Influence

The Slaves of Golconda and various litbloggers are discussing Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and have some very thoughtful things to say there. One of them commented that much of the story would be lost on younger readers, at least on their first reading of it. I think I might agree with that. I got the feeling that I was missing something when I read it (this was my first Spark). I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it the same way everyone else did. I think it deserves another reading after some more time has passed.

But Miss Brodie's influence on her little set resonated with me. Her reach extends from their opinions about art to their educational paths to their sexual decisions (Miss Brodie's admiration of fascism grows as her influence on the girls becomes more pronounced). And the girls' reactions to Jean Brodie vary according to their age, their perceptions, their discoveries about themselves. When they are younger, they idolize the teacher as a 'pure woman.' As they grow older and discover sex, their understanding of Miss Brodie evolves to correspond with their views of the world. Or maybe they adjust their views according to Miss Brodie's action -- the line between the two is completely blurred, ambiguous. That influence Miss Brodie has over her set, their admiration of her -- these shape the girls as they come of age, particularly Sandy Stranger. Sandy is clearly most troubled by Miss Brodie's grip on her, and her admiration mutates into something else entirely. You get the sense that Sandy was very conflicted about her relationship to Miss Brodie -- she wants her teacher's approval, she wants to be like her, but at the same time she wants to escape that influence. Miss Brodie's life becomes part of her forming personality, whether she likes it or not.

In English, I read Jean Baker Miller's writings on the psychology of power dynamics and inequalities. She theorizes that 'dominant' groups are able to hold power in part because their 'subordinates' consent to it. In Fascist Italy and Germany, this may have been the case, but surely the girls, at least in their younger days, were much more easily manipulated? In that sense, Sandy's betray is the ultimate rejection of Miss Brodie's lessons.

Actually, now that I'm writing about the book, I'm liking it more, discovering more about it.

Grip

A few hours ago, tired, I sat down with Sara Gran's Come Closer. I barely moved until about five minutes ago when, wide awake, I finished and decided not to wait to make this post until morning (well, later in the morning).

Come Closer is a short novel with a single plotline: Amanda, a happily-married architect slowly becomes possessed by a demon called Naamah. The intensity of the possession increases--slowly at first, then exponentially, destroying Amanda's marriage, career, and sense of self. It's a gripping story; I told myself I would read a few pages and then go to bed, but after page 10 I didn't even think of putting it down again. I was surprised at how quickly it went by. Gran's prose is succinct and direct, engrossing and natural. She's the kind of writer who makes you think that the act of writing is simple (and of course, you go to write about her and realize how deceptive that is). The novel works very well as a story--macabre, sexual, psycological. But it's also a striking metaphor for the turbulence of the inner self. Gran writes, "He had imagined a person was as sleek and neat on the inside as outside. he couldn't stand the mess, the chaos, the blood." Amanda tries to maintain her relationship with her husband Ed, her job, but her possession looses all of her latent desires, takes her to the opposite extreme. It's an experiment in giving into desire, of refusing to be responsible to others' expectations. But wants and desires can be a slavery all their own.

Blunders

Whenever I start a new post, the fear of making a serious gaffe always lingers in the back of my mind. (Will I misspell? Sound like a blowhard?) Sometimes I have a tendency to invert letters or syllables (reading Europe Central last year, I occasionally found myself saying "Shokastovich" to myself rather than "Shostakovich"), which can be really confusing. And embarassing. (It's also interesting how unconscious these errors are, how long it takes to notice them).

Last year, when drafting my college essays, I mentioned the play A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen. C, proofreading that particular essay, always sent my drafts back with with the word IBSEN! scrawled in a prominent place. The comment always puzzled me. Yes, Ibsen. So? My mistake didn't hit me until I was working the register at the bookstore one day. I looked down and scanned the barcode on the book in my hand....and realized that all along I had been referring to the playwright as "Isben," a bastardized form of ISBN.

Thoughts?

"...you would have drawn the conclusion, watching him, that a writer is one to whom writing comes harder than to anyone else."

--Thomas Mann, "Tristan"

Miscellany

• Reading: I couldn't get into Crawl Space, so I'm going to hold off on the LBC readings until the other two arrive in the mail. My copy of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains (summer reading for school) did arrive, though, so I read a little bit of that. It was more interesting than I expected, but it's one of those books that I'll probably have trouble picking up again. Not quite sure what I'm going to read next.
  
  
• Academics: Today was the first day of my summer session at UCI....and my last. I'd planned to take a Women's Studies class; I took one last year ("Gender and Popular Culture") almost by accident, but wound up really liking it. So what could go wrong? Well, I got to this class--"Beauty, Culture, and Feminist Thought"--and was absolutely bored. I left at the break. Part of it was that I'd heard so much of it already (Popular Culture focused on mainstream media, which Beauty would too). It cured me of any lingering desire that last year's course left in me. Also goes to show that classes can turn on the professor's approach.
  
  
• Critical Mass asks readers to recommend a book in which "nothing happens." I couldn't think of one but I'm interested to see what people will say. I noticed that Proust was on the list. My immediate reaction was, "that's not true," but I guess in terms of plot it is. A lot of authors on that list I'm interested in....
  
  
• Ed Champion has created a petition to oust Sam Tanenhaus from the New York Times Book Review. I'm curious about how many signatures this will pick up.
  

White Spirit by Paule Constant

I'm really glad that the LBC decided to reveal the nominees in advance. I'm going to try to read as many of them as I can so I can participate in the discussions. I've just finished one of the books, Paule Constant's White Spirit. It's excellent. I'm going to reserve some of my thoughts for the discussions, but I'd like to recommend it to everyone. White Spirit is a tragicomic portrayal of postcolonial (kind of) Africa. I say 'kind of' because the influence of the West--especially America, and Hollywood in particular--is everywhere. The novel begins with Victor, a Frenchman, taking a post at a company called African Resource. His job is basically to sell the effluvia that the West doesn't want--toasters, irradiated milk, carcinogenic baby clothes--to the residents of a nearby 'Model Village.' In the great scheme of commercialism, African Resource is "the drainpipe at the bottom of the sea." Constant also gives us Lola, a biracial prostitute obsessed with whiteness and the Western (ie, Hollywood) ideals of beauty, and Brother Emmanuel, a priest of sorts whose dream is to attain paradise. The book is absurdist and satirical: African Resource overflows with things no one wants, like toasters, the economy runs on bananas, which no one likes and no one buys, etc.

And yet it's also a serious exploration of colonial devastation. Constant writes of the banana plantation-workers:

Nobody rebelled against this stupid fruit, this anarchy of fertility, this eternally lutted nature that constantly had to be relieved....Suffering, exhaustion, sleepless nights, and surveys on foot did not result in hatred or repugnance for bananas -- instead, the result was an irreparable hatred of man for man.

Constant's language is beautiful and fresh, making the book a pleasure to read. My only qualm is with the ending, which I won't give away. It makes sense in the context of the theme of Hollywood fetishism (the last chapter is called "Happy End"), but it didn't quite seem to fit with the climax of the book. I haven't quite made up my mind. But I was very, very happy with the book as a whole. Here's hoping that the other nominees are of such high quality as well. Thanks, litbloggers.

Russian it is

Earlier I talked about my academic conundrum. I've been trying to find some interesting works on Germany, and German literature does seem really promising, but I'm still incredibly fascinated by Russia and Russian lit. (Example: last year I read Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. The parts that most interested me were background information about the Russian Revolution and Germany's relationship with Russia. Nerdy, I know). So to hell with it. Usefulness should not be a consideration when we're talking literature.

Of course, this will probably not be the last word on this subject. But that's the thought for today.

UPDATE: Wavering already. Fantastic.

Bragging

On a lighter note, I'd like to brag a bit. Since I started SB nearly a month ago, my Technorati rating has jumped from 1.4 something million to 847 thousand something. Which is nothing to sneeze at, mind you. (Although of my "4 links from 3 sites," two of them are from MetaxuCafe, ie, me reposting myself. But that's only if you want to be picky about it.)

Maybe by the end of the year I'll have advanced to a cool five digits.

Brevity

There's been a lot of talk in the blogosphere lately about how the 'Great American Novel' has come to be equivalent with the 'Incredibly Long Novel.' Length is supposed to be an indicator of ambition, scope, complexity, depth, and so forth. And while long novels can have those things, this often means that shorter works are treated with less respect.

I agreed with these arguments when I read them, but they didn't actually hit me until today. I picked up Gilbert Sorrentino's A Strange Commonplace after some abortive attempts at other books. I've been wanting to read Sorrentino since I first started hearing about him through litblogs, but to be honest, I don't think I would have read him today if it weren't for the book's brevity (154 pages). After Proust, I felt like I didn't want to be 'committed' to another long book just yet. As I started reading, I realized that I automatically equate 'short' with 'easy.' Not so with Sorrentino, and actually, I'm really glad for that. Despite being so trim, and with such short chapters, A Strange Commonplace requires attentive and active reading. The characters are intricately linked together, often mirroring or echoing one another. The episodes were ambiguous enough to make me flip back to earlier sections and reread them, something which I usually don't do. But I really wanted to understand this one and to get as much out of it as I could. And despite being a physically short book, there's enough in there to keep me busy thinking for a while. A long while. (And maybe after Proust I'm used to the long tangents and detailed descriptions and long explications of emotional subtleties)

More than ever now, I think that length and brevity have less to do with ambition or depth than with style and aesthetics. It's been said, but it bears repeating, because the length-stereotype (of literary merit, of intelligence, of 'seriousness') has become almost unconsciously ingrained in book culture. Or at least in my mind.

Avoiding "the end"

Writing about Proust is daunting. For me, at least. Because I'd like to do him some kind of justice, and not sound too stupid or too pedantic. Which is why I've been delaying this post -- fitting, I guess. And what can I say, anyway? Mental block. So I'm going to be concise, and in the future I'll probably build on this more and more. Which I think is the point: not to try to distill everything into a few snappy sentences and move on, but rather to let it affect me over time. Proust writes, "reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we realize only through the book." And I would think that the reverse would be true: the full value of the work is not realized right away. Life adds dimensions to a book that we wouldn't have seen on the first reading.

As I try to get back into the habit of writing creatively, I'm going to bear the following in mind:

It is probably true that when one is in love with a work of literature one wants to make something as like it as possible but one needs to sacrifice one’s love of the moment, to think not of one’s own taste, but of a truth which does not ask for your preferences and forbids you to think about them

As much as I adore certain writers, in my own writing (which has been nonexistent lately) I try too much to mimic them. I need to develop a voice of my own. Easier said than done.

So that wasn't the satisfying, profound post I would have liked it to be, but at least I've circumvented the mental block.

Film: Osama

Last night, a friend and I raided the foreign film section at Blockbuster. We ended up watching Siddiq Barmak's Osama (2002), an Afghan film set during the Taliban regime. It follows a n unnamed 12-year-old girl who is forced to pretend to be a boy in order to support her widowed mother and grandmother. Simply working is terrifying enough, but then she is conscripted for religious and military training, where she is utterly out of place in every activity, from performing ablutions to playing with the other rowdy boys.

This has to be one of the most depressing films I have ever seen. It is a stunning depiction of the plight of women (and, well, everybody) under the Taliban. The film opens with Afghan women protesting, demanding the right to work. The government appears, and they flee. They are hosed, locked up, frightened. But some of the most harrowing moments are more subtle: when the girl's mother is escorted home on a bicycle, they are stopped by the Taliban because her feet are exposed. We never see the government officials, who are yelling at the escort, "Men will become aroused!"--only a close up of her feet as she slowly adjusts the burqa to hide them.

[Spoiler warning]

The girl is ultimately discovered and arrested, but there's a twist. My friend and I were bracing ourselves to see her shot or stoned (as two prisoners are before her, thought this is not done on camera). Instead, she is pardoned at the request of one of the Taliban who taught her earlier in the film, and given to him in marriage. The film leaves you with the terrible sense that death would actually have been the preferable alternative to the life that 'saves' her.

The film dates the protagonists' troubles at least as far back as the Soviet invasion. Makes you wonder, how much has life changed since the fall of the Taliban, and how much has remained the same?

Already Thinking About Academics, Again

After a nice lull, I've started thinking about academics again. I know I shouldn't be stressing about this for a while, but I am soon going to have to start selecting classes for the fall semester. I'm interested in too much. I want my primary focus to be literature, that I know. But what concentration, I'm not sure. I won't actually have to declare one for a good two years, but as I'm very interested in foreign languages and literatures, I'll need to start learning a second language.

I'm primarily interested in Russian and German (French too, but less so). Russia fascinates me; I love reading about the history, have enjoyed what little I've read of the literature (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov). But I don't know that reading Dostoevsky in the original Russian would add that much to my experience. I'd also like to focus on contemporary literature, and I don't know what kind of potential Russian has for that (I should probably go sniff around The Complete Review some).

I know considerably less about Germany (my European History class shamefully glossed over everything after WWII in a mad dash to prepare for the AP exam) and German literature (I think of that language I've only read a little Kafka and some of Mann's stories). But I'm still interested in learning more -- I definitely need to spend some time at the library looking up the twentieth-century history. From what I understand from The Complete Review and This Space, contemporary German lit is incredibly rich (Handke and Hofmann are sitting at the top of my to-read pile). And the very, very brief time I spent in Germany (we're talking 36 hours, here) inspired a little infatuation with Berlin, which isn't really relevant, but still worth mentioning. Any tips as to where to look for German history, literature, etc, would be much appreciated.

The End

I've finished Finding Time Again. I'm going to wait a bit to post on it at length though, because I'd like to think about it and the work as a whole. For now I'll just say that it was incredible. One of the most rewarding books I've ever read. Admittedly, I haven't read that many. But the last volume's depiction of time, of the distortions of society, of the characters (the 'masks'), of art -- I'd like to be able to convey the impression that the book left on me, the greatness of it, but I don't think I can do so without lapsing into cliche, so I'll wait until my thoughts have congealed. Okay, maybe a little (please excuse the banality): it was one of those books that you know has left a mark on you. Alright, done being sappy. More when I actually have something to say.

Reading Himself (Myself)

Proust:

It is only out of a habit derived from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that writers talk about 'my reader.' In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen himself. The recognition within himself, by the reader, of what the book is saying, is the proof of its truthfulness, and vice cersa, at least to a certain extent, it often being possible to impute the difference between two texts not to the author but to the reader.

Disparate Thoughts on Proust

I've just begun Finding Time Again (Time Regained in the other translation) and I should probably do some posting while the last books (or book, depending on how you look at The Prisoner and The Fugitive) are fresh in my mind. I'd also like to prolong the experience. I don't think I really believed I would make it this far--people build it up because of the length and the sentences, etc. It's very strange to be reading the last volume. Of course, I still may be struck by lightening before I finish.

One of the things that has really struck me is the depth and complexity of the characters. Early in Finding Time Again, the Narrator talks about his approach to people--looking for the psychological underpinnings rather than the topical details: "How ever often I dined out, I did not see the other guests, because when I thought I was looking at them, I was radiographing them" (25)*. The characters are documented with the sensitivity of a seismograph, from the largest rumblings to the most subtle. Proust adds layers and layers to his cast, considering everything, even aspects which seem contradictory. People are fascinating: we can surmise and guess and come up with dozens of theories as to their motives, all of which may be correct or partially correct on some level, and yet they remain fundamentally mysterious, unknowable. Maybe this is because in our minds, impressions of others are entwined from our own interior lives, "this continuous web of habit from which we cannot extricate ourselves" (The Prisoner, 85). And: "For every being that we know, we posses a double" (231).

Art is also taking on a greater and greater prominence: "the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over" (241).

I am not sure what to make of Proust's views on love and jealousy. Part of me wants to agree, part of me wants to resist. I was amazed at the Narrator's possessiveness, and the idealistic part of me wanted to call him too cynical. But then I couldn't help feeling truth in much of it, such as this:

We fall in love with a smile, the look in someone's eyes, a shoulder. That is enough; then during the long hours of hope or sadness, we create a person, we compose a character. And later, when we come to know better the person we love, we can no more, whatever cruel realities confront us, detach this kind disposition, this amorous feminine nature, from the person who has that look, or that shoulder, that we can remove her youth from a woman who has grown older but whom we have known since she was young. (The Fugitive, 496).

Without much experience in this department, I'll just have to leave it at that.


*The page numbers are included out of sheer habit.

How Did We Get Here?

My mother is trying to get my youngest brother, 10, to read more. I'd like to help, but I don't really know anything about YA literature. Recommendations and advice would be much appreciated.

It's gotten me thinking about beginnings--how did some of us get to be so absorbed in books, while others drifted off into other areas? My brother and I are polar opposites--he's incredibly athletic and social, I'm more of a sedintary lump and an introvert--so it's not surprising that our reading habits should be so different. But then, though I've always loved books(I still have this, the first 'chapter book' I ever read), I don't think I became a really passionate reader until I was a bit older than he is now. I'd like to nudge him into reading, but is that possible? Does it have something to do with personality or is it learned? Maybe he'd just enjoy different books.

So much for indecisiveness. I think.

About an hour after making last night's post, I found myself going back to The Fugitive. I've gotten so used to the writing and I've become so wrapped up in the novel that I'll at least finish out this volume. I've tried not to read much about the book, especially about these later parts, so that my impressions will be fresh (although I sometimes get the sense that I'm missing something, but that's what rereadings are for). I've been delaying writing about Proust, though, out of self-consciousness. I don't have much faith in my ability to write about literature (yet), so I don't want to make a fool of myself (as I seem to already have done elsewhere...). But pretty soon I'll swallow my pride and write about what I'm reading, if only because I love it so much and I feel that writing will deepen my appreciation of it. So the dallying will stop. Eventually.

Excuses

Things are slow around here lately, not because of the new technology but because I haven't been reading as much as I'd have liked. I'm about a third of the way into The Fugitive, but I think I might need to take a break from it. This past week has been a strange one, so I think I need a change before returning to Proust. And I've just got to stop being so damn lazy. I promise that there will be some better posting soon.

Geek Chic: SB Goes Mac

After nearly two decades on a PC, we've switched over to Mac. Not yet sure how this will affect posting, but it could make things slower as we are still getting acquainted with our new OS.

Still More on Being Censored Censorship

Censorship has been on my mind a lot recently. I've co-edited a student publication, Mandala, for four years, and every year we are more and more constricted by the school's administration. Last year, they came down hard on our advisor for allowing words like "nipples" and "penis" into the magazine (it's an annual publication, so we only get one shot). This year, we had a hard time finding material we liked, so we shortened the book by a great deal. We submitted it to the advisor for approval about a week before it needed to go to the publisher. Five days passed. Then the advisor went through and read it, deciding to excise a lot of what we had put in. Some of it went, some of it we defended. A lot of the art was 'edited' too (ie, a drawing of a bottle of wine had the label white-out).

Our theme had originally been social commentary, looking outside 'the bubble.' (The cover: a pen stabbing through an orange). So much for that. Some of the better work had been cut. So, another editor and I decided to show our problems indirectly: the editor's letter. We wrote about the theme, as always, and then went on to describe how some of the best material had been cut. We also included a lengthy quote from 1984. Of course, there was no intention of letting this go directly into the book. So we took a sharpie to our work and, a la Catch-22 , blacked out nearly the entire letter, leaving only a broken sentence ('We at Mandala read') and random words: 'happy,' 'bubble,' 'exercise,' etc. And, of course, the Orwell. It was beautiful. Our advisor even found it funny. We signed it and had a good laugh (yes, we knew no one would understand, but no one reads that page anyway).

So my friend and fellow editor gave me a copy of the finished publication a few days ago. It came out better than I had expected. With one bitterly ironic caveat: in place of our letter was an expanse of white. All but our signatures had been excised. How many layers of censorship is that? It was sad, but also quite funny in a sick, sick sort of way.

I leave you with the quote we had chosen as the centerpiece of the editors' letter, Syme's description of Newspeak:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.'

Scholarship and Privacy

This week's New Yorker article on Stephen Joyce, excuse me, Stephen James Joyce, seems to have many readers indignant. I agree that his efforts to block scholarship seem authoritarian and, well, self-defeating (as, from what I understand, Joyce thought that that very scholarship would ensure his immortality). His narrow views do seem to constrict the possibilities of scholarship. And the hints that he destroys Joyce's correspondences? Alarming.

However, F. Scott Kieff makes a crucial, though underplayed, point near the end of the article. D.T. Max quotes him: "It would be really bad if Shloss won. If all I need to do to get access to your property is to say that the restrictions that you are using are unfair--and by unfair I only mean unpopular--then anyone who is unpopular loses their property rights." Were Schloss to win her lawsuit against Stephen Joyce, isn't it possible that the pendulum might swing the other way, that we might see the scholars behaving just as arbitrarily as S.J. Joyce is now? And of course, that would have consequences far beyond the lifting of Joyce's copyright in 2012.

Spot of Hope

Sign on a Marc Jacobs store in New York City (thanks, Soffs):

A Preview of Things To Come

The Little Professor on this strange pheonomenon of "seasons":

One of the nice things about this area of NY--from a purely psychological point of view, that is--is that it's permissible to grumble about the weather. As a native Southern Californian only belatedly introduced to this odd phenomenon known as "seasons," I find that my delicate mental equilibrium demands the occasion grumble. In Chicago, of course, bad weather (especially bad winter weather) "builds character," and anyone who complains about it finds herself promptly written off as a weather wimp (or, er, a transplanted Southern Californian). Still, I have fond memories of a mid-1990s June in which the temperature didn't get much above 32F; it was the only time I heard the native Chicagoans really objecting to the cold. It seems that winter temperatures only build character when they stay in the winter.

We love this post because we are soon-to-be-transplants to the East Coast and we are very excited about the whole 'season' thing. Although we'll probably be quite whiny when we actually experience it the first time around (seeing as how currently we own about 2 long-sleeved shirts and a few flimsy jackets)......

While We Ruminate On a Post of Our Own

Dan Green at The Reading Experience writes about Faulkner in particular and aesthetics in art in general:

Ulin's prejudice seems to be for fiction that "re-create[s] life as it is lived," but no writer is in the business of "re-creation of life." [...]

I have highlighted this passage from Ulin's review because it encourages a view of both modernism and postmodernism that distorts and devalues their aesthetic ambitions. This view makes precisely the distinction between "artifice" and "art" that Ulin thinks distinguishes Faulkner's lesser from his greater work. "Artifice" is about style or form, while "art" is about life. But how can any work of fiction or poetry be about anything but life? On what can a writer base his art other than his experience as a living human being? That some modernists/postmodernists are preoccupied with aesthetic questions is true enough, but why are these kinds of questions not considered properly "human"? Isn't the ability to formulate the concept of the aesthetic one of our defining features as a species? Presumably Ulin wants Faulkner's books to be sources of wisdom, while I want them to be sources of aesthetic delight. But I can see no reason why the former rather than the latter should be the deciding factor in judging a writer's work sufficiently "profound" to be art.

This post makes us all the more sorry we didn't do Faulkner justice before. And that we've neglected this side of literature for so long.

Amazon links?

I came home from a lackidasical day at work to find Critical Mass making a stink over Amazon links. Prior to starting a blog, I never thought much about the Amazon links, although I guess it should have occurred to me that bloggers might get a small commission. I've been using Amazon links on this blog just for the sake of legitimacy and because I've always found it quite useful to be able to pull up the information on a book and read other opinions about it. Actually, now that I know about the associate program I'd say I'm more likely to shop via blog-links because I'd like to support the blogs I like (see the comments on the post, and The Literary Saloon's take). I agree with the comments for the most part: $0.50 is unlikely to make a blogger dishonest. And who be mistrustful about a glowing, buy-this review?

In addition to the comments about advertising and book reviews, isn't it a little naive to think that your ordinary, run-of-the-mill booksellers don't have some sort of interest in the books you buy, even more so than a blogger? A blogger writes because he wants to, and he has the freedom to say whatever he likes without any significant fear of repercussion. On the other hand, it is a bookstore clerk's job to sell books, any books. I would think this would be especially true at the smaller (ie, endangered) bookstores. And what if your boss finds out that you're actively discouraging people from buying books, especially in a struggling store?

All this is very cynical, I know, but it just seems ridiculous to pick on blogs when there are so many other areas of advertising that are much more offensive.

Fessing Up

We at SB have a slight problem. And discovering the blogosphere has really only made it worse. We buy books. Lots of books. We can't help ourselves. (Using the plural here actually makes us feel a little better, as if the books were for more than one person, rather than just....me). Express checkout? Buy-It-Now-With-One-Click? These things make it too easy for us to indulge in our addiction. You know things are bad when you start to figure that an addiction to booze or smack might save you money in the long run (you know, shorter life-span).

A sampling of recent acquisitions:

• A Strange Commonplace - Gilbert Sorrentino
• Divided Kingdom - Rupert Thomson
• White Spirit - Paule Constant (LBC nominee)
• Crawl Space - Edie Meidav (LBC nominee)
• Heredity - Jenny Davidson
• The Film Explainer - Gert Hofmann (okay, I found this for $5, so I'm not feeling guilty there)
• On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House - Peter Handke
• Samuel Johnson Is Indignant - Lydia Davis
• The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll - Alvaro Mutis (mentioned earlier)

We have to stop now, before the guilt and embarassment become too acute. But we want to read them all....

To What Effect?

My recent readings have left me wondering about my last four years of literary education. It was lacking in a lot of obvious ways, but I am wondering if my teachers' approach to literature was the correct one. ("Correct" is the wrong word. I'm sure that for their ends--standardized tests, college admissions, coherent essays--their methods were entirely sufficient. And the first year of English really did open my eyes to all of the aspects of language and ideas that I had been missing. But after that initial jump, classes basically consisted of showing up and doing the assignments. "Satisfying"? No...)

A few blog-posts started me on this tangent, so I feel I should (briefly) mention them (especially as I am at a loss as to how to begin this post). In a column last week, Scott Esposito discussed the novel meant to "explore the ideas and realities that animate our society" (to paraphrasing a small part of the post). More recently, Stephen Mitchelmore took issue with Suite Francaise because he perceived it (albeit without reading it) to be lacking in language and, more generally, as a novel. Again, just paraphrasing. Essentially, these, along with other latent, churning thoughts, got me thinking about the different approaches to the novel.

It would be wrong to say that I have read The Sound and The Fury. Yes, I physically read the book and absorbed the plot, but that is the extent of it. Part of it was that I was resistant to the whole atmosphere (ie, learning for a test rather than to learn), but part of it was the instructor's actual approach to the book. She chose to focus solely on ideas. More specifically, idea. Before we read the book, we were told that the unit would culminate with an essay about the concept of time in the novel (actually novels; we had to read Einstein's Dreams and then treat the works as equals). So beforehand we knew what we were looking for (we also generally knew what the teacher believed, which further degraded the reading process), which completely skewed the actual reading of the novel. We weren't readers, we were search engines looking for quotes to pluck out of context and wax philosophical about. Whether or not what we wrote had anything to do with Faulkner was peripheral.

In a nutshell: overemphasizing of the idea.

Obviously, ideas are important, but they do not exist in a vacuum. Even a 'novel of ideas' (I don't know that the term is even appropriate) has more to it than that. But novels are treated as classroom tools. It's almost as if educators believe that students need to learn by parable: they won't understand Jung's concept of the shadow, so we'll make them read A Separate Peace and then tell them, "Finny doesn't exist." The old "show, don't tell" adage. And although we were taught 'style analysis,' even this was about extracting the larger idea -- to what effect? (Giving rise to this conversation: "If the book is trippy, to what effect?" "It trips you out.")

What I'm trying to illustrate is that I am finding myself having to relearn how to read. The search-and-destroy method doesn't work for me. I find myself reading and having to think to myself, 'Well, what is it about the language?' To what effect? is useful for the AP exams, and for basic comprehension, but it's only a start. Maybe I should pick up some books on literary theory (of which I'm ignorant), but I also want to figure things out for myself. Ideas? Yes, important. But novels are not philosophical treatises.

Some further thoughts on my reading habits

Yesterday I gave a cursory explaination of why I'm interspersing my reading of Proust with other books, but now this strikes me as inadequate. Although part of it comes from restlessness, another part of it is to remind me of why I'm reading Proust in the first place.

Interesting as the Simenon was, I couldn't help thinking as I was reading parts of it, This is too flat, this is too simplistic. This was not really a fault of the book -- after I thought about it, I realized that these initial dissatisfactions were too extreme and not really justified. But it, like Other Electricities, left me anxious to get back to Proust. As pointed out at Tales from the Reading Room, Proust's sentences are long, spacious, full. They slow you down and make you think more about the reading experience than about any sort of plotting.

Sometimes I feel I'm going 'too slowly,' like I'm not 'accomplishing' anything in my reading, which is patently ridiculous. Yet after so many years of school, it's hard to erase the impulse to try to catalogue one's achievements. I think this is why I'm turning to these other books--to feel like I'm getting something done. And yet, reading them is largely unsatisfying. I finish them thinking, Alright, that was good, but... At the end of the day, I much prefer the reading experience of In Search of Lost Time to whatever shallow pride comes from some quantifiable 'achievement.' And that is one of the things that I am hoping to accomplish with this blog: to slow down, to learn to immerse myself in reading for the sake of literature, not to seem 'smart' or 'well-read' or anything like that.

There is so much to absorb, so much to read, so much to say. This quote from The Prisoner struck me:

Yes, I have been forced to cut down the facts and to belie the truth, for it is not one universe but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and human intelligences, that wake up every morning.

I'll definitely cling to Proust for a while now. In Search of Lost Time is a whole other way of reading, one which I'm finding much more satisfying than the alternative.

But I wonder what happens when I finish it. Where do you go from there?

Miscellany

We're too under-caffeinted to make the coherent Proust-post we'd like to, so here are some links of interest. There's work later, so probably no posts until late afternoon (PST). You've probably seen these at other blogs, but you know what? It's early.

• N+1 remembers Gilbert Sorrentino. We're ashamed to admit that we hadn't heard of Sorrentino until his recent death--those claims that Sorrentino was underrated, unknown, underappreciated, etc? I'm living (and pathetic) proof of the truth of that. I'm now on the prowl for his books. (Last I checked, the store where I worked did not have his books in stock; I put them on the outlist and am going to check again today).
  
  
• The summer edition of Boldtype is up. It includes reviews of The Amalgamation Polka, which we're very intrigued by (we picked up the galley some time ago, but haven't gotten around to it yet) and The Last of Her Kind, which interests us but not in any urgent way.
  
  
• The Literary Saloon on Suite Francaise, anothe book waiting, so patiently, on our nightstand
  
  
• Scott Esposito is polling readers about whether or not they are interested in Updike's newest, The Terrorist. We at SB? Not.
  
  
• Tales from the Reading Room on what makes a good book blog. We aspire. We're trying.
  

Readings: The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

Note: Please bear with me during my first attempts at lit crit. Hopefully, through experience, reading, and constructive criticism, I will come to sound less like a canned honors English student and more like myself, more like I actually have a worthwhile opinion. I think for now just the act of writing and thinking about what I'm reading will be beneficial.

My major goal this summer is to finish In Search of Lost Time. I first read Swann's Way (Moncrieff translation) last summer, and though I liked it, I didn't know if I would want to continue with the rest of the novel. It took me a while to get used to Proust's observations, his digressions, his meticulousness. I finished the book liking it, but sort of left hanging (it ends with the beginnings of Marcel's [Narrator's] infatuation with Gilberte Swann). A few months later, I picked up Within a Budding Grove on impulse, and enjoyed it much more. I felt I had a better grasp of the characters and the style; I also liked how it added complexity to the characters introduced before. Last month, I decided to pick up with the novel again, this time switching over to the new Penguin translation. I read both The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah and bought the last two volumes from Amazon UK. However, a little ways into The Prisoner, which happened to coincide with final exams, the end of school, etc, I became restless. My attention span fizzled.

In order not to become burned out, I've been padding my reading of Proust with books that are radically different. I read Ander Monson's Other Electricities, a winter LBC nominee (I actually liked it more than that season's winner), went back to Proust for a little while, and then became distracted again. So I picked up Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By.

The book is short and quickly paced. Briefly, it is the story of Kees Popinga, a middle-class Dutch manager who finds out that his boss has been committing fraud, leaving the company ruined. Popinga decides to abandon the life he no longer cares to sustain--he finds it boring--and to act on his impulses. He goes to his boss' mistress and propositions her, then accidentally kills her when she refuses. The majority of the novel is about Popinga's life in Paris, avoiding the police, becoming increasingly paranoid and isolated, and his attempts to remain in control.

The novel does not at all condone Popinga's renunciation. Although writes to a newspaper repudiating his respectabe former life, he also finds this repudiation too extreme. (On one level, we can see the events of the novel and Popinga's descent into paranoia and madness as a consequence of his attempt to completely abandon all of his life's responsibilities. Simenon's novel is similar to those of the existentialists in the following decades in this respect.) One of the book's most compelling aspects, for me anyway, is Popinga's utter confusion over who he is supposed to be (Kees Popinga, or the extreme opposite of Kees Popinga?) and how to live. It's not that I expect a novel to tell me how to live--that would be ridiculous. What I find compelling is just that recognition that

you can do everything you're supposed to do and still find yourself alone in a corner, feeling confused like there must be something more to life, that maybe there had been something else you could have done!

Simenon gives us a complex, existential portrait in the guise of drama (I almost wrote 'thriller,' but that seemed too cheap and not quite accurate).

Popinga ends up a parody of himself (his selves), andthe novel ends not with a statement but with a (granted, rhetorical) question: "There isn't any truth, you know?" Looking for such definitive answers, he implies, is as silly and petty as dropping a chess piece into a cup of tea.

Library in Sierra Leone

Ah, busy morning! One of my mother's friends is undertaking an ambitious project: to build and stock a library in Sierra Leone. Her goal is to ship 30,000 pounds worth of books by the end of this month. She writes:

I live in Glen Head, New York (on Long Island) and am hoping that some of you will be willing to mail me either one book or 1,000 books... whatever you can spare. New or used, interesting or boring, children (preferred) or adult, text or steamy novel, it doesn't matter. Your participation is what counts.

The freight/shipping of books by book rate can cut down on the cost of getting them to me. I assure you that knowing your books will help give some children their first experience of reading will be well worth your effort of cleaning off some shelves in your house. In addition, LemonAid Fund will send you a tax letter for your donation.

If you are interested, please contact me for the shipping address.

Recomendations

The guy who invited me down for the event emailed me last night with the names of some books we were talking about. (He's wonderful, used to work at the SCP Book Soup but now works out of LA).

Some poins of interest:

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez was in the Sunset store a few weeks ago. Yes, that one. Everyone pressed him for a book recomendation. He told them to read The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis, which sounds great. Obviously it must be, if Garcia Marquez is talking about it to starry-eyed booksellers.
  
  
• Sarah Schulman was in the LA store a few weeks ago as well to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of her novel, Empathy. Another one of her speaking points was the underrepresentation of queer writers in publishing, as well as the complete ridiculousness of the publishing trade itself but what really sparkled out of the whole thing was her discussion of writing. After listening to her talk about that last point, my friend, though initially dubious, decided to pick up the book. He read it and called it "brilliant." Schulman also gave him some recomendations . Included were Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River, Rabih Alemeddine's I, the Divine (see also: review at Moorish Girl), and, of course, Carson McCullers.
  
  
• Also, probably not news to many of you but certainly to me, two excellent independent bookstores: Small World Books in Venice and Skylight Books in LA.
  

Events

Three days with a blog and I'm already falling down on the job. Yesterday, however, I was actually doing book-related things. I worked at an off-site event for Book Soup, an indie bookstore where I am a slave part time employee (I work out of the South Coast location, but I was invited up for this event). It was a political rally for Marcy Winograd, although I didn't know that until I'd actually gotten there. Gore Vidal was endorsing her as wells as speaking and doing a signing (of his older books).

It was my first political rally. For the most, the speakers weren't great. Many of them were rambling and sort of off-topic, and there were some jokes in very bad taste (one speaker tried to make light of the Venice High shooting, which was just a few blocks away -- there were still helicopters circling when the event started). Steven Hill gave a long lecture, obviously a summary of the book we were selling. Some of what he said was interesting, but he was not a good speaker. He was stuck to his prepared notes (not well written), not very confident, and didn't know how to respond to the audience (which clearly wanted to participate). And was it really necessary to compare the government to the levees in New Orleans three times? Even once was bad, but three times?

Gore Vidal, on the other hand, was excellent, incredibly sharp. His talk was very short, no notes, and he mostly dealt with the candidate (although he made some jibes at Hill, joking that Hill had stolen one of his (Vidal's) own speeches). He criticized the government and addressed common criticisms, but never lost sight of his audience. (When the microphones kept slipping down, workers had to rush to adjust them. "Our party is the party of...." Vidal was saying as they adjusted the mic "communication and technology!"

Winograd herself was a good speaker, very confident, although she reminded me just a bit too much of the high school teachers I just managed to escape. Which makes sense, considering her background as an English teacher. I don't know how politically realistic her plans are, but I liked many of her policies.

Afterwards, Vidal and Hill signed their books (needless to say, Vidal got much more traffic). It was disheartening though, to see people crowding Vidal, coming up to his wheelchair to get pictures (while he was trying to eat), and stopping him even as he was leaving to get his autograph. Retail has definitely made me cynical about people.

Inaugural Post

I'm jumping on the blog bandwagon. Over the past year I've gotten quite addicted to litblogs, such as Maud Newton's, Scott Esposito's, Mark Sarvas', etc and many of the books I've discovered through them. So I'm making my first foray into the blogosphere. I hope that eventually my blog will be half as interesting as theirs. It'll take a while, huh?

A little about me: I'm a native of Southern California, but at the end of summer I will be moving to the East Coast for college. I don't know what I'll be studying--I'm pretty damn indecisive--but most likely it will have something to do with literature and/or humanities.

Until then, I'll be taking a class at the university near my house and trying to read as much as possible (and stay the hell away from TiVo).

Whew. Hopefully the posts won't be so awkward after this.

~AC