tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40742459172042170642024-03-18T22:01:27.449-07:00Zombie Chekhov"Ach, Tchehov! why are you dead? Why can't I talk to you, in a big darkish room, at late evening — where the light is green from the waving trees outside?" (Katherine Mansfield) This is the place where we talk about books.Lit. Hitchhikerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17550130679377279052noreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-16152797483707252072014-09-16T09:47:00.000-07:002014-09-16T09:56:21.982-07:00Odours from the abyss: Jacky in Howards End<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu9iqg8-MS4YXduXGxB-7iPXvq4MeNEjthOrIlOtIaaG1TMgPDHZHrfld_-8du2OWvgW3T_LJI7yMQHt6i68dCSEEsRfxX7yqoJ05UZTg30Ygx0Kln_aDvTXWZ07Z63QVdi1sysXYrFNRj/s1600/book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu9iqg8-MS4YXduXGxB-7iPXvq4MeNEjthOrIlOtIaaG1TMgPDHZHrfld_-8du2OWvgW3T_LJI7yMQHt6i68dCSEEsRfxX7yqoJ05UZTg30Ygx0Kln_aDvTXWZ07Z63QVdi1sysXYrFNRj/s200/book.jpg" height="126" width="200" /></a>I recently read <i>Howards End</i> and, long story short, I loved it. The characters are amazing, the text is endlessly quotable: goblin
footfalls, telegrams and anger, the size of each of our islands. It
made me think about early 20th century London, it made me think
about socialism, and love, and the differences between people independent of historical context. I remembered when a friend showed
me the <i>confidence trick </i>quote to comfort me after being
fooled, I read whole pages aloud for anyone I could get to listen, I
physically restrained my brother until he read the parts about
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.<br />
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But when it was over there was a question that was bugging me more than "Would it be tacky to get <i>Only connect</i> tattooed?", and that was "<b>But who provides for Jacky?</b>". Because Jacky is not mentioned at all in the last chapter, where the affairs of the Wilcoxes and of the Schlegels are settled. We get to know both their financial situation and their social one: that Charles wants to change his name, that Dolly doesn't, that Paul (even he gets a paragraph) is resentful to be tied down in England. But not a word on Jacky.<br />
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It is easy to imagine, and I do, that Margaret doesn't let her starve. But it bothers me to no end that Forster doesn't say so explicitly.<br />
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When I realized this, I wondered whether I have a more general problem with how Jacky is written. It is clear that she isn't treated with nearly as much interest as any of the other characters. She is pitied in an impersonal and vague way, her hostile circumstances are declared "<i>bad</i>" by the narrator, but their tragic aspect is not explored. In fact, she is deemed "<i>incapable of tragedy</i>". To the narrator, Jacky is a convenient metaphor, taken up every now and then. To the Schlegels, Jacky is a vision of the abyss, "<i>like a faint smell, a goblin footfall, telling of a life where love and hatred had both decayed</i>", and her mistreatment by Henry is always an afterthought. When Helen is angry at Mr. Wilcox over Jackie, it is chiefly directed at the way Leonard was ruined by being entrapped by her. When Margaret chastises Henry, his betrayal of Mrs. Wilcox takes up more space than his abandonment of Jacky. <br />
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But none of this soured Howards End for me. Forster owns up to how Jacky is not written as a character, stating plainly that "<i>we are not concerned with the very poor</i>". Jacky had sunk under the surface of the ocean, and about these people there can be no narrative. This acknowledgement alone is a very powerful commentary: Jacky cannot be written as a person because society does not allow her to be seen as a person. Her treatment thus becomes a shared failure of the author and the reader, and I liked that.<br />
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But even if this was not Forster intention, and he has written Jacky like this because of a shortcoming of imagination or craft, I could still live with it if only her affairs would have been settled in the final chapter (there were many options that made sense: she could have been given some of the income Margaret is renouncing, or some of Helen's or of Henry's). In short, I don't ask that Forster give Mrs. Bast a story or a personality; I just ask that <a href="http://www.zombiechekhov.com/2013/12/give-mr-bast-money-and-dont-bother.html">he give her money and not bother about her ideals</a>.Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-10842922773282602712014-08-23T07:15:00.000-07:002014-08-23T07:16:56.600-07:00"I Did Not Want to Lose My Summer for a Scare": T.S. Eliot on the Outbreak of World War One<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eliot's draft registration card photo, 1918</td></tr>
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A hundred years ago today, T.S. Eliot wrote to his mother with his first impressions about the war that will become known as World War One. At the beginning of August 1914, Eliot was in Germany, attending a summer school in Marburg. Though he would later describe the experience of being caught in Germany as "much like the childhood's exasperation of being in an upper berth as the train passed through a large city - (...) an intolerable bore," his first letter to his family paints a slightly different picture. He captures the disbelief, confusion and rising tension as the international participants at the summer school suddenly find themselves thrust into the roles of friends or enemies to Germany, according to their nationality. <br />
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I confess I did feel a little doubtful of the advisability of remaining in Germany a day or two before war was declared against Russia; but it never entered my head that England would declare war too: and we all supposed that after the mobilization, we could (as proved the case for those of us who were Americans) slip away without difficulty. Besides, I had come to Germany <i>expressly</i>. The summer school was just opened that day, and I did not want to lose my summer for a scare. It was not until evening (August 2) when the pupils assembled that I appreciated the seriousness of our position. We were told it would be impossible to leave for a fortnight; that it would be impossible for the summer course to continue; but that to fill our time during the enforced stay various makeshift courses and conversation groups would be arranged. The director made a speech in which he cautioned us to be very careful, to avoid crowds, and not to talk in foreign languages in the street. By this time he had got us pretty well frightened of course, and no one was taking very keen interest in the proposed courses. The Russians, who knew they wouldn't get out anyway, were miserable and silent; there appeared to be only one Frenchman, the professor, who was also miserable; the English and Americans were talkative and excited.
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- <i>The Letters of TSE</i>, Faber & Faber 1988, page 52-53</div>
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In the end, Eliot manages to make his way to the Netherlands and then to London, thanks to his American passport ("[They] looked at our passes - 'Amerikaner - ach, schoen!' let us by." p. 53) There, a different sort of confusion awaits. While in Germany, reading German papers and met by German hospitality, Eliot had thought Germany right. His early letters from the war are entirely sympathetic to the idea that Germany is fighting for its existence (in the peculiar, ominous sense that phrase has when used about Germany). But once in London, met with the British papers and the display of British naval superiority ("The waters as we approached were black with English warships." p. 54), he begins to change his mind. His position during the early war seems to have been that Germany had a point, but must ultimately lose to England:</div>
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I have a great deal of confidence in the ultimate event; I am anxious that Germany should be beaten; but I think it is silly to hold up one's hands at German 'atrocities' and 'violations of neutrality'. The Germans are perfectly justified in violating Belgium - they are fighting for their existence - but the English are more than justified in turning to defend a treaty. But the Germans are bad diplomats. It is not against German 'crimes', but against German 'civilisation' - all this system of officers and professors - that I protest. But very useful to the world if kept in place.</div>
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- <i>The Letters of TSE</i>, Faber & Faber 1988, page 56</div>
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On a personal note, having straddled both worlds at precisely the time when they turned against each other, TSE found himself "unable to adopt a wholly partisan attitude, or even to rejoice or depair wholeheartedly" (p. 58) when it came to the war. As he writes to his cousin Eleanor in September 1914: </div>
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I cannot but wonder whether it all seems as awful at your distance as it does here. I doubt it. No war ever seemed so real to me as this: of course I have been to some of the towns about which they have been fighting; and I know that men I have known, including one of my best friends*, must be fighting each other. So it's hard for me to write interestingly about the war.</div>
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- <i>The Letters of TSE</i>, Faber & Faber 1988, page 58</div>
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* Probably Jean Verdenal, Eliot's friend from Paris who died in 1915 and to whom <i>Prufrock </i>is dedicated.</div>
Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-10694379136841327232014-08-21T12:14:00.000-07:002014-08-21T12:24:05.354-07:00Review: There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmila Petrushevskaya<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnUeChq_D3jOMm-lxj_Z3ATRqnQn6YAopcdYvuuj0ztikJj1GBZ1zT7WIsBtT855vZi1uMpHXiZsDjaPkPwhcTToxkwi-eUNGjnCom4S192ezlYs1qP8-LWoGkE24wlW6dN13LFmB3Y2tY/s1600/16161253.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnUeChq_D3jOMm-lxj_Z3ATRqnQn6YAopcdYvuuj0ztikJj1GBZ1zT7WIsBtT855vZi1uMpHXiZsDjaPkPwhcTToxkwi-eUNGjnCom4S192ezlYs1qP8-LWoGkE24wlW6dN13LFmB3Y2tY/s1600/16161253.jpg" height="320" width="208" /></a></div>
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This is a book that's hard to pin down.<br />
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It's a collection of 17 stories by Russian writer Ludmila Petrushevskaya and it falls a little short what I would have wanted to see, as far as editing collections goes. We are given no useful information about these stories. We are told in the introduction that they span the whole of Petrushevskaya's life, but it's unclear if they're the only short stories she's written (they are not). There are no dates attached to any of the stories, beyond a statement in the introduction that the first of them was published in 1972 and the last in 2008. Why is this important, though? After all, we're only here for the literature, right? Well, it's important because the translator, Anna Summers, is the one who selected the stories and organized them in sections. The theme for each section is transparent and their interplay is sometimes clever. Nonetheless, there is a meta-story being told here and it's Summers' story, not Petrushevskaya's. Or perhaps it is Petrushevskaya's after all, and this is the most natural order for these stories, but we have no way of evaluating that. This lack of basic tools is even more frustrating when you realize that it's not something Google can fix for you if you don't speak Russian (and perhaps not even then). </div>
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All that being said, I don't dislike the story Summers is telling and there are nice touches running throughout. For example, in the very first story, "an unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave
their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover."
The night is unsatisfactory and, as the man leaves, "skipping off happily, unaware of the
catastrophe," she decides the affair is over. And yet, the very next
day, reminded of the humiliating loneliness of her divorced coworker, she
decides she loves him and "tears of joy welled up in her eyes." The very last story is that of an old, married woman who discovers her independence away from her family when she inherits an apartment. Her life thus reaches "its final, happy phase." I appreciated this contrast.</div>
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The juxtaposition in the book's title becomes clear from the very first story: these are
love stories, yes, but they're sad and cruel. Though perhaps those are not the right words. They require something more than Petrushevskaya's narrator allows for. "This is what happened." is the
sentence that opens the volume. "This is, in short, what happened" answers another opening sentence further on, from the story whose storyline gives the name for this volume (<i>Hallelujah, Family!</i>). That story is told in the form of a numbered list. There is a sort of ruthless narrative efficiency reminiscent of folk tales at work here. (I was at times, in fact, put in mind of Angela Carter's <i>Bloody Chamber</i> while reading this.) </div>
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There are a couple of exceptions to this style. The most striking one - and one of the best stories of the volume - is <i>Young Berries.</i> Its opening paragraph sets the narrative mechanism in place. "A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and then left. I was that girl." The story alternates between the first and third person as it unfolds and, partly as a result, it reads more personal than the rest. There is this wonderful moment when the narrator is going on in third person about how the girl kept losing her things: her handkerchief, her mittens, her scarf and one of her stockings. And then a parenthesis: "(One lies there by the bed; the other God knows where.)" and with this we know how small the gap between narrator and the events is, even in third person. The narrator is reliving the frustration of the child in the present. </div>
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This is also the only story, I think, that addresses communism directly. We're told explicitly that the system in the sanatorium is a reflection of Soviet society, and the bullying the girl initially receives is framed as the reaction of this communal society to anyone who stands out or doesn't conform to its rules. This alleviates a bit my annoyance with one aspect of Summers' introduction, which I felt tried too hard to push the "These stories take place in the grim, depressing world of Soviet Russia and <i>because </i>of it." interpretation. I think that for most of these stories this is not true. The setting is specific, but the actions and feelings that populate it are not unequivocally tied to it. If I believed in the Great Russian Soul, I'd say that what these stories show, if anything, is that whatever was up with Russians before communism continued to be the case during communism. As I don't believe in the Great Russian Soul, I will say that whatever is up with people in general continues to be up with people in Soviet Russia as well. And that's reason enough for the communist authorities not to like Petrushevskaya. You don't have to say "You caused the human condition." for the communists to hate you. It suffices to say "You haven't overcome the human condition." to be in trouble.</div>
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Then again, <i>Young Berries</i> is explicitly tied to its context and I would be tempted to read it as a sort of key to the rest of the collection (as the one where the author shows her hand, if you want), if only this volume had been put together by Petrushevskaya herself, so perhaps I'm pushing too hard on this. </div>
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<br />Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-41998466500850120382014-08-19T06:03:00.001-07:002014-08-19T06:03:47.719-07:00Listen to a Short History of Metaphor<div style="text-align: justify;">
Yesterday I <a href="http://www.zombiechekhov.com/2014/08/the-literary-hippopotamus-chase.html">talked a little about metaphors</a> and I quoted from Davidson's paper <i>What Metaphors Mean</i>. Davidson's paper was philosophy; it only used examples from literature to make a point about how language works. But reading about this topic yesterday I stumbled across <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w227c">this Radio 4 show</a> that discussed the evolution of metaphor in the history of literature. I thought some of you might enjoy it. Granted, it jumps around a lot and there is some conceptual sloppiness going on (some of the examples they discuss are not metaphors), but it's a pretty interesting conversation. They discuss Homer, Milton, Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, Dickens, Woolf and possibly a couple of other people I can't remember right now. </div>
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If you're in the UK, you can listen to the show <b><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w227c">here</a></b>. If you're not in the UK, there is a browser extension on Chrome called Hola that lets you pretend you are :)<br />
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-74920645431832956212014-08-18T07:59:00.001-07:002014-08-18T12:16:02.624-07:00The Literary Hippopotamus Chase<div style="text-align: justify;">
I wanted to sit down and write a short post about James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and a hippopotamus. Sounds easy enough, right? But one thing led to another and somehow, at the end of two hours, I found myself busy trying to find out who called Tolstoy a "great moralizing infant," all thoughts of Joyce or Eliot forgotten. It was time well spent, though, as I did read a ton of interesting stuff and I'm going to share some of it with you here (including, yes, who called Tolstoy such apt names). Here then is my wild hippopotamus chase across the internet and the reading list that resulted from it.
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1. Where it all started: <i>The Letters of T.S. Eliot</i>, vol. 1. </h2>
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This is the first item on my reading list, but also the only one that I wouldn't wholeheartedly recommend. I am 1/3 through this volume now and I am delighted and entertained by it. But if you don't already have an interest in modernism, literary history or snooping on dead people's letters, I think you can safely skip this one. We only need a footnote from it to get this literary hippopotamus chase started, and I'm going to quote it for you right here: </div>
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TSE used to say that the only evidence that James Joyce had read anything of his, was that one day in Paris the novelist told him that he had been, presumably with his children, to the Jardin des Plantes, and had paid his respects to 'your friend the hippopotamus'. </div>
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- <i>The Letters of TSE</i>, Faber & Faber 1988, page 213</div>
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Can you spell "adorable literary history anecdote"? I mean T.S. Eliot definitely keeping track of whether Joyce had read his stuff or not, Joyce with his kids visiting the menagerie, Joyce telling Eliot he saw his "friend the hippopotamus" - there is not one aspect of this that I don't find adorable. So of course I was then off to read Eliot's poem, <i>The Hippopotamus</i>. </div>
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2. You always need an anti-clerical poem in your life: Eliot's<i> The Hippopotamus </i></h2>
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It is fairly well known that Eliot got all weird and religious as he got older. This poem (which you can read at <a href="http://lit.genius.com/Ts-eliot-the-hippopotamus-annotated">Rap Genius</a>, along with some helpful annotations) is from before that period and fairly unfriendly to the Church, though, I think, not to religion as a whole. Eliot borrows the form of the poem (and its hero, the hippo) from a piece by Théophile<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Gautier.</div>
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<td valign="top" width="50%"><b>Gautier</b>:<br />
L’hippopotame au large ventre<br />
Habite aux Jungles de Java,<br />
Où grondent, au fond de chaque antre,<br />
Plus de monstres qu’on n’en rêva.<br />
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<td valign="top" width="50%"><b>Eliot</b>:<br />
The broad-backed hippopotamus<br />
Rests on his belly in the mud;<br />
Although he seems so firm to us<br />
He is merely flesh and blood. <br />
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But something very interesting happens as the poem goes along. Gautier had set up the image of the solid, peaceful and impervious hippopotamus in his poem to compare the man of firm belief - himself - to it in the last stanza ("I am like the hippopotamus:/ Swathed in my conviction,/ protected by
strong and inviolable armor,/ fearlessly I cross the desert."-
translation from Rap Genius). This is Théophile<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Gautier, by the way. He does kind of look like he'd laugh and stare you down while "bullets bounc[e] off his hide," doesn't he?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9MSX6y_7KksYU_g5eRLxeCFRmKj8gEriJ1EmFDtOokKySSFHo_l0sKLcy4I3a_yqxJmI5PO_GV8weYmzj_6Zai75KOK8s2g0zBegBsCIKut8xcCRfP6VdstjYMlEEgYDsp1a4DE0L8VhT/s1600/gautier.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9MSX6y_7KksYU_g5eRLxeCFRmKj8gEriJ1EmFDtOokKySSFHo_l0sKLcy4I3a_yqxJmI5PO_GV8weYmzj_6Zai75KOK8s2g0zBegBsCIKut8xcCRfP6VdstjYMlEEgYDsp1a4DE0L8VhT/s1600/gautier.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tell me he doesn't look like Hagrid.</td></tr>
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Now, Eliot's hippopotamus is also a symbol of man, but that's because he's vulnerable, helpless, prone to err, because "although he seems so firm to us/ He is merely flesh and blood." Who is strong, thick-skinned and set in their ways in Eliot's take? The Church. The poem is basically a list of comparisons between the hippo in his muddy swamp and the Church, and the hippo comes out looking vulnerable and human. It's so bad it's good. I mean, at one point Eliot manages to compare the Church's union with Christ to hippopotamuses mating, and that really tells you everything you need to know about this poem. At the end any pretense at subtler satire is dropped and we're just told directly that the hippo went to heaven and the Church to the swamp. </div>
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Apparently a lot of smart people hate this poem, but you shouldn't let that stop you. It's silly and outrageous and not very good in the end, but do read it for the "I can't believe he just went there." factor if nothing else. And if you find yourselves with a thirst for knowledge and a bit of time on your hands, here's a pretty good <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10131752.2011.617995">scholarly paper</a> on it as well. Google Scholar is your friend on the literary hippopotamus chase.<br />
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And while I was on Google Scholar trying to figure out, as per usual, what the heck Eliot's epigraphs mean (and, as per usual, they're actually pretty smart and important - read that paper!), I fell down another rabbit hole.<br />
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3. "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language": Davidson's <i>What Metaphors Mean </i></h2>
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In my mental categories, Donald Davidson inhabits two important sets: "great philosophers of language" and "people who <a href="http://baudelairies.tumblr.com/post/86899953949/all-reading-is-interpretation-and-all">wrote</a> cogently about James Joyce." So seeing that he referenced Eliot's <i>Hippopotamus</i> in <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342976">a paper about metaphor</a>, I jumped at the chance to read it. The bad news is that I am pretty sure he misread Eliot. There is just no way to make sense of the poem if you take the hippopotamus to stand for the Church and not as a point of contrast to it. The good news is that this is otherwise a great paper. The even better news is that it is written in a pretty clean, clear style, so you can follow it even if you haven't read this type of philosophy before and it has a good chance of whetting your appetite for more philosophy of language. </div>
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The problem here is basically how metaphors work. Do they work by conveying a second, metaphorical meaning besides their literal meaning? Like, for "all the world's a stage", the metaphorical meaning would be something like "the world is like a stage" or "the world shares features a, b, c, d with a stage." Davidson argues against this position. He argues that metaphors don't depend on a precise metaphorical meaning that is being conveyed, but on their capacity to trigger an act of interpretation in the listener. Taken at face value, a metaphor says something jarring (often because it's false or absurd), forcing the listener to notice something, to consider connections they wouldn't have otherwise.</div>
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What we attempt in "paraphrasing" a metaphor cannot be to give its meaning, for that lies on the surface; rather we attempt to evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention. (...) But there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor "means," we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention. How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.</blockquote>
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4. "Nature loved them, her darlings": Thomas Mann on Goethe and Tolstoy</h2>
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One of the examples Davidson uses in his paper is that of someone calling Tolstoy a "great moralizing infant." It's a striking phrase and it lends itself to pretty humorous footnotes (see below), but I was mostly curious to find out who the "famous critic" who came up with it was.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I do love philosophers sometimes</td></tr>
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The culprit turned out to be Thomas Mann in an essay from 1922 called <i>Tolstoy and Goethe</i>. I will probably return to this essay, as it is quite long and makes a number of interesting points, but for now I'll just quote the fragment where Davidson's example came from. For context: Mann draws an opposition between nature and spirit, and claims that Goethe and Tolstoy were similar in that they belonged to nature (nature "loved them and clung to them"), but both strove to break away from it "in the direction of spirit and morality." For Mann, Tolstoy's attitude towards music is symptomatic of this tendency:</div>
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When he met Berthold Auerbach in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself at the piano - that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside Tchaikovsky and listened to the composer's <i>Quartet in D major</i>, he began to sob at the <i>andante</i>, before everybody. <b>No, unmusical he was not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he was, felt that he ought not to return her love.</b></div>
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Oh, Tolstoy. </div>
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So there you have it, folks. This is where chasing a fictional hippopotamus led me this weekend. I hope you'll find something nice to read in this list as well.<br />
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-16945197206789874412014-08-16T08:06:00.000-07:002014-08-16T08:06:18.206-07:00Change Your Bookmarks and Let's Go!<div style="text-align: justify;">
As I mentioned before, I grew tired of our current name/URL and have been longing for a change. My co-bloggers agreed, but it took us a while to find the time and courage to do it. It's time now. This weekend I'll be tinkering and this site might go offline for a while. From Monday we'll have a spiffy new home at <b><a href="http://zombiechekhov.com/">zombiechekhov.com</a></b>. If you're wondering why Zombie Chekhov, there's a longer answer <a href="http://www.zombiechekhov.com/p/about.html">here</a>, but the short version is that it started as a playful riff on this quote from the diary of Katherine Mansfield, a quote we love and resonate with. </div>
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"Ach, Tchehov! why are you dead? Why can't I talk to you, in a big
darkish room, at late evening — where the light is green from the waving
trees outside? I'd like to write a series of Heavens; that would be one." </div>
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Under this new name, we'll still be writing about the same old things: books, writers, the occasional movie. If we occasionally do manage to conjure that "conversation in a big darkish room, at late evening" feel, we'll be happy.</div>
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<b>I want to keep reading your blog, what do I do? </b></h2>
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<li>Mom, you're so sweet. </li>
<li>Bookmark <a href="http://zombiechekhov.com/">zombiechekhov.com</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">If you subscribe to Lit. Hitchhiker via email, feed reader or the Google Followers gadget, I <i>think </i>I can redirect those, so you probably don't have to re-subscribe. But if you don't see any updates on Monday, that means I failed horribly. Check <a href="http://zombiechekhov.com/">zombiechekhov.com</a>. Give me a hug.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Follow us on twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/LitHitchhiker">@lithitchhiker</a>. We'll keep this handle for a while longer to minimize confusion.</li>
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We hope to see you on the other side. Zombie Chekhov will be waiting. (I am sorry. I will see myself out now.)</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The man.</td></tr>
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<br />Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-20991965481117780862014-08-12T04:48:00.000-07:002014-08-12T04:48:39.185-07:00A Handful of Books<div style="text-align: justify;">
When I was a teenager, I used to read blog posts by people in their 20s and 30s who complained about how they don't read anymore. Reader, I scoffed. I had a pretty clear list of things that might happen to other people as they grow up, but would never, could never happen to me. Soul-killing jobs. A passion for running, cooking or, if God was really unkind, both. No reading. My job is okay, my legs unexercised, my mind still in shock after it discovered one can actually overcook pasta last month. I don't read much. </div>
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Or perhaps I should say that I do read. It's only that books became what theater used to be for me. Something I enjoy but rarely go to, because it seems to require so much effort when so many alternative sources of entertainment can be had for no effort, and every time I do go, I tell myself, "This was worth the effort. I should do it more often." and then don't come back for another year or two. And so I've only seen a handful of plays in my life and read only a handful of books this year. It comes back to the same thing: easier entertainment to be had elsewhere. And yes, if we are to express everything in terms of entertainment and steer clear of categories like "learning," "self-improvement" or whatnot entirely, in most cases inferior entertainment too. I know that reading that Ishiguro novel would bring me more pleasure than refreshing tumblr for the 250th time today. That's not the point. </div>
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Book blogging is a double-edged sword here. Knowing that I will have to write about a book adds more to the cost of reading it, a cost that my mind is already reluctant to shoulder. And because I'm bad at focusing on two things at the same time, it also creates a break between books that allows my mind to wander off into the world of the refresh button again. "No more books for you until you write that post about <i>Their Eyes Are Watching God</i>!" usually leads to no books instead of leading to a post. (Witness the life of this blog so far.) But blogging can be a tool as well. I have taken to carving time for reading. I'm not at the stage where<a href="http://coreyrobin.com/2014/06/14/my-dirty-little-secret-i-ride-the-rails-to-read/"> I ride trains for it</a> (yet), but this summer I've started to develop little strategies to trick my mind into reading. I'm hoping to add bragging to that list. I'm proud of the few books I read so far, snatched from the jaws of the internet, so I will make a list of them here. I am not sure which one of these I am going to write more about. So far the best strategy has been <i>not</i> to stop reading, to go from book to book with no pause. I'll have to figure out where writing about things and remembering them fits in this scheme. </div>
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So here's my handful of books from August and July. </div>
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<b>Heinrich Böll, <i>Group Portrait with Lady</i></b>: I have to confess I am unclear on the concept of "midcentury novel," but if I were pressed this is the kind of book I would point towards, at least in Europe. The aftermath of war, just enough experimentalism, somber humor and a few moments that manage to be touching. It also made me want to read some Kafka.</div>
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<b>Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, </b><span class="st"><b><em>Réflexions sur la peine capitale (Reflections on the Death Sentence)</em></b>: This is great little volume that could use an English translation. It takes an abridged version of a text by Koestler, <i>Reflections on Hanging</i>, which he wrote during the campaign for the abolition of the death sentence in the UK, and adds to it a symmetrical text by Camus, <i>Reflections on the Guillotine</i>, arguing for abolition in France, and a more historically-oriented essay on the situation in France by Jean-Michel Bloch. I really liked this idea, bringing together similar statements by two very prominent intellectuals, and I wish I could read something about its impact. </span></div>
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<b>Ivan Goncharov, <i>Oblomov</i></b>: I didn't entirely forget that I was supposed to be reading Russian literature in 2014, you know. And I am glad that I didn't, because reading this book has been one of those "Where have you been all of my life?" moments one is sometimes lucky to get. I don't want to say much more about it here, but this book - especially in its first half - has made me so happy. <i>Where have you been all of my life.</i></div>
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<b>Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, <i>There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself</i>:</b> To keep with the Russians. Short stories about shabby lives. Weird, sad, claustrophobic. "Claustrophobic" is a word I got from the preface and realized it fits more than just the Soviet apartments it was used to describe there. It fits these stories. But some of them are touching and that is enough. </div>
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<b>Stephen Greenblatt, <i>The Swerve: How the World Became Modern</i></b>: The history in this is firmly on the side of caricature, but it makes for a compelling tale. I'll keep to the terms of Greenblatt's tale, exaggerated as they may be, to describe it: an Italian humanist ("book hunter") brings to light one of the few surviving manuscripts of Lucretius' Epicurean poem <i>De rerum natura</i> and unwittingly unleashes modernity upon the world (hedonism! atheism! atoms!). This is what I've always imagined I'd find in Umberto Eco's <i>The Name of the Rose</i> if I ever got around to reading it (monasteries! crazy monks! dangerous books!). I hope I was not wrong.</div>
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<b>Corey Robin, <i>Fear: The History of a Political Idea</i></b>: I've actually also read <i>The Reactionary Mind</i>, but I'm too lazy to add the cover for that as well. <i>Fear </i>etc. is part intellectual history in broad strokes: how fear and its relationship to the state are understood by Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Arendt; part argument for a specific understanding of fear. Two main conceptions of fear and its role emerge from the historical analysis: fear as a political tool used by the elites within the state to control the masses or fear as an instrument of the destruction of the self under tyranny and authoritarianism and the main thing the modern democratic state is built in opposition to. Robin argues for the former. I do have some instinctive mistrust of intellectual histories that come out so neat, but in this case I don't care. It's not because of my sympathy to its politics, but because this book does such a good job at making you want to read the authors it discusses that I'd still feel I was given a gift even if it turned out its interpretation of them was not the best.</div>
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<b>Javier Marías, <i>Dark Back of Time</i>:</b> What a rich and strange book. I think I need to read it again to be able to say anything coherent about it, but damn, this man can write almost hypnotic prose. You know I'd forgive almost anything to people who can write compelling long sentences. I almost want to say that there is something to his sentences that reminds me of Henry James. I'd read more by Marías. <b></b>I will read more Marías.</div>
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<b>Daphne Patai, Wilfrido Corral, <i>Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent</i></b>: Finally, this is what I'm currently reading. I've seen it mentioned somewhere recently and picked it up on a whim. Or because during the last year or so I must have heard the phrase "with the crash and burn of Theory" a dozen times from different people, and it made me curious. I've only read a few essays so far, learned a bunch of interesting things, but I've failed to get very invested in the topic, so perhaps I won't read all 700 pages of this, at least not linearly. </div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-76718349786917773702014-06-17T02:10:00.000-07:002014-06-17T02:14:26.004-07:00The Great Bloomsday Read-A-Long<div style="text-align: justify;">
Hello everybody! I know I have ignored blogging about <i>Ulysses</i>, but fear not: I'm still reading. I'm currently half-way through C<i>irce</i>, which I'm loving. I've been reading quietly and desperately trying to find something to say that would be insightful and interesting, but kept ending up feeling inadequate and not writing. But here we are: Bloomsday just passed and I'm reading <i>Ulysses</i> and I feel I should mark the day somehow (although it's not the first time Bloomsday catches me reading <i>Ulysses</i>, I was a few pages in this time last year).</div>
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So I'll address some of the points brought up by <a href="http://readingwhilefemale.blogspot.ro/">Emily</a> and <a href="http://chercafe.blogspot.ro/">Lori</a> during the weeks I was away, and bring up a topic of my own. </div>
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<b>Writing styles: your favorites, least favorites, how do they work, etc.</b></div>
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I like the writing in the first three episodes (when we're following Stephen) the most. I like how visual the writing is here (more so, I think, than any other episode until <i>Circe</i>)<i> </i>and I like the constant back and forth between Stephen being over-dramatic and Stephen mocking himself. </div>
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There are quite a few bits of these episodes that I remember off the top of my head, at least enough to search for them efficiently:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell
no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you
read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans the
shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking,
creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue
night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my
obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He
has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes.</blockquote>
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What doesn't exactly work for me is when Joyce is blatantly parodying popular writing styles of the era (like he does in the romance-y beginning of <i>Nausicaa</i>), though, to be honest, this is mostly because I'm never sure if I'm in on the joke.<br />
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<b>Favorite episodes</b><br />
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Much like Emily's, my mind was blown by <i>Oxen of the Sun</i>. I had a hard time at first making sense of what's going on (is someone really giving birth? why are the students there? why are the middle-aged men there? what's an objurgation? what's up with the bloody castle?!), but once I got over the stupor, I enjoyed everything about this episode. I like the fact that we have so many characters in one place, all talking over each other (<i>Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False
Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer</i>, te-hee), the way everyone's characterization is furthered by their participation in a discussion about birth, the medieval setting, the humor, and even the really hard-to-read part at the end, that's all drunken slang.<br />
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Finally, here's what I'd like to ask my fellow readers. <b>What's your favorite made-up-by-Joyce word so far? </b><br />
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Unfortunately, I can't retrieve my notes and highlights (my e-reader died a sudden death), but I remember that <i>nutquesting classmates</i> made me laugh out loud, and I will forever be using <i>objectquesting people.</i></div>
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Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-61624242076780381232014-05-22T06:33:00.000-07:002014-05-22T08:36:04.246-07:00Why We Need Diverse BooksImagine a triangle.<br />
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That's a right<i> </i>triangle. I didn't tell you to imagine a right triangle. I told you to imagine a triangle in general. </div>
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That's isosceles. You have to try again. We're not after particular angles or sides here. Try to be blind to those. Only see <i>triangles</i> as they are beyond these differences. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyifqa86MidWL4Bcyq3EOU_PG84vlhf2J14SghyphenhyphenhyWgtkr1OHyv7UczTxqAQzWtH27JhI5NN5KISpjVRl9asLN9lU0pmhAvNCHZqekU4g8G8kfHwEGKo33MzudyP_Sl46W9ePsxwb0dU11/s1600/scalene.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyifqa86MidWL4Bcyq3EOU_PG84vlhf2J14SghyphenhyphenhyWgtkr1OHyv7UczTxqAQzWtH27JhI5NN5KISpjVRl9asLN9lU0pmhAvNCHZqekU4g8G8kfHwEGKo33MzudyP_Sl46W9ePsxwb0dU11/s1600/scalene.gif" height="161" width="320" /></a></div>
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You being deliberately obtuse? </div>
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Now, if this were just satire of the real world instead of open criticism and I were writing for The Big City Review of Triangle Depictions I'd probably tell you, "Finally<i>, ecce triangulus</i>! This here is the naked
triangle condition that shines through in every triangle ever
drawn!" </div>
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But this here is just an equilateral triangle. It's not The Triangle, because well, there's no such thing. You cannot imagine an abstract triangle. You'll always imagine a particular one, be it isosceles or scalene. And when you draw a triangle, you'll draw a particular one and everything you want to show about triangles in general will have to be done through that particular shape. There's no escaping these differences. Representation - in your mind or on paper - is by definition of particulars. Keeping to equilateral triangles your whole life won't change that fact. It won't bring you closer to the ideal triangle. It will, if anything, distort and narrow your idea of what a triangle must be.<br />
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And if your mind cannot do more than this for 3 sticks put together, why would you think it can do it for a concept as complex as "human being"?</div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-83287240316948754242014-05-12T10:34:00.000-07:002014-05-12T11:57:04.094-07:00Ulysses Read-Along: First Impressions<div style="text-align: justify;">
For last week, <a href="http://readingwhilefemale.blogspot.com/2014/05/ulysses-read-along-first-impressions.html">Emily</a> suggested as a discussion topic <i>first impressions, </i>and I want to talk about how I felt about <i>Ulysses</i> the first time I picked it up and how that changed.</div>
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To be honest, the first time I tried reading <i>Ulysses</i>, in high school, I did not like it at all, and I only made it as far as <i>Aeolus</i> through sheer stubbornness.
I think my dislike was due to the fact that I never got immersed. I have one of those heavily-annotated editions, where the notes double the thickness of the volume. I figured the notes are there because they are important, because you cannot get everything out of the book without them. And I did want to get everything out of it. So I thought I should read all the notes; not as I encountered them, but to have a master check-up at least every few pages. Of course, then I would need to re-read the text with the notes in mind. Except I wouldn't remember half the explanations (many of which didn't mean anything without an even more detailed context of 1904 Dublin), and I would have to do this a couple of times more. I could appreciate how smart some of the connections were, or how elegantly Joyce could reference in a phrase a story that took a page of explanations in the notes, but re-reading something you've just
read isn't very fun. So my first impression of <i>Ulysses </i>was that it's a clever book, but also i) very boring, and ii) pointless to read since I will never get all of it. </div>
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I was about to make the same mistake when I started again, but then <i>a birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl</i>... happened and it was so beautiful and I just wanted to read on and know the story. I didn't stop again until <i>Proteus</i>, where I found it fascinating, rather than frustrating, to read up on Aristotle in order to be able to follow Stephen's thoughts. Now I make notes of things that I don't get but make me curious, and I try to keep the balance between looking up details and staying with the book. And of course I will not get everything out of it, but that's ok.</div>
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This time around, I actually have impressions about characters and situations and language, and not only about <i>the book</i>. I find Stephen adorably obnoxious, I think Buck Mulligan is funny but I empathize with Stephen's cringing around him, and I like Bloom a lot. I also have a very long, very fast-growing, list of phrases and sentences that I love. </div>
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Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-9382813275884378352014-05-02T15:56:00.000-07:002014-05-02T16:09:03.100-07:00A Bloomsday Read-Along<div style="text-align: justify;">
Emily from <a href="http://readingwhilefemale.blogspot.com/">Song of My Shelf</a> and Lori from <a href="http://chercafe.blogspot.ro/">The Coffee Girl</a> are hosting a read-along of <i>Ulysses</i>. When I learned it was going to be very laid-back, I decided it was the thing for me. So I'm participating in The Great Bloomsday Read-Along. Here are my answers to the start-up questionnaire.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">1. Introduce yourself.</span><span style="background-color: white;"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Hi, I'm Irina, though I usually go by Iris around here. I'm a Physics Master's student whose favorite activities include reading, power-walking (not good for your knees, I know), and taking random naps (not good for your productivity, I know). My taste in books is erratic, and so is my reading schedule. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">2. Have you read </span><i>Ulysses</i><span style="background-color: white;"> before? Any other Joyce? Any attempts?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">I've read </span><i>Dubliners</i><span style="background-color: white;"> and </span><i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i><span style="background-color: white;">. Attempted </span><i>Ulysses</i><span style="background-color: white;"> half-heartedly in high-school, and again with more enthusiasm last summer. I didn't get halfway through the book on any of these attempts. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">3. Are you feeling nauseous?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">Does anyone even need to ask?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">4. Why are you doing this?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">I loved what I read of </span><i>Ulysses</i><span style="background-color: white;"> last summer. Besides, I have the time for this now, I don't know when that will be the case again. I also want to participate in the blogging world more, and have some incentive to be more organized.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">5. Are you planning to use any guides or resources?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">I... haven't figured this out yet. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">6. Do you have a reading strategy? Are you sticking to a schedule</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Whatever strategy I choose, it will turn into "over-worrying" and "posting at the last possible minute", so I decided to at least avoid worrying about a strategy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">7. What are you most excited about?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">A few beautiful turns of phrase I remember from my previous attempts, plus looking up and figuring out more of the philosophy references. Also, maybe I can get Claudia to make me a </span><a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2013/02/james-joyces-ulysses-personal-odyssey.html">"I finished <i>Ulysses</i>" badge</a><span style="background-color: white;">, if all goes well.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">8. What are you most scared of?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Not having anything to say other than "I like this" or "I don't like this".</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">9. If this is your first time, what is your impression of the novel going into it?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">I have the vague idea that I will enjoy it as a whole, no matter how difficult the process will be, or how many "I don't get any of this what is wrong with me stab me now" moments I will have. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">10. Have you read </span><i>The Odyssey</i><span style="background-color: white;"> or seen </span><i>O Brother, Where Art Thou</i><span style="background-color: white;">? before?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">I read </span><i>The Odyssey</i><span style="background-color: white;">, but that was quite a long time ago.</span></div>
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Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-62340989146225395032014-05-01T04:45:00.001-07:002014-05-12T13:59:37.712-07:00Review: The Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH4DfqkiYA9TzO22AqhXBqSGzondFLFK90lXhijj4q8u1Wi4x9yRfPRtmrv5ivXjAhaeAPPfHk_U5I5gWrpkxFla72dP1ibNesWA125HvcqEn4789NAOI0kKaYeFj4_WCqs251lXWt7E7l/s1600/bromeliad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH4DfqkiYA9TzO22AqhXBqSGzondFLFK90lXhijj4q8u1Wi4x9yRfPRtmrv5ivXjAhaeAPPfHk_U5I5gWrpkxFla72dP1ibNesWA125HvcqEn4789NAOI0kKaYeFj4_WCqs251lXWt7E7l/s1600/bromeliad.jpg" height="320" width="206" /></a>The title of this post is a lie: I don't actually want to review Pratchett's <i>The Bromeliad Trilogy</i> (also known as <i>The Nome Trilogy</i>), but rather to gush over how great it is and to tell you all how it blew my mind when I was about 10.<br />
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I love this series the absurdly protective way reserved for childhood classics and I credit it with a big part of my interest in social change and activism. (I also spend a lot of energy aggressively trying to get all my friends to read it; and I would like to take the opportunity to ask you all to join the campaign for Claudia's education NOW). </div>
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The Nome Trilogy consists, unsurprisingly, of three books (<i>Truckers, Diggers, Wings)</i>,<i> </i>and is, also unsurprisingly, about Nomes. Nomes are tiny people, about 10 cm high, who live on Earth unnoticed by humans. In <i>Truckers</i>, a group of outdoor Nomes, lead by Masklin and Grimma, find their way to Arnold Bros. (est 1905), a department store. There they meet the inside Nomes, who have lived under the floors of the store for generations and who don't react well to the unfamiliar (most inside Nomes hold the religious belief that ‘The Store’ contains 'All Things Under One Roof', and so there can be no “outside”, while the more scientifically inclined have devised the theory that outside Nomes would have pointy heads, as this shape is more fit for unpredictable weather). The outside Nomes have owned, since times immemorial, The Thing, a mostly useless metal cube. In the presence of the electricity in the store, The Thing powers up, revealing that it's the board computer of the ship that brought the Nomes to Earth, long ago. When they learn that the store is about to be demolished, the Nomes have to work together, navigating religious systems and social norms, as well as personal antipathies. They manage to escape the store in a truck, and find a new home at an abandoned quarry. </div>
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In <i>Diggers</i>, the Nomes have more or less adjusted to life in The Quarry, but they are continuously threatened by human presence. A religious sign prompts Masklin, Gurder (a religious leader), and Angalo (a prodigy engineer) to leave the quarry, going out to the investigate a nearby airport, taking the Thing with them. In their absence, those left behind have to deal with a new threat: the quarry is to be reopened. Grimma leads the defense efforts, sabotaging equipment, locking up the quarry, and even attempting to communicate with humans. In the end, the Nomes are driven out again, escaping on an excavator. </div>
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<i>Wings</i> is the story of Masklin's, Gurder's and Angalo's journey. The Thing convinces them that they should take it to a satellite launch, where it can attempt to contact the ship. The Nomes end up in Florida, where they meet other tribes of Nomes and realize there must be more to the Nomanity than they thought. Humans also have to deal with the existence of Nomes, as their spaceship lands. The Nomes use the ship to save the ones that are escaping the quarry, then leave Earth. But they know they must return, for all the other Nomes, as well as for humans, who might be capable of intelligent communication. </div>
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The title of the series comes from bromeliads, a type of tropical plant with big flowers. The rainwater pools that form in the central cup of the flowers are home to some species of frogs, who live their entire lives there, unaware that there's more to the world. Grimma learns this fact in a book, and uses it as a metaphor when refusing Masklin's offer to “settle down” with him, in <i>Diggers</i>. The metaphor is then picked up by the narrator as a parallel for living under floors and space exploration. (Ok, that's not how bromeliads actually work, they don't have a closed flower, and the poison-arrow frogs only spend the first part of their lives between the petals, but let's just go with it).</div>
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By the time I read this trilogy, I had read a bunch of children's books and a few grown-up ones. I was familiar from grown-up books with the idea that sometimes in stories you don't have a clear-cut villain, but a diffuse conflict. And that's the case with TBT. Humans don't actively want to hurt the nomes, they just sort of don't notice them. The abbot doesn't set out to hurt Grimma by preventing her to read (because her womanly brain may not be able to take it), he and the others are enforcing the norms they have inherited. And it's perfectly clear that Grimma wants to read, that the Nomes want to live, and that these are legitimate desires. The tension is ingrained in the structure of the world and arises from the conflict between the institutions and the individuals. This wasn't entirely novel to me as a conflict. What was novel was the fact that the characters unequivocally triumph over the structures: the narrative rewards Grimma's curiosity about the world with a SPACESHIP. Exposed to new religions and lifestyles, Gurder, the fervent worshiper and religious authority of the Nomanity, neither doubles-down nor disintegrates in despair, but becomes an agnostic humanist (nomeist if you will) and sets out to do community building work. Dorcas gets to tinker away with Jekub and his enthusiasm for improving Nomes' lives with technology does actually improve nomes' lives.</div>
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I knew, as a kid, that there are stupid, wrong things in the world that are nevertheless respected; that people argue over religious dogma, that there were things girls weren't allowed to do, and that in different parts of the world the rules were different but just as arbitrary. But I was pretty floored by the idea that stupid wrong things can be changed. And especially by the idea that the process of change can make such a compelling story.</div>
Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-35608095677589533022014-04-30T11:25:00.001-07:002014-04-30T11:25:47.611-07:00Rainer Maria Rilke and A Regrettable Abundance of Consonants <div style="text-align: justify;">
You know how they say that the hardest thing about blogging is what to say when you come back after a long absence? Well, I just tried to refute that theory by staring at the screen for the past twenty minutes, trying to come up with a properly chatty intro. So okay, perhaps it's not the <i>most </i>difficult thing about blogging (that title should probably go to updating regularly, i.e. the thing that brought us here in the first place), but it's up there. Top three or so. </div>
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So lacking a properly chatty intro, I then thought I should tell you about why we were gone for so long. And I wish we had a good reason, but the truth is that when it's been a while since you blogged, it's going to be a while longer. Once it gets going, not-blogging is mostly a self-sustaining process. (At least in our experience it is.) So there was that, and also the fact that I started to really resent our name/URL and its entirely-too-many consonants awkwardly broken by I's. I'd been meh about it for a while, but about a month ago it finally got to the point where I decided we need a new name if we're ever to start blogging again. Cue brainstorming. Cue almost naming our blog "A Different Kind of Failure" for a. the T.S Eliot reference and b. the ability to utter endless variations of "During the day I write for my thesis. In the evenings I write for A Different<i> </i>Kind of Failure." In the end, we did find what we think is a good name (although my heart will always be with A Different Kind of Failure). We're going to have to be Lit. Hitchhiker for a while longer, as I figure out the logistics of transferring to a new domain, but after that, it's shiny new name time! </div>
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And in order not to make this a purely State of the Blog kind of post, I decided to also share a poem I've been fairly obsessed with for... uh, 6 months now, give or take? Just in case you don't know it (and are ready to be punched in the gut by its brilliance) and also because I really wanted to have it somewhere on the blog. It's Rilke's <i>Archaic Torso of Apollo</i>, in the translation of Stephen Mitchell. Fretting about translations and where they differ is one of my favorite pastimes, but in this case I'll just go with the first version of this poem I read. I feel a sort of weird loyalty towards it for being the one that first made an impression on me. You can find the German original, together with a different translation, <a href="http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/gr/Rilke.html">here</a>. And, at the height of my obsession, I've also found <a href="http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/triggs/Artpoetry.html">this article</a> and <a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/archaic-torso-apollo">the discussion here</a> pretty useful.</div>
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<b>Archaic Torso of Apollo</b></div>
<br />We cannot know his legendary head<br />with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso<br />is still suffused with brilliance from inside,<br />like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,<br /><br />gleams in all its power. Otherwise<br />the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could<br />a smile run through the placid hips and thighs<br />to that dark center where procreation flared.<br /><br />Otherwise this stone would seem defaced<br />beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders<br />and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:<br /><br />would not, from all the borders of itself,<br />burst like a star: for here there is no place<br />that does not see you. You must change your life. <br /><div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-28630382209672730422014-01-05T06:05:00.000-08:002014-01-05T06:05:31.787-08:00A Resolution <div style="text-align: justify;">
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Warning: this week's Feminist Sunday post will be 2/3 pure, undiluted rant and 1/3 a New Year's resolution I can get behind. It started with <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2014_01.php#020468">a post</a> I read earlier this week on Blog of a Bookslut. Jessa Crispin talks about how she's never read some of the so-called great male authors:</div>
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It's not like if you decide not to read any John Updike, because it just sounds like being trapped in a car with a narcissist with his dick out, it's not like you run out of books. For a while I thought I should read everything, back when I was trying to be a book critic. So I read that dreadful Franzen, I read that dreadful Messud. I had opinions about Dale Peck reviews! God help me, why did I do that. And then I remembered again, that one could decide not to read things. (...) And I'm beginning to think that this stance of non-participation might be a more important one than, you know, this bores me I don't want to read it.</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>That post is written from the perspective of a critic/writer, but it resonated quite strongly with me, as a reader. I've come to a point where I feel I waste way too much energy reading and then hating on certain kinds of books, mostly books that belong to the "self-indulgent male narrator" genre. 2013 was particularly bad in this regard: this
is the year when I read both <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2013/11/review-factotum-by-charles-bukowski.html">Bukowski </a>and <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2014/01/a-gripe-about-ernesto-sabatos-tunnel.html">Sabato</a>. And it’s not like I picked
them up randomly in a bookstore, having no clue what I’m going to find inside.
I knew pretty well what to expect from both, and yet I subjected myself
to them. I made myself go through hundreds of pages of boring narcissism, unengaging
plotlines, and misogynistic drivel, simply because I thought that was something
I needed to do in order to be able to participate in the conversation about
them. I felt like a fraud dismissing Bukowski as “a slightly more successful Tucker
Max” having read just a handful of short-stories; I felt it would be a moral
and intellectual failure to throw Sabato across the room when his narrator
opened with something along the lines of “I killed a woman because I couldn’t possess
her fully and I know you won’t understand, you limited reader, but I am compelled to tell you all about it anyway.” And, before that, there were Hemingway,
and Miller, and Vonnegut. I read them all because, well, isn’t that what you’re supposed
to do as a reader? Read the famous important writers, not cheat on high school
reading, not abandon books that are deemed important?</div>
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The question that I should have asked myself is “deemed important by whom?” I used
to accept the canon as the best that humanity has to offer, because I assumed that
all of humanity contributed to its selection. The stories that I like to read
are the ones that feel universal (one of my favorite books is <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>, and the reason I love it so much is that the circumstances of late 19th
century England seem incidental to Isabel Archer’s characterization; even the
circumstances of her being a woman seem inconsequential to her inner life), and I used to think that <i>the canon </i>simply
collects the authors who have achieved this universality. But this, of course, cannot
be true. The criteria for calling a book a "classic," the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow literature, the curricula,
weren’t formed in an unhistorical frictionless vacuum. They were formed
within and together with institutions; the books that are compulsory reading were chosen by the same authorities that devised racist admission criteria and sexist salary distribution. If we accept that academia and journalism
are biased, we have to accept that the
literary canon reflects those biases.<br />
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But even in circles (academic or not) where this is self-obvious, the admission is usually followed by attempts to broaden, finding things to read <i>besides</i> the canon, not <i>instead</i> of it. I am very grateful that these discussions happen at all (I'm glad I've discovered many new, exciting books in unexpected places, since I've been around as part of the internet community of readers). But this doesn't entirely solve my problem: the urge to read and engage with self-indulgent male narrators is still there. Even if criticizing and pointing out problematic aspects is useful in itself, at the end of the day, this means a lot of time and energy spent on books that aren't worth it. And it means subjecting myself to narratives that both capitalize on and inform the structures that oppress me, straight from the mouth of the oppressor.<br />
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Stepping out of your comfort zone, discovering new books and authors, and filling out the gaps are important goals. But I may never get to achieve them unless I stop wasting time and energy. This is why my resolution for 2014 isn't about what books I want to read, but about books I want to avoid. It doesn't matter if I'll miss out on a few good pages. In 2014, if I pick up a book and it starts
along the lines of “I killed a woman because I couldn’t possess her fully...”, I will try to remind myself that it's ok to throw it hard against the wall. Unless
it’s on my Kindle. Then I’ll simply delete it. I love my Kindle.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0gWd0cLl1MIr3syXf2dzfRTX2gzSNK1GsWZzpNi97sN35FTUMPxZLCBPlb29V5RtyWqkksTJEGu87JF9DUUMd-VfutOqKndqNQtqPFCTqBrpEa9CkchY-98bN-NqmshKq7gqlW0CqUvjH/s1600/feministsundays3-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0gWd0cLl1MIr3syXf2dzfRTX2gzSNK1GsWZzpNi97sN35FTUMPxZLCBPlb29V5RtyWqkksTJEGu87JF9DUUMd-VfutOqKndqNQtqPFCTqBrpEa9CkchY-98bN-NqmshKq7gqlW0CqUvjH/s200/feministsundays3-001.jpg" width="168" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;">"Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme created at Books and Reviews. The aim is simply to have a place and a time to talk about feminism and women’s issues. This is a place of tolerance, creativity, discussion, criticism and praise. Remember to keep in mind that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, although healthy discussion is encouraged." </span>
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You can read the guidelines <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/an-update-on-feminist-sundays/">here </a>or check out what other people wrote this week <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/feminist-sundays-6/">here</a>. </div>
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Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-11972185622318463402014-01-04T05:44:00.000-08:002014-01-04T05:44:25.268-08:00Music and The Other City <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Because <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2014/01/review-other-city-by-michal-ajvaz.html">my review</a> for <i>The Other City</i> turned out so long, I decided to leave out one clever detail from the book that I initially wanted to discuss. But since it's my blog and since I had the inspiration to institute the <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/p/footnotes-reviews.html">footnotes & reviews system</a> for situations such as this, there's nothing stopping me from discussing it separately. So here it is. </div>
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It's about music. We discussed previously about how the other city has a weird language that has the same words like ours but seems to be incomprehensible gibberish otherwise. As you read, the temptation to find hidden meanings in every sentence is very strong. The narrator describes this impulse so well when he says</div>
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I had encountered the words and gestures of the inhabitants of the other city, the screeches of its creatures, and the stiff poses of its statues like a hieroglyphic text,<b> whose shapes from time to time have been penetratingly and almost painfully cut through by the incandescent discharge of unifying meaning, but every time it had been extinguished before I managed to grasp it. </b></div>
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But it's not only the language that is obscure. Music itself is different in the other city. (Does music qualify as a language? I'm not sure.) When the narrator first hears it, at the end of a religious service in a subterranean church of the other city, he describes it as "a monotonous tinkling" that "maybe (...) was supposed to be music." And then, when people sing, this is what it sounds like to him, not so much music as noise: </div>
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The worshipers (...) started to sing a long drawn-out wordless melody in which I could detect no rhythm or system, and which most resembled the random sounds of wind shaking tin window seals on winter evenings. I listened to the strange song and waited to see if anything else would happen, but there was simply the sound of that formless singing, just unending intonements of a single note, after which the melody would abruptly rise or fall and remain fixed once more into a long single note. The singing was putting me to sleep (...). </div>
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In the absence of a rhythm or system, this is barely recognizable as music. This is at the end of chapter 3. At the end of chapter 5, after hearing some stories about the other city and chasing the marble streetcar that takes people away from the normal world, the narrator is in a garden. He hears a "magical music to which [he] felt irresistibly drawn." He follows it and discovers that what he took to be liturgical singing was actually a piece of tin roof shaken by the wind. Like the music in the subterranean church, the sound is soporific.</div>
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What is so nice about these two episodes is how they illustrate the constant search for meaning and structure, applied even to music. Seeing that the music in the garden was only his mind attributing intentionality where there was none should make the narrator doubt that there is any meaning to be found in the other city as well. (It doesn't.) But seeing how this sound was very similar to the one he heard in the church and yet this time he immediately recognized it as music instead of random noise, how his mind imposed an intentional pattern on nature on the basis of a prior experience, should perhaps make us, readers, wonder about the source of all demarcations like those between language and nonsense, music and noise. Is familiarity the only difference between what we are willing to accept as music and what we deem to be noise? </div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-16359791690848440572014-01-03T06:07:00.000-08:002014-01-03T06:21:17.360-08:00Review: The Other City by Michal Ajvaz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Fantasy is a place where it rains." This is how Italo Calvino begins what would have been one of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, with a riff on a line from Dante’s <i>Purgatory</i>. In Michal Ajvaz’s world, fantasy is a place where it snows. Prague in winter is a space of pure possibility. It snows heavily from the very first chapter – the one where our hero and narrator finds a mysterious book on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop. The snow and darkness outside contrast with the coziness of the interior: warm, quiet, smelling pleasantly of old books. But the contrast is deceptive. The books inside are described as if alive: “pages rustled as they were turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep,” when one book is withdrawn from the shelves the others “draw breath” and fill the space. The snow outside seems to have a life of its own as well; it arranges itself in “snowy chimeras” that hypnotize and entice the narrator. It’s part of what makes him buy a book written in a strange alphabet, part of why he decides to pursue the source of the mysterious script. As he says:<br />
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(...) the snow lying everywhere is almost already the beginning of the
unreal. It too urges us to leave: we are bound to find in it footprints
of chimerical beings, footsteps that will lead us to secret lairs in the
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In this novel's world, the decision to buy a strange book is not a minor one. It is a step towards crossing the frontiers of our ordinary, normal, logical lives, and it is described as such from the start:<br />
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Like everyone, I had, on many previous occasions, ignored a half-open door leading elsewhere - in the chilly passages of strange houses, in backyards, on the outskirts of towns. The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn't run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest. Our gestures would seem to rise out of an entity that also encompasses these concealed spaces, and in an odd way they reveal their shadowy existence, although we are unaware of the roar of waves and shrieks of animals - the disquieting accompaniment to our words (and possibly their secret birthplace); we are unaware of the glittering jewels in the unknown world of nooks and crannies; usually we don't stray off the path even once in our lifetime. </div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
What would one find straying off the path? Our narrator finds another city, a city whose life seems to run parallel to Prague's. Some of its inhabitants are citizens of Prague by day, citizens of the other city by night. Others were citizens of Prague until they stepped onto a green marble streetcar one day and left the normal world entirely. They all seem to worship a Christ-like figure, Dargoos, a man killed by a tiger. All this we piece together from the narrator's forays into the other city. He becomes obsessed with getting to the center of the city, with unraveling its mystery. He sneaks into ceremonies, sermons and lectures. They are all incomprehensible, shot through with absurdity. Every piece of discourse from the other city is a plunge into the fantastic, the absurd, the surreal for both the narrator and the novel as a whole.<br />
<br />
One – perhaps paradoxical – effect of this strategy is that the surreal aspects are somewhat tamed by mediation. The frame of the book is the real world, from which the narrator gradually separates himself in order to explore the unreal. At first, all the meaningless sentences are confined to quoted discourses from the other world. It's never the narrator who tells you that pianos turned into crabs or that the Great Battle in the Bedrooms was an important historical event; it's always someone from (or connected to) the other city. The narrator's merit is to accept all this with an uncanny lack of surprise or fear, which adds to the strange atmosphere: he is an almost transparent medium through which we can experience this unusual world.<br />
<br />
But as the book progresses and the narrator gets more and more immersed into the other city, some of these absurdities become literal reality for him. He gets to experience surrealism in the flesh and he accepts it with the same calm he accepted discourses about it. He has his own battle in the bedrooms, in the sheets of an inexplicably giant bed. The books that seemed to be alive in the first chapters turn into a literal, dangerous jungle, which he decides to brave in order to find the center of the other city. This episode is one of the most visually-striking in a book that is full of inventive and stunning images, from glass statues filled with water and schools of fish, to waves lapping at
the carpet in a room, and ships sailing through the snowy streets of Prague. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This rampant life of the library - the rotting and twisting of shelves, the swelling of books, the aggressive burgeoning of plants, the ripening and rotting of fruit, the pervasion of creatures - meant that the bookcases expanded and became bloated with the constant turmoil; the aisles between them became narrower; I was obliged to squeeze through gulches and cut myself a path through overgrown books with the machete. </div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This is, then, a book that allows you to sink into its strangeness slowly before it envelops you entirely. But I think that's partly because that strangeness is <i>instrumental</i>. It's never about the images themselves, striking though they are. This is not really a "strange and lovely hymn to Prague," as the blurb describes it. It is a philosophical novel using strangeness to make its point. You are dropped into surrealism gradually, but into philosophical reflection suddenly and from the first pages. That second passage I quoted is a good sample. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
What are the philosophical ideas behind this, then? It's always dangerous to offer the Ultimate Philosophical Interpretation to a piece of literature, but here is one way of looking at it, pieced together from the numerous openly philosophical passages in the novel. A point the narrator makes over and over again, more openly as the book progresses, is how his – and by extension, ours – is a world that lost its meaning, a world "whose events, in which the sap of meaning has dried up, have gradually been changing into a meaningless ritual." At the same time, we are prisoners in this world, because of our incapacity to look beyond it.</div>
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</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
(...) we have excised heights from our space just as we have the dark outskirts. What do we know about the mysterious landscapes of facades that sail above our heads like miraculous islands? If a city of gold, with temples and palaces growing on the roofs, who would notice? Maybe a child who has not yet entered the narrow passage of the meaningful, which we stagger along in pursuit of our images, or someone defeated, who has come out of it because his final goal, whose attraction was enhanced by this passage, has collapsed: maybe the person who strolls along without any goal in the glowing new space opened up by the final defeat will suddenly notice that the facades of houses are pages of books on which are written the messages of the departed gods that we vainly sought throughout our lives. </div>
</blockquote>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The narrator, who tells us so little about himself, says in the very first chapter that his "failures of recent years" are what made him less afraid of crossing the frontier. So he is the defeated person, ready to step outside "the narrow passage of the meaningful." But is it really possible to do so? There is a difference between the vague, slightly corny message "There are miracles everywhere, if only we remembered to look." and the possibility of there being a world completely, radically different from our own. The other city is an example of such a world, and it is not without significance that our narrator encounters so many difficulties in getting to the center of this city, in penetrating the mystery. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Can we ever know a world <i>completely </i>different from our own? Nothing in it would make sense, because nothing in it would follow the rules of our language, which are the structure of our reality. Everything in that world that we managed to understand by our rules, to translate in our terms is just part of our world. The rest, like everything the<i> other citi</i>zens say, is nonsense. We cannot, with the tools of our world, grasp a different world. One of the characters says this directly: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Don't concern yourself with weird books that remind you of the
frontiers of our world. They can't lead you out of it, they can only eat
away at its structure from within. The frontier of our world is a line
with only one side. There is no path from the inside out, nor can there
be.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
That's basically early Wittgenstein. But of course the narrator ignores this advice. What he hopes to find is that his city and the other city, his language and the other language, have a common origin. His quest for the center of the other city is actually a quest for a new center for his own world. He is after something that would transcend his world and return meaning to it. And what he is told, again and again, is that he has to forget about the center. One character tells him that "by searching for the center you move further away from it," because the center is everywhere. Another agrees with him that the other city is the secret center
of this world, but tells him that the other city also has a center, and
that center also has a center. It's centers all the way down, and one
cannot hope to ever get to the final center. Finally, at the end of his journey through the library-jungle, the narrator is told by yet another character that there is no final center to get at: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It is not all a question of the center being remote and mediated in too complicated a fashion, nor of the original law being irreparably distorted by countless translations of translations like a game of Chinese whispers, nor yet of the god's face being hidden behind thousands of masks. The curious secret is that there exists no final center, that no face is hidden behind the masks, there is no original word in the game of whispers, no originals of the translations. (...) All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
All of these are perspectives of individual characters. None of them are The Truth. But what the narrator does in the final chapter seems to follow the implications of that last quote. He accepts the idea that his attempt to impose meaning on the other city was what kept him forever on its margins. He was carrying his own world with him and it is only by giving it up, by giving up meaning, by giving up goals, that he can reach it. (Though, of course, once he gives up having a goal, he may reach the city or not, it doesn't matter anymore.) There are no more shapes or attempts at meaning projected by him mind onto the surrounding world. No more footprints of chimerical beings. No more of this book, which belongs to this world and stops at its frontiers. His final journey to the other city is over "untrodden white snow."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<h2>
The Bottom Line </h2>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Should you read this book? Yes, but do it twice. The least you'll get out of it is an encounter with two fascinating cities. The glimpses we get of Prague make it sound quite lovely in its own right, and the superimposed world of the other city is delightful and unexpected at every turn. These are the kind of beautiful fantastical images that will stick with you. But there might be more waiting for you – you might agree to my attempt at an interpretation above or find your own theory as to what's going on. Despite what I believe to be its overarching message, I don't really think embracing the idea that the book in itself is meaningless is the way to go, but even if you do that, you'll be enriched by reading it. And if I haven't convinced you, go read <a href="http://readingwhilefemale.blogspot.com/2012/02/other-city-by-michal-ajvaz.html">Emily's review</a>. She recommended this book and she does have a way of presenting books that makes you want to read them.<br />
<br />
PS: If you liked the quotes here and want to find more, I transcribed a bunch of them on <a href="http://baudelairies.tumblr.com/">my tumblr</a>.</div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-16013188290190984302014-01-02T04:33:00.002-08:002014-01-02T04:33:13.188-08:00A Gripe about Ernesto Sabato's The Tunnel <div style="text-align: justify;">
<div>
Hello, everyone! I'm delighted to see you around in a new year, and I hope it will be a good one for you (and me as well)! I'd like to be able to say I have big plans for 2014, but right now my great ambition is to choose a good book to start my year with. I finished 2013 on a not-so-great note, with Sabato's <i>The Tunnel,</i> and I want to get the bad taste out of my mouth as soon as possible.</div>
<br />
I read <i>The Tunnel</i> because it’s one of those books that are inescapable in my social circle. The author, Ernesto Sabato, used to be a physicist, and a rather successful one at that. He got a PhD in Theoretical Physics, a fellowship at the Marie Curie Institute, a position at MIT, the works. Then he quit and started writing and became successful as a writer, providing inspiration and hope for physics students with a taste in books and secret literary ambitions everywhere.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6_MmZN9JZE0318zAVqDLCN8jBx4MDLY0mMSCA4aWGcxK91vz-2gHE8aps1C2hXZ5hqkEV4TyCOsO_RvUL9Bp_YaHQ9TIKNJDSB7SRandSk6-3eTNl_YAQCoIvCrZ1i9BVg8Scu4U1CEIj/s1600/638px-Ernesto_Sabato_circa_1972.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6_MmZN9JZE0318zAVqDLCN8jBx4MDLY0mMSCA4aWGcxK91vz-2gHE8aps1C2hXZ5hqkEV4TyCOsO_RvUL9Bp_YaHQ9TIKNJDSB7SRandSk6-3eTNl_YAQCoIvCrZ1i9BVg8Scu4U1CEIj/s320/638px-Ernesto_Sabato_circa_1972.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="text-align: justify;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-align: justify;">So I read </span><i style="text-align: justify;">The Tunnel</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> fully expecting it to blow my mind. That didn’t happen: I think it’s a bad book and I also didn’t enjoy reading it. I will get around to reviewing it sometime soon, hopefully. In the meantime, I want to use this footnote to elaborate on the “not enjoying reading it” part. </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
I realize that compartmentalizing my criticism like this may sound weird, since the intellectual assessment I make of a book and the experience of reading it can never be completely different things. But the peculiar thing about reading <i>The Tunnel</i> is that, even though I realized within the first few pages that I was not going to enjoy it, I had high hopes until the very end that it would turn out to be a good book. It had such good recommendations from people I trust (and I so wanted to like the writer) that I was sure there will be a great pay-off. I was <i>waiting for</i>, not <i>hoping for</i>, the twist or revelation that would illuminate the subject matter in an original way, making the obnoxiousness I was putting up with worth it. So now that I know there is no pay-off, I am amazed I managed to stand the torturously bad writing for so long, and I need to vent.</div>
<div>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>I want to focus on a few passages from a scene that I see as the lowest point of the book, writing-wise. You don’t really need to know anything about the story to see why this scene is bad, but I will give a little context. The narrator is “<i>Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed María Iribarne</i>.” This is not a spoiler, this is how he introduces himself. He sees María at one of his exhibitions, where she is the only visitor that pays attention to a small scene (a woman at a window) that is very important to him but goes unnoticed by everyone else. He becomes obsessed with María, convinced that she is the only person that understands his art and his soul. So when he sees her again by chance, he pursues her. These passages are taken from the scene of their second meeting, brought about by him stalking her workplace.</div>
</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I need you very much,’ I repeated.<br />
She did not reply, but continued to stare at the tree.<br />
‘Why don’t you say something?’ I asked.<br />
Never taking her eyes from the tree, she answered:<br />
‘I’m nobody. You are a great artist. I don’t see why you need me.’<br />
I shouted, almost brutally:<br />
‘I tell you I need you! Don’t you understand?’<br />
Eyes still on the distant tree, she murmured:<br />
‘Why?’</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘For now, I know that it has something to do with the scene in the window: you were the only person who paid any attention to it.’<br />
‘I’m not an art critic,’ she said softly.<br />
That infuriated me, and I shouted:<br />
‘Don’t mention those cretins to me!’</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'[...] No, I’m wrong. There was one other person who reacted to the window, but negatively. He upbraided me for it. It made him apprehensive, he said, almost nauseated. In contrast, you …’<br />
Eyes straight ahead, she said quietly:<br />
‘But … couldn’t it be that … that I had the same opinion?’<br />
‘The same opinion?’<br />
‘The opinion the other person had.’<br />
My nerves were raw. I strained to see her expression, but her face in profile was inscrutable, her jaw tightly clenched. I replied confidently:<br />
‘You think what I think.’<br />
‘And what is it you think?’</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘Haven’t I been telling you I don’t know what I think? If I could say in words what I feel, it would be almost the same as thinking clearly. Isn’t that true?’<br />
‘Yes, that’s true.’<br />
Now I was silent. I was thinking, trying to see things clearly.<br />
Then I added:<br />
‘Maybe you could say that all my previous work was superficial.’<br />
‘What previous work?’</blockquote>
<div>
You see what I mean? This is how I thought Great Dramatic Scenes should look like, when I was ten. This is writing that tells you something great and important is going on, but deliberately prevents you from seeing it, in an attempt to make it seem greater than life, impossible to put into words. Both characters sound like they are trying really hard to avoid having a conversation, asking for clarifications that shouldn’t be necessary (<i>‘The same opinion?’</i>, <i>‘What previous work?’</i>) and jumping between lines of thought. (Someone suggested it could be an issue of translation, so I checked this scene out in the original Spanish. It didn't make much of a difference: the issue of this not being a good depiction of how people talk didn't go away).<br />
<br />
You could argue that the way the characters talk here is part of the characterization, and I agree to an extent. For example, it is revealed later in the book that she was afraid of what this conversation might lead to and was pretending she didn't really understand his art in a unique way. But even that doesn’t explain why she continues the conversation at all, or why he asks dumb questions. If we accept this conversation as character driven, we can no longer accept the characters. We cannot be expected to believe that characters who talk like this can also hold down regular lives. In fact, we cannot be expected to believe they exist.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
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Irishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14388590362228183832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-53073450385623760722013-12-30T07:05:00.000-08:002013-12-30T07:05:33.405-08:00In 2014 I Want To...<h2>
... read Tolstoy and Chekhov </h2>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
O from <a href="http://beholdthestars.blogspot.com/">Behold the Stars</a> is hosting a <a href="http://beholdthestars.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/russian-literature-2014.html">Russian Literature Challenge</a>. I will participate, but I'm not yet sure how many books I will read or what those books will be. I only know that I want to read Tolstoy and Chekhov. I will definitely read <i>War and Peace</i> next year (famous last words) and I thought I could perhaps try to read all of Tolstoy's major works. The last piece I read by him, years ago, was <i>The Kreutzer Sonata</i>. To say I hated it at the time would be an understatement - I despised it as I rarely despised anything in my life and it colored my view of its author ever since. It's time to read more and make up my mind. So 2014 might be the year I decide if I hate Tolstoy or not. Ah, the suspenseful life I lead. </div>
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<a href="http://beholdthestars.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/russian-literature-2014.html"><img alt="http://beholdthestars.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/russian-literature-2014.html" border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBC0O3I8zHNbaOxRyuEsYgYHwRlfxJWKTBXkEvRCH-zBSIjEccBuQK1LivvJ8y-6PK-A7BScAOVGMUhPcdtB726OHttGbryEdzPQuJ4C3D24lqShiAT4zYiYGp1sX-D-hv0Fy6DIuqFqcI/s320/russian+literature+2014.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
As for Chekhov, all I know of him through cultural osmosis make him sound like someone whose works I'd enjoy reading. I confess part of it is that I've been a little obsessed with this beautiful passage from Katherine Mansfield's journal for a while now and it made me crave to read Chekhov.</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #181818; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 18px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<h2>
... read Henry James </h2>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Remember <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2012/08/know-your-james.html#.UsFi-rS2LkM">that time </a>when I thought reading the complete works of Henry James will make all of my problems magically go away? I have decided that the only flaw in that plan was my lack of follow-through, so I will be returning to my <a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/2012/08/know-your-james.html#.UsFi-rS2LkM">Know Your James</a> project in 2014. I also plan to read Leon Edel's five-volume biography of HJ. It is the best thing I bought this year and so far I've only read half of the first volume, because I'm awful. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcDqxwGrMXNs5F1TK4e5Y2Czb2VZJEY9XBQ8ygmTKOsCV9jxE6FfV-YcPrDYfRi3jkCAy3FdvRahlmprjgRuH76FQfG1Dx1hlR1yzSkKH4A5DsU7XdBilVBy1USHycBBOk7wM0kcXrUnEF/s1600/tumblr_msedx2KtjP1s4mgroo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcDqxwGrMXNs5F1TK4e5Y2Czb2VZJEY9XBQ8ygmTKOsCV9jxE6FfV-YcPrDYfRi3jkCAy3FdvRahlmprjgRuH76FQfG1Dx1hlR1yzSkKH4A5DsU7XdBilVBy1USHycBBOk7wM0kcXrUnEF/s320/tumblr_msedx2KtjP1s4mgroo1_500.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #444444; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">The books ❤</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #444444; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">❤</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #444444; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 16px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;">❤</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<h2>
... read Ursula K. Le Guin </h2>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
My general policy in life is to follow book recommendations from <a href="http://readingwhilefemale.blogspot.com/">Emily</a>. It's a good policy, I'm happy with it. It made me read Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Michal Ajvaz and my first book from Ursula K. Le Guin: <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i> (which I will review at some point in January). And since I liked <i>The Lathe of Heaven</i> quite a lot, my New Year's resolution is naturally to.... </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiedWiXsu5CUF_e_gfO8izGNdxqm23gQFp9-pHBhZH48NSDSyPDG5qm-n3m1UmQ14yOnInzAP8DlctslRdDKXNvosUmOx-y6kTpMNC9mIiofB3LMl4KGuGfA-2if7F0lhlDgSVhzNa3jUd0/s1600/read_all_the_books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Read ALL the Le Guins!" border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiedWiXsu5CUF_e_gfO8izGNdxqm23gQFp9-pHBhZH48NSDSyPDG5qm-n3m1UmQ14yOnInzAP8DlctslRdDKXNvosUmOx-y6kTpMNC9mIiofB3LMl4KGuGfA-2if7F0lhlDgSVhzNa3jUd0/s400/read_all_the_books.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
...or at least as many of them as I can manage in a year. If you have any favorites, feel free to share them in the comments so that I know what to read first. (I don't think I'll be reading her backlist in chronological order. It seems a bit much to be doing that for two authors.) </div>
<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
... tell you all about it </h2>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I haven't been very good at keeping track of my reading on the blog. I read some wonderful books this year that I didn't get around to reviewing: <i>Winesburg, Ohio</i>, <i>The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter</i>, <i>Shirley</i>, <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i>, <i>Native Son</i>, <i>The Golden Notebook</i>. I will try to review some of these next year and try not to fall so far behind on my reviewing in general. It's not so much the sharing aspect of it that worries me - though I'm sure I missed a lot of great conversations by not discussing these books - as it is the fact that the posts I write are aids to memory (as Francis Bacon would call them) and boy, does my memory need them. </div>
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I think this is my last post for this year, so happy 2014! </div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-9199160875735624912013-12-28T04:36:00.000-08:002013-12-28T04:36:53.474-08:002014 TBR Pile Challenge <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm signing up for <a href="http://roofbeamreader.com/2013/11/27/announcing-the-2014-tbr-pile-challenge/">Adam's TBR Pile Challenge</a> for next year. For all two of you who've never heard of the challenge, this means that in 2014 I will aim to read and review <b>twelve books</b> that have been in my TBR pile for a long, looong time. I am allowed to list two alternatives, just in case some of the books from my list turn out to be too unbearable to finish. Here's my list, but promise not to laugh at me for not having read some of these sooner - just know that I could have put <i>Lord of the Flies</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> in there as well. My list went through several versions, but in the end I decided to only stick with new-to-me authors (with the exception of Tolstoy).</div>
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I will be updating this post with links to the reviews as I go, so keep an eye on this space if you'd like to know how it's going.</div>
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<ol>
<li><i>War and Peace</i> by Leo Tolstoy </li>
<li><i>A Confederacy of Dunces</i> by John Kennedy Toole</li>
<li><i>I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings</i> by Maya Angelou</li>
<li><i>Brideshead Revisited</i> by Evelyn Waugh </li>
<li><i>The Invisible Man</i> by Ralph Ellison</li>
<li><i>If This Is A Man</i> by Primo Levi </li>
<li><i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i> by Anne Bronte</li>
<li><i>The Way We Live Now </i>by Anthony Trollope</li>
<li><i>White Noise</i> by Don DeLillo</li>
<li><i>The Color Purple</i> by Alice Walker</li>
<li><i>Germinal</i> by Emile Zola</li>
<li><i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i> by Zora Neale Hurston</li>
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Back-up options: <i>Middlesex </i>by Jeffrey Eugenides and <i>Kafka on the Shore</i> by Haruki Murakami.<br />
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-15097049730774966822013-12-22T03:51:00.001-08:002014-01-03T23:45:58.958-08:00Feminist Sundays: "It had to be uttered once in a life, to adjust the lopsidedness of the world."<div style="text-align: justify;">
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This is going to be the laziest post ever, but, in our defense, we let Claudia read François Poulain de la Barre and she was sucked into the depths of early modern feminism <strike>never to be seen again </strike>with no chance of getting out in time to write this week's post. So instead you'll get one of the nicest ways to describe what's in essence a feminist speech we've ever encountered. Like most nice things on our blog lately, it comes courtesy of E.M. Forster. The speech was Margaret's speech to Henry in <i>Howards End</i>, a very satisfying cry against double standards. We will quote it here in all its glory, but it might be spoiler-ish, so cover your eyes if you haven't read the book and plan to:<br />
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“Not any more of this!” she cried. “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect. I’ve had enough of your unneeded kindness. I’ve spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself, ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done.’”</blockquote>
The speech in itself was perfection. But the words Forster found to describe it were even better.<br />
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Her speech to him seemed perfect. She would not have altered a word. <b>It had to be uttered once in a life, to adjust the lopsidedness of the world. </b>It was spoken not only to her husband, but to thousands of men like him—a protest against the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age.</blockquote>
Doesn't that sentence perfectly encapsulate the relief you feel as a reader at encountering this counterbalance to injustice in the text? The world seemed unfair, oppressive, <i>lopsided</i>, and a discourse like that sets it right, if only for a moment. It's the same startled delight Jane Eyre's "I am not a bird and no net ensnares me" speech or Nora's monologue from <i>A Doll's House</i> give you. Someone just had to say it. And conversely, when one doesn't say it, the narrative can seem unsatisfying. Edith Wharton's <i>The Glimpses of the Moon</i> comes to mind, a frustrating little book in which the hero's hypocrisy is never appropriately called out. <br />
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That's all for our laidback Feminist Sunday. Join us next week for a taste of early modern feminism!<br />
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<span style="color: #444444;">"Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme created at Books and Reviews. The aim is simply to have a place and a time to talk about feminism and women’s issues. This is a place of tolerance, creativity, discussion, criticism and praise. Remember to keep in mind that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, although healthy discussion is encouraged." </span>
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You can read the guidelines <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/an-update-on-feminist-sundays/">here </a>or check out what other people wrote this week <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/feminist-sundays-6/">here</a>. </div>
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Lit. Hitchhikerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17550130679377279052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-47319758195478033162013-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:002013-12-21T11:09:04.265-08:00Review: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I can't manage to write a coherent review for <i>Howards End</i>, even though I loved it and want to recommend it endlessly (or perhaps precisely because of that). So I will write about <i>The Machine Stops</i> instead, a sci-fi story by the same E.M. Forster. I must confess that I had no idea Forster had written anything that could be described as “sci-fi,” but I am glad I stumbled across this short story, because not only is it pretty compelling in its own right, but it also jibes unexpectedly well with <i>Howards End</i>. </div>
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One of the themes in <i>Howards End</i> is alienation in the modern world: the severed connection to nature; the city as a “tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity" encroaching upon nature; the motor cars traveling so quickly that one loses all sense of time and space after a drive; the oft-repeated notion that this progress of technology is unavoidable and one must simply adapt to it. The world as created by Forster's Wilcox family is not a pleasant place to inhabit, and this is not limited to England. Imperialism brings with it cosmopolitanism, so the quivering grey is to spread across the planet. </div>
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Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!</blockquote>
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<i>The Machine Stops</i> takes place in the world that came to replace this civilization of speed. The human race has turned its back on nature, after one last effort to defeat it. The zenith of the civilization of speed was the attempt to “keep pace with the Sun” by flying high-speed airplanes westward in an attempt to neutralize Earth’s diurnal rotation. Once that failed, humanity lost all interest in nature and retreated underground, in a cocoon made possible by technology. Each individual lives in their own little hexagonal room within a huge Machine that fulfills their needs. They don’t go to things; things come to them. They never leave their rooms and rarely travel, for they have everything they could possibly want at their fingertips. They spend all their time discussing their <i>ideas </i>with friends from other cells, via the Machine’s communication systems. Being connected is the default: <br />
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Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.</blockquote>
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I suppose this is the part one might find "prophetic" in this story - this pattern of (incessant) communication that mirrors the one created by today's social media. Fair enough. What is more interesting, though, is the role ideas play in this scheme. Reality is not important, one’s ideas about it (constantly broadcasted to the world) are. Anything outside the inner world, sustained by the quiet, efficient way in which the Machine meets everyone’s physical needs, is simply not interesting. The Machine does not need to forbid people from leaving their cells: they have little interest in it and, besides, they lost the ability to breathe the outside air unaided.</div>
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Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul. […]<br />
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'No ideas here,' murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus behind a metal blind. In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, 'No ideas here,' and hid Greece behind a metal blind. </blockquote>
In a way, technology and this primacy of ideas over sensations are twin dangers, because they separate people from the world. (I do wonder if this is the modernist in Forster talking.) In any case, for Forster something is definitely lost in this communication mediated by technology. As Kino, the one character who craves the real deal and eventually finds a way to briefly escape to the surface, says: "I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear
something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you."<br />
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This is maybe a bit naive. There is no guarantee that there is something inherently different (let alone better) about "humanity naked" that is altered by technology. Still, there is something moving about the account of Kino's struggle to get to the surface. It's perhaps the mere idea of resistance, of breaking free in general. The fact that the Machine turns oppressive in response to this act of rebellion only validates the struggle. </div>
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It was easy at first. The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don't know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled. But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.</div>
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I'm not going to spoil the ending for you. If you want to see what happens when the Machine stops, this story is available for free <b><a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops">here</a></b>, go forth and read it. It's not long and it's definitely a text worth engaging with.</div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-34615602855869949992013-12-15T04:44:00.001-08:002013-12-15T04:59:45.481-08:00Feminist Sundays: "Girls, forget what you've read. It happened like this -"<div style="text-align: justify;">
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For this week's <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/feminist-sundays-5/">Feminist Sunday</a>, we thought we'd share one of our favorite poems with you: Carol Ann Duffy's <i>Eurydice</i>. But first a few words on the remarkable volume this poem is part of: <i>The World's Wife</i>. <i>The World's Wife</i> relies on a simple but effective idea: it takes familiar stories of male heroes, from history or fiction, and retells them from the perspective of a female counterpart. The refashioned narratives range from Greek mythology to Freud's
biography, and from Grimms' Fairy Tales to Hollywood blockbusters. In most cases, the woman whose voice we hear is the wife or mistress of the hero (hence the book's title), but there are a few stories retold from the point of view of a sister, and a couple that break the mold entirely, by relating two female perspectives and mentioning a man only indirectly (<i>Demeter</i>), or by exploring a gender-swapped version of the original narrative (like in the awesome<i> Queen Kong</i>).<br />
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You can easily see why we'd love this book. Our favorite stories are in there - and getting a new twist on them is always nice - but there is more to it than that. Giving a voice to a neglected female character, making her front and center and letting her give her take on the hero, is more than an addition to the original story - it's a <i>vindication</i>. And what is awesome about it is that we don't simply get the same old stories told by a different narrator. Duffy engages with these narratives by bringing women's experiences and women's concerns to the table, making us aware of the patriarchal conventions that underlay the originals. In most cases, getting <i>her </i>side of the story doesn't complete the story, it changes it altogether (in poignant, funny, raunchy ways).<br />
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One of the most satisfactory aspects of this book is the subversion of the idea that the hero's love interest is awestruck by him and happy to be part of his story. This is the central point in <i>Eurydice</i>, the poem we have unanimously settled on as our favorite. We've always suspected that if the muse talked back, what she'd say wouldn't be particularly kind to the poet. And it isn't. It's funny (a lot of poems in this volume are), it's biting, it's not without its beautiful moments despite this ("<i>Please let me stay.</i>/ But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.") - it's, in a word, perfect and you should all read it below.<br />
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<h2>
Eurydice </h2>
Girls, I was dead and down <br />
in the Underworld, a shade,<br />
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.<br />
It was a place where language stopped,<br />
a black full-stop, a black hole<br />
where words had to come to an end<br />
And end they did there,<br />
last words,<br />
famous or not.<br />
It suited me down to the ground.<br />
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So imagine me there,<br />
unavailable,<br />
out of this world,<br />
then picture my face in that place<br />
of Eternal Repose,<br />
in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe<br />
from the kind of a man<br />
who follows her round<br />
writing poems<br />
hovers about <br />
while she reads them,<br />
calls her his Muse,<br />
and once sulked for a night and a day<br />
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.<br />
Just picture my face<br />
when I heard -<br />
Ye Gods -<br />
a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death's door.<br />
Him.<br />
Big O.<br />
Larger than life.<br />
With his lyre<br />
and a poem to read with me as the prize.<br />
<br />
Things were different back then.<br />
For the men, verse-wise,<br />
Big O was the boy. Legendary. <br />
The blurb on the back of his books claimed<br />
that animals,<br />
aardvark to zebra,<br />
flocked to his side when he sang,<br />
fish leapt from their waves<br />
at the sound of his voice,<br />
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet<br />
wept wee silver tears.<br />
<br />
Bollocks. (I'd done all the typing myself,<br />
I should know.)<br />
And, given my time all over again,<br />
rest assured that I'd rather write for myself<br />
than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess,<br />
etc. etc. <br />
<br />
In fact, girls, I'd rather be dead.<br />
<br />
But the Gods are like publishers,<br />
usually male, <br />
and what you doubtless know of my tale<br />
is the deal.<br />
<br />
Orpheus strutted his stuff.<br />
<br />
The bloodless ghosts were in tears.<br />
Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years.<br />
Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers.<br />
The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.<br />
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Like it or not,<br />
I must follow him back to our life -<br />
Eurydice, Orpheus's wife -<br />
to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,<br />
octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,<br />
elegies, limericks, villanelles,<br />
histories, myths...<br />
<br />
He'd been told that he mustn't look back<br />
or turn round,<br />
but walk steadily upwards,<br />
myself right behind him,<br />
out of the Underworld<br />
into the upper air that for me was the past.<br />
He'd been warned<br />
that one look would lose me<br />
for ever and ever.<br />
<br />
So we walked, we walked.<br />
Nobody talked.<br />
<br />
Girls, forget what you've read,<br />
it happened like this -<br />
I did everything in my power<br />
to make him look back.<br />
What did I have to do, I said,<br />
to make him see we were through?<br />
I was dead. Deceased.<br />
I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late.<br />
Past my sell-by date... <br />
I stretched out my hand<br />
to touch him once<br />
on the back of the neck -<br />
<i>Please let me stay.</i><br />
But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.<br />
<br />
It was an uphill schlep<br />
from death to life<br />
and with every step<br />
I willed him to turn.<br />
I was thinking of filching the poem<br />
out of his cloak,<br />
when inspiration finally struck.<br />
I stopped, thrilled.<br />
He was a yard in front.
<br />
My voice shook when I spoke - <br />
<i>Orpheus, your poem's a masterpiece.</i><br />
<i>I'd love to hear it again.</i><br />
<br />
He was smiling modestly <br />
when he turned<br />
when he turned and he looked at me.<br />
<br />
What else?<br />
I noticed he hadn't shaved.<br />
I waved once and was gone.<br />
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The dead are so talented.<br />
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake<br />
near the wise, drowned silence of the dead</blockquote>
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<span style="color: #444444;">"Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme created at Books and Reviews. The aim is simply to have a place and a time to talk about feminism and women’s issues. This is a place of tolerance, creativity, discussion, criticism and praise. Remember to keep in mind that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, although healthy discussion is encouraged." </span></div>
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You can read the guidelines <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/an-update-on-feminist-sundays/">here </a>or check out what other people wrote this week <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/feminist-sundays-5/">here</a>. </div>
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Lit. Hitchhikerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17550130679377279052noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-8063617778426938462013-12-10T08:48:00.001-08:002013-12-10T08:48:41.275-08:00Who Would You Want To Be Written By?<div style="text-align: justify;">
Here's a silly little question for you, if you choose to engage it. Setting aside all the B-movie connotations of this scenario, if you were to be a character written by a (real, existing) author, who would you want that author to be and why? </div>
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For me, it would be <b>Sherwood Anderson</b>. In fact, this question first crossed my mind a few months ago, when I was reading <i>Winesburg, Ohio. </i>I was struck by<i> </i>the <i>delicacy</i> with which everything was handled in it, by the essential kindness underlying the narrative, and I realized that I wouldn't mind if someone wrote about me like that. This would be the kind of narrator who <i>understands. </i>One<i> </i>and one's silly dreams would not come out aggrandized in that narrative, but not be ridiculed either. What more could one ask for?</div>
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Oddly enough, I wouldn't like to be a character written by either of my two favorite writers (James and Faulkner), and the only other author who comes close is the E.M Forster of <i>Howards End</i>, who I think could describe all my actions and thoughts in clever sentences that make <i>so </i>much sense. (But I've no use for the Forster of <i>A Room with a View</i> or <i>Where Angels Fear to Tread</i>.) </div>
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So, who would do <i>you </i>justice?</div>
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<br />Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-90546323542627540772013-12-08T06:05:00.000-08:002013-12-08T11:31:11.868-08:00Feminist Sundays: Books with Openly Feminist Characters<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Hello and welcome to our very first Feminist Sunday! <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/an-update-on-feminist-sundays/">Feminist Sundays</a> is a weekly meme started by Elena of <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/">Books and Reviews</a>. It is supposed to be a space where we can discuss all sorts of things that might fall under the larger umbrella of feminism: from important female figures in history to the portrayal of women in fiction, and everything in between. We're very excited to join and we hope to participate every week (and perhaps have some of you join us as well). For now we thought we'd kick off this series by discussing - and hopefully getting some recommendations for - <b>books with openly feminist characters</b>.<br />
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What counts as an openly feminist character? </h2>
We are not great readers of contemporary literary fiction. (And yes,
that is a thing we are trying to fix.) We do know our media, though, and
we are somewhat familiar with contemporary romance novels, too. Openly
feminist characters are rarer in them than you might think, considering
that feminism did change the world and in some cases made the plot of
said books or movies possible. And much too often, when a feminist
character does appear, she turns out to be a stereotype - the
man-hating workaholic that needs to be tamed/defeated/abandoned by the
hero or some variation thereof. (We say "<i>she </i>turns out to be"
because there doesn't seem to be a parallel trope for male allies/feminist men.) So what are the features we are looking for in an openly feminist character? <br />
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<li style="text-align: justify;">The character must live during a period when feminism existed as a movement - say 19th century onwards. This is of course not to say that there weren't women <i>vindicating their rights</i> before, but only that we are interested in the historically (and geographically) determined feminist movement and the connotations of this label in fiction. <b> </b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The character must be explicitly associated to feminism somehow. What counts as an explicit association might vary from case to case, but it has to be something more substantial than a character wearing pants or holding a job or insisting to open her own doors. Or, in the case of men, simply tolerating women who wear pants, hold jobs and open their own doors. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The character must not be a straw feminist. Feminism can be criticized in the narrative, it can even have a negative impact on the character's life, but feminist caricatures need not apply. (If you don't know what a straw feminist is: 1. lucky you and 2. <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawFeminist">TV Tropes to the rescue</a>!) </li>
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A few examples from contemporary fiction</h2>
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Interestingly enough, all the examples we could think of from literary fiction are pro-feminism in a general sense, but also address problematic issues of the movement. Without further ado, here's our selection: <b><i> </i></b><br />
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<b><i>On Beauty</i> by Zadie Smith:</b> This is the book that initially inspired our post, because one of its main characters, Kiki Belsey, is the kind of feminist we can recognize. The language, the authors, the quotes that inspire her are tailored to evoke a strand of mainstream American feminism that is also pretty popular on the internet (not particularly radical, but not aggressively corporate either). For much of the novel, Kiki's explicit feminist beliefs contrast with the pretty stereotypical gender roles she and her husband have unconsciously slipped into. </div>
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<b><i>Possession</i> by A.S Byatt</b>: This book engages not only with feminist characters, but also with feminism as an institutional endeavor. One of the main characters, Maud Bailey, is an academic feminist, working in a Women's Studies Department, going to conferences on the topic, writing feminist literary criticism. She provides a glimpse into the workings of feminism in academia: the struggle for recognition and funds, the solidarity and networking between departments, the evolving perspectives in the field etc. Through Maud, the novel also deals with the difficulty of doing feminism in an organized institutionalized way while not losing its liberating and transgressive power.<br />
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<b><i>The Handmaid's Tale</i> by Margaret Atwood</b>: Belonging to the genre of "speculative fiction," Atwood's novel deals with the possibility of feminism being unable to hold on to its advances. The openly feminist character (the protagonist's mother) is a second-wave feminist: she goes to rallies where they burn Cosmo-type magazines, she takes pride in not needing a husband, she is distrustful of men. <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i> also gets the reader to engage more in depth with the framework of feminism, by presenting ways in which the Republic of Gilead has appropriated elements of the feminist discourse into an essentially anti-woman doctrine.</div>
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So what other books we should check out for nuanced openly feminist characters? We'd love to compile a bigger list, so if you know a good example, feel free to share. And if you're interested in what other people discussed this Feminist Sunday, do head over to <a href="http://booksandreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/feminist-sundays-3">Elena's blog</a>.</div>
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Lit. Hitchhikerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17550130679377279052noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4074245917204217064.post-91273972395962527912013-12-03T13:20:00.000-08:002014-01-03T23:46:19.467-08:00 "Give Mr. Bast money, and don't bother about his ideals. He'll pick up those for himself."<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.lithitchhiker.com/p/footnotes-reviews.html#footnotes">What's this?</a></td></tr>
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You should know this one thing about me: I'm a sucker for books that touch upon 19th century and turn-of-the-century reform movements. It doesn't need to be the main topic of the book, it doesn't even need to be portrayed in a positive light, the simple mention of your typical socialist circle will have my ears perk up. I confess I don't know enough about these movements, either from a historical or from a theoretical perspective, and that's something I always promise myself I'll fix and never do. But, from the low perch of my knowledge, I feel that these people's questions are like my questions, and that exploring them will teach me something valuable. </div>
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What that something will be, I don't know, I haven't reached it yet. But here's an example of the kind of discussion that gives me a jolt of recognition. You might have encountered variations of its modern version on the internet. How should we help poor people? <a href="http://aiffe.tumblr.com/post/48916125483/chainofaffection-have-you-ever-come-across-a" target="_blank">Should we give homeless people money or just stuff we bought for them with that money?</a> Should we impose restrictions on money people get from the government and, if so, what kind of restrictions? Should we force a set of values on them, along with our money? And now here is a scene from <i>Howards End</i>: a discussion at the group frequented by the progressive Schlegel sisters. (The quote is long, but read it through, the last sentence alone makes it worth it. All random bolding my own.) <br />
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The subject of the paper had been, "How ought I to dispose of my money?" the reader professing to be a millionaire on the point of death, inclined to bequeath her fortune for the foundation of local art galleries, but open to conviction from other sources. The various parts had been assigned beforehand, and some of the speeches were amusing. The hostess assumed the ungrateful role of "the millionaire's eldest son," and implored her expiring parent not to dislocate Society by allowing such vast sums to pass out of the family. Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had "Mr. Bast" to profit? The National Gallery was good enough for the likes of him. After property had had its say—a saying that is necessarily ungracious—the various philanthropists stepped forward. Something must be done for "Mr. Bast"; his conditions must be improved without impairing his independence; he must have a free library, or free tennis-courts; his rent must be paid in such a way that he did not know it was being paid; it must be made worth his while to join the Territorials; he must be forcibly parted from his uninspiring wife, the money going to her as compensation; he must be assigned a Twin Star, some member of the leisured classes who would watch over him ceaselessly (groans from Helen); he must be given food but no clothes, clothes but no food, a third-return ticket to Venice, without either food or clothes when he arrived there. <b>In short, he might be given anything and everything so long as it was not the money itself.</b></div>
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And here is a reply I resonate with, courtesy of our heroine, Margaret Schlegel: <br />
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"Give them a chance. Give them money. Don't dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things. When your Socialism comes it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes give people cash, for it is the warp of civilisation, whatever the woof may be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realise it vividly, for it's the—the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. <b>Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don't bother about his ideals. He'll pick up those for himself.</b>"</blockquote>
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I don't know yet whether the book as a whole will validate this message, but there is something convincing about this speech, however dire some of its (probably true) implications are. And the follow-up to it kinda put me in mind of a Thomas Hardy novel:<br />
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Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered, <b>"Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world."</b> Then they said, "No, we do not believe it," and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows.</blockquote>
<i>Howards End</i> is quite, quite wonderful so far.</div>
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Claudiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10261580712036977730noreply@blogger.com0