Reading, Writing, & Raptures

MLA Conference in Seattle and Some News

2012-01-25T00:21:00.000-06:00

Okay, first things second. I will have two poems in an upcoming edition of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review (when I find out which issue, I'll let you know). I'm so excited, you'd think I was up for a Nobel.

*****

Earlier this month, the Modern Language Association held its annual conference in Seattle. Several sessions were open to the public. So I went up on Thursday night and spent Friday at the conference. (Many thanks to the Seattle Brengans for room, board, and good times.)

Here are some photos from the Kingston ferry dock.

After being happily landlocked for so many years, I'm amazed that I live near all this water.

I didn't get much sleep the night before the conference, and I discovered that when I'm tired I can't understand directions. I lived at the help desk. Here's a photo of part of the lobby area with one of the conference workers helping an attendee who isn't me, for once.

Being in such an academic environment was both invigorating and bemusing. Before one session, I heard a woman behind me mutter something about "the politics of periodism." I couldn't decide if I was more tickled by the fact that there are people who can say things like "the politics of periodism" and Foucauldian without blinking—or by the fact that I knew what she was talking about.

Some of the sessions were academics presenting papers on minutiae that I suspect you can only appreciate if you're already studying those particular subspecies of English literature. I felt relief that I wasn't a doctoral student (and gratitude that other people are willing to be doctoral students and let me pick their brains).

I stumbled into my favorite session of the day by accident. (I had intended to go to a session on Harold Pinter, only to realize that session was on Saturday. Did I mention that I can't read directions when I'm tired?) Author Richard Van Camp's session was so good, I worked up enough courage to ask to have my photo taken with him.

Speaking of awesome writers... here's the Chinese poet Xi Chuan answering an audience question.

The man next to him is his official (written) translator, Lucas Klein. A poem would be read in Chinese, and over half the audience would laugh or nod. Then those of us who spoke only English would eagerly wait for the translation so we could find out what everyone else was reacting to.

I left the conference feeling revitalized and with an even bigger to-read list. (Special thanks to Scott who talked to me during lunch and gave me some great suggestions.)

2012 Reading Challenge (part 2)

2012-01-04T04:36:00.002-06:00

Okay, now I can post my 2011 Fifty Books Challenge list!

Fiction

YA/Juvenile
Nonfiction
Memoir
Collections (short stories, essays, etc.)
Drama
Poetry

1.      The Woman Who Walked into Doors—Roddy Doyle
2.      The Handmaid’s Tale—Margaret Attwood
3.      Sense and Sensibility—Jane Austen
4.      Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov
5.      Reading Lolitain Tehran—Azar Nafisi
6.      Human Chain: Poems—Seamus Heaney
7.      Frankenstein—Mary Shelley
8.      Essex County (Vol. 1-3)—Jeff Lamire
9.      Alice in Wonderland—Lewis Carroll
10.  Through the Looking Glass—Lewis Carroll
11.  The Haunted Bookshop—Christopher Morley
12.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—L. Frank Baum
13.  V for Vendetta (graphic novel)—Alan Moore
14.  Mushishi (Vol. 2)—Yuki Urushibara
15.  A Circle of Quiet—Madeleine L’engle
16.  Saving CeeCee Honeycutt (audiobook)—Beth Hoffman
17.  Alexander Calder and His Magical Mobiles—Jean Lipman, with Margaret Aspinwall
18.  The Road—Cormac McCarthy
19.  Ender’s Game—Orson Scott Card
20.  The Bird Woman—Kerry Hardie
21.  Superman: The Complete History: The Life andTimes of the Man of Steel—Les Daniels
22.  The Science of Superheroes—Lois H. Gresh andRobert Weinberg
23.  The Táin—trans. by Ciaran Carson
24.  A Contract with God and Other TenementStories (graphic novel)—Will Eisner
25.  Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty—Stan Lee
26.  Road to Perdition (graphic novel)—Max Allen Collins
27.  The Tiger Rising—Kate DiCamillo
28.  An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in NewEngland—Brock Clarke
29.  Surfacing—Judy Gill Milford
30.  The Graveyard Book—Neil Gaiman
31.  Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table—Editedby Amanda Hesser
32.  Sidekicks—Jack D. Ferraiolo
33.  Life of Pi—Yann Martel
34.  The Influencing Machine (graphic novel)—Brooke Gladstone
35.  Stories for the Christian Year—The ChrysostomSociety
36.  West with the Night—Beryl Markham
37.  How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One—StanleyFish
38.  The Help—Kathryn Stockett
39.  Sonnets from the Portuguese—Elizabeth BarrettBrowning
40.  Field Work: Poems—Seamus Heaney
41.  The Awakening—Kate Chopin
42.  The Waste Land—T.S. Eliot
43.  Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel—JeannetteWalls
44.  Alice Adams—Booth Tarkington
45.  Lady Windermere’s Fan—Oscar Wilde
46.  The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago(or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues,and Yourself)—Carol Fisher Saller
47.  Enchanted Irish Tales—Patricia Lynch
48.  A Woman of No Importance—Oscar Wilde
49.  To the North—Elizabeth Bowen
50.  Peter and Wendy—J. M. Barrie

So the total:

23 Fiction (give or take Half Broke Horses)

8 YA/Children's Lit.

7 Nonfiction (though it feels funny to include books about superheroes in this category)

4 Poetry

3 Collections

2 Plays

2 Memoir/Autobiography

Again, six of these were graphic novels (or collections of graphic novelettes). Seven were on that literature list I like.

Other, shorter things I read included:

Cathleen Ni Houlihan—W.B. Yeats

Deirdre—W.B. Yeats

John Law: Detective—Will Eisner (and several Spirit comics)

This post is already awfully long, so if you're curious about what I thought about a particular book, ask me in the comments. (Hopefully, I'll do a better job discussing the books as I read them this year.)

After reviewing my 2010, 2009, and 2008 lists, I've made some reading resolutions for 2012. I'd like to try to read:

At least two Pulitzer fiction winners each year
At least one Nobel prize winning author I haven't read yet each year
And six poetry volumes (this year, and then I'll reevaluate)

My fiction to nonfiction ratio tends to bounce around depending on what I'm researching, so I'll just let that change naturally over the course of the year. Two plays a year seems to be my average whatever resolutions I make. But now that I live closer to Seattle, maybe I'll see more plays.

Some bloggers I follow read 100+ books a year, which both awes and horrifies me. I think I'm happy sticking to fifty. I also have non-reading resolutions to keep.

What are your resolutions/goals this year? (Reading or otherwise.)

2012 Reading Challenges (part 1)

2012-01-03T03:29:00.003-06:00

Happy 2012, everyone!

I hope you all had a good Christmas. Most of our decorations are in boxes, which are hidden behind other boxes somewhere in our storage unit. So we had a sweet, simple Christmas this year.

That's a bay tree for a Christmas tree. And note the wood stacked under the fireplace. Most of that ended up in the last upstairs room that needed flooring. (And don't worry, that's a fake log in the fireplace.)

Normally, I would now post my Fifty Books Challenge list for 2011, but I realized that I had neglected to post a list for 2010. In part because I was more worried about moving and selling the house than blogging, and in part because I wasn't sure I had actually read fifty books. But by including some of the longer, more "word heavy" graphic novels I read, I just made fifty. 2011 will have to wait until the next post. Here's 2010.

Fiction

YA/Juvenile
Nonfiction
Memoir
Collections (short stories, essays, etc.)
Drama
Poetry

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Dai Sijie (tran. by Ina Rilke)
Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village—written by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Bird
The Literary Enneagram: Characters from the Inside Out—Judith Searle
The Glass Castle: A Memoir—Jeannette Walls
1984—George Orwell
Shriek: An Afterword—Jeff Vandermeer
The Patron Saint of Liars—Ann Patchett
Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth
The Bible Cure for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue—Don Colbert
Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
Early Irish Myths and Sagas—trans. by Jeffrey Gantz
In Country—Bobby Ann Mason
The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend—written by Marie Heaney, illustrated by P.J. Lynch
The Color Purple—Alice Walker
Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat—Gwen Cooper
Murder in the Cathedral—T.S. Eliot
The Stranger—Albert Camus
The Messiah of Stockholm—Cynthia Ozick
Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels—From Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe—Anthony Arthur
One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Quiet American—Graham Greene
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—J.K. Rowling (audio book)
A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader—Anne Fadiman
99 Poems in Translation—selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, and Geoffrey Godbert
Moll Flanders—Daniel Defoe
How Reading Changed My Life—Anna Quindlen
The Reader—Bernhard Schlink (trans. by Carol Brown Janeway)
The Complete Persepolis (graphic novel)— Marjane Satrapi
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood—bell hooks
Longing: Stories of Racial Healing—Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia—Elizabeth Gilbert
Watchmen (graphic novel)—written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons
Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform—Christina Katz
Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A.—Julia Alvarez
Coraline (graphic novel)—written by Neil Gaiman, art by P. Craig Russell
What Ever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? (graphic novel)—Brian Fies
Wish You Well—David Baldacci
Mushishi (Vol. 1)—Yuki Urushibara
Smile (graphic novel)—Raina Telgemeier
Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire—Ron Elliot (as told by Wayne Dammert)
Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston
Maus (graphic novel)—Art Spiegelman
Sarah’s Key—Tatiana de Rosnay
New Covenant Bound—T. Crunk
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel—Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere—ZZ Packer
American-Born Chinese (graphic novel)—Gene Luen Yang
The Art of Reading Poetry—Harold Bloom
Watership Down—Richard Adams

Total:
22 fiction.

11 non-fiction

7 memoir (though maybe Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? should be here too)

4 juvenile/YA (or 5, since Smile is a YA memoir)

3 collections

2 poetry collections

1 play

Out of those books 6 were graphic novels. (A medium I started exploring in 2010.) And 10 were on that literature list I like.

There were other things I read that were too short/word-light to make the list. I thought a few of these were worth mentioning:

A Day in the Life of Ireland: Photographed by 75 of the World's Leading Photojournalists on One Day, May 17, 1991—Collins Publishers

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152—David Peterson (graphic novel)

The Arrival—Shaun Tan (graphic novel/picture book)

Nikky Finney Wins National Book Award (and some other news)

2011-11-19T04:14:00.001-06:00

If you know me on Facebook, you know that even though I am far away from Kentucky now, I am ecstatic over Nikky Finney's recent winning of the National Book Award for poetry (for Head Off and Split). She is a Kentucky resident, a professor at the University of Kentucky, and a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets.Below is a video of the award ceremony from LexGo. The award announcement for poetry starts at about 12:30. At about 17:00 Finney gives her acceptance poem/speech.

I first heard Nikky Finney when I was in high school. One of my writing mentors, Judy Milford, had lent me some books, including a copy of Finney's Rice, so that I could read some Kentucky poets in preparation for Kentucky's Governor's School for the Arts. When Nikky Finney showed up at our GSA class, I asked her to sign Judy's book as a thank you.

This story segues nicely into some other (slightly more nepotistic) accomplishments I've been meaning to acknowledge.

Judy Milford now has a book of poetry out: Surfacing (Finishing Line Press)—an exploration of grief and faith in the everyday. I've been waiting a long time for this book.

And my aunt, Rachel Clark, created the cover art and designed the book cover for the recently released Circle of Law (Xlibris) by Lia London—a Young Adult fantasy adventure. (I really should get a picture of the back cover on here too, so you can see her awesome cityscape.)

Congrats all around!

Also, my artist sister and I have started a joint Tumblr account: Magical Bipolar Sofa. We'll hopefully be putting some of our own work up there, but it's mainly a catch-all for reblogging things we find interesting, amusing, or wonderful, but that don't fit our individual blogs. In other words, it's awfully strange. I don't know whether to recommend that you click the link or that you stay very far away.

(Note: The second book image I stole from my aunt.)

Sidekicks by Jack D. Ferraiolo

2011-10-12T03:19:00.000-05:00

(Warning: The book discussed in today’s post deals with youngmale sexuality. Since I have never been teenage boy, this is bound to be awkward. Since I am full of unverified opinions on all kinds of topics,this is bound to be very soap-box-y.)

Now that I’m blogging again, what work of classic literatuream I going to tackle first?

I’ve been on a bit of a superhero kick lately (no pun intended), and I have along-standing love for juvenile/YA fiction.

Sidekicks (AmuletBooks 2011), a middle-grade superhero novel by Jack D. Ferraiolo, seemed like a perfect fit.

I enjoyed the middle of this book.Once the arch-nemesis is revealed the story picks up speed, the dialoguebecomes both more interesting and more believable, and the plot takes severalunexpected turns. It was all good, action-driven fun.

But the beginning and the end gave me some problems.

The book is marketed as middle school fiction (Amazonsuggests ages 10 and up), and for the most part it reads like light-hearted,slightly satirical middle grade fare. But the story begins with the hero, ScottHutchinson (a.k.a. Bright Boy) rescuing a woman and, to his greatembarrassment, experiencing an erection. All while news teams film him andshout insults.

A recurring debate in juvenile fiction is whether to mentionsex and puberty and how much to mention. To oversimplify, the arguments forintroducing sexual changes generally fall under two categories: 1) that this makesthe story more realistic and the characters more relatable and 2) that thislets kids know that puberty is normal and nothing to be ashamed of.

Sidekicks setsitself up as a realistic (give or take a little for the sake of comedy) comicbook story. Phantom Justice and Bright Boy fight in our New York City (ratherthan in a stand-in like Gotham or Metropolis). They have our technology andsomething of a medical explanation for superpowers. Yet the morning news showcontinually replays the footage of Scott’s boner. I had some trouble buyingthat premise. It’s no surprise that the media can be cruel to young celebrities(Rebecca Black, anyone?). But the coverage Ferraiolo depicts seems more likely for latenight shows and internet sites. And the news plays nothing but thatclip for about twenty minutes. No news day is that slow.

When Scott goes to school, everyone is talking about what a“perv” Bright Boy is. Everyone. It would be one thing if the character only felt that everyone was talking about it.That would be realistic. That would be teenagehood in a nutshell. But even the kindergarteners are talking about it.Scott’s mentor doesn’t have any encouragement to offer beyond, “Yeah, youembarrassed yourself on national television. Forget about it and train.”

What exactly is the message middle school boys are supposedto get from this? “Your sexual desires exerting themselves will result in the singlemost shameful and embarrassing moment of your life. And everyone will notice.And no one will forget it. And you will live eternally in the shadow of yourshame. (Or at least, until you learn to dress better and manage to kiss a girl.Because then you will be virile and manly. And not just a perv.)”

Or maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe the message is simplythat erections are hi-LAR-ious.

Someone who’s actually experienced the boy’s version ofpuberty can correct me, but I don’t sense that this book is setting middle-schoolers up for a healthy understanding of their bodies.

Another problem I had with the beginning is a problem Ioften have with stories marketed toward middle/high school students. (Here’sthe point where I step away from Sidekicks specifically and climb onto another of my soapboxes.)

It's a story-telling trend to try to garnersympathy for the main character by placing him or her in embarrassingsituations right off the bat. We all love an underdog. The unpopular kid. Theunder-appreciated employee. The long-suffering sibling/child/parent. We’ve allfelt this way. We see ourselves in these characters. And this setup makes iteasy later on to show that the character’s circumstances have changed.

The pitfalls here are two-fold. First, being acharacter the reader/viewer pities is not quite the same thing as being acharacter the reader/viewer relates to. Sometimes, the writer wants to garner too much sympathy too quickly and ends up putting the main character into horrificallyembarrassing situations. At this point the reader may withdraw emotionally fromthe main character because the reader does not want to see him/herself ascapable of suffering such embarrassment (particularly if the character seemsunusually passive in the face of his/her difficulties).

And the second pitfall is that moving from unpopular topopular, unsuccessful to successful, or uncool to cool, is an easy change todepict, but it does not indicate any sort of lasting change in the character.Often we understand “more popular” to be shorthand for “more confident andself-assured.” But self-confidence, by definition, comes from the inside andcannot be given through the sudden approval of peers. It’simportant to show that the change is more than external. And since characterchange is plot (generally),cheap changes are like long journeys that go nowhere.

Moving back to the book I’m supposedly reviewing, as I said,I enjoyed the plot twists in the middle of the book. It’s not oftenthat I read a book for middle-schoolers where I’m surprised by the plot turns. Iappreciated Ferraiolo’s inclusion of modern technology. (I laughed when Scottpointed out that his phone can probably do ninety percent of what PhantomJustice’s Main Crime Computer can do.) I liked the parody of the whole Batmanand Robin setup. And I particularly enjoyed the villains.

A few hours after I finished Sidekicks, Fridge Logic started to kick in. The endingflowed naturally out of the rest of the story, but some of the solutions couldhave been explained better or hinted at earlier on. And there were loose ends.I suspect a sequel. But I have no idea if a particular character is dead. I getthe impression I’m supposed to know whether or not this character is alivebut the author just forgot to make it clear.

I think Ferraiolo is a good writer, and I suspect that witha little more care and attention Sidekickscould have been a better book.

Moving Update: Notes from the Northwest

2011-10-05T20:38:00.000-05:00

What does Bethany do during those long stretches when she's not blogging? Generally, she shuffles commas for money, writes, gets sinus infections, and reads books which she then fails to blog about.

Oh. And she moves across the country.

In May, my family and I moved from western Kentucky to Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. (Finally, a legitimate excuse for being behind on all the things I'm usually behind on anyway!)

There was (and is) a lot of work to be done on the house and not enough space for everyone and all our boxes, so I spent two weeks (which quickly became three months) in Salem, Oregon with my wonderful grandmother.

A quick recap of things done and seen in Oregon:

Hanging out with family and learning how to gamble.

Birthday parties.

Memorial Day.

Fourth of July.

Reader's Guide bookstore.

Salem Public Library.

Powell's Books. This photo is of my favorite room in Powell's. (And note those lovely wooden shelves.)

I’d been to Powell’s when I was younger, and it wasn’t as big as I remembered, but it’s still huge. You need the map. (In my imagination, Powell's was the size of Disneyland, except better because it was entirely books.)

There were quirky little things all over the store, especially in the Literature and Fiction section: handwritten notes with employee recommendations, search tips on alternate spellings of authors's names, mini-reviews, etc.

(See the size of this Graham Greene section?)

I wanted to get some photos that showed how large Powell’s is, but I was a little distracted.

English Country Dancing. That red blur is me.

Dancing that requires an understanding of left vs. right is generally not for me. But I loved English Country Dancing, though it took all of my focus to follow the instructions. I've gained a new respect for Elizabeth Bennet, who could converse and dance simultaneously.

Most of my things (read: books) are still in boxes, but I'm happy to be back "home" in Washington now. It's beautiful here: ocean, mountains, really tall evergreens. I can't get over how tall some of these trees are.

Here's a tree looming over our roof.

Or for scale: Here's my family and some of the trees at the Dungeness Recreation Area.

I'm slowly settling in, but I'm still missing a certain... Kentuckiness. Things are different here. Not better or worse, just different. I enjoy meeting new people and seeing new places (though I still spend far too much time in front of my computer screen), but I keep wishing someone would say y'all.

Another Reason to Love Used Books

2011-02-05T21:57:00.004-06:00

I buy used books because they're cheap. Given the choice between one new hardcover and three slightly mangled paperbacks, I will choose the paperbacks.

But sometimes, used books contain more than monetary rewards.

Like this.

In case you can't tell what this is, I'll show you the back.

Yep. That's Anne Rice's house. And this postcard is from the quaint days when fan clubs used to advertise through the mail. I think I found this in my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I'm not sure. I've been moving it around. Postcards are the perfect size for marking trade paperbacks.

In my much highlighted copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, I discovered these gems, reminiscent of an early xkcd.

"Like the Breakfast Club... except without the high school... and with more ARMIES." I really wish I knew what that was about.

(P.S. Click the images to see larger versions.)

Bethany _ Politics with a _, and then ___, Quickly

2011-01-26T03:48:00.008-06:00

Normally, I don't like to touch politics—the same way I don't like to touch rotting zombie flesh. But last night I watched the State of the Union address like the good civic-minded person I pretend to be. (This does eventually have a connection to language; I promise.)

I've watched a fair number of State of the Union addresses, over several administrations. And I find myself wondering, Can we all just agree—not as Republicans or Democrats or too-cool-for-your-party Independents—but as Americans, that State of the Union addresses are boring?

They're basically recap. We're really just watching to see if the President is going to sneak in something awesome (i.e. Our New Inalienable Right to Chocolate) or horrifying (i.e. Selling Idaho to China Will Help Us Balance the Budget). And because all the good TV shows have been postponed.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, do you remember Mad Libs? I sure do. As a kid, I learned the difference between adverbs and adjectives from those crazy fill-in-the-blank stories.

Well, Cracked.com kindly gives us State of the Union Mad Libs. There's more to the article, but the Mad Libs made my night.

(Heads up: The rest of the article contains some swearing—as is typical of Cracked.com articles.)

P.S. Thanks, Caitie, for pointing this out.

Last Library Book Sale in Kentucky (for me)

2011-01-21T20:19:00.002-06:00

It snowed yesterday, which is just rare enough an occurrence in western Kentucky to be noteworthy.

Yesterday was also the opening day of the McCracken County Friends of the Library winter book sale. Practicality tells me that the last thing I need is another box of books to drag across the country, but to paraphrase my mom, "Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat... nor common sense shall keep the Brengans from the library book sale."

I spent almost as much time talking to people as I did buying books this year. And I was reminded that high on the list of things I'm going to miss when I move are the bi-annual book sales, the Friends of the Library volunteers, the McCracken County (and the Graves County) Library's book club, and the library staff.

As you can see, I was more restrained than usual.

But I'm pleased with my purchases. This was one of those years where it seemed like I had a future self/reading-doppelganger who had read the books I wanted and then donated them to the sale. I'm still floating on my "great book buys" high.

On another note, I wanted some photos of our cardinals against the snow, but the local wildlife all fled from the photographer in squeaky snow boots.

I had to settle for other signs of life.

The neighbor's cat.

A rabbit.

A dog. (And my hand, for scale.)

Lots of birds.

Is it just me, or does that last set of bird footprints look a like a tiny pair of human hands?

There's probably a poem in that somewhere.

New Year, New Home, New Blog Post...

2011-01-20T00:18:00.002-06:00

Confession: I want to become famous.

I want to be well-known and a perfect enigma.

I want to be loved by the reading public without anyone knowing anything as personal as my favorite brand of mustard.

I want people to wander around bookstores saying, "Bethany Brengan—we know nothing about her, except that she's brilliant!"

Apparently, I want to be Marilynne Robinson.

Blogging probably isn't the way to achieve this goal, but a good friend who I rarely see* recently told me that I should update my blog and "include stuff that's, you know, actually about you. And add some photos."

Fine.

For those of you who haven't heard, I've been (and am still) struggling with some exhausting health issues. And I will soon be moving from western Kentucky to Washington state.

Illness and the general instability of life have made it difficult to keep up with friends. Moving halfway across the country isn't going to make this any simpler.

So I'm reviving my "letter to the world," even though my friends are the only ones who read it. The majority of my posts will still be about reading. (How could it be my blog otherwise?) But I'll try to work in some news about moving and adjustments to my new home state. Maybe I'll even mention my favorite brand of mustard.

Also, here's a photo of Cadfael, my cat.

(He's a very smart cat, but I should admit that this photo was staged. He wasn't actually reading Joyce.)

*You know who you are.

Brontë Sisters Action Figures

2010-05-13T22:54:00.008-05:00

Thanks, Aunt Rachel, for pointing this out.

Although the dolls look similar to the eccentric, and often writerly, action figures available from Accoutrements, as far as I can tell, there are not yet any Brontë figurines. The video was created in 1998 by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (most recently famous for their movie adaption of that other Gothic Romance classic, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). This educational pseudo-commercial was never aired.

My childhood feels retroactively deprived.

Maybe the right idea at the wrong time? If internet reaction to the video's recent release is any measure, the world is more than ready for the Brontësaurus.

Anne, I love your WWWF growl. But if you really want to blast barriers with Feminist Vision, hit 'em with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

One of the semi-secret goals of my life is to spread the realization that Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a superior book to Agnes Grey and deserves far more recognition than it receives. Other goals on this invisible list include: learning to pick locks and finding a way to recharge my laptop battery via hamster wheel. And getting my hands on some Brontë Power Dolls.

Why Do We Love Typewriters?

2010-04-11T22:15:00.007-05:00

My laptop is like an extension of my mind, but with a more reliable memory. But pictures of manual typewriters cause inexplicable tingles of nostalgia to run down my spine. (The site myTypewriter.com makes me croon with delight, even though I know that without my laptop I would not be seeing these images.)

I only tried to use a typewriter once—back in high school when I didn't have a computer and I thought carrying around my mother's old typewriter would be equivalent to having a laptop. It was not a "portable" typewriter by any stretch of the imagination. Writing on a heavy manual typewriter with very old ribbon in the back seat of a moving vehicle is not for the faint of heart. I had to pound the keys with all the strength in my wimpy little fingers to make any impression on the paper. Is it possible that this short-lived experiment left a pleasurable impression on my psyche? I doubt it. But what other explanation is there for my typewriter love? Watching the opening credits of old Murder, She Wrote episodes too many times?

Or maybe this yearning is a manifestation of some innate longing for connection to the past, to writing traditions? I'm certainly not the only person who loves old typewriters. There are societies, museums, and several eccentric collectors dedicated to the obsolete machines. Ads in Writer's Digest and images on writing sites are much more likely to feature typewriters than PCs. There is something aesthetically pleasing about a typewriter (particularly one with the old round keys). A beat-up laptop just looks beat-up. A beat-up typewriter has character. A computer has a brain (and frequently, a will) of its own. It's just as likely to be your antagonist as your friend. A typewriter may have a personality, but you don't have to worry that your typewriter is secretly beating your solitaire scores or surfing the web for ways to increase its radiation output when you're asleep.

And then there's the sound. I love the clicking of my computer keyboard when I'm banging away at something. But a typewriter really builds up a rhythm, especially if you've got a nice carriage return lever: Clickity-clickity-clack-clack. Ding! Ziiiiip. With that sound comes a physical connection to the work you are carving out of the air. Besides, the furious clicking of my computer keyboard could easily mean that I'm playing online Boggle instead of making progress on my novel. The sound of a typewriter always means writing is being done.

I may wax poetic, but I am not going to convert. In a (typewritten) essay on why she believes typewriters create better writers, Rino Breebraat states:

The computer automatically flags and corrects; its design choices are limitless and its printing quality is faultless. But still you don't write the same way—the machinic mutuality is completely negated and abstracted. It's all fixable later.

With typewriters there's a need to think a sentence through completely, one has to print it correctly the first time by focusing on the physical typing process, and hence the pace of the entire writing process is different.

And that is exactly why I am not trading in my laptop for an Underwood. Some days, the only thought that encourages me to write is I can fix this crap later. I often write a scene, only to find—fifty-five drafts later—where I originally thought things were going was nowhere near as interesting where they finally ended up. But those first fifty-five drafts were essential. No amount of mental preparedness can take the place of my awkward, stop-start-backspace-rewrite process. I am not a very good writer. I am becoming, however, a great re-writer. Typewriters are not kind to re-writers. If I had tried to write this blog post on a typewriter, I would now be passed out on the floor from overexposure to Wite-Out fumes. Never mind my single-handedly completing the deforestation of North America.

I still love looking at typewriters. Perhaps all I really need is a nice steampunk computer. Then I could feed my inner Luddite and still have high-speed internet.

Enough philosophy. Want to see some old, really funky-looking typewriters? You know you do. Want to see some images of famous writers and their typewriters? Why not? Want to see the awesomeness of a working steampunk laptop? Random photos of typewriter prettiness? I could link forever—this rabbit hole has no bottom.

(First image from an Odee article showcasing the amazing work of typewriter sculptor Jeremey Mayer. The image of the lovely Hansen writing ball is from The Virtual Typewriter Museum. Image of Steampunk laptop by Jake von Slatt is from a Wired article. The typewriter/waffle iron comes from artist Chris Dimino's site.)

Racquetball Poetry

2010-01-21T13:52:00.001-06:00

I've only ever played Racquetball once. By myself. I couldn't figure out how the scoring worked, so I can't tell you who won—either the wall or the ball.

That said, I will not be traveling up to Racine, Wisconsin to compete in the Racquetball Chapbook Tournament on February 1st, but I sort of wish I was.

How can you not love a contest that begins its description with

Tired of myriad chapbook contests whose winners are determined by their works’ literary merit? Are your poems being rejected for publication because editors deem them unfit to print?

Would you prefer your chapbook published because you displayed a level of athletic prowess and competitive determination that in no way signifies your achievements as a writer?

In other news: I won an honorable mention placement in the Kentucky State Parks 85th Anniversary Poetry contest. Richard Taylor, a former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, was one of the judges, and the thought of him holding one of my poems makes me feel happy and slightly sweaty at the same time. At some point, the winners are supposed to be listed on the Kentucky State Parks site, but that point is not yet.

After this experience, I feel a connection to Ken Burns. He created a 600-hour documentary on the National Parks; I wrote a one-page poem on a Kentucky State Park. I'm probably only two-degrees removed from a Peabody Award now.

2010 and Wrapping Up Old Business: Fifty Books List for 2009

2010-01-19T20:19:00.008-06:00

I wasn't sure I was going to finish the fifty books challenge for 2009. I did, but just barely. (What I didn't seem able to finish was blogging about them.) I'd rather focus on what I'm reading/writing in 2010, so I'll just post the 2009 list and a give you quick run-down of my favorites.

Non-fiction
Fiction
Memoir
Drama
Poetry
Children/Middle School

I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us about Their Path to Jesus—Don Everts and Doug Schaupp
Once Upon a Marigold—Jean Ferris
Gaelic Ghosts—Sorche Nic Leodhas
A Journey of Poems: An Original Anthology of Verse—ed. Richard F. Niebling
Heart of Darkness—Joseph Conrad
Doctor Faustus—Christopher Marlowe
Life is a Dream—Pedro Calderón de la Barca
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm—trans. Jack Zipes
Housekeeping: A Novel—Marilynne Robinson
Girl Meets God: A Memoir—Lauren F. Winner
The End of the Affair—Graham Greene
One Writer's Beginnings—Eudora Welty
1-2-3, Pain Free—Jacob Teitelbaum
Little Dorrit—Charles Dickens
The Pope's Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland's New Elite—David McWilliams
Ulysses—James Joyce
The Hero with A Thousand Faces—Joseph Campbell
Calder: Gravity and Grace—Carmen Gimenez
Clans and Families of Ireland: The Heritage and Heraldry of Irish Clans and Families—John Grenham
Calder Game—Blue Balliett
The Black Dudley Murder—Margery Allingham
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—Betty Smith
The Case of the Late Pig—Margery Allingham
Fathers and Sons—Ivan Turgenev
Pictures at an Exhibition—Sara Houghteling
The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil—Wiley Miller
Attack of the Volcano Monkeys—Wiley Miller
The New Kid at School (Dragon Slayers’ Academy) —K.H. McMullan
Revenge of the Dragon Lady (Dragon Slayers’ Academy)—K.H. McMullan
Searching for Dragons—Patricia C. Wrede
The Grapes of Wrath—John Steinbeck
Breathing Lessons—Anne Tyler
Calling on Dragons—Patricia C. Wrede
Talking to Dragons—Patricia C. Wrede
The Joy Luck Club—Amy Tan
The Ugly Princess and the Wise Fool—Margaret Gray
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication—John Steinbeck
Mystery Mile—Margery Allingham
Rice—Nikky Finney
Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing—Gary Provost
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—Edward Albee
Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision—ed. W. Dale Brown
Lunch Money—Andrew Clements
A Reliable Wife—Robert Goolrick
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha—Roddy Doyle
Brave New World—Aldous Huxley
Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way—Ruth Reichl
The Cider House Rules—John Irving
Four Quartets—T.S. Eliot
Emergency! True Stories from the Nations ERs—Mark Brown

That's 9 nonfiction, 3 poetry, 19 fiction, 3 memoir, 3 plays, 11 children/middle school books, and 2 "other" (both happen to be collections of stories). Fifteen of these works are listed on Editor Eric's Greatest Literature of All Time list. After my 2008 list, I'd said I wanted to read more poetry and drama for 2009, but comparing the two lists, I can see that I've finished the exact same amount of work in both categories. I've also been working my way through 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, which is heavier than my cat, so I've technically been reading more poetry, even if I haven't finished more volumes. Maybe I should just try to see more plays?

Favorite Fiction of the Year:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith—I suppose I could have included this under Children/Middle School because it's often assigned as middle or high school reading. But the best books about childhood are rarely written (entirely) for children.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Very Honorable Mention: Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling—I hadn't really heard of this book before I won it in a drawing through The Book Studio. The melancholy atmosphere, the aching combination of tenderness and disconnection in the characters' relationships, and sensitively depicted obsession with Art kept reminding me of Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev. (The fact that a majority of Houghteling's characters are Jewish, albeit, non-practicing, probably doesn't hurt the comparison.)

Favorite Non-fiction:
I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us about Their Path to Jesus by Don Everts and Doug Schaupp
Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing by Gary Provost
Of Faith and Fiction: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision ed. by W. Dale Brown

Favorite Play:
Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Favorite Poetry Volume:
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Favorite Memoir:
Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way by Rachel Reichl

Favorite Children/Middle School:
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede
The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil by Wiley Miller

I'm restarting the challenge this year. (My first book is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.) But I can't help thinking that maybe I should make it my goal for the year to keep up with this blog...

The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator

2009-09-24T21:38:00.001-05:00

A friend directed me to this, and I had to share.

(Maybe the shortness of this post makes up for the length and convolutedness of my last one.)

Also, I'm having a meditation published in The Upper Room in the 2010 Sept./Oct. issue. So, um, you can congratulate me... in a year.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

2009-09-22T18:10:00.007-05:00

Generally, I avoid blogging about nonfiction reads on topics I have no real knowledge of. So I'm really not sure what to do with The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Mythology is not my forte. But story is, and I was interested in reading Joseph Campbell was because I'm attracted to the concept of archetypes.

I know Campbell is supposed to be the father of modern mythological studies, but I found myself questioning his research and compilation techniques. He seems to have started with his theory and then eschewed everything that didn't fit, claiming that stories that didn't match his "cosmic cycle" were either folktales (and therefore not "true" myths) or myths that were "contaminated." For example, in a footnote, Campbell declares,

A broad distinction can be made between the mythologies of the truly primitive (fishing, hunting, root-digging, and berry-picking) peoples and those of the civilizations that came into being following the development of the arts of agriculture, dairying, and herding, ca. 6000 B.C. Most of what we call primitive, however, is actually colonial, i.e., diffused from some high culture center and adapted to the needs of a simpler society. It is in order to avoid the misleading term, "primitive," that I am calling the undeveloped or degenerate traditions "folk mythologies." The term is adequate for the purposes of the present elementary comparative study of the universal forms, though it would certainly not serve for a strict historical analysis (289).

I'm not sure what makes these folk mythologies "undeveloped." At other points in the book, Campbell insists that the earlier forms of myths that are the uncorrupted ones, but the quote above suggests that many early "myths" may be too undeveloped to deserve the title. I think that if I had a better understanding of the academic borders between myth and folktale, I might understand this. As it is, it seems like a "true" myth is whatever form fits Campbell's cycle the best, so Campbell is attempting to prove his theory with his theory.

I knew and liked the hero cycle (click here to see a simplified version) before I read Campbell. I could easily attach most stories to some form of this cycle, so I thought I wouldn't have any trouble agreeing with Campbell ideas. But Campbell begins as if he's already proved his theory. He expects the reader to simply accept that every story he compares is the same story and things that seem like opposites are, in fact, the same, if you'll only squint a little. He glosses over differences in religion, tone, purpose, etc. as though everything that appears to contradict him is merely extraneous.

Kudos, however, to Campbell for employing a broad range of sources: Arabian Nights, Christianity, Buddhism, Native American tales, etc. But I started to wonder about his piecemeal style of quoting sources when I noticed that his examples for Jesus' story are pulled from sometimes contradictory sources: the four gospels accepted by most Christian denominations, a gnostic gospel, church liturgies, etc. Each example is carefully selected to give an impression of a seamless whole, and the pieces that don't fit are not mentioned. Campbell never explains how he decided which pieces were the "right" pieces, and which were the ones he could ignore. (I started to wonder what he did to the written works of religions that I'm less familiar with.)

The book is probably meant for those who have a greater understanding of mythology than I do (some sections seemed written in response to Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, which I've never read), but I found it frustrating that Campbell mentioned several stories and did not (or could not?) carry a single one through all the stages of his monomyth.

Beyond that, I have a few personal bones to pick with Hero with a Thousand Faces:

Hero with a Thousand Faces is not simply a comparative study of mythology, but a philosophy. All well and good if you happen to agree with the author's philosophy, but I have issues with statements like

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult (249).

I'm not sure what he expects readers to do with myths that have some basis in history, or why something can't be both factual and "living." Campbell's abstract theories are not necessarily less "remote" than "biography, history, or science."

On another note, nearly all of Campbell's "heroes" were male. The male/female protagonist ratio in myths is, of course, beyond Campbell's control. But I do wonder how it colors his interpretation of the monomyth. I know that the hero cycle is supposed to spin the same whether the protagonist is male or female, but what do I with the "Atonement with the Father" requirement? Campbell's interpretation is so very Freudian/Oedipal I'm not sure it can fit female protagonists. Also, he claims that "Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know[...]. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure" (116). All well and good, but what happens when the woman is the hero(ine) who wants to know? (There's a Campbell quote about women in myths that I might address in another post. ...Or I might not.)

I'm deeply intrigued by the possibility of a different view of the monomyth, covering the journey of the heroine. Anyone know of any books on this?

Also, anyone who knows about mythology or Campbell and wants to comment, please, please do.

(Note: Image from Amazon. Quotes are from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.)

Alphabets Don't Kill People, the Letter K Kills People

2009-09-09T20:09:00.001-05:00

I couldn't resist putting up a few more photos from my trip. While in Grand Rapids, I visited the Public Museum, which had made an alphabet scavenger hunt for children out of some of their exhibits.

So, for example, H was a collection of hats from different countries and eras. And K was...

Apparently, they couldn't find any kites, kangaroos, or kumquats.

And here's the sign in front of the exhibit, in case you didn't think they were serious.

I guess I would have been less surprised by "W is for Weapons." After all, when I was young, I was fascinated by our DK book on weapons and armor.

But "K is for Knives and Guns"... that really sounds like something out of a cruder version of an Edward Gorey alphabet, doesn't it? Or a deranged sort of Sesame Street: "Today's murder was brought to you by the number 13 and the letter K!"

Two Things that Made Me Happy

2009-09-07T23:13:00.002-05:00

I guess even lazy bloggers get a summer vacation. But I didn't take a vacation from reading (heaven forbid!), so I've got a lot of blog-post material just waiting to be written up.

Meanwhile, I'll share two semi-literary things that made my summer sunny.

One
I spent some of my non-blogging time up in Grand Rapids (thus the big red Calder sculpture) and while I was there, of course, I had to visit one of my favorite independent booksellers: Schuler Books (this is the store on 28th St.).

*begin rant*
There are some big chain bookstores that I like (there are very few bookstores that I dislike), but often when I walk into a chain bookstore, I feel that they are selling products, not books. (Yes, cue the "cans of olive oil" scene from You've Got Mail now.)

I become irritated when the front of a bookstore is crowded with only best-selling popular fiction and celebrity biographies. Then I usually end up wandering through a nonsensical shelving system, trying to find the poetry section, which turns out to be smaller than Charlie Chaplin's mustache. Maybe this is due to my living in a smaller, more rural area. A larger population, particularly in a city with several universities, seems more likely to buy a broader variety of books. But I still can't help feeling that some books would do better, if only they were put where buyers could see them.
*end rant*

Back to Schuler Books. When I walk into Schuler, I get that people-here-know-books sense. I immediately see two dozen titles that I've been wanting to read and/or I've heard praised through sites like The Book Studio. Also, the organization of the store is wonderful, with helpful wooden signs hanging from the ceiling (though you can't really see this in my photo).

And the poetry section is actually a section, not a pitiful two and a half shelves.

My favorite part, the part that warms my frugal, little heart: in the center of the store is a used book section, also beautifully organized.

Two
In other news, I placed third in one of this year's Kentucky State Poetry Society contests (see "Street Cred" sidebar). Not really the road to writerly fame and favor, but one of those events that makes you think, Maybe I'm not so very terrible at this writing stuff.

Sometimes having a small victory is enough to give you the courage to spend the evening writing and revising new poems to send out. Or at least enough to convince you to write another blog post.

R.I.P.: James Baker Hall (also Some Bad Excuses and a Plotness Story)

2009-06-30T23:39:00.001-05:00

So I thought I was going to write another blog post last week, but both my internet and my brain went down (electrical problems and a bad flu/cold). If I wanted to sound really pathetic, I would add that the dishwasher also went out, but it's not as a good an excuse.

Over the weekend, I found out that former Kentucky Poet Laureate James Baker Hall passed away.

Besides being Poet Laureate of his home state, he won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an O. Henry Prize. Hall wrote fiction, poetry, and was a professional photographer. He was married to novelist Mary Ann Taylor-Hall.

I know that among the many people who will feel Hall's loss are his students. I never studied under him, but I was fortunate enough to hear Hall read at my local library when he was making his Poet Laureate circuit. And that, by itself, was an education.

On the way to the reading, I ran into an older woman from my poetry group. She asked me what I thought about James Baker Hall. I made some innocuous remark about liking his work (I didn't mention the poems I couldn't understand), and she replied, "Well, I think he's a fox. A silver fox." I swear, if she knew how to growl, she would have.

I must have stepped back because she added, "That's something you'll understand when you reach my age."

It was a good reading. I wish my memory of it was clearer. I'm horrible at describing voices, but I know Hall's was distinctive, sort of deep and wry and gravelly. His head was round and balding, but his eyebrows were bushy and expressive and accented the sharp brightness of his eyes.

Most of the audience was silver-headed. Afterwards, when I asked Hall to sign my copy of Mother on the Other Side of the World, he squinted at me and said, "Do you write poetry?" At the time, I thought this was some kind of shaman-like poet's intuition. (Now I realize that I had been so young and eager that this was the obvious question to ask.)

"Yes," I confessed.

"Is it any good?" He raised one of those expressive eyebrows.

"I don't know. Maybe." (How do you answer a question like that?)

Then he smiled and signed my book and that was the end of that. I had thought I would be able attend another reading by Hall some time in the future, buy another book, get it signed as well, and maybe by that point I would have published enough poetry to have answered his question.

Obviously, that's not going to happen now.

Even by relative strangers in the dusty corners of poetry-writing, you are missed, Mr. Hall. You Silver Fox.

(Image from the University of Kentucky.)

What Do Writers Do with Their Time?

2009-06-23T23:08:00.005-05:00

(Not blogging, apparently.)

I promise I will write a real post this week. But first, look at this article I loved on "writing time."

Little Dorrit (2)

2009-05-25T23:35:00.002-05:00

I kept meaning to complete my review of Masterpiece Classic's Little Dorrit while it was fresh in my mind, but... well, something about the best laid plans of rodents and bloggers.

Warning: This whole post is basically a spoiler. If you are planning to read or watch Little Dorrit, I suggest you skip this post.

The end of Masterpiece Classic's Little Dorrit was strangely rushed, but then so was the end of Dickens' novel. If the producers had just given themselves an extra half hour (and really, what's thirty more minutes to a five-part mini-series?) some points could have been clarified, certain scenes could have been more satisfying, and a lot of confusion could have been avoided.

Many of the flaws in the series were inherent to the work and would have been difficult to change without greatly altering the original material. For example, the romantic in me would have preferred to see better things happen to Flora, John Chivery, Pet Meagles/Gowan, etc. The writer in me would have simply preferred not to have had characters dropped off the edge of the world when they suddenly started to bore the author. Also, since Dickens is (or can be) a sucker for poetic justice/literary karma, I was disappointed that Arthur Clennam was allowed to save Amy from the Marshalsea, but Amy was not allowed to return the favor. (One could argue that because of property laws at the time, if Amy had money and Arthur married her, her money would have become Arthur's--so Arthur's refusal of finacial aid/romantic connections could be viewed as a refusal to take advantage of Amy's love. But his refusal to accept any sort of aid from her seems excessive and like a refusal to see Amy on equal footing with himself. He can play rescuer, but she can't.) Instead, Daniel Doyce must become the deux ex machina, returning from the Continent full of money and goodwill.

There were many changes that I appreciated:

Some characters were actually given a bit more time at the end of the mini-series than they were in the novel (i.e. Fanny, Mrs. Merdle, Sparkler--a nice scene there).

Harriet/Tattycoram returns but is spared the teeth-grinding speech on duty and suffering that Dickens forces her to submit to.

We get a nice wedding scene where we're allowed one last look at most of the characters we came to enjoy.

Amy doesn't burn the papers Mrs. Clennam gives her. I was disappointed when I read the novel that Arthur never got to know how much his biological mother loved him (or that he had any sort of mother who loved him), though I get the impression that Amy was trying to protect him from the stigma attached to being an illegitimate child.

But in many ways, the conclusion of the Little Dorrit mini-series was at least as confusing as the book's:

The scene where Pancks cuts off Mr. Casby's beard is a bit awkward in the book and more so in the series--largely because it happens too quickly. In the novel, the reader actually sees public opinion semi-gradually turn against Mr. Casby, as Pancks rants against the landlord while knocking off his hat. But in the mini-series all it seems to take is Pancks saying, "Hey, he's the one cheating you guys--not me!" and suddenly the scales drop from everyone's eyes.

In the novel, Jerimiah's body is never found, and it's suggested that he escaped before the house collapsed, but no one knows for sure. In the novel, this works. What doesn't really work, is having Jerimiah pop out of the rubble like a crocus, and wander off, dusty but undamaged, without anyone noticing.

The one thing I could not overlook, however, was how the last episode made the relationship between the Clennams and Amy Dorrit uncomfortably unclear. This is supposedly the big mystery of the tale. In the first episode, Fredrick Dorrit mentions running a boarding house for dancers (which, in the novel, is how he knew Arthur's biological mother, and the money owed to Amy is partially a result of Fredrick's kindness to Arthur's mother), but by the end of the mini-series this tidbit seems to have been forgotten, so we only know that Amy was mentioned in Gilbert Clennam's will. The viewer is left to sort out why.

The only reason I knew the connection between Amy and the House of Clennam after watching the mini-series was because I'd read the book first. In the "reveal" scene, there's a good bit of confusion in the dialogue about who exactly the illegitimate child is (or how many illegitimate children there are) and why Amy was supposed to inherit money from the Clennams (some of this confusion comes from unclear pronouns). Without that information, the conclusion seems to imply that Clennam and Amy are related somehow... which makes their wedding scene a bit squicky.

And I'm not the only one who thought so. In an effort to show that Little Dorrit is not about incest Masterpiece Classic offers a transcript of the explanation scene and then explains it.

Writing Problems

2009-05-21T23:17:00.005-05:00

Bit of blogger's block, but since there never seems to be a wrong time to post Frazz strips...

(Note: Click strip to see a larger version at Comics.com.)

Two Things I Liked

2009-05-18T21:26:00.001-05:00

I enjoyed this list of Ten Things Only Writers Understand on Strictly Writing.

...Also, this article on Elaine Showalter's book about American women writers.

Introducing: Paducah Reads

2009-05-18T19:44:00.001-05:00

If you live in western Kentucky (or even if you don't), I invite you to check out Paducah Reads, my new blog promoting local literary news and events: writers' group meetings, poetry readings, open mic nights, book signings, etc.

(I know, I know, like I need another blog.)

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Things to Do Instead of Writing

2009-05-16T21:02:00.004-05:00

Check e-mail for responses to submissions sent last week.
Read a chapter from Be a Better Writer... Yesterday!
Check e-mail. Again.
Go get the mail. (Pretend this is not because you're hoping for a snail-mail response).
Read the junk mail.
Fill out the "send me more information" card for correspondence courses. Check "Private Investigator."
Eat a sandwich in front of your computer screen, while casually checking e-mail.
Plan National Book Award acceptance speech.
Load the dishwasher (now you're getting desperate).
Look up stuff on the internet about what other writers do instead of writing.

I like this advice from Neil Gaiman:

It's amazing how much time you can spend not writing, without even trying. Make a rule that you can either write, or not do anything at all. (No TV. No long baths. No reading New Scientist. Staring out of the window is okay.) Pretty soon, you start to write, because it's more interesting than staring vacantly out of the window. (I think I got it from a Daniel Pinkwater essay in Fish Whistle, and it's a wonderful concept.)

I don't know that I'll follow it, but I like it.

Writers' Name Resources

2009-05-15T22:48:00.003-05:00

I've just made my way through Clans and Families of Ireland: The Heritage and Heraldry of Irish Clans and Families by John Grenham, which, besides being a good, basic guide to Irish surnames, is also a "pretty" book: full of photos of the Isle and drawings of coats of arms. (I love coats of arms with strange things on them. A cross and a red hand: okay. A cross, a red hand, AND a gold hedgehog standing on a unicorn: perfection.)

This made me think of other name books I've read. When I was younger, I used to spend days going through Best Baby Name Book In The Whole World by Bruce Lansky (possibly still my favorite baby name book).

Then I'd have huge lists of characters with amazing, meaningful names, who I'd never write any stories about. (Plot wasn't my strong point.) When I started writing stories on a deadline, I'd tack "temporary" names onto my characters, hoping to come up with something more purposeful later. Eventually, I'd turn the stories in with the temporary names still in place.

But I'm easing my way back into name-meanings--not just the literal definitions of characters' names, but the cultural connotations too. (For example, in Susan Glaspell's play The Verge, the main character has relationships with three different men--Harry Archer, Richard Demming, and Tom Edgeworthy--they become "every Tom, Dick, and Harry," a sort of Greek chorus for the socially acceptable.)

Literal name definitions, however, still fascinate me, and I've collected a handful of baby name books. I thought I'd see if anyone had a favorite name book or website that he/she'd recommend. Suggestions?

(Images from BooksUlster.com and Mommie Books.)

What's Wrong with Puns?

2009-05-13T21:47:00.001-05:00

Remember that article I linked to on puns in March? Well, here's another one, this time defending puns and questioning why Americans hate them so much.

I don't know. I like puns (though some of my Dad's puns... heaven help us). And I seem to be surrounded by them: puns appear in the comics, in book titles, newspaper headlines, e-mail forwards, and restaurant names (i.e. Thai One On). If Americans hate puns, then we sure are a masochistic society.

I think we're both addicted to puns and ashamed of our addiction. Is this dislike a mild sort of classism? Most puns can be understood by anyone who speaks the language, so they're a populist form of humor, linked to "lowbrow," commercial texts.

Of course, specialty shops continue to sell t-shirts, mugs, and tote bags adorned with jokes for their niche market. Is my Dad's t-shirt with the ancient mathematician and the slogan "Here's looking at Euclid" a more acceptable form of humor than your garden variety pun? Or just as groaning-inducing?

Thoughts?

In Defense of Strunk and White

2009-05-06T21:25:00.007-05:00

I was going to let the fiftieth anniversary of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style slip by without comment, but then I stumbled on this article by Mark Garvey. As much as I enjoy Language Log's embrace of the complexity of English, I'm happy to see someone call Geoffrey Pullman on his disproportionate hatred of this slim writing handbook.

I have not used Elements of Style in a long time--my dip into the editing arena made me a Chicago Manual of Style girl (another book Language Log doesn't love)--but I still keep a copy on my shelf. I know there are better books on English grammar available. But for nervous writers just dipping a toe into the murky waters of English usage, there are very few volumes as concise, affordable, and (most importantly) non-scary as Elements of Style.

(Image from Better Know a Book.)

Wishing You a Belated Happy Kentucky Writers' Day

2009-04-27T23:57:00.001-05:00

I wanted to write a post for Kentucky Writers' Day (April 24th), but computer problems and personal insanities kept me occupied.

I also wanted to add an amendment to my previous comment about former Poet Laureates of Kentucky, and note that it's a little difficult to find information on some Poet Laureates, particularly from early on, when the appointment process was a bit more sporadic.

I remember hearing James Baker Hall describe the early appointment process (and I paraphrase): Sometimes a member of the General Assembly would say, "So-and-so down in such-and-such holler writes some poems. Let's make her Poet Laureate of Kentucky." And the Assembly would vote for this, and the poet was happy, and the member was happy because he'd made his constituents happy. But beyond this the benefits for Kentucky and literature were relatively small.

So, when I said that as far as I know, former Poet Laureates of Kentucky wrote poetry, well, I only know back so far. But certainly ever since the Kentucky Arts Council has been involved in the process, Poet Laureates in Kentucky (until now) have written poetry.

On to newer news: I was very happy to hear that the crowd for Gurney Norman's April 24th induction ceremony overwhelmed the Capitol Rotunda. There aren't a lot of literary events that require more seating than is available. So Huzzah! for auspicious beginnings!

Gurney Norman: New Kentucky Poet Laureate

2009-04-22T23:52:00.008-05:00

National Poetry Month seems like the perfect time to formerly induct a new state Poet Laureate, and on Friday (April 24th) Gurney Norman will officially take over from Jane Gentry Vance. After receiving the news, my first thought was Oh! I didn't know Gurney Norman wrote poetry. How wonderful!

Well, he hasn't published any poetry. The official Kentucky website says, "The word 'poet' in the position's title is interpreted in its broadest sense to include persons whose accomplishments are in any literary form." The dictionary allows for this broad use of the word poet. But the U.S. Poet Laureate always falls under the narrower definition and writes poetry, and as far as I can tell, all of Kentucky's past Poet Laureates wrote poetry. This seems a little funny to me.

Part of me is peeved because it's not as if Kentucky's run out of great (poetry-writing) poets on whom the Kentucky Arts Council/governor could bestow this honor. And part me is tickled by imagining the Kentucky Arts Council watching Gurney Norman's long and acclaimed career and waiting and waiting for him to write a volume of poetry until, finally, someone exclaims, "Darn it all! We have to get Gurney Norman for Poet Laureate before the man dies on us."

I've only read Norman's Kinfolks (so far), but his history of prose achievement and promoting literature in Kentucky (and Kentucky in literature) is certainly worth honoring. A major part of the job of Kentucky Poet Laureate is to advance reading and writing in the Commonwealth, and in that sense, Gurney Norman is a perfect fit. I won't be able to attend the ceremony in Frankfort, but I hope our new Poet Laureate makes it down to my end of the state. I also hope that he pays special attention to the important, but much neglected, role of Kentucky poetry.

Book Personality Quiz

2009-04-17T18:46:00.001-05:00

I love Blue Pyramid's Book Quiz! In six questions, it picks one out of 64 works of literature for you to be. I'm A Prayer for Owen Meany. Not half bad!

You're A Prayer for Owen Meany!

by John Irving

Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers, and you manifest this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of destiny pervades your every waking moment, and you prepare with great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak, IT SOUNDS LIKE THIS!

But then, of course, I had to keep retaking the quiz to see what else I could be. (I stopped when I got Ulysses.) Take it and let me know what you get. I know it's silly, but come on, it's only six questions...

Ulysses by James Joyce

2009-04-16T22:36:00.001-05:00

I've finally finished James Joyce's Ulysses. A work of such magnitude, symbolism, and breadth deserves a long, thoughtful post. But since when have I been in the habit of giving great writers what they deserve?

Top Five Reasons You Might Want to Read Joyce's Ulysses

You're the sort of person who gets a kick out being able to say you've read some large, ponderous volume. Enough of a kick to actually endure said large, ponderous volumes. (This is my excuse.)

You're getting a graduate level degree in English, and you're terrified of what will happen if your peers find out you haven't read certain large, ponderous volumes. (They won't kill you. On the contrary, they need to keep someone around they can mock. Instead, you'll receive copies of Dan Brown's work in the mail with anonymous notes saying, "This made me think of you.")

You've heard that Ulysses is obscene, and you really prefer your erotic reading to contain no actual sex but to involve men who think constantly about sex, bowel movements, and academic theories; women who think constantly about sex, bowel movements, and how much they hate other women; and long strings of rhyming words that dissolve into jumbles of letters just for the heck of it.

Reading twenty-five pages of dialogue that you can't comprehend makes you feel smart. (Also my excuse.)

You've read everything else in the world, including the West Kentucky Rural Telephone Directory and the Sony M-16 VCR manual. (But in that case, you've already read Finnegans Wake, so nothing should intimidate you.)

Top Five Things I Enjoyed about Ulysses

The complexity and breadth of Joyce's symbols: father-son relationships, Hamlet, the mother (as Freudian symbol, as Ireland, as female ideal), The Odyssey, Irish history (particularly in relationship to conflict and betrayal), Biblical stories, and... well, everything else.

The novelty of Joyce's writing. Joyce's various styles and tones (the language of old Celtic legends, of 19th century humorists, of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, etc.) are mixed with various forms (play script, Q&A catechism format, newspaper headlines, etc.).

Joyce's use of foils to bring out his characters' personalities. (It wasn't until Bloom and Stephen were together that I really felt the distinctness of these two characters.)

The occasional bouts of the hilariously ridiculous.

Finishing it.

(Image from The Blue Pyramid.)

The Literary Merits of Biblical Characters

2009-04-14T22:03:00.004-05:00

I've got a nasty cold/infection/virus, so I've been doing a lot more reading than writing (and a lot more curled-up-on-the-couch-PBS-watching than anything), so I'm keeping my nonsensical, mucus-laden thoughts to myself. (You can thank me later.)

Do, however, feel free to check out Tod Linafelt's thoughts on the literary merits of Biblical characters. I haven't read James Wood's How Fiction Works (which Linafelt discusses), but that didn't make this article any less intriguing. (In fact, I find I sometimes enjoy reading about certain books more than I enjoy reading the books themselves. But that may be unnatural.)

Easter Poems

2009-04-11T22:00:00.004-05:00

I forgot to mention that April is National Poetry Month! Americans are being encouraged to read a poem a day for a month. Daily poems can be found at the Academy of American Poets, Knopf Doubleday, and (as always) Poetry Daily. More on celebrating National Poetry Month next week.

But a much more important celebration waits in the wings. I wish you a blessed Easter and renewed hope in Christ.

(Here and here are some Easter poems. My favorite is probably Rory Harris'.)

Fewer Posts, Better Posts... Same Great Price

2009-04-08T21:54:00.003-05:00

Breaking News: Bethany has decided to cut back to four blog-posts a week.

In the past, the blogger tried to post five times a week. Her decision, she says, stems from her hatred of that "morning-after regret when I go through the post I wrote the night before and try to fix all the typos, run-on sentences, missing transitions, and stuff-that-just-makes-no-sense-unless-I-was-drugged-and-translating-from-an-alien-language. This blog will never be great literature, but I'm hoping the posts will flow a little better if I give myself more time to write and edit them."

Bethany also said she'd like to write more posts about writing if she "can think of ways to do this that don't sound really uninformed or self-indulgent, like 'Today I wrote stuff. Then I wrote more stuff. It was all crap. I hate my life.'"

A source close to Bethany said that she's probably also trying to steal more time for her non-blog-related writing, but Bethany would neither confirm nor deny this statement.

"Who knows?" she said. "Some weeks there might be more posts, but I'm not promising anything." In the past she has been known to skip a whole week of posting without explanation.

(Image from Muppet Wiki.)

Literary Recipes

2009-04-08T19:11:00.004-05:00

So apparently I when I said I would be celebrating the International Edible Book Festival (April 1st) "in some way," I meant "by getting sick and thinking, It's April Fool's Day already? Crap."

So instead, I give you Tom Nugent's "Novel Recipes." (My favorite is Faulkner's Cracklin'-Broiled Pigs' Feet Vainglorious.)

Also, check out photos on the official Edible Books site (though there are only three up for 2009 right now.)

Should Writers "Stick Together"?

2009-04-07T21:48:00.007-05:00

How much should a writer publicly (and negatively) comment on the work of other writers?

If you pay much attention to popular fiction, you've probably heard about Stephen King's criticism of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. The blogosphere boiled: some defended King's right, even duty, to criticize other authors; others declared that King was motivated by jealousy and greed. On one commenter called King's criticism of a fellow writer "just tacky." That struck a chord because I remember saying that after author/lecturer roundly mocked another Christian writer's work as "trash." In fact, as I bring the situation up in my mind, it still seems tacky. And yet I criticize other authors on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

On the one hand (excuse me while I play Tevye), I don't fret over what I say about Marlowe, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, or Dickens. Their places in the literary canon are not going to be disturbed by a few snide comments from an (as of yet) unknown writer.

Also, they're dead. I don't have to worry about running into Edith Wharton at some writing conference and having her snub me because I didn't love Ethan Frome. (This would be sad on so many levels, but largely because I'm sure Wharton would be an interesting person to know.)

But contemporary authors... Well, you could suggest that I'm worrying too far ahead of myself (a special talent of mine), but the publishing world is fairly intimate, so ticking too many writers off = bad career move. And I find that most writers, even those whose work I don't care for, are people worth knowing.

But this question goes beyond career or social moves. Humility, compassion, and truthfulness are all supposed to be part of the Christian life, but how these virtues relate to criticism (whether formal or informal) is still a bit of a mystery to me.

And as a writer, I know better than anyone else how much work and self-doubt goes into what may ultimately be a merely mediocre book. I know that what hits the page is never as vibrant or brilliant as what was in your mind. I know how brave it is to write. I also know that there are very few things I've read that are so bad that they couldn't, at some point, have been mine. There are a lot of unpaid critics out there. Does the world really need another one?

In this sense, I understand the bloggers who only blog about books they liked. They remind me a little of a relative of mine who was famous for her strict adherence to a "If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all" policy. The worst thing she was known to have said about someone was "Well... I'm sure he breathes well." I sort of admire this attitude. But sometimes I imagine that if taken too far, you'd find yourself having uncomfortable luncheons with a bunch of murderous dictators and remarking on how well everyone's breathing. (Of course, saying nice things about people doesn't mean you have to eat lunch with them, and anyway, writers are rarely allowed to rule countries.)

I don't generally feel the need to rant against other writers. I enjoy most of the books I read.

On the other hand (you were waiting for that other hand, weren't you?), getting read is not a privilege. My money and time only go so far--I rely on friends, blogs, professional reviews, etc. to help me decide what I might enjoy.

I'm certainly not trying to pass myself off as a professional reviewer (which should be obvious from my blog posts). I do, however, have a history of experience with books as a long-time reader, as an English major, as an editor... and as a writer. I notice what sort of work hasn't been done by an author. I'm frustrated when slip-shod workmanship and poorly thought out ideas are passed off as brilliance, and real, honest-to-goodness brilliance ends up in some dark hole of a back-list. And there are some books that are so dishonest that I feel like warning all potential readers against them (someday I'm going to talk about the Elsie Dinsmore series here). I recognize bad writing--I've created enough of it myself. But is pointing it out to the world mean, helpful, selfish, or morally neutral? Or is it "tacky?"

Maybe it depends on the presentation of the criticism. I'm not sure there's much good done by saying a book is "trash" or that someone "can't write worth a darn." But then I remember of Jesus bluntly saying "you white-washed tombs" to the Pharisees.

What do you think? Is there a line that shouldn't be crossed in writer-on-writer criticism?

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

2009-04-06T22:43:00.000-05:00

I love Dickens, but lately I think I love him for what he could have been rather than what he is. I love his intertwined plot-lines (even at their most convoluted). I love his eccentric, comic, and/or admirable secondary characters (Pancks, Daniel Doyce, Flora, John Chivery, Mr. Baptist, Mrs. Plornish, etc.). I love the nobility of his sentiments.

But I am always tweaking him in my mind.

For one thing, I want his female characters to be more developed. I expect a certain number of flat characters in any Dickens' novel because the very best Dickens is a marvelous mixture of the satirical and the sublime. Mrs. Plornish is probably not going grow and change, and who wants her to? I want to her to continue thinking that she knows how to speak Italian while she declaims in poorly structured English to Mr. Baptist. But Dickens' more "serious" female characters (particularly if they are young) are either unbelievably sweet and docile (Pet and Little Dorrit) or bitter and angry (Fanny, Tattycoram, and Miss Wade). Dicken's female heroines are not allowed to become angry (particularly about their own treatment), but must wait for other, preferably male, characters to stick up for them. Thus, the quiet Amy (Little) Dorrit is rewarded and the passionate (Tattycoram) Harriet is reproved at the end of the novel. And this isn't particular to Little Dorrit; compare the novel with Dickens' young female characters in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, etc. and you'll see the same pattern.

But still, the seeds for more complex female characters are definitely there. Out of Dickens' hints, one can almost create a Little Dorrit who is both loyal to her family and resentful of them, and a Tattycoram (Harriet) who lashes out against real injustices. Yes, I think, this could easily be fixed--the ideas are still right.

Apparently, I love Dickens for his potential. Particularly his potential to inspire movies and mini-series.

I have been on edge ever since Masterpiece Classic announced their Tales of Charles Dickens series. (I had, at first, hoped that they would do all the tales of Charles Dickens, but then I realized that would involve over twenty novels--many as long as Little Dorrit--and numerous short stories. Even the most die-hard Dickens fan might balk at that.). Masterpiece's David Copperfield is an old stand-by, so I wasn't anxious about that. And I'd already seen several versions of Oliver Twist (this one wasn't a favorite). But I've been psyched about Andrew Davies' adaption of Little Dorrit ever since it was announced (so much so that I read the 900+ page monster, even though I had promised myself to avoid huge novels while fighting Ulysses).

So far, I'm pretty happy with the mini-series. The first episode was disjointed and had too many melodramatic violins and sea-sickness-inducing camera tricks (Dickens really doesn't need have the melodrama played up). But in the second episode, the mini-series hit its stride. The script makes me very happy--picking the best of Dickens' lines and sentiments and bringing them to modern audiences without seeming overtly "translated." The casting, in general, is superb. Claire Foy is all the things Amy Dorrit was meant to be, and Matthew Macfadyen keeps Arthur Clennam endearingly polite but not boring (in the novel, the conventional Arthur is often overshadowed by Dickens' other characters).

I'll probably continue to comment on Little Dorrit (both the series and the book) as the mini-series continues. If you missed any of episodes and are curious, you can catch up here (until May 3rd).

(Image from Cartoon Stock.)

Insert Bad Joke Here

2009-03-31T22:12:00.002-05:00

I hope to have some real posts up by the end of the week, but for now, enjoy (or suffer through) this article on puns.

One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

2009-03-27T22:39:00.004-05:00

The sensible thing to do would have been to read some of Eudora Welty's novels/collections and then start on her memoir (though I have read two or three of her short stories). But One Writer's Beginnings was already on my shelf, and I've wanted to read it ever since I was assigned excerpts in a college writing class.

This is the sort of memoir that very private people write--almost the opposite of a tell-all. My copy is only 114 pages (with photographs). One Writer's Beginnings is based off of three lectures Welty gave covering her childhood impressions and how these affected her writing self. And Welty is very careful to present her writing self instead of her "personal" self (as much as the two can be separated):

Around the age of six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave to me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio (11).

The entire book is woven out of these small moments made beautiful by Welty's vivid but straight-forward prose (I couldn't help but fall in love with her line about "the insect murmur" of the electric fan). In contrast to these writerly details, Welty only briefly (though poignantly) mentions her father's early death to leukemia.

My father, I believe, was unconscious. My mother was looking at him. I could see her fervent face: there was no doubt as to what she was thinking. This time, she would save his life, as he'd saved hers so long ago, when she was dying of septicemia. What he'd done for her in giving her the champagne, she would be able to do for him now in giving him her own blood.

All at once his face turned dusky red all over. The doctor made a disparaging sound with his lips, the kind a woman knitting makes when she drops a stitch. What the doctor meant by it was that my father had died.

My mother never recovered emotionally. Though she lived for over thirty years more, and suffered other bitter losses, she never stopped blaming herself. She saw this as her failure to save his life (101).

This is the most revealing passage in the memoir, partially because this is the most difficult thing Welty says about anyone in her family, and partially because it reveals how determined Welty is to present herself as an observer only. She never tells the reader how her father's death effects her--there is a curious, ladylike distance between the supposed subject of the narration and reader. The reader is left with only a vague, ghost-like image of Welty herself. The real subject of the story is story itself.

If Welty had been more revealing, I might have found her story more interesting (I took my time finishing it--in spite of her skill and the book's brevity). In many ways, however, I appreciate Welty's determination to protect her in privacy. (She was, supposedly, pressured into writing a memoir by her friends.)

On the other hand, Carolyn G. Heilbrun (in the introduction to a book I haven't read yet--it's on the list) claims that Welty's memoir is overly nostalgic and a dishonest representation of life and writing to other aspiring female authors.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't particularly believe that anyone "owes" the world her complete, unedited life--if I ever wrote a memoir, I would certainly edit some scenes out, and I tend to expect memoir writers to do the same.

But is there a point where an incomplete truth joins the ranks of lies? I'd say yes. But I wouldn't say that One Writer's Beginnings has quite crossed that line. There is something uncomfortable about finding such large gaps in a memoir, but the gaps are so obvious, it's as if Welty is saying, "No, this isn't all. But really, is that any of your business, dear?"

(Image from Amazon.)

Inspiration at the Speed of a Bullet

2009-03-25T21:03:00.003-05:00

Okay, I know this seems like it has nothing to do with anything, but if you're a writer, you somehow manage to pull everything back to your trade. Alan Sailer's high-speed photographs focus on colorful, almost tangible moments. There's a whole writer's block theory (and market) built around seeing and doing unusual things that spark new associations in the writer's mind, pulling him/her out of creative ruts. I certainly feel my brain stretching beyond its usual vocabulary as it recreates the sounds and sights that must have occured in Sailer's studio.

Plus, these are just cool. My favorite is the glass ornament full of sprinkles.

(Image from Enginoob.)

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

2009-03-24T22:27:00.007-05:00

I'd like to thank Josh for recommending The End of the Affair and my mom for thinking it would make a good gift (it did). I would also like to thank Graham Greene for existing and writing books. And now that I've made it clear how very unbiased I am...

There were so many things to love stylistically about The End of the Affair, I'm not going to try to cover them all. Greene's narrative within a narrative was deftly employed. Greene's style is so tight, so refined, it appears almost accidental. One of things I most appreciated about The End of the Affair was Greene's ability to take the complexities of theme and characters one expects from literary fiction and combine them with the suspenseful plot structure of genre fiction.

I tend to have a hard time relating to characters in novels about affairs (and a large percentage of literary fiction involves characters having affairs), but I didn't have this difficulty with The End of the Affair. As a writer, I enjoyed Maurice Bendrix's (often wry) observations about the life of a novelist (he acts as a stand-in for Greene). As a reader, I related to him in ways I didn't expect. Bendrix is a selfish, almost cold, narrator, but I immediately understood his self-editing tedencies, his habit of admiting to certain flaws in order to distract from other failures, his ego, etc. From the opening paragraph, I was drawn to Bendrix's character.

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who--when he has been seriously noted at all--has been praised for his techinical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet' (1).

But the true kudos go to Greene for writing a believable female character (I'm reading Joyce and Dickens right now--I've definitely felt a need for this). In Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Sons and Lovers--I could appreciate the authors' redendering of certain psychological types, but I didn't really feel like I understood why (outside of a dry, textbook explaination) they did what they did. Through Sarah Miles' journal, I felt I could understand her affair because I could understand her.

But there's not a single person anywhere to whom I can even say I'm unhappy because they would ask me why and the questions would begin and I would break down. I mustn't break down because I must protect Henry. Oh, to hell with Henry, to hell with Henry. I want somebody who'll accept the truth about me and doesn't need protection. If I'm a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake? (75)

Moving beyond style and plot, I do question how important The End of the Affair would be to me if I didn't already accept the claims of Christianity. Greene's stretches, particularly at the end of the novel, seem acceptable to me because I was enchanted by his ideas well before I arrived at his last chapter.

Michael Gorra, in the introduction of my copy of The End of the Affair, claims, "[T]his book challenges the particular kind of truth-claims on which fiction conventionally relies. The End of the Affair does not simply ask us to suspend our disbelief. It instead demands that we do believe, and believe in the religious sense of the term" (vii). A friend of mine remarked, after reading a Greene novel I haven't tried yet, that Greene seemed a bit heavy-handed to her. To which I could only respond, "Yeah, he is sometimes."

Without giving away too much, I'll admit that in the last section Greene pushes belief on the reader in ways I doubt I could if I was writing the same sort of novel. I think the conclusion seems particularly "difficult" because it flips the typical question "Why does/should one believe?" to "Why does/should one doubt?" In this way, Greene's novel reminds me of C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces--the reader is faced with the assertion that doubt is no more rational or cool-headed than belief, that we doubt with the same blind desperation we attribute to those who believe.

(Image from Jalopnik.)

P.S. I apologize for the disjointedness of this post--I finally stopped waiting till I had a clear enough mind to do The End of the Affair justice and just gave up and wrote this silly thing.

Report on the Condition of the Inner Editor

2009-03-23T21:46:00.004-05:00

I'm in the first stages of a very rough edit/restructuring of my novel, which means I switch a lot between writing new scenes and editing previously written scenes. This is like constantly crossing the border between the Creative Country of Associative Anarchists (where the road signs say things like "Beware Falling Carousels" and "Sudden Death/Life Possible," or they just consist of almost-identifiable, Rorschach-like silhouettes) and the forever war-torn Republic of Correction-Fluid ("Plot-holes Ahead," "Cliches Kill," "Just Say 'No' to Double Negatives," "Rogue Commas Will be Shot on Sight," and endless miles of red ink as tiny factions of prescriptionists and descriptionists and 6th grade English teachers wriggle through the mud, trying to claim a particular molehill).

This sort of right-brained/writing vs. left-brained/editing is oversimplified (I certainly need my left-brain to write). But I'm no longer in a job where I keep the Chicago Manual of Style closer than my cup of tea, so I'm starting to feel nervous. I'm losing that grammatical shine I used to apply so liberally to other writers' work. (I feel this loss most distinctly when I re-read my blog posts...)

I needed a bit of snarkiness to make me feel better about my dying skills, so today I spent some time over at Testy Copy Editors and The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

I laughed so hard that I decided my inner editor can't be completely dead--she just needs a little company.

An Expert Explains Why Bethany's Recent Posts are So Short

2009-03-20T21:55:00.002-05:00

(Image from ICanHasCheezburger.)

This Would be Easier...

2009-03-19T22:53:00.000-05:00

I like Debbie Ridpath Ohi's brilliant idea (on the left).

Irish Tales Retold for Children

2009-03-17T22:41:00.001-05:00

In honor of Saint Patrick's Day, I'd thought I'd mention a few children's books based on Irish legends that I've had the pleasure of reading lately.

I've noticed that the older the Irish legend, the less appropriate it seems for a children's book. Several storybooks present these tales "as is," leading to the sort of faithful and depressing retellings I would have disliked as a child. I believe, however, that my childhood self would have approved of the books below.

The Children of Lir written by Sheila MacGill-Callahan, illustrated by Gennady Spirin. I actually like the sadder, more familiar, Christianized version of this story better, but as a child, I would have appreciated MacGill-Callahan's happy ending, the addition of Jasconius the whale (borrowed from the legend of Saint Brendan), and the large role played by animals throughout the story. Spirin's detailed illustrations are both fantastical and formal, reminding me of a Renaissance stage play.

The King of Ireland's Son, told by Brendan Behan and illustrated by P.J. Lynch, was transcribed from a audio-recording of Behan, and the text vibrantly reflects the best qualities of oral storytelling. The story is light-hearted and lyrical, and Lynch's pictures are a perfect match: the characters are lovingly detailed and humorously expressive.

Irish Fairy Tales and Legends, written by Una Leavy and illustrated by Susan Field, is possibly my favorite of the three. First, you get ten tales to delight in, instead of one. Second, Leavy does the best job I've ever read of staying true to the nature of old Irish legends while fitting them into a language and tone appropriate for children. Third, the collection is a generous mix of serious and comic stories. Fourth, Field's pictures are absolutely marvelous: expressive, warm, colorful, and childlike.

(Images from Amazon and LitWeb. )

Victor Borge Plays with the English Language

2009-03-16T21:46:00.003-05:00

I watched the Victor Borge special on PBS last week, and I was wondering, On Monday, should I link to a clip of Borge's phonetic punctuation or one of his inflationary language routine?

The answer, obviously, was yes.

Books We Lie About

2009-03-13T22:39:00.001-05:00

Have you seen this?

I guess I'm not surprised that people have lied about not reading 1984 (I'm embarrassed not to have read it yet). But do so many people really find it necessary to lie about War and Peace and Ulysses? This is a British list, so the books Americans lie about may be different. Still, I would have expected to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on the list first.

Unless I actually am the only reader left who hasn't read The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Rats. I wasn't going to let you know that.

Girl Meets God: A Memoir by Lauren F. Winner

2009-03-12T22:37:00.002-05:00

I don't read many memoirs, but when I do, I am always struck by how difficult it must to be to take your own life and pin it down in a story someone else will find worthwhile. I admit to feeling a certain level of trepidation over whether or not I should judge someone else's life on its artistic merit. Fortunately, I enjoyed Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God enough that I don't have to feel overly guilty.

Winner writes like a cross between an English and a history major--her writing style and approach to faith strongly attest her love of stories and tradition. Her style is not necessarily what I would term "literary" (in comparision to, say, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking), but it is always bookish. I particularly appreciated Winner's attempt to structure her memoir around the intermingling (Orthodox)Jewish/(Episcopalian)Christian calendar. Within these sections, however, the story often felt fragmented, and I wasn't sure why certain scenes were placed together.

The intended audience for Girl Meets God is probably the broadly-defined spiritual reader. But reading reviews on Amazon, I quickly came to the conclusion that different readers pick this book up for very different reasons. Christians readers want to know how Winner came to Christianity. Jewish readers want to know how Winner left Judaism.

I don't share all of Winner's theological conclusions, but she expresses her relationship with her new faith in some beautifully honest passages. Several readers complain about not having a clear grasp of what drew her to Christianity, but I appreciated the fact that she can't, for all her obviously academic and linear leanings, wrap her personal journey into neat theological points.

The Incarnation appealed to the literature buff in me. Embodiment was the novelistic culmination of anthropomorphism, of assigning God human characteristics. All through the Torah, God is pictured as having hands, a face. The rabbis say, Of course God doesn't really have hands, but the Torah uses the language of hands and faces and eyes so that we will have an easier time wrapping ours minds around this infinite, handless God. That is what you say if you are a rabbi. But if you are a good novelist, you actually give him Him hands and eyes by the end of the book, and that is what the Bible does. It says, in Deuteronomy, that God brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; and then it gives Him an arm in the Gospel of Matthew (51-2).

Unfortunately, the language of a faith which is new to her was sometimes a little stale for me. I was often more interested in her passages about Judaism (which is less familiar to me). Some of the most beautiful of scenes in the book recount, layer after layer, what Winner lost when she left Judaism, and her yearning to create connections between the two religious halves of her life. I was particularly moved by her description of buying a Jewish papercut of Ruth 1:21 (Naomi's lament: "I went away full, but the Lord brought me back empty"):

I track down the artist. Her name is Diane and she lives in New Mexico. I email her and ask if the papercut of Ruth 1:21 is available for sale. She writes back: She will sell me the picture for $900. It is Friday afternoon that we exchange these emails, and she wishes me a Shabbot shalom, and I think, Of course, she thinks I'm Jewish. I half-feel I am deceiving her by not spilling my entire religious autobiography to her over email. (Are you sure you want to sell your art to a traitor?)

When the papercut comes in the mail, I unwrap it with some ceremony, and hold it in my hands for a long time and then I hang the papercut on a wall with crosses--a sturdy, orange clay cross that I bought at that Episcopal church in Oxford, Mississippi, and a trio of iron crosses, Jesus' and the two thieves', that I found at a small craft shop in North Carolina. It hangs underneath those, and it looks delicate and just slightly out of place, like a bit of lace peeking out of a heavy woolen winter coat.

"It is a difficult verse," Diane writes to me in her email. "The challenge for me was to capture the loneliness of the verse, and still imbue it with a sense of beauty. I suspect it reflects difficult losses for you" (249-50).

All in all, Girl Meets God is a unique and honest addition to my small collection of memoirs.

(Image from Random House.)

The Reading Habits of TV Ad Characters, Or More Silliness

2009-03-11T21:11:00.001-05:00

Have you seen this Mirena commercial?

I actually have nothing to say about the product being promoted (leave it to an English major to go for the peripherals)...

But the line "In five years... finish a book" always jars me. I know she's busy with her promotion, soccer coaching, kids, etc. and that a lot of people don't read as much as I do (i.e. have a social life), but she had time to learn French and an Associated Press-Ipsos poll suggests that the average American claimed to have read four books in 2006. I guess I'm surprised because commercials tend to aim for the "average" viewer. I hope she wasn't reading the one book over the whole course of the five years because she's really not going to remember what was in the first chapter by the time she gets to the end. Then again, maybe she's reading Ulysses and she can't remember the previous sentence by the time she gets to the next one... *sympathetic groan*

Of course, the wording is probably just to parallel the language of that final "...finish a sentence." I'm sure she's finished several sentences over the course of five years. But the singular "finish a book" preceded by other one-time actions (I assume she only moves to Memphis once) still sounds like it's implying that this is the one book she's finished in five years.

Of course, a couple online commentators thought she was implying that she had finished writing and publishing a book. In which case: *envious groan*

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

2009-03-10T22:05:00.008-05:00

It took me a long time to finish Housekeeping--not because I found it dull, but because I found myself overwhelmed with jealousy for Marilynne Robinson's prose style.

If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, "That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail pairing dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate's wife dreamed her dream," the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them. Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on (73).

My slow, "spurts" of reading method, however, didn't really do Housekeeping justice. Because the life of this novel is so deeply embedded in the flow of language, rather than in the plot, or even the characters (though the imagery exists through the characters), it can be difficult to get back into that flow if you only read a little at a time (I found this true with Robinson's Gilead as well, but I read that more quickly).

Just about everyone seems to have nice things to say about Marilynne Robinson's novels, so for simplicity's sake, I'm just going to list all (okay, several) of the things I liked about Housekeeping:

Robinson's breath-taking mix of water/air/ice imagery.
The picture Robinson draws of Fingerbone, Idaho through Ruth's position as someone neither completely inside nor completely out.
The idea of transience, and the question of whether it is harder or easier to something/someone transient.
The characters. There's almost a gentleness in the way Robinson portrays people. Most of the people I've grown up around are likable and even (outwardly) boring. I always have a little trouble relating to novels populated by scoundrel after despicable, colorful scoundrel.
There's an innate spirituality in Robinson's prose. And she has a way of taking Biblical images (such as the Flood) and turning them so that they catch the light in a new way.

...and things that may make reading Housekeeping difficult:

There is a plot structure, but it's not immediately visible. Don't expect a fast read. (Not that I believe a fast read automatically equals a good read.)
Ruth, the narrator, (like many of the other characters) is a ponderer. I can relate, but sometimes I felt like shouting, "Just do something already!" But this, ultimately, makes the actions Ruth chooses more meaningful.
The knowledge that Robinson's prose is much, much more elegant than your own.

(Image from LITTORAL.)

Excuses, Excuses...

2009-03-05T22:55:00.005-06:00

The past couple days, I've been wearing my brain out long before I've managed to get to the blog. I've tried working from the mental "netherworld," and at least with blogging (and grammar), results are sketchy.

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, trans. by Jack Zipes

2009-03-03T22:29:00.005-06:00

I've finally finished my Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (illustrations by John B. Gruelle, aka Johnny Gruelle). I particularly appreciated the inclusion of tales the Grimms later omitted from their collection and Jack Zipes' brief biography, "Once There were Two Brothers Named Grimm."

Gruelle's pen-and-ink illustrations are the quintessential fairytale images, but in a 734-page book, they feel spread rather thin. I like my fairytales heavily illustrated, even when the tales are not actually for children.

I hoped reading all 242 of the tales would help me recognize some of the basic fairytale/folktale structures and elements. What surprised me was the tension between the morals of different tales. In most stories, for example, kindness and politeness to rude and unusual strangers is rewarded, but in "The Gnome," the youngest brother, who meets the gnome's incivility with harshness, is rewarded with information (of course, the reader knows the gnome is up to no good, so the message supposedly is "know who you're dealing with"). Throughout the collection, tales switch between confirming and subverting values like humility, honesty, patience, industry, etc.

Notes on the Translation: Jack Zipes says that his translation from the German attempts to keep historical references and the Grimms' mix of the "graceful" and "coarse," while avoiding mimicking a Victorian style. Comparing Margaret Hunt's (much older) translation of "The Three Spinners" to Zipes, I find I greatly prefer Zipe's "'Ahh!' said the bridegroom. 'How did you ever come by such ghastly-looking friends?'" to Hunt's more sedate "'Ah,' said the bridegroom, 'how comest thou by these odious friends?'" Also, (though unrelated to translation quality) I am predisposed to like anyone responsible for a book titled Don't Bet on the Prince.

(Image from Random House.)

In Praise of Procrastination

2009-03-02T21:42:00.003-06:00

I'm acutely aware of the lack of content/punctuality in my recent posts, but even with a fresh Monday in front of me, I don't really feel like blogging. Fortunately, today I found an article on how the connotations of the word procrastination have changed over time, and why procrastination may be a good thing.

I don't completely believe it, but I believe it just enough to put off writing a real blog post till tomorrow.

Thoughts on Random Words, or Yes, My Brain has Melted; Thank You for Asking

2009-02-26T21:19:00.010-06:00

I couldn't decide if it was worse not to blog or to subject everyone else to my current state of mind...

I'm sure I'm not the only word-lover who finds herself falling in love with a different word each week. I was very disappointed when it struck me yesterday that I would never be able to refer to myself as "just a bloke who [fill-in the blank]." Never. There is no female equivalent to the word bloke, or if there is, I'm sure it doesn't trip off the tongue so lightly.

Also, I will never be knighted--partially because I'm not male and partially because I'm not British. (Speaking of which, I'm not sure I've ever heard an American say bloke.) But supposing I, oh, suddenly woke up British tomorrow and then happened to do something really noteworthy, the best I could hope for is to be made a dame, which really just sounds like something out of a PI novel (i.e. "Then this dame burst in. I could tell she was trouble from the way she was swinging her Order of the British Empire around"). Not that special. On the positive side, I can't find any evidence that the British actually refer to the bestowing of this honor as being "damed," which is a relief.

P.S. The refuge of the lazy blogger, Wikipedia, informs me that I don't have to wake up British tomorrow to in order to receive an honorary knight-, er, dame-hood.

Also, I may have watched just a little too much of PBS' Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work this week.

While We're on the Topic of Dickens...

2009-02-25T20:07:00.004-06:00

I found this interesting (London) Times article on Dickens' house for "fallen" women.

Redeeming Fagin "the Jew"?

2009-02-24T23:15:00.010-06:00

Oliver Twist is not my favorite Dickens' novel, but "Boz" and I go way back, so I watched Masterpiece Classic's first installment of The Tales of Charles Dickens series.

This movie-length version zips along at a much faster pace than the novel, and in about thirty minutes Oliver is out of the workhouse, past the undertaker's workshop, in London, and being introduced to Fagin (played by Timothy Spall). And I'm all excited and thinking about the use of color, the musical score, the beefing up of Oliver's personality when--Oh my word! They didn't...

They did. They made Fagin a Jew, again.

In case you don't know, there is a long, perturbed history behind this. Fagin is considered the 19th century literary equivalent to Shakespeare's Shylock.

Historical Side Note: After Dickens became friends with James and Eliza Davis, a Jewish couple, Eliza expressed disappointment over his portrayal of Fagin. Dickens (after some initial defensiveness) stopped the printing of Oliver Twist and removed most mentions of Fagin's Jewishness from the last, unset chapters of the novel. (He also, presumably, created Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend as attempt to atone for Fagin.) But the miserly, demon-like image of Fagin "the Jew" had already been born.

The other versions of Oliver Twist that I've seen have blended together in my mind, but my impression was that contemporary directors tended to downplay or ignore Fagin's Judaism. (Some quick internet research shows that this isn't true, but I haven't seen/remembered all those interpretations.) I do remember frightening portrayals of Fagin, but he was also clever, almost to point of being a lovable, unrepentant rogue. This has been what I remember instead of a continuation Dickens' stereotype.

In a PBS interview, Timothy Spall said that his goal was to make Fagin more sympathetic, which seems like plausible idea to me (after all Fagin is the first remotely kind face Oliver meets in the novel). Spall is a good actor (I thought the scene where Dodger finds him praying was well-done), but his talent seems to have been poured into creating another Jewish caricature. Spall's Fagin is ingratiating, awkward, anxious... morally and physically weak. Spall even says, "Fagin seems to be used to getting hit a lot." Sympathetic apparently equals downtrodden and helpless.

I can't help feeling that the Jew as powerless victim isn't an improvement on Dickens' stereotype. Nancy and the Artful Dodger were each given moments where, futile or not, the viewer saw them set their teeth and go against the flow of circumstances--making them tragically heroic. Fagin kept folding like a card-table; somewhere along the way he'd lost the one admirable trait Dickens gave him: his resourceful mind. Without spoiling the ending, I can say that there was a moment where Fagin almost regained his dignity, but it wasn't enough for me. The focus of the scene was not on Fagin but on the prejudice that surrounded him, and he seemed like a flustered rabbit swallowed by hounds rather than a man overcome by tragedy.

I think I still feel a little stunned, both by what was attempted and what I actually saw. Has anyone else seen this? Thoughts?

(Image from BBC America Shop.)

Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

2009-02-23T23:45:00.001-06:00

Although to have been born,
I know, is an offence, and with just cause
I bear the rigours of your punishment:
Since to be born is man's worst crime. But yet
I long to know (to clarify my doubts)
What greater crime, apart from being born,
Can thus have earned my greater chastisement,
Aren't others born like me? And yet they seem
To boast a freedom that I've never known.
The bird is born, and in the hues of beauty
Clothed with its plumes, yet scarce has it become
A feathered posy--or a flower with wings--
When through ethereal halls it cuts its way,
Refusing the kind shelter of its nest.
And I, who have more soul than any bird,
Must have less liberty?

~ Segismund

My reading of Marlowe's somber Doctor Faustus probably suffered from being followed immediately by Pedro Calderón de la Barca's techni-color Life is a Dream. Roy Campbell's translation of Calderón is thrillingly vibrant. I hadn't heard much about this play, but after reading it, I won't be able to think about Renaissance theatre without this play jumping to my mind as the (late) essence of the era.

Let me count the ways Calderón delighted me: his poetic language, the question of free will vs. destiny, parallels in his characters' dilemmas with honor, disguises, imprisonment, the force of Rosaura's personality, the portrait struggle scene, etc. The tragi-comedy mix of Life is a Dream threw me for a loop several times, but this was also part of what made the play so enjoyable--not knowing whether a scene would end in laughter or an increase in the overall body count.

There were some scenes that sat oddly with my modern sensibilities. The romantic pairings at the end of the play occurred with swift, Renaissance comedy convenience ("You hate me? Let's get married!" "Sure!"), which I imagine is a challenge for contemporary directors. But I enjoyed this play so much, I was willing to temporarily suspend whole truckloads of disbelief.

Note on the Translation: I don't know much about translations beyond the fact that I enjoyed Roy Campbell's efforts in Life is a Dream. The first pages of Edward FitzGerald's translation on Project Gutenberg read much differently than Campbell's (almost like a different play). In Spanish, Life is a Dream rhymes, and FitzGerald attempts to keep this element in his English translation (Campbell doesn't). FitzGerald's version, however, seems to have very different (flatter) images and many more lines than Campbell's. I don't know if there are several versions of Life is a Dream (Calderón reworked his plays frequently) or if FitzGerald just took more creative liberties, but Denis Florence MacCarthy's translation is much closer to Campbell's (while rhyming).

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

2009-02-19T23:45:00.005-06:00

I was feeling very proud of myself for noticing allusions to Faust in Conrad's Heart of Darkness when I realized I'd never actually read any version of Faust.I decided to start with Christopher Marlowe's version because, well, that's what I found on the shelf.

I'd been led to believe that Marlowe was Shakespeare with a more exciting personal life, better hair, and less PR. Sometimes it's unfortunate how expectations play into one's enjoyment of a story; I wasn't overly impressed with my first full-length Marlowe play.

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is the source of the famous lines about Helen of Troy, a wonderful dialogue of Mephistopheles' about hell being wherever he is, "misery loves company" as an explanation of Satan's desire for Faustus' soul, and a truly pitiful closing plea by Faustus. In general, however, I found Marlowe's language less fluid and quotable than the best of Shakespeare. (Unless, of course, Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays, then... well, I still didn't like it as much.) Perhaps I'm just too familar with hellfire-and-damnation language, but I anticipated most of Marlowe's metaphors before I read them. The descriptions of hell and salvation seemed pulled straight out of morality plays. (You could, I suppose, attribute this to an underlying subversion of religion in Faustus--but often virtue and sin seemed equally dry.) Also, Marlowe's characters read like slightly rounder versions of morality play stand-ins. The only time I really believed Faustus' emotion was at the play's close. Faustus seems to switch between hardened sinner and piously fearful almost-penitent whenever Marlowe gets bored.

Typical Doctor Faustus scene (repeat as needed)...

Random person/angel who we will never see again: Faustus! Stop dabbling in black magic and making deals with the devil--you'll lose your soul!

Faustus: Oh no! I will? Woe is me! I must repent!

Mephistopheles: (Suddenly appearing.) Again? Geez, Faustus! Remember, you like evil. Also, I own you, nerd-boy.

Faustus: Oh, okay! Let's go raise people from the dead and recreate some more scenes from the Iliad!
Mephistopheles: (under his breath) Only twenty-four years, only twenty-four...

Doctor Faustus is obviously not my favorite Renaissance play, but P.M. Pasinetti (1979 Norton's Anthology of World Masterpieces introduction to Renaissance lit.) points out that Marlowe should be credited for creating a Faust/Doctor Faustus who sells his soul not merely for power but for knowledge; a temptation which is understandable to curious Renaissance audiences and scholars in all eras.

Speaking of which, I now have a great desire to read other versions of Faust and compare them to Marlowe's.

(Image from AssociatedContent.com.)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

2009-02-18T21:33:00.003-06:00

My family was amused that I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness during our power-outage. I kind of wish I'd picked something else; Conrad does not make one feel better about being cold and unshowered.

I was warned at the beginning of Heart of Darkness that for Marlow (the main narrator) "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow bring brings out a haze." But by the end I felt like, "Curse you, Conrad! Where's my deep, hidden kernel? I read all this, and no kernel?"

In other words, you can pretty much guess the basic idea of the book from the title: Life is dark and people stink.

Although Conrad's novel reads as an anti-Euporean-imperialism work, Heart of Darkness contains the disturbing assumption that African cultures are not "civilizations" (i.e. that they place no moral restrictions on their members) and are therefore much closer to the frightening, "primeval" heart of man. Chinua Achebe has some sharp words about this in "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." I didn't read all the critical responses to Achebe's speech, but I think you could argue that Conrad is portraying Marlow, not as the sum of his own feelings as an author, but as a man caught between his natural cynicism of imperialism (and just about everything else) and his inbred ideas about Africans. However, the only times Marlow (and through him, Conrad) recognizes Africans as human are when he sees the "darker" aspects of humanity in them. In other words, Conrad seems to say, "Yes, blacks are savage and wild and superstitious, but so are we all, under the skin," which may not technically be racism, but it is definitely dehumanizing.

Oh, and yes, there are Marlow's characterizations of women. Also annoying.

Also, it sort of irritates me when a character is "telling" a story, but he uses language that even the most eloquent of storytellers would never use off the cuff.

Of course, Heart of Darkness is a classic, so Conrad must have done more here than write things to annoy Bethany. This would include:

Creating one of the eeriest atmospheres in literature. Conrad's Congo is a psychological terror.

Creating suspense. Not a lot actually happens in this book and it's pretty short, but, like Marlow, I found myself on pins and needles, waiting to meet Kurtz.

Employing a cool narration inside a narration style.

Verlyn Klinkenborg's introduction in my Everyman's Library edition, which helped me understand Conrad better and made me feel smart, even though I probably disagree with most of Klinkenborg's conclusions. Well, okay, Conrad can't take complete credit for that.

Creating one of the best titles ever.

Convincing me to read Lord Jim in spite of myself.

(Image from ManyBooks.net.)

Literary Food

2009-02-17T20:30:00.014-06:00

Lately, I've been thinking about the relationship between two things that make me very happy: books and food. So when the Book Maven mentioned The International Edible Book Festival on April 1st, I got very excited. Looking at the gallery of previous creations makes me feel both hungry and creative. I'm having a little trouble finding events in my area for this year; the official site seems to be behind due to the death of founder Judith Hoffberg. But I'm sure I'll be celebrating in some way.

Here are some other links on food and books that I enjoyed:

Literary Quotes on Food
Serious Eats Discusses Food in Literature
And a similar discussion on Chowhound

So which books made you hungry/gastronomically curious? (I credit Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy with making me give mushrooms a second chance.)

Also, has anyone read the literature/food journal Alimentum? I'm intrigued by the idea behind it.

The Importance of Editing

2009-02-16T21:39:00.005-06:00

The U.S. Post Office and I are being bums today. (Thank-you, Abe and George!)

So here's a short Washington Post article that warmed the cockles of my Chicago-Manual-of-Style-addicted heart. (Once an editor, always an editor...)

Chocolate, Shakespeare, and Other Romantic Miscellany

2009-02-13T20:43:00.000-06:00

After yesterday's silliness, I found this much, much funnier Shakespearean parody on Literati World.

On a slightly different note, here are some interesting Valentine's Day gifts (too late, I know, but maybe next year):

All of Shakespeare's sonnets on one page. One-hundred-fifty sonnets. One big, poster-sized page.

Finally, chocolate you can hide on your bookshelves.

The Most Adorable Shakespeare Teddy Bear Possible! Followed by the more-affordable-but-still-charming Shakespeare teddy bear.

Also, I am jealous of the lucky people who live in Columbia, SC and get to eat chocolate at Literary Sweets Cafe. Looks wonderful.

(Note: Images from Gifts.com, PRweb, and WednesdayABC.)

Shakespearean Valentines

2009-02-12T21:31:00.013-06:00

I couldn't help myself. I apologize in advance if some of the jokes are a bit too obscure/silly...

Macbeth,

Roses, they're red;
Daggers should be too.
Buttercups are yellow.
Question is... Are you?

Your Lady "Tigress"

*****

Desdemona,

The roses were red;
The violets were blue.
"Allergies," you said.
Here's a hanky. Achoo!

Othello

*****

Bottom,

I paid for our evening;

(I'm a broad-minded lass)

While you ate the chocolate,

The roses... hay, grass(!).

I just wanted a card.

It's over, you a**!

Titania

*****

Hamlet,

Roses are purple; violets are gray,
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day...
Pansies are yellow; rue is like gold.
Marriage is hellish; nunneries, cold.
Pray, love, remember, when you are blue,
That--hey, nonny, hey--I'm crazy for you!

Ophelia

A Journey of Poems edited by Richard Niebling

2009-02-11T22:03:00.009-06:00

A Journey of Poems: An Original Anthology of Verse edited by Richard Niebling was compiled in the 1960s as a student's introduction to both well- and lesser-known poems.

Two things are particularly noteworthy about this book. One is Niebling's choice of divisions. Many introductory literature texts are divided chronologically, which makes sense, but often leaves the uninitiated reader sick of literature before he manages to clear the Renaissance. Niebling's divisions are loosely based on tone and theme, and within each section, poems are carefully ordered so that one idea flows easily into the next. He also lets the poems "be"--not forcing interpretations on readers and keeping explanatory notes to a minimum.

The second noteworthy choice is Niebling's placement of lesser-known poems and poets ("Pitcher" by Robert Francis and "The Gull" by Michael Thwaites) next to ubiquitous classics (Yeats' "Second Coming," Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day," Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"). Even work by the expected poets is not necessarily expected. (How wonderful to find something by Frost in an introductory collection other than "The Road Not Taken.")

This is not my favorite anthology. I would have preferred more translations and the inclusion of, say, some e.e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, etc. But how much can you fit in a poetry volume without making it look frighteningly huge? (A Journey of Poems is a slim 175 pages of poems.) A Journey of Poems also contains poets who interested me when I was younger, but whose over-familiarity has now bred... well, something more like boredom than contempt. Niebling's volume is, however, an enjoyable collection--for both the student and anyone interested in sampling various poetry flavors.

Gaelic Ghosts by Sorche Nic Leodhas

2009-02-10T16:00:00.000-06:00

The ghosts in Gaelic Ghosts by Sorche Nic Leodhas (aka LeClaire Gowans Alger) are the least frightening, most good-natured haunts you'll meet in a long time. Half the fun of Nic Leodhas' stories resides in the telling. Nic Leodhas' writes the stories as they would be told by an expert Scottish storyteller. The written brogue is natural and wry, and not so thick that it's unbelievable (if you've ever read Caleb Balderstone's dialogue in The Bride of Lammermoor, you know what unreadable brogue looks like).

Gaelic Ghosts includes about 20 woodblock illustrations by Nonny Hogrogian, but book remains fairly text-heavy, although short (110 p.).

In this collection of ten non-terrors, the task of ghosts is not so much to frighten but to correct a wrong. In "Sandy MacNeil and His Dog," "The Grateful Old Cailleach," and "The Old Laird and His Dogs" the ghosts reward and protect those they "haunt." In "The Giant Bones," "The Gambling Ghosts," "The Walking Boundary Stones," "The Lady's Loaf-field," and "The Holy Relic of Bannockburn" hauntings serve to set people back on the straight and narrow. Most of all, however, the ghosts serve as reminders not to value the past too lightly.

Gaelic Ghosts ends on the farcical tale "The House that Lacked a Bogle." My memory is that this story (or a very similar version) appeared in a Halloween issue of the children's magazine Cricket, and several online sellers are marketing Gaelic Ghosts as a children's book. I hadn't considered the book a children's collection while I was reading it, but like the best folktales, the stories in Gaelic Ghosts should amuse readers across a wide span of ages.

Once Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris

2009-02-09T21:43:00.006-06:00

A fairytale about a young boy who runs away from home to live with a (very surprised) troll, a princess cursed with being able to read people's thoughts, several bouncy dogs, and an evil queen with a pet ferret. Jean Ferris' middle school novel Once Upon a Marigold: Part Comedy, Part Love Story, Part Everything-But-the-Kitchen-Sink really ought to be the sort of book I love. Unfortunately, somewhere between the concept and the writing, the author lost me.

I suppose I was expecting more from Once Upon a Marigold because I've read such great things about Ferris' Love Among the Walnuts, Or How I Saved My Family from Being Poisoned (recommended by ALA and nominated for a National Book Award).

But back to Once Upon a Marigold... Ferris is half poking fun at fairytales and half over-earnest. On the one hand, there are tongue-in-cheek subplots, such as Edric's attempt to crack the Tooth Fairy's monopoly of the tooth market. And Edric's mangled metaphors ("He'd buttered his bread, and now he had to lie in it") never fail to trigger smiles.

On the other hand, despite Ferris' obvious writing skills, her prose often needs tightening. There are too many scenes where characters tell and then retell each other information the reader already knows and too many characters' responses that are based on the needs of the plot rather than believable human reactions. I also wish more had been made of Marigold's curse--this interesting idea was merely incidental to the plot. The protagonists, Christian and Marigold, are highly likable, but sound so cheesy at times that I have to wince. I expect love and marriage to be somewhat simplified in books for middle-schoolers. But I know this can be presented better:

"If my Marigold vouches for you, that's good enough for me. But you'll have to stay here just a little longer."
"No, Papa," Marigold insisted, holding on to the bars of Christian's cell. "They have to get out now."
Christian reached through the bars to run his fingers along the smooth curve of her cheek. "It's all right. I'll be waiting for you. Don't forget me."
"Never," she said.
Oh my, thought Ed and Swithbert simultaneously.

Compare Ferris' passage above to another confession of love in another popular middle school fantasy, Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine:

Dear Ella,
Impatience is not usually my weakness. But your letters torment me. They make me long to saddle my horse and ride to Frell, where I would make you explain yourself. They are playful, interesting, thoughtful, and (occasionally) serious. I'm overjoyed to recieve them, yet they bring misery[...].
You like me. You wouldn't waste time or paper on a being you didn't like. But I think I've loved you since we met at your mother's funeral. I want to be with you forever and beyond, but you write that you are too young to marry or too old to marry or too short or too hungry--until I crumple your letters up in despair, only to smooth them out again for a twelfth reading, hunting for hidden meanings.

Still a little silly, yes, but a more believable, love-induced silly.

Most of the reviews online were glowing, and most were by middle-schoolers, whose judgements of this book matter a great deal more than mine. While overwhelmingly positive, several reviews complained about Once Upon a Marigold's slapdash ending. Beyond the surprise of sudden conclusions to previously stretched-out senarios, what startled me was Ferris' cliffhanger ending. The unsatisfying last lines are obviously a lead-in to Ferris' sequel Twice Upon a Marigold, but while I still plan to look for Ferris' Love Among the Walnuts, I think I'll skip Once Upon a Marigold, Part Deux.

Note: Book cover image from Norwalk Middle School Library.

More Things in Heaven and Earth... Hamlet Text Adventure Game

2009-02-06T19:36:00.007-06:00

Everyone is probably tired of my Hamlet obsession by now, but this is the best thing I've seen in ages. Yes, a Hamlet text-based adventure game. I never played many computer games growing up, so didn't take long for me to die--bisected by Othello's scimitar. Yes, bizarre, but let's be honest: Othello could totally take Hamlet. And there is something oddly sastisfying about typing ">kill claudius with flute, >kill claudius with nailscissors," even if it's all to no avail.

I'm addicted.

I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us about Their Path to Jesus by Don Everts and Doug Schaupp

2009-02-05T23:35:00.010-06:00

Don Everts and Doug Schaupp admit that they don't have a firm definition of postmodern (I don't know anyone who does), but they've noticed that people's views and their approaches to Christianity have shifted subtly during the past two decades. In I Once was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us about Their Path to Jesus, they discuss what they've learned about ministering to a postmodern culture.

This book interested me because I've sometimes wondered if I don't quite "get" evangelism. The image I was generally given of a good evangelist was either someone who worked the Romans Road into every conversation with non-Christian friends or somehow yanked these friends into church, where a fiery sermon and an altar call would do the trick. Well, most of my non-Christian friends are pretty darn smart, and there's no way I could ever "trick" any them into the faith. Any traditional evangelical efforts only result in rolled eyes and an affirmation of their beliefs about "crazy religious fundamentalists."

Some non-Christians are just waiting for an invitation to believe. But Everts and Schaupp believe that "the lost" are not simply a one-dimensional lump of humanity.

If our most sophisticated understanding of the path to faith says that our neighbor is either a Christian ("on") or not a Christian ("off"), then we tend to have just as unsophisticated a response to them. If they aren't a Christian, well, it's time to pull out evangelism shotgun to try to force the switch to the "on" position. That's what it means to "do evangelism," after all. (Which tends to explain why we so rarely engage in evangelism.)

I Once was Lost encourages Christians to match their evangelistic efforts to individuals rather than abstractions, and suggests viewing non-Christians as at different thresholds in their journey to Jesus.

The thresholds are

1) Trusting a Christian
2) Becoming Curious
3) Opening Up to Change
4) Seeking After God
5) Entering the Kingdom

I won't try to explain all the thresholds here (click the book title above if you're curious). These divisions are based on conversations the authors had with over 1,000 postmoderns about their conversion experiences. Although this is still a form of lumping people together, the categories didn't feel contrived to me. In fact, they set off little light bulbs in my head as I thought back to conversations with friends and realized, "Oh, that's where they were coming from!" (It also may explain some of my uncertainty about Mere Christianity; the book's geared toward those who are open to Christianity, but I've heard many people say that they hand it to dedicated atheists. I can't imagine this works well.)

Cons: I hit a passage that said: "If you ever feel stuck wondering what you could do to help a non-Christian friend grow, telling him or her your favorite stories about Jesus is almost always a great thing to do."

My immediate reaction was "Seriously?" That seems a little contrived to me. Most of my non-Christian friends have grown up around Christianity and they can smell "subtle" proselytizing from a mile away. Just beneath this passage, Everts and Schaupp reiterate the need "be sensitive to what level of interest [people] actually have," so my reaction may say more about my friends' levels of religion-based distrust than Everts' and Schaupp's methods. But I felt, at times, that they needed to remind readers to be natural with their Christianity--when talking about your faith, you are (hopefully) presenting the relationship and excitement about Jesus you actually have, not the relationship and excitement you think you ought to have.

All in all, however, I highly recommend I Once was Lost. Everts and Schaupp are frank about the absence of a magic, fail-proof way to convince people to believe and the fact that each non-believer is an individual, not simply another fish in the evangelism sea.

Note: Book cover image from Barnes and Noble.

Rest In Peace, John Updike

2009-02-05T16:37:00.001-06:00

While I was out of contact with the world, John Updike died.

A Terrible Beauty: Winter Storm 2009, Western Kentucky

2009-02-04T19:02:00.003-06:00

In case anyone was wondering, I haven't been asleep at my post. Western Kentucky was right in the middle of a catastrophic ice storm, and I've been without power for 8 days. (700,000 homes/sites lost power, and some may not have it for weeks yet.) The kinfolk and I are fine (Praise God!), but being in the center of federal disaster area does not lend itself to frequent blogging. Please keep the area in your prayers--especially people without any heat or water.

Like elaborate blown-glass... Aprox. one inch of ice, which the local media said made the trees weigh 30 times more.

Most of our trees couldn't hold that kind of burden.

The treeline around the house (or anywhere I've been, really) looks like a drunk barber came through with a giant pair of clippers. For at least 24 hours after the storm hit you could hear large branches cracking and falling at the rate of about three a minute. First, there would be a sudden popping noise, like gunfire in the distance; then a loud crack! as the branch broke completely free; and finally a tinkling sound, like glass wind-chimes, as everything fell.

After the ice melted, the top finally snapped off this juniper tree (greenish thing to the left). Stepping outside, the first thing that hit me was the "green" and slightly spicy smell of all the broken pine and oak trees.

Close-up of a hole through the roof of my parents' house. (Caitlin, if you're reading this, take a close look--it'll be gone before you get back. Terribly undramatic for a hole-through-the-roof, I thought. Not that I'm complaining.)

Dad taking care of some of the mess with his chainsaw. Still photos don't begin to capture the otherworldly nature of the aftermath. Sometimes life is more dramatic than literature.

(Note: Many of these photos were stolen from my parents. Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

Hamlet-Libs: There's More Madness than Method

2009-01-25T00:16:00.008-06:00

I'm sure you've done this before, but a good literary mad-lib always makes me giggle.

Hamlet's Soliloquy
To curse, or not to curse -- that is the delight:
Whether 'tis nobler in the foot to embrace
The scissors and roses of yellowing goldfish
Or to take arms against a fjord of flags,
And by billowing end them. To extinguish -- to smile;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural needles
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a thirst
Devoutly to be wish'd. To extinguish, to smile;
To smile -- perchance to kiss: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of agony what dreams may frown
When we have billowed off this mortal snakeskin,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The cinnamon sticks of despis'd rapture, the law's delay,
The angst of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy strokes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a raging wire coat hanger? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and fall under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after desire --
The undiscover'd glacier, from whose bourn
No mechanical engineer returns -- tears the will,
And makes us rather slap those ills we have
Than rage to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make gardeners of us all,
And thus the weeping hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the purple button of thought,
And sparrows of vivid pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of dormouse. Earnest you now!
The chastised Michael! -- Nymph, in thy books
Be all my shelves remember'd.

(What a plea to end on!) If you want to play (you know you do!), go to Crazy Libs and scroll down to Classic Stories. Feel free to post any particularly great warpings in the comments.

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

2009-01-23T19:38:00.031-06:00

I'm not quite sure what to make of Mordecai Richler's Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (illustrations by Fritz Wegner, who I know for The Little Cat Baby).

On the one hand, I feel compelled to give it points for being such an odd, funny little book. The situations in the story become crazier and crazier, building on hilarious horrors like a children's prison with a Happy Nightmare Hour and an agent of evil who secretly puts puzzle pieces in the wrong boxes, so no one can ever solve them. Richler also plays on children's delight in stories where most grown-ups are villainous and must be outwitted by resourceful kids (think Roald Dahl). And I love the "reveal" with the Hooded Fang at the end.

On the other hand, I keep wondering about Richler's audience. The 1975 New York Times reviewer claimed, "I haven't the vaguest idea who it's written for and don't care," but I want to know who the target age group is. Amazon.com suggests a reading range of 9 to 12. Jacob Two-Two, however, is is only "two plus two plus two" years old, and protagonists are rarely younger than their intended readers, so I would assume that the readers are meant to be those who most identitfy with Jacob's inability to "ride two-wheeled bicycles, dial a telephone number, whistle, do joined-up writing, play checkers, and catch a ball." Yet the reading level and humor of the book seem beyond most six-year-olds. The book could be read aloud (it seems to written for that purpose), but some of the things that would be funny to an eight-year-old would still be confusing to a six-year-old (i.e. dream sequences that aren't explicitly explained and fears of a real court that might lock up children for accidentally insulting "big people").

Ah. I have just found a review of Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (the sequel to The Hooded Fang) that recommends pushing the reading age up to 9 because of the cynical humor of the book, particularly in regard to authority figures.

Apparently, none of my concerns have kept Jacob Two-Two from popularity. I was surprised to find a recent television series based off of Jacob Two-Two, as well as two movies, and, of course, the rest of the book series.

Library Booksale!

2009-01-22T23:29:00.010-06:00

Today was a special event, an event that only comes twice a year: the McCracken County Friends of the Library Book Sale!

I didn't take as many pictures as I thought I would because I was too busy elbowing my way through the crowd.

Here is Saint Paul's fellowship hall at the end of the sale. (To those in the area still hoping to buy books, the sale opens to the general public tomorrow at 9am and closes at 7pm; on Saturday you can shop from 9am to 1pm. As you can see, there's plenty left.)

The family "book cart," second load.

People in line to pay, wondering what I'm taking pictures of.

My haul (minus one book, for a friend). You should have seen the ones that got away! (Lack of shelving kept me from being overly impulsive.) So happy!

An Odd Odyssey

2009-01-21T21:25:00.004-06:00

Here's a little game. If you know all the answers, get a few wrong anyway--more fun that way. (P.S. It's more entertaining to pick Odysseus.)

Rumpelstiltskin

2009-01-20T23:43:00.008-06:00

Research into variations of a certain form of fairytale led me to The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm translated by Jack Zipes, and now I'm all caught up in discovering stories I've never read before and rediscovering childhood favorites. (Note: Those familiar with the grotesqueness of original fairytales will know why I wasn't introduced to many of these as a child... and the Grimms' versions are still considered "sanitized.") In my mind, as in fairytales, one thing leads to another, and I started to think of interpretations of various stories...

So, today, "Rumpelstiltskin" (sometimes Rumpelstiltskin):

Vivian Vande Velde's The Rumpelstiltskin Problem will always be a favorite of mine. In her introduction, Velde complains that Rumpelstiltskin is the most convoluted and illogical of the popular fairytales (i.e. Where does a poor miller's daughter get a ring and gold necklace? And why would you want them if you could spin straw into gold? And doesn't the king sound like a horrible sort of husband?). Each of Velde's six tales reinterprets "Rumpelstiltskin" in a different and delightful way, while filling in some of its plot holes.

In the realm of picture books, it seems like there's Paul O. Zelinsky's Rumpelstiltskin... and then somewhere at the bottom of the ladder there's every other version. Zelinsky's illustrations are rich and glowing, and I love his Renaissance details (i.e. "the strange little man" has a gold piece attached to his hat brim as a sign of his trade). I didn't think another illustrator could hold a candle to this version...

...until I saw The Girl Who Spun Straw into Gold written by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. The story is based on a West Indian version of "Rumpelstiltskin." The Dillons' illustrations are lavish: gold-leaf, scrumptious clothing, and architecture that is almost a character itself. I particularly love the changes in the illustrations as Quashiba moves from being afraid of to being ticked off at her greedy husband.

There are several story-cousins to Rumpelstiltskin. One of the funniest in my Brothers Grimm collection is "The Three Spinners," in which three strange-looking women help a lazy maiden complete an impossible spinning task and get her out of ever having to spin again. More recently, the January 1994 (vol. 12, no. 5) issue of Cricket published "The Old Woman and the Imp" written by Sophie Masson, illustrated by George Riemann, in which the "imp" (obviously, though unnamed, Rumpelstiltskin) matches wits with an old spinner who is just as sneaky as he is.

Because you've all been so good: The Fractured Fairy Tales version by A.J. Jacobs and an odd little poem.

(Book cover images from Vivian Vande Velde, Amazon.co.uk, and Children's Books for Parents.)

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

2009-01-16T21:33:00.004-06:00

It's sad that I have been a reader and a Christian for this long and this is my first attempt at reading one of C.S. Lewis' nonfiction works (I've read The Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces, part of The Space Trilogy, and a short story or two). I doubt I have much to say about Mere Christianity that hasn't already been said, so I'll be brief.

Mere Christianity was not quite what I was expecting. I found myself arguing with Lewis all the way through the book, but when I got to the end I had to admit that I agreed with his basic statements. I suppose what made me argumentative was the knowledge that if I didn't already believe what he was writing about, I seriously doubt I would have been convinced by his arguments. Particularly since a large portion of his arguments consist of "What if the world was really more like [insert analogy] instead?" which is interesting, but not exactly irrefutable logic and made me want to ask, "Or what if it's really more like a kumquat?"

I can't, however, think of many other books that give such a concise and quotable summary of basic Christian beliefs. Below are a couple favorites:

I feel a strong desire to tell you--and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me--which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse (160).

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all (114).

"Other Writers" Myths, or Occupational Neuroses

2009-01-15T21:26:00.012-06:00

Some days, I can write and write and at the end of the evening realize that almost everything I've typed is going to be cut out in the next round of edits. Then my mind starts building on this despair with stories about what other, better writers do. Some are true; I've read them in some writer's guidebook or blog somewhere. Some of them are just part of the inborn "Great Writer" legends we humble wordsmiths warmth ourselves over.

Don't tell me I'm the only one...

Other Writers

Other writers sit down at their computers, tap out 50 pages, and then stretch and say, "Hmm... still another hour till lunch."
Other writers do not pick up new books (or friends' drafts) with dread, afraid of another Crap! That's already been done too? moment.
Other writers have memorized the Chicago Manual of Style, the dictionary, and Norton's Anthology of Really Impressive Poems. For fun.
Other writers have secret parties where they drink Chardonnay and do imitations of saps who haven't finished their first novels yet.
Other writers do not want to lie when asked, "So, what do you do?"
Other writers do not forget how to spell their protagonists' names halfway through their drafts.
Other writers do not stop in the middle of writing their climaxes and think, I'd really like a chicken sandwich.
Other writers would not rather play with their cats than work.
Other writers do not repeat with increasing desperation, "A novel is how many pages?"
Other writers will be hunted down, one by one; shot with an elephant gun; and arranged to be found holding their least favorite books.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

2009-01-14T17:37:00.016-06:00

Excuse me while I gush. I loved The Power and the Glory. I loved Graham Greene's combination of suspense and absurdity. I loved the balance of the human and the divine. I loved lines like:

Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, 'What is God like?' and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion... But at the centre of his faith there always stood the convincing mystery--that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but he was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, 'Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?' and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

Greene is certainly not the first author to write this sort of line, or even the best, but what I love about The Power and the Glory is Greene's juxtaposition of Christian ideals with the ridiculousness and grime of his characters' lives. The unnamed "whisky priest" risks his life performing mass and giving the sacraments, but what he really wants is a drink. Luis' mother reads to him about saints and martyrs, but the only "holy men" she's seen for years have been the whisky priest and Padre José, who has denied his faith and married.

History: As I was reading, I wasn't sure if The Power and the Glory (originally titled Labyrinthine Ways) was based on real politics or a sort of Orwellian "possible future." Turns out, that the novel is based on Catholic persecution that Greene witnessed in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution. Goes to show how much I know about Mexican history.

What is the most intriguing to me is the Catholic Church's original response (though 14 years after publication) to Greene's novel. While not condemning the novel outright, officials considered it dangerously "paradoxical" and admonished Greene against writing more of the same. (I generally consider paradoxy a marker of Christianity: "He who would save his life must lose it..." and all that.) When Greene met with Pope Paul VI, however, the pope basically told him not to worry about it, some people just would be silly.

(Book cover image from here.)

Not Just for Kids

2009-01-13T18:13:00.017-06:00

I suppose it says something about my immediate family that no one in it is under twenty and yet there were still several children's picture books given out this Christmas. Among these were...

The Milkman written by Carol Foskett Cordsen, illustrated by Douglas B. Jones. Cordsen's rhyming sentence fragments read aloud well. While a few of the phrases may be unfamiliar to young children, they should become obvious in the context of Douglas' illustrations. The illustrations are uber-nostalgic (and reminiscent of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel). Young readers will love watching for the milkman's cat and the "missing" puppy.

Ten Minutes till Bedtime by Peggy Rathman (of Goodnight, Gorilla and Officer Buckle and Gloria fame). This is one of those "short" bedtime stories that can take forever to read, especially if you want to count all the little hamsters, and heck, I know I do!

Loud Emily written by Alexis O'Neill, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. I imagine that this story could cause some trouble when parents say, "Use your indoor voice" ("But Emily's loud, and she saved everyone from being smashed to bits!"), but I love that this book is about a young girl who speaks up (quite literally) and finds her place in the world. Also, the story follows the deliciously bizarre logic of children's-picture-book world, and Carpenter's American folk-style illustrations are the perfect expression for Emily's outlandish adventures.

Gifts for the English Major in Your Life (3)

2009-01-12T20:44:00.025-06:00

The Jane Austen action figure. I have this one, but there's also Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe. (Image from here).

All Natural Tasty Notebooks from Ivy Lane Designs on Etsy.

If you have $400 lying around (and who doesn't?), how about this one-of-a-kind Writer Charm Bracelet (also on Etsy) from Caitlin M. Shurilla? Includes etched pen nibs, etched letters spelling WRITE, cast sterling silver paper with bits of text, cast sterling silver wads of paper with text, etc.

Supposedly, the poet Friedrich Schiller needed the smell of apples rotting in his desk drawer to help him write. So perhaps apple (and blueberry and grape and...) scented pencils from Laurentien will banish writer's block. Or you can always try pencils marketed for just that purpose, both the inspirational and the absurd.

Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God by Sybil MacBeth

2009-01-11T23:42:00.000-06:00

She had me at Chapter -5.

The (short) introductory chapters on prayer in Praying in Color count backward down to Chapter 1, where Sybil MacBeth begins to explain her own method. And at that bizarre little numbering system, I knew I was going to like this book.

Let me add here that this is a book for people who pray like I pray... distractedly. This is a book for fidgetters. The idea behind it is not so much to still the body and the mind for prayer, but to focus the mind through involving the body in prayer and to use visuals as a prayer aid (both for prayer itself and for prayer reminders).

The Praying in Color theory is extremely simple (and the book, at just over 100 p., is extremely short): "When I draw as a way to enter prayer, I get to delight in my prayer and to feel God's delight that I am making an effort to pray." As someone who is always trying to connect the Arts and Christianity, I appreciated MacBeth's belief that prayer could be creative.

The cherry on the cake would be that this is a very well written little book. Authors of how-to books are not usually this enjoyable and honest:

"I feel quite free to make a mess of my personal prayer life; but when someone says, 'Please pray for me," they are not just saying, 'Let's have lunch sometime.' They are issuing an invitation into the depths of their lives and into their humanity--and often with some urgency. They are publicly exposing their vulnerability, sorrow, and fear. Something about their life is so out-of-control that they call upon the likes of me for help. I warn them: sometimes the people I've prayed for have died. It's a risk."

Finally, the proof is in the practice. I find I enjoy longer times of prayer when I include colored pencils and paper, and drawing helps me focus on what I'm praying for and who I'm praying to. I'm not, unfortunately, having an easier time remembering the person I'm praying for during the rest of the day. This may, however, say more about my memory than it says about Praying in Color. But using MacBeth's ideas with passages of Scripture does help me remember what I've been reading beyond the moment I close my Bible.

I'll definitely be adding Praying in Color to my devotional repertoire.

West Wind: Poetry and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver

2009-01-09T23:53:00.005-06:00

A sinus infection and a bad internet connection have interrupted my blogging plans, so I have a bit of catching up to do...

You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
~ Mary Oliver, "West Wind #2"

When I was taking Contemporary Lit. in college, I went to a Mary Oliver reading on the professor's recommendation. Afterwards, the professor asked me what I thought. I had connected to the few Mary Oliver poems we read in class, yet... "Well, I enjoyed it. But... um--for a contemporary poet she, well, seemed kind of 'old school' to me."

I couldn't explain I meant by 'old school' at the time, but now I realize that there were two elements in Oliver's work that stumped me.

First, after being told over and over that most of my poems would be better off with the last two lines chopped off, Oliver's conclusions sometimes seemed amateurishly overstated. She was blatant in ways I never could have gotten away with in a college workshop.

Second, Oliver's poems lacked the edginess that I had come to assume was a necessary part of contemporary poetry.

I felt embarrassed by my lack of appreciation for the Pulitzer-winning poet, so it was with joy and relief that I recently ambled through West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems. The author is so delighted with the transient beauty of the world, so full of awe and expectation, that it's no surprise that she seemed a little naive to me. There is no slyness in her work. Reading West Wind is like taking a walk with Oliver in her own backyard. She gives you the weight of her meaning with the same simplicity with which she might hand you an interesting stone. I still sometimes feel the sacrilegious need to lop of a last word or line from some of Oliver's poems ("Pilot Snake," for instance), but I wonder sometimes if this isn't because I've been trained to be less generous in my writing.

I'm a pretty selfish poetry reader too. What I look for most in poet is that "yes" moment. The moment in which I say, "Yes, that's exactly how that is, but I never could have said it that way" or, even better, "How does she know? How does she know it feels just that way, but only to me?" It doesn't matter how beautiful the language or refined the style is, if I don't have that "yes" moment, I leave a poetry collection disappointed. I was not often disappointed with West Wind. I've read the poem "Black Oaks" about six times now. The whole poem is like a "yes" moment, but the lines that clinched it for me were "Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from /one boot to another--why don't you get going?" It is hard for me to pull a single line out of any one of the poems in West Wind because the lines were made for the poem and not the other way around (which tends to be my temptation when I write), and I don't know when to stop quoting.

There is not a large variation in tone, theme, or subject in West Wind, and this may keep Oliver out of my very favorite poets list, but West Wind is arranged so that the poems build gently on the same ideas. Not many collections feel as perfectly ordered as this one. If she reminds me of a child at the beginning, by "Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches," the last poem in the book, she seems ancient enough to ask, "Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?" and then explain what the world really is. I find that I accept her credibility as a guide without knowing at what point I gave in.

50 Book Challenge & Reading Resolutions

2008-12-31T15:42:00.035-06:00

At the beginning of the year, I joined a challenge on the Reading is Sexy Facebook group to read fifty books in one year. I didn't include anything much shorter than the shortest play I read (about seventy pages, I think) or anything I didn't read completely (which is too bad because the Encyclopedia of New York State would have looked amazing on here).

Yesterday, I finished the challenge. Here, purely because I want to see them all together, is my list. Yellow is YA/juvenile/children's lit. Green is fiction. Salmon is poetry. Purple is nonfiction. Blue is drama. The two in black are crossovers (A Book of Ireland is a compilation of Irish writing and Eugene Onegin lives somewhere between poetry and fiction.)

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dubliners by James Joyce

Yiddish with Dick and Jane by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman

Earthly Astonishments by Marthe Jocelyn

From Fatigued to Fantastic by Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Some Writers Deserve to Starve: 31 Brutal Truths about the Publishing Industry by Elaura Niles

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Ireland (LIFE World Library) by Joe McCarthy

Healing Stones by Nancy Rue

Saints Behaving Badly by Thomas J. Craughwell

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake

Irish Saints by Robert Reilly

The Coal Tattoo by Silas House

A Book of Ireland edited by Frank O'Connor

The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Terpin by Tor Seidler

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster

World War I and Nationalist Politics in County Louth, 1914-1920 by Donal Hall

Carlingford Town by P.F. Gosling

The Autobiography of S.S. McClure by S.S. McClure and Willa Cather

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Master Harold... and the "Boys" by Athol Fugard

Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott

The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R. F. Foster

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore

Who Let the Blogs Out? A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs by Biz Stone

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

Woman's World by Graham Rawle

West Wind: Poetry and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver

Praying in Color by Sybil MacBeth

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler

(If I didn't feel so lazy, I'd have more hyperlinks here.)

About 20 of these come from my favorite Greatest Literature list. About 10 were directly related to research for my book (several more were indirectly related). Perhaps what surprises me the most about this list is the amount of nonfiction I read.

I'm starting the challenge again for 2009, but I don't think I'll be very particular about whether or not I get to fifty next year. I already know I can do it, and right now I'm much more interested in finishing the book I'm writing. I would, however, like to read more poetry and drama this coming year, particularly poetry.

Pictures of Books on My Shelves

2008-12-29T20:23:00.015-06:00

My brain works in strange ways when I'm sick. I woke up this morning and thought, My books are so pretty! I love them! Also, I like looking at pictures of other people bookshelves (though perhaps in a somewhat covetous way). So here are pointless pictures of my books.

My "borrowed" books:

The bookshelf I see first thing in the morning:

The bookshelf in the closet:

The bookshelf built between the air-duct and the wall (and another bookshelf):

Woman's World by Graham Rawle

2008-12-28T21:20:00.014-06:00

I received Woman's World as birthday present from a fellow English major. I have mixed feelings as I write about this novel. On the one hand, Graham Rawle's Woman's World is an incredible work: satirical, visually appealing, carefully structured, etc. On the other hand, I'm having trouble thinking of people I could recommend it to without repercussions.

Without giving anything away, I think it's fair to say that that some of the explorations of gender in this novel are unsettling, and without Rawle's light touch they could have been even more so. Also, (like a lot of satire) this book is at least as tragic as it is funny.

That said, Woman's World is brilliant.

First, you have a novel that's been created entirely from words clipped from 1960s women's magazines. That idea alone made me want to love it: the collage of different typefaces; the bizarre, materialistic language of advertising put into everyday life; the questions of femininity and how its image is shaped...

Second, Rawle does not skimp on plot structure. Woman's World is not merely an interesting gimmick, but a well-spun tale. The pacing is slow for a novel that plays off the rhythm of the mystery and romance genres, but this didn't bother me because it became a stylistic foreshadowing that the story and characters were going to become more complicated than initially suggested. (Afterwards, I kept trying to think of ways he could have changed the novel, and nothing I came up with in my head was as believable, satisfying, or appropriate to the tone of the book as what Rawle had already done.)

Third, Rawle plays with language in hilarious ways. The characters become straight (wo)men to his comic brilliance:

I sat perfectly still, going over and over everything in my mind, thinking about what I should and shouldn't have done, and wondering what was going to happen to me. [...]Not killed Mr. Hands--that's what I should have done.

Also, Rawle's toying with the language of women's advertising makes Woman's World full of images like

I threw back my head and with closed eyes let the words of admiration flood over me like a family-size can of Carnation evaporated milk.

Or...

I felt very vulnerable there, facing the double-edged sword of being spotted by Mrs. Price and having Mary open the living-room door and see me with my coat on. Life is a bowl full of pickles, and here I was, a butterfly trapped in the stuff.

Finally, although the novel is full of strange situations and satiric language, the responses of the characters are psychologically believable. I ended up feeling a great deal of sympathy for the main characters, even as I giggled at Rawle's expressions.

I'm sure I must know some people who are strange enough to enjoy this book too. Which reminds me... thank you, Cara, for the birthday gift.

The Red Pony and "Junius Maltby"

2008-12-27T23:59:00.005-06:00

Even when I don't like Steinbeck, I like him. I prefer The Red Pony to The Pearl, but neither of them are really favorites of mine. (I'm more of an East of Eden and Of Mice and Men fan.)

However, Steinbeck does "straightforward yet subtle" better than any writer I know. The action doesn't exactly build in this collection; each story has it's own moment of crisis, but I loved how Steinbeck's theme of violence and its relationship to "becoming a man" wandered through the stories and sat down at the simple conclusion (though I still felt like I wanted more out of the last story in The Red Pony).

My copy of The Red Pony tacked the short story "Junius Maltby" (part of the Pastures of Heaven collection) to the end: an unusual addition. "Junius Maltby" is a fine story, but it has parable quality that seems at odds with The Red Pony's more realistic style. But both of the stories play with the elements of boyhood, and The Red Pony is so short that few publishers seem willing to print it alone. (You'll find copies of the The Red Pony with The Pearl or Tortilla Flat on Amazon, but very few of just The Red Pony.)

I'm surprised that this novella/collection is so frequently assigned in early high school (perhaps because of length and the age of the protagonist?)--I think the ending would have been frustratingly anti-climatic for me at that age. But maybe I'm not giving high schoolers enough credit.

Side Note: Apparently, Aaron Copland did the music for the 1949 movie version of The Red Pony. I don't have much desire to see the movie, but I'd love to hear the soundtrack.

Yes, This is a Real Company

2008-12-23T22:43:00.004-06:00

Sorry for the long silence. I've been itching to get back on here, but lately my internet access has been sketchy at best.

However, consider this an early Christmas present.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2008-12-14T22:58:00.008-06:00

I thought I would try to find what sort of connections my birthday had to important literary events. Today in Literature tells me that Aphra Behn was baptized on this date (most of her early life is unknown). The Writer's Almanac says I share my birthday with Shirley Jackson and Amy Hempel. Also, Charles Schulz retires and quantum theory is born.

Not too bad a day.

Introducing the Book

2008-12-11T00:13:00.003-06:00

Because I had other things I wanted (needed) to do today and I love this.

Ethan Frome

2008-12-09T22:11:00.003-06:00

Just a few paragraphs into Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, I couldn't help thinking, I've read this before, only then it was called The Age of Innocence and it was longer.

That turned out to be a fairly accurate assessment of Wharton's novel (novella). The main difference is the setting and the "twist" ending (which felt a bit cheap and expected to me). Beyond that, both of Wharton's novels deal with an adulterous passion (which can never be completely fulfilled) and an overwhelming sense of (tragic) fate. Ultimately, I preferred Age of Innocence, with its more subtle sense of fate and more realistic ending. Ethan Frome seemed a bit like an experiment in authorial cruelty. (The ending of Ethan Frome is so exaggerated that it seemed almost humorous.)

Also, everything I read implies that Zeena should be viewed as a tyrannical, selfish being, but she was so caricatured that I started to feel sorry for her. I started to think, Well, of course she acts all mean and suspicious; she thinks you want to have an affair with her cousin. Oh wait--you do! Her doubtful illnesses started to seem like desperate attempts to get some kind of attention from her husband. It wasn't difficult to see why Ethan liked the sweet, inadept Mattie Silver in contrast to his wife. But I had a hard time feeling he had a good reason to cheat. Not that I ever feel there's a really good reason for someone to cheat on his or her spouse, so maybe that sums up my problem with the novel right there. In Age of Innocence, however, I didn't feel as annoyed about Countess Olenska cheating on her husband (he was cheating on her already and she was continually talked out of divorcing him for the sake of her family--which sounds a lot like Wharton's own marriage).

I guess I'm not on quite the same page as the young woman who said, "I love Edith Wharton. Her stories are so depressing!"

On (Not) Using Characters as Moral Centers, Part 2

2008-12-08T15:12:00.016-06:00

So just a couple days after I blogged about using characters as moral centers in fiction, I was brushing my teeth (Have you noticed that all epiphanies come during personal hygiene moments?), and I thought, What on earth were you talking about? Not that I suddenly dislike using characters as moral centers, but I realized that the character I'd been thinking about using as a moral center wasn't going to work at all. In the back of my brain, I guess I've kind of known she wasn't supposed to be that sort of character for a while now.

There are several reasons the character I had in mind can't be my moral center--most too difficult to explain here. But I think it can't be a coincidence that most of the characters who fulfil the role of moral center in literature are generally secondary characters (a notable exception would be Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, but we see him through the memories of his daughter, Scout, so there's still a bit of distance between him and the reader). Moral centers may have amazing personal histories, but generally, they just pop in and pop out of the story as needed: like an occasional angelic visitation. Somehow, the more you know about a person's past, the harder it is to accept his or her moral authority. (Jesus' problem when he went back to his hometown of Nazareth. "Look who's the big shot now. Ha! I used to change his diapers!")

It's the skillful writer who can create believable moral authority in a well-detailed character. An example of this might be Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The Bishop may still technically be a secondary character (Hugo's "brief" character sketches are chapters long), but before his scene with the protagonist, Jean Valjean, the reader already knows how many chairs the Bishop has in his house, that he is generous to a fault, the sort of notes he makes in the margins of his books, his thoughts on politics, and that he has given up his house for use as a hospital. This not only makes the later scene with the candlesticks believable, but somehow the sincerity of the Bishop's portrayal allows the reader to accept the sincerity of the change he triggers in Valjean.

Even the best writers seem to struggle with using a moral center as a primary character. A few months ago, I tackled The Brothers Karamazov. The young novice Alyosha is obviously Dostoevsky's moral center, and the reader gets to spend a good deal of time with him. Dostoevsky wrote some marvelous scenes with Alyosha, but after a while, Alyosha's goodness becomes annoyingly dull. I tired of following him because there was little question about how Alyosha would respond to situations.

I'm still trying to decide what I'm going to do in my novel. Since I'm playing with multiple narrations, I actually have a choice to make with each storyline, which is both exciting and scary. I realized that in at least one of my storylines I already have an obvious moral center character who I've been ignoring. I may do something completely different with my other storylines. Of course, the acceptance of a character (moral center or not) as "believable" depends on the specific reader, but right now I'd be happy if I could just please the writer.

Side Note: The image above is Olin Levi Warner's Truth with a mirror and serpent from the Library of Congress because... well, just because I got tired of searching for images in the public domain.

The Catcher in the Rye

2008-12-07T18:17:00.024-06:00

I recently finished The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger--the iconic novel of adolescence that everyone read in high school, except me.

I enjoyed Catcher in the Rye a lot more than I expected to: great style, hits every basic literary theme, a believable narrator, etc. But I seem to feel more ambivalent about the book than most readers. Ed. Williamson on Epinions.com notes that from its publication date, Catcher in the Rye slammed "into the American consciousness with all the subtlety of a herd of bulls in a china shop." Most of the comments I heard before reading were that it was a "whiny, emo book" loved only by people who were emotionally immature (which made me fearful) or that it was THE only Great American Novel (which made me sceptical). Possibly its only unargued position in the literary cannon is as both one of the most widely assigned, and the most widely banned, novels in U.S. high schools.

After A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham and Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich, Catcher in the Rye seemed fairly tame. In spite of his language, drinking, and nervous sexual endeavors, Holden strikes me as a bit of an innocent. Being far enough removed from high school, I feel a sort of maternal sympathy/concern for him (and, at times, a maternal desire to shake some sense into his head). But in high school, yes, Salinger's hero would have annoyed and disturbed me.

It's amusing/sad that this novel is now considered a "teen" book and almost exclusively assigned in high school (Huckleberry Finn suffers a similar fate). I actually find it more interesting (read: "less painful") to read about adolescence now that I'm done with it. When I was a teenager, I preferred books that explored (an exciting) adulthood.

Side Note: While we're on the topic, here's something wonderful: Catch Her in the Oatmeal.

Cartoons on Writing, Or an Oddly Comic Depressing Look at the Writer's Struggles

2008-12-04T00:00:00.002-06:00

It's late, and I'm still working off an unreliable internet connection. So here are some writers' issues as discovered by ANDERTOONS:

1. The Fear of Greatness
What I think every morning.

2. Social Issues/A Sense of Inadequacy
We know all writers (all good writers, anyway) are supposed to mingle at 1920s-style cocktail parties. This is why I can't.

3. Selling Out
He may be abandoning his tragic genius, but post-meaning poetry sells, apparently.

Gifts for the English Major in Your Life... Part Deux

2008-12-03T21:45:00.005-06:00

Sorry for the long silence; my laptop is in the hospital, and I've had a little trouble finding a reliable internet connection.

To continue the last post...

A Cup of Creativitea by Tea Talk. Also available at Signals, Amazon, Expressions, etc. Tea and writing just seem to go together like, well, bookstores and coffee shops.

English Major Stereotypes sweatshirt. Similar shirt available from Zazzle.com.

Poetry Comics: An Animated Anthology by Dave Morice. This is a strange, strange little book. Sometimes, its interpretations are funny; often they are terrifyingly surreal. I find it delightful, without knowing exactly why.

Old Typewriter Key Jewelry from What's Your Type. Like we needed more pics of jewelry on here, but I really love typewriter key bracelets. I'm just too frugal (read: "poor") a writer to buy any.

Gifts for the English Major in Your Life... Or You

2008-11-29T23:00:00.009-06:00

Book Purse from Etsy.

Fountain Pen Necklace from Etsy.

The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook by Fredrick C. Crews, parodies of various literary theories.

Dark and Stormy Night Earrings from Etsy.

Also, Crazy Writer Journal at CafePress.

Alas, Poor Hamlet

2008-11-28T23:54:00.004-06:00

I didn't have much to say today, so here's something silly instead.

And while we're on the subject, here's something even better. (Thank-you, Cara!)

Becket or The Honor of God

2008-11-27T23:09:00.017-06:00

Happy Thanks -giving! I am thankful to be over the flu and back online. But while I was sick I managed to finish some reading, including Becket by Jean Anouilh.

I have to confess, in my freshman history class, I had trouble keeping Thomas Becket separate from Thomas More. Both Thomases opposed powerful Henrys (the II and the VIII) and were killed for holding certain ideas of the Church above the king. And I'm not the only one to see a connection.

I particularly appreciated Stephen Greydanus' remark, "In a way the 12th-century events of Becket, which is the earlier story (and also the earlier play, and the earlier film), play as a kind of dress rehearsal for the more momentous 16th-century events related in A Man for All Seasons." The whole time I was reading the play, I kept thinking, "This line is so familiar. I've seen this. No, wait... that was A Man for All Seasons." Now I don't feel so silly.

Anouilh admits that his play is not always historically accurate (particularly in it's portrayal of Becket as a Saxon), and as I was reading, I found myself thinking, "Really? People were that primitive back then?" But it's not the actions, or even the attitudes, of the characters that I had trouble believing. Instead, it's the convenient simplicity of his dialogue that throws me. Anouilh says in his preface that he is not a "serious" person, and his dialogue has a witty, light touch, but this somehow makes it too heavy-handed when revealing who the unenlightened, selfish characters are (i.e. all the Normans). Also, Becket's motives for refusing the king seem petty, or even self-serving, at times, but Anouilh doesn't question them.

Not that I would be overly embarrassed if I had written Becket. Anouilh's play is still an enjoyable and powerfully concise treatment of honor, religion, and politics. I'll have more to say about it once I've read T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Side note: Henry VIII may not have missed possible connections between Thomas Becket (d. 1170) and Thomas More (d. 1535) either because in 1538 he ordered Thomas Becket's shrine destroyed and all references to his murder and sainthood erased. This was only after the long-dead saint refused to show up at a trial to explain why he wasn't a traitor.

King Lear

2008-11-22T19:18:00.009-06:00

Huzzah! for Shakespeare. I just finished King Lear (which, strangely enough, I never read in my college Shakespeare class). This may be my favorite Shakespearean tragedy, after Hamlet.

Every possible opinion about King Lear (as well as every possible "study guide"--useful or otherwise) seems to available online. But the line "Would it have killed [Cordelia] to flatter her father just a little?" made me laugh. Cordelia as a pointlessly stubborn troublemaker could make an interesting essay...

On a more serious literary note, I found this wonderful exploration of Mansfield Park as a retelling of King Lear by Susan Allen Ford. I wish the ending wasn't so abrupt (I would have liked more about the significance of Austen's conclusion), but Mansfield Park is my least favorite Austen story, so anything that helps me see Fanny Price as more than a Regency period Elsie Dinsmore is greatly appreciated.

The painting at top is by Edwin Austin Abbey. (See how evil Regan and Goneril look? They're like Lady Macbeth twins!) I also love Susan Herbert's Cat King Lear yowling against the storm.

Eugene Onegin

2008-11-21T18:22:00.016-06:00

I recently finished Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (trans. by Douglas Hofstadter). This was my first Pushkin, and though it’s literary heresy, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed.

The translator’s preface says:

Those who have seen the Tchaikovsky opera will remember it as a lugubrious story of star-crossed lovers, of anger, jealousy, and tragic death. And yet, although that is indeed the “plot line” of the novel, it is but one facet of the work. What makes Pushkin’s book so marvelously alluring is not its sad plot line (which is fine as far as it goes), but the way in which that line like a single line in a piece by Bach, weaves in and out of focus, yielding the floor to other lines of quite different character.

Above all, the novel’s counterpoint involves an intricate, unpredictable bouncing back and forth between the characters in the story and Pushkin’s own droll, sardonic observations about life, about himself, about poetry, about women’s legs, about friendship, about wine, about truncated lives, about nature, about each of the seasons, about foreign words used in Russian, about hypocrisy, and on and on. All of this is executed in graceful, sparkling, yet mostly colloquial language[…] (xi).

I still kind of want to read the book Hofstadter is describing—it sounds wonderful. But now the question is why didn’t I enjoy Eugene Onegin?

Let’s start with the plot: The plot line of Onegin is, in many ways, your stereotypical Russian tragedy: Someone dies, someone’s heart is broken, there are some scenes with snow, there are some lengthy digressions about Russian society, there are too many balls. There is, interestingly enough, very little mention of the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Also, unlike the more romantic Tolstoy, both country life and city life seem to be equal platforms for ennui, and changing scenes doesn’t help Pushkin’s characters.

Side Note: From my little bits of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (who I don’t really consider tragic), and now, Pushkin, I assume that the Platonic ideal Russian tragedy would have all the expected tragic things (i.e. deaths, murder, guilt, broken hearts, suicide, adultery, etc.), but the added bonus of having most of them start with some sort of lack of communication that could be easily fixed, only the characters are predestined to have communication problems forever. Also, society is messed up—but you still have to keep going to balls, or at least, keep wishing that someone important will invite you to balls. Also, instead of ending with some nice melodramatic scene like, say, an English or French tragedy, the characters who are still alive in the last fourth of the Russian novel are doomed to continue miscommunicating their feelings and/or hating each other for their earlier miscommunication—to the point that they can only mutter, “Ah… Don’t you…? No, of course not.” This is a lot less cathartic than the usual, high body count, tragic ending.

Back to Onegin’s plot, there are some interesting scenes—particularly Tanya’s dream sequence—but overall I kept wishing I was reading something else. Maybe because I didn't care much for Eugene: a sort of world-weary, cynical, goalless protagonist. Most of the novel involves getting to hear about how world-weary and cynical he is in different settings.

But plot only a small piece of the novel. So let’s talk about “Pushkin’s own droll, sardonic observations,” which are supposed to be at least half the novel’s charm. And some of it was charming (particularly the parts where talks about writing and the poem itself), but after a while I grew tired of this too. I’m still trying to figure out why. Perhaps because I’m a dialogue person and, no matter the quality of the narration, I would have preferred to follow the characters without so most authorial interference? But I do enjoy some other authors who spend passages “telling instead of showing” in droll language (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, for example). Perhaps Pushkin’s narrator reminded me too much of Eugene—bored with the world and announcing it every so many stanzas? Yes, I think that may have something to do with it.

Perhaps some of it was the translation. This is not to make light of Hofstadter’s hard work. My favorite part of the novel was actually his preface, in which he talks about his love of Eugene Onegin, his exploration of various Onegin translations, and how this eventually led to his learning Russian so he could translate Pushkin’s work. The preface really makes me wish I had enjoyed Onegin because Hofstadter is obviously moved by it. Hofstadter admits that his translation is not the most Pushkin-like, but more modern, more “jazzy.” (One translator remarked that parts sounded as if they “had been translated by Cole Porter,” and Hofstadter was flattered.) Hofstadter generously provides samples of other translators’ work that readers might prefer to his. (Hofstadter does not, however, recommend Vladimir Nabokov’s translation. And though it’s not hard to understand why--their philosophies on translation are completely opposed--I still find it humorous that most of Hofstadter's footnotes are about how he’s purposely doing the opposite of Nabokov.) I think I might have preferred Jim Falen, Walter Arndt, or Babette Deutsch just because their sentence structures seem to be a little less staccato, a little less overtly alliterative; outrageous statements seem more droll to me when said smoothly and subtly. Though many of Hofstadter's plays on words are fun, I prefer rhymes and translations that don't call so much attention to themselves. I'm willing to try again at some point, but I doubt another translation will make me love Onegin.