Benjamin on Proust

I didn't get much done today. I've been very restless, and this afternoon I had a flat tire. On the freeway. Everything's fine, but it left me jittery.

I couldn't stick with any fiction for more than a few pages (I might be postponing reading Under the Volcano), but I did finally settle down with some nonfiction: "The Image of Proust" in Walter Benjamin's Illuminations.

It's not a long essay, but there's a lot to learn from it. For instance, Benjamin on involuntary memory:

For an experienced event is finite--at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before and after it. [....]

The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real--that is, space-bound--form, and this passages nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without. To observe the interaction of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust's world, to the universe of convolution.

And on Proust's style:

His style is comedy, not humor; his laughter does not toss the world up but flings it down--at the risk that it will be smashed to pieces, which will then make him burst into tears. And unity of family and personality, of sexual morality and professional honor, are indeed smashed to bits. The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered by laughter. Their return and reassimilation by the aristocracy is the sociological theme of the work. [....]

Is it not the quintessence of experience to find out how very difficult it is to learn many things which apparently could be told in very few words?

If I don't stop now, I'll wind up typing the entire essay.

One Book Meme

Stefanie has tagged me with the one book meme.

1. One book that changed your life.
   Anna Karenina. I read it at exactly the right time, three years ago. I can't really say in what way it was life-changing, but I felt changed after I reading it.
   
   
2. One book that you've read more than once.
   The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I read it once when a favorite teacher gave it to me, then a few week ago when I decided to read it the way I should have the first time around.
   


3. One book you'd want on a desert island.
   In Search of Lost Time. On a desert island there would be no other books to feel guilty about neglecting, so I would have no problem starting from the beginning all over again.
   


4. One book that made you laugh.
   The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon. To paraphrase one of my favorite exchanges:
   Q: "Are there many Jews in Japan?"
   A: "Jujitsu."
   


5. One book that made you cry.
   I can't remember the last time I cried over a book, but the one that came closest recently was Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which is about the Rwanda genocide. Not only the tragedy, but the world's response (or lack thereof) left me desolate for weeks.
   


6. One book that you wish had been written.
   Whatever Thomas Hardy might have written had he continued to write novels after Jude the Obscure.
   


7. One book that you wish had never been written.
   HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson. I had to read it for English. Not that masculine psychology isn't important, but this book is an overly simplistic, archetypal approach. And I had to use it several times as 'criticism.' Yuck.
   
   
8. One book you're currently reading.
   Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry. Just started it last night.
   


9. One book you've been meaning to read.
   (Only one?) Kafka's The Trial. I've started it twice over the past four years and kept getting sidetracked.
   


10. Now tag five people.
    Danielle, Bloglily, Litlove, Scott, and Arash (if you ever send me your URL!)
    

Moratorium

Yesterday I was reorganizing my TBR books and the sheer number of them is just shameful. So I've made a resolution: no more book-acquisitions for three weeks (August 20). It would be longer, but I want to give myself a grace period before leaving for school (the 25th). It's not going to be easy, this book-celibacy, particularly because I read so many blogs. But I need to read what I have. I did this for about six weeks at the beginning of the year, too, so there's hope. Now I need to figure out how to temporarily block Amazon.com.....

Wish me luck. ;)

And a Little More..

One thing I don’t think I made clear about Correction: although the narrator and Roithamer attempt “little by little to comprehend,” the “why” of Roithamer’s suicide is never really in question. Unlike many books, which seek to make sense of a suicide, to find reasons, etc, Bernhard doesn’t make the suicide a mystery. Suicide is the final ‘correction,’ and thus doesn’t really need to be explained. It’s Roithamer’s life, particularly his childhood at Altensam, that is impossible to make sense of; a clear understanding is always just out of reach. For instance, Roithamer’s distaste for Altensam isn’t as easy as it seems:

He, Roithamer, had never had to get away from Altensam, he had, in fact, struggled all his life only to draw closer to Altensam, to make himself understood where it had always been impossible, a crazy dream, where it always would be impossible for him to be understood [....]

This relationship to one’s home, to one’s childhood, resonated so strongly with me. The simultaneous repulsion and attraction, the inability to come to terms with it, to define it – I think this was more compelling for me than an explanation of Roithamer’s suicide would have been. In Correction, it is the period between birth and death that is the most infathomable.

Also, Stefanie noted below that she wasn’t sure whether or not I liked the book. So I’d like to clear that up:

YES!

Correction, Part Two

[Note: This is a continuation of the previous post. I thought that it was too long as one entry.]

The first section is the narrator’s, to a point: he arrives at a mutal friend’s, Hoeller’s, to begin his work on Roithamer’s papers (wanting to work in Hoeller’s garret, where Roithamer did much of his most important work). He reflects on his friend’s life, on his suicide, and agonizes over approaching Roithamer’s legacy – how to do it, whether he should do it at all. The second half of the book, “Sifting and Sorting,” is largely Roithamer’s writings, although the narrator still keeps us distanced from his friend. Nearly every sentence contains the words “so Roithamer,” a reminder that we are reading what he has left behind, what the narrator is ‘sifting and sorting.’

All of which is outline.

The essence of the novel is the attempt to understand, “little by little to comprehend.” The “facts” set out in the beginning are revisited, explored and re-explored, lose their apparent objectiveness and gain complexity and depth, particularly in Roithamer’s writings about Altensam and his childhood. And with time, Roithamer corrects his previous writings, realizing

that everything I’d described in my manuscript was no so, that everything is always different from the way it’s been described, the actual is always different from the description, Altensam and everything connected with Altensam [….]

I had to bring it to a conclusion before I could realize that everything is different, “everything” underlined. Correction of the correction of the correction, so Roithamer.

As Roithamer writes, over time, he comes unraveled, becomes angrier, comes closer to the end:

Every correction is destruction, annihilation, so Roithamer. This manuscript too is nothing but a mad aberration, just as perhaps and with certainty, “with certainty” underlined, the erection of the Cone was nothing but a mad aberration, [….] to build the Cone and to write this manuscript about Altensam, and these two crazy acts, one resulting from the other and both with the utmost ruthlessness, have done me in, “have done me in” underlined.

The point of correcting is to destroy, to annihilate – and, so Roithamer, the act of suicide is itself a final correction, the correction.

Correction, Part One

I originally wanted to write several entries about Correction as I read, but I kept putting it off, wanting to wait until I had a better understanding of the text. I put it off until I reached the end of the first section, “Hoeller’s Garret,” figuring I’d do one entry for each half. But I procrastinated until I…finished the book. So much for describing as I read.

Throughout school, any remotely different novels were introduced via Power Point (always Power Point, in easily digestible bullet-points) so as to steer us in the right direction. I didn’t prepare for Correction. Although it would have been prudent, I didn’t want my reading colored by other people’s opinions. I wanted to read with fresh eyes.

For me, reading Bernhard was entering completely foreign territory. The form and experience of the novel were unlike any I’ve read. And so, of course, daunting for this novice to write about.

(I’d also like to note that the novel is heavily influenced by and a response to Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but I am really not familiar with these philosophers, so I there are some aspects of the novel that I have obviously missed.)

Within the first pages of Correction, we learn the core “facts” of the story. The unnamed narrator’s friend, Roithamer, has committed suicide, not long after the death of his sister. Roithamer came from a (deteriorating) upper-class family, and had inherited their estate, Altensam, despite the fact that he had fled the place to live in England as soon as he was able. Roithamer spent the last six years of his life on a project that everyone around him considered crazy: he designed and built a home, the Cone, for his beloved sister, because he believed it would make her “supremely happy” (the building literally is a cone, and she dies soon after moving in). Roithamer, though a scientist, has left a considerable literary legacy, particularly a document called “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.” Actually, this is not one document, but three: the original writing, the correction, and the correction of the correction. Roithamer dies before completing his corrections, but essentially the correction is an annihilation of the original work.

Bernhard on Reading

Thomas Bernhard:

And if it isn't life and if it isn't nature then it's what we read, it's the life and the nature of what we read, for long stretches there's only the nature we get out of our reading, life out of books, periodicals, all kinds of writings, we bridge the gaps between our contact with nature itself by reading that represents nature, represents life. Because we can't always, no organism is capable of it, absorb life-as-nature into ourselves, we go for long stretches, for years on end absorbing it only through reading matter [....] At certain points in our existence we break off the nature of our existence and proceed to exist only in books, in written stuff, until we again have the opportunity to exist in nature and to continue to exist in natre, very often as another person, always as another person, "always as another person" underlined. [....] Or else we exist in both simultaneously, in nature and in reading-as-nature, in this extreme nervous tension which as a form of consciousness is endurable only for the shortest possible time span.

More on Correction forthcoming.

Reviews At Odds

The post on Bernhard is coming, I swear, but I came across some interesting reviews that I want to share. Both are editorial reviews from Amazon, and both are about Elfriede Jelinek's Women as Lovers. This one is from the UK site:

Women as Lovers is a compelling early novel from the 2004 Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Originally published in 1975, the story of two women, Paula and Brigitte, as they grow up and start families in a small Austrian town, is anything but picture postcard pretty. But if you relish innovative, adventurous writing, you will be stunned by what Jelinek achieves with a very simple plot. [....]

Jelinek’s clear dissection and comparison of lives, and of a grim society we can only hope is disappearing, has a mathematical beauty to it. She plays with this mirroring of lives, and satire is never far away. At times the narrative voice sounds like that of a staid government film on life in the provinces; at times it seems we are privy to platitudes and local folk sayings. Yet what we hear would never be heard in a proverb or official documentary, it is far too bleakly true. There are also passages of hilarious cartoon exaggeration, where Jelinek’s theatrical skills liven up normally mundane activities like nappy-changing and tea-serving.

And this is the entire Amazon US editorial review, originally from PW:

This brief, pitiless novel advances such a narrow, bleak vision of the human race that one wonders why its author, who apparently finds everything pointless, saw the point in writing it. In oddly punctuated, repetitive prose reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's but lacking Stein's energetic compassion, Jelinek's (Lust and The Piano Teacher) latest doesn't have much good to say about love or marriage or sex or babies. And for Paula and Brigette, these are the only escapes from a life--if one can call it a life--of sewing bras in a factory in the mountains of Austria. It's hard to imagine even the pretense of love in a marriage to a drunken lout like Erich, the rotting apple of his sad, miserable parents' eye, or to fat and stupid Heinz. What shallow, covetous creatures women are, is what Jelinek seems to say. It doesn't matter if they don't enjoy sex; they don't deserve it, and anyway, someday we'll all be dead.

I know, I know -- it's Publishers Weekly, not really the best source for literary criticism. But it's the only "editorial" review featured. But I find it really irritating that the assessment centers on the presence or absence of something "good to say about love or marriage or sex or babies."

I have to wonder: how many foreign authors have been dismissed like that, and so ignored stateside? (And how many domestic ones?) And forget dismissed -- how about ignored? This is the only Amazon.com entry under "Editorial Reviews" for Thomas Bernhard's Correction: "Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title." The UK description isn't great, but at least there is one.

What resources are there for literature in translation, foreign authors, and so on? And I'll get to work on that Bernhard post now. Soon.

Long Sentences

I've been thinking more about long sentences (see Involuntary Memory) since I started Thomas Bernhard's Correction this morning. I don't think I've read enough to post on it quite yet, although it really is great. I just wanted to throw out an issue that's been on my mind since I started.

Long sentences. Correction opens with a sentence that's about two pages long. Most of the sentences (not all) are very long, and there are no paragraph breaks. You'd think this would be frustrating, but it actually works very well -- pulls you on and on, and before you've realized it, several pages have gone by. Steve M. wrote somewhere that Bernhard 'rattles along' (as opposed to being difficult), and that's really the perfect verb for it. The prose doesn't feel dense at all; it's a pleasure to read.

On the other hand, a few months ago I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch for English class. Likewise, Garcia Marquez uses extremely long sentences (much more so than Bernhard, at least thusfar). The longest goes on for about fifty pages. (Someone told me that there are something like 22 sentences in the entire 250 page book, which is probably an underestimate, but it gives you an idea of what it's like). I found Autumn excruciating. There, the conceit felt forced, almost gimmicky. It felt almost didactic -- like the author was trying to drill a lesson into my head. I'm sure that was intentional, as the book is about a Latin American dictator, so the sentences themselves become tyrannical. All the same, I didn't like it -- and I like Garcia Marquez in general. Every few lines I'd flip around to try to find the period so I could look forward to some respite. I hated reading it.

So why the difference? Why does Correction strike me as beautiful, lucid, etc, while I couldn't stand Autumn? I'm not sure, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that there's no obvious 'agenda' with Bernhard. That could be why I found Autumn gimmicky, because the prose seemed merely functional.

Has anyone had a similar experiences? Why do styles ostensibly so similar create such different reading experiences?

Possible Project

A few nights ago I was out with friends and I asked them (typical me) what they'd been reading. One of my friends was very excited about a Vonnegut novel she'd just finished. Shamed, I admitted that I'd never read Vonnegut.

The English Honors program of my school had some interesting selections for required reading, which was refreshing, but on the other hand, I missed out on a good lot of the 'canonical' books -- the ones that everyone reads. And by this I mean that in addition to their literary merits, these books form the basis of a kind of cultural literacy. (For instance, most people, at some time or other, were forced to read The Great Gatsby, or 1984, so when someone alludes to either of them, they have at least an idea of what's going on).

So I'm thinking about taking on a personal project -- to read at least some of these books I missed out on, maybe at a pace of one or two a month. I'm trying to make a list of books to read (so I don't go out of my mind), but I can't come up with many. Here's what I have so far:

• Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (I've actually scratched the surface of this one, but it's fallen to the wayside since I started Correction, of which more later)
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (I don't know how I was allowed to graduate without reading this one)
• All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
• The Stranger - Albert Camus
• Notes From the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
• Poetry of Emily Dickinson (I technically did read some of it, but it was for a class that...uh, didn't do her justice. This was the one where we'd analyze and talk about what we thought the poems were about and the teacher would respond, "Yes, but what do you think about the dashes?")
• Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison
• At least one Steinbeck, not sure which
• Something by Mark Twain
  

Any suggestions? Anything crucial that I left out? Or just really good? (Nonfiction welcome)

On Duras

After this morning's false start, and a few more, I picked up Marguerite Duras' The Lover (tr. Barbara Bray) and fell into it right away. It's a short novel centered on a fifteen-year-old French girl's affair with a Chinese millionaire (the girl, also the narrator, is unnamed, as are the majority of the characters) and her family life in Indochina of the 1930s (see Litlove's earlier post). It seems simple, but Duras has an amazing, enigmatic way of telling the story. She weaves in and out of the past and present -- in both time and tense -- as well as alternating between the first and third person. She has a remarkable way of not saying things, of circumlocution. She says it best at the beginning of the novel: "And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them."

(And in the next passage: "The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line.")

So many of her sentences are ambiguous and enigmatic (which I love). For instance, when she describes the day the narrator first meets her lover, she describes an image of which she has no picture, of which no picture has been taken. She writes, "And it's to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute." I read this sentence over and over. The virtue of failure -- and yet, the image has been created, or recreated. (It also takes me back to Proust and to memory (as everything seems to) -- is a mental image, a memory, not also a creation?)

Death and love are inextricable in The Lover. The narrator comes to see her pursuit of desire as a pursuit of death. And she discovers immortality within others, but not in the conventional sense.

It's while it's being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it's not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It's as untrue to say it's without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void.

I need to think more about that last part, "the pursuit of the void," something about it fascinates me.

This is a book I can see myself rereading and rereading.

Strange, Strange Logic

Yesterday was one of those agonizing days -- I kept picking up books, then putting them down again, unable to concentrate for more than a few pages. I hate that.

When I'm in that kind of mood, I tend towards nonfiction to tide me over. Between books, or when I'm too tired or distracted for fiction, I've been reading Mary Fulbrook's A Concise History of Germany. I'm up to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It's interesting how I tend to take nonfiction less seriously than fiction, or at least the reading of it. And it takes me much longer, too. I've been reading Fulbrook since before I began The Magic Mountain, even though it's only about 260 pages. I find it much easier to stop reading nonfiction. It took me something like six months of noncontinuous reading to finish Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, even though it was both amazingly well-written and fascinating. But I just found it easier to put down and ignore for a while. There's an immediacy to the world of fiction that demands my attention, whereas I feel I can always play catch-up with nonfiction (I also read a lot of history, which seems to contain a lot of rehashing of ideas, people, themes, etc for the sake of clarity and explanation).

Anyway, I had a terribly unsatisfactory Sunday -- couldn't stick with anything for more than three pages. This morning, however, I was reading Bloglines and noticed this post at Conversational Reading. I went to read Pynchon's description of his new book and all of a sudden I thought, "Of course! Gravity's Rainbow!" This is a book that, pre-Mann, I couldn't read more than a paragraph of. But I picked it up and read the first few pages and found myself not only understanding it, but enjoying it. So, if I can stick with it, this tome and I will be good friends for a while. Sorry, Mary.

Intuition is a bizarre thing. I will never, ever understand the way my odd brain works.

[Update: Never mind. Sorry, Pynchon, but my mind has gone out wandering and wasn't considerate enough to leave a note. Damn.]

Sappho In Particular, Love In General

Rilke makes a significant distinction between loving and being loved: the former is freeing, the latter, a burden. (Today's popular wisdom would hold the opposite: witness the cult of celebrity). He imagines that the prodigal son essentially fled the stifling love of his family, "because in their presence too he couldn't do anything without giving pleasure or pain." Their love "had nothing to do with him" -- it is not disinterested, nor is it for his own sake. It's vain.

In contrast to the somewhat self-congratulatory love of the prodigal son's family, Rilke writes that Sappho

lamented, not for one man who had left her embrace empty, but for the no longer possible one who had grown vast enough for her love. [....] how right that poetess had been: when she knew that sexual union means nothing but increased solitude; when she broke through the temporal aim of sex and reached its infinite purpose. When in the darkness of embracing she delved not for fulfillment but for greater longing. [....] By such supreme partings her heart became a force of nature.

And later, in 'marginalia,' sandwiched between two unassuming brackets: "To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure."

Solitude?

An entirely different conception of all things has developed in me under these influences; I have had certain experiences that separate me from other people, more than anything I have ever felt in the past. A different world. A new world filled with new meanings. For the moment I am finding it a bit difficult, because everything is too new. I am a beginner in my own life. [....]

My God, if only some of this could be shared. But would it be then; would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

Everything Rilke writes is so beautiful. I'm hesitant to comment much ("I am a beginner in my own life"...), but I do want to touch on something.

With Rilke, as with so many others (Proust too), there is this tension, this incongruity between the inner life and the life one shares with others. The work is an expression of the inner self that emerges from solitude. Isn't it strange that the work should then leave the artist's hands and enter the community? Those last two sentences just made me think of that. Here, Malte writes that "it is at the price of solitude" -- and yet, here I am, miles and decades away, holding the novel in my hands.

Calculated, Carelessly

Dorothy and Litlove have great posts up about blogging personas and pseudonyms. Early on in this blog, I blundered by not maintaining enough anonymity. Now I think I'm getting the hang of balancing authenticity and exposure.

Anyway, I wanted to write about pseudonyms. "AC" isn't too difficult to figure out, nor is it very literary, clever, etc (I wish it stood for a famous author or a great novel, but it's just a family nickname, nothing special). But there is an explanation for the URL.

A few years back, when I was at a loss for a handle (for an unrelated website), a friend told me to open a book at random and use whatever I found. So I picked up Pushkin (Eugene Onegin, tr. Charles Johnston) and opened to page 71:

No, incorrect and careless chatter,
words mispronounced, thoughts ill-expressed
evoke emotion's pitter-patter,
now as before, inside my breast

I didn't really think much about it before transferring it to Blogger, but now that I look at it, it seems quite appropriate for my literary fumblings....

Rereading

Is it possible, it thinks, that we have not seen, known, or said anything real and important? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, meditate, and record, and that we have let these thousands of years slip away like a recess at school, when there is just enough time to eat your sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it is possible. [....]

Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we have always spoken about its masses, just as if we were telling about a gathering of many people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it is possible. [....]

But if all this is possible, if it has even a semblance of possibility, --then surely, for the sake of everything in the world, something must be done.

--Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(tr. Stephen Mitchell)

I had the same problem today as before -- I found myself unable to sustain an interest in a book for more than a few pages. It was a kind of reading I was looking for -- like the experience of reading Proust and Mann.

I dug around my bookshelf (my books are double-stacked) until I found The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I read it two years ago, but even then I knew I hadn't really given it the attention it deserves. I think now I know how to approach it -- slowly, with patience, with attention to images and to words. Not looking for a narrative.

I'm only about thirty pages or so in, but it's exactly what I was looking for. Part of me feels guilty over the other neglected books (Danielle currently has a good post up about that), but there's just something wonderful about this kind of reading.

And the book carries a secondary emotional meaning for me -- one of my favorite teachers gave it to me, apropos of nothing. The first page is inscribed:

AC,
The muse always alights from darkness...
GR
12/04

And a Few More Dubliners

I've finished the rest of Dubliners. The word "unexpected" comes to mind. True, I was clueless going in, with no preconceptions other than the "difficult" one (which it really wasn't). But in each story, Joyce lures you in to a certain atmosphere and then turns the story on its head. Or turns you on yours, depending on how you choose to look at it. "Grace" begins with a man found unconscious and bleeding in a bar and ends in the Catholic church, but rather than being a tale of saving grace, Joyce paints a picture of the Jesuits reminiscent of the mafia -- scheming and unscrupulous. And ultimately secular, like a corporation or an oppressive government.

"The Dead," the longest and most famous of the collection, is probably the best example of this. The 60% of the story is radically different from the rest. It begins with a concert and a Christmas dinner -- very bourgeois, banal really. After the party, a song awakens a memory in the protagonist's wife, acting much like Proust's madeleine. The husband, Gabriel, realizes how little he knows his wife and what kind of role he has really played in her life. The contrast is so sharp -- the party (and past life) is terribly quotidian, the present given depth and shadow. I'll admit I was kind of bored by the first part of the story, but when I got to the last third I realized that that was the point -- the vignette capture's the couple's entire life together. Like most of the stories, maybe moreso (probably why it's so famous), I was left unsettled and uneasy. It's hard to explain; I keep wanting to use the word 'depth.' The characters who initially seemed quite flat suddenly gain depth -- very suddenly, giving you a real feel for Gabriel's dizziness.

The stories are all acerbic and cleverly cynical -- take, for instance, this passage from "A Mother:"

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

I've read that the stories are arranged like a human life, beginning with childhood (the narrator of "The Sisters" is a young boy) and ending with death ("The Dead"). It's true, but then life and all of its stages are encapsulated in every story.

Not too scary after all.

An Aside

When I worked in the bookstore, one of the managers loved Joyce, so I would always ask him about reading Joyce for the first time. I was interesting in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. No, he told me, read Dubliners first. Then, if you want to read more, read Portrait, then the Ellmann biography, then the annotated Ulysses. If possible, read Ulysses with a class. And so on. I didn't really understand why Dubliners should be first, but he was a smart guy and a huge Joyce fan, so I trusted him.

A little while ago, I read Stefanie's post on not being able to mix Joyce and Proust (I guess some books are more reticent with each other than others). Actually, now that I think of it, it's quite fitting that they don't go well together because they didn't have much to say to each other in real life, either.

I was a little befuddled by the post. Are they so different? I asked myself. So I went to Amazon and read the beginning of Portrait:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

I'm not even sure if I typed that right. Compare that with the opening of "A Painful Case" from Dubliners:

Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.

Now I know why my friend said Dubliners first: it innoculates you, makes you think, "Oh, Joyce isn't so scary"....

"A Little Cloud"

I'm moving through Dubliners very slowly, as my sleeping has been erratic lately (and the dogs like to get me up early).

So far, one of the best stories in the collection is "A Little Cloud." The piece really captures the grittiness of Joyce's Dublin, and the ambivalence of Dubliners towards their city:

The friend he had known under a shabby and necessitous guise had become a brilliant figure in the London press. [....] The glow of a late autumn senset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures -- on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life [...]

And a few passages later:

He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

The stories all have varying degrees of this juxtaposition: the grit and the decay with the hope and the nostalgia. Characters who don't fully understand their feelings for their home.

Tsunami Relief

I don't know what's going on elsewhere, but here in the US the tsunami is getting little to no coverage in the media. (The Middle East coverage is pretty skewed, too; see Laila's post). Please donate if you can. (Also, if you know of any other relief organizations that deserve a mention, please let me know and I'll post a link)

Omissions

The morning I began Dubliners -- my first foray into James Joyce. Another one of those writers who seems very, very daunting, but so far so good. (This book is looking more and more enticing. If it weren't so damn expensive....)

Already I've noticed something that fascinated me in Mann (and tormented me: did I miss something???): omissions. In "The Sisters," so much is left unsaid. The characters discuss Father Flynn in a very roundabout way, trying to make points without the narrator understanding them. And the dialogue is punctuated with ellipses. Whenever something important seems to be coming, it's suddenly ... avoided. Tantalizing.

Mann, too, avoided crucial scenes. After a pivotal scene between Hans Castorp and Frau Chauchat on Mardi Gras eve, the narrator tells us that they spoke once more; after this second conversation, Frau Chauchat gives Hans her 'interior portrait' (x-ray -- both old-fashioned in a sense and simultaneously quite morbid). You'd think that with such an outcome, the conversation would be important. But it's omitted entirely. And later, Joachim discovers that his cousin is secretly going for psychoanalysis, something that the former considers 'a betrayal.' After the discovery, only one or two references are made to Hans' analysis, but the substance is never revealed. If the storytelling is so slow and deliberate, as the narrator explicitly tells us several times, why leave these out?

The omissions are fascinating, but sometimes I feel like I'm knocking my head against a wall: What is it? What is it? What don't I know?

I'm sure that's the point, of course. And even if the technique frustrating at times, it's pretty damn effective.

Das Ende

I've finished The Magic Mountain. For part of the last hundred pages, I felt I was trying to sprint through, for the sake of finishing (and for getting through a bizarre chapter about telekenisis), but I calmed down towards the end and was able to enjoy it.

Hans Castorp has indeed spent years on his magic mountain, but the tensions of Europe errupt and jolt him from his position as the 'German sleeper.' The flatland social-political tensions he ignores break out amongst the International Sanatorium Berghof patients. Not just tensions, but real, physical fights. The extremes found within certain patients (Settembrini and Naphta, etc) turn violent. Settembrini tells Castorp, 'The purified abstraction, the ideal, is at the same time also the absolute, and is thus rigor itself, and contains more profound and radical possibilities for hatred, for categorical and irreconcilable hostility than are found in social life.' Long held ideas (Naphta's about the Church, science, and communism come to mind) become increasingly absurd. The magic mountain seems to explode (implode?), no longer able to stay removed from European politics.

I really don't want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it and wants to, but I do want to say that it felt like the book had come full circle (like the cycles of time, of the passing years). The language of the conclusion--the very phrases--echoed the rest of the book. The narrator bids Hans Castorp, still 'life's faithful problem child,' farewell. Despite any flaws he may have, saying goodbye was difficult. Somehow, I felt as if years had passed since I began the book.

Even without a lengthy plot description, I want to convey a flavor of the reading experience towards the end. I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler leave you with these few lines:

There were moments when, as you 'played king,' you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around--will love someday rise up out of this, too?

'And now I have it'?

In my previous post on Mann, I mentioned something to the effect that Hans Castorp doesn't grow in the sense that Proust's narrator does. I think this was something of an overgeneralization on my part and I'd like to elaborate.

In In Search of Lost Time, the narrator constantly puts events in perspective and reflects on his growth throughout time. Not so in The Magic Mountain. But this is not to say that Hans Castorp doesn't learn anything. (Spoiler warning)

For much of the book, Hans Castorp is caught between two pedagogues--Herr Settembrini and, more recently, Herr Leo Naphta. The latter is a Jesuit (though not really pious), which is fascinating and alarming for Castorp. Later, Naphta reveals that Settembrini is a Freemason. The two academics argue passionately for the sake of influencing Hans Castorp, whose opinions fluctuate regularly. Which isn't surprising, given the self-contradictions apparent in all of the rhetoric. Both men, though supposedly coming from completely opposite viewpoints, wind up at essentially the same place: they both espouse some form of terror or moral absolute. (These are the only real indicators of the political situation in the flatlands. There are alarming flags: Settembrini declare that, in order for progess to advance, the first blow must be struck to Vienna; Naphta vehemently declares the necessity of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' and so on. Settembrini also makes an interesting remark regarding Germany, to the effect that it is caught between Eastern and Western traditions and must 'choose.' Hans Castorp does not answer.)

In the midst of this 'moral chaos,' Hans Castorp teaches himself to ski, and one day gets caught--willfully, it turns out--in a snowstorm. Exhausted, he collapses and, in delerium, has a dream. He comes away from this vision with a sense of the horror and violence latent beneath polite civilization. His thoughts turn to his 'two pedagogues:' 'With their question of 'true aristocracy'! With their nobility! Death or life--illness or health--spirit or nature. Are those really contradictions? I ask you: Are those problems? No, they are not problems, and the question of their nobility is not a problem, either.'

He essentially rejects both as windbags, realizing that reason

stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. [....] Death and love--there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death--it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. [....] For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken. For with that I have dreamed my dream to its end, to its goal. I've long been searching for truth [....] The search for it drove me into these snowy mountains. And now I have it.

Yes, Hans Castorp emerges from the wilderness with his truth, but this is where he is fundamentally different from Proust's narrator. The revelations at the end of Finding Time Again precipitate action; not so for Hans Castorp. The latter returns to his mountaintop sanatorium, and 'by bedtime he was no longer exactly sure what his thoughts had been.'

The changes in Hans Castorp are smaller. Afterwards, he is able to take his pedagogues' arguments a little less seriously, to see them as 'little chatterboxes.' And he resists playing the cavalier when Clavdia Chauchat returns to the sanatorium with a Dutchman, Mynheer Peeperkorn, a 'traveling companion.' Rather than shun the man or 'play cock of the walk,' Castorp befriends him and takes an interest in him for his own sake. But otherwise, he continues to live life as before--he still has moments of thoughtless effusiveness, still loves Clavdia, and so on.

Here, I think, is where the warped time comes into play. I've gotten a little farther since the last posting, and since then the narrator has let it slip that years have probably passed since Hans' arrival. The blurring of time and the inability--and unwillingness--to recognize its passage stunt any major changes. Proust makes similar observations about how time seems to pass, but his narrator is able to be more objective than Mann's. Hans Castorp initially is very intrigued by the phenomenon of time, but as his stay at the sanatorium prolongs, he thinks of it less, and then in a more abstract sense. He doesn't apply his conjectures to his situation. Thus his revelations are very dreamlike in that they seem to be almost outside of time. What took Proust's narrator so many years and so many experiences to learn, Hans Castorp learns in a dream. And, as with a dream, his realization loses its power when he returns to his Swiss Shangri-La, to life as usual.

[Note: like earlier, as I read on, I keep finding that I need to qualify what I've already written. Part of the medium, I guess....]

Another Take On Time

Thomas Mann:

Time is an element of narration, just as it is the element of life--is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. [....] But since [narration] can 'deal' with time, it is clear that time, which is the element of narrative, can also become its subject; and althouh it would be going too far to say that one can 'narrate tim,' it is apparently not such an absurd notion to want to narrate about time--so that a term like 'time novel' may well take on an oddly dreamlike double meaning.

This reminds me so much of In Search of Lost Time, of Proust's desire to portray beings in Time. All of you lucky readers at Involuntary Memory have by now encountered Time in some form -- one's perception of it, life within it, etc. Time has been central in The Magic Mountain as well. Time is warped in the sanatorium, up there in the mountains removed from real life. As I near the end of the book, the narrator increasingly insinuates that Hans Castorp, the 'ordinary man,' is no longer trustworthy when it comes to discerning time. The narrator refers vaguely (so far) to his 'disgraceful management of time, in his wicked dawdling with eternity.'

These insinuations are pretty abstract until a new character, Mynheer Peeperkorn (Frau Chauchat's new lover), orders a bottle of wine -- an '06. It occurred to me that I have no idea what year it is, or how many have elapsed since the novel began. Nor does Hans Castorp, who can no longer determine his own age -- 'because we lack an internal organ for time, because, that is, if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating elapsed time.'

Unlike Proust's narrator, though, Hans Castorp does not seem to grow particularly wiser with the passage of time. It seems that the warping of time up on the Magic Mountain also stunts the growth of perspective...

On 'San Luis Rey'

I've been meaning to write about The Bridge of San Luis Rey for a few days now, but I've been distracted by some unofficial college news (I'm eagerly awaiting the confirmation of my housing assignment for the next year; more when I get the official word).

Everyone rags on Amazon recommendations ('Recommended for you: Sudoku for Dummies because you said you own The New York Trilogy,' etc), but sometimes they're helpful. This is how I first found Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I know, it's like admitting to using match.com or eHarmony. But Amazon did well by me.

In 1714, a bridge in San Luis Rey, Peru, snaps, sending five people to their deaths. One witness, a Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper, witnesses the tragedy and sets out to discern the 'Intention' behind it. (He believes that theology must be recognized as an 'exact science;' in the process, he comes up with some rather creepy statistics in which he calculates the worth or goodness of those who live and those who die by plague. The results? 'The dead were five times more worth saving.') The book that we read is not the one that Brother Juniper writes, but rather an anonymous account from several decades (centuries?) later. History hasn't provided clarity, though: 'And I, who claim to know so much more, isn't it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?'

Despite the declared hypothesis--the Intention--the events in the characters' lives seem senseless and capricious (culminating, of course, with the accident). 'The discrepancy between faith and facts,' the narrator writes matter-of-factly, 'is greater than is generally assumed.' The survivors are no better off--they're left with bitterness and regret. Only one, an Abbess of a convent, is able to glean any meaning from it: to love, 'the only meaning.'

It's a very short book; the style is simple but beautiful. It's both sharp satire (skewering society and the Catholic Church) and a bittersweet meditation on love. Although five people were killed in the accident, the book only deals with three of them directly--a Marquesa (ridiculed by contemporaries but later a revered writer), Esteban (mourning the loss of his twin), and Uncle Pio (the former caretaker of Camila Perichole, a great actress). All three love particular individuals , but their various loves are not returned. The Marquesa, driven to impress her daughter, writes magnificent letters; she is posthumously recognized for her genius. The past, the future, the present--they never seem to line up correctly.

As I write this, the book sounds very bleak, but it really isn't. It's often very funny, and although it ends by suggesting chaos rather than divine intervention, it ends on a hopeful note. Life may have no discernable plan, death may strike regardless of virtue, but in between, there's love. Love justifies itself, even if it is not returned.

Family Tragicomic

My new books proved too tempting today. I put The Magic Mountain aside and read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. It's only the second graphic novel I've ever read -- actually, it's not a novel, but a memoir. (Do graphic fictions and nonfictions belong together just because they're illustrated, or am I being too literal?) So, graphic memoir. I usually don't read memoir, either. There's a lot of talk about this book in the blogosphere, but I didn't really take much of an interest until someone at work showed me a few pages in which Bechdel intertwines her story with In Search of Lost Time (there's a whole chapter called "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower").

Fun Home is the story of Bechdel's childhood, her own coming out, her discovery that her father himself was gay, and her father's death (possibly a suicide). These are at the core of the story, but the way Bechdel fleshes them out is incredibly poignant. The story goes in nonlinear fashion; each chapter illuminates what we know and adds depth and mystery to the characters. (Does one refer to 'characters' in a memoir?)

One of the many compelling aspects of the book is the way that Bechdel weaves literature into her story. She associates her family and her narratives with Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, James, Wilde, Colette, and Camus, to name a few. It isn't just clever name dropping--not at all--nor mere description. Bechdel writes, "I employ these allusions [...] because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms." Her bookish upbringing allows her to find more meaning in her life than she otherwise might have, and vice versa.

Her father and his predilections remain inscrutable, despite what she is able to analyze, conjecture, and remember. During a trip to New York for the bicentennial, she realizes that "the suspect element is revealed to be not just benign, but beneficial, and in fact, all-pervasive." Bechdel doesn't try to "claim" her father as gay. She draws parallels between her sexuality and his, but does not confuse them. From her life, and from Proust, Wilde, and Joyce, she discovers that "sexual shame is itself a kind of death." And in the end, it's the familial ties that count.

Fun Home is wonderfully, wonderfully done.

I Really Don't Have a Problem

Today was my last day at the bookstore. Although I know it's time to move on, it was sadder than I expected. I'm now a civilian. Of course, this won't stop me from showing up and bothering everyone there.

Someone gave me a generous gift certificate for graduation, so I used to, ah, adopt my employee-hold pile. And a few others....

Looking at this stack, it's clear that litblogs have heavily influenced my reading interests, broadened them. I can't wait to start these.

I think maybe my TBR pile is getting out of control.

No, impossible....

Interlude

I'm trying not to reread my earlier posts on Mann, afraid that I'll find them boring, or missing the point entirely. There have been so many great discussions in the blogosphere lately about reading impressions, about atmosphere; I feel like I'm stalled in honors-English-mode. I still don't quite know the right way to convey my impressions, to write about books, or at least it feels that way. Confusing, uncertain.

How does one write about literature one loves?

The Magic Mountain, Part Two

I went to write about two aspects of the book--illness and desire--and realized that I would have to break them down again. So I'll start with illness--it's very, very strange in The Magic Mountain--and discuss the other topic another time, perhaps when I've gotten farther into the book. Again, this is not comprehensive. At all. But I wanted to convey the feel of the novel, the strangeness and the morbidity, the way illness almost feels like a cult, the way the sanatorium strikes me as a kind of Purgatorio, and one that does the opposite of what it intends.

As would be expected for a book about a sanatorium, the nature of illness and its implications play a significant role. When Hans Castorp first arrives, he mentions to Settembrini that he finds sickness ‘venerable,’ ennobling in some way. Thus he is appalled by the crassness of many of the patients – he finds it incompatible with the exaltation he associates with suffering. Settembrini retorts that, on the contrary, illness is a ‘debasement,’ that it turns invalids into bodies without souls. Hans doesn’t quite know what to make of this, but later, while looking at Frau Chauchat, he realizes that her ‘carelessness’ is the same as her ‘debasement,’ and that is precisely what attracts him.

If illness is debasement, maybe this is why it gives the patients such a sense of freedom (relative to their peers in the flatlands). They’re no longer constrained by the burden of making themselves appear virtuous, chaste, or whatever it is that flatland society demands. Which would explain why the characters cling so tenaciously to their afflictions. They take their temperatures six times a day, and those with almost-normal temperatures (including Hans) exaggerate the extent of their illness. There is an underlying fear of being sent back ‘down,’ to the flatlands. After a while, illness seems almost a pretext. Joachim tells his cousin the story of a young woman who, fully recovered, tried desperately to make herself sick, and went so far as to falsify her temperature chart. In the end, she was forced to leave. Another young man returned to the flatlands, but was unable to readjust to everyday life – he only wanted to loaf around with a thermometer in his mouth, telling people that their priorities were wrong. His family sent him back to the sanatorium. Illness and isolation allow the patients to change their demeanors, to eschew manners and conventions, to essentially live outside of ordinary time.

At other times, the sanatorium seems like a kind of Purgatorio, where souls are held in indefinite limbo. No patient knows just how long his or her stay will be (often, time is extended).

Furthermore, the sanatorium almost generates sickness. Hans Castorp is only mildly anemic when he arrives, but almost immediately flushes and has heart palpitations. The doctors see illness everywhere (Settembrini suggests that they’re overzealous, identifying illness where there is none and vice versa). One of the specialists, Director Behrens, had a wife who died at the sanatorium. After her death, he caught an indeterminate sickness; the narrator expresses doubts as to whether he ever recovered. Which poses an interesting dilemma:

‘But can someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he is enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free? […]With all due respect, one must ask whether someone who is part of the world of illness can indeed be interested in curing or even nursing others in the same way a healthy person can.’

There’s a very morbid, cultish feeling to the patients’ and doctors’ obsessions with their various illnesses. The extremely ill are revered; the mildly ill, pitied or disdained.

One of the more grotesque scenes occurs when Hans and Joachim go for their x-rays. They get their chests photographed, but then they have to stand in front of a fluorescent lens (some kind of x-ray device) while the Behrens examines the inside of their chests. Hans looks at his cousin’s and feels a kind of awe—the illness is manifest, written on the body. And he stares at his cousin’s heart, watches it beat.

After his own, Hans ‘begs’ the doctor to let him look at his own hand through the lens. He sees ‘the process of corruption anticipated [….] and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.’

The doctor gives Hans Castorp a free photograph of his x-rayed chest. Hans puts it in his wallet; Settembrini jokingly refers to it as his ‘passport.’

The Magic Mountain, Part One

I'm about a third of the way into The Magic Mountain now, and I wish I'd started writing about it sooner. Since there is so much to say, I'm going to cut my thoughts into two large posts. The first one, this one, will give a basic overview of what's going on, the 'who's who,' and then next one (hopefully up shortly!) will delve more deeply into some of the interesting aspects of the novel so far. So, without further ado, here goes....

The Magic Mountain is the story of Hans Castorp, a young bourgeois German, and his stay at the Berghof sanatorium—told “for the sake of the story itself.” When we meet Herr Castorp, he is taking a three-week ‘vacation’ before beginning an apprenticeship as a naval engineer. Although he cockily assures the other patients that he is healthy, at the end of his stay the specialists have found something wrong with him and he stays on for an indefinite period of time (which is expected, considering the length of the book and RH’s spoiler on the back cover), although his affliction is relatively minor.

The narrator suggests at the beginning of the novel that Castorp is average, an everyman (at worst, mediocre). He’s bright, though not exceptionally hard-working, enjoys luxuries (tobacco, good food, wine), and considers himself refined (he takes decorum very seriously—ie, finding the slamming of a door to be downright offensive). He’s impressionable—and wants to be impressed, influenced.

Hans Castorp joins his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at the ‘spa;’ Joachim is seriously ill and has been ‘sentenced’ to five more months at the sanatorium, although he longs to return to the ‘flatlands’ and join the military. Hans falls in with his cousin’s routine, but retains the aloof superiority of a visitor, maintaining that he is perfectly healthy. Time at the sanatorium is warped: there are no seasons to speak of, time is for the most part measured in months, most days are the same. Patients live in the ‘eternal present:’

‘The tenses of verbs become confused, they blend and what is now revealed to you as the true tense of all existence is the “inelastic present,” the tense in which they bring you your soup for all eternity. But one can’t speak of boredom, because boredom comes with the passing of time—and that would be a paradox in relation to eternity.’

The sanatorium is its own universe, filled with foreign nationals of all kinds with definite social patterns (albeit much laxer than those in the ‘flatlands’). Affairs between patients are common, and usually undisguised. Hans Castorp himself becomes infatuated with, then falls in love with, a married Russian woman named Madame/Frau Clavdia Chauchat. He first notices her because of the qualities he finds distasteful – she slams doors, is careless, bites her fingernails, has poor posture, etc. As time passes, though, he comes to find these same qualities endearing.

One of the sanatorium’s most inscrutable inmates (I think the term here is less an archaism than it seems) is Herr Settembrini, an Italian ‘humanist’ and man of letters (read: pedagogue). Settembrini’s diatribes are seductive in their grand pronouncements, but stepping back one finds much to disagree with. He seems less of a humanists after a while than a Marxist or socialist-revolutionary, calling for republicanism and denouncing music as ‘politically suspect.’ His humanism, too, is suspect; he compares nature to Asia and civilization and technology to Europe, making arguments that I imagine Europeans used to justify colonialism, industrialization, and social inequality (they smack of social Darwinism). Castorp is both attracted to and repulsed by Settembrini.

As his three weeks draws to a close, Hans Castorp finds himself reluctant to leave. As luck would have it though, he comes down with a cold, which the doctors diagnose not as a minor affliction, but as a result of a more serious ‘moist spot’ in his chest. Hans stays on at the Berghof, no end in sight, and becomes more and more like his fellow patients in his manners (or lack thereof), his obsession with and pride in his illness, the brazen way he tries to catch Frau Chauchat’s attention, and his desire to stay up on the ‘magic mountain’ indefinitely.

Selections

I'm moving slowly through The Magic Mountain, mostly due to laziness but also because I've also begun A Concise History of Germany. I am, however, thinking about my first post on Mann, which should be up within a day or so.

As I was browsing the Internet looking for a parka (like a strange animal to me), I started thinking about which books I would take with me to college. I went through my TBR stack--er, stacks--and came up with the following* tentative first selection:



Something tells me that these piles are only going to grow....

*Only books in the foreground. They're sitting in front of a larger TBR stack.

"And with that, we begin."

Over the past week or so I've made several abortive attempts at starting new books. I've been a little skittish about longer novels, although probably for the wrong reasons. I tried several different contemporary novels and short story collections and was unable to really stay focused. So I'm going to change tactics: rather than try to get away from Proust, I'm going to read something similar in style, feed the experiences that In Search of Lost Time fostered in me. So I'm going to start The Magic Mountain, which seems completely illogical given the monstrous pile of books in my TBR stack. Stacks. But I've read some of Thomas Mann's short stories before, and his meticulousness, the style of reading his work demands, strikes me as just what I need.

I think I'm actually glad that my teachers were so disdainful of the Modernists (most of them loved the Postmodernists, or at least the idea of Postmodernism) because they gave me a chance to discover those writers for myself.

I was hesitant at first, but then I picked up The Magic Mountain in the bookstore and read the forward:

Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.

And so this storyteller will not be finished telling our Hans's story in only a moment or two. [...] It will be best for him if he is not all too clear about the number of earthly days that will pass as the tale weaves its web about him. For God's sake, surely it cannot be as long as seven years!

And with that, we begin.

How could I resist?

Blurbage

Robert McCrum on the meaning behind blurbs:

Rule one: if it sounds like baloney, it probably is baloney. 'A dark allegory about empathy, nuclear power and contemporary feminism' is not for us. Then there are those danger words. Adjectives to be wary of include: 'intense' (quite boring), 'merciless' (boring), 'unsparing' (very boring) and 'bleak' (unbelievably boring). There is also that lit-crit jargon that says everything and nothing: 'ironic' (up itself), 'magisterial' (too long), 'surreal' (no plot), 'humane' (turgid), 'complex' (unreadable) and 'picaresque' (pointless). Beware 'masterpiece' (we paid too much for this and it's translated from the Albanian). Watch out for 'momentous' (not a quotable review in sight and the editor responsible has been fired).

This was a good article to wake up to. (Via This Space).

Today's Two Cents on Blogging

This is from Sut Jhally's article, "Imaged-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture" (from last year's Women's Studies text):

The other set of concerns are connected to issues of literacy in an image-saturated society. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, in the early development of capitalism workers were taught how to read but not to write. The skills of reading were all tht were required to follow orders and to understand the Bible. Contemporary society is in a similar position. While we can read the images [in media] quite adequately (for the purposes of their creators) we do not know how to produce them....most people do not understand how the language of images works.

The article focuses primarily on images in advertising, but I would say that this applies to most mainstream media as well. In this sense, blogs are part of the answer to Jhally's 'literacy' issue. Many bloggers take issue with the treatment of literature in the established print media (NYRB, New York Times Book Review, etc), and their response has been to establish these litblogs as an alternative. Which, in turn, many in the media react vehemently against. Jhally again:

information about the institutional context of the production and consumption of the image-system should be a prerequisite for literacy in the modern world....Such a course of action will not be easy, for the institutional structure of the image-system will work against it. However, the invigoration of democracy depends upon the struggle being engaged.

Maybe, at least as far as blogs are concerned, this is a little too utopian for our purposes. Nonetheless, I like Jhally's idea of 'literacy;' I think litblogs work to enhance that literacy (eg, in terms of the publishing world), which can't possibly be a bad thing. They also promote a diversity which is rarely seen in the print media (seriously, how many times do I need to be told that critics dislike Updike's latest?).

Some of many reasons I enjoy litblogs so much.