Since I have been writing about American Idol for two days, I feel the need to elevate the tone of this blog a little. Of course John Irving called this book "entertainment" as opposed to "literature." I'm not going to get into it with John Irving on the merits of various books. John Irving and I have never had a problem before, in all the many times we've exchanged thoughts on art and pop culture.



After I recover from the effort, I will read another book by Tom Wolfe. Maybe I Am Charlotte Simmons. Want to trade your copy of that for my copy of this? Wolfe takes a long time to write his novels. I like that about him. A Man In Full was just wonderful. I highly recommend.

Labels: a man in full, book reviews, books, literature, reading, tom wolfe

Today three books accompanied me to Disney MGM Studios: The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus, Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

There are two "thrill rides" at Disney MGM Studios: Tower of Terror, where an elevator car gets yanked up and down, and up and down, and up and down again, causing the contents (book and human) to freefall periodically, and the Rock and Roll Roller Coaster, where you get shot around in the dark, including upside down. The House of Sand and Fog rode both these rides, even the freefalling one, even though I was actually crying at one point, crying for my life to return to me.

Here's The House of Sand and Fog blending into the decor inside the Hollywood Tower Hotel (where the aforementioned elevator is located):



Here he's posing with a fellow fan of freefall:



This guy said, "What's the book about?"
And I said, "Well, it's pretty depressing. So I brought it to Disney World to cheer it up."
And the guy said, "Fair enough."
Brits don't demand too much explanation when it comes to odd projects.

The House of Sand and Fog and As I Lay Dying both really loved the Beauty and the Beast live show. Here they are watching a foggy scene, and the scene where the beast lies dying:




They further bonded over some pin trading:



And at the "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" playground. Here's The House of Sand and Fog playing hide and seek:



Look on the rocks behind the giant tub of Play-doh, As I Lay Dying! I think that's where he's hiding!



Oh, wait, it's only Fear and Trembling, having another pout.



Don't get pizza sauce on your Oprah's Book Club badge, The House of Sand and Fog. And sit up straight in your high chair.




It wasn't until we got to the Muppets in 3D Movie that Fear and Trembling began to appreciate the outing. Kierkegaard said he liked the muppet community because each member maintained his own uniqueness and character, and there was no assimilation or group mentality. He also said it was difficult to understand, and therefore inspiring. It may have been made more difficult by his refusal to wear the 3D glasses, but... I didn't want to press him. He kept leaping into a fake props box marked "2D Fruities."



One final literal interpretation. The House of Sand and Fog in Tattoine:



Tomorrow is our last adventure in the Magic Kingdom. A Room of One's Own has been clamoring for a seat on the tour bus. We the Living too. So it'll be girls' day out, with Anxious Pleasures to chaperone, naturally.

Labels: books, disney world, kierkegaard, mgm studios, take the books to disney world, the house of sand and fog

We're going to the Magic Kingdom, and Heidegger is wearing mouse ears.

On the Way to Language is on the way to Space Mountain. So, Martin Heidegger, what is your relationship to the words, "Space" and "Mountain"? Have you ever considered your relationship to these words before? Do they touch the innermost nexus of your existence? Or what?

Heidegger:

To undergo an experience with something -- be it a thing, a person, or a god [or a mechanical roller coaster all in the dark with whooshing and screaming] -- means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us, and transforms us.

I don't have any good pictures of me helping Heidegger ride Space Mountain, because it is dark in there. I do hereby swear on my own becoming that I held him up high, and he was probably really transformed.

Here is One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, watching the comedy show "The Laughing Floor," based on the movie, "Monsters Inc." If you're not familiar with Marcuse's classic critique of moden society, here's the gist: we're all a bunch of happy, fat, complacent conformists, who just accept everything comfortable and normal, because individuality and freedom is too hard for our enormous middle-class asses. He also believes that waste and destruction are bad. This book was big in the 60's, yes? Are we together now?

He thought the monsters were really two-dimensional and that the jokes were repressive.

He didn't feel right about the dualism of Buzz Lightyear's battle with the Evil Emperor Zurg, either. Good vs. Evil. So reductive. So farcical.

Marcuse went on to say:

"In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal to 'go along' appears neurotic and impotent. [Curse you, Star Command!!!]"

It's just what I've always privately felt about Disney: Not dialectical enough. They should work on that.

Here's Marcuse glowering at the guy who sings in the Carnival of Progress:

Great big beautiful tomorrow, forsooth!

At the Swiss Family Robinson's Tree House, he yearned for a return to simpler times, when people rebelled against the hulls of their ships, got themselves properly shipwrecked, and then lived in trees. When revolution was really possible. And simple machines could change your whole plumbing situation.

On the Way to Language was down with the treehouse life, but I have to say it was a real drag how he wanted to read, read, read every single sign in the whole park. Enough with the words, buddy. We get it.

After one last attempt to cheer up One-Dimensional Man, we stowed him in the stroller and let Dr. Zhivago join the party. Here's Marcuse on Aladdin's Magic Carpet, griping about how pretending to be a prince just plays into the existing imperialist norms. Whatever. Go get spit on by a camel.

Does anyone need to go look up dialectic? No? Alright.

The good Dr. Zhivago was a bundle of energy, right out of the book bag. He fell in love with Cinderella at first sight during the afternoon parade. Then, at Splash Mountain, he had to be pulled down off the roof of The Laughing Place. Here's the angry parent of a child he was taunting, revoking his playtime privileges. Time out, Dr. Zhivago, if you're going to act the fool at Disney World.

Here's Dr. Z on the Thunder Mountain Railroad. Not the five o'clock express through the steppes by any stretch of the imagination, but of course, he still wanted to sit in the front. I can't totally grasp the significance of railroads to the Russian Revolution, but that's probably because at that point in the text I was so beset by eight syllable surnames that I was crying on my sleeve.

Tomorrow, it's a trip to Animal Kingdom for Moby Dick and Anxious Pleasures. Rowr!

Labels: books, disney world, dr. zhivago, heidegger, magic kingdom, marcuse, take the books to disney world

We are still on our way to Disney World. No one should panic.

Tonight we went to see the Delta IV Rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. We stood on the edge of the ocean at Cocoa Beach to watch it go up. I took along Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and We the Living by Ayn Rand. I thought that Fear and Trembling would really appreciate the way the rocket was subverting the universal for the individual, and of course, the trembling beach beneath us. I knew that We the Living would deeply respect the simultaneous frailty and power of that rocket climbing into space, an expression of human achievement, and another mad swipe at the firmament.


(terrible video uploaded from mobile phone!)

Unfortunately I got excited watching the rocket, and forgot to take either book out of my bag so that they could experience the sublime rumbling, the flash of orange that lit up the ocean, and the cries of fellow rocket nerds: "Happy Birthday, NASA!"

There was a bit of grumbling and a "What's that, a piece of apple core?"

To make up to the books for my gross neglect of their entertainment, I took them instead to the world famous "Ron Jon Surf Shop." It was on our way back to the car, and I thought they might enjoy it?

Here are the books:

And again:

See how the blonde loves literature? We the Living is the short one. Fear and Trembling is taller.

About this surf shop experience, Kierkegaard had the following to say:

"It goes without saying that the tragic hero, like any other man who is not
bereft of speech, can say a few words in his culminating moment, perhaps a few
appropriate words, but the question is how appropriate is it for him to say
them. If the meaning of his life is in an external act, then he has nothing to
say, then everything he says is essentially chatter, by which he only diminishes
his impact, whereas the tragic conventions enjoin him to complete his task in
silence, whether it consists in action or suffering."

I chose that quote for him because I see that as an undergraduate I wrote the word, "HAH!" next to that paragraph in the margin. I must have been anticipating the culminating moment of this particular book, outside the Ron Jon Surf Shop, and Kierkegaard suffering in knightly silence.

Labels: books, disney world, kierkegaard, take the books to disney world

The books had to be up early. We left at 6:30.

Here is The House of the Seven Gables sticking his head out the window, getting some air, letting his jowls go flapping:



It's been years since he felt the wind ruffling his pages.

Here are Anxious Pleasures and The House of Sand and Fog checking out the space coast, from our hotel room in Cocoa Beach:



Zzyzzyva made itself useful making coffee. Bustling around, all purposeful:



All in all the books behaved well on the trip. The Heidegger kept its comments to itself, for now, and Moby Dick gave Hawthorne his space. Now we're going to watch the Delta IV rocket launch. Taking a few books with me. Hope they like it.

Labels: books, disney world, take the books to disney world

Some time ago, I decided to take some books to Disney World. I asked for help in narrowing down my guest list, and now I've made my final selections. I've narrowed it down to twelve, and here they are:



1. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (Wanted specially to go, to see Cinderella's castle.)
2. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Look! Already wearing mouse ears!)
3. Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen (To make up for not reviewing it sooner.)
4. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard (Because he deserves it.)
5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (Must see Flying Dumbos.)
6. We the Living by Ayn Rand (A smile means friendship for everyone!)
7. Zzyzzyva (This is a literary magazine, sent to me by the publisher, to thank me, or scold me, or inform me after I wrote my screech about how literary magazines are dead.)
8. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus (A reader suggestion, thank you.)
9. One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse (For help in staging protests at gift shops.)
10. On the Way to Language by Martin Heidegger (For interpreting words like "Imagineers.")
11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Because it is my favorite book ever.)
12. House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Because Moby Dick wanted him along.)

If you aren't on the list and you expected to be, it was because I didn't have a paperback copy of your book (Joshilyn Jackson, looking at you) or because I couldn't find my copy of your book (Sylvia Plath, hello). There you are. Tomorrow we start our trip. May we all have a damn good time. If you can't wait to see where we are and what we're doing, you can follow us on our mobile blog. I will try to write while I am away, but if the internet doesn't smile on our timeshare, I will see you when I get back.

Labels: books, disney world, take the books to disney world, trips

I read this book when I was in college and then reread it in graduate school. I love it. Love Phoebe, love Hepzibah, love weird old Clifford, love enigmatic young Holgrave. Love daguerrotyping, whatever it was. I embrace the sentiment, the examination of the weight of human history and the awfulness of the soul and the impossibility of light in a populated room. I even love Thomas Pynchon, on whose ancestors these characters are based. I am, you might say, a fan. This is me with Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Yes, he looks kind of two dimensional and like he's not paying attention to me enough, and yes, that is my child there, my child with my husband, who lives here with me in the 21st century, but... Hawthorne and I have a special bond. I'm the only one in my American Lit class in high school who actually *liked* Young Goodman Brown, actually read My Kinsman Major Molineaux, who didn't buy the "good vs. evil" explanation that was being spooned out by Miss Cardimone to the rest of the class.

By the way if you're reading this and I knew you in high school, assume you weren't in that class. I'm looking at you, Ann. Any disparaging remarks do not apply.

I loved Hawthorne, and Melville, and Poe, and the way Melville loved Hawthorne, and the way Poe hated everyone, and how they wrote to and about each other, and how they all spat on Emerson, and his ilk, and pooped in Walden Pond, and dug around in their dark hearts and and wrote about what they found.

Last week I was in Boston. My husband suggested we go up to Salem to see Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthplace and the House of the Seven Gables. I was, of course, panting with excitement. Wouldn't you be? Except that I'm serious.

This is the House of the Seven Gables. It is the house on which Hawthorne based the house in his book. The house that represents original sin. This is it. He visited it as a child; it was owned by relatives of his. It's been restored, in fact restored to be more like the one in the book than the original house actually was (Hepzibah's store was there, and there is also a secret and terrifying passageway up through the chimney).

On the day we went to Salem, it was foggy and chill, although the rest of our week in Massachusetts was sunny and breezy. We walked all over the place and then down to the harbor where the Custom House is, where Hawthorne did some writing:

Here's the USS Friendship, across the street. And my son:

The house was neat, interesting, educational. So was the house in which Hawthorne was born, which is also on the property, having been drug there from five blocks down the street in order to add it to the museum. It was a historical site, well-preserved, well presented, valuable.

Now, I hesitate before exposing my soft underbelly like this, but I must say that beyond the interestingness and the educationability of it all, I got a little misty thinking about the history of the house. Considering Hawthorne sitting there in the parlor, about the book he wrote, about the period of time he wrote about, I found myself swallowing hard and wiping my eye.

They had only recently rid themselves of the British, and they were living in a brand new country. It would have been so vital, so fascinating, so *patriotic* and so important, to create this new national identity in literature. I know, I know, I had read about this before too, and I knew it in my brain. About how James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving drew dark lines around a colonial asthetic. But until I was standing there in Massachusetts, having walked through the South Meeting Hall in Boston, where they had the rabble-rabble meeting before the Boston Tea Party, having looked at Paul Revere's Grave, having stood on Bunker Hill, I did not get what they were doing, those people up at Brooks Farm and in Concord and what it meant while my boys were pissing on transcendentalism -- it was more than just ideas, it was identity. I get that now.

I have two reactions to that: one is that I need to think more about what I'm writing and why. What are we doing here? Do we still take up a black marker and make bold outlines around American literature any more? Are we all just happy to be citizens of the world? The other is that I wish more urgently that I could have been there when Melville walked out of that Emerson lecture, when Poe wrote that criticism of Hawthorne, when Hawthorne was sexually rejecting Melville.

At least I got to go to the house. I knocked on the front door, climbed around under the rafters, put my hand on the original bricks in the fireplace. I wouldn't have thought someone mean and cynical like me could be moved by such an experience, but I was. Next time, we're going to Concord.

Labels: book reviews, books, hawthorne, house of the seven gables, nathaniel hawthorne

Who wants to take a ride with me on Cinderella's Golden Carousel? Now put your hand down if you're not made out of literature. I’m going to take ten books to Disney World. Books that deserve it. Books that need it.

I have been trying to read Doctor Zhivago for several months, and between the lengthy surnames and all the railroads going this way and that, I am ready to conclude that what this book needs is to get out of Russia for a while. To ride the spinning teacups. To meet Donald Duck.

I can think of lots of books that need a trip to Disney World. Heart of Darkness. Bleak House. How about As I Lay Dying?

My books spend most of their time spread open, lying upside down. Periodically they get shoved into the diaper bag, where they get drowned in apple juice, squashed with M & Ms, and have to babysit Barbies. When I’m finished reading them, I publicly criticize their authors, make fun of their movie versions, and snicker at their cover art. What kind of life is this?

I’ll tell you another book I’m going to take to Disney World: Anxious Pleasures. Lance Olson’s publisher sent me a review copy months ago and I’ve been belligerently sitting on it, waiting to reread The Metamorphosis before I read this rewrite. A few rides on Space Mountain should put things right.

I’m going, I’m really going, in the middle of November. I might even take my children. But will I be able to get Ariel to pose with Moby Dick? Will they fine me for littering if The Bell Jar throws itself off the ferry railing? Will The Sun Also Rises get kicked off Small World for shouting at the animatronic children?

Do you have a book you think needs a trip to Disney World?

Labels: books, disney world, literature

Literary magazines, the time has come that we all knew was coming. It’s over. It’s done. The lady in the Viking corset has belted out the final high C sharp. Please exit quietly at the rear door, but leave your plastic 3D glasses in the bins provided. You will no longer be hosting the revolutionary planning sessions. The revolution already happened, and at someone else’s house.

You had a good run. Well, not really, but for the sake of politeness, we’ll say that you did. I have no ill will. I have no desire to wound you in these, your final hours. You once served a purpose, but the purpose is extinct, and so are you. No more glossy coverstock. No more precious author bios. No more black and white photography opposite poems about rain on the window pane and how it’s like roads. No more “This page purposefully left blank.”


I’m with you, and we can go through this together, but let’s face the facts. Literary magazines used to exist for two reasons. The first was immediacy. Rather than waiting for the long, grinding, seasonal cycle of big traditional publishers to get new books on the shelves, readers could find fresher fare in literary magazines, published quarterly, or even monthly. The second reason was for content, as literary magazines reached farther out of the mainstream, farther into the margin, to pull new writers, strange writers, uncommercial writers, into the world of print and out to the world of readers.

Now we have the internet. Do I need to explain, or would it be too painful?

With web sites enjoying daily updates, the old publishing schedule of even an ambitious quarterly magazine now seems yawning and slow. My attention span stretches approximately to the update cycle of The Onion, and then shatters into a thousand pieces. Are you publishing your literary magazine twice a year? Are you kidding?

Then there’s the content and readership. Any brilliant, strange, new, marginalized writer with a Blogger account and a willingness to network can gain far more readers than any literary magazine was able to reach in the history of time. In fact, any jackass with a LiveJournal can reach more of an audience than most literary magazines have ever boasted, even the big ones. I’ve been published in respectable, established literary magazines that I bet fewer than a hundred people actually read. And that is true. Hold me. It is true.

Then there’s the subject of money. The internet is, mostly, free. And well, you know the rest.

So, really, do we need another literary magazine? Just one last really special one? Do we need to hear about how this publication is different, this one is going to be a “really beautiful object,” this one is going to change publishing forever? Do we need to hear from another self-congratulatory editor-in-chief, lovingly stroking his in-jokes, musing fondly on how many subscribers he’ll need to break even, figuring out how to woo in another bored midlist author to showcase in the autumn issue? How about one more magazine named “BRICK” or “PHYLACTIC TUNA”?

Let’s admit it, we were all there at one time. Graduate school can make you feel like that. I freely admit that I, with milk-white hope in my shiny heart, at one time published a collection of short stories written by a friend of mine, and got it placed in local bookstores. I think I was twenty-two. It was fun to play pretend that way. But for the love of Kinko’s, as grim as it may sound, you have to grow up.

Enough is enough. You cannot change the world with really expensive paper, you cannot revolutionize literature by being “more ironic than McSweeneys” (is that even possible?), and you cannot sell a literary magazine. Literary magazines are not books, no matter how you try to fetishize them, they will never be on the shelf with the novels. They never have and they never will. Literary magazines are the cousins of newspapers. Novels are the cousins of history.

What can we do? I would call for a boycott, I guess, but boycotting literary magazines would be like boycotting sandpaper pants. Nobody’s rushing out to the stores to grab them up anyway. The sad fact is that nature will take its course, and these beautiful, exotic creatures will be eaten by literary evolution. But will anyone survive?

The lumbering giants will survive: The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, etc. These are the litmags you have to get in because they put a big gold star on your resume, and they will survive because of their prestige and tradition. People still want to break their heads open on the editorial boards that published Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Beckett. We’ll eventually be using The Paris Review to line the fork drawer, but not yet.


Which brings us to blogs. Remember zines? Blogs are the new zines. People used to staple together mimeographed pieces of crap in their grandmother’s basement and distribute it via copy machine, coffee shop counter, and word of mouth. They were subversive, populist, and updated instantly on the whim of the publisher. Blogs are the zines of the new millennium – now instantaneous, with open access for all. With all of this magic at the other end of a short wire, is it really worth our time to go around trying to sell paper and glue for ten dollars a glob?

It’s time to stop the presses. I know it’s not easy to pull that plug. Litmags are icons of intellectual privilege. You have to fight against a lifetime of programming that’s telling you literary magazines are good, therefore more literary magazines must be better. You respond out of habit, and assume it’s good news, like when a baby is born. It’s not. Magazines aren’t babies. In the world we live in, we need literary contraceptives. So stop. Put down the telephone. Put down the really nice pen. We don’t need another literary magazine. Literary magazines are dead.

Labels: books, literary magazines, literature, publishing

A man walks into a bar, gets drunk, sells his longsuffering wife and infant daughter to a stranger for five smackers. POW! What a hook. What a first chapter. The next day, he wakes up sober, repents, and walks to the nearest church. At the altar, he swears off drink for the next 21 years. He looks for his wife, but it's too late; she's gone. WHAT WILL HAPPEN!?

If I'd had a seat, I would have been on the edge of it. Fortunately I was sitting on the floor, watching the children in the tub. But I was riveted to the point that the children were in danger of hypothermia. That's a hook, my friend, worthy of a high concept Hollywood road movie starring Vince Vaughn and and Benicio del Toro. What, you don't think they would be good together? They would be GREAT together.

The Hollywood movie would then switch over to the wife with her new husband, see how they're getting on, and then switch back to the original husband, etc. Not this book. Instead, Hardy takes 19 years out of the story, brings us back to the wife returning to look for the original husband, daughter in tow. Okay. Now he's the mayor of a fine big town and one of the big time corn dealers as well. Rich, famous, well-respected, and still not drinking. From there, things go downhill, as you might expect from a Thomas Hardy novel. You will not be surprised to learn that the couple did not quietly reunite and live out the rest of their days happily and without notice. They were noticed.

Another thing I have come to expect about a Thomas Hardy novel is a female main character whose virtue or position is compromised in public court of opinion through no real fault of her own, but just because she was following a logical course of action, or acting under impulses we today would find quite normal. Tess, Sue, Elfride, all are caught both by cultural circumstances and mistakes that we all can see they should not make. The bad ends to which they come are both brought on by their own bad choices and dictated by the restraints of Victorian society, both high and low.

In this novel, there is no such character. Lucetta comes close to this, but isn't really central enough, or independent enough, to fit. I realized only when I was near the end that the main character was actually the man, or the men, the two men who share the title "Mayor of Casterbridge" during the span of the book. Then it all became clear. The main character, Michael Henchard, the man who originally sold his wife, is the one whose impulsive, passionate character and rotten choices seal his tragic failure -- he has more in common with Tess, actually, than the other women do -- uneducated, irrational, earthy, but bizarrely driven by good intentions. Donald Farfrae, the other mayor, has much in common with Bathsheba from Far from the Madding Crowd, as he also gets his final quiet happy ending, with the one he should have had all along.

It made more sense once I figured out I wasn't supposed to really like the females, because I didn't. I love the way Hardy writes women, particularly Sue Bridehead. Particularly the incomparable Tess. But the women in this book were unsatisfying. Maybe he just hadn't got there yet -- Sue and Tess were to come later. Bathsheba was ten years previous.

People who are not fans of Thomas Hardy are permitted to skip the previous three paragraphs. Oh, should I have mentioned this before you slogged through all that? Woops.

Here's a writerly note: The opening scenes of the novel are really an *excellent* example of how the pros used to do third person objective point of view, you know, just the human witness, no insights into anyone's thoughts or feelings, motives or past. The opening of the book was really SO amazing. I do so love Thomas Hardy. Just look at him there, with his moustache. You could just eat him.

I think now I have read all the Thomas Hardy I need to read. I've read five of his novels, including all the famous ones and one of the romances. It makes me a little sad. I remember when I first read his poem, "Neutral Tones," and I initially thought, what a dull little plop that was, but it really stayed with me, okay, I know this makes me sound like a SUPERFOOL, but I always remember that first reading of it. Here it is:

NEUTRAL TONES

by: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Yeah! Makes you want to go out and write a bunch of valentines doesn't it! That's Thomas Hardy for you. Writer most likely to make you feel like rolling under the bed and rotting already. Bless his grey little heart.

Labels: books, literature, novels, thomas hardy, victorian

When Joshilyn gave me this book, a long time ago, she said that it was really two books mashed into one, and she felt sure I'd like one of them. I know I liked the second half much more than the first. So much did I not like the first half that I actually put the book down for more than a year. I liked the present sections more than the past, the dog sections more than the human. Which were the two books? I'm not sure. I picked it up again because I finally succumbed to the hook, and had to know how it ended.










Visit The Dogs of Babel on Amazon.com.

Labels: book reviews, books, carolyn parkhurst, dogs of babel, novels

To: Anne Elliott
CC: Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, Elinor Dashwood
Subject: He loves YOU. YOU are the one he loves.
Attachments: clues.xls


Dear Anne,

It is you that he loves. Obviously. He loves you, only you, and always you, to the end of his days. HOW do you not see this? You spend page after page, heart atwitter. A tiny gasp, a tiny sigh. Is it denial? Is it mental retardation? Or are you actually physically blind and deaf? Has all of your mild, sweet goodness clogged up your aural passages?


I know that you don't like to come right out and say things. I know you prefer to hint around and embroider wainscoating and use your eyelashes to communicate the intricate ticks and giggles of your soul. Your patience, your modesty, they cripple you. You flounder. You languish.


Here's news: If you weren't in a Jane Austen novel, where all comes right in the end, you would never be Mrs. Wentworth. Real men don't pine that much. Real men, if they pay attention to Louisa Musgrove, are doing that because they actually want to get busy with Louisa Musgrove. But you're okay. He's a Jane Austen hero, and that means in spite of all the completely contradictory evidence, he does really love you, you blind, deaf, ignorant fool of a woman. Please, when the truth comes out, take a minute to breathe and weep, and then give yourself a good smack, right on the head, because really, a cocker spaniel could see that he loves you, and only you. Louisa Musgrove? You have got to be freakin' kidding me.


Sincerely,
LYDIA


Jane Austen said that Anne Elliott was too good for her. Jane, Anne Elliott was too good for me too.


Let's face it, Jane Austen novels are not about suspense. There's a man and a woman, or there are two men and two women, and at the end of the novel the church bells will peal, and there will be joy. The pleasure in one of these romantic comedies, like most romantic comedies where the end is predetermined, is watching the characters muddle through, make their mistakes, rush around.


I liked watching Emma, and Elizabeth, and Elinor and Marianne. But not Anne. I didn't like watching Anne. Anne made me impatient and irritated. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just a dreadful person, incapable of appreciating the sensitive spirit of Anne. I know this novel is all about the subtle. And most of my friends seem to like it. I, however, was not able to love this book, although I know I should. Anne was too good, Louisa Musgrove was too annoying, and Captain Wentworth was just impossible.


You know what? In the end, they got together. Don't blubber about me spoiling the ending. No one was shocked. I was glad it all ended well, but this time, instead of weeping with joy, like I did for Elinor and Marianne, I snapped the book shut, BAM. Enough already. This time, she took it too far. Bless you, Jane Austen, you do better with sass.

Labels: book reviews, books, Jane Austen, novels, persuasion

Labels: angela's ashes, book reviews, books, frank mccourt, novels

Well, this was a silly little book. A book that treats writing like Juliet Binoche treats acting. That is to say, with a lot of insubstantial intensity, and mystic eyes. You can read Sin in a sitting, and get up feeling pensive, taciturn, and violent. Or you can read it in little chunks over a period of weeks, while you're giving your children a bath, like I did, and every time you open the book you have to remember how serious life is, how morbid, how dire, how dramatic. How everyone uses small sentences, and feels things deeply, so deeply.

I read it before, years ago, and recently somehow via some used book shelf it came back into my life. The same edition too. Page 169 still seems to bear the blush of shame after my shuddering eye-roll. The last few lines:

These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please, answer me.
Answer me, as I leave you now.
As I leave you.
As I leave.

The only work of fiction I've seen trying to end on an echo effect, like a power ballad from the 80s. If the ending seems unforgivable, you should know that there are other disastrous lines in the book too. Like this one:

Hours later, Dominick lay on top of me. And whispered love again. And again. Perhaps the music in his own head made him deaf to my silence.

"Deaf to my silence"? That's one of those lines that sounds complex and interesting, but in reality means nothing. Like Juliet Binoche again. She can be thinking of her grocery list, but as long as she fires up her "piercing depths" eye lock, you'd think she was decoding the fate of the world. Hart knows how to ratchet up the drama in the way a scene sounds, even if the plot is really a rather standard soap opera chain of events. Adultery, death, rivalry, hatred, love, etc. The pounding drum in the language, the constant syntactic reminders that This! Is! Dramatic! actually diffuse the drama from her character's troubles, much the way a soap opera's soundtrack can make light afternoon fare out of murder and betrayal.

I am simultaneously reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, and Sin does not bear up well in contrast, since McCourt's delivery of disaster and wretchedness is at low volume, with no fanfare, no sonorous words, no short sentences drifting off into black. Unfair comparison, maybe, but... still.

SIN

Labels: book reviews, books, josephine hart, novels, sin

Labels: billy bathgate, books, contemporary, e.l. doctorow, novels

I have only one thing to add, really, to the enormous pile of both professional and amateur Potter-related commentary online. Plot summary at Wikipedia, many interviews where Rowling finally "tells all," and of course enduring speculation. What did the Hufflepuff common room look like? What kind of toothpaste must Snape have used in order to manage a purple Patronus? Etc.
I've read and loved all the Harry Potter books -- they are literary confection and I truly enjoyed this final episode, even if the book won't count for my home study doctorate. ;)

Here's my thought, and it doesn't even contain any spoilers. About halfway through the book, it occurred to me that Harry's mental anguish, his internal conflict, his disappointment with his past and his longing for family, will all be resolved and his life will be fixed when he becomes a father. Seeing him in this light was strange and unfamiliar, and the fact that I had this thought told me that Rowling had done something special in following this boy from childhood into what obviously had become adulthood. If I was brought to the point where I realized that redemption was possible through having kids, then I was seeing him in a much different light than I saw him in book one, and Rowling's project, showing this coming of age in multiple thousands of pages, was a success.

That impressed me -- to bring your reader to his/her own realization of the "proper" outcome, just by showing the plot happening, is the ultimate accomplishment, for a writer of any kind of fiction. I thought she did a magnificent job and I really respect her for that.

I also appreciate that she added the "years later" epilogue. I think a lot of writers would have stuck up their noses at that type of thing, and acted all mysterious and "you'll have to imagine" or "no one can say" but she went ahead and drew out the whole thing clearly for her readers, and I don't think anyone felt that such a neatly tied bow at the end of the series was anything less than appropriate and kind. Well done.

J.K. Rowling would like to add, "Buy my book!"

Labels: books, Deathly Hallows, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling

Months ago, I abandoned this book halfway through. I was mystified at the incredible laudits it had received, the awards, the blurbs, the iconic status. I had read other Ursula Le Guin books, finding them completely awesome and wonderful, but this one, maybe her best known and most praised, I just couldn't penetrate.



I didn't like it. It was so political. So dry. With a few exceptions, where chapters would suddenly jump into the mythology of the alien planet, it was all so trudgingly expository.

On this planet, Gethen, humans are without gender. That is, they only have a gender during a few days out of the month, when they become sexually active. During these things, they could go either way -- one month male, another month female, it just depends on who's around. The main character is an envoy to this planet from an interplanetary alliance, and he is their first contact with the outside universe. Male. All the time male. So, during the first half of the book, or so, there's a lot of palaver over what they're going to do with him, and he drifts around making little progress as a diplomat, finding out more about the planet. Nothing terribly urgent happens.



This summer, I'm trying to finish some books that I'd given up on. You may recognize some of these sentiments from the last review. So, I picked up the book and read a few more pages of politlcal this and that. THEN the second half of the book happened, and it all became magically clear, why everyone raves about the book, and loves it, and considers it so revelatory, so sublime. The envoy suddenly experiences everything you want characters in novels to experience -- danger, love, and a challenge to his intellect -- bang, bang, bang, right on through to the end. Now all the imagery makes sense. Now all the exposition pays off. It's all struck into bright definition, like a chalk drawing that's been fadoodled over with light grey strokes for hours and then instantly becomes a dragon with three bold lines of a darker shade.

Did she have to go through all that, to get to this place? Maybe she did. Obviously it worked. And for those weak souls like me who have to flog themselves through the first half, where everything seems cold and dry, and nothing seems to be moving, take heart, keep flogging, and get some sleep too, because once you get on the truck headed north, you're going to have trouble putting the book down.

Labels: books, left hand of darkness, scifi, ursula k. le guin

When I acquired The Sacred and Profane Love Machine I also acquired The Black Prince, and when I was disappointed by the former I was still determined to try the latter. After all, Iris Murdoch has been so effusively praised by people I respect. Maybe the first book was an anomaly.

I read a few chapters of The Black Prince and had trouble going on. Everyone was so unsavory. Everyone had a hole in their stockings and a bit of pink marbled flesh protruding. Or greasy hair. Or was pallid and sweating. I mean everyone. With one exception, the entire cast were middle aged English people, ruthlessly portrayed in all their greying sagging glory by a middle aged English novelist, the main character, Bradley Pearson. Everyone was foul and mean and preoccupied and irritable. But not in entertaining or interesting ways -- in ugly little sour ways. Halfway through the book I was just having to force myself to continue. After all, Kate Winslet played her in the movie based on her life. I owed her at least to finish the lousy book.

I will tell you that the book improved dramatically halfway through, and continued to get better and better as it bounced along toward the ending. And then I will tell you that the ending really did redeem the whole book, made it very retroactively interesting in terms of what a writer is, what fiction is, what "truth" is, what a reliable narrator is and isn't, and other complex questions.

The book is very smart, and it does at the end pull back its scalp and reveal there is a large and whizzing brain inside, which has been there all along, under that peeling, sparse scalp. The problem here is, friends, that you have to read a whole lot about the ugly and small agendas of a lot of people you'd rather not get to know, in order to understand the point that's being made about art. As to the apparently thrilling (to critics) question about whether or not the narrator is a homosexual in denial, I don't think that's really interesting or relevant. I'd rather hear more people discussing whatever the heck happened to him at the end, and who P.L. was. All that seemed much more mysterious than the gayness. But then, discussions of whether people are gay or not don't tend to fascinate me (take note, friends, this extends to Herman M.).



The Black Prince is a book I enjoyed having read, but not a book I enjoyed reading. It is an experimental book, all the more so because it appears to be a very traditional book. Things are not always as they seem -- take heart if you are toiling through this novel by choice or on order from an educator -- there will be a payoff, and it will all end eventually.

Labels: books, contemporary, iris murdoch, novels