Of Books and Bicycles

You'll find me over at Wordpress

2007-01-01T11:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm moving my blog. You'll find me here. If you would, please update your blogrolls and feedreaders and whatever else. Thanks!

The new year

2006-12-31T08:29:00.000-05:00

I feel uncertain about making resolutions for the new year, not being a resolution-making kind of person and especially having just read Bloglily's very sane post on the topic. But I do want to think about what I'd like to accomplish this year, if only to try something new. So here are some goals, but I won't beat myself up if I don't reach them. Mostly they have to do with reading, although I'll end with some cycling goals.

First of all, back in October I made a list of 13 classics I'd like to read in 2007, and I'd like to complete that list, with one change. Here's the list again, with James Boswell's Life of Johnson substituted for the Burney novel, either Camilla or Cecilia, I'd had on there originally:

1. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained.
2. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall.
3. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson.
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote.
5. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out.
6. Virginia Woolf, The Years.
7. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks.
8. Gertrude Stein's Three Lives.
9. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and/or Wives and Daughters.
10. Balzac's Cousin Bette.
11. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
12. Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater.
13. James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

I'm determined to finish Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks, the Woolf novels, the William James, and the Proust novels; the others I'd really, really like to read but if I don't, that's okay. Considering my reading pace, 50-60 books a year, this list is pretty ambitious.

After that, I really don't want to get specific about what I want to read, as I like room for spontaneity. But here are a few things I'd like to do:

Read more poetry than I did last year. As I read 2 1/2 books last year, this will mean 3 books, plus finishing up the 1/2 I have left in my current book -- Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.
Read more plays than I did last year. As I read no plays at all last year, this will meant reading at least one. We have a copy of Angels in America around the house I might pick up. I just realized, however, that I'll be teaching a play this spring -- as yet unidentified -- and I suppose that will count. It kind of feels like cheating, though, in a weird way. If I'm reading it for work, it shouldn't count for my New Year's resolutions? That's silly.
Read more short stories. I managed one collection (Alice Munro) and some individual stories for A Curious Singularity, so this means I'll try to read two collections and probably more individual stories for the short story blog.
Read more books in translation. Last year I read 8. If I read all the books listed above, that will be 7 (Balzac, Mann, Cervantes, and 4 volumes of Proust). Any other books I read in translation I'd like to be non-European. (I'll check out Book Traveller's posts for inspiration.)
Read one science book. I love reading science but I haven't done it lately. I have Brian Greene and Bill Bryson on my shelves; one of those will do nicely.

Okay, I'll stop there. I could on, but the fewer goals I have, the likelier I am to reach them.

Before I begin all this, however, my first order of business is to decide which blog I want to use, the Blogger one or the Wordpress one. I can make the big, life-shaping decisions almost instantly, but the little decisions take me forever.

As for cycling, I'm not sure what goals to set, as I'm really still not sure what I'm capable of. But here's an attempt:

This past year I rode somewhere between 3,656 and 3,700 miles (depending on how far I ride today). For next year, I'd like to ride at least 4,000 miles but preferably as many as 4,500. The 3,656 number counts only outdoor rides on my road bike; I rode a few more miles on the indoor trainer and on my mountain bike, but those I can't easily count. I'm aware that when it comes to preparing to race, I should probably focus less on the number of miles I ride and more on the level of intensity with which I ride those miles, but one of the things I learned last year is that I don't have enough of an endurance base, so reaching a certain base level of miles ridden seems valuable.
I'd like to ride in more races than I did last year. Last year I did 16 -- not all of them were official USCF races, but the non-official ones were just as challenging. I did 13 criteriums and 3 road races. I wimped out on a few races in May and June and then I got burnt out toward the end of the summer and stopped racing, so this coming year I'd like to complete more and stick with it longer.
I'd like to stay with the pack longer in each race and not get dropped as often. This goal should be more specific, but I don't know how to make it so. So I'll just have to say that I'm going to train harder so I'm stronger and therefore won't be quite as easy to leave behind.

We'll see how I do. Chances are I'll accomplish some of these things, but other, maybe better, things will happen and the year will turn out differently than I expect.

More on Footsteps

2006-12-30T08:16:00.000-05:00

I love books that deal with an intellectual problem or issue in a personal way -- books that are as much about the author grappling with the issue as they are about the issue itself. Richard Holmes's Footsteps is just such a book; it's about biography as a genre and about the lives of various writers Holmes has researched, but mostly it's about Holmes's process of learning how to write biography and his discoveries about what we can and can't know about the past and about other people's lives.

I've written about Holmes's chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson, where he writes about following in Stevenson's tracks through France; I've now read his chapter on William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft and I'm halfway through his chapter on Percy Shelley. The Wordsworth/Wollstonecraft (mostly Wollstonecraft) chapter is about their experiences of the French Revolution, but Holmes gets at the topic by writing about his own experience of the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. He tells about getting caught up in the action on the streets and how an officer held a rifle to his chest, and when Holmes said he was English to try to get out of the situation, the officer told him to mind his own business and go back home to England. Holmes moves from there to considering what it was like for Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft to be in an analogous situation -- foreigners experiencing another country's revolution. Holmes wants to know what it was these two were seeking in France and what they might have felt.

This leads him to think about the differences between a rational reaction to revolution -- a philosophical take on events -- and an imaginative and emotional one -- its personal impact. Wollstonecraft was capable of being very philosophical about the revolution, in the sense of distant and nonemotional. She could even be a little glib. But when she actually lived through some of the revolution's most dramatic events, it changed her. Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft went through some personally harrowing times while in France, and somehow these personal events (love affairs, babies) and the political ones connect. Holmes speculates that the real effects of revolution aren't so much political as they are personal -- the internal turbulance revolution causes matters just as much as the political turmoil, and the internal revolutions might cause longer-lasting changes. He isn't quite so despairing about the failure of the May 1968 uprising when he thinks about revolution in this sense -- the immediate political goals might have been left unfulfilled, but it did cause changes in the way many people thought and acted.

Perhaps these are the conclusions one might expect from a biographer, one who is focused more on individual lives than on the sweep of history.

At any rate, I like Holmes's method of placing himself in the middle of his discussions of 18th and 19th century people, and he's careful not to make too much of the parallels too -- the comparison between the French Revolution and May 1968 can only go so far, after all. But it gives him a way of getting inside the experiences of people long dead -- a way of imagining what they might have seen and thought and felt.

Holmes has some amazing things to say about what it's like to write biographies and he makes me want ... not to write a biography exactly, but to research a writer deeply. I may write about this more later (I'm by no means through with posting about this book!), but for now I'll leave you with this quotation:

In daily human affairs notoriously, we all do sometimes act apparently out of character -- especially in situations of great stress or temptation or depression. In such situations one could say that a person's sense of their own identity is diminished, and that they act almost in spite of themselves. Yet the biographer views and witnesses these daily human affairs in a special and privileged perspective. He gains a special kind of intimacy, but quite different from the subjective intimacy that I had first so passionately sought. He sees no act in isolation; nor does he see it from a single viewpoint. Even the familiarity of a close friend or spouse of many years suffers from this limitation. The biographer sees every act as part of a constantly unfolding pattern: he sees the before and the afterwards, both cause and consequence. Above all he sees repetition and the emergence of significant behaviour over an entire lifetime. As a result I have become convinced of the integrity of human character. Even a man's failings, sudden lapses, contradictory reactions, sudden caprices, seem in the long run to fall within a pattern of character. One could say, paradoxically, that people even act out of character in a certain way; there is always, so to speak, meaning in their madness, provided one has full knowledge of the circumstances.

Blogging update

2006-12-30T07:25:00.000-05:00

I now have Haloscan back up so those of you having problems with commenting should have no problem now (I hope!).

By the numbers

2006-12-29T08:55:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd do one more post about the past year; it occurs to me that looking at some of the numbers might be interesting and might show me something about how I read. I have never kept track of my reading quite so carefully before, so I might as well take advantage of it and analyze the information I've got.

Books read: 56 (it might possibly go up to 57 by Sunday night, but I'm not sure, so I'll leave it at that.)
Novels: 36
Nonfiction: 17
Poetry collections: 2 (although I'm now halfway through another one.)
Short story collections: 1
Journals/diaries (included in the nonfiction number): 2
Books written by men: 24
Books written by women: 32
Books in translation: 8
Books from the 11th century: 1 (The Tale of Genji)
From the 18th century: 4
From the 19th century: 6
From the 20th century: 23
From the 21st century: 22
From the 20th or 21st century but about an earlier century: 6
Books read for book groups (online or in-person): 7
Nonfiction about books, reading, literature, or literary history: 9
Travel books: 2 (Tobias Smollett and Rory Stewart)

I tried to count how many essay collections and memoirs I'd read, but I run into problems with categorization; for example, is Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering a memoir? A history book? A book on religion?

I have no idea what percentage of men vs. women I've read in the past; it wouldn't surprise me, though, if I usually read more men than women. But this time I read more women than men, which makes sense to me, as I felt throughout the year that I was discovering a lot of women writers I really like: Rebecca West, Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor.

I see I haven't read as much from the 19th century or earlier as I thought I might -- 11 books. Maybe for next year the classics challenge I'm doing (13 books) will change that. Not all of the 13 are from the 19C or earlier, but with those and others I might increase the number. But if I add in the books I read about earlier centuries, I reach 17, which isn't too bad.

I'd like to read more books in translation. And more short story collections, and more poetry, and more travel books, and more essays, and more books on religious history, and more books on literary history, etc., etc. It's the problem Stefanie wrote about: what to do when with every new book one reads (especially history and books about books), one's to-be-read list grows? I'd like to read in many different areas, and I'd also like to read deeply in a few, but I can't do both. My list of books I'd like to read now has 167 books on it, which doesn't include the 90 books I own but haven't yet read. Yikes!

Wracked with indecision

2006-12-28T14:40:00.000-05:00

I still can't quite decide what to do about this blog -- to stick with Blogger or not. I had just about decided to stay, but I'm continuing to tinker with a Wordpress blog I set up and am still tempted to go. Ack! I hate making decisions. The Wordpress blog is here.

Update: I have no update. I'm still completely uncertain. Here's the thing: I like Wordpress better overall, but I like the way my Blogger template looks, and I can't find a Wordpress template that does exactly what I want it to (replicate my Blogger template basically). I'm just not quite so fond of the best I can do on Wordpress, which is what's up now. So, which do I care about more? Appearance or ease of use? Normally I'd go for ease of use in a heartbeat, but I'm just not quite ready to give up a look I like. And I'm not experienced with HTML or CSS to mess with the Wordpress templates and I don't want to pay money to be able to do so. Yikes.

I'm back!

2006-12-28T08:09:00.000-05:00

The Hobgoblin and I returned yesterday, and we're mostly settled back in. It's nice to get away, but just as nice to return home again. Yes, I know, it's a very cliched thing to say, but I feel it strongly anyway. I like seeing my family, but unfortunately, it only takes a few days before I begin to return to my irritable, annoying, obnoxious, I-can't-stand-the-world-and-my-parents-drive-me-crazy 13-year-old self. Will that self ever die away? I'm beginning to doubt it.

I had a very nice trip, all irritability aside. I got to see 4 of my 6 siblings, one brother-in-law, one sister's boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend? I can't quite figure it out and didn't get a chance to ask -- to ask my mother, of course, as I wouldn't have asked my sister. That would be awkward), and some acquaintances at the Christmas Eve service. I was able to keep up my tradition of complaining bitterly about the awfulness of the Christmas Eve service, as it was suitably awful this year. Sometimes it's awful in a "let's have a birthday cake for the baby Jesus" kind of way, but this time it was awful in a "let's draw on as many offensive gender stereotypes as we can, even if they are irrelevant to the sermon" kind of way. I made sure not to ride home from the service with my parents, as I wasn't feeling irritable enough at that point to want to offend them and hurt their feelings. Traditions are nice, aren't they?

Christmas itself was nice, and I got a lot of cool things -- the Hobgoblin gave me a copy of Michael Dirda's Book by Book, which I've now read a little in, and it promises to be interesting. It will feed my current interest in books on books and reading. My mother-in-law gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card, so we went there on Tuesday, and I found Lawrence Weschler's Vermeer in Bosnia, which has been on my TBR list for a long time, and Jeffrey Robinson's The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, which will feed my other current obsession with books about walking. I was happy to find some good nonfiction books; I love novels, of course, but often the books that get me most excited and fuel multiple long blog posts are nonfiction ones. And Christmas isn't quite over yet, as I know I have a box coming from a friend who always sends me books. Yay!

The Hobgoblin also got me a new pair of cycling shoes, which are black and very cool looking:

Oh, and he also got me a sticker with my new "photo" or avatar or whatever you want to call it:

A couple of people have asked where it comes from -- it's from one of my favorite novels ever, Tristram Shandy; it's the narrator's rendering of his story's plotline -- very digressive. I like the picture because I love the novel, of course, and ... I like digressions.

I read a little bit, more in Proust and Richard Holmes's Footsteps, and a little of the Dirda book, but mostly I sat around and did nothing. I needed a few days of that. I sat around and did nothing, and I also watched a lot of episodes of "The Office," which was great fun; as we don't have TV, we miss a lot of crap but also some good stuff, and I was happy to catch up on some of the good stuff.

So -- I'm happy to be back reading your comments (thanks!) and catching up on blog posts and posting once again myself. I hope to do some goal-setting around here soon, and maybe some more summing up of my year, and definitely some more raving about Footsteps, and I might finally get around to beginning Buddenbrooks.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow

2006-12-22T16:31:00.000-05:00

This is my last post for a while, as the Hobgoblin and I are heading out to my parents' place in western New York state tomorrow. As they have very slow dial-up, I think I'll have to do without blogs for a few days. It'll be hard, but I'm going to try my best not to let it get to me. I'll be back by the middle or end of next week.

I finished Orhan Pamuk's Snow last night and was very impressed. It's a beautiful book and one that taught me a lot about Turkey and Turkish culture. I don't mean to make it sound didactic, but I do think that reading novels is a good way to get a sense of another country and culture. Snow dealt a lot with the conflict between Eastern and Western Europe -- the main character Ka has been in exile in Germany for many years and in the novel returns to the Turkish city of Kars, and throughout, he is faced with questions about what it means to have become westernized but not to be fully western. Connected with this cultural conflict is the religious one -- shortly after Ka arrives, the city of Kars undergoes a military coup, meant to keep religious conservatives from winning the upcoming election, and throughout the novel religious differences turn violent. Ka takes part in many philosophical and theological discussions about what it means to have given up his faith and about whether or not he has become an atheist.

Ka wanders the city and gets himself involved in adventures; he isn't all that interested in all the conflict going on around him -- he'd really rather write poems and talk to Ipek, the woman who is the real reason he has journeyed to Kars (the ostensible reason is to investigate a rash of suicides committed by young religiously conservative women who want to keep wearing their head scarves). All this is a way for Pamuk to write about religious and political conflict, but it's also a way for him to consider the relationship of the artist to the political world. It seems like nearly everybody in the novel has aspirations to be a writer; so many people Ka talked with had poems stashed away somewhere or used Ka to try to find a publisher for their work. The novel's closing section centers around a play, an incredibly loose adaptation of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which brings together all the novel's themes and works through the conflict the city is experiencing.

One thing I found particularly interesting is the way the narrator becomes a character himself, gradually talking about himself more and more as the story proceeds. The narrator's name is Orhan, making him a stand-in for the author himself, or perhaps another version of the author. At first I found this narratorial intrusion awkward; I wasn't sure who the narrator was supposed to be and what his relationship to Ka was. All this cleared up gradually, however, and by the end we know quite a lot about him and his presence in the novel adds a layer of complexity to it. His relationship with Ka reminds me of Richard Holmes's book Footsteps, which I'm currently in the middle of, and also a little bit of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart; in all these examples, one person is following in the footsteps of another, trying to puzzle together what that person's life is like and to see what that person saw. And then each person writes a book about it. In the case of Snow, the narrator is doing research on a novel about Ka, walking where Ka walked and talking to the people he knew. He follows the exact route Ka took on a book tour, staying in the places he stayed and asking audiences what they remember about Ka.

All this brings me back to travel metaphors, the subject of an earlier post, because part of the narrator's writing process is traveling (which is true for Holmes and Stewart as well), but writing about travel is itself also a kind of travel (one could say all writing is a kind of travel), as the writer follows the map of the journey, this time in words. And it's true for the reader too. Following in someone's footsteps can be done by crossing a landscape but it can also happen as a book gets written and as it gets read. So the narrator tries to relive Ka's life twice -- once by following his path through western Europe and Turkey and another by writing about the experience.

There's another sense in which the novel is about writing itself. Pamuk talks about what a novel can and can't do; in one scene, the novel's narrator talks with another character, Fazil, who is troubled that the narrator plans to write a novel about him and the other residents of Kars. This is what Fazil says to the narrator:

"But I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how poor we are and how different we are from them. I don't want you to put me into a novel like that."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't even know me, that's why! Even if you got to know me and described me as I am, your Western readers would be so caught up in pitying me for being poor that they wouldn't have a chance to see my life. For example, if you said I was writing an Islamist science-fiction novel, they'd just laugh. I don't want to be described as someone people smile at out of pity and compassion."

In another scene, the narrator asks Fazil what he would like him to put in his novel, and this is Fazil's answer:

"If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away."

"But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said.

"Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds."

So we come up against the problem of whether a novelist can capture the truth of somebody's experience so that a reader can really understand it, so that the reader can get beyond expectations and stereotypes and keep from pitying the poor people of Kars, and so that the novel won't just be another way of reinforcing the separation between east and west. I opened this post talking about what I learned from the novel, so I guess I do believe that reading novels can tell us something true about other people's experiences and can help people bridge cultures, but I appreciate this warning about what a complicated process it can be.

My year in cycling

2006-12-22T07:53:00.000-05:00

This year has brought almost as many changes in my cycling as it has in my reading -- this is the year I began racing, right about the time I began blogging, in fact, which, I suppose is what inspired the name of this blog, even though I write about reading much more than riding. I'm already gearing up to train for this coming season, which makes it a good time to look back to last year's season, I suppose. My racing results were mixed, but I'm happy I began racing and pleased at the progress I made.

My very first race I stayed with the pack about 5 minutes and then I dropped off the back as they were going just way too fast. I remember my heartrate was up above 180 and I felt like I was going to get sick. I'm not sure I ever felt so bad on a bike before. But it really does take a while to get used to riding that hard -- I often got dropped in races after that, but it happened later and later in the race until finally I was able to stay with the pack until the very end. Well, in some races, that is.

I learned a lot about what kind of rider I am -- at least for now, I'm much better at criteriums, the shorter, more intense races where you do laps of a mile or less over and over, than I am at road races. In the road races I did, I'd get left behind on the hills pretty quickly. One thing I need to work on this year is becoming a better hill climber. I do think the endurance road races require takes a while to build up, so I'm hoping I'll improve at these, but I think I might be built more like a sprinter than an endurance rider or hill climber. I tend to put on big muscles that can generate some power -- and I'm most definitely not the skinny type that can fly up the hills seemingly effortlessly.

I learned a lot about riding in a pack too. I've talked to a number of women this fall who are interested in racing but who talk about being afraid of riding with a large group of people, and it is a little scary. There's nothing like riding at 25 or 30 miles an hour in a group of 30 or 40 or 50 people packed closely together. But you do get used to it; it just takes a little practice. I still need to build up some confidence in my ability to do it, and I need to work on things like riding around corners fast, but I've learned that these are things I can work on.

The hardest thing about racing, I think, is showing up the first time. I do sympathize with those women I talk to who are interested in trying it but still fearful and uncertain. That's exactly how I felt last year. But once you get the courage up to give it a try, you realize that you can do it and there are things you can work on to get better and it's not as impossibly hard as it once seemed.

So this fall and winter I've been trying to take my training more seriously than I have in the past. I still wonder about myself if I'm not the type who enjoys the training part more than the racing. Last summer I started to feel burnt out with racing, but I was still interested in going out to ride on my own. But I think since it was my first season, feeling burnt out is understandable, especially since I spent so much time riding with people who were noticeably stronger than me. I got tired of working so hard to keep up with a pack of people who could leave me behind easily if they really wanted to. I'm very curious to see what happens to me next year, how much I change, or don't change, how much better I get.

Nerves

2006-12-21T10:46:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to post for a while, but I can't because I've got a job interview today and I'm completely distracted by it. I keep telling myself I feel ambivalently about the possibility of getting the job -- it's not exactly what I want -- and that's true, but it doesn't keep me very calm. My semester has been over for a couple days now, but it won't feel over until I finish up this stupid interview.

Back later.

Update: the interview went fine. Thanks for your kind comments everyone! I think I did okay, although I have no idea how things will turn out. I feel like I can charm an interview committee pretty well, but I'm not entirely sure they bought all my answers. I did do one stupid thing -- I left my coat in the interview room, and by the time I figured this out, they'd begun the next interview. I had to interrupt them or wait around for an hour before I could get back in there, so I interrupted them and felt like an idiot. Oh, well. Now my holidays can begin.

Blogging update

2006-12-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I just spent a whole lot of time playing around with my template. I like the new look, but I'll have to do without Haloscan for a while. They say they are developing a way to make Haloscan comments work with Blogger Beta and will release it in the next few days, and at that point, I'll re-install it. For now, I'll deal with Blogger commenting. I was this close to giving up on Blogger and getting a Wordpress blog, but then I realized that with Blogger Beta you can make up your own color scheme and that made it worth while to stay. That and I don't want to go through the hassle of making everybody re-do their blogroll.

After I finished all this, I realized I was unconsciously copying the color scheme from So Many Books -- I hope you don't mind Stefanie! I just like the colors a lot. What I really want is a blog with long lines -- I'm not fond of the narrow columns -- and this new template gives me just what I need.

Footsteps

2006-12-20T08:18:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a break from summing up my year (more on that to come though!) to write about Richard Holmes's book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, of which I have now read about 35 pages, and 35 captivating pages they are. I've found a new quotation for my blog (see above) and have become convinced I need to read Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Holmes is following in Stevenson's footsteps and writing about his travels and also about his devotion to Stevenson and to the genre of biography.

In one scene, Holmes describes how he has become so obsessed with Stevenson, he feels that Stevenson is actually there, and as Holmes walks through towns and looks at faces, he searches for Stevenson's likeness. But then he experiences a disappointment: although he has tried to follow his footsteps exactly, he realizes that the bridge on which he crossed a river is not the one Stevenson had used; instead, he finds an old crumbling bridge a little further upstream that marks his path. His response is powerful: "The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful."

What he realizes is that he cannot follow in Stevenson's literal footsteps -- the route has changed over the course of the hundred or so years that separate them -- but also that he cannot find Stevenson himself; he cannot perfectly follow the traces of his life. A biographer can only approximate the life, can only follow in the subject's footsteps at a distance; there is always a gap between biographer and subject:

Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognized; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance -- the critical distance, the historical distance -- had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic....

... it was the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called "biography" really means. I had never thought about it before. "Biography" meant a book about someone's life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

I'm a sucker for travel metaphors and I like this one -- to write a biography is to travel along with the subject, following in that person's footsteps on his or her life's journey. Holmes is physically acting out his life's work, covering the landscape Stevenson had crossed, attempting to see the things Stevenson's saw, but seeking Stevenson's mental and emotional landscape as well as his geographical one. And he both succeeds and fails in this attempt -- time and change create a space between Holmes and Stevenson that can't be bridged. I like that it is a journey that teaches him this lesson and that he has turned this lesson into a book; Footsteps is a travel book in two senses (but all travel books are this, aren't they?), physical travel across a landscape and an intellectual and emotional journey as well.

My year in books, continued

2006-12-19T07:45:00.000-05:00

When it comes to books, it's been a year of changes. First of all, of course, this year I began blogging, and this has changed my reading life -- my life, period -- pretty radically. I used to keep a wimpy list of potential books to read that was about 10 books long and I hardly ever looked at it, and when I was in the store, I'd often have trouble finding something I wanted. No more, let me tell you. Now my list of books I'd like to read is something like 250 books long and growing fast. I've found dozens of blogs I read regularly, and I've learned so much about books and authors I'd never heard of before from them. I think about books and the publishing world differently now that I blog and read blogs.

And I read differently, knowing that I will write here about everything that I read. I've always felt that my reading should have some purpose; with my well-developed Puritan work ethic and sense of guilt, I can't just read purely for pleasure very easily. Being an English teacher is one way of "doing something" with my reading, but I've discovered that blogging is another. My reading doesn't stop with me; instead I write about the experience and people read me and sometimes write back. Something of my reading experience gets circulated back out into the world in a more direct and immediate fashion than it used to, and I like that a lot.

Blogging has meant that I'm now involved in conversations about books I never was before, and I'm part of books groups -- online and in-person -- that are new to me. I've made some great online blogging friends, and one of them, Emily, turns out to live near me, so we can be -- what do you call them, in-person? traditional? regular? -- friends too. I'm reading Proust because of blogging, and I'm reading more short stories, and I'm reading new books because of the Slaves of Golconda. As other people have said before, it's like being in a very fun literature class, or like being part of a literary salon. It's class without the grading and where I write all the "papers" effortlessly.

My reading habits have changed this year as well. I'm now reading poetry again, which I'm very happy about. I don't read it very fast, but I do read it regularly. I'm reading multiple books at once, which means I feel able to read more challenging things -- if I have only one book at a time, I'm much less likely to pick up something long and difficult because I don't want to find myself stuck with it and bored. I can tackle something difficult for a while, and then put it down for my fun novel or nonfiction book. This means I'm not finding it difficult to read Proust. Rather than driving myself crazy trying to read it and it alone, I'm reading it along with a lot of other books that provide some variety.

What else ... I found Book Mooch, which means I have whole shelves full of books strangers have mailed me, and I mail books out to strangers now and then. Half of the books on this year's list I might not have read if it weren't for blogging. I've taken to accumulating books at a frightening rate. I never used to do this; I generally bought books at the pace I read them, but no more.

I've developed some unexpected obsessions this past year -- for books about books and reading, for example. I've read 4 of these books this year -- by Jane Smiley, Alberto Manguel, Sara Nelson, and Nick Hornby -- and I am looking forward to reading more. I had a brief but intense love affair with footnotes after reading The Mezzanine and Dracula (the editor's footnotes were wonderful). And I've recently gotten excited about books on walking, with Rory Stewart's book and now Footsteps, and with Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost on my shelves, and W.G. Sebald and Bruce Chatwin waiting for me. I also discovered the joys of reading diaries -- Virginia Woolf's and Frances Burney's in particular.

All this feels like a lot in one year. It makes me wonder what next year will bring.

My year in books

2006-12-18T07:47:00.000-05:00

I suppose I can resist no longer -- it's time to begin summing up my year in books. I think I'll do a couple posts on the topic and at least one on my year in cycling. But for now, here's a list of the books from 2006 I liked the best. I only read maybe 2 or 3 books published this year (some of them I'm not sure if they are this year or last), so it's by no means a guide to this year's books. It's just a list of things I liked.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I loved these books and flew through them. I haven't read young adults books in forever, and these books made me think that's a shame. I'm certain I'll re-read them at some point when I need something fun. I found the plot absorbing, but the ideas were too.
Mary Oliver's American Primitive. This is the first book of poems I picked up when I decided to try reading poetry again after years of not doing it, and I'm so glad I did. The poems are beautiful and moving, and -- if you like poems about nature that aren't sentimental (in the bad sense) or sappy, give this book a try.
Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. This short book inspired me to write about it on this blog so many times, I was afraid you all would get tired of hearing about it. I found it a beautiful book, as befits the title, one that I read through slowly because I wanted to stop and think about its ideas so often.
Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. West captures childhood so well in this novel. The narrative voice is irresistable. It's a portrait of a troubled family, and it seems to me to describe a young girl's experience of such a family perfectly.
Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. Many thanks to Stefanie for starting the Proust blog and inspiring me to tackle this book -- actually, I've tackled all of In Search of Lost Time, which I should be able to finish in 2007. Without the group blog, I may never have read this book, and I'm so glad I did.
Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. Another one I posted about often. This novel follows the main character's thoughts as he travels up an escalator on his way back to work after his lunch hour. And that's the whole plot. It felt more essayistic to me than novelistic, complete with footnotes as it was. And it got me off on a long string of posts about footnotes.
Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. I was enthralled at Stewart's sense of adventure and his bravery and his ability to write about his walk across Afghanistan. I finished this one only recently, and it's inspired me to read more contemporary travel writing, particularly books about long walks.

I could list more, probably, but as I will have read 56 or 57 books by the end of the year, listing 7 favorites seems about right, if I'm trying to focus on the ones I thought were the best. Actually, it's 9 favorite books because I counted the Pullman books separately in my year's total. As I was coming up with the list, I didn't try to pick different genres, but I'm happy to see there was variety, with some poetry and nonfiction on the list, and it makes me think I should make sure to read lots of both next year, along with tons of novels, of course.

Books I've begun

2006-12-17T08:27:00.000-05:00

I began Orhan Pamuk's Snow a week or so ago and I'm enjoying it. I'll probably wait to say anything substantive about it until I've finished it (I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through), but it's an interesting follow-up to Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, since both books deal with Islam, although in very different settings and in different ways. But Snow is very much about the conflict between secularists and fundamentalist Muslims and the changes Islam has undergone and the changes it's brought about in the last few decades, just as Stewart's book is. I like the way Pamuk deals with the political issues -- largely through his hapless main character Ka who wanders rather aimlessly around the Turkish city of Kars, trying to woo the beautiful Ipek and getting himself into trouble. Political and religious conflict is all through the novel, and we see a lot of it directly, but we also get it filtered through Ka's experience, which helps balance out the serious tone and subject matter. I will say I find it a tiny bit slow-going. It doesn't have much narrative drive. But that's okay, I think, as the ideas and the characters are so interesting and well-done.

Last night I began Richard Holmes's book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, and I'm really excited about it. I've only read about 5 pages, but I can tell this is going to be just the kind of book I like -- it's a mix of personal narrative, travel book, and biography. It starts off telling the story of Holmes's journey through part of France, following in Robert Louis Stevenson's footsteps. Both of them traveled mostly on foot, sleeping outside many nights and getting fed by local villagers. It reminds me once again of Rory Stewart, although again it's a very different experience. But Stewart was also following someone's footsteps, in his case, Babur, a 16th century man who founded the Mughal dynasty of India. Both Holmes and Stewart are looking for traces of history as they travel through and write about the modern world.

Holmes will go on to write about Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Gerard de Nerval -- in this book, more exactly, he'll be writing about the experience of traveling in their footsteps as well as writing about the people themselves. It promises to be a great mix of the historical, the critical, and the personal.

On writing

2006-12-16T07:14:00.000-05:00

I most likely will never write a novel or even a short story, but this post on Kate's Book Blog tempts me just the tiniest bit to give it a try -- not because I think I can write a good novel or story, but because it makes me realize just how much I'd learn from the attempt. If I did it (which I almost certainly won't -- I'm just playing with ideas here), I wouldn't show it to anybody, but would do it solely for my own educational purposes. Because Kate's post makes me realize how little I pay attention to the technical details of what I read. I'm aware of some things like plot structure, point of view, creating scenes, showing vs. telling, etc., but I don't really get into the nitty-gritty of it. If I tried creating my own scenes, though, or if I had to worry about how to get characters from one place to another or had to choose what details to include and what ones not or if I had to struggle to get the point of view right, I'd be seeing the matter in another way entirely. I'm a believer in the value of learning by doing; don't you think this would be a fabulous learning experience?

Kate is writing about Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which I haven't been interested in up until now, because I'm not that kind of a writer, but now I'm intrigued. Perhaps I'd learn a lot about reading even if I'm not exactly Prose's intended audience, although Prose's subtitle, "A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write them," leaves open the issue of audience, implying that the two groups of people mentioned might not necessarily overlap completely.

The Hobgoblin is writing a novel, of course, and I've got a good friend who's a novelist, and I read other bloggers who write fiction, and I'm interested in the insights they have into the craft of fiction and I find myself wanting those insights too.

And one more point about writing, unrelated to the above: I've been thinking about Litlove's post on the way we compare ourselves to others and how easy it is to get jealous of what other writers can do. I don't get jealous of fiction writers or poets, as I don't write in those genres, and although I write academic criticism now and then, I don't get jealous of other people's ability to write that sort of thing, maybe because I don't feel like that kind of writing is all that important to me, but I sometimes get jealous of what other bloggers can do. When I began blogging and spending a significant amount of time reading other people's blogs, I'd get overwhelmed sometimes because I found so much good writing of the type I could never do myself. I really don't understand those who think there's no good writing on blogs, because if you look around just a little bit, you'll find tons of it.

Blogging has been interesting for me because I've found I care about my writing in a way I haven't before. I've had moments of feeling so inadequate as a writer that I've thought to myself, either you stop writing entirely to get rid of the bad feelings or you accept that you will never be able to do what those other people do and instead begin to enjoy their ability. And it's possible, at least in moments, to accept that some people are just outrageously talented and to appreciate that rather than get jealous. As I wrote in a comment over at Litlove's, surrounding oneself with fabulously talented people makes it easier to get to the point of no longer wanting to compete because the effort is just too exhausting. And it's probably at that point that a person can do their best work.

Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist"

2006-12-15T08:32:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

I have a copy of Kafka's Complete Stories; it's been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, and I'm not sure if I'll ever read all the stories in it, but I would like to read more, as I enjoyed "A Hunger Artist." I feel like I've read a lot of Kafka, but when I think about what, exactly, I've read, I realize it's only The Trial, and that I read over a decade ago. Maybe I've read a lot about Kafka and that makes me feel like I've actually read a lot of his work. The term "kafka-esque" is very easy to throw around in conversation, and so it's not hard to begin to think I've got him all figured out.

I don't think I've got him all figured out, but "A Hunger Artist" didn't upset my expectations of what I'd find in a Kafka short story -- you could call it "kafka-esque": it feels like a parable; it deals with ideas as least as much as characters and more so than plot; it's absurd, and yet the story is told as though it weren't; it's about darkness and suffering and yet there's something fine and admirable about it.

At the center of the story is the paradox of the "hunger artist" himself -- how can one be a hunger artist? What's artistic about not eating? The narrator tells us the hunger artist believes in "the honor of his profession," and we learn that no one but the hunger artist can know for sure he is not cheating, so "he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast." So there is something mysteriously artistic about fasting, and not only that, but the hunger artist is the only one who really understands it. He also says that although no one else knows it, fasting is easy, further undermining the "artistic" element of it. And there's the twist at the end where we learn that he fasts because he can't find food he likes to eat. So in what sense is fasting artistic?

I don't know, really, but it defines art as a complex give and take between artist and viewer. The artist knows fasting is easy, but the viewers won't believe it, so they insist that they are witnessing an act in one sense or another -- the artist is either "out for publicity or else was some kind of cheat who found it easy to fast because he had discovered a way of making it easy," i.e., he managed to sneak food into his cage. So part of the "art" is simply doing nothing and then letting viewers make what sense of it they will. The more the artist insists he's doing nothing, the more "artistic," partly as in "artifice" and "artificial," the viewers think it is.

Art in this story is nothing -- it's negation and refusal. It's about letting the body waste away, until it disappears at the story's end. And yet the art is nothingness that creates an event. It's a refusal of the body that's also a display of that body -- a weird denial of and celebration of the body. If art here is about nothing, it's also about death -- the artist makes his living off of dying.

No wonder taste is changing and people pass him by to head for the menagerie, and no wonder they prefer to see the panther, so full of the joy of life. And yet I don't think the story is leading us to sympathize with this changing taste; the hunger artist seems to be an admirable figure, and the people who refuse to appreciate him are refusing to see something real and true about life. It's like the hunger artist is the one who can recognize the true nature of things -- that everything ends in death and nothingness. He is an artist because of the way, simply by placing himself in a cage and refusing to eat, he can turn nothing into something -- he makes some kind of meaning, difficult and distressing though it may be, out of emptiness.

Books, books, and more books

2006-12-14T07:54:00.000-05:00

I've written before about not mooching more books, but I haven't kept that resolution. Surprise, surprise. How can I resist when they are free?? I know I have to mail books to other people in order to mooch books for myself, but it still feels free. I still have four points left, which means four more free books. There are lots of things that look good, but I'm trying to keep the points for books I really, really want, ones I just can't resist. I was this close to getting a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, for example, but somebody else mooched it before I could put in my request. Sigh.

But, in addition to Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary and Edmund White's biography of Proust which I mentioned in a previous post, I recently received a Penguin Classic with some of Jane Austen's lesser-known work: Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon. Books by Jane Austen that I haven't read! What's taken me so long?

I also received just today Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit is one of my literary heroes. I was reading her book Wanderlust a year or so ago and took it with me on a plane trip and noticed a woman in the airport watching me reading the book with some curiosity. I realized later that the woman looked suspiciously like the author photo of Solnit. I can't be sure, but it might have been her, noticing me reading her book. I wish I could have told her how inspiring I thought her book was.

And, thanks to a mention by Litlove, I have Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade on the way, which will do very well when I'm looking for something outside of my usual reading pattern, and also Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, which will help satisfy my interest in books about walking.

On another topic entirely -- I read Franz Kafka's story "A Hunger Artist" the other day, and I'm planning on posting about it on the short story blog A Curious Singularity, but I haven't quite had the time -- or maybe it's that I haven't had the energy and the courage? -- to write about it yet. I need to re-read it for one thing. And for another, I'm not sure what I will say. It's a great story though, wonderfully strange.

And one more random note here -- I've been trying to decide if I want to do the Winter Classics challenge, but I'm unsure. Part of the problem is time -- I want to finish up the From the Stacks challenge, and I'm not sure I'll have time to do both of these. The other is that I tend to take reading plans and challenges very seriously and if I did it, I'd probably read dutifully through the list, and I think it's better if I keep some room for spontaneity in my book choices. Challenges are fun and I like being a part of a group and they are so tempting because books plans and reading lists are fun, but I'd probably better stay away.

Post in which I reveal that I'm a little bit of a scrooge

2006-12-13T07:54:00.000-05:00

Sorry! If you're way into the Christmas spirit, don't feel that you have to read this. So why am I doing this Christmas meme if I can be a bit of a scrooge? Because that's what scrooges do! Actually, it's not so bad. I'm only a little bit of a scrooge, not a full-blown one.

I'm not sure who began this meme; if it's you, let me know and I'll give you proper credit.

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Hot Chocolate. I don't have much experience with egg nog. I'm open to change, but I doubt I'll develop a taste for it.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree? I wrap them. Or sometimes I make the Hobgoblin do it.

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? None. We don't decorate. Now there's a reason for this -- it's because we almost never celebrate Christmas at our place. We travel to my parents' house and stay there for a few days, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to make the house look festive.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? No.

5. When do you put your decorations up? We don't.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish? Um ... pie? My mother makes delicious sweet rolls for Christmas morning -- that's my favorite.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child: Trying with my six other siblings to wake my parents up so we can open presents right away.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? I don't remember.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Sometimes. Since the Hobgoblin and I celebrate Christmas at my parents', we sometimes open a gift privately on Christmas Eve, away from my family. I don't think this has quite become a tradition though.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree? I don't.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? Dread it. Most years we drive to western New York state where my parents live. If you know anything about winter weather in western New York state, you know this is a very bad idea.

12. Can you ice skate? I did it semi-successfully a time or two when I was a teenager, but not since then. So no, not without some time to practice.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? Books, always.

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? A break from school -- whether I'm taking classes or teaching them. It's lovely to hang out at my parents' place and do meaningless things like extremely difficult sudoku puzzles for hours on end.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? Christmas cookies with frosting and sprinkles.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Attending the Christmas Eve church service with my parents and then complaining to the Hobgoblin about how awful it is.

17. What tops your tree? Nothing.

18. Which do you prefer: giving or receiving? I'm supposed to say giving, right?

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song? No Christmas music, please!

20. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum? Well, I'll eat 'em. But I prefer Christmas cookies.

There. Now I'm in the holiday spirit!

Reading patterns

2006-12-12T07:40:00.000-05:00

Danielle posted a great set of questions recently (I find Danielle's blog a great source of inspiration -- uncertain what to blog about? Go check it out and you'll find an idea):

Do you read a certain type of book more than others? ... Do you choose books mainly for the story? Or do you just try anything at all? Do read outside your comfort zone often?

I'm not sure if I do read a certain type of book more than others. I do have a certain kind of book that's a comfort read; this year that's meant authors like Anita Brookner and Elizabeth Taylor and Curtis Sittenfeld -- these authors write character-driven books that are fairly introspective, quiet, domestic, and most often about women.

But I don't know that I read this type of book more often than others. I suppose I'm drawn to contemporary literary fiction of the prize-winning type -- think Alan Hollinghurst, Alice Munro, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, my recently-bought-and-still-unread Kiran Desai -- but obviously these examples don't really fit neatly in a category.

And if I read too many of this type of author, I start to get a bit restless and begin to long for something different. I've been feeling this way lately. My current novel, Orhan Pamuk's Snow, is providing me with something a little different, as it's set in Turkey and it's a novel in translation, but I could easily have listed it in the previous paragraph as contemporary literary fiction of the prize-winning type.

The other kind of book I turn to frequently is the 18C or 19C novel. This year I've read Frances Burney and George Sand and Bram Stoker and Jane Austen and Henry Mackenzie, and that's pretty typical.

All these types of books are easy for me to pick up, and they are what I'm drawn to most naturally. But I do try to read things outside this pattern -- most often when I'm consciously picking out something different, it will be a work in translation or something modernist or postmodernist that feels like a challenge, or maybe a classic that isn't necessarily as easy to read as Dickens -- say, The Tale of Genji, which I read earlier this year. I've got Samuel Beckett's Molloy on my list of things to read, which fits into this "stretching myself" category, as does Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and Cortazar's Hopscotch. Boccaccio's Decameron fits in here, as does Boswell's Life of Johnson. I expect to enjoy these books, but they don't bring quite the same kind of effortless enjoyment the other kind of book does. But I'm not always in this for effortless enjoyment.

Danielle asks if we choose books mainly for the story, and I don't, really -- I choose them based on what category I think they fit into, and there are tons of categories I use when I'm thinking this way -- for example, a 19C novel that's not as famous as Dickens or Eliot (Elizabeth Gaskell maybe), a lesser-known novel by a famous author such as Virginia Woolf (The Voyage Out), serious contemporary fiction that deals with important social or political issues (Snow or maybe something by Coetzee), not-quite-so-serious contemporary fiction that sounds like a lot of fun (Kate Atkinson?), experimental fiction (Delillo perhaps). The list could go on. When I'm choosing books I don't usually think about story; rather, I think about what I know about the author, the author's reputation, and what category I place the author into and whether that category is different enough from the book I just finished. I don't just try anything at all, as Danielle asks -- I generally know something about how to place an author in the literary world, and I use that knowledge to help make a decision.

And all this doesn't even cover my reading patterns in nonfiction -- that's another issue entirely. Do you have recognizable reading patterns?

On blogging

2006-12-11T08:04:00.000-05:00

How do you fellow blog readers keep blogs from taking up all your time? I'm not talking about blog writing -- I'm content to spend the time I do on the writing; I'm talking about reading other people's blogs. I ask because it seems like I can add new blogs to my reading list endlessly. I'm thrilled when someone new leaves a comment on one of my posts -- thrilled! -- but often that means a new blog to check out and it might very well be one I want to keep reading. That's great, but I can't keep adding new ones or I'll never have any time for anything else. There are most definitely more excellent, intelligent, well-written book blogs out there than I can possibly read. How do you decide what to read and what to skip?

I use bloglines, which means I can read people's posts all in one place, making the reading easier since I don't actually have to go to each website to see if there's a new post. It's a lot more time consuming to visit the actual sites to check for new material -- I like to visit people's actual sites to read the posts in the context the author created, but with a feedreader like bloglines, I can visit only when I know there's a new post. My point is that bloglines helps cut down on time spent online -- but still, I'm subscribed to 78 blogs at the moment, and that's a lot to read, even if many of the blogs aren't updated all that regularly. My current pattern is to subscribe to the feeds of new, interesting blogs (new to me, at least) on bloglines and read them for a while to see if I like them or not. But I tend to like more blogs than I dislike, so my list grows.

I suppose I can also skim posts more often and read only those that I find most interesting. I do this with some blogs already (not those written by anybody who reads here regularly!), but I prefer to find bloggers I really like and then read most if not all of their posts. Blogs tend to make more sense and be more enjoyable if you read them regularly, and since I think good blogs succeed because of the writer's voice, I want to experience that voice often. And, since blogging for me is largely about community and sharing thoughts and ideas, I prefer to follow those writers I like closely to keep up with their lives and what the conversations are about.

A related issue is that of blogrolls, so I can ask that question as well: how do you decide what links to put on your blogroll? This is on my mind because of Danielle's recent post and the accompanying comments on the subject. Do you think a blogroll should be short or long? Mine doesn't strike me as terribly long, but that's largely because I don't update it very often -- if I put all the blogs I read on the blogroll, it would be longer. The argument for a shorter blogroll might be that the links would then be more meaningful -- they are the best of the best, perhaps. But a longer blogroll is more inclusive and more welcoming, which seems like a very good thing. There's no need to make blogging clique-ish.

By the way, if you're a regular reader, and you're not on my blogroll, leave a comment or email me, and I'll put you there.

The blogger meet-up

2006-12-10T07:46:00.000-05:00

My new book club met yesterday – I shouldn’t call it a blogger meet-up, since only three of us were bloggers – and it was a lot of fun. The Hobgoblin and I were there, of course, and Emily from Telecommuter Talk and three other women. Talking about the book, Barbara Noble’s Doreen, was a lot of fun, but one of the best things about it was meeting a fellow blogger and finally putting a face to a name. I haven’t had the experience of meeting a blogger in the flesh I’d known only online, and it’s interesting the way your mental image of a person, shaped by their blogger persona, has to adapt to the real-live person. Well, for those of you wondering, Emily is even cooler in person than she is on her blog -- and we all know her blog is pretty cool.

We had a great discussion of the novel; we talked for something like an hour and a half, at first very intensely, and then we slowed down a bit, but it was like we didn’t want to finish up and we kept coming back to the book to make new observations. A couple of the people brought notes and questions and I felt a tiny bit unprepared – I must remember to take notes next time! – but ultimately that didn’t matter, as we all had things to contribute. It felt comfortable and completely non-competitive, and it was the kind of book discussion I like, where people feel free to make personal connections and tell stories from their lives that relate to the book and help to make sense of it.

And I learned more about the book – one of the coolest things about the meeting was that one of the book club members is English and so she could give us some information into the dynamics of class in England, an important part of the novel. We Americans were eating up all her insights into how accurately the book portrayed the class tensions – interestingly, she told us that the two ways of pronouncing Doreen – the accent on the first syllable or the second – was a marker of class difference, a detail I would never have figured out on my own.

So the group is planning on making the trek to the Tenement Museum in New York City in February – they’d read Triangle, a book about a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in the city and are visiting the museum as a follow-up to that. And I suggested and everyone agreed that we read Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers about a young Jewish girl growing up on the Lower East Side and struggling with her father and her religious heritage. I’m looking forward to the trip!

Blogger issues

2006-12-09T07:58:00.000-05:00

Not much of a post for you today because I spent too much time switching over to Blogger beta and it's not working for me. When you switch to the new Blogger, to get the full benefit you have to upgrade your template, and when I did that, I lost a lot of stuff. I could replace everything except Haloscan, which I use for comments; I tried and tried but just couldn't figure out how to make Haloscan work. And I like Haloscan -- I find it easier to keep track of comments that way. So I'm back to the old template and I don't get to use most of the new features of Blogger. What a waste of time!

I did, however, manage to acquire some new books recently: yesterday Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary showed up in my mailbox thanks to Book Mooch, so I can continue my reading about reading pattern. Then last night the Hobgoblin and I were at the bookstore, one of those stores that has a 3-for-2 deal, and since the Hobgoblin needed one of those books for a Christmas gift, we figured we might as well buy one more of them and get one for free. So the Hobgoblin picked out one, and I got Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss; I had trouble choosing between that one and John Banville's The Sea, but Desai won out eventually. And just a couple days ago I got Edmund White's short biography of Proust, courtesy of Book Mooch. I'm looking forward to learning some more about Proust's life.

The Places in Between, part II

2006-12-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

So I've been meaning to write about Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. I thought this was a fantastic book for a lot of reasons -- the writing is wonderful, the story of his walk is enthralling, and the information he gives about Afghanistan is of the type you won't find in most other books about the country.

As I was reading I had a tendency to focus on the adventure parts of it, but I don't want to neglect the political and historical aspects: I learned a lot about the history of Afghanistan, as Stewart gives descriptions of the towns and villages he passes through and tells a bit of their past. He talks a lot about the complex religious heritage of the place, including the Buddhism practiced in ancient times and the more contemporary Islamic history; he explores the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha sculptures destroyed by the Taliban only 9 months before he arrived there. He also criticizes westerners who lament the lost Buddhas but know very little of what's happening to the people alive there today.

I was fascinated by the conversations with villagers Stewart recounts, and the very vague and hazy picture of the west many of the people have -- not so different from the hazy picture of Afghanistan many westerners have, although it's easy, particularly for Americans, to think that the whole world knows everything about us. Many of the people he talked to had never traveled farther than a few miles from their villages. There are very few women in the book, as for the most part they keep themselves separate from the groups of men Stewart moves among, although, interestingly, in the remote mountainous area the Hazara people inhabit, women are allowed a little more freedom. Stewart stays away from overt political statements, but he does criticize western politicians for saying ill-informed things about Islam and westerners in general for not understanding or caring much about the region.

And then there's the adventure:

Daulatyar was only fifteen kilometers away and there were probably two hours of daylight left, but I had forgotten how much deep mud and wet snow slowed my pace. I felt muffled in the snow-fog and imprisoned by the rain hood I was wearing. I threw back the hood. I could hear and see again. The day was very silent and the plain seemed very large. The snow driving into my eyes at a forty-five-degree angle made me feel much freer, but my left foot seemed frozen to a cold iron plate.

Exhaustion and repetition created within the pain a space of exhilaration and control. And at this point, I saw two jeeps, their headlights on, weaving slowly toward us through the fog. They were the first vehicles I'd seen since Chaghcharan. When they reached me, an electric window went down. It was the Special Forces team from the airstrip.

"You," said the driver, "are a fucking nutter." Then he smiled and drove on, leaving me in the snow. I had seen these men at work when I was in the army and in the Foreign Office and I couldn't imagine a better compliment. I walked on in a good mood.

Stewart insists on walking every inch of the way, even though he must walk in freezing temperatures over mountains, making his way through snow drifts, often in wet clothes. He's sick much of the way, probably having caught a virus in the water and because he doesn't eat very well. He depends on local hospitality traditions, often very reluctantly kept, for his food and shelter every night. At one point he lay down in the snow exhausted and in despair, and even though I knew he made it out of Afghanistan alive, I was afraid he wouldn't get up again. His dog Babur rescues him, barking and whining until he gets up and starts walking again.

Babur turns out to be an important part of the story; Stewart picks him up in an Afghan village when a family, who had been mistreating the dog, offers to give him away. He is a huge mastiff of one type or another, and Stewart spends much of the book dragging him reluctantly along. Poor Babur causes a lot of trouble; at every village they pass, a pack of dogs comes chasing after him looking for a fight. Stewart is constantly beating back these wild dogs with his walking stick. But Babur is an excellent companion and his life with Stewart is much better although more physically demanding than his previous one.

And, finally, here is an example of the kind of writing you'll find in this book:

Almost every morning, regrets and anxieties had run through my mind like a cheap tune -- often repeated, revealing nothing. But as I kept moving, no thoughts came. Instead I became aware of the landscape as I once had in the Indian Himalayas. Every element around me seemed sharper, the colors more intense. I stared, expecting the effect to fade, but the objects only continued to develop in reality and presence. I was suddenly afraid, uncertain I could sustain this vision.

This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in the place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

Walking

2006-12-07T08:13:00.000-05:00

I finished Rory Stewart's The Places in Between and loved it, and I'll write about it soon, but I'm too tired right now. The book does remind me of how fond I am of walking and particularly of going on epic walks (Rory Stewart walks across Afghanistan in the winter through the mountains).

I just came across this article from the New York Times about how the novelist Will Self walked from Kennedy airport to Manhattan -- about 20 miles -- rather than taking a cab. He flew to New York from Heathrow and he didn't take a cab to Heathrow either; he walked there from his home, about 26 miles. He wanted to do the New York walk because:

It would take him through parts of the city that most people never notice while driving in a car: an experience that Mr. Self, a student of psycho-geography, believes has imposed a “windscreen-based virtuality” on travel, cutting us off from experiencing our own topography.
“People don’t know where they are anymore, “he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I'm not quite sure what "psycho-geography" is, although it sounds interesting. I like his idea a lot -- that the best adventures available today are those we can experience in near-by places, if we just get outside and actually experience them.

I've written before about how much I liked Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust, a history of walking. Does anybody know of other good books about walking -- either theoretical/historical ones, or stories of long walks? I know of Bill Bryson's book A Walk in the Woods, and Dark Orpheus mentioned Bruce Chatwin's book Songlines as one that would interest me. Others? I haven't read enough contemporary travel writing, and this is one form of it that particularly interests me.

More on Rory Stewart tomorrow ...

This and that

2006-12-06T07:47:00.000-05:00

Love eighteenth-century literature? Know someone who does? Check this out then. It's Mall Flanders, "accessories for reading eighteenth-century British literature." It's got Brobdingnag and Lilliput University T-shirts and sweatshirts, two different Tristram Shandy mugs, a Robert Burns mousepad, an Alexander Pope clock, Academy of Lagado tote bags, and a Pamela journal. If I kept a journal anymore, I'd make sure I kept it in a Pamela journal. It's also got these stickers -- I must get my hands on this Tristram Shandy plotline sticker:

You've probably already seen the Un-suggestor (link via Maud), a Library Thing service which tells you what you don't need to read. You type in a book you own or have read, and it comes back with un-suggestions. What interested me about it was that when I typed in Mrs. Dalloway, I got back a whole bunch of religious books. I don't need to read Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church or John R.W. Scott's The Cross of Christ or Millard J. Erickson's Christian Theology or Max Lucado's Just Like Jesus. Thank heavens. Similar books came up when I typed in Swann's Way, although the Harry Potter books came up too. The religious book results amuse me because I've got a brother who reads just those things. How did we end up in the same family? Well, long story.
Finally, I was interested to find this article (via Reading Matters) by Genevieve Tucker in The Australian. It's on book blogging, and it's pretty good. After a glowing mention of Metaxu Cafe, she says, "it's the conversation with other readers that is bringing them back again and again to share their considered readings and thoughts, rather than a constantly shifting, shimmering page of book news and snippets of the here and now." That strikes me as exactly right.

Barbara Noble's Doreen

2006-12-05T07:55:00.000-05:00

I finished Barbara Noble's 1946 novel Doreen this weekend and found it quite interesting; I'm grateful to my new book club for getting me to read it, as I'd never heard of it before. I can't say I thought it was a brilliant novel, but it was a fun read and it gave insight into an interesting time period.

It's set in World War II and is about what happens to children evacuated from London; Doreen is a 9 year old whose mother has decided she has taken her chances keeping Doreen in the city for too long, and when the opportunity arises to place her in a good home in the country, she takes it. Of course, this is difficult for mother and daughter both, but Doreen settles into her new home fairly quickly.

Here is the problem, however, since Doreen's new family -- the childless Geoffrey and Francie Osbourne -- quickly fall in love with her, and Doreen's mother, when she finds out about it, becomes jealous. Doreen is caught between her love of her mother and her affection for the Osbournes and enjoyment of her new life. The novel centers around this conflict; most of the adults are well-meaning, but they find themselves at odds with one another and the unwilling Doreen must try to keep peace.

The novel is interesting because of its depiction of London and the countryside during the war; Noble gives descriptions of bomb shelters and air raids in the city, and the quieter but still unsettled life of the country. Even more so, it's interesting because of the class dynamics among the characters. Doreen's mother is working class; she cleans offices and struggles to keep up a respectable life while living in a decaying house turned into apartments on a seedy street. Doreen's mother and father are separated, which makes things even more complicated. The Osbournes, on the other hand, are comfortably middle class. They live on a hill above a town, a situation meant to indicate their status relative to the town's working class residents.

So Doreen experiences new comforts with the Osbournes -- her own room, a garden, occasional presents -- and it becomes harder and harder to imagine her going back to her cramped London life. Her mother is torn between wanting to keep her daughter safe and fearing that she will lose her loyalty and affection. The book showed me a little of the attitudes toward class distinctions at the time -- surprisingly strict, I thought -- and it probed the psychological effects of the disruptions of war and evacuation very effectively.

It's a slow-moving novel; I wondered for a long time when something exciting was going to happen. It did, eventually, but this book is more meditative than action-packed. It isn't a stunning novel, but in its quiet way, it's quite good.

Vocabulary

2006-12-05T07:51:00.000-05:00

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!
You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

Woo-hoo! Thanks for pointing this out Kate!

Mountain biking

2006-12-04T07:32:00.000-05:00

I haven't done a cycling post in a while, not because I haven't been riding but because the riding hasn't been all that terribly exciting. But yesterday I did something I haven't done in quite a while: rode on my mountain bike. I've had one for 3 or 4 years, but it generally sits out in the shed; I don't think I'd been on it for almost 2 years. But the Hobgoblin got them out on Saturday and cleaned and repaired them, so yesterday we took them out to a local park and rode for an hour or so.

I'm not a very good mountain biker, but I shouldn't be surprised or upset at this, as I have done maybe a dozen off-road rides in my life. But I'm always surprised at how different road and mountain bike riding are; they feel like two completely different sports. Mountain biking is much more intense, I think; I'm worn out after an hour, whereas on the road, an hour is about the shortest time possible to make the ride worthwhile. That the mountain bike is much heavier than the road bike is part of the reason, but also the hills tend to be steeper, and you have to guide yourself over rocks and roots, which takes extra power. A short hill that takes less than a minute to climb can leave me completely out of breath with my heartrate sky-rocketing.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, although cold -- cold compared to what I'm used to at least; the last week has been in the 50s and 60s, but yesterday it was barely 40 when we left home. We drove to a park about 5 miles a way, one that is well known among local mountain bikers for having excellent trails. I like the park because it's got a variety of trails -- lots of carriage roads for the unskilled like me, and even more single-track trails for the experts.

As I got on the bike for the first time, I realized that I'd forgotten how, exactly, to fit my shoes into the pedals, and once I'd figured that out, I saw I was heading down a hill steep enough to make me ride the brakes the whole way down. It took me a long time to get back in the groove of mountain bike riding; that hill was actually insignificant, but I forget so easily what I'm capable of and what the bike is capable of, and so I spent quite a while riding around the easiest trails getting the hang of it again.

By the end of the ride, though, I felt skilled enough to try a short bit of single-track. Here things got a lot more interesting, as all the sudden I had to maneuver my way between trees terrifyingly close together and over jagged rock gardens that took up the entire space of the trail and up little hills where I felt my front wheel was in danger of lifting off the ground.

No, I'm not a very good mountain biker. I didn't crash, but that's because I got off the bike and walked it over anything too dangerous. Good mountain bikers crash now and then because they try risky things. I even walked my bike around a few menacing puddles and mud patches because I didn't want to get wet and dirty, which is totally not in the mountain biking spirit.

But I did get an excellent workout. I'm hoping if I keep mountain biking now and then over the winter, I will build up some power that will help me out with racing in the spring. At any rate, it's nice to do something a little bit different. Okay, it's not all that different; I was still on a bike after all, but different enough for me.

Spare language?

2006-12-03T08:25:00.000-05:00

I keep coming back in my mind to a passage from Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree about writing that gets praised for being "spare":

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. What's that chinking noise? It's the sound of the assiduous creative-writing student hitting bone.

Hornby uses J.M. Coetzee to illustrate what he means by the "spare tradition" and it turns out that while he admires Coetzee, he's actually not a fan of super-pared-down language. The passage above comes at the beginning of a long celebration of Dickens, the most un-spare writer there is, and Dickens clearly comes out ahead in the comparison. Here's what he says about pared-down writing:

There's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words -- entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?

As I was typing this passage, I realized that I don't like it, although I think I share Hornby's taste for wordy, talkative fiction. Working toward spare, pared-down language doesn't mean one is working toward nothingness, of course. This is Hornby being churlish and unfair.

But I do love long novels and digressive, wordy prose; while I also admire writers in the "spare tradition," I tend not to love them. Prose that begins to veer toward poetry begins to feel like work to me, and while I'm often happy to do that work, I'm not going to get absorbed in the story. Here's what it is -- I often read novels with that spare, poetic, pared-down prose and I enjoy the experience, but it's not quite as visceral or thrilling as a novel that isn't overtly drawing attention to its own language.

But then Hornby gets even more annoying:

The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming or logging.

The first line is fine; I agree that fiction isn't utilitarian in the least. But then we're back to the gendered language I've complained about before. Okay, he's joking, but still -- writing as wussy? My feeling is that people's desire to write in a simple, pared-down manner has nothing to do with whether writing is a "real job" or not. Hornby seems to be reading his own uncertainties about the seriousness and manliness of writing into other people's aesthetic tastes.

But I really didn't mean to turn this into a pick-on-Hornby post. I'm interested in these passages because I've felt ambivalently about the "spare tradition," which leads me to thoughts about what I look for in a novel. Am I looking for a story so absorbing it makes me forget I'm reading, or do I want to be immersed in language itself, aware of the ways an author is using it? Do I want a flood of words on the page, or do I want carefully-measured, crafted prose that suggests more than it actually says? All of these things, obviously, at different times and to suit different moods. But I feel most comfortable with the Dickensian tradition, and I wonder what that says about me as a reader.

Books I've finished

2006-12-02T08:03:00.000-05:00

I finished listening to the audio version of Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel, and I thought it was a lot of fun -- I like Maisie a lot and the story was good. I thought perhaps the ending dragged on a bit long; I could feel things wrapping up for a good two of the nine CDs I was listening to, but that was the only flaw.

One of the things that intriqued me about the novel was its touch --just a touch really -- of eastern thought. The implication seems to be that Maisie's particular insightfulness comes from a mix of her "western" rationality and her "eastern" spirituality and insight. She meditates, she's gotten training from someone of eastern origin -- I have to be vague because I listened to the book and so can't go back and check my source -- she's acutely aware of other people's states of mind and how these are reflected in their bodies. She's not a hard-nosed detective type but finds success through intuition as much as logic. There's something just a little bit mysterious and mystical about her.

I'm now realizing how gendered this is. Of course she's not a hard-nosed detective! She combines "masculine" strength and resolve and logic with "feminine" compassion and intuition and that's what makes her so good at what she does.

I liked this book enough to want to seek out other Maisie Dobbs novels, perhaps also in audio. I must see what my library has.

I've also finished Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I find myself with little to say about it, although I continue to enjoy reading the novel a lot. It's so rich I should have much to say about it; I think, though, that I have been letting it wash over me and haven't tried to back away to get some critical distance in order to write something. Perhaps this is a sign of defeat -- maybe I should try to get some critical distance on it -- but I don't really have the energy, and, more importantly, I'm enjoying the experience plenty as it is.

I've begun Barbara Noble's novel Doreen for a book club meeting next week, at which I'll meet Emily. This will be fun!

Alice Munro

2006-12-01T07:44:00.000-05:00

I finished Runaway last night and have decided, much to nobody's surprise, that Alice Munro is a genius. I will agree that too much Munro might not be a good thing, but too much of anybody is probably not a good thing.

There are eight stories in this collection, all of them with a woman as their main character, at all different stages of life. Often Munro will cover decades in one story, so we might see a young woman as she meets a man and gets engaged, and then we see her as a widow, and we learn how the marriage turned out. Munro gives long stretches of time and she does it gracefully, the information on what happened in intervening years worked into scenes so that it doesn't feel like summary.

I particularly liked a sequence of three stories about the same character, Juliet. She's off to her first teaching job in the first story, in the second, she's returning home to visit her parents after a long absence, and in the third she's an older woman and the story is about her relationship with her daughter. Each story is fairly focused in time, but together they give a sense of Juliet's entire life. I like this scale; the stories show both how much Juliet gets wrapped up in each event in her life and what the events mean in the larger picture. We get the emotions of the moment which we can place in the context of an entire life.

I've read criticisms of Munro's work that claim she's too narrowly focused on the personal and private and doesn't let larger world events into her fiction. This may be a valid point, but one important social and political event that does inform her stories is the women's movement. Juliet, for example, is a graduate student whose male professors do not take her intellect and her job prospects seriously:

Her professors were delighted with her -- they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted -- but they were worried, as well. The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married -- which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all -- she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). She would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier to men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

As she ages, however, and as her society becomes a little more open to ambitious women, she finds ways to take on a public role. The public world -- the world outside the family and the self -- does have a place in Munro's fiction; it's just indirect and muted. It's not the focus. But this strikes me as realistic, in its own way; many of us deal with significant world events in indirect and muted ways.

I remember somebody calling Munro's stories "novelistic," in the sense that are so rich with emotion and complexity that they could fill the space of a novel -- this makes sense to me, although I wouldn't want to sound like I'm denigrating the short story genre by calling excellent stories "novelistic." Perhaps I should just say that these stories are satisfying in the way they capture whole worlds and lives and minds and emotions.

I enjoyed my experience of reading a book of short stories, which I have rarely done, and I think I would like to read more. The trick, for me, is to read them fairly slowly, meaning only one at a time, and to read them in one sitting if I can. To read a whole series of stories at once would confuse me (just as reading a whole series of poems would), but to sit down and read one an evening or every other evening works well.

This book, as you can see in the sidebar to the left, is my second book in the Winter Stacks challenge -- three more to go!

Thursday thirteen: re-reading

2006-11-30T08:05:00.000-05:00

This will be a pooter-ish post, one that might get me soundly mocked. But, in the spirit of Danielle's post from yesterday and in the spirit of book-blogging solidarity, because many people think lists and reading plans and TBR piles are fun, here we go!

Inspired by another one of Danielle's posts, I'm going to try my own list of books I'd re-read. I'd like to re-read more than I do because, if the book is a good one, the second time around feels so much richer. I sometimes retain so little of what I read, and I'm afraid it's because I rush through things and don't absorb them properly. But there are so many wonderful new books out there ... anyway, here's a list of things I'd likely turn to if I got the urge to re-read.

1. Anything by Jane Austen, even though I've already re-read the novels a lot. In fact, I've read all her major novels except Northanger Abbey multiple times; I don't even know how many times. I turn to them when I want something comfortable and familiar and lengthy; they feel like an indulgence. I've also been assigned many of her books for various classes. What I haven't done is read her juvenalia, which I really must do some day.

2. The Moonstone. I'm guessing that many of the books in this list will be ones I've already read multiple times. I can be such a creature of habit. The Moonstone is wonderful fun and I never seem to tire of it; I think I've read it twice, although it's possible I've read it a third time. At any rate, I'd be happy to read it again. What I really like is the way Collins tells the same story from multiple perspectives.

3. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and/or Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse I've read at least twice; I'm not sure about Mrs. Dalloway, but I love them both.

4. A.S. Byatt's Possession. I'm not being original here -- Danielle mentioned this one too -- but it was so much fun. This is one I've read only once.

5. The Anne of Green Gables books. I've read these books who knows how many times, but I've never re-read them as an adult. It would be interesting to see if my responses to them would change.

6. Anything by George Eliot. I've already read Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda twice and Adam Bede and Silas Marner once. I read The Mill on the Floss in High School, so that's probably the one I'd choose were I to read Eliot again. What can I say -- I love the Victorian novel.

7. Crime and Punishment. I read this book during college, I think, in the summer, and was enthralled. I'd like to go back and see if I have the same intense experience.

8. The Phillip Pullman series. I read this just last spring and tore my way through them; I'd get a kick out of doing it again. This sounds like a wonderful thing to do during the holidays -- just hunker down and read fun novels really fast.

9. Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay. If I haven't read all the essays in that book, I've read most of them and they are definitely worth returning to.

10. Swann's Way. Yeah, I read it just last summer, but this is a book that rewards multiple readings and I can already see that I'm going to want to look at parts of In Search of Lost Time again.

11. Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes. I love this kind of smart, quirky, unconventional novel.

12. Flannery O'Connor's short stories. She's so fascinating and odd and she's such a master of the short story, I can see myself re-reading some or all of them. Maybe her novels too, both of which I've read once each.

13. Mary Oliver's book of poems American Primitive. Poetry is an obvious thing to re-read -- it can be so complex and rich and it's short and so doesn't require a huge time commitment -- and yet I didn't think of it much as I was making this list.

I could probably think of more, but I was beginning to slow down toward the end of that list; I guess when I re-read I tend to turn to the same very small number of books, mainly Victorian or early 20C novels. I could have put Tolstoy and James on that list too.

How do I read Cortazar's Hopscotch?

2006-11-29T08:30:00.000-05:00

I just got a copy of Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch through Bookmooch, and although the truth of the matter is that I won't read it for quite a while (not because I don't want to, but because of all my other reading obligations and desires), I was intrigued by its form -- and also set a bit on edge by it.

The novel comes with a "Table of Instructions" (which will make more sense if you know the novel has 155 chapters):

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all.

The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.

The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list:

73-1-2-116-3-84-4-71-5 [I won't give you all the numbers, but they continue on for 10 lines or so of text].

Each chapter has its number at the top of every right-hand page to facilitate the search.

I'm not sure what to make of this, and I don't know how I'll read the book when I do get to it. The notion of reading the first 56 out of 155 chapters and then quitting with "a clean conscience" seems highly unrealistic, given my intense desire to finish books -- finish them all the way to the end. There's no way I'd quit after 56 out of 155 chapters with a clean conscience.

But following the jumbled-up sequence of chapters doesn't seem quite the thing to do either. It upsets my notions of how to read a book.

The other option, of course, is to disregard the Table of Instructions and read the thing from cover to cover in the normal way. But ... would that work? Would it make any sense at all?

I'm curious about what the different ways of reading would be like. I suppose there's another option, which is to read the novel in the two ways the author describes: once through the end of chapter 56, and then once following the jumbled sequence of chapters. That way I'd know what the two experiences are like, and I'd be following instructions like the obedient reader I tend to be. But that would take a lot of time and would require re-reading large chunks of the novel. Maybe even I am not prepared to be that obedient.

I realize that my uneasy feelings must be part of Cortazar's point; he's making me aware of my conventionality in reading, my obedience, my feeling that I must complete books, my need to have the experience I think the author wants me to have. He's making me question the traditional arc of a story, the convention of reading from cover to cover, and my assumptions of what must be included to make a story complete (at least I think he's doing these things -- can't really say until I read the thing I suppose).

Has anybody read this novel before, and, if so, how did you do it? If not, which reading method would you choose?

Links

2006-11-28T10:02:00.000-05:00

More on the blogging/reviewing controversy: this post at The Midnight Bell is awesome, as is this one by Tim Sterne at Sarsaparilla. Check 'em out.

The Places in Between

2006-11-28T07:57:00.000-05:00

I've begun Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, a book about his walk across Afghanistan starting in January, 2002. It's quite absorbing, and it makes me want to go on adventures. Before this trip, he'd spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, but he'd had to skip Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to let him into the country. After the fall of the Taliban, he decided to give it another try. This is how he begins his Preface:

I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia.

I love that attitude, the "I'm not sure why I did it, I just wanted to" attitude. Because why do anything at all, really? In a lot of ways walking across Asia makes as much sense as anything else anybody might choose to do. So he walked across Asia because it was there and he could.

Can I tell you how much this makes me want to go off on some crazy, senseless adventure?

So far the book is very well written, very absorbing, and full of sentences like these:

It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.

I've read story after story of Stewart walking into strange villages with no idea whether he'll be welcomed or attacked. In his previous walks, people had always taken him in, following customs of hospitality, but in Afghanistan things are not so simple -- while the hospitality custom is still strong, so is fear of strangers in a country so unsettled.

Stewart briefly describes what fills his mind while he's walking day after day. This is the only passage I've come across so far that talks about walking in a more theoretical way; I kind of wish he'd do it more often, but that's not what the book is about (and if you're interested in that subject, I highly recommend Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust):

Before I started, I imagined I could fill my days by composing an epic poem in my head or writing a novel about a Scottish village that would become more rooted in a single place as I kept moving. In Iran I tried earnestly to think through philosophical arguments, learn Persian vocabulary, and memorize poetry. Perhaps this is why I never felt quite at ease walking in Iran.

In Pakistan, having left the desert and entered the lush Doab of the Punjab, I stopped trying to think and instead looked at peacocks in trees and the movement of the canal water. In India, when I was walking from one pilgrimage site to another across the Himalayas, I carried the Bhagavad Gita open in my left hand and read one line at a time. In the center of Nepal, I began to count my breaths and my steps, and to recite phrases to myself, pushing thoughts away. This is the way some people meditate. I could only feel that calm for at most an hour a day. It was, however, a serenity I had not felt before. It was what I valued most about walking.

As an occasional backpacker, I'm interested in what people think about when they spend hours walking (or something similar like running or riding) -- for me, sometimes get in the meditative mood Stewart describes and I agree with him that it's one of the best things about walking.

More on this book later ...

Book blogs and the mainstream media

2006-11-27T07:39:00.000-05:00

One part of me says I should leave this alone, but another part of me can't resist saying something. I'm talking, as you probably guess, about John Sutherland's article on the sorry state of web reviewing (mainly Amazon reviews but also blogs) and Rachel Cooke's article on how dull and badly written book blogs are (I came across the links at the Literary Saloon).

It's the Cooke article that interests me most; she sums up the significance of the disagreements over web reviewing thusly:

The question that Sutherland has raised - what effect is the internet having on criticism? - is not only fair; it is one that no one who cares about art, and especially writing, can ignore.

Cooke says that professional reviewing and book blogging can coexist at present, but she's worried that someday "serious criticism" might disappear so that we are left with only "the populist warblings of the blogosphere." She dearly hopes that this will never happen.

At this point, I'm with her -- I think it would be a shame to lose the professional criticism we've got. I read it and value it.

But then she goes on to attack book blogs, and at this point she loses me. She spends a day reading blogs and comes away very unimpressed, citing examples of blogs she can live without. But I don't think she's done her research very well. Anybody can come along and pick a few sentences out of a blog and hold them up for ridicule; I could do it myself with my own blog writing (I can see it now -- "she reads a Jane Kenyon poem and all she can say is 'I like this poem because it reminds me of how wonderful it is to walk in the woods in winter'?"). Many blogs create their effect over time; people find pleasure in them because they get to know the blogger's voice and sensibility and interests, and if they like those things, they come back day after day, even to read the less-than-stellar posts.

Perhaps Cooke is not interested in spending that much time getting to know a blogger's voice, but one day's reading will only give her a taste of all the blogs out there. If she wants high-quality writing all the time, I'm positive she can find it on a blog, if only she would look around a little more. The thing that bothered me most about Cooke's article was her claim that there's no good writing on the internet, that good writing must be paid for:

I read and I read; I dutifully followed every link. And come supper time all I could think was that not a sentence I'd read was a millionth as good as anything in The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby's recently published diary of 'an exasperated but ever hopeful reader'. Why? Because his words are measured, rather than spewed, out; because he is a good critic, and an experienced one; and because he can write. The trouble is, these qualities are exceptional - which is why they must be paid for.

I encounter excellent writing on blogs every day. It's absurd to believe that one has to pay for good writing; bloggers write for all kinds of reasons and many of them, while being good writers, aren't interested in making a living from it. It's possible Cooke and I have radically different ideas of what constitutes good writing, but it's much more likely she wasn't really giving bloggers a fair chance.

There are all kinds of blogs -- book review blogs, publishing industry gossip sites, reading diaries -- and only some of them have the kind of reviews and articles that might get published in the mainstream media. So it strikes me as odd that when criticizing book blogs, people tend to blame them for not living up to the standards of professional reviewing. Why can't bloggers have different purposes and do radically different things than one finds in newspapers and magazines? If Cooke finds reading diaries dull, which it's her right to do, then there are plenty of other people who love them. What blogs do so wonderfully is open up the possibility for new kinds of writing, so it makes no sense to me to dismiss blogs for not doing the same old thing.

And I'm not buying the idea that professional writers and reviewers must be at odds with book bloggers. Why the hostility? Will internet book reviewing really place traditional, professional criticism at risk? I don't know, actually, but what I hope will happen is that the two will exist side by side -- ideally without the carping -- and that the various types of writing about books will enrich the others. Amateur book bloggers have much to learn from professional critics -- and vice versa. And the two categories overlap anyway; some professional writers have their own blogs, some literary critics keep reading diaries online, some people who make a living off one type of writing turn to the internet to produce another. There ought to a fruitful relationship here, not antagonism.

Update: You simply must check out this hysterical response to the controversy.

A Jane Kenyon poem

2006-11-26T08:17:00.000-05:00

After doing the poetry meme yesterday, I'm inspired to give you a Jane Kenyon poem I read recently and really liked. It's also appropriate for the upcoming season:

Depression in Winter

There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
A crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green ....

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness --
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

I like this poem because it reminds me of how wonderful it is to walk in the woods in winter -- to notice little things like the thawed space near the rock Kenyon is describing, and to see green things here and there, as a reminder that spring will come soon. The Hobgoblin and I have done a lot of winter hiking, sometimes involving laboring our way through several feet of snow and occasionally involving temperatures barely in the double digits. There's nothing more exhilarating than a tramp through the snow and nothing nicer than coming home again and warming up with a hot shower and some food.

But Kenyon's not talking about that kind of walk -- the poem also reminds me of how well a walk in the woods can transform my mood. I never come home feeling the same as when I left. I think I know what Kenyon means by being "greedy for unhappiness" -- I get like that sometimes: mildly depressed and doing my best to stay that way. And a walk will almost always break me out of that rut; whether it's seeing something beautiful like Kenyon did in the poem, or whether it's the movement and exercise that does it, I don't know, but I rarely come home from a walk unhappy.

Cam's poetry meme

2006-11-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

The Hobgoblin tagged me to do Cam's poetry meme, so here goes:

1. The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to was.... Surely nursery rhymes were among the earliest. This question makes you think about what a poem is, doesn't it? I remember nursery rhymes, songs, chants from when I was a kid. I remember reading Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" for school. Oh, yeah, and I remember reading Ogden Nash early on too.

2. I was forced to memorize (name of poem) in school and........ I wasn't forced to memorize poems in school until I got to college, and then only one professor required it. That's quite a shame, really, because there's no better way to learn about poetry than memorizing it, I think. You get an intimate feel for how a poem works. I memorized W.H. Auden's poem "Under Sirius."

3. I read/don't read poetry because....I read poems because I enjoy it and want to figure out more about how poems work. I only began reading poetry semi-regularly early this year, so I still feel strange calling myself a poetry reader. I read poems when I was in college and shortly after, but then I stopped for a long time. It's not that I didn't want to read them, I just never figured out a way to fit them into my life. Now I have a volume I keep on my shelf next to my reading chair, and I read a few poems a week. It's not much, but it gets me through a book in a couple months.

4. A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is .......I'd have to name poets rather than poems, as favorite poems don't come to mind. Favorite poets? Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson.

5. I write/don't write poetry, but..............I don't write poetry, although I can't say I never will. But I just have no idea how to write one. I mean, what constitutes a poem? What should it be about? I have no idea. And I have little idea, to be honest, about what makes a good poem. As someone who teaches poetry now and then, maybe I shouldn't admit that, but it's true. It's easy to teach older stuff because it's generally accepted as good, but newer stuff, I have a hard time saying. That's one reason I'm curious about reading more poems, to get a feel for how they work and what makes a poem great.

6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature.....I don't really get poetry. My students sometimes say that and they mean it negatively, but I'm not being negative here. I don't really think there's anything to "get" about poetry, actually -- that makes it sound like there's a key or code to understanding it, which there isn't beyond being familiar with tradition and form. I just mean I find it rather mystifying -- and that's part of what makes it fun.

7. I find poetry..... well, mystifying. In a good way. Sometimes enlightening, often beautiful.

8. The last time I heard poetry....The local coffee shop has an open mic on Wednesday nights and last February they had a day where people could bring their love poetry/erotic poetry to read. A lot of people showed up to read and to listen, and there was a lot of good energy in the room. It was fun.

9. I think poetry is like....Litlove wrote in a comment a while back that a poem is like a dream, and I've found that idea useful. I was initially resistant because I generally don't find dreams and dream interpretations all that interesting, but the analogy does work; a poem often has loosely connected images that fit together in some shadowy half-known way, just as a dream does. A poem can get at truths in that sideways way a dream can.

I tag ... whoever wants to do this great meme!

More on The Polysyllabic Spree

2006-11-24T08:02:00.000-05:00

So I finished Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree yesterday, just as I thought I might. The weather never did get nice enough to go on a bike ride, although The Hobgoblin, Muttboy, and I did go on a hour-long walk in the rain at our local woodsy park. After that, it was nice to come home and take a warm shower and stay indoors for most of the rest of the day.

I thought the book was a lot of fun. It's rather addictive; I'd finish a chapter and consider moving on to something else or drifting off to sleep, but then I'd look at the list of books read and books bought that begins the next chapter, and I'd think, oh, just one more. Next thing I knew, the book was finished. Hornby's attitude toward books is infectious. I like how he reads all kinds of different stuff; he writes just as well and just as enthusiastically about a collection of Chekhov's letters as he does about, say, Mystic River.

There were a couple things that bugged me. He has a bit of an attitude about the "literary novel"; he reads them and reads them happily, but he picks on them an awful lot, to the extent that I began to wonder why, and I also began to wonder if it's really so clear just what the "literary novel" is. Is it really a clearly-defined category? When talking about Chris Coake's book of short stories We're in Trouble he says this:

Sometimes, when you're reading the stories, you forget to breathe, which probably means that you read them with more speed than the writer intended. Are they literary? They're beautifully written, and they have bottom, but they're never dull, and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas. And Coake never draws attention to his own art and language; he wants you to look at his people, not listen to his voice. So they're literary in the sense that they're serious, and will probably be nominated for prizes, but they're unliterary in the sense that they could end up mattering to people.

Now this strikes me as unfair. Why should the "literary" be that which doesn't matter to people? I think he's got too much invested in this idea of the literary and that he too easily categorizes and dismisses books based on their supposedly "literary" qualities and readers based on their devotion to those qualities, whatever they are. I'm not sure most readers actually read with this category in mind.

Hornby plays around with Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine posturing about books and writing a little too much for my taste. Books are always in a battle with other books or with other forms of art. This is what's on the book jacket; it's quite funny -- but also ... eh, not my thing:

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute vs. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper vs. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -- Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn't give much for Pale Fire's chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and then you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

This is clever, but after a couple of passages about fights among books and the degree of strength or wussiness it requires to write, I start to feel a little alienated. What saves it for me is that Hornby is not actually taking any of it seriously; he's mocking himself a bit, pretty much admitting he's not very good at the Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine stuff.

I didn't come away with a lot of new books I want to read, although I did pick up a couple of recommendations. One is Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books; I remember Jenny D. has an intriguing post on it. The other is Janet Malcolm's book on Chekhov, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. This seems like a very interesting mix of literary criticism and personal narrative, a combination I like very much.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-23T08:06:00.000-05:00

My day will be quiet; the Hobgoblin and I are staying home and having Thanksgiving dinner all by ourselves -- well, with Muttboy, of course, who will get his share of the food (although not nearly as much as he'd like). Our closest relatives, my parents, are five hours away, and while such a drive is possible, we don't usually make it on Thanksgiving, largely because we're too swamped with school work to take much time off. Yes, unfortunately, my Thanksgiving weekend will be spent grading. I still haven't decided whether I'll grade today or not; it sucks to work on a holiday, but it also sucks to have even more work on the remaining days because I took one day off. Yes, the glamorous life of the teacher.

Even if I do a little work, though, I'll still have plenty of time for other things: eating, of course, and maybe a bike ride if it doesn't rain all day, and I may even have time to finish Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I'm about 30 pages from the end. Or I may rush through The Polysyllabic Spree, just because it's so much fun. I'll surely read at least one more Alice Munro story, and I may even read a few poems from Jane Kenyon's Otherwise, a book I've neglected lately.

At any rate, to American readers, enjoy the holiday! To others, have a great day too!

De-lurkers?

2006-11-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

I've seen on a couple of blogs that this is de-lurking week. I've de-lurked on a couple blogs myself -- anybody out there want to say hi?

Ooh -- I just discovered the de-lurking idea came from RevGalBlogPals, and there's a cool image that goes with it:

The Polysyllabic Spree

2006-11-22T07:46:00.000-05:00

In addition to Alice Munro's Runaway, I recently began Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I remember other bloggers writing about this book enthusiastically, and I couldn't resist. Apparently books about books are what I need these days; I'm reading this book shortly after Sara Nelson's So Many Books -- although I think I'll like Hornby's book better. Books about books are good during times of stress I think -- they are usually fairly light reading, they make good company, and they keep me thinking about things I'll read when I have more time.

Hornby organizes his book into chapters that cover one month's reading. For each month, he begins with a list of books bought and books read, and then he discusses those books for a few pages, not in a whole lot of depth, but very amusingly. Somehow he manages to say substantive things in very short chapters, so that I don't feel he's rushing through his book discussions but I don't get bogged down in details either. Sara Nelson's book had a similar format, short chapters covering her reading over a certain period of time, but I finished her book feeling that the tone was too breezy and that she hadn't really said all that much. Hornby doesn't go into depth, but somehow he captures the essence of his response to a book in a way that's both succint and satisfying. I'm not sure how else to account for why I liked one book and not the other except to say that it might just be a personality thing. In these books, personality is everything.

Side note -- I feel a little bad picking on Sara Nelson in the way that I have over a few posts now. Just recently, Kimbofo had a post asking people if they review books they don't like. I do. I believe it's important to think about what doesn't work in a book and why, and I think such analysis makes book talk everywhere stronger and more interesting. But I do still feel a little bad.

An excerpt from Hornby on rereading and on forgetting:

I don't reread books very often; I'm too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality. (I recently discovered that a friend who was rereading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Rudge. That's just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead.) But when I tried to recall anything about [Stop-Time by Frank Conroy] other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy's Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, I haven't even read the books I think I've read. I can't tell you how depressing this is. What's the fucking point?

It's both depressing and it's true -- it's true for me certainly; my memory of what I've read can be so bad. And here's Hornby doing the numbers on what he's read:

I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month -- five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: They go up on the shelves straight away (as opposed to onto the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again ... And anyway, anyone who is even contemplating ploughing straight through over a thousand pages of [Robert] Lowell's poetry clearly needs a cable TV subscription, or maybe even some friends, a relationship, and a job. So if it's OK with you, I'm taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight -- and the Heller I've read before, years ago, so that's six and a half out of eight. I make that 81 1/4 percent! I am both erudite and financially prudent!

I suppose one reason I'm liking the book is that I often think this way myself -- maybe without the humor, but certainly with the obsession.

Short stories

2006-11-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

I began Alice Munro's book of short stories Runaway last night, and I finished the first one, the title story. I haven't been a big reader of short stories; what Diana said about the effort it takes to get into a story and the fatigue of having to do it again and again with a book of stories really resonated with me. With a novel, you orient yourself once, or maybe a couple of times with new characters and locations, but then you're set, and you're in a world for as long as the novel lasts, and you can return again and again to that world every time you pick the book up. I like to live with characters for a while.

But I do want to read more stories, and while A Curious Singularity, the short story discussion group, is helping me, I'm eager to read some collections of stories on my own. Okay, that sounds more planned and organized than I really feel -- I got inspired to read stories when I saw the Munro book, and I'm getting the feeling that I should continue to read stories now and then.

So, the Munro story was good [spoilers ahead]. It's about a young married woman Clara, her husband Clark, and their older neighbor Sylvia; Clara turns to Sylvia for help when she realizes how unhappy she is in her marriage. Munro describes the marriage dynamic extraordinarily well; I can see just why Clark was so difficult, just why Clara would have been attracted to him in the first place, and just why she'd think about leaving him. And why she'd return, as much as I didn't want her to. Munro can dramatize all this history and all these feelings so effortlessly.

I remember a commenter telling me to look out for the goat in this book -- well, the goat appears in this first story and turns out to be the story's symbolic center. Clara's goat Flora is missing through most of the story, but she appears at a crucial moment near the conclusion when Clark confronts Sylvia for helping Clara run away. The goat comes walking out of a fog, illuminated by passing headlights, and frightens the two characters, so that Clark grabs Sylvia's shoulder in a protective move and she lets him do so, although the two had just been fighting. Sylvia writes to Clara later that:

[Flora's] appearance at that moment did have a profound effect on your husband and me. When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified -- no, frightened -- by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between then, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity -- that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. So Flora has her place as a good angel in my life and perhaps also in your husband's life and yours.

And yet -- if you've read the story, you'll know this is not what happens at all. Flora comes to stand for something much different -- much darker -- in their marriage. So the story ends, not with the issues resolved and not with the kind of reconciliation Sylvia hopes they might have had:

All she could hope was that perhaps Clara's flight and turbulent emotions had brought her true feelings to the surface and perhaps a recognition in her husband of his true feelings as well.

If Clara and Clark have recognized their true feelings by the end of the story, this recognition is not an easy or a rewarding one. Sylvia's hopes are a dark counterpoint to the reality of the marriage -- a marriage in which Clara now seems firmly entrenched.

Okay, now I'm depressed. But, sigh, this seems like real life to me. I suppose part of Munro's genius is to capture a rich, if dark, emotional world in such a short space. I'm looking forward to the rest of the stories in this collection.

A blogging question

2006-11-20T13:46:00.000-05:00

Okay -- I can't decide whether I should syndicate full posts or only small sections of each post. Does anybody have any advice or opinions on this? If I syndicate full posts, people can read me without actually coming to the site, which I don't like particularly, but having readers even if they don't always click on the actual site seems good. I can't decide and I keep switching back and forth. Thoughts?

Marguerite Duras' The Lover

2006-11-20T07:45:00.000-05:00

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It's a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you're interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove's post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras' life and reputation.

It's a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family -- her mother and two brothers -- and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn't stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator's later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel's end she describes the lovers' fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

The narrator's voice is simple and spare; the sentences seem empty of feeling, although emotion lurks under the surface, unexpressed but present. Here is a sample (from early in the book -- I'm not giving anything away):

My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother's death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don't mean anything to me any more. I don't know any more about them since that day.

The voice is halting and obviously pained but also detached, as though she's trying to make sense of her experience but only can repeat sentences about the meaninglessness of it all.

The narrator is isolated; she feels loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways, she attends school but has few friends, and she quickly gets a bad reputation because of her sexual experience. She travels to and from school in an odd outfit that marks her as the outsider she feels herself to be.

The love affair is described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner; it is all-consuming -- the narrator spends all her time with her lover and sneaks home late at night -- but it seems emotionless. We learn very little about the lover, except that his father refuses to let him marry the narrator.

This is largely the story: the novel tells how the lovers meet, gives us some stories about the difficult family dynamics, describes the narrator's desire to be a writer, and moves forward in time now and then to give glimpses of the narrator's future life. What The Lover excels at is creating a mood; through its shifts in time and its short, simple sentences, it creates a feeling of a writer haunted by her past, exploring it but grazing across the surface of it rather than digging in deep.

Set in Indochina in the 1930s, the novel also gives a sense of what it was like to be a French family far away from their home country. It describes race and class tensions, as well as familial ones.

Although the story is a dark one, I enjoyed the experience of reading it; there's something compelling in the voice of the narrator, haunted by the past as she is. I don't usually like prose styles one might call "lyrical," as one can call the prose in this book, but the blunt honesty and courage of the narrator saves it for me.

The novel is largely aubiographical; I'm curious to find out more about Duras and her life. She seems like a fascinating figure.

This book is part of my "From the Stacks" challenge -- one down, four to go. Next up will be Alice Munro's Runaway.

Audio books: experiment update

2006-11-19T08:51:00.000-05:00

Last week I wrote about experimenting with listening to audio books while riding on the trainer. My update is that I haven't actually conducted the experiment yet; fortunately for me, the weather has been good enough that I could ride outside -- yesterday, for example, I rode outside for two hours and although my toes were a bit cold when I returned, I did fine.

I have been listening to my chosen audio book, however, Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel; I've just been doing it in the car. I've got a half hour commute to work, and while I usually listen to NPR to keep up with the news, I was so excited about the novel that I decided to listen to it right away.

I used to listen to audio books all the time, back when I had a really horrendous commute of 1 1/2 hours. They were what kept me going; I could only listen to NPR for so long before the stories started to repeat and I started to go crazy. Listening to Winspear's book now, I'm reminded of how much I like listening to audio books, and how I missed listening to them after we moved and I didn't have as much time for them anymore (although I definitely did not miss that long commute). For most of the books I listened to, I liked the reader -- which is crucial in an audio book -- and I felt like the reader became a character him or herself, one that I could get to know a bit. I found myself responding much more emotionally to an audio book than to a regular book. Sometimes I'd be crying as I drove down the highway. I wonder if anybody ever noticed. I'm not sure what this means, exactly. Is my reading with a regular book detached and more cerebral somehow? There's something about a real voice telling a story that makes it seem intimate and very real.

The reader for the Maisie Dobbs novel is great; I love her voice and it's fun listening to her do different British accents. For all I know she may be butchering some of them, but it all sounds good to these American ears.

And I'm enjoying the novel too. I don't read mysteries all that often, and now I'm wondering why. Luckily, all I have to do is check out Danielle's post over here to find a whole bunch of them that look good. I'll write in more detail about the novel when I've finished it, but so far, I like the main character a lot, and I'm interested in the time period -- it's set in 1930 and it deals with the aftermath of World War I. One of Maisie's assignments is to investigate the deaths of two British soldiers in France in the war. And it's got an element of eastern mysticism and philosophy that's intriguing. More on that later.

Reading in airports

2006-11-18T08:47:00.000-05:00

The Hobgoblin is home! I picked him up at the airport Thursday night and yesterday we spent recovering -- the Hobgoblin had more to recover from than I did by far, but since I'm the type of person who suffers if I get just the tiniest bit less than 8 (preferably 9) hours of sleep a night, the fact that I didn't get home until 3 am threw me for a bit of a loop. Let's just say that with all the flight delays I had plenty of time to get some reading done while waiting in LaGuardia airport.

I think two types of books work well for reading in airports -- those that are so completely absorbing that the time flies by and you barely notice what's going on around you, and those that you read slowly and ponder and look up from often to let your mind wander a bit before returning to read another paragraph or page. My airport reading experience this time around was the latter. With the slower reads, you can still do the people-watching that is so much fun in airports, particularly New York City airports, and you can get yourself in a dreamy book-inflected mood where you're half in the airport, half in the book, but really no place except your head where the time flies too.

I had Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree with me, but I didn't get to it and still haven't begun it, and I also had Marguerite Duras' The Lover, which I managed to read about 60 pages in. Considering the number of hours I was at the airport and how quickly the pages in The Lover read, that isn't very much. But I was relatively content sitting there and sort of reading, sort of watching people as they walked by. The book was a good companion -- it's got a powerful narratorial voice that rewards slow, meditative reading. This is not a book to rush through.

Plus, it's kind of fun to notice people glancing at my book and to wonder what they think of it. Isn't this a striking cover?

Early reading meme

2006-11-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

Kate's got a great meme on early reading, and it's high time I did it.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

A frequent refrain in my answers will be "I don't remember exactly," but I'll do my best. I think I learned to read in kindergarten, when I was five, although apparently I knew my letters much earlier. My dad tells this story about how I was going to school and going to school and going to school until one day I came home and picked up a book and out of the blue began reading. I have a memory of coming home from school and beginning to read out loud to my parents' delight, so maybe my memory and my dad's story refer to same thing, although there's no knowing for sure.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

I have an early memory of owning a copy of Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle. I'm sure I owned others, but for some reason the huge stack of turtles sticks in my mind. Later I remember owning a complete set of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie books, the ones with the yellow covers that came in a yellow box. My friend had a set of the Little House books with blue covers and a blue box, and I was a little jealous as I liked the blue set better. I remember finding the Betsy-Tacy books in the library, as well as the Louisa May Alcott ones.

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?

I'm not entirely sure. I know I bought Nancy Drew books at some point, though, which I loved very much. But most often I got books from the library or read ones my parents owned. I was a very frequent library visitor as a child.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?

I most definitely was a re-reader. An obsessive re-reader, in fact. I practically had the Little House books memorized, as I really wanted to be Laura Ingalls. I re-read the Alcott books, Little Women and the others, including Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Also I read the Anne of Green Gables books frequently. I think I re-read Nancy Drew books, and I'm sure I re-read the Betsy-Tacy books.

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?

I don't have a clear memory of this. But I do remember reading books from my dad's bookshelves, so the first adult book was likely one of these. I know I read David Copperfield very early, so it's quite possible Dickens was one of my earliest adult reads. I read Ayn Rand early on (shudder!).

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?

I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when I was young, but I didn't read the rest of the series until I was an adult. I can't say I learned to love those though. Other children's or young adult books I've read as an adult weren't published when I was a child, such as the Philip Pullman books and Harry Potter (I've read only the first one of these). I somehow never found L.M. Montgomery's Emily books as a child, and I still haven't read them as an adult, so I think I'll seek them out at some point. I never got into the Madeleine L'Engel books as a child, but I suspect I might like them now, so perhaps I should give those a try too.

Bike repair class

2006-11-16T08:07:00.000-05:00

I think I'm a poor student. Or maybe it's that I'm an obnoxious one. I've been in a number of classes lately, short, half-day things, and each time I find myself resistant, rebellious, and generally annoyed at the procedings. I don't know if this is simply my (not very nice at times) personality, or if my years as a teacher have made me extremely sensitive to less than perfect teaching. Not that my own teaching is perfect, by any means, let me be clear; it's just that I'm very tuned in to what's working and what's not.

Yesterday evening I went to a bike repair class and had a mixed experience. I think I learned some things, so I'm not unhappy I went, and I got a pretty cool bike repair book, but there's a lot the class covered that I didn't really learn because I had a hard time seeing what was going on and I didn't get the chance to try it out for myself.

The class was at the "novice" level and some of it was review for me; I already know how to fix a flat for example, although I did learn some tricks to make it easier, such as shifting the chain into the smallest cog to make getting the rear wheel back on a bit easier. I had a bad moment when we were practicing fixing a flat and I was struggling to get the tire off the wheel and the instructor, trying to be nice and help me out, took the wheel from me and took the tire off himself. That's exactly what I don't need! But he was just trying to help out. And as a teacher, I know it's hard to figure out when to let students struggle on their own and when to have mercy on them and provide assistance. But as a difficult student, I got irritated at this.

And then we went over some maintenance things like making sure the stem is on tight and adjusting the brakes and the cable tension. This part really irritated me because I didn't get a chance to try it out myself. But then again, it would have been very hard to have everybody try these things out without enough instructors to really keep an eye on each person to make sure nobody did any damage. We didn't really have enough time for all that.

The Hobgoblin has very nicely tried to teach me some things about bike repair over the years, and I've learned some things from him, but if I was a bad student in the bike repair class, I'm a truly awful student with the Hobgoblin -- for lots of complicated reasons, it's probably best that we not try to teach each other things. It just doesn't work.

But the good thing about the class is that it's motivated me to continue to learn more about bike repair and maintenance. I think I really do enjoy working with mechanical things when I have some sense of what I'm doing; up till now I've been reluctant to learn much about bikes because how they work seemed so mysterious.

I'm also very bad at regular maintenance; I just don't like the constant cleaning and fiddling and adjusting and testing that keeping a bike (or a car or a house, for that matter) in good shape requires. This is one area where I'm decidedly lazy. I know that good maintenance can extend the life of bike parts and save me tons of money, but it's still so hard to drag the bike outside for regular cleanings and to check the tires for wear and do all those things I'm supposed to do.

Anyway, there will be follow-up classes to this one, which I am going to try, partly because I heard they will have only 4 students in them, which will make it a lot easier to really learn stuff.

So Many Books, So Little Time

2006-11-15T07:50:00.000-05:00

I finished Sara Nelson's book So Many Books, So Little Time last night and although I didn't like it any better by the end than I was liking it when I wrote this, I did find myself fairly contentedly reading on to the end. I'm not sure why the experience of reading the book was positive when I felt unimpressed by it -- perhaps I enjoyed the experience of not liking it or maybe I kept hoping it would get better. Its short chapters certainly kept me feeling that I was breezing my way through it which made it easy to keep going. Perhaps it's that I enjoy book talk so much I'll contentedly read it even when it doesn't impress me.

The things that annoyed me about the book can probably be summed up by Nelson's comment in one of the book lists at the back; here she is commenting on J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. She finds it:

a surprisingly readable novel about racism and family in South Africa, proof positive that prize winners -- this won the Booker -- are not automatically homework.

Why surprisingly readable? Why assume this book would be dull? And why assume prize winners are homework? There's something anti-intellectual about the tone here that bugs me.

But I was struck by one thing she said, and I'd like to get your opinion on it. She talks about the "skip-around method": "the one where you read the end first and then work your way back to the middle, if not the beginning," and she says that "people skip around in books all the time." For the first 30 years of her life, she writes, she wouldn't have considered doing such a thing, but she considers it now because she's stuck in a book she really wants to finish and she thinks that reading the ending might motivate her. She does a survey of her friends and finds that many of them don't read in order.

I can't think of a time when I've done this. Do you skip around? I pretty much subscribe to Nelson's earlier philosophy that:

You have to start at the beginning and get to the end before you're allowed to comment on what came in between. There's an order to these things you must respect. Beginnings, middles, and ends are meant to be beginnings, middles, and ends: confuse them at your own peril.

I don't even read collections of stories or essays or poems out of order, or at least not often. I'm probably too devoted to the "rules" of reading, too worshipful of the text as the author presents it to me. But as far as novels go, I don't really want to know the ending until I get there.

What do you think -- is skipping around common?

Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay"

2006-11-14T07:53:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

I appreciate A Curious Singularity for introducing me to new authors and stories; I'd never read Katherine Mansfield until now and I'm glad I've read "At the Bay." It's quite a long short story with a relatively large cast of characters; it's structured in a series of vignettes that tell the stories of members of the Burnell family. It takes place over the course of one day, opening with a fairly extended scene filled with descriptions of the natural world. We see a shepherd leading a flock of sheep past the bungalows of a summer colony in an unnamed place, although it's presumably New Zealand where Mansfield was born.

From there we get brief stories about the characters who range in age from the very young, unnamed "boy" and his three older sisters to the mother Linda Burnell, her husband Stanley, and Linda's sister Beryl. I found these stories unsettling. Stanley seems supremely self-absorbed, expecting the entire family to cater to his every need, and when he returns at the end of the day contrite and apologetic for not having said goodbye to Linda that morning, he only gets irritated when he realizes she has no idea what he is apologizing for. In the section devoted to Linda, she confesses that she doesn't love her children, and at the story's end, we read about Beryl's sinister encounter with the husband of her friend.

The most enjoyable parts of the story were the descriptions of the children. Mansfield captures the feeling of being young very well, but even here the story is jarring as Linda's daughter Lottie becomes distressed when she can't figure out how to follow the game the children are playing and screams when she sees a strange face in a window. Another daughter Kezia, in a scene where she is napping with her grandmother, realizes for the first time what death means. She tries desperately to get her grandmother to deny that she will die one day, but she gets no answer and instead her attention is diverted. Instead of answers all we get is distraction.

These unsettling stories are framed by quiet, peaceful nature scenes, a pattern that reminds me of Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," where descriptions of nature also predominate. In Woolf's story, the natural world showed the brevity and relative insignificance of the human lives; her story of the snail trying to get past the leaf seemed just as important as anything happening in the people's lives. In Mansfield's story there seems to be more of a contrast between the peaceful natural setting and the discontented humans who populate it. Mansfield highlights the precariousness and uncertainty of human experience by contrasting it with the stability of nature. Here's the closing section:

A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still.

In contrast to this stillness and serenity, the people seem stuck in a "dark dream."

I think this story is most effective in the way it creates a mood -- it evokes a feeling of dreaminess that begins to shade over into a nightmare at times. It doesn't have a strong story line, but instead it gives a brief glimpse into a number of characters' lives and through those glimpses builds its atmosphere.

Memes

2006-11-13T07:30:00.000-05:00

There are two brand new memes out right now that I'd like to do; Kate has one on childhood reading, and Litlove has an "Aspirational Meme" that is designed to get you to think about "what would make life that bit better." Since this past weekend was a little rough (the Hobgoblin is now safely in Houston visiting his father, and Muttboy and I are left here feeling lonely. Poor Muttboy -- there's nothing sadder than a depressed dog.), I think I'll go for the aspirational meme first to get myself thinking about how life could possibly change. Here's the meme:

What part of the past would you bring back if you possibly could?

Summer vacation. I haven't had a summer vacation -- meaning the entire summer off -- in a long while, since I've had jobs that go year round for the past few years and before that I've had the summer "off" but have had things like course papers and dissertations to write. I'd love to have a real summer vacation and have months with nothing to do but whatever I want.

What character trait would you alter if you could?

I'd like to be more relaxed. As I'm sitting here typing, I can feel the muscles in my shoulders all tense and tight; I've been seeing a chiropractor for a long time about neck and shoulder problems caused by tension, and she tells me ways to stay relaxed, but I just can't seem to. I'm uptight and anxious an awful lot of the time.

Which skill would you like to have the time and energy to really work on?

I'd really like to become a better reader (read more kinds of things, read difficult things, become a better reader by writing more about reading), and I'd really like to become a better cyclist, and I'd also really like to be good at yoga. I suppose this last one is the best answer, since I already do "really work on" the former two. But yoga is the thing that I skip when I run out of time and that means I skip it a lot. And doing more yoga would really help keep me relaxed.

Are you money poor, love poor, time poor or freedom poor?

Time poor. I could use more money but I'm usually okay there; I'm not love poor in the least, and I'm not freedom poor, except to the extent that a lack of time and not having tons of money keep me from doing some things I'd like.

What element of your partner’s character would you alter if you could?

You know ... I'd better stay away from this one. The Hobgoblin is far away from home now and he's probably not reading my blog from Texas, but he still might read through my archives and find this answer. Maybe I can say that I wish he had a knack for making lots of money? Otherwise, he's perfect :)

What three things are you going to do next year that you’ve been meaning to do for ages but never got around to?

Practice yoga regularly. Hike the entire Long Trail (it runs the length of Vermont and will take 3 weeks). Read Don Quixote.

If your fairy godmother gave you three wishes, what would you wish for?

Just a little more time, a little more money, and some peace of mind. With too much time on my hands I get depressed, so I only need a little more, and too much money would make my life more complicated, not less so. I can do with tons of peace of mind.

What one thing would you change about your living conditions?

While I love my town, I wish I could live in a more open, rural area. I really love the countryside. I also wish this hypothetical place still had the four seasons like my current place does, but was on average 5-10 degrees warmer from November to March. That would be perfect.

How could the quality of your free time be improved?

I need to be able to forget about work while I'm not working. I've gotten better at compartmentalizing my work and leisure time, but I'd still love to obsess less about work problems and really be able to relax.

What change have you made to your life recently that you’re most proud of?

I'll agree with Litlove on this one -- beginning to blog. It's added so much to my life.

An experiment

2006-11-12T08:50:00.000-05:00

I tried an experiment last year that didn't work so well, but now I'm considering trying it again. The experiment was to listen to audiobooks while I rode on the indoor trainer. Stefanie wrote about this recently and inspired me. I've listened to music in the past and that worked okay, but I hate the trainer so much that music only makes it better for a little while. The idea with an audiobook is that it might get me really interested in it so that I won't want to get off the bike -- I'll be operating with the rule that I only listen to the audiobook on the bike or in the car. So maybe I'll get so wrapped up in it that I'll stay on the bike to hear what happens next. Maybe.

The trick, I think, is to pick the right book. Last year I chose Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, which didn't really work; I never got all that interested in it. This time around I think I've chosen better. This morning I walked down to the local library and picked out Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. What could be more engrossing than a mystery? And Danielle has written so eloquently about the Maisie Dobbs novels that this one caught my eye immediately. Pardonable Lies is not the first in the series, which is too bad, but it's the only one my library had, so it'll do.

I'll let you know how this experiment goes; it looks like today might be the first time this season I'll ride indoors. Yesterday was beautiful -- 60s, sunny -- a day that makes me think winter might never get here. I rode for two hours and didn't need more than shorts, a jersey, and arm warmers. But today is supposed to be rainy, and although it'll be relatively warm, I still won't want to ride in the rain. So, unless there's a break in the rain that looks like it'll last for an hour or so, I'll be indoors on the trainer. Ugh. Have I said just how much I hate the trainer?

Update: The rain held off long enough so I could ride outdoors today -- no trainer for me! Not yet, at least.

Reading notes

2006-11-11T08:42:00.000-05:00

The less time I have to read, the more I long to do it. I'm really looking forward to things slowing down in a month or so when I'll finally have some solid chunks of time to read. In the meantime, it helps to read shorter things, or I begin to feel bogged down. So the book I just finished, Hotel du Lac, was perfect, and the one I'm going to begin this weekend, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, is as well. And it's part of the From the Stacks Winter Challenge, for an extra bonus.

Am I violating the challenge, which involves reading books that I already own instead of buying new ones, if I admit I just bought two books on Amazon? Oh well, what can I do, since I need the books for two book clubs? The first is The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz, which I'm reading for the Slaves of Golconda. We won't be discussing the book until the end of January, so if you like, get a copy and join in.

The other is Doreen by Barbara Noble, which I'm reading for a group Emily just invited the Hobgoblin and I to join. This is a real-live, face-to-face group -- did you know Emily and I live practically up the road from one another? Okay, it's one town away, say 5-10 miles or so. We had no idea our houses were that close until very recently, and I'm very excited about meeting Emily in the flesh -- a blogger meet-up! I know nothing about Doreen, and I'm eager to get the book and find out.

I am about 20 pages from finishing Frances Burney's Journals and Letters, which has been quite a read -- it's pretty long and not uniformly interesting unless you're a real Burney fan (which I am), but it has a lot of really great sections, including one very exciting episode where Burney, at this point 65 years old, is walking along the coast and gets caught by the incoming tide. She scrambles up a rocky cliff and gets stuck and has to wait as the water rises to see if it will climb high enough to pull her into the sea. I knew as I was reading that she survives -- because the journals and letters continue -- but it was a suspenseful episode nonetheless.

And Proust is coming along nicely; I'm maybe 100 pages from the end of the second volume. I'm reading along steadily and enjoying it, although I haven't felt inspired to post about him on the Proust blog. I'm guessing with more time and leisure will come inspiration. Until then, I'll enjoy the book quietly.

Too many novels!

2006-11-10T07:28:00.000-05:00

Check out this article over at The New Yorker. It's the latest Shouts and Murmurs, if you're familiar with the magazine. If you're not, Shouts and Murmurs is a humor column; I don't always find it funny, but this time it's great. The column starts off with this excerpt from an article on "Ten Sure Ways to Trim your Budget":

Check books out of the library instead of buying them. . . New releases of hard-cover novels cost $25 and more these days. If you buy just two a month, that’s $600 a year.

The author, Ian Frazier, then gives a series of quotations from people who live in a made-up world where people are addicted to novels and waste tons of money on them and could turn their financial lives around if only they'd stop buying novels. Some highlights:

Mrs. Louise Rodgers, Eau Claire, Wisconsin: “I never owned brand-new hardcovers when I was a girl, and now I want my twin sixteen-year-old boys to enjoy opportunities I didn’t have. My boys are like any American teen-agers, in that they eat, sleep, and breathe novels. And they don’t want the three-dollar used paperback version, either. It’s got to be new, mint, original dust jacket, the works. How do you tell a youngster that he can’t have that just-released Modern Library edition of the complete Sinclair Lewis he’s been dreaming of? But I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do; I don’t see any other option.”

Jules Amthor, Torrance, California: “Let me give you a hypothetical situation: I’m walking down the street, I pass a bookstore, and they have a little table out front with some of the latest novels. I pick one up. The jacket says it’s about a male professor of writing who has an affair with a much younger female student. I leaf through the book, and I come across a sentence about the student, who is also very beautiful, sleeping in the passenger seat of a car that the narrator (the professor) is driving, and the student wakes, and stretches, and looks at the professor, and—here’s the part that gets me—the pattern of the car-seat upholstery is still imprinted on her cheek. Well, there’s simply no way I’m not going to buy that book. I can be dead broke, nothing left on the credit cards—doesn’t matter. And that’s what happens to me, over and over again.”

Mitch Gelman, West Hempstead, New York: “As an accountant, the first thing I tell my clients is ‘Get a library card!’ Otherwise, you’re too subject to temptation, and liable to find yourself in over your head. Few people know that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is the ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’ novels. You overspend on one, and, just when you begin to dig yourself out, the next installment comes along. Public libraries began during the Depression as a government measure against this very problem. They’re there for our protection, so we should use them.”
Melissa S., Manhattan: “Eventually, I was able to cut back on novels to one a month, then half a novel, then just a few pages. As of this week, I have not looked at a novel (except from the library) for eighteen months, knock wood. For the first time, I’m learning what it is to live within a budget. At the end of the month, I’m always surprised to find a positive balance in my checking account—it’s nice. Little by little, I’ve reacquainted myself with my TV. There have been some innovations in the formats of reality shows that I had known nothing about. Every morning now I make it a point to get dressed and go outside. I’m paying more attention to my hair. If I hadn’t happened to pick up that copy of the News that day, I don’t know where I’d be.”

I may have given you most of the article. Anyway -- wouldn't that be a very different world to live in?

Hotel du Lac

2006-11-09T07:11:00.000-05:00

I just finished Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and ended up enjoying it quite a lot. You'll find my earlier post on the book and my musings on Brookner's reputation here. The ending -- I won't give anything away -- was satisfying; it was suitably, quietly dramatic. I'm eager to read more Brookner, but I'm thinking, based on comments people made on my earlier Brookner post, that she's probably best read occasionally rather than all in a rush. She strikes me as someone, like Elizabeth Taylor, who is good to have on hand for when the right mood strikes. I'm going to try to get her latest, Leaving Home, when it comes out in paper, and I'm curious about Look at Me after the wonderful review on Book World.

The main character, Edith, is a romance novelist, and it seems to me that it might be fun for an author to have a main character who is a writer. You can play around with ideas about writing and what authors are like and what they do and you could explore some of your own feelings about writing, or maybe create a writer who’s very different than you are.

Brookner plays around with the genre of the romance a bit: Edith can be said to have a romantic outlook on the world and on her life, in the sense that she believes in love’s power to transform. She refuses to take a more “practical” approach to her life, although many people put pressure on her to do so when she has the chance to marry a good man she does not love. We find out early on that she is involved in an affair with a married man, and the drama of the rest of the book is not so much about what will happen to that relationship, but about whether Edith will give up on love itself. Hotel du Lac is not at all a romance novel of the type Edith would write, but it is a romance novel in another sense – it’s a novel that ponders what it means to be devoted to the ideals of romance.

The hotel itself is almost a character in its own right. It’s an out-of-fashion resort hotel where one finds people who have gone there for years out of habit, and it’s a place where families and friends send women they aren’t quite sure what to do with, women who need some rest and recovery, who may have strayed from acceptable behavior and need some time to ponder their sins. Edith is there for this reason, to get herself back to normal, and, as one might expect in a novel, this is precisely what she doesn’t do. As you can imagine, a hotel of this sort is a wonderful setting for a novel – it’s a confined space full of interesting people, and Brookner makes good use of it.

What makes this novel work, I think, is the strength of the main character. I loved seeing the world through her eyes. In several scenes, Edith sits in her hotel room writing letters to her married lover, describing the hotel’s odd characters and the slow pace of life there, and I was struck as I read those letters at the way Brookner creates a sense of a gap between how Edith felt about her life and how she wrote about it in her letters. She’s trying to give shape to her life and inject some energy into it through her writing – this is true of her novels too – and the writing seems very brave and hopeful but also that much sadder because we know that real life isn’t like what it is in novels and brave, cheery letters. Edith comes across as heroic – an odd sort of hero, but a hero nonetheless.

Not a post on books

2006-11-08T07:41:00.000-05:00

I usually write my posts in the evening and post them the next morning, and here I am on Tuesday evening, and it’s looking like I won’t be able to write a coherent post on my usual subjects. There’s a lot going on right now, the Hobgoblin’s father’s illness, mainly. For all I knew this morning, the Hobgoblin would be flying out tomorrow to Houston to visit his father, but right now it’s looking like that won’t happen for another week or so. So we’re at home feeling restless and distracted and unable to concentrate on anything or do anything.

Which gets me to the other thing going on – the election, of course, and watching the returns come in. We don’t have a television, or, rather, we have a television but don’t get TV reception, so I’m getting my news from internet. So I’m sitting here reading political blogs, rather frantically hitting refresh to see if there are new posts with new information. I've got my laptop where I can read blogs, we're listening to NPR on streaming audio, and I've got Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time that I glance in occasionally. It's a good book for dipping into now and then in between election news fixes.

That’s going to be my evening, I’m afraid; there’s way too much going on to do much reading. By the time I post this tomorrow, we’ll know (hopefully) how things turned out and this post will be irrelevant, except as a record of how I’m feeling at the moment.

Back to the books soon.

Books and book blogs

2006-11-07T07:12:00.000-05:00

In addition to the four books I've had going in recent days, I've begun reading Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time. I've got mixed feelings about it. It's kind of fun, and it keeps me interested and happily turning the pages, but ... I'm just not that impressed with her book discussions. The idea behind the book is that she'll read a book a week for a year and then write about them. The chapters are short meditations on some of those books -- she's also got a list at the back of books she read but didn't discuss -- where she writes about how she found the book, what the book's about, what she thinks about it. The chapters tend to have more on context, how she found the book and the circumstances in which she's reading it, than about content.

She's got a chapter on "The Clean Plate Book Club," about how she learned to set down books she's not enjoying rather than suffering through to the end, and another on what it means when a new friend gives you a book -- it's the moment of truth, when you find out for sure if this friendship will last. She writes about how important the location and the timing are in determining how much you will enjoy a book, and about what it feels like to get completely wrapped up in a book so much so that you can't put it down.

All that's good. But I'm reading along and thinking that my blog writer friends do this exact same thing and do it better. It's a reading diary, and an exploration of what it's like to be a reader, and a discussion of a lot of individual books, and I love that stuff, but I'm thinking I now prefer to get it from a bunch of blogs rather than a book. It strikes me as much nicer to read a person's reading diary as it gets produced, in regular blog posts, and to be able to comment on it and maybe influence how that reader thinks and what he or she reads, and to be able to respond on my blog, and do all the things book bloggers do. As far as reading diaries go, they seem much more interesting on blogs than in books, where they can be interactive and immediate.

I'm also not connecting with Nelson's choice of books, which accounts for some of my mixed feelings. I picked up the book hoping to get some good recommendations, at least, but nothing she's reading is really getting my interest. For this type of book to work, the author has to win the reader over, and I'm feeling a little bit resistant still. I'm hoping to get a little more excited about the book as I read further (being a loyal member of the Clean Plate Book Club, I'm afraid), and it is reliably entertaining, but I'm coming away from it feeling more than justified in all the time I devote to reading book blogs.

Anita Brookner

2006-11-06T07:46:00.000-05:00

I began a new book recently: Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. This is my first Brookner novel, and so far, so good. A friend really liked her most recent novel Leaving Home, and Sandra has written glowingly about Brookner. Hotel du Lac is just the kind of novel I really like: character-driven, smart, funny in a sly kind of way, slow in a good kind of way -- not boring but taking its time to let you get to know the main character. And it's a short novel. I'm about half way through; I'm curious about whether it will end in dramatic fashion or continue on in the way it's been going, at a leisurely pace. More on this book later.

I'm also curious about Anita Brookner's reputation. In the last couple months I came across a blog post where the blogger, in talking about Alice Munro's reputation for writing about domestic concerns, said something like "Alice Munro is starting to give me a mild case of the Anita Brookners." This blogger -- a woman -- praised Munro's writing but felt that too much Munro makes her long for something more intense. This comment was witty, and I wonder how many people who've read Munro and/or Brookner feel this way.

I haven't read Munro, although I plan to, and my first exposure to Brookner is a positive one. But I wonder if I were to read a lot of either of them, if I would begin to feel a bit claustrophobic too. And I wonder what it means to criticize these writers for being "narrow" in their interests. Women writers have often been dismissed for writing about "women's interests" and for being interested in domesticity, and I'm sensitive to how women are expected to read books that are about traditionally "male" pursuits but men will sometimes balk at reading books about "women's" interests (I've heard students complaining in this way).

But this blogger is one I like and trust, and I’m positive she was fully aware of all the gender implications of complaining about Munro, and obliquely about Brookner, on these terms. And she said she felt badly about complaining in this fashion, at least as far as Munro goes. I do think there has to be room to say, "I'd prefer to read adventure stories," or "I like something with more edge," or "reading Munro I begin to feel claustrophobic" without at the same time dismissing books about topics that concern or have concerned women.

I remember a friend in grad school who was taking a course in 19C American sentimental literature and who complained about being bored by the sentimental novels the class was reading, saying something about how she'd rather be reading Moby Dick because it's much more exciting than domestic fiction. She was very aware of the gender implications of this, but still felt that adventure stories were more entertaining than stories set in kitchens. I don’t mean to imply that women and domesticity automatically go together – lord knows in my case they don’t – but simply that women have traditionally been associated with domesticity and so to dismiss domestic novels can sometimes be a way of dismissing women’s interests.

The question I’m left with is this: how do we figure out the extent to which our reading preferences are shaped by a culture that tends to devalue women and the extent to which we are merely expressing a legitimate preference for one type of story over another?

And also, is it fair to criticize Munro for being narrow in her interests? I’m eager to read her to find out.

Does anyone know more about Brookner’s reputation? She won the Booker prize for Hotel du Lac, but that blogger’s comment makes me wonder if her reputation has suffered generally or if this is merely one blogger’s preference.

A recent acquisition

2006-11-05T08:33:00.000-05:00

We've got four used bookstores in my small town, which I'm sure I've mentioned before, and last night, while we were waiting for our takeout pizza, the Hobgoblin and I wandered over to one of them. It's a very odd bookstore, mainly because it's kind of hard to get to the books. It's a small room to begin with, and then every aisle is full of boxes, which block some of the books and make it hard to get at the others. I have no idea why this is. And I wonder how much money the owner makes with the place. My town really isn't big enough to support four used bookstores, and this one doesn't seem to get many customers as far as I can tell.

The owner is rather odd. Does that come with the territory? Are many used bookstore owners odd? I'd love to own a used bookstore myself, and I'm not sure if I'm odd enough. Maybe I am. It's difficult to measure one's own oddness. Although, truth be told, when I try to think about what makes this man odd, I can't come up with particulars except for the boxes that block the books and the sense that he spends an awful lot of time alone in the store, most likely talking to himself. He seems caught up in a world all his own, and walking into the store feels a little bit like a personal invasion.

Anyway, he's very chatty, and he remembered what I bought the last time I was in the store: two Elizabeth Taylor novels. I was impressed. I was also very happy to see that he had two more Elizabeth Taylor novels in stock, and I made sure to walk away with one of them: The Blush, which, I just this very moment discovered is not a novel, in fact, but a book of short stories.

It's nice to know that there's another Elizabeth Taylor book for sale within walking distance of my house, the book I left behind. I loved the two novels I read last summer, and I've decided it's a very good thing to have an unread Elizabeth Taylor book in the house, ready for me when the mood strikes.

I wasn't planning on buying any more books, but it's rare that I walk into a used bookstore without buying something -- and that's not so much because I see things I can't resist but because there's something about the smallness and intimacy of used bookstores that makes me very aware of the owners, and I feel this urge to help them out and support the store. And it's not hard to give in to this urge when the books are fairly inexpensive. So I find something or other I'll want to read eventually and feel much better. There's something I really don't like about walking out of a used bookstore empty handed.

A challenge!

2006-11-04T07:28:00.000-05:00

Here's a challenge I think I can do. It's from Overdue Books, and here's what it is:

"If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays."

Now, what to pick? Following Kate's example, I'm going to try to pick books, at least some books, that have been sitting around for a while, not ones I've recently acquired. I'll try to pick at least one difficult book -- something that feels like a challenge and that I've been avoiding reading because I feel intimidated by it.

Okay, here's a try. I reserve the right to make some changes as I go along, but if I do make changes, I'll substitute something I've had around for a roughly equivalent period of time.

The Lover, Marguerite Duras. I've had this forever. And when I'm finished reading it, I can take another look at Litlove's post on it from a while back.
Molloy, Samuel Beckett. I've also had this one around forever. This is my "challenge" challenge read -- something I've been avoiding because it looks scary. Perhaps I'll be surprised.
Snow, Orhan Pamuk. I haven't had this one quite as long, but it's been staring at me from my TBR shelves for a while now.
Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. I'll have more time on my hands than usual in December, so I think I can commit to a longer novel, and I've had this one for a number of years.
Runaway, Alice Munro. I've never read her, and I simply must.

One of these books overlaps with my Thirteen Classics in 2007 challenge: Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Now it's virtually certain that I'll make it through that book :)

The Time Traveler's Wife, Part II

2006-11-03T07:18:00.000-05:00

I finished the book last night, and I liked the second half almost as much as the first (which I posted on here). A couple things bugged me, though. The first is that I felt the novel got a bit long; about 2/3 of the way through it, the pace slowed down and I felt ready to get to the end.

The bigger thing that bugged me was a conversation Henry and Clare had when Clare confessed to Henry some of her sexual experiences before their relationship began (The adult relationship, that is -- they'd had a friendship going on when she was a child and he was time-traveling to her as an adult ... it's complicated). Henry had slept with lots of women before he met her and Clare didn't have much trouble with that fact. She worried, though, about what Henry would say about her own experiences, and I kept waiting for Henry to point out the potential double standard or for Clare to realize it, but neither of them did. That struck me as strange.

And then at the end (I'm not really giving anything away here), Niffenegger gives us a quotation from The Odyssey about Odysseus and Penelope reunited at long last, and I'm reminded of how Penelope spent the whole Odyssey waiting, and I realize Clare spends the whole book waiting too; in fact, the first words of the book are "It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he is okay. It's hard to be the one who stays." I'm bugged by the stereotypes here. These two things together -- Clare as the woman waiting and as a woman who worries that her husband will be angry that she slept with another man, well before their marriage -- are making me rethink my response to the book.

So, if this is a kind of retelling of The Odyssey, in a very loose sort of way, does Niffenegger do any updating of the traditional gender roles in that ancient story? I'm thinking not, but maybe I'm missing something. Any thoughts, those of you who have read this??

BUT, the experience of reading this book was great, and I do recommend it, the above reservations aside. Its chief pleasures, for me, were trying to wrap my mind around what it would be like to time travel and meet myself as a younger or older person. Also, Niffenegger does interesting things with the problem of how knowing the future can possibly change the future; Henry refuses to tell some things about the future, saying that he feels it would be wrong, but there's nothing to stop him from giving things away, and, in fact, he uses his ability to time travel to make lots of money on stocks and lotto. He does tell people what will happen to them now and then. But he always says that those things will happen anyway no matter what people do and that they can't change it -- and in a few cases he creates future events by telling people that those events will happen.

So we're left with the question of free will: it seems from what Henry says that the future is set and we can't change it, and yet sometimes he seems to interfere with the future. But when he interferes with the future, is he really changing it or is he living out what would have happened anyway, no matter what?

The book makes you think about interesting questions like this -- and it's an entertaining love story. Not bad, eh?

Reading update

2006-11-02T07:04:00.000-05:00

I think I posted recently about not wanting to acquire new books. Well. I have. First of all, I needed to buy volumes three and four of Proust, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah. I'm less than 200 pages away from finishing volume two, so I need to have the next books on hand. They look serious. Proust is such a stable, steady part of my life these days, I'm glad to have some more thick volumes on hand.

Then, the way that Book Mooch works is that you can create a wishlist, and then when other people post books from your wishlist on the site, they'll send you an email letting you know the book is now available. So I can decide with the best of intentions not to mooch any more books, but then they send me those emails about books I'd really like that I can get for free, and it's hard to resist.

So when I got an email about Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, I snapped it up. I've now got two science books on my shelves (the second one is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos), so I should get to one of them soon. I do like reading science, although I don't do it often.

Also, I've heard such good things about Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, I couldn't resist that one either. It sounds like a fun book about books and reading, which strikes me as a perfect thing to read right now. And also, I saw Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and decided to try it. I'm not sure if I'll love it or find it gimmicky, so I'm curious. I've found that things people call gimmicky I tend to like, so I'm optimistic.

Who knows when I will get to these, but I'm glad they are around. I still have five points left, which could mean five more free books, so I'll see what possibilities turn up in my email box.

Frances Burney

2006-11-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

I'm nearing the end of Frances Burney's Letters and Journals, about 100 pages from the end of a 560-page collection. As I think back over the book, I'm realizing that a few sections really stand out and the other parts, while I might not remember them in detail, give me a more general feeling for what Burney's life was like. The parts that stand out are the publication of Evelina and Burney's acute embarrassment any time anybody mentioned the novel -- and they mentioned it a lot because it was hugely successful, the sections where Burney meets a lot of famous people (Johnson, Reynolds, Burke, for example), the period she was working at court and got to know the king and queen, and, just recently, her account of her mastectomy.

This last is truly horrifying. She got breast cancer at the age of 58 while she was living in Paris with her French husband. She saw numerous doctors, some of whom wanted to operate and others who did not. About a year after she first noticed the lump in her breast, they decided to operate. She tells the story over 10 pages or so, and it's one of uncertainty and agony. The doctors -- for some reason -- decided that they wouldn't tell her the date of the operation but would give her only two hours notice. And then they wait for three weeks until they actually follow through, so she spends three weeks wondering when it will happen.

And, of course, there's no anesthesia at this time. Burney didn't mention any kind of pain-killer whatsoever, and it seems she was conscious through the entire operation. She describes it with a lot of raw detail; I won't quote here because it's too awful, but she doesn't spare the reader at all. She describes being in tremendous pain, but also being embarrassed when seven doctors enter the room to perform and observe the operation. She does her best to keep her maid and nurses by her side to have some feminine comfort, but all but one dash off in fear. She describes climbing up into her bed surrounded by all the doctors -- how different from a modern operating scene! -- who place a hankerchief over her face, although it does little good as she can see through it. When she sees the "glitter of polished steel," she shuts her eyes.

I've never read anything like this before, and I wonder at Burney's motivations for telling it in such detail. She tells the story in a letter to her sister, and she frames the story with a warning to women to pay attention to the signs of cancer. It must be that the experience was so profound she felt she needed to record it, and it's probably also the novelist in her who has turned many episodes of her life into set-pieces in the letters and journals. And I would think describing the details would help her get some kind of control over or distance from the experience.

I've always been grateful for modern medicine, but I feel this even more strongly now.

Scary things

2006-10-31T07:07:00.000-05:00

I'm not very into scary things. This is going to be a lame Halloween post. I realize I've got a strange relationship to Halloween, now that I think about why the holiday doesn't interest me much -- I celebrated Halloween in the normal way for a while when I was a kid, maybe until I was 5 or 6, but at that point because of the evangelical Christianity I've written about recently, my parents decided Halloween wasn't an appropriate holiday for us to celebrate and I never dressed up to go trick-or-treating afterward. Instead, we had Halloween-replacement parties of one sort or another -- usually just regular old parties at our church with food and games, and we'd pretend they were as cool as real Halloween parties.

So I have a very short history of dressing up and getting into the pagan spirit of the holiday, and I haven't gotten back into it as an adult. The Hobgoblin, good pagan that he is, makes up for my lack of spirit a little bit; as I type, he's downstairs carving pumpkins. We'll pass out candy to the neighborhood kids, and that's about it.

I can be such a spoil-sport sometimes. Actually, intellectually, I'm interested in the holiday and think it has a fascinating history, but when it comes to celebrating -- I just have never really felt comfortable with it.

And, continuing with the theme of me not being comfortable with things, I'm not particularly interested in scary books -- or movies too, for that matter. Scary movies really scare me, to the extent that I stop having fun. I don't really understand the enjoyment people feel in being scared by them. For me, it's not a pleasurable fright; it's a "please, please, please make it stop!!!" kind of fright. So I don't watch scary movies much. I can't remember the last one I saw.

I'm a tiny bit better about scary books, but I can only say that because I just read Dracula, which I didn't find all that scary. If I were to pick up a Stephen King horror novel, I have no idea how I'd take it. Except for Dracula, I can't remember the last scary novel I read.

I'm willing to work on this, though -- unlike scary movies, I might be able to handle scary books. I think I did okay this season, adding one scary novel to my usual list of staid realist fiction. Perhaps next year I'll read two of them. And maybe I'll choose something likelier to scare me than Dracula. The farther away things are in time, they less likely they are to scare us, perhaps? Older horror and gothic novels from the 18C and 19C are more likely to be funny than scary, I think.

Any recommendations for this reader who's afraid of being afraid?

The Time Traveler's Wife

2006-10-30T07:42:00.000-05:00

I'm about half way through The Time Traveler's Wife and it was exactly what I've been needing: something absorbing and long but that reads quickly so that I don't feel I'm getting bogged down or that I'll be reading it forever.

What an interesting book it is! The basic premise -- and I'm not giving anything away -- is that of the two main characters, one of them, Henry, travels through time. The other, his girlfriend/wife, Clare, doesn't. What makes the book interesting, I think, is that time traveling turns out not to be glamorous at all; rather, it is a huge pain in the neck. Henry has no control over when he will travel through time, so he's constantly worried about disappearing at the wrong moment. He won't drive a car, for example, for fear that he'll time travel while driving and cause horrible accidents.

And when he time travels, he leaves a pile of clothes behind him and lands in his new time completely naked. So the first thing he has to do, always, is find clothes before people find him and he gets into all kinds of trouble. He becomes a first-rate thief in order to steal clothes and food -- he's also always ravenous when he time travels. He runs obsessively to keep in shape so he can flee pursuers. Clare loves him deeply but just about everyone else in the novel finds him suspicious, and it's clear that Henry is a complicated, potentially dangerous, mysterious, and difficult person.

He tends to travel to times and places in his own life that caused him great stress. This means he revisits some awful memories again and again. Because he travels to scenes in his own life, he meets older and younger versions of himself. He also visits Clare, which creates some very odd situations. He visits her when he is older, in his 40s, for example, and she is younger, say, 6. Can you imagine such a scene? Meeting your spouse when he/she is a child and you are an adult? So when Clare meets Henry in "real time," she's already spent hours and hours with him because of his time traveling.

This book is a mind-bender.

It's written in first-person, switching back and forth between Henry and Clare, and the switches occur frequently, so I sometimes get confused about who is talking and have to turn the page to check. The effect of this, I suppose, is that the two main characters blend together, although I do like getting their different perspectives on the same scene.

One of the interesting characteristics of Henry's time travel is the way he's more likely to disappear into another time when he's under a lot of stress. So he tries to keep himself calm in order to stay in one place. This leads to some high drama on his wedding day -- because what could be more stress-inducing than going through a wedding ceremony? His particular problem is that this stress might mean that he leaves his bride stranded at the altar.

Henry talks about his efforts to keep calm as attempting to stay in the present moment. So the phrase "staying in the present" that we use to mean staying focused on what's going on around us rather than wandering off to other places in our minds becomes, for Henry, something physical as well as mental. His "staying in the present" means, literally, not traveling to the past or the future. So in a way, Henry's struggles to stay in one place become a way of thinking about the efforts we might make to "stay present," or "stay grounded." Who wants to be absent from their own life? The novel plays with the mind/body relationship: is a wandering mind that much different from a wandering body?

I shall let you know how I like the second half of the book ...

George Sand's Indiana

2006-10-29T08:04:00.000-05:00

I liked this book very much; unfortunately, I wasn't in the mood to focus closely as I read it or to take notes or even gather my thoughts much about it as I read, so I won't have a long or particularly intelligent post.

But I do recommend it if you haven't read it and are interested. It's a good story, and it takes up a lot of interesting ideas, chief among them, for me, about women's lot in a society run by men. Indiana doesn't get a great education and she doesn't have much experience in the world. A lot of what she learned about matters such as love and marriage come from novels -- always a sign of danger to come. It is a long and venerable tradition to use a novel to warn against novel reading.

She is married at 16 to an older man so she has no time to explore life and look around her as an adult. She lives in a time when emotional displays are valued in women, but rationality is not; Indiana seems not to have had the opportunities to develop her mind and the male characters seem lacking in the ability to value emotion. How is she to judge Raymon when he comes along? How is she to know she should stay far, far away? She has no real grounding from which to make sense of her situation.

And what an odd situation it is. She is married to Colonel Delmare, a jealous and violent man; she is watched over by the reserved and mysterious Ralph, a childhood friend; and she is pursued by the charming but untrustworthy Raymon. Her closest female friend dies early in the novel, leaving her quite alone. So the men vie for her attention and she falls for Raymon, not realizing that he is incapable of returning her love. The novel becomes the story of Indiana slowly making that realization -- that she is a much better, stronger person than the one she loves -- and dealing with the consequences.

I was shocked at the descriptions of Delmare's violence toward Indiana. This struck me as a harsher, more direct condemnation of men's power over women than I'm used to seeing in novels of the time period. Stefanie pointed out the horrifying scene when the dog Ophelia is brutally killed, and I think you can see this as an echo of what happens to Indiana herself -- she is portrayed as an innocent creature brutally struck down by a cruel world.

Ralph is an odd character, with his perfectly impassive face and his seeming heartlessness, although we learn by the end of the novel that seeing him as heartless is a mistake. But through most of the novel he hovers about, shadowing Indiana and rescuing her repeatedly, but not making clear his intentions or his role until the novel's end. And what makes Ralph an even odder character is his semi-incestuous relationship with Indiana. He's described as being her brother, her guardian, and her lover. In this sense, I'm not sure what it means that Indiana ends up with him at the end -- has she found her true love, or has she settled for something more familiar and calm and safe?

I understand that the novel's ending is controversial. The question seems to be whether we should see Indiana as subdued once again by the patriarchy -- she seems lifeless and spiritless at the end -- or whether this is actually a hopeful ending, illustrating how one woman escaped from the two men who caused her so much pain and established a comfortable life devoted to helping others. For she and Ralph decide to spend their time and energy and money buying the freedom of slaves.

I feel conflicted about this. It was my impression as I read that Indiana's voice and energy were written out of the text; in the final pages Ralph tells her story and all she seems to do is retire early to bed. This didn't seem like the Indiana of the earlier part of the novel. On the other hand, though, she has escaped, and, most importantly, escaped alive and she will live on to affect the lives of many people -- those slaves that she and Ralph are working to free. We are led through the novel to expect her death and to see death as her only option, but the novel's final word thwarts this expectation.

I'll be curious to see what others have to say about this.

My teaching demonstration, part III

2006-10-28T07:56:00.000-04:00

My teaching workshop is now over, and while I learned a lot, I'm happy to be finished. It was hard to spend all day in a workshop when I had lots of work to do at home. And doing teaching demonstrations for my peers is stressful, and I'm glad I don't have any more to plan.

But the last one went well; it was probably my best. I did another lesson on metaphors, a follow-up to last week's lesson, this time looking specifically at metaphors in poetry. This is the poem we discussed, by Linda Pastan:

Marks

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'til they learn
I'm dropping out.

This poem worked well because it's short and it's got one main metaphor that's possible to discuss satisfactorily in 10 minutes. I asked the class to write some quick thoughts about the speaker's feelings in the poem, which we discussed, and then I paraphrased a part of the poem, taking out the metaphor, and asked which worked better, my paraphrase or the poem. The answer is obvious -- the poem is much better than my paraphrase -- and we talked about what metaphors have to offer a poet.

Another workshop participant did a great lesson on connotations in poetry; she put about a dozen words on the chalkboard and asked us in small groups to write down the associations we bring to them, which we discussed for a while, eventually beginning to make connections among the words. And then we learned she took the words from a poem by Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays," which we could make almost immediate sense of because we'd spent so long looking at some of its individual words.

I loved that way of approaching a poem -- closely considering some of the important words out of their context, so that in context we brought a lot of thought and depth to them immediately. I think that this could work really well with students who are intimidated by poetry, because they can get comfortable with the words before being confronted with the poem itself. It was almost like we were building the poem ourselves, starting with the same building blocks the poet did.

The other great part of the day was doing a social styles inventory -- categorizing ourselves into one of four different types: the driver, the analytical type, the expressive type, or the amiable type (those labels bug me because they're not parallel). The driver is the take-charge person; the analytical type is organized, methodical, and thoughtful; the expressive type is artistic, imaginative, and talkative; and the amiable type is the friendly people-pleaser. The idea is that each teacher fits into somewhere in one (or more) of these categories and each of our students does also, and as teachers we should try to reach out to students with different styles and not always use the style of interaction that comes naturally to us. Analytical teachers tend to teach best to analytical students but might lose the expressive ones, for example.

I was not surprised to find that I fit the analytical type the closest, and am also pretty strong in the amiable category. My scores in the expressive and driver categories were extremely low. That struck me as absolutely right -- I'm reserved, introverted, thoughtful, organized, detail-oriented as analytical types are, and I'm also in tune with other people and eager to make other people happy as amiable types are. And I think I tend to lose the expressive type students in my classes, which is something I can work on.

I tend to be skeptical of personality tests -- I never feel like my answers to the questions are all that accurate -- but the results to this one seemed right on.

I've come out of this workshop knowing more about teaching, but also knowing more about myself. It was worth giving up a month's worth of Fridays for, I think.

Further adventures in cycling

2006-10-27T07:42:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I had one of those rides where everything goes wrong. Almost everything. I set out on my ride around 11:00, planning to ride for an hour, shower quickly, gulp down lunch, and make it to my mid-afternoon class. But 45 minutes into the ride, I got a flat.

This is never good, but today it was only in the mid-40s outside, so I was worried about cold. And it’s hard to change a tire when your fingers are a bit numb. But I got started. Another rider from my racing team rode by and stopped to see if I was okay. I said yeah, no problem, I’ve got all the equipment I need. He stuck around for a while, suggesting that he could wait until I finished so we could ride into town together, but I urged him to go on – partly because I wanted to be nice and keep him from getting cold but mainly because I’m slow at fixing flats and would have felt embarrassed to have him hanging around while I fumble with the tube and the tire levers. So he rode on.

I got the tube in the tire and was ready to use my CO2 cartridge to fill it up – those cartridges are so much easier to use than a regular old bike pump and are easier to carry – but it wouldn’t work. I tried, but in the process of trying, I let all the CO2 out into the air, where it did me no good.

So, I was stuck 4.5 miles from home without a way to fix my flat. I don’t carry a cell phone on these rides, although even if I had one, I didn’t have anyone to call. The Hobgoblin was in class and couldn’t come get me, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who would be home.

So I walked. I watched what felt like hundreds of SUVs pass me and construction vehicles and pick-up trucks, and I thought oh, why don’t you stop and ask if I’m okay! Because I’m not! I thought about hitch-hiking, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept hoping a police car would pass me so I could wave it down and get a ride, but no luck.

I ended up walking 2.5 miles. Walking 2.5 miles isn’t normally a big deal for me, even with a bicycle at my side, but I was wearing those fancy cycling shoes that don’t bend in order to get maximum efficiency as you ride and that have plastic cleats that snap into the pedal. So basically I had horrible walking shoes. I didn’t have a normal stride with the stiff soles and the cleats get slippery on the pavement.

At mile 2.5, though, things got better – I came across a group of men working on a construction project, just hanging out next to a couple of trucks, and I said any chance you can give me a ride? One of the guys put my bike in the back of his truck and drove me the rest of the way home. He told me how his secretary rides also, and how she’ll be thrilled to know he helped out a cyclist because normally he gives her a hard time about her riding. He doesn’t understand the point of it.

It turns out I didn’t mess up with the CO2 cartridge, which I thought I had, since I’ve had trouble getting those things to work in the past – the trouble was that I had the wrong kind of tube. I needed one with a longer stem. Even with a bike pump, I wouldn’t have been able to pump up that tube.

I did make it to class on time.

I can’t have great rides without having some terrible ones, I suppose. And this one wasn’t so bad. If I lived in a different time and were a man, I think I’d get a kick out of hitchhiking – there’s something about traveling and not knowing exactly what's going to happen that I find appealing. And that’s a little bit true about every bicycle ride – most times they are uneventful, but other times, I have no idea how I’ll get home.

Can you guess the book?

2006-10-26T07:30:00.000-04:00

I'm stealing this from Dr. Crazy who got it from Anastasia. I'm all about memes these days. They are great when I'm feeling tired and uninspired.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

"His work no longer seemed as inevitable as before. I began to wonder whether originality really shows that great writers are gods, each of them reigning over a kingdom which is his alone, whether misleading appearances might not play a role in this, and whether the differences between their books might not be the result of hard work rather than the expression of a radical difference in essence between distinct personalities.

We went in to dinner. Lying beside my plate was a carnation, its stem wrapped in silver paper."

Hmmm. I don't think that's hard to guess at all, especially if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of this blog. I could have picked something harder, but I was following direction #5 to the letter, and went for the closest thing. And my chair is right next to my ... oh, never mind. Just guess. And then try it for yourself!

Musings on writing

2006-10-25T07:44:00.000-04:00

Courtney has this great post on running and writing where she compares the two and concludes that they are more alike than she thought. She says, “Like writing the novel, running is all about showing up, going further than you think you could, under circumstances you previously never would have considered.” Now that strikes me as absolutely true. I don’t have experience writing a novel, but I do have experience writing a dissertation, and I learned from it that there’s nothing more important than just showing up every day. Or even just showing up most days.

I got through the dissertation one hour at a time. I realized fairly early on that I’m terrible at working long hours on an intellectual task as difficult as scholarly writing, and so I didn’t ask myself to work long hours. I just asked myself to work for one hour, or sometimes even for a half an hour. That worked. Even a pace as slow as 5-7 hours a week will get you a dissertation eventually, and the novelists will probably tell you it will get you a novel too. Now I wasn’t a stellar dissertation-writer, and I took longer to graduate than I should have (I never had to ask for an extension, but that still left me with years and years of time available), but I finished.

I expected that I would have to work long hours at the end; I have the impression that most dissertation-writers have to go through a crazy period where they are frantically making revisions and finishing up that last chapter and furiously hunting down references, but it wasn’t like that for me. I kept working an hour a day, a page or two a day, and I kept doing it and doing it until I reached a point where I didn’t have any more revisions to do and then I stopped. At that point my dissertation advisor and I set a defense date, and then I waited a month to give people time to read things, I defended, and that was that. I did have to add on a short conclusion, something like 8 pages, before I turned in the final copy, but that wasn’t difficult. It was rather anti-climactic, really. I was writing an hour a day and then I wasn’t. Simple as that.

Actually, what happened is that my hour of dissertation work a day became my hour of blogging a day.

As I was writing I kept cycling and backpacking metaphors in my head. Showing up at my computer for my hour of writing was like taking a ride. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but take enough rides, and at the end of the year, you’ll have ridden something extraordinary like thousands of miles. Or it’s like a day of backpacking. One day’s walk doesn’t get you very far. But walk every day, and you can walk the entire Appalachian Trail, from George to Maine, and you’ll finish in a matter of months. You’re not doing anything extraordinary each day; if you walk 10 miles a day, you can finish the Appalachian Trail in about 7 months. Healthy, able-bodied people can walk 10 miles a day without working too, too hard, especially once you’ve given yourself time to get used to it. Walk at a meager 2-mile-an-hour pace, and it’ll take you 5 hours. Do that every day, and you’ll have walked across a continent.

Similarly, write a page a day, and you’ll have something 365 pages long at the end of a year. And how long does it take to write a page?

Well, okay, sometimes it takes a while to get to the point where you can write a page; certainly I had to do an awful lot of reading before I was ready to write my pages, but even so, when it comes to dissertations if you do an hour of preparation a day, you’ll be ready before you know it. Or if, in writing your novel, you decide you need to discard half your pages, you’re still left with 180 at the end of the year.

So for me, writing is an endurance sport. How about other writers – what metaphors do you use?

The Bible

2006-10-24T07:33:00.000-04:00

I was reading recently about Victoria's Bible-reading project and found myself intrigued. She'll be reading one or two books of the Bible every month until she's finished, doing it partly for intellectual reasons and partly for personal ones. As you all know if you read my post yesterday, I come from a Bible-reading family; I grew up reading, studying, listening to, memorizing, analyzing, hearing sermons on, and doing creative projects in Sunday School about the Bible. I feel like I know it well.

I couldn't even tell you how many times I've read it because it was such an ever-present part of my life. I may have tried to read it systematically once or twice, but mostly I read bits and pieces as we studied it in Sunday School or youth group or Bible camp or Vacation Bible school or whatever else I was doing. I'm pretty sure there's not a sentence of the Bible I haven't read, but that's not because I read it in the usual way one reads a book.

There must be a huge value to studying a book in this way as a child; even though my Christian upbringing causes me a lot of trouble and grief in some ways, I'm always grateful for that training in history and theology and myth and language.

And yet I feel like I have so much to learn about it still. I grew up reading and studying the Bible as though it were the inspired word of God -- which, if you read yesterday's post you'll know I no longer believe -- and this is very different from the way I'd read it now. I haven't read it in quite a few years, except for short passages if I happen to attend a church service, which happens rarely these days.

But I have read some books about the Bible, and I've greatly enjoyed doing so. If you are interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend Jack Miles's book God: A Biography and Karen Armstrong's A History of God and anything by Elaine Pagels, but especially Beyond Belief. These books were so much fun for me because I was finally seeing the history of the Bible that nobody had told me about when I was younger -- the uncertainty about authors (not God!) and the complicated textual histories and the sheer weirdness of Genesis. When you look into it closely and learn something about the history and cultural background, you'll discover that Genesis is one of the weirdest things ever written. There's a whole world of Bible scholarship I never learned about, some of it written by believers and some by non-believers -- scholarship that doesn't take core evangelical beliefs in the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible as a starting point. I find this scholarship fascinating.

All of this was a revelation to me, and it still is in a way; I haven't read a book about the Bible in a while, but I've got my eye on Bart Ehrman's books and am always on the lookout for others like them.

So I'm just as fascinated in the Bible as ever, and I'm pleased that my life story has a book as a central part of it, even though the role that book has played has changed dramatically. I'm not planning on re-reading the Bible anytime soon, but what I'd like to do at some point, some years down the road, is to read it again and see how it's changed for me. Right now I'm content to read about the Bible occasionally, but someday I should take another look at the text itself. I may see some surprising things in it once again.

Five things you don't know about me

2006-10-23T07:42:00.000-04:00

I'm stealing this meme from Litlove and Charlotte because it looks like a lot of fun. The "you" from "five things you don't know about me" obviously doesn't include the Hobgoblin; to come up with five things he doesn't know about me would be very, very hard. Actually, I may have mentioned some of these things on the blog before or in comments on other blogs, but I can't remember, so I'm assuming you don't know them.

1. I'm the oldest of seven children. Sometimes when I tell people that they look at me and say, "Yeah? I'm the youngest of eight," or "My mother is from a family of 13." But often they are amazed and want to know if I'm close to my siblings -- which I'm not -- or if I had to do a lot of babysitting -- which I did. Being the oldest of seven children has a lot to do with why I don't have a child of my own. Not that it wasn't a good experience, because it was, but I know exactly what it's like to raise children and I'm not excited by the prospect.

2. I come from a family of very committed evangelical Christians. The other question people ask me when I say I'm the oldest of seven children is whether I'm Catholic or not. No, I'm not Catholic, thank you, and how tactful of you to ask. I'm also no longer Christian, although I don't tell my parents that. I am very fascinated by Christian subcultures, though, and I love to read about religious history and theology. I've become an annoyingly vague "spiritual" type of person, of the sort that would have irritated my younger self to no end.

3. I was an English major in college, which you probably knew or would have guessed, but I was also a German major. I spent a summer in Germany, but never learned the language as well as I should have. I'm pretty good with languages, but I needed more time to get really comfortable with it. And since I haven't used German since college, I've forgotten a ton.

4. I was homeschooled for three years -- from 4th-6th grade. This has something to do with coming from an evangelical family -- the horrible things kids learn in public schools and all -- but I think it also has a lot to do with my mother being a bit bored by the housewife role and wanting a challenge. With a bunch of kids it was kind of hard for her to go to work, but she could take on the task of educating us. I learned a lot in those years, but you can imagine how hard it was to go back to school in 7th grade. There's a lot of stuff -- non-academic stuff -- you learn in 4th-6th grade that I had to learn all at once, in a big, awkward rush.

5. I hate potatoes. This is a bit of a problem, as the Hobgoblin is Irish. And he loves potatoes. This is more of a problem for him than for me, as he kindly refrains from cooking potatoes unless he provides me with a rice or bread alternative. Isn't that nice?

Okay, that was fun. Anyone else want to try?

Book notes

2006-10-22T08:21:00.000-04:00

I now have seven points over at Book Mooch. That means seven free books, if I choose to mooch them. But, like Danielle, I'm trying not to mooch too many more books than I mail out, so I'll let those points sit around for a while and I'll wait for a book that I just can't resist to appear.

That doesn't mean I haven't made requests over the last couple weeks, however. That's just a resolution to take effect starting now. I just received Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, a book I've heard about from Ex Libris, and I've got Peter Ackroyd's The Lambs of London on the way, which I remember hearing about on Book World. And the wonderful Victoria just sent me A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes.

Also, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants will also be arriving shortly, as will De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, a book on my list of classics for next year.

And then there's Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, which it turns out the Hobgoblin had and I didn't realize it until recently, so now I've claimed it for my TBR shelves. That one I read about at Around the World in 100 Books.

What Kate said about blogs enriching our reading is absolutely true, isn't it?

But when will I have time to read all this? I'm about to finish Indiana, and then I'll get to choose what's next. I'm considering the Fitzgerald book, or perhaps a Nancy Mitford novel, or perhaps The Time Traveler's Wife, which has been sitting around for a little while. I've got lots of choices. Take a look at the latest version of my TBR shelves:

My teaching demonstration, part II

2006-10-21T08:15:00.000-04:00

Two teaching demonstrations down and one more to go next week. I'll be glad when this workshop is over, much as I am learning from it and enjoying it. I normally spend Friday madly grading, and I hate having to push the mad grading off until Saturday and Sunday because I'm at the workshop all day Friday.

Yesterday my teaching demonstration went okay. The lesson didn't go as well as last week's pace line lesson went, but I was also working with a much harder, more abstract topic: metaphors. The idea was that the metaphors we use shape how we think about ideas, basically the idea in George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By. For example, we think about arguments in terms of war or battle metaphors ("you shot down my idea," or "you've never beaten me in an argument") and argument becomes war when it doesn't necessarily have to be so. I like this concept a lot, and the class got it by the end, but there was a bit of confusion as we went along. Perhaps it was just too complex for my short 10 minutes -- but a fun challenge anyway.

But the really interesting parts of the day came first when we were discussing my lesson, and the Business and Computer Science instructors thought I needed to spend a little more time defining "metaphor." They hadn't thought about the term since they were in college and spent part of the lesson in confusion. That took me a bit by surprise, since I tend to assume that people -- adults at least -- can produce a workable definition of the word immediately and are ready to jump to more theoretical ideas about metaphors right away.

And then as I sat in the Business instructor's teaching demonstration, I experienced moments of panic as she introduced the lesson and asked us to do an activity that I had no idea how to do. She gave us a chart with numbers and asked us to analyze the numbers and come up with definitions of terms such as "unit fixed costs," "total fixed costs," "unit variable costs," and "total variable costs." I sat there looking at the numbers and thinking, "What???" It's not that I'm bad with numbers. I'm actually good with numbers and I like them a lot, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the instructions and those business terms, and I did my best but didn't figure it out right away.

We talked in our discussion later about how she could have offered us clearer instructions to help us out, but as we were in the lesson, other people seemed to be getting it without the extra instructions. I sat there thinking, "please don't call on me, please don't call on me!! Because then I'm going to have to admit that I don't get it at all, when I'd really rather just sit here and stare at my paper avoiding eye contact with you and waiting this lesson out."

Later the Business instructor and I had a moment of understanding: we'd bewildered each other, and now we both had a better idea of what our students feel when they don't get what we're doing, and the rest of the class seems to get it, and they might have to admit publicly that they don't get it and feel stupid.

It's great to be reminded of how students feel sometimes -- and not just to be reminded, but to experience it, to feel the intimidation and panic myself.

Lists, Lists, Lists!!!

2006-10-20T07:33:00.000-04:00

A while back people were writing quite a lot on that book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and thanks to Bookslut's recent mention, people seem to be doing it again. So I clicked over to the list and counted how many I've read. Whew! That was hard work. I can't believe I just spent all that time counting. I'm not entirely sure I didn't miscount. But my estimated total is 185 books read from the list. There are a lot left!

But ... it's not as easy as that. If you've looked at that list or a similar one and tried to do your own count, you probably have noticed how difficult it can be to figure out what you've read and what you haven't. For me, I wasn't sure whether or not to count books I've listened to on tape or CD. Ultimately, I decided not to count those. And then there's the category of books I know I read when I was very young and now hardly remember. Yeah, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, but I really don't feel I should count it because I couldn't tell you a thing about it. And then there are books I'm not sure if I read or not. Did I really read Of Mice and Men, or am I remembering incorrectly? Which Graham Greene books did I read? And then there were a couple titles of short stories, and I wasn't sure if the list was referring to the short story only or if the title was also a title of a collection. I've read "The Yellow Wallpaper," but is that story the thing the list is referring to?

If I only counted those books I could write a reasonable summary or review of, my 185 number would be a lot smaller.

I did a lot better in the earlier centuries than in the 20th and 21st. I rocked in the 18C. I could complete that century without too much trouble: 16 books left. Well, that would be a little bit of trouble. But I'm not planning on following that list. I'll hang on to it for a good source of ideas when I want them, and that's it.

And then there's Susan's Thursday Thirteen list: 13 Classics to read in 2007. My list is a day late, and it's not a list I'm committed to, but I thought I'd play along anyway. Here's my list of 13 classics I'm considering reading in 2007:

1. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained. If I can't think of 13, I'll separate these out and count them individually, but for now, I don't want to bore you with too much Proust.
2. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall. I've had this book around for a while. Someone mentioned it's kind of gothic, so maybe it's a good October 2007 read.
3. Frances Burney, Cecilia or Camilla. I've read her other two novels already, and now it's time for these two. Or one of the two, at least.
4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. This is a major one I need to tackle.
5. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out.
6. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Must read more Woolf.
7. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. This is on Susan's list also, and I've had it around for a long time. It looks like a great long, absorbing read.
8. Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. Another one I've had around forever. A recurring theme in this list is "books I've had around forever but have been avoiding because they are slightly intimidating." Time to get over this.
9. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and/or Wives and Daughters. I love 19C novels, so I'm expecting to love these.
10. Balzac's Cousin Bette. I've never read Balzac and would really like to.
11. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (see #8).
12. Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater. Who can resist that title?
13. James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ditto. I'm fascinated by confessions.

We'll see how I do!

Narrative

2006-10-19T07:13:00.000-04:00

For some reason, I have a block against writing narrative. I was reminded of this when Litlove wrote in a comment on her blog something about being able to write anecdotes and reminiscences but not "proper storytelling." I won't speak for what Litlove can and can't do (and everyone who reads her blog knows not to underestimate her!), but that rang true to me -- I feel that while I might manage an anecdote, a short story or a novel I could never do.

I'm not sure why this is. I remember having to write stories in high school and not succeeding all that well. I clearly remember one teacher wanting to know why I had some extraneous detail in a story of mine -- although I don't remember the story itself. I remember a lot of anxiety about her comment. As a junior in high school, I worked on another story, this time turning to something science fiction-like, as I'd been reading in the genre recently, and it got some rather odd reactions from classmates. I have no idea what the final thing I turned in was. And that's it for my story-writing career. I had to write a few poems in my senior year of high school (and read them out loud in front of the class!), and I remember my teacher approving of what I wrote, but somehow I knew it wasn't that good. I was good at following meter, but not particularly imaginative.

So I'm not sure if it was a lack of early practice and encouragement that turned me off story writing, or if I'm just genuinely not good at it. These days, I find that if I try to think of a story idea, my mind is blank. If I wanted to get serious about it, I could probably try some freewriting or other idea-getting technique and maybe come up with something, but the thought fills me with such anxiety that, since no one is making me write fiction, I won't try it. And I don't mean to imply that I think this is a failing of mine; I'm just interested in why I'm this way.

I think early on I got this idea in my head that I'm not creative. To some extent I still believe that, but I'm more inclined to think that it's not that I'm not creative, but that I don't show my creativity in traditional ways. And I'm interested in trying to get past whatever block I have when it comes to creativity and to let the creativity I do have out a little bit. Having a blog is a great way to do that, I think.

If I were ever to write a novel, or if, in some bizarre hypothetical situation where I'm forced to write one, or I'd get a million dollars if only I'd write one, or some such scenario, I would have to write something like what Nicholson Baker writes. By that I mean it wouldn't be traditional narrative. It would have to be some mix of story and essay, like Baker's story of the man riding up the escalator, which is the entire novel's plot, with the rest of it made up of the narrator's meditations. Something about the arc of a story eludes me, and this is where Baker is so brilliant -- he replaces the metaphorical story line with the literal line of the escalator climbing from one floor to another, freeing up the novel to wander elsewhere.

I did have more success at personal essay writing; I took an advanced writing class in college where we worked on an essay over the course of half a semester, and I remember enjoying the process and getting really enthusiastic reactions from my teacher and classmates. I wonder if I'm drawn to this genre because that's the way my brain works, drawn to an essayistic kind of logic or vision, or because with the essay I don't have bad memories of anxiety and failure. Maybe the freedom of the genre frees up my imagination in a way traditional fiction doesn't.

Mid-semester reading and riding

2006-10-18T09:15:00.000-04:00

I started an experiment last spring with reading multiple books at once, and I have come to love it, but I've been needing to revise that practice lately. It turns out that when I'm stressed and busy -- as I always am in the middle of a semester -- I can't handle it as well, and I feel the need to cut back. Danielle has a post on this topic, on wanting to cut back, and I'm agreeing here. I get even more stressed when I feel that I'm not reading in a particular book enough -- those of you who are working on a book for months or years, how do you keep the momentum going?

Now I'll be working on Proust for months and maybe years, but I'll be doing that steadily. What's harder for me to understand is reading in a book -- especially a novel -- only now and then so that the reading process extends for ages. I need to be making steady and regular progress. Without that, don't you lose the thread of the story, forget characters, have to skim what came before? Or maybe that's just me and my bad memory. I like having multiple books going, but I need to have time to read in all of them at least a couple times a week; otherwise I don't really feel like I'm really reading.

So I finished the biography of Colette, and I'm not going to start another book until I finish something else. That leaves me with four books, one of which is a book of poems (Jane Kenyon's Otherwise) which I don't feel I need to read as quickly. And then there's George Sand's Indiana, which I will probably finish next, Fanny Burney's Journals and Letters, and, of course, Proust.

As for riding -- yesterday was my coldest ride yet at 47 degrees, and it started raining halfway through. Riding in the middle of the semester is even tougher than reading in the middle of it, but I'm determined to carve out some hours for both. Luckily, I don't teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays until mid-afternoon, so I have some guaranteed daylight hours on those days. The challenge with riding in the winter is to fit it in before sunset (I won't ride in the dark -- too dangerous), and that makes the college teacher's life perfect, with its flexible schedule. Unless, of course, I have meetings, which I did yesterday. Then I have to get on my bike even earlier to get home on time and then straggle into the meeting a minute or two late and with my hair still damp from my late-morning shower (because I refuse to use a hair dryer -- what's the point when the air will dry my hair for me?).

But you know what? I have priorities, and riding my bike is pretty high on the list. Don't tell this to anybody at work, but when it comes to where I put most of my thoughts and energy, it's not into work, it's into my riding and my reading. That's what keeps me sane, I think.

Colette

2006-10-17T07:35:00.000-04:00

I have finished reading Judith Thurman's biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh, and I'm looking forward to reading some of Colette's fiction (at some point in the future -- I'm not entirely sure when). I probably should have read more of the fiction to begin with and the biography later because I got a little tired of Thurman's descriptions of books I hadn't yet read. This is not a criticism of Thurman's writing -- just an observation of how it felt to read about the books rather than reading the books themselves. I very much like the idea of Kate's upcoming Virginia Woolf project (briefly mentioned here): reading Woolf's work chronologically as she reads through Julia Briggs's biography Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. With Colette that would be a huge undertaking -- and I imagine it would be a pretty big undertaking with Woolf also -- and one I'm not capable of doing with any author right now. But doesn't that sound fun? What a sense of the author's development you'd get, and what interesting dialogue between the work and the biography you'd hear.

As for Colette, she's a fascinating person. She's such a different person from me, I'm not sure she could be any more different, and that's part of why I liked reading about her. I like reading about people I probably wouldn't like or would be scared of and people who would ignore me or dislike me from the safe distance of the corner of my study. She had amazing energy first of all. She wrote a lot, including essays, memoirs, novels, novellas, stories, reviews, plays, screenplays, journalism. She was an actress and a mime and she toured endlessly. She ran her own business selling beauty products.

And she worked hard to subvert social expectations and norms. She had numerous love affairs with both men and women. She became an actress when this was unacceptable for a woman from her social background. Her great themes of love and sex scandalized some readers. She's an elusive figure, often exaggerating stories about herself and doing whatever she needed to to tell a good story. I imagine it was very hard to write a biography about her because of these evasions; Thurman was constantly having to second guess and qualify and question Colette's own claims about herself.

In a way Colette comes across as very selfish. She is known for neglecting her daughter and her mother at times and for failing to take a stand in World War II during the German occupation of France when she published her works alongside Nazi propaganda. Her husband during the war was a Jew, and Colette worked hard to get him out of a detention camp, and yet she seemed oblivious to the resistance movement and to the larger political implications of her actions.

And yet while recognizing her selfishness or whatever we might want to call that troubling quality of hers, we can also see her as a powerful, larger-than-life woman who's admirable for her energy, her strong will, and her insistance on being exactly who she is and nothing else. And, of course, what will matter in the long run is the writing.

I recently received her novels Cheri and The Last of Cheri in the mail, and I will probably start there when I begin to read her fiction. For those of you interested in her, I read My Mother's House and Sido recently, both autobiographical works (sort of -- as always with Colette one must qualify!) that I recommend highly.

So much for book reviews

2006-10-16T07:44:00.000-04:00

As I've written about before, I read book reviews less often than I used to, but I do still enjoy a quick skim through the New York Times Book Review on Sunday mornings. Yesterday made me wonder why. The main problem was that I didn't like Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Jonathan Franzen's new book The Discomfort Zone. The review struck me as overly focused on Franzen as a person, whom Mendelsohn clearly does not like. Mendelsohn does critique the writing too, but the whole thing is colored by his opening complaint about Franzen's "excessively lofty sense of himself." He describes the book as

an unappetizing new essay collection that makes it only too clear that the weird poles between which the author seemed to oscillate during l’affaire Oprah — a kind of smug cleverness, on the one hand, and a disarming, sometimes misguided candor, on the other; a self-involved and self-regarding precocity and an adolescent failure to grasp the effect of his grandiosity on others — frame not only the career, but the man himself.

Franzen has done a number of stupid things (the Oprah incident being the worst), but I can't find it in myself to get as annoyed with him as a lot of people seem to. I've noticed on a number of the bigger book blogs that Franzen-bashing is kind of normal and expected -- like you don't have to bash the guy at all, just mention his name and people know what you mean -- but I don't see why. I liked his novel The Corrections, and I liked his book of essays too, How to Be Alone. And he strikes me as someone who has some flaws, like speaking before he thinks and therefore saying stupid things that get him into trouble, but also as someone who tries hard to write honestly about himself, flaws and all. In his essays, I suppose, I see a level of candor that I like. He has a quality I see in other essayists I like such as Mary McCarthy: a desire to tell the truth even if it makes him look foolish.

I don't take gleeful delight in mocking Franzen because I can somehow see myself saying something stupid at just the wrong time to the wrong person, and although that person almost certainly won't be Oprah, I'd feel trapped by the whole incident anyway and I'd hate to be defined by it, in the way Franzen is defined by his bad incident.

I'm not certain I'll read Franzen's new book, but that's largely because I've already read big chunks of it in The New Yorker. We'll see. I might check it out anyway.

The other thing that annoyed me about the book review yesterday was the quotation from Adam Gopnik's new book Through the Children's Gate that the reviewer ends with. This is about a chess match:

“Luke next played a slow girl who was taking everything down in proper notation,” Gopnik writes about his son. Of course the boy lost, learning a concrete lesson. “ ‘Girls with notebooks are risky,’ he said, truer words never having been spoken.”

At this point, I was ready to fling the paper across the room. Yeah, smart girls -- you gotta watch out for those.

And I've been wanting to read Daniel Mendelsohn, who wrote the bad Franzen review, and Adam Gopnik as well. I might read both of them, but I'll probably put it off for a while.

Clothing: a cycling post

2006-10-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I rode for two hours, and I had to wear both knee warmers and arm warmers for the first time. This is a sign of cold days to come, and of all the layering I'll have to do in an effort to keep warm. I'm going to try to ride regularly all winter so I can be in shape for the races in March, but, boy, let me tell you, riding yesterday when it was 58 degrees out felt cold, and I'm not looking to riding when it's 28. Or 18. I might draw the line about there. At that point, I can ride indoors on the trainer, much as I hate having to do that.

Riding in the winter is complicated because I have what feels like endless layers of cold-weather clothing. All this takes forever to put on as I'm getting ready to ride, but it's also difficult to figure out exactly what clothing I'll need. 30 degrees on a sunny, windless day feels very different than 30 degrees on a cloudy, windy one. If I put on too much clothing and get hot, I can take some of it off, but then I'll have to carry it around, which is annoying, and if I don't put on enough, I put myself in serious danger of frostbite or hypothermia.

And I have a lot of options for what to wear on the bike (probably more options than I have for my non-cycling clothing!): I always wear cycling shorts, a jersey, socks, shoes, cycling gloves, and a helmet, but to these I can add arm warmers, knee warmers, tights, tank tops, t-shirts, a thin fleece jacket, a heavy fleece jacket, a nylon jacket, thin long-fingered gloves, thick long-fingered gloves, thin shoe covers, medium shoe covers, thick shoe covers, thick socks to cover my regular cycling socks, an ear band, and a hat. The Hobgoblin plans on ordering both of us balaklavas for those really cold days, and I might look into battery-powered shoe-warmers, as all those socks and shoe covers still don't keep my toes warm. I need some long-sleeved t-shirts also, I think.

And in what combination do I wear these things? If I wear a jacket, do I need arm warmers? If I have shoe covers, do I need two pairs of socks? Thin gloves under thick ones, or thick ones all by themselves?

And I'll frequently make trade-offs. For example, I hate wearing knee warmers (they go from mid-thigh, under my shorts, to mid-calf, but they frequently slide down my legs and then I'm out on the bike trying to hitch them back up and looking like an idiot), so I figure I'll wear a lot of layers up top so I don't need them on my legs. And sometimes that works. Or I may wear my tights over my shorts, but then not have many layers up top, in an effort to avoid those knee warmers again. Or I'll figure if I have a jacket on, I might not need the super-heavy gloves, or if I wear a hat under my helmet, I can get by without the jacket because I won't have all that heat escaping from my head.

You see how complicated this all is? It can take me as long to get ready for the ride as it does to do the ride itself. But the worst thing -- the absolute worst thing -- is when I'm all ready, I've got all my layers on and I'm walking out the door, and I realize that I forgot to put my heart rate monitor on. The heart rate monitor is a strap that goes around my chest right next to my skin. So I have to peel a bunch of layers off, put the thing on, and start all over again.

How long until spring?

My teaching demonstration

2006-10-14T08:09:00.000-04:00

So you know how I wrote last week about my teaching workshop and the 10 minute mini-lesson I'd have to do? I had to do the lesson yesterday, and I ended up doing the lesson I mentioned in my last post, the one on a cycling pace line. And I thought it went pretty well. I was the only one, out of five participants, who finished within the 10 minutes; everybody else got cut off short (the workshop leaders had no mercy and wouldn't let anybody seize a few extra minutes to finish up). This seems typical of me: I'm generally an extraordinarily good direction-follower (not always a good thing, let me say) and someone who doesn't tend to take up a whole lot of anybody's time. We had a short feedback session after each lesson, and one of the participants said that she thought I might have taken less than the allotted ten minutes if people hadn't asked questions. That's true; if I'm at all nervous (which I was, a little bit), I'll rush, and forget half of what I wanted to say. And I was trying so hard to keep from going over 10 minutes -- not a long stretch of time at all -- that I was in danger of overdoing it.

But the session did go well. I made them act out a pace line, so they got to walk around the room, rotating from front to back up to the front again as they went, and then we talked about the benefits of a pace line (drafting) and the dangers (bumping into other riders) and the need to keep a steady pace and not stay in the lead too long.

The "class" responded very well to my enthusiasm; I started off talking about how some of my happiest moments have been spent on a bike and particularly riding in a pace line, and people talked about that afterwards as a highlight of the lesson. I'm reminded that a little bit of enthusiasm in the classroom will go a long way. And they liked the active nature of the lesson. I'm sure I don't take enough opportunities in my regular classes to make students move around and do things and be active in some way.

I also learned that spending seven hours in one room with the same people -- actually it was more like 6 1/2 since we got out early -- is exhausting. I'm a pretty extreme introvert in the technical sense: even though I like being around people a lot, it drains me of energy, and I need a lot of time to recover. By the end of the day I was ready to crawl into a corner and refuse to talk to anybody.

So, two more Fridays in this workshop, and two more mini-lessons. Even though I think I could easily do two more lessons in cycling, I'll probably try to teach something about writing or about literature. But I have no idea what.

Friday reading notes (warning: a bit whiny)

2006-10-13T07:34:00.000-04:00

I've been in what feels like a long reading slump where I can't seem to get in a rhythm with my reading. I feel like everything takes too long to read and I get bored with it about half way through, and I'm not focusing on what I'm reading so I forget a lot or rush through details that are important. The fault lies with work, I'm sure; I'm having a good time at my new job, but it's a lot of stress and in the evenings when I usually have some time for myself, I don't have a lot of energy and reading often doesn't go so well.

I did enjoy The Mezzanine a lot, but that was very short, and I read even that one in a disconnected way that I'm not really happy about. And my blog writing doesn't feel inspired in the least. I don't have as much energy for it either. I do still like the discipline of writing every day, but it gets harder when I'm not reading as much, and you're more likely to find whiny posts like this one.

I'm nearing the end of my Colette biography, and I'm happy I'm near the end. I'm enjoying it -- really -- but it's so long and I want something new! She's fascinating, but even so, it's time to move on. I'll write about her soon, and I hope to read some of her fiction soon too.

I'm chugging along with Proust also. I have a tendency to decide to do something and then stick with it no matter what -- sometimes well after the pleasure in it is gone -- and while the pleasure is not gone here, it occasionally feels like an obligation. But I've got this stubborn side, and I'm not letting go. So onward with Proust! Sometimes this trait is good; without it I might not have made it through graduate school. I might not ride centuries either. At other times, my stubbornness gets silly.

Now and then I'd like to throttle Proust's narrator. Is it really that bad to leave your home and your mother and go to Balbec for a little while? Is it really so hard to sleep in a strange bed? Really??

George Sand's Indiana has begun well, but I'm afraid I might end up reading it in my distracted manner and won't do it justice. That would be a shame.

And I keep looking at my TBR shelves and thinking about everything I want to read and feeling frustrated that I'm obviously not getting there. I've got a whole new list of writers to look at after my post the other day on the Observer's list of great novels of the last 25 years, writers people recommended to me in the comments especially, such as JM Coetzee and John McGahern and Anthony Burgess. And Penelope Fitzgerald and Edna O'Brian.

I have this feeling that I've written pretty much this exact same post before -- in that case, sorry! I warned you this would be whiny.

Introductions and Prefaces

2006-10-12T07:44:00.000-04:00

This is a follow-up to Danielle's post on Introductions and Prefaces, on whether to read them or not. I began George Sand's novel Indiana last night and went through an experience similar to Danielle's; I had to decide whether to read the intro and the several prefaces or just go straight to the story. As I was tired and had a longing to read an absorbing story, I skipped all the opening stuff and began with the novel's first sentence.

But I often do something a little more complicated, something more like skimming the intro hoping to find some good information on the book's background and themes without picking up any major plot points that will give the story away. Sometimes I'll look at an intro when I've gotten a little ways into the novel if I'm feeling confused or disoriented by the story; the intro will sometimes help clarify things. As for author prefaces, I usually feel like I should read those -- if the author thought something preface-like should be said, then perhaps I should read it. Last night, however, I was too tired for prefaces. I'll return to those later.

Danielle talks about the fear of not "getting it," and it's in this respect that reading or not reading introductions becomes complicated. I've felt that fear myself. I'd like to just read the novel and form my own opinion, notice what I notice, draw my own conclusions, and then test them against what the introducer says. When I'm tempted to read an introduction before the text, it's usually because I'm nervous about not getting it -- not a very good reason, is it? But I also don't want the experience of missing something important in the novel and reading the whole thing without that key piece of information or that key idea or theme. When that happens, I will read the introduction and get frustrated because I wish I'd known that information to help me make sense of the book. While some books are very accessible on their own, others really do benefit from a little background and extra information.

Thinking about all this, I start to think that the best way to read is to read things twice. Now excluding poems and short stories, I realize that's not feasible. But isn't it the ideal approach? I could read something once with absolutely no outside help, no introduction and no notes. And after finishing it the first time, I could read the introduction, get some information on the author, maybe read a little criticism, and then read the text again, in the light of everything I just read. And then I could read it having gotten most of the initial comprehension issues out of the way -- I'd know the plot and characters and some of the themes -- and I could begin to consider more complicated interpretive questions.

But I don't have the patience to read everything twice and don't plan on trying. I do think, however, that it's on a re-reading that I really begin to read.

Best novel of the last 25 years?

2006-10-11T07:47:00.000-04:00

You've probably heard about the Observer's poll to find the best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel from the last 25 years. Like the American version of a while back, they asked a bunch of famous literary people to vote and came up with a list. I didn't like the American list at all, and got quite annoyed at the whole enterprise, but I'm not having that reaction this time. I'm guessing that's because I don't feel any "ownership" or any stake in this because it's not "my" country -- but as you can tell from my scare quotes, I don't particularly like feeling that way. Why feel any ownership over American literature? I'm someone who's spent an awful lot of time studying British literature anyway! A bad list is a bad list.

But I don't really know if the Observer's list is a bad one or not largely because I haven't read much on it. That probably explains my non-reaction. When I saw the list I immediately bookmarked it as a source of future reading suggestions, while the American list did not inspire me in that way at all.

In case you're too lazy to click over here are the top winners:

First place

Disgrace (1999)JM Coetzee

Second place

Money (1984)Martin Amis

Joint third place

Earthly Powers (1980)Anthony Burgess

Atonement (2001)Ian McEwan

The Blue Flower (1995)Penelope Fitzgerald

The Unconsoled (1995)Kazuo Ishiguro
Midnight's Children (1981)Salman Rushdie

Joint eighth place

The Remains of the Day (1989)Kazuo Ishiguro

Amongst Women (1990)John McGahern

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001)John McGahern

Of these, I've read only The Remains of the Day and Midnight's Children, and I've listened to Atonement on CD. All these books I loved, especially the Ishiguro and McEwan. I've read other books by Martin Amis, but no Coetzee (although I've been considering it for a while), no Burgess (I haven't been interested, but maybe I should be?), no Fitzgerald (I'm guessing I'm missing out here), and no McGahern (no idea about this one).

There's a longer list of other nominations, which you'll have to click over to read; I am familiar with most of the names but some are completely new to me.

What do you think -- am I more interested in this list than the American one because it's a better list, or because I don't know enough about it to be disappointed in it?

Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

2006-10-10T07:30:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

In a way, I'm hesitant to talk about Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" as a story, since it shares so little with other short stories I'm familiar with. In what sense is this a story? In a lot of ways, it seems more accurate to call it a sketch, or maybe a prose poem. It consists of a description of a flower bed in Kew Gardens and a snail slowly making its way between the plants and around the leaves. It describes the colors and the light in minute details. We read of small groups of people who walk by the flower bed; we catch little bits of their conversations, enough to begin to piece together a story, but really only fragments before they move on and we lose sight of them.

What tempts me to call the work a prose poem is not so much the beautiful description, although there is plenty of that, but more the way it creates a mood, the people and the natural world together, so that the point is not what happens but how we feel as we read it. I'm also tempted to call it a prose poem because it gives us little glimpses of stories that we have to work to put together, in the way a poem will sometimes hint at a situation without fleshing it out, and focus on the feeling of that situation more than the events, even though the events are often implicit.

What we get from the vignettes are images, as we might find in poems, as when the first man thinks of 15 years previously when he sat in the gardens with Lily and asked her to marry him and she refused:

We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe.

We picture the man staring at the Lily's shoe and watching its impatient movements and understanding his fate, and we also picture that same man 15 year later walking through the gardens with his wife and children and remembering Lily's rejection with relief and with regret.

We see an old man walking with a younger one:

The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerking his hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless.

He talks incessantly to the younger man about spirits who are speaking to him of heaven, and the younger man's "look of stoical patience [grows] slowly deeper and deeper." With the older man's jerky movements and the younger man's strained calm, we put together the story of failing mental powers on the one hand and youthful health and energy on the other. Woolf gives these hints of story through the images themselves; they are vibrant because they are brief and sharply focused.

Woolf spends as much time describing the flower bed and the snail as she does the people; in fact, since there are four groups of people who walk by, the snail gets much more attention than any particular person does. The human stories are not privileged; the snail's decision whether to crawl around or over or under the leaf is just as important as whether Lily said yes or no. With Woolf's careful description of the flowers and the sunlight, she creates a feeling that the natural world, even though it is made up of individual parts that are fleeting, as a whole is more real and long-lasting than the human world.

Footnotes on footnotes

2006-10-09T07:51:00.000-04:00

As Nicholson Baker nears the end of his novel The Mezzanine, his narrator begins talking about Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. We learn he has begun to read this book because of "a glowing mention in William Edward Hartpole Lecky's History of European Morals (which I had been attracted to, browsing in the library one Saturday, by the ambitious title and the luxurious incidentalism of the footnotes)." And here Baker inserts a footnote. This footnote starts off with anecdotes from Lecky's book and modulates into a discussion of footnotes themselves. This is the sentence with which the footnote ends:

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

I'm not entirely sure if that's a brilliant sentence or a terrible one. Maybe it's brilliant in its awfulness. But I love the idea that footnotes connect the book to the rest of the library, to a wider reality.

But back to the beginning -- Baker's narrator repeats a couple of the anecdotes from Lecky's book, one of which tells us that Spinoza "liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders' webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that he occasionally burst out laughing." The narrator considers why such side notes, such digressions are so much fun, and in doing so, he quotes Boswell on Samuel Johnson:

Upon this tour, when journeying, he [Johnson] wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.

The narrator goes on, and here we get to the heart of his footnote on footnotes:

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a tough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.s's" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one's mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom.

At the risk of boring you, here's a bit more:

Digression -- a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument -- is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going? (They have removed this blemish in later editions.)

This whole book is an illustration of what Baker means by "luxurious incidentalism"; we find this in his footnotes, but we also find it in the text itself, which wanders from topic to topic as the narrator's mind wanders on his lunch break. I begin to wonder, not how Baker could write 135 pages about one morning, but how he could capture the whole morning in a mere 135 pages.

Footnotes on one's own thinking interest me. How does one decide what belongs in the main text and what belongs in a footnote, especially when the main text is itself already very digressive? To footnote someone else's text I understand, and to footnote one's own scholarly work with further details and explanations and documentations I understand, but to footnote a record of one's own thoughts, a record that is by no means smooth and sequential to begin with and is already full of footnote-like digressions -- that shows just how complicated it is to try to capture what goes on in a mind. If the "outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph," then neither is the "outer surface" of the mind.

I'm curious about this because the book ends with two endings, two climaxes, one in the main text and one in a footnote. The ending in the main text is quite simple: the narrator makes it to the top of the escalator. The footnote ending is about the resolution of the shoelace dilemma (what, exactly, wears them down and causes them to snap?) After researching the question exhaustively, the narrator finds a 1984 volume of World Textile Abstracts, with the following entry by the Polish researcher Z. Czaplicki:

Two mechanical devices for testing the abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish standards are discussed.

Here is the narrator's response:

I let out a small cry and slapped by hand down on the page. The joy I felt maybe difficult for some to understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute's thought, as I had, and go to lunch -- he was going to make the problem his life's work ... A great man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in Poland, would take it from there.

He doesn't discover what makes shoelaces wear out, but there is somebody out there just as fascinated by the question as he is. The footnote ending shadows the main text ending, but in a way it is more important than the main text ending. The footnote ending points the reader out of the novel, out of the narrator's mind, out to the world; it is an example of those "finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library."

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine

2006-10-08T09:15:00.000-04:00

I finished The Mezzanine last night and loved it. If you've ever been tempted to read Nicholson Baker but haven't yet, or even if you've never been tempted, I'd say give him a try. This is one sort of book I love very much -- a non-traditional narrative that's more about thoughts and ideas than about plot. It's the kind of book where the narrator's personality makes or breaks it; it's all about voice. If the voice is good, it doesn't matter what the subject is. It's a novel that's closer to the essay than it is to more traditional novels.

The subject of this book, that I say doesn't matter so much? Let's see. The main events include riding an escalator, contemplating why the two shoelaces on a pair of shoes snapped within a short time of each other, shopping at CVS, eating a cookie and milk, talking to work colleagues, and visiting the bathroom. The book describes the escalator ride from the vantage point of a few years afterward, and it moves backward from the escalator ride to describe the morning at work which precedes it and the lunch break which the ride brings to an end.

But these things aren't really the subjects of the book. The real subjects are the way the narrator's mind works and his enthusiasm for the little details of modern life. This enthusiasm is boundless. When the second shoelace snaps shortly after the first one did, the narrator sets off on a quest to discover how shoelaces wear out. Is it because of the stress caused by pulling the laces tight when he ties them? Or is it the wear on the laces caused by the slight friction of lace against shoe every time he takes a step?

Now that I think about it, I realize that there are a number of more traditional narratives and genres that the book plays with, one being the quest narrative. While a quest to discover why shoelaces wear and break might seem small, what this narrator is really after is knowledge of those details that shape our day-to-day lives that most of us don't even notice, much less understand. He's showing that those details matter -- they are our lives, after all. We are surrounded by things we don't understand, things we use without knowing where they came from or how they got to us, or how they function and why they break. He wants to dig those details out and examine them and understand them.

He also wants to understand the way the mind works. In one passage, he considers the "periodicity of regularly returning thoughts," the number of times he thinks of a particular thing a year. If he can study and chart this, he can understand his mental life much better; without this study, he has only a vague impression of what thoughts he actually devotes his energy to. He realizes how complicated such an endeavor would be, but he makes a chart with his best estimates, a chart that occupies a couple pages of text, and tells us that he thought about how "people are very dissimilar" about 16 times a year, and about how "people are very similar" about 12 times a year. And he thinks about staplers 7 times a year and escalator invention 12 times.

This sounds rather Proustian, doesn't it?

Some of these thoughts are inspired by Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, a book the narrator carries with him on his lunch break. Here is another traditional form Baker draws on, for his own book could be called meditations -- meditations on the world the narrator has found himself in. He never reads very much of Aurelius's Meditations, but he has it with him because he fell in love with one line he came across by chance while looking at the book in the bookstore. Here's the line:

Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!

The narrator's response to the line is this:

Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence, full of phrases that never come naturally to people's lips now but once had: "condition of life," "so well adapted for," "chance finds you," as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought that book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night.

And that, you could say, is the book in a nutshell, from the enthusiasm in that opening "Wo!" to the list of things that make up an ordinary day at the passage's end, to the idea in the passage's middle that one can live an ordinary life profoundly.

And lest you think this book is all seriousness, let me say it's hilariously funny, and I often laughed out loud as I read. The bathroom scene -- generally I'm not big on bathroom humor, but that bathroom scene -- ah, just read it.

I haven't even gotten to the footnotes yet, but perhaps I'll come back to them tomorrow. I must talk about the footnote on footnotes and the footnotes on the resolution of the shoelace conundrum. It's a very moving passage, something I never thought I'd say about a passage on shoelaces.

On teaching

2006-10-07T08:13:00.000-04:00

So I signed up for a workshop at my job that teaches instructional skills; it's called, logically enough, an Instructional Skills Workshop, or ISW. The workshop involves four Fridays this October. We met yesterday for four hours, and we'll meet the next three Fridays for seven hours and learn about things like creating effective lesson plans, formulating learning outcomes, assessing student learning, and encouraging student participation in class.

On the one hand, all that sounds kind of boring and bureaucratic. Say the words "outcomes" and "assessment" to average academics and they will roll their eyes. On the other hand, though, today's workshop was fun, and I think I'll learn a lot. It's very practical, so what I'm learning will be directly usable in class. I'm guessing it's kind of like coursework you might do for a degree in elementary or secondary education -- where they actually teach you how to teach -- shortened into four days. And that sounds like a very good idea to me, since many, many college instructors don't get formal training in pedagogy. I got some training in how to teach writing, but very little in how to manage a classroom. My problem is that while I know some things about good teaching, my knowledge is kind of vague and nebulous, and this sort of workshop will help me be more consistent and systematic about doing the things good teachers do.

This kind of workshop works for me, since I'm more of a planner than a spontaneous teacher, and this way I'll learn better ways to plan. The things we're learning don't preclude some spontaneity anyway. This is one way the Hobgoblin and I are quite different; he's got a post on more spontaneous forms of teaching, which sound great but just aren't my style. I think I'm learning ways to play to my strengths as a teacher rather than trying to be a kind of teacher I'm not (the kind who can wing it successfully).

The main part of the workshop is a series of mini-lessons all the participants have to do: one a week for the next three weeks. I'm supposed to do a 10-minute lesson on whatever I want next Friday, so I'm wracking my brains for what I can teach. The workshop leaders recommend teaching something out of one's discipline -- a hobby or non-academic skill one has, for example. So I might teach something related to cycling. I'd thought about doing a lesson on how to watch a bike race; i.e. how to make sense of what's happening. But the lesson is supposed to be interactive in some way, and I'm not sure how to teach that lesson interactively. Then I thought of teaching the concept of the pace line -- what it is and why cyclists use them. I can be interactive with this lesson easily -- I can make everyone form a line and pretend we're riding and act out the paceline's movements.

Anything about cycling anybody out there has always wanted to know? I don't think anyone else in the group knows much about it, so I can get away with teaching the basics.

We'll get videotaped as we teach, but, thank God, we're not forced to watch ourselves. We'll get feedback on our teaching, which will be fine, but I can't handle the thought of watching myself on tape. And I don't even own a VCR, so I have no easy way to watch the tape anyway. What a relief.

Reading notes

2006-10-06T07:45:00.000-04:00

Diana has a post on how she's storing up for the winter in various ways, including stocking up on books, and that's what I appear to be doing too, although there's no need for me to panic about running out of reading material, since I can walk to four used bookstores in town. But I have the urge to acquire and accumulate also, and I haven't resisted it. I haven't really even tried. Recent acquisitions include:

Geraldine Brooks's novel Year of Wonders, about the plague -- which makes two books I own about the plague, the other being the nonfiction book The Great Mortality. Some fun winter reading!
The Time Traveler's Wife, which everyone I know who has read it (which includes quite a lot of people) says I should read and will like. Looking forward to it.
James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is quite a wonderful title. I heard about this from Jane Smiley's book on the novel.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. I've read one book by Gaskell, North and South, and liked it and am looking forward to another. I love 19C novels, and I'm happy that Gaskell has written quite a number of novels I haven't read. I like all the potential that means.
Colette's Cheri and The Last of Cheri, because, of course, since I'm reading the biography of Colette, I have to read more of her own writing as well. And this is the one Litlove recommended to me.
Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being, uncollected autobiographical writings, because I can never get enough of Woolf. Thanks to Diana, who is sending me the book!
Finally (for now), Carolyn Heilbrun's Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, because I read about it on some blog, and I can't remember which, and it sounded really cool.

Plenty of good choices here, I know, and plenty more on the TBR shelves that have been there for a while. I should be okay this winter.

Proust and Joyce

2006-10-05T07:20:00.000-04:00

There's a review (not available online) in the 10/19 New York Review of Books of a new book on Proust, Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose book Changed Paris by Richard Davenport-Hines. The book tells the story of an exclusive supper party hosted by Violet and Sydney Schiff, who held the party in order to introduce Proust and James Joyce. Here's the reviewer's account:

The Schiffs behaved like zoo-keepers coaxing two rare and skittish beasts into the same cage and hoping that something magical would come of their brief union -- a bon mot, a fascinating discussion, a lasting friendship. The scene was set for one of the great meetings of Modernist minds. The food had already been cleared away when a shabby, drunken man blundered in, sat down next to Sydney Schiff, and, according to the art critic Clive Bell, "remained speechless with his head in his hands and a glass of champagne in front of him." Later, he was heard to snore. This was the author of Ulysses. Then, between two and three o'clock in the morning, a small, dapper figure wrapped in a fur coat slipped into the dining room. If Clive Bell's description is accurate, he looked somewhat like a rat: "sleek and dank and plastered." This was the author of A la recherche du temps perdu.
Joyce and Proust failed to live up to the historic occasion. There was no sparkling conversation and the two writers never met again. This did not prevent gossips and writers of memoirs from inventing the dialogue later on. Davenport-Hines quotes six different versions, the most interestingly boring of which is the version Joyce himself gave to Frank Budgen:
"Our talk consisted solely of the word 'no.' Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, 'No.' Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said, 'no.' And so on. Of course the situation was impossible."

Something about this pleases me. Why should two great writers perform for these people after all? It would feel like an obvious set-up, like two single people at a dinner party who are clearly supposed to meet and fall in love. It would make me want to rebel and act badly.

The review also describes Proust's apartment, his last home, on the Rue Hamelin, and sheds some light on "involuntary memory." Objects in the apartment:

were not ornaments but the apparatus of experiments in progress. Sydney Schiff noticed that a particular object -- a jug, a coffee cup, or a half-emptied beer glass that had caught the sun in a particularly way -- would be left where it was. "Sometimes he insisted on it remaining indefinitely, because he wanted to renew the sensation it had given him." In A la recherche du temps perdu, these apparently trivial sensations occur only by chance. They bring about the epiphanic moments when the narrator grasps the whole "edifice of memory" and can begin to transform "lost time" into a work of art. In Proust's apartment, those sensations were continually on tap. The apartment in the Rue Hamelin was a novelist's laboratory in which involuntary memories could be generated at will.

So -- is it involuntary memory or not? I'm not sure what to make of the real-life difference from the novel. I like the idea of the artist's apartment as a laboratory, but it makes the ideas about memory in the novel seem artificial. As I'm reading Proust, I tend to think of it as reflecting reality -- as Proust's ideas about what life and the mind are really like -- but of course, it's fiction and there's no reason to think the narrator's ideas are necessarily Proust's. He's just so good at making you think that the narrator is Proust and that we're getting Proust's thoughts, when really, that's not how it works. I know that's not how it works, but the experience of reading makes me forget.

I learned another interesting thing from the review:

A man who subjects himself to a steady diet of caffeine, opiates, barbiturates, amyl nitrate, and pure adrenalin is unlikely to remain oblivious to the functioning of his brain. The quantity and variety of drugs that went into the writing of A la recherche du temps perdu are probably unparalleled in French literature. Proust urged his critics not to trace facile patterns of cause and effect when analyzing the process of literary creation, but it is probably reasonable to suppose that the vivid, hallucinatory memories that the narrator of his novel enjoys at intervals of several years were more common occurences for the author, and that they were produced by substances less innocuous than a madeleine dipped in a cup of herbal tea.

Quite interesting, yes?

A mad King George III chases Frances Burney in Kew Gardens

2006-10-04T07:35:00.000-04:00

So I just read this extraordinary passage in Frances Burney's Journals and Letters that I'll give you some excerpts from; this is from February 1789 and King George III is suffering from a bout of insanity. Burney has a position as "Second Keeper of the Robes" to Queen Charlotte, so she's a part of court life, but she's trying to stay away from the king because he's rather unpredictable. She fails:

I strolled into the Garden; I had proceeded, in my quick way, nearly half the round, when I suddenly perceived, through some Trees, two or three figures ... I concluded them to be workmen, and Gardeners;--yet tried to look sharp, -- and in so doing, as they were less shaded, I thought I saw the Person of his Majesty!
Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not to know more, but turning back, ran off with all my might -- But what was my terror to hear myself pursued! -- to hear the voice of the King himself, loudly and hoarsely calling after me "Miss Burney! Miss Burney!--"
I protest I was ready to die; I knew not in what state he might be at the time; I only knew the orders to keep out of his way were universal; that the Queen would highly disapprove any unauthorised meeting, and that the very action of my running away might deeply, in his present irritable state, offend him.
Heavens how I ran! -- I do not think I should have felt the hot Lava from Vesuvius, -- at least not the hot Cinders, had I so ran during its Eruption. My feet were not sensible that they even touched the Ground.

He chases her for a while, along with some attendants who are trying to get her to stop. She refuses and keeps running out of terror. Finally she stops when the attendants tell her it hurts the king to run:

When they were within a few yards of me, the King called out "Why did you run away?--"
Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward, to meet him -- though the internal sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most proper, to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so violently combatted by the tremor of my nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of personal courage I have ever made.
The effort answered, -- I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of Countenance, though something still of wildness in his Eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders, and then kiss my Cheek! I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when I saw him spread out his arms! -- Involuntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me; -- but the Willis's, who have never seen him till the fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing, perhaps, it was his customary salutation!
I have reason, however, to believe it was but the joy of a Heart unbridled now, by the forms and proprieties of established customs, and sober Reason ...

What is a poem?

2006-10-03T07:33:00.000-04:00

I wrote about poetry reading generally yesterday, so today I thought I'd write about how my current poetry read is going, Jane Kenyon's Otherwise. I'm liking it, although I don't think I've quite figured it out yet. I've read maybe 40 pages out of 200 or so, so I still have time. I'm not quite sure what I mean when I say I haven't figured it out yet, except that I'm thinking as I read about what it is that makes the poems poetry, what unites them, if anything, what Kenyon's style is, what makes her a great poet, if she is indeed a great poet.

Although I've sort of read poetry for a while, mostly in my capacity as a teacher, I've taken up more serious and steady poetry reading purely for pleasure once again after a long, long break without reading it much. So as I read, I'm figuring out what it is I like in a poem and what kind of poetry draws me. So far I've been very pleased with my choices; I've read Mary Oliver's American Primitive and Jane Hirschfield's Given Sugar, Given Salt and was blown away by them both. I think I loved them both so much because their poems were beautiful and they were wise. Kenyon's are those things too, but I'm still figuring out how.

I'm realizing that poetry may do something substantially different for me than fiction does. I try to be widely read in fiction -- I try to read from different cultures and different time periods and I try to read different novel types. With poetry, I'm less interested in that kind of coverage. I read poetry very slowly -- these days I'm reading only a handful of poems a week so it will take me forever to get through a book -- and so will never read all that widely. And with poetry, I'm more likely to go for what I think will be a comfort read. In fiction I might try an author I'm afraid I won't like; in poetry I wouldn't do that.

Jane Kenyon's Otherwise is made up of "new and selected" poems; it makes me wish I had full, individual volumes of her work instead of selections from the different books, as I wonder how much each book has a central theme, and how much I might be missing reading poems outside the context of the original book. I'm reading selected poems from her book From Room to Room right now, and many of the poems seem to be about visiting or living with her husband's family, about visits to elderly relatives, about funerals and mourning. And I wonder if there's a story behind the book or a theme that runs through the book that I'm not getting. In that case, the poems would be discrete units in and of themselves, but they would also together form a whole as a book.

Here's an example of a poem from the book:

Cleaning the Closet

This must be the suit you wore
to your father's funeral:
the jacket
dusty, after nine years,
and hanger marks on the shoulders,
sloping like the lines
on a woman's stomach, after
having a baby, or like the down-
turned corners
of your mouth, as you watch me
fumble to put the suit
back where it was.

So what makes that a poem? It's got images in it -- the hanger marks slope like lines on a woman’s stomach or like the corners of the man’s, probably her husband’s, mouth. It creates a mood and captures a moment – the husband seems unhappy, frowning at being reminded of his father’s funeral. The dust and hanger marks make the passing time vivid, and yet the emotion is still there. You’ve got the death and life theme, with the reference to having a baby, and cleaning out the closet makes one think of renewal.

The situation is rather complex, really, as the speaker is speaking directly to the man, who seems to frown at what is happening – not liking to be reminded of the funeral or unhappy that the speaker has taken the suit out, and the speaker fumbles to put the suit back, as though she has done something wrong, invaded some space she shouldn’t have. Watching the woman clean out the closet is too painful for the man, I suppose, so the speaker tries to make up for evoking hard memories by returning the suit to its original place, as though she could undo her original action. Maybe she doesn’t even know for sure that that’s the suit her husband wore to the funeral but can gauge it by her husband’s reaction. Cleaning out the closet brings too much into the daylight.

There’s probably more going on there, that I haven’t gotten to?

Okay – one thing I can say about what makes a poem a poem, is that a poem says more in a few words than I can say in a lot of them in prose!

On poetry

2006-10-02T07:45:00.000-04:00

David Orr has a very interesting article on poetry in yesterday's New York Times Book Review; he's reviewing a new book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Travelled, which, though it's a terrible title, sounds like a great book, and I liked the review because Orr writes very sensibly about what it takes to understand poetry and why many people are a bit afraid of it. I'm guessing I'll never read Fry's book about poetry, but the review is good enough I'm tempted. Orr talks about how people come to poetry with unreasonable expectations; they expect "either to be awed by excellence or overwhelmed by the Raw Passion of It All" and instead are disappointed:

only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack; usually, the response is closer to “What?” or “Eh” or at best “Hm.” This doesn’t mean that other reactions aren’t possible; but such reactions generally come from learning what exactly is going on.

He goes on to say, "You learn what’s going on by reading carefully, questioning your own assumptions and sticking with things even when you’re confused or nervous."

Orr is particularly good on what he calls The Fear -- the anguished or icy reaction teachers get from students when asked to respond to poetry in class. General readers too often see poetry as unapproachable, difficult, impossible for the average person to get. And so they stay away from it or resent it.

I like Orr's point that understanding poetry takes time and practice -- I agree, at least once you get beyond the most immediately accessible stuff -- and it takes an interest and curiosity and a certain self-confidence. Many students don't have these things, and so give up before they've really tried and poetry remains off in its own world they'll never willing venture into.

I'm not sure what a teacher should do about this, except maybe try to get students to build some confidence by rewarding their interpretive efforts even when they are a bit lacking. I've entertained some pretty unlikely interpretations in class simply because I don't want to crush a student's excitement at having begun to figure things out. I think, though, that students are alert to any hint of the idea that poetry can mean whatever you want it to, and they jump at the opportunity that idea offers to say whatever they want, but at the same time they despise the wishy-washiness of that stance.

I've known a lot of students who like to write poetry, but once they hear about poetry's technical details, they disconnect from their personal experience with poetry and begin to feel The Fear. That's too bad because if they could take their personal interest in writing poetry, no matter how bad that poetry might be, and use that energy to tackle the kind of poems they read in class, they'd learn a lot.

Orr says that Fry's goal is to:

demystify the art without deadening it; to make it seem as open to the interested amateur as “carpentry and bridge and wine and knitting and brass-rubbing and line-dancing and the hundreds of other activities that enrich and enliven the daily toil of getting and spending."

I like that attitude. Poetry does not require mystical insight or super-human intelligence; rather, while it requires experience and skill to grasp, those things are within the reach of anyone.

Reading update

2006-10-01T08:50:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. Not at the moment actually, but when I look forward to the next month, I'm overwhelmed; when I look forward to Monday, I'm overwhelmed. And that means the familiar feeling that there's so much I'd like to read right now that I just can't is worse than usual. I won't post another picture of my TBR shelves (yet), but they are getting worse. I keep mooching books at Book Mooch even though I have no idea when I'll read them. I've got The Time Traveler's Wife on the way, and Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story, a book litlove wrote on a while back. The latest to arrive is Mary Gaitskill's novel Veronica, and I've requested Geraldine Brooks's novel Year of Wonders and Moments of Being, a collection of autobiographical writings by Virginia Woolf. This last one is coming from Diana -- thank you!

This last book reminds me of this cool new reading group I can't join: Woolf for Dummies. They are reading The Voyage Out and Lyndall Gordan's biography at the moment. I'd love to read both, but I just can't add another reading group right now. Sigh. I'm also jealous of another group, Our Coffee Rings, which is reading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women right now. What a marvelous book! I'd love to re-read it.

And bloggers have been writing about so many great books I want to read immediately. Sandra has reminded me how much I want to read Anita Brookner, and Danielle's post on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, as well as the posts of many other bloggers on that novella, has made me want to re-read that book. I've been saying that in the comments section in many, many blogs, I believe. And Danielle and others have raved about Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, which I need to get my hands on. And Jenny had a post up awhile ago about Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love that convinced me I need to read it.

I'm enjoying my current books very much, but that doesn't stop me from looking ahead and hoping to be able to pick up new books soon. It's nice having my unread books on shelves up in my study across the room from my reading chair, so I can see them easily, but having them right there makes me want to pick them up immediately.

Let me leave you with a footnote, this one from The Mezzanine. The narrator contemplates a sandwich labeled, "cream cheese and sliced olive," and this is how he footnotes his own contemplations:

I was especially interested that the food service had inserted "sliced" in the title of their sandwich, perhaps on the model of "sliced egg sandwich." You don't have to say "tuna and sliced celery," or even "tuna and celery"; the reason we flag the existence of olives is that while the tuna is tan and crumbly and therefore aggregative, cream cheese is a unitary scrim, and the olives inset into it demand an equal billing. In truth, the question is less subtle than this: olives are a more powerful taste in a bed of cream cheese than celery is within the tangy disorder of tuna: celery is often used simply as an extender, texturing and adding a cheap chew-interest, while olives are more expensive ounce for ounce than cream cheese, and therefore demonstrate higher yearnings, nobler intentions. What can freshen and brighten that blandness? the food scientist asked himself, assigned the task of making a simple cream cheese sandwich appetizing. Mushrooms? Chives? Paprika? And then -- he sliced one olive, worth maybe two cents wholesale, into six pieces, spaced them evenly in their white medium, and suddenly all the squinting, cackling, cocktail-wickedness of a narrow gourmet jar of Spanish olives in the door shelf of your refrigerator inhabited the cheapest, most innocent, most childlike sandwich you can make.

Art and life and Proust

2006-09-30T08:20:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted at Involuntary Memory

I have recently come across a beautiful passage from Proust on the relationship of art and life. It is a passage on Vinteuil's sonata, the famous sonata from which comes the "little phrase" that was so important to Swann as he fell in love with Odette. Now it's the narrator who is thinking about its significance.

This is what he thinks: upon encountering a new work of art -- "new" meaning something recent that departs from established methods and schools -- we can't understand it immediately. We don't have the background to make sense of it; it seems foreign and chaotic, and maybe ugly. We can't analyze it -- break it into parts -- because we can't get a grasp of the entire thing in order to understand its structure. When we do begin to appreciate the new work of art, we don't appreciate the right things:

Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first.

When we finally understand the work more fully, those things we valued at the beginning of the process, we have now forgotten. And here is his conclusion:

Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirely -- it was an image of life.

If we were to possess life entirely, it would have to be from the perspective of death, wouldn't it? Otherwise, we are always changing and so can't possess a thing in flux. But because we are changing constantly, our understanding of art is constantly changing, so we can't possess the work of art either. Art isn't so much a way of getting life to stand still as it is a way of charting its movement.

Proust elaborates:

But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheet power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.

I like what this says about art; I'm not sure I like what it says about life. About art, this tells me that some of the greatest pleasures to be had are those I have to wait and work for. It tells me, as I think about my post from a couple days ago, that pleasure and effort and patience are not opposed. If I stick with a difficult and bewildering work of art, it will begin to reveal beauties to me.

About life, Proust implies that the best parts come first, that we have the greatest access to beauty when we are young. I'm not sure I like this because I find it depressing, and also because I'm not sure it's true. Perhaps we have more intense experiences of life when we are young -- perhaps -- but surely the nature of one's experiences become deeper and more complex. Surely there is beauty in life that witholds itself until we have been patient long enough to see it revealed.

What is it with me and footnotes lately?

2006-09-29T08:31:00.000-04:00

I've begun reading The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, and guess what? It's a novel with footnotes! Not the usual kind of scholarly footnotes written by an editor, but footnotes written by the first-person narrator. I had no idea! I've only read about 15 pages of the novel -- which is short at 135 pages -- so I can't say much about whether they work or not, but so far, I'm liking it. In typical Nicholson Baker-fashion, the book gives you everything in minute detail: the setting, the character's thoughts, the action -- which, as I understand it, consists of the main character taking an elevator ride. The footnotes elaborate in great detail on the already detailed main text, explaining such things as the history of staplers, the history of straws, and how the narrator pulls up his socks. This could be intensely annoying, but so far it's not, although I am predisposed to like this book, as I like other things Baker's written (especially U & I).

Thanks to Barry for pointing out Mark Dunn's novel Ibid, a novel made up entirely of footnotes. This, clearly, I will have to check out.

One of the blurbs for The Mezzanine says this:

I love novels with gimmicks. The list of great ones -- Tristram Shandy ... Pale Fire ... Ulysses, the ultimate gimmick novel. The Mezzanine is a definite contribution, a very funny book about the human mind. Mesmerizing.

I don't like this reviewer calling these novels gimmicky. Isn't the term "gimmicky" kind of dismissive? These novels are more than just gimmicks; they are experiments, explorations, novels where the author is pushing the limits of what a novel can do. If something is gimmicky, it's interesting only in its newness and tricksiness, but these books do new things and also old things -- old things like telling us what it's like to be a person or to live in one's mind or to experience the world or to be obsessed with another person.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from one of Baker's footnotes, one that's about reading and eating:

I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn't flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand -- what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback. I soon found, as many have, that there was a way to drink no-handed with these new floating straws: you had to bend low to the table and grasp the almost horizontal straw with your lips, steering it back down into the can every time you wanted a sip, while straining your eyes to keep them trained on the line of the page you were reading. How could the staw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness!