis of the two.

Hounded--Kevin Hearne

2011-06-28T04:32:00.000-07:00

Meet Atticus O'Sullivan, the last druid--no, real druid. The pull-power from the earth and work magical things kind of druid. Atticus lives in the town of Tempe Arizona--a place he has chosen because there is no easy way for member of the Fae to find him. And that is just fine with Atticus because his relations with the Fae are, shall we say, tenuous.

Atticus runs a new-age book shop and herb/tea story in town. He has fixed the place up with all the latest accessories in cold iron (to keep away the unwanted fae and most other magical charms). But Atticus has a pretty huge problem. Despite his close relationship with The Morrigan (Choser of the Dead in Battle) he has managed to earn the emnity of a few of the powerful members of the Tuatha de Danaan--the Celtic Pantheon. Chief among these are Aengus Og, the Celtic God of Love. (Once you meet him, you'll have no doubt about why the Irish have always gotten along as well as they have.)

Obviously, from the details given above, we are talking light reading here. The book clips along at a nice place--the initial premise is fascinating and plays out very well in the overall story. I'd love to share a couple of really interesting moments of mixed pantheon--but that would give too much away--and this is a story of twists and turns, the less you know overall going in, the more you'll enjoy it as the surprises and interesting moments unveil themselves.

I found it so interesting, I have already picked up and gotten through the second in the series Hexed, about which more soon.

For light-minded, light-hearted beach readsl--a prince among books--****

The Mating Season--P. G, Wodehouse

2011-06-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm pleased to report that I finally pushed my way through my first (and very likely last) P. G. Wodehouse novel. I've read selected shorts here and there and always wanted to attempt a novel. Now, with the backing and help of my book group, I've done so--a milestone accomplishment.

However, I fear the task was accomplished with dismal results. My report will not tickle the ears of many, because I found Wodehouse the literary equivalent of the Three Stooges when I was hoping for the Marx Brothers. Reading through this story of mixed up identities at the house of the fearsome Aunts, I was constantly amused and frequently dismayed. Dismayed, because it seemed that every line strained so hard to amuse, tried so hard to be funny, worked feverishly to entertain, with the net result that the entertainment value, for me, was diminished. And perhaps the most telling point of all--Jeeves and his actions occupies all of about twenty pages in the entire opus. This is nearly all devoted to the fathead Bernie Wooster, who, if one were to meet in real life, one would be tempted to give a stern lecture to about coming to terms with reality.

That's not to say that there were not some extremely amusing, laugh-out-loud moments in the book. (One of them comes in the description of an exotic dancer than must have been the inspiration for "The Cobra Dance" of Bride and Prejudice fame.)

But the net effect, the final summation, for me was that while the book amused, it did so to the point of tiresomeness--that effect that comes when, while reading you're also squeezing those pages you have left to go and wondering if you'll get through them and if so, when.

Summation--I find myself hard-pressed to recommend this book. I find myself perplexed by the legions of fans who are wild about these books even while acknowledging that there are some powerfully amusing moments. Sadly, I would say, that if a fan this might tickle your fancy, but I suspect that it is not a good place for the novice reader to start.

Even so, well written, and if not my cup of tea, reasonably well executed--***1/2

"Pretend You Know Better"

2011-06-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

Smugopedia--Pretend you Know Better

The intro blurb is worth the price of admission.

Gil's All Fright Diner--A. Lee Martinez

2011-06-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

Yep, my brain has slumped into a summer reading mode which is likely to include a lot of light-weight fiction. You might encounter the odd The Secret Agent or other more notable piece of fiction in among the fray--but don't count on a lot of it.

This one was an anomaly. I picked it up in the bookstore and started reading and was hooked by the road trip of a werewolf and a vampire wandering through the desert Southwest and nearly running out of gas as the coast into Mel's All Night Diner. When they get out of the car, they face the restaurant's owner battling it out with a horde of zombies (more the haitian type than the apocalyptic type) and the action escalates from there through zombie cows, ghouls, graveyard guardians, and a slight encounter with the Elder Gods through the aegis of a 17 year old which and her trusty (and lusty) assistant.

Yes, the teenage practitioner of magic plans to open the gate and allow the great old one through. And of course Mel's Diner has a secret with regard to the gate.

The action is fast, mildly amusing, and engaging. The story twists and turns along byways that most Lovecraftians know by heart and though there is never any doubt about the outcome, there are moments in the book during which you wonder how such an outcome will be achieved.

The one thing that nonplussed me about the book was a banner on the cover that indicated that the ALA voted this a "Best Book for Young Adults" and granted it an "Alex Award." I would strongly caution anyone thinking about handing the book to a young adult, particularly a young adult on the lower end of that spectrum. There is very adult subject matter scattered throughout the book, and while not extremely explicit, there are moments that I would rather not have a teenager in my charge reading without discussion and guidance. (Guess it kind of tells you something about the ALA that they are no longer able to distinguish subject matter truly appropriate for young people--it's one thing to have a shrouded, discrete contact in the book, another when it is as casually peppered through as it is in this tale.) Of course, none of this really reflects on the book itself, but rather on the suspect judgment of those who hand out awards. As I noted, I advise caution.

However, for adult readers looking for a light supernatural romp with a few laughs and a unique perspective, you could do worse than Gil's All Fright Diner.

In the category of freaky, fun, light, supernatural beach read--Gil's gets two thumbs up. ****

Celebrating Bloomsday

2011-06-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

From a Dublin colleague--this potpourri of how to celebrate the day:

Tweeting Ulysses

How to Celebrate Bloomsday

The Joyce Center: Bloomsday 2011

Enjoy!

Happy Bloom's Day

2011-06-16T04:21:00.000-07:00

Or Bloomsday as you prefer.

This just in, sent from a friend:

Yes, It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub!

DFW v. BEE

2011-06-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Foster and Ellis together again not for the last time

I truly wish I could get through Foster's longer works. I've managed two short stories--but I am so put off by post-modern games in literature that I find it impossible to read. On the other hand Ellis created a sort of sick tour de force in Less than Zero and has not since equaled that early work. Of the two, I would like to like Foster and find Ellis unreadable, but for me, it is exactly the reverse. And because Ellis is readable but had nothing of interest to say--I find that I cannot read either.

By the way, the blogpost referenced above is an elegant consideration of the two writers well worth your attention if you are interested in either of them.

100 Greatest Nonfiction Books

2011-06-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

100 Greatest Nonfiction Books

"The Wasteland" App

2011-06-14T06:20:00.001-07:00

Eliot's Wasteland hits the media age

Joyce in Paris

2011-06-14T05:07:00.001-07:00

"Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him."

The Painted Veil--W. Somerset Maugham

2011-06-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

I can say with some pleasure that this is the first of Maugham's books that I have ever finished. I've tried many--Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage, and none of them ever quite did it for me. Maugham's style is rather flat and his plots and events something of potboilers. And so it is with this one as well.

However, in this case, I like the particular pot that was boiling. The Painted Veil reads a bit like a two-penny version of any of Greene's great works (I'm thinking here of The Heart of the Matter or The End of the Affair as particular examples). Whereas Greene prefers Africa for his exotic locale, Maugham has chosen China to set his story of infidelity, broken marriage, and redemption.

Vane, shallow, brow-beaten Kitty marries an infatuated intellectual--Walter Fane. Walter Fane is a bacteriologist in the service of the Royal Colony of Hong Kong and he soon enough sweeps her away to that dismal land--so different from and inferior to England where Kitty takes up an affair with a person every bit as shallow and self-absorbed as herself. Upon discovering her affair, Walter gives Kitty an ultimatum--go with him into the cholera-blasted depths of mainland China, where it is entirely likely that she will die, or have him divorce her and as a result get her lover in serious trouble as well. There's a little twist here as well that serves to show Kitty what she has been involved with and starts to clear the path to redemption.

The novel is mercifully brief and to the point. It is also very much of its time--redolent, as I said above, of Graham Greene's ruminations on similar topics and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Nevertheless, it reads well and quickly even now and if there are awkward moments--such as when Maugham practically sticks the reader in the eye with a major, enigmatic symbol in the form of some last words--that passes swiftly enough into the rest of the tale.

Despite some of these imperfections, the book is a good read--enjoyable, a balance of the serious and the light (because the prose is so workmanlike). It would make an excellent beach book for those too self-conscious to carry J. D. Ward (or for that matter J. D. Robb) to the beach.

****--Recommended

Equal Opportunity Offense

2011-06-09T04:58:00.000-07:00

Ms. Armstrong is likely to offend those who abide by a strict literal interpretation of scripture, but her words support those of us who have to answer the question--"Why the difference between the God of the Old Testament and the one in the New?"

from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Karen Armstrong

There is a great deal of tribalism in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Hence we fince tests such as the book of oshua, which describes Israel's brutal slaughter of the ingigenous people of Canaan, and the book of Revelation, which imagines Christ slaughtering his enemies in the Last Days. Not surprisingly, some have been puzzle by the Charter for Compassion's call "to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate."

But we have to remember that people have not always read scripture in the way it is read today. Rabbinic midrash was not interested in the original meaning of the biblical author; far from sticking slavishly to the literal sense of the ancient scriptures, the rabbis sought a radically new interpretation for a drastically altered world They took from the old texts what was useful to them and set the rest reverently aside. Henceforth Jews would read the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the Mishnah and the Talmuds, which entirely transformed it. Christians were equally selective in their exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, focusing on texts that seemed t predict the coming of the Messiah (which they understood in an entirely different way) and paying little attention to the rest. Even Martin Luther (1483-1546), who saw scripture as the only valid path to God, found that he had to create a canon with the canon, because some biblical texts were more helpful than others. The reading of the bible was, therefore, a highly selective process, and until the early modern period nobody thought of focusing solely on its literal meaning. Instead Christian in Europe were taught to expound every sentence of the Bible in four ways: literally, morally, allegorically, and mystically. Indeed, as a Catholic child in the 1950s , this was how I was taught to read the Bible. For the Christians as for the rabbis, charity was the key to correct exegesis. Satin Augustine (354-430), one of the most formative theologians in the Western Christian tradition, insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

My son asked me, upon my returning home from work yesterday, what it meant when the Old Testament said to slaughter all the Amalakites, their women, children, cattle, and fowl. And I told him that it could have several meanings. The first of which was to put away all false belief--that one was not to literally kill those who disagreed, but one was not to allow the incorrect thought to persuade one to wrong ways. A second way to look at it was that it was the way a warring people understood their radical "chosenness" and they way they chose to express that thought. Finally, I pointed out that such a command was inconsistent with the scriptures later in the Old Testament that demanded fair treatment of widow and orphan and a sacrifice of charity not of the blood of oxen--a repentance not of sackcloth and ashes but of liberating the unjustly imprisoned, and relieving the oppressed of their burdens.

Any interpretation of scripture that allows us to justify harm to another or to hate any person for any reason is unjustified. If such a God exists, He may as well not because He is no better than us. And all of the evidence points in the opposite direction. God is God from eternity to eternity--it is not possible for Him to order the slaughter of innocents and then tell us to "Turn the other cheek." It isn't in his nature. And because it is not and because all true understanding of God emphasizes compassion, it is necessary to understand biblical texts always in that light, even when that light seems exceedingly dim. The vagaries of scripture are better understood as human failings than as failure of Compassion.

Compassion--The Jewish Tradition

2011-06-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

I loved these passages from Armstrong's book:

from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Karen Armstrong

Building on the insights of the Pharisees, the rabbis of the Talmudic age were able to transform Judaism from a temple faith into a religion of the book. Hitherto to the study of the Torah (the teachings and laws attributed to Moses) had been a minority pursuit; now it would replace temple worship. In the course of a massively creative intellectual effort, the rabbis composed new scriptures: the Mishnah, completed in about 200 CE, and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, completed in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively. Compassion was central to their vision, as we see in a famous story attributed to the great sage Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus's. It is said that a pagan approach Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if he could recite the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied: "What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go study it."

*****

The great Rabbi Akiva, executed by the Romans in 135 CE, taught that the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" was the greatest principle of the Torah. Only his pupil Ben Azzai disagreed, preferring the simple biblical statement "This is the roll of the descendents of Adam" because it emphasized the unity of the human race. In order to reveal the presence of compassion at the core of all the legislation and narratives of the Torah, the rabbis would sometimes twist the original sense and even change the words of scripture. They were not interested in merely elucidating the original intention of the biblical author. Midrash (exegesis) was an essentially inventive discipline, deriving from the verb darash, "to search," "to investigate," or "to go in pursuit of" something that was not immediately self-evident. A rabbi would be expected to find fresh meaning scripture, which, as the word of God, was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation.

I love the observation of Ben Azzai as it is both salutary and terribly necessary in the world today. We are all part of one human family. If we could remember in the time of heated encounter that the person we are facing is indeed a brother, indeed loved of his mother and brother and sisters--it becomes more difficult to regard such a one as a stranger. Compassion starts with realizing our common humanity and our common brokenness. There are those who think they are not broken and often, they are the most aggravating and difficult to deal with. But the reality is that once we see who we are and how broken each person is--either compassion or contempt must follow.

What I find difficult in the post-modern world is that too often it is contempt and not compassion that emerges from this realization. How often do I read a book in which the authors too obviously hold no love whatsoever for his or her characters? Such works are trials--even if they are well done--they are trials. We seem to have something of a void in the way of compassion in serious literature. Perhaps that is why I like Yiyun Li and Maaza Mengiste so much--their compassion and love for the characters whose stories they tell is so large and so encompassing and so beautiful.

Compassion Considered

2011-06-06T06:41:00.000-07:00

It is hard to continue on the point of yesterday's post without sounding as though I am on a tirade against the solid intellectual foundations of faith. My first task is to dispose of that notion. I do not stand opposed to careful and clear articulation of fundamental doctrinal and dogmatic understandings. What I do stand opposed to is that Jesus, or for that matter any other spiritual leader, ever intended that to the be legacy that they left us with. The true legacy of a profound spiritual teacher is the changed lives of his or her followers--not the knowledge that they have of hidden things.

Too often that sort of knowledge is put to poor use as a bludgeon to batter those less intellectually inclined--or, by demagogues for purposes even less charitable. But misuse of knowledge is not a credible argument against its acquisition. And the purposes of such thought should be ultimately to help the follower in faith to live his or her faith.

Yesterday was another case in point at my Church--a predictable one. In the United States the celebration of the feast of the Ascension has been moved to the Sunday before Pentecost. While done for good and meaningful pastoral reasons, all of this moving about of feasts is actually counterproductive because it accommodates the spiritual life to the secular life. That is, the purpose and portion of non-Sunday feasts was, at least in part, a continual reminder that the faith life is not to be confined to an hour on one day of the week. When the faith is lived rather than merely acknowledged, all days are holy and precious for the insights they bring.

Back to yesterday--on the Ascension--a feast celebrate the compassionate act of Jesus both as teacher and savior returning to the Father in preparation for sending out the Holy Spirit on Pentecost--we got a lecture on ecclesiology, Christology, and eschatology. In point of fact, many people can't even pronounce the words--and if they're so inclined they might puzzle out what at least one of the three is all about. But how does knowing the word and hearing a bit about the role of Jesus in salvation history actually inspire the listener to worship Christ in the only way that matter--imitating Him? I'm certainly not going to ascend on clouds of heavenly glory. Still less am I likely to found a Church (although I suppose much could be made of the question as to whether that was ever an intent as well). What I need to know as a person occupying a seat in a pew is what does this action in salvation history call me to do for my brothers and sisters today.

It isn't that Christianity doesn't view this question as important, it is just that throughout history many of the major teachers have been notoriously bad at explaining it in any way that would foster the kind of growth that produces compassionate people. The wrong things get emphasized and division is the order of the day.

Or worse yet, this sort of compassionate activism becomes the end-all be-all of religious life and is as hollow and empty as many of its detractors claim it is. Living the life of faith is a delicate balance between knowledge and action--contemplation and activity.

Here, in a nutshell is what Ms. Armstrong (among many others) has to say to us about compassion:

from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Karen Armstrong

Compassion impels us to work tireless to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, with exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in bot public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others--even our enemies--is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women

--to restore compassion tot he centre of morality and religion;

--to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate. . .

I like particularly the last part of this. How many of us have seen signs from some who call themselves Christians that say something like "God hates f_gs"? God hates? How do the two words even come out of the same mouth in such a juxtaposition? How is it conceivable to even think in such ways? If God can hate (at least persons) then such is not a God I can have any interest in serving. If God does not regard each and every one of us as a particular, singular, and precious child, then only Atheism offers a release from the terrors of such a monster. Or perhaps Antitheism would be the more appropriate term. Needless to say, I do not believe this in any way describes the God we meet in most of the sacred scriptures of the world.

While doing the prayer for Vespers yesterday, I came upon a passage from Hebrews referring to Jesus, "now he waits until his enemies are placed beneath his feet." And was brought to an abrupt halt. If Jesus is the savior of all, who then might be His enemies? And it occurred to me that this had a very simple answer--the enemies of Jesus are not people but spiritual entities that pervade the world--ignorance, anger, hatred, fear, cruelty, visciousness--all attributes of humankind--but not the only attributes. It was these that are the true enemies of any Christ-life one might wish to undertake, and until they are vanquished in is impossible for the individual to be what is required of each of us.

LoA Story of the Week--Stephen Crane

2011-06-06T04:42:00.001-07:00

"An Experiment in Misery" Stephen Crane

What Catholics (and other Christians) Can (and Should) Learn from Buddhism

2011-06-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Karen Armstrong

Yet sadly we hear little about compassion these days. I have lost count of the number of times I have jumped into a London taxi and, when the cabbie asks how I make a living, have been informed categorically that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history. In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric. There has been much flagrant abuse of religion in recent years. Terrorists have used their faith to justify atrocities that violate its most sacred values. In the Roman Catholic Church, Popes and Bishops have ignored the suffering of countless women and children by turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse committed by their priests. Some religious leaders seem to behave like secular politicians, singing the praises of their own denomination and decrying their rivals with scant regard for charity. In their public announcements, they rarely speak of compassion but focus instead on such secondary matter as sexual practices, the ordination of women, or abstruse doctrinal definitions, implying that a correct stance on these issues--rather than the golden rule--is the criterion of true faith.

While Ms. Armstrong and I might have words to exchange over the relative importance of doctrinal and dogmatic clarification, I think we would see mostly eye-to-eye on what really matters. When I think about the teachings of Jesus, I don't remember a time when he said, "Blessed are the test-makers, for they shall have a precise measurement of the gates of heaven." Nor do I recall that the ultimate test of faith would be multiple choice on doctrine and dogma. Rather it seems clear to me, that Jesus articulated a very pronounced criterion for success in faith matters. "When I was in prison, you visited me. When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink. When I was hungry, you gave me to eat." This, it seems to me, is the test of whether faith has any substances--not abstract knowledge of the principles.

I don't want to denigrate that abstract knowledge because it helps to inform the practical actions one should undertake. However, when the abstract knowledge becomes the end rather than the means to a living faith, one needs to examine the principles that are being articulated.

For me, faith has no meaning if it is not lived in a way that everyone can see. And by that, I do not mean mouthed so that all can hear--although that can be an important aspect of a living faith--but the fundamental understanding that John Donne had when he wrote:

from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Meditation XVII
John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.

Such a statement comes only from certain knowledge of a shared fate and a deep compassion for human frailty and weakness--a compassion that demands walking with those more frail and weaker than ourselves and helping shoulder their burdens. We do this in prayer, in corporal works of mercy, and sometimes in our mere presence--a listening ear to turn to.

What Catholics could learn from Buddhists (oh, and a great many other faiths as well) is to recognize the criteria of lived faith and to celebrate those even as we worship as we have been taught. What we do not need is further division in the name of doctrinal purity or even in the name of "right translation." I know that what I have to say is not popular among some groups of Catholics, but the Church would be much better off if more attention were lavished on compassion and how to demonstrate it and how to practice it, than on whether multos translates literally as "for the many" or "for all" when it is absolutely crystal clear in all dogma and practice that Jesus died for all that sins may be forgiven. It is the sort of tone-deaf word mincing that causes all manner of difficulty in and out of the church. And I, for one, am tired of the endless division it inculcates.

Is that a problem of the faith? No rather, it is a problem of people who must always be in the right. But, if they would just open their eyes, they must see that to be in the right is to help to take away some of the suffering of those around us--to practice compassion and lovingkindness to one another. There is no way of being wrong if one's life is lived on those principles. And when we've died and gone another way--translated into a new life, the legacy left behind is one of mercy, compassion, love, and perhaps a small part of the Earth that is a little better off than before we had been there.

The Book Group Choice

2011-05-31T04:53:00.000-07:00

Tiring of angst, agony, irony, and other vestiges of the postmodern in our literature, the book group unanimously elected to pursue the reading of P.G. Wodehouse's The Mating Season. As I have yet to make it through a Jeeves and Wooster novel or even collection of short stories, this will present a signal challenge and opportunity. Wodehouse is much like Chesterton for me--legions of vehement fans--but I just don't get it. So let's hope that this is my opportunity to get it--and, if not become a rabid fan, at least have a new source of gentle comedy to turn to when the angst of the new age becomes too overwhelming.

By the way--the entire group hated Brockmeier's The Illumination. The verdict--beautifully written--but too many unrelated gimmicks in a story that was really too dismal for words. That said--I know that there are a great many out there who will enjoy it and my overall ranking for it--despite by personal distaste remains four-star.

The Sleekest, the Neatest Top 10 New Species of the Year

2011-05-27T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Sleekest, the Neatest Top 10 New Species of the Year

Glowing fungi, spiders that build river-spanning webs, rust eating bacteria, and other more cuddly species.

Beautiful Photographic Survey

2011-05-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

Depression Era color photographs--very, very nice--Thanks Bea!

Thinking About the Bookgroup

2011-05-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

Thinking about the bookgroup I belong to and the fact that I'm kinda looking for something that isn't post-modern and isn't "all that" in the most recent circles of the literati. Indeed, I'm rather tired of the choices of the literati and thought that a return to 19th or early twentieth century British fiction might do the trick. I'm looking at the following titles. If anyone has additional suggestions, I'd love to hear about them:

The Painted Veil--W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge--W. Somerset Maugham
The Secret Agent--Joseph Conrad
(Nostromo)--Joseph Conrad--sort of in the back of my head--perhaps a little too much right now
Cranford--Elizabeth Gaskell
Parade's End--Ford Madox Ford
The Old Wives Tale--Arnold Bennett
Something by D.H. Lawrence? Women in Love? The Rainbow? In college, Sons and Lovers was quite enough of a Lawrence experience--but perhaps the time has come to revisit?

Having read one Joyce and one Woolf with mixed reviews in the group, I'm shying away from consideration of further works. But perhaps another Waugh (I've read nearly all, but the group has read, I think, Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One. Or Graham Green--I think I'd aim at Brighton Rock--The group has managed at least The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American.

So--others I should consider. I've read a bit of each of the first seven books--enough to be intrigued by each of them, but not enough to decide what might be worthwhile for everyone so I could make a cogent suggestion.

Input and discussion are, as always, more than welcome.

LoA: Story of the Week--Wallace Stevens

2011-05-23T05:02:00.000-07:00

While called the story of the week, this weeks offering is actually a poem from the LoA collection of "religious verse." In the instance--Wallace Stevens's magnificent "Sunday Morning."

"Sunday Morning" is a gorgeous, rich, lush meditation on matters religious and otherwise and as with another poet of my acquaintance it perfectly enunciates the inner struggle some have conducted in search of truth--whether or not it comes from faith.

The Illumination--Kevin Brockmeier

2011-05-23T04:46:00.000-07:00

The Illumination is a book of seven short stories each linked at a single point through a single device. It tells the story of a diary of love notes that passes from hand to hand and the stories of those individuals who receive the diary.

Beyond that, I have little to say for the novel. It is well written. There are parts that are compelling. There are characters about whom you want to know more--but the necessarily brief space allotted each does not really allow for a deep understanding of each character.

I suppose I would speaking too strongly to say that I was disappointed in the book; but there is some truth to the statement. It never seemed to gel for me in the way something like The Imperfectionists, which is constructed along the same lines, did. The novel didn't seem to have so much an ending as a stopping point. But I don't know what more I could have asked from it or form its unique device. You see, the illumination is an event at which every human pain and injury suddenly becomes visible to all around. Each wound, each illness, each pain shows through by the light it gives off.

Perhaps some of the disappointment isn't with the book so much as it is with the idea that this sudden change in things illicits no real change from the human beings whom it effects. After a brief shift in perception, things return to much the way they were. Here, injury and pain shines out and begs for consolation, and as human we develop new ways to shield ourselves from it, to politely deny it. That observation in itself has a profound strain of truth--we are creatures who cannot accept too much pain. We spend much of our lives seeking a remedy for our various bodily aches and pains--sometimes, depending upon the source of that relief, destroying the bodies themselves. Our recourse to instantaneous relief of pain, often causing yet more damage.

So, in sum, the stories and characters are interesting, the plot device compelling, but the novel never seems to come together as a complete story--it never really has a resolution. And the two devices of illumination and diary seem almost too much for a single book. All that said, the book is fine writing, and perhaps I am overly harsh in my view of it.

Recommended--****

A Welcome Restoration

2011-05-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

Meatless Fridays for Catholics in England and Wales

While there is a standing obligation to perform some form of penetential recognition of the day, I know that I often do not do so--more often than not. Not because I'm unwilling but because the law itself is too nebulous to be of help. When it is expected of all (Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and the Fridays of Lent) it is relatively easy to observe.

A moment out to remember what we are about as a people is salutary. Perhaps the obligation should be more other-focused--but that is hard to do without serious interference in daily life. For example an obligation to serve at a food station for the homeless, or to take a home-bound neighbor to the store, a doctor's appointment, or other needed or desired destination. These would be the penance not of "sack-cloth and ashes" but of "liberating the poor, the lonely, those imprisoned unjustly" etc.

But this sort of penance would suffer from the present Friday obligation--nebulosity. So some reminder that we are eternally in debt and that debt may only be paid to others is a good and necessary thing.

Edge--Thomas Blackthorne

2011-05-10T05:47:00.000-07:00

I first picked up Edge in a bookstore because of the unique cover treatment. There was an end-dump with books from Angry Robot ( a press I had not heard of) and this one had a cover design that was nearly all words--so much so that the title is a little difficult to distinguish the title. The cover described what can only be described as a "Running Man" type scenario with knife fights and sudden death.

So, in an England of the future where the right to vote is dictated by the willingness to carry a knife and engage in knife duels and challenges, a young man runs away from his psychiatrist's office and the young man's father goes on a legal rampage against the psychiatrist. He also hires our knife wielding hero to find his son. One would think given that this is a future of intense monitoring of all activity that it wouldn't be such a trick. But just as everything is monitored, much can be cloaked, hidden, and changed in the system.

We follow for much of the book the parallel stories of the searchers and the young man. But then as we reach a kind of resolution to the plot some sort of additional complication ensues that allows the author to indulge in training for and a long description of the sort of battle featured on the front cover.

Up until this sudden larding of the plot, the story perked along at a nice pace. A lot of angst, a lot of future dystopia, some interesting insights into character, some fascinating hints of technology and its application. Really fine stuff.

But this larded plot--this extra piece, which was really, more properly a separate book entirely was nearly impossible to get through. It added little to what was already there and seemed to detract much. While I would still recommend the book, it is not with the fervor that I would had it lacked the last hundred or so pages. Ironically, I will note, it is this latter part of the novel described on the cover--indeed, it is for this that I picked up the book in the first place and discovered a much different, much better story heading up the "fun and games" of the latter fourth of the book.

So, overall--a really nice novel with a not-quite-coherent novella tagged on at the end. Read it for the novel and enjoy, or not the extra piece--it adds little and doesn't take us anywhere we haven't already seen in greater detail.

For the great beginning **** but overall, I fear, ***

LoA: Story of the Week--Shirley Jackson

2011-05-09T05:16:00.001-07:00

"The Night We All Had Grippe"

Ezra Pound for Young Writers

2011-05-06T07:22:00.001-07:00

Pound's composition tips for young writers

Another Startling View of WCW

2011-05-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
Wendell Berry

But after thinking of both of them for many years, I believe that the person to whom Williams can be most suggestively compared is his younger contemporary, William Faulkner. They are nothing alike in their ways of writing or in their subjects. They dealt with two distinct varieties of American disorder: Williams with the accumulating mass of detail in the rapidly industrializing New Jersey suburbs of New York City, Faulkner with (among other things) racial division both within individuals and among people who lived more or less together and sometimes were kin to one another. Both dealt, in different ways, with the reduction of the country's original abundance to a sum of exploitable and deteriorating "resources" for industry. They seem to have been, if not similarly, then equally burdened by their subjects--not, as with many writers, subjects sought out or acquired, but subjects that they inherited by being born int he places where they also lived their lives, and for which they were required, as a personal emergency, to find a language and an imaginative order, at the cost of a life's unremitting work and always at the risk of failure.

First, who would have thought to compare Williams and Faulkner. To say that they are nothing alike in style or subject is an understatement that beggars the imagination. And what it says most of all to me is that Berry evidently reads them out of his own heart of concerns. The themes he recognizes (rightly, I think) are the themes that are part and parcel of Berry himself. There is a concern with knowledge of place with both the natural elements of it AND the cultural elements as an additional layer. I am not well enough acquainted with the vast amount of poetry from Williams--and some of it is daunting in its paucity of potential interest. Really, Patterson, NJ? And some of the earlier work just thuds on the ear. So I must trust one better acquainted with the subject. Again, the power and value of an interested critic.

As a side note--it is interesting that while I was typing the above excerpt, I typed, "They are nothing alike in their ways of knowing. . ." instead of "They are nothing alike in their ways of writing. . . " And I realized for me that writing is the fundamental way of knowing. In a very real sense, if it is not written, then it isn't really understood. It has always been so for me. I don't think that it is for everyone--but for me, knowledge or understanding gels better when it is written out. I can read and read and read and read, but true insight occurs when I pause in my reading and take time to say to someone else--even if that someone is only myself--what it is that I am learning or hearing in what I am reading. Do others have a similar experience? Or perhaps a very different experience? I'd love to hear it.

Influential Works

2011-05-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

One often sees lists of influential books and written media, but as I was thinking about it, while books have been highly influential, so have other works of art. I present below a list of the most influential works or artists in my life:

E. A. Poe
H. P. Lovecraft
Philip K. Dick (most particularly The Man in the High Castle, but also the amazing, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said)
Harlan Ellison--particularly "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Tick-Tock Man."
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke
Mendelssohn--Overture to the Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) and Incidental Music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Claude Debussy--particularly Jeux, Images, and La Mer
Richard Wagner--(I suppose I should be a little ashamed of this--but I can't muster up much shame for it--splendid if often over-the-top music)
Salvador Dali
Rene Magritte
Yves Tanguy
Claude Monet
Auguste Renoir
Basho
The Bible--but most especially the incredibly beautiful Apocalypse of John.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
To the Lighthouse
The Good Soldier

In substantial and profound ways the works listed above have influenced my own writing and my view of the world. There are probably many others and I'll think about it some more and perhaps come back with what lingers with me from each of these works.

Pet Sounds Breakdown

2011-05-05T09:44:00.001-07:00

Pet Sounds Breakdown

Those who know know, and those who do not won't care.

The Kindly Ones considered

2011-05-05T05:34:00.001-07:00

The Anything But Kindly Ones reviewed

Repulsive, abhorrent, deeply wrong--this book sounds like a candidate for the surrealist manifesto prize.

Apropos de l'imagisme

2011-05-05T05:10:00.001-07:00

HD arrives in London--a font of imagism

More on Williams

2011-05-05T05:06:00.000-07:00

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
Wendell Berry

The now-prevailing idea seems to be that poets occupy their designated place in the departmented structure of the arts and sciences, of which the increasingly industrialized modern university is the model. Poets, that is to say, are professional like other professionals and specialists like other specialists. Their business is to produce, ideally, perfect poems of lasting value individually, as objects of art or "high culture." This assumption seems to underlie the judgment of such dismissive critics as Donald Davie and Bruce Bawer. Precedent to them was Yvor Winters, who, admirable as he was in some ways, ranked individual poems as the greatest ever, greatest in English, etc. as if the art of poetry were a sort of contest. Increasingly, moreover, poets are attached to universities and are dependent upon them for a living. I have been at times so attached and so dependent myself, and thus I know something of what is involved. Unless university poets are actually from some place in particular, and unless they have the good fortune to be employed somewhere near their homes, they tend to be careerists an migrants, without local knowledge or affection or loyalty, like their professional and specialist colleagues. They are therefore under pressure to conform to, and they have no immediate reason to resist, the industrialist order represented by their university. They, like their critics are inclined to think that the arts are under obligation to keep up with the times, and to conform to the industrial values and the advances of technology.

Of course, given the title of the work, we knew we were to work our way around to the themes close to the heart of Wendell Berry. I do not know that I necessarily agree with his poetic theory. Nor am I certain that I would agree with his evaluation of Williams in this light. But what I do see here is what I see in so much criticism, a revelation of a person in the light of his reading. Whether or not Williams is indeed a regional poet (a matter that can be debated endlessly, I suppose) what really matters is that Berry read and reads him as such and reading him as such has proven influential in Berry's own work.

Do I care whether or not Albert Camus cherished Christian values--not at all. Can I find delineations of classical Christian values in Camus's work--undoubtedly. But, and here's the trick, that doesn't mean he put them there--that means only that I am capable of finding them where there is work strong enough to support any critical apparatus. Obviously that says a great deal more about me than about Camus. Likewise, those who read say Walker Percy or Flannery O'Connor and fail to see the very obvious and pointed references to Christian Theology and values are constructing their own works rather than reading what is on the page.

Not that constructing one's own work is such a bad thing--literature is a cooperative endeavor. We consent to be guided by the author, but we do not consent to be blinkered. We will see what we will see whether or not that was what the author intended for us to see. While there is an importance to authorial intention, it is not the ultimate importance in reading and understanding a work of literature. I think this is what Harold Bloom means when he speaks of great works of literature "reading us." We will see as in a glass (sometimes darkly) what we are in the great works. We will make of them some mix of what the author made of them and what we already are in our experience. Thus we will engage with each in quite different ways. It is why one so widely read and so thoroughly conversant with literature as Bloom can have such a stubborn blind spot in his vision when it comes to someone like Edgar Allan Poe--nothing there engages Bloom and so Poe is not great.

But this is where Bloom makes his mistake--Poe can still be great even if Bloom finds nothing there for himself. This is mystifying to Bloom, you can see his comments in several works on this mystery. There is about Poe something of greatness--is it in his prose? Probably not--but whatever it is, it lasts, it grows, and it is highly influential.

So, when Berry reads Williams, he reads a regional poet. When I read Williams, I read an imagist, and is some cases a near surrealist who transcends any region and, who in fact, is less likely to take me to a specific place than a poet like, say Wordsworth. Which is Williams? Well, in fact, through the magic of collaboration--he is both. I come to know a new Williams by reading Berry's appreciation of him.

So, the value of critics and of criticism. They force us, for a moment, to look outside of our own narrow worldviews and participate in the world views of others. Not necessarily those of the author under discussion--and so, in a sense--literature and criticism were a very early form of social networking with the author providing a base and all of the commenters building up a community--sometimes antagonistically (as happens today) sometimes not.

Perhaps more later about Berry's view of Williams, but it is a quick, deep, refreshing read. I am not a profound fan of much of Williams, but Berry's work suggests that I need to look to Williams for what he does well, not for what I want to find.