Thoughts on books

New New Thing, again

2009-05-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

Pretty much like everyone else in the publishing sector, I've been ruminating on e-books and it's place in the future of book printing. Needless to say, it's just ruminations since none of us can know the impact of e-books, regardless of the many publishing executives running around these days, patting themselves on the back for being innovative and forward thinking. Recently, I've begun to feel as though the whole industry is sort of like a rehash of presidential election 2008, with everyone saying "CHANGE!" in an optimistic way with sparse thoughtful considerations on what this change will mean.

Many in the tech sector along with marketers (generally marketing people who have published books and top-notch clients who pay them high salaries) are pushing for free or cheaper content. Yet, if the demise of newspapers proves one thing, it's that free content will not make the content more valuable to society. I've done my share interaction on political forums, including many debates in recent years about the fate of newspapers, and one striking element in the debates were the number of people who considered first-hand sources exactly the same as second-hand sources. While established newspapers are not always able to provide first-hand sources for every single written sentence, many journalists and newspapers are dedicated to validating as many claims as possible by checking through the sources and trying to ensure that claims come from first-hand sources. Blogs, on the other hand, are not tied down to such grassroots, laborious efforts. Instead, like the politically biased pundits on what passes for tv news these days, they take primary source news and then rant and rave a little bit. Devaluing primary source information monetarily, have newspapers devalued the service they provide to the various communities?

One can divide publishing financially in multiple ways...but what is clear is that production is not the only cost. There are multiple people who are necessary to publication, and all these people are specialized in what they do and need money in order to survive. I would list at least the following:
1) Authors: receive an advance and a royalty cut
2) Agents: receive a percentage of advance
3) Editors: receive a salary for acquiring books and for shaping the book
4) Marketers/Publicists/Sales people: receive a salary for positioning a book in media and within the market place
5) Production/Design: a book needs an interior design as well as a cover that highlights the contents of the book with a visual as striking as the book
6) Financial/Permissions/contracts people: keeps all financial operations going on a regular basis

Say all content was made free and books were kept alive through advertising...what then? How many advertisers are willing to support a new emerging author whose first volume of short-stories would be read by a extremely tiny number of Americans, roughly somewhere about 1,500 to 5,000? How many advertisers would put a flash banner on a collection of poems by an experimental poet whose audience ranges from 400 to 1,500? Would the survival of publishing houses be at the hands of advertisers? Would we all be providing content on par with a formulaic Hollywood movie, one that is guaranteed to draw millions of people?

Outside of business executives and marketing/advertising gurus (technically speaking, marketing and advertising gurus are in the same category of "business" in bookstores despite marketing and advertising gurus somehow labeling themselves as "creatives" these days), the writer willing to give up an advance and royalty are far and between. While there are writers who have finally established themselves materially by means of different academic positions cobbled together with fellowships, there are also many writers who struggle financially. Sure, what they are writing is "intellectual property" but why should their intellectual property be given away for free when many writers need the money? Isn't their writing worth $15 (paperback price...about the same amount as buying one pizza pie) or $24.95 (cloth price...about the price tag of a t-shirt at The Gap)?

We live in an odd world where material goods are priced higher and higher and intellectual goods are worth not even a cent. I remember half a decade ago discussing with a friend in the industry the price of art books, roughly in the range of $40 to $80 (or higher for the highest production art books). For those $80, the art book is in competition with blouses, dresses, a dinner at a fancy restaurant, an expensive bottle of wine, a moderately priced pair of shoes....yet, so many middle-classed and affluent Americans prove time and again that they would rather have clothes over an art book.

What then is the book industry to do? Is it a question of ebooks taking over? I don't think it's as simple as that. In my opinion, for what it's worth, the real problem does not lie with the format of the book as much as the devaluing of content. We live in an age where music explodes because the iPod is marketed properly. Don't get me wrong....I like music. And I liked my iPod until the battery died. But somehow, music seems to be intrinsically different than books.

For instance, music is a short-term commitment of minutes a day. A book is like a long marriage. It's settling into the content. In an age when people consider articles in newspapers dated and too difficult (yes, I know people who consider the New York Times difficult...and from looking up newspaper subscription and viewer rates, those seem to be the majority of Americans rather than the minority), where are the people who will consider the book worth their time, be it a e-book or printed on paper?

As you can see from my paragraphs above, I am talking about a specific kind of book: perhaps something like Greenblatt's Shakespeare in the World, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, or Paul Muldoon's Hay: a literary book which always has a limited audience. Is the audience for those books shrinking?

I suppose Murakami and the marketing around that provides one answer: make an author the ultimate cool. But somehow, I cringe at that. Yes, I like Allen Ginsberg but do I think that he's as good a poet as Paul Celan. No. And it's so much easier to market Ginsberg than Celan. In a world where books (in any format) are competing against the internet, movies, cable tv, tv, and music, will there be money for both Ginsberg and Celan?

I have no answers, just random thoughts on this topic which could or could not change much.

Aquarium

2008-12-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

Go read my old friend Jeffrey's poems in his first collection, Aquarium. The New York Times Book Review, by Karl Kirchwey, was a rave:

Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and the view is exhilarating. Not since D. H. Lawrence’s “Birds, Beasts and Flowers!” or the bestiary written by Kenneth Rexroth for his daughters has a poet wrung so much human meaning from the natural world. But whereas Lawrence is discursively tender, and Rexroth wry and epigrammatically clever, Jeffrey Yang speaks in tongues as if touched with a Pentecostal flame. He leads the reader through a net of allusions in poems barnacled with hard words. A typical Yang poem begins with the title “Oarfish”; traces it to the abode of humans called Midgard in Norse myth; invokes the ourobouros, the serpent devouring its own tail in a symbol of infinity; quotes the 19th-century American artist Elihu Vedder, the Baroque religious scholar Sor Juana and Lawrence’s poem “Fish”; glances at the Homeric word “oarismos” (roughly, “pillow talk”); and ends with guanine, a chemical that codes genetic information and also a substance found in fish scales. Nonetheless, as Ezra Pound would say, it all coheres — not just in art but in life. Yang is an editor at New Directions, which has published Rexroth, who edited a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s poems (and, like Yang, translated Chinese poetry). In fact, a fragment of Pound’s own Canto 36 is quoted by Yang, who is “testing the overtones” of language and history by means of a collage of brilliant fragments just as his master did, exploring the “divine quiddity” of the world.

Compounding his ingenuities, Yang has also arranged the poems in this book as an abecedary, proceeding from A (“Abalone”) through to Z (“Zooxanthellae”). What might feel like a gimmick instead leaves the reader dazzled at Yang’s polymathic knowledge: dazzled, but not threatened, since the advent of Google means that allusiveness in poetry is no longer the challenge it used to be. In any case, as one ancient master tells us, “What people / know is inferior to what they do not know.” Yang writes with a keen ear for the sound of language; indeed, his poems’ openings sometimes seem like verbal spasms, before they smooth into grammar: “Abalone Rumsen aulón / Aristotle auriform Costanoans / cultivated, Brueghel painted, / awabi Osahi dove for / on September 12, 425 A.D.” Subject, verb and object resolve only gradually out of such a music. These poems are concerned with translation and with metaphor, both of which involve a “carrying across” from the natural into the human world; from the past into the present; from one language or civilization into another. Often they use the mousetrap form of the epigram, sudden and pleasing: “The barnacle has the longest penis / of any animal in proportion / to its body size. Happiness / and proportion: / never be ashamed of evolution.” Modesty figures among the lessons to be learned from nature, too; and honesty; and patience. And the poetic vehicle for these lessons is capable of great delicacy. A poem describing a kind of tetra, the familiar aquarium fish, reads in its entirety: “You can see straight thru / an X-ray fish to its heart. / We are just as transparent / so be true, gentle, honest, just. . . .”

Accordingly, politicians are at one end of the moral spectrum for Yang, and our genetic near-neighbors the dolphin and the manatee are at the other. For in addition to its other strengths — so considerable that they may distract the reader from its most important accomplishment — this is a moral book, in the best sense of the word. “Philosophy’s shadow: poetry. Poetry’s / shadow: philosophy,” Yang writes. And chief among nature’s lessons, it seems, is that of symbiosis or “mutualism,” exemplified by the type of algae that gives its name to the book’s final poem. Zooxanthellae live in tropical seas, dependent upon coral but also benefiting it. In this poem, the lines of which change progressively into prose as if under the torque of outrage, the peacefulness of such a coexistence is juxtaposed with the coldbloodedness of those American scientists and soldiers who first uprooted certain Pacific islanders, then destroyed their atolls in increasingly devastating nuclear tests and finally returned to their desolation to sample the extent of nuclear poisoning. “Mutualism” thus becomes a foil for the absolute corruption of natural instinct, which is more characteristically human. In fact the lesson is more complicated than this: the algae described are dinoflagellates; their presence in high concentrations in the flesh of fish causes sickness in the humans who eat it. The partners in symbiosis are not neutral, as Yang notes in an earlier poem: “Some causes / are invisible to the naked eye. / Strive for equilibrium / rather than neutrality.”

This poet is obsessive, as was the 17th-century English writer and physician Sir Thomas Browne, who tried to reconcile science and religion, and who believed he read numbers and lessons in nature that were of significance to humans. Browne has the last word in this book, in a concluding epigraph that reads in part: “Thus there is something in us that can be without us and will be after us.” He could have been describing an isotope of uranium — or just good poetry, which is what Jeffrey Yang has delivered in this book.

Hard Times Books

2008-12-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

While I was in the midst of writing my Balzac entry, it struck me that there are many books appropriate to a recessed/depressed economy, books that either take place during America's Great Depression or where money and its machinations play a central role in the plot. Hence, my books for Hard Times (more appropriate to these times, perhaps, than the top 10 or top 100 now making its rounds in the remaining book review sections nationwide).

1. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
Written during WWII when food rations made gourmande treats impossible, when even every single egg was cherished, Fisher gives the full details on how to make the most out of every small piece of beef, every egg, the slightest bit of butter and cream. Until such dire times again arrive, we can read this book and relish each egg with its pat of butter.

2. Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, photographs over multiple volumes
While Walker Evans is best known for his collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I admit my ignorance of Agee's text. Instead, when I think of the worst of the Depression, the images of American men, women, and children as captured by Evans and Lange during their work for WPA flood my mind. The legs of a child lying down with a piece of white cloth thrown over the upper part of the body like a hasty shroud, the gaunt cheeks of a woman...such images speak of earnest good people trying to face the hardships that a national economy in turmoil has brought to their daily lives.

3. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Not having read Agee, I naturally people the American epic, Grapes of Wrath, with the faces of those who appear in Evans' and Langes' respective photographs. In many ways, things have not changed much since Steinbeck wrote this call to arms for the poorer folks. Corporations would still prefer to throw away goods rather than give it away to those without; profit still means more than a social responsibility to see one's fellow human beings clothed, sheltered, and fed; hypocrisy and machinations of profiteering are still what rules the country. But, in reading Grapes of Wrath, one is gratified to learn that there might still be the hope to become better people.

4. Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
Almost any novel by Charles Dickens will suffice as all of them are interested in a character rising from poverty to prosperity, or vice versa. One of my favorites is Little Dorrit, one of his lesser-known novels but accomplished than many others. Like Dickens himself as a child, one of the main characters has a parent in Debtor's Prison where people lived perpetually in England until their debt was paid in full. BBC recently did a movie-series of Little Dorrit which I haven't seen yet but which I hope to see. In the midst of new publicity for the movie after the movie was announced, the Mail did an interesting article on the original real-life woman on whom Little Dorrit was based, a woman abandoned by her common-law husband turned prostitute to support her child. Furthermore, the Mail article talks about a house Dickens helped found to turn wayward girls into women who could respectably marry. All such real-life facts aside, I always find Dickens tremendous fun during dreary times, even while he writes about poverty. I remember once reading a part in Anne of Green Gables where Anne has to stop eating Dickens to eat because there's always so much eating going on in Dickens. I prefer the Oxford edition with an excellent introduction by Lionel Trilling.

5. Hard Times, Studs Terkel
If you want the real deal, the way the Great Depression was actually survived by real people...the best source is the primary source. And no one does it better than Studs, the one-person chronicler of American lives who detailed the Depression whether it be factory workers, bankers, or politicians. One co-worker whose parents lived through the Depression was telling me how her parents told her there were always men passing through the neighborhood asking for handouts of food. It's scary to think about it.

6. Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
I am up to Volume 4 on the life of Siddharta as depicted by Osamu Tezuka. This series makes it onto the list as we may all want to aspire towards an inward light with less consumption as we will have less money for consumption.

7. Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
As with Dickens, it was hard to pinpoint one novel for Balzac which should make this list as so much of Balzac's novels involve the fall and/or rise of wealth for an individual. Yet, Lost Illusions might be considered an encapsulating novel for Balzac because it contains vivid scenes of Paris as well as provincial life along with portraying the lives of aristocrats, writers, and inventors. While few will be tempted to read the ninety-nine volumes that make up the Human Comedy, no one should pass up the seven hundred some odd pages that make up Lost Illusions. The Modern Library edition, translated by Kathleen Raine and with an introduction by Richard Howard, is superb.

8. What Work Is, Philip Levine and Eunoia, Christian Bok
Very soon after 9/11, one bookstore buyer told me that he tries to keep his poetry section fully stocked as he considered it an important way of feeding the mind with other ideas besides current events. While What Work Is is mostly about Levine's own reinterpreted events of the Depression, it also has a somewhat inspirational tinge. Besides What Work Is, I would recommend Eunoia by Christian Bok, a poet singularly up to the tradition of Oulipo (whether he be professed as one of them or not). There's no greater joy for a lover of poetry than reading this accomplished piece of whimsy, genius, linguistic rules, and frivolity rolled up in one.

9. Theory of Moral Sentiment, Adam Smith
While Smith is better known for the Wealth of Nations and his metaphysical invisible hand, we are the worse off that Theory of Moral Sentiment is not as well read by American capitalist. While Wealth of Nations might detail the mechanisms of economics which has been reinterpreted to suit our current ideas of how finances should be jigged, Theory of Moral Sentiment details the relationships between human beings. In such notions, Smith shows an idealistic and humanist side that would have allowed for a more humane interpretation of his Wealth of Nations. Such a reinterpretation might be called for after the fall of capitalism in its current form.

10. Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
If there is one flaneur who daily interpreted culture and the effects of capitalism on culture, it is Walter Benjamin whose essays on every aspect of culture was shot through with the understanding that all of culture was being changed in front of his eyes by "Modernity" as enforced through manufacturing and technology. He understood that his very life was under such forces, that the cultural values that he esteemed would no longer be esteemed by societies that were being reshaped, where folk cultures were dying out, and objects that testified to history and its place in time were being eradicated. Even while questions about our economics and the financial underpinnings of the nation might need to be reassessed, will such things happen? Instead, will we all just want to be reassured that things will return to the way it was a few years ago?

Balzac and money

2008-12-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

In this time when every single dinner party languishes into laments about the economy, it's fitting to read Balzac. Granted, buying the complete Human Comedy is not a cheap venture, but one can help along the economy with such an expensive outlay. Moreover, given that the Human Comedy is composed of 99 separate stories, the whole project can keep me entertained for at least two years for approximately $140 dollars (sixteen volumes purchased at $93 with the other two volumes being picked up separately through used book vendors on Amazon). The edition I purchased was edited by George Saintsbury (of History of English Prosody fame) and includes a useful introduction to each of the stories in the Human Comedy.

As Henry James notes in his essay, "Honore de Balzac", money is always of interest to Balzac and often a motivator for villainous or cowardly deeds. It is speculated that Balzac's great interest in money derived from the fact that he never could make enough to pay off all his debts. Indeed, if this is a primary reason to be so interested in money, those of us in publishing would only publish books with money as a central theme. I myself believe that Balzac, along with many French Naturalists, saw how much capitalism, in its evolving modern form, was changing the fabric of life and the values of society. Zola has that wonderful novel called The Ladies' Paradise where the real central character is the first large department store in Paris.

In regards to Balzac and money, Henry James wittingly says about one of his characters:

His women, too, talk about money quite as much as men, and not only his ignoble and mercenary women (of whom there are so many) but his charming women, his heroines, his great ladies. Madame de Mortsauf is intended as a perfect example of feminine elevation, and yet Madame de Mortsauf has the whole of her husband's agricultural economy at her fingers' ends; she strikes us at moments as an attorney in petticoats. Each particular episode of the "Comedie Humanie" has its own hero and heroine, but the great general protagonist is the twenty-franc piece.

THE cookbook

2008-12-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I took the subway down to Union Square to the Strand where I was mentally prepared to browse for several hours. Suffice it to say that I did not last the four or so hours I anticipated to look over all of the fiction available at the Strand. Instead, I had to leave after two hours...because staying at the Strand can be extremely dangerous to my bank account (pitiable thing that it is).

In my many years of visiting the Strand, I had never once ventured to look over their cookbooks. I assume this is because I was always bewilderingly distracted by their poetry and fiction, along with the many tables of discounted new books. However, yesterday, I ended up meandering along the hardbound classic section as I have been keen on finding another Balzac novel translated into English (while famous Balzacs such as Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, etc. are easy to find, much of his Human Comedy remains unavailable in English today).

Little did I know that the cookbook section is right next to the hardbound classics; in the midst of my Balzac search, my eyes wandered to alight on Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II, first edition! Surely, this must have been an oversight on the Strand's part. Their loss, my gain. While missing a dustjacket, the cover was a beautiful blue fleur-de-lis pattern on an off-white background, classic and elegant.

As soon as I got back home, I settled for a long cookbook read while eating goat cheese on wafer-thin crackers. Nothing that will make you as hungry as reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I assume the same for Volume 1 which I plan on buying very soon). Even thinking about the book now has me reaching out for those crackers, anything to fill my mouth while thinking about those soups recipes rich with cream, the roasts studded with lardons before being briefly pan fried with pork fat, the sausage recipes with one portion ground pork to one portion pork fat, the pate cooked in brioche dough, the deconstructed cabbage reconstructed with a stuffing of ground pork and rice, the lighter than air pound cake...hungry yet?

For all the recipes, what makes Child and Beck's cookbook so outstanding is the thorough description of technique, the idea that each section is built around one technique which can be mastered and used again and again throughout one's cooking lifetime. In many ways, today's cookbooks are extremely light on technique with too many homecooks reliant on cookbooks to offer a diverse range of techniques that needs to be learned over and over again. However, this is not the way cooks of old did it. Instead, what matters are a core set of skills (after all, cooking is a craft) that can be learned and which can be reinterpreted through various recipes.

For example, Child and Beck cover a good range of beef stew recipes. However, underlying each recipe, as the authors point out, is the central skill of braising with variations on the beginning and finishing portions of the recipe as well as slight modifications of ingredients. In this section, the authors, amateur cooks themselves who loved food but did not cook for restaurants, offer comprehensive information on different cuts of meat, what makes a certain cut of beef better for braising.

Many of the recipes are illustrated with drawings showing technique. This isn't the cookbook as food porn, which is so often the case these days and a visual feast I fully indulge in frequently, but the cookbook as a serious manual to a central skill.

Why a central skill? I realize that many people now cook only for entertainment. However, nothing is as nourishing or as reliable as a good meal. There might be days when I won't have the time to read (that mental and even emotional sustenance that I need). But I must eat, even if my lunch is too frequently in front of a computer. And I always eat a full breakfast, not a continental breakfast of pastry and coffee. With such eating habits, I try to always make a substantial main course that will last me for several breakfasts in a row (today, I made chicken and rice porridge with jujubee). Even if I have a long day of reports ahead of me, I can look forward to my breakfast, enjoy having something warm and filling, particularly on these cold December mornings. I know pop psychology is popular these days as a means of working one's self towards happiness...but I really think everyone would be happier if they learned to cook so that they could eat something delicious everyday.

Not work reading, someday?

2008-12-04T20:48:00.000-08:00

So, there are all the joys of working in publishing...such as all the free books, meeting people who do nothing but work on books in one way or another and talking with such people about books, and doing something I love for a living.

However, believe it or not, as everyone in the industry will tell you, you never get the time to read for pleasure. The problem is reading for work. Work at the office is filled with too many distractions to actually read, between people popping in and out with questions, emails, and sorting through the kazillion pieces of paper waiting in the in-box.

It makes perfect sense that a co-worker gave me for a birthday recently: Franz Kafka's The Office Writings! Among the contents are "Jubilee Report: Twenty-Five Years of the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute" (1914), "Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public" (1916/1917),"The Scope of Compulsory Insurance for the Building Trades" (1908), and much more written by Kafka as a lawyer working for the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to dip into it...too much work reading!

OT: The divine Eggleston

2008-11-26T19:36:00.001-08:00

Go see it at the Whitney Museum. Your eyes will thank you.

Schulz and Peanuts

2008-11-16T07:55:00.000-08:00

I finally read David Michaelis' biography, Schulz and Peanuts, in a long marathon read starting on Friday evening and lasting all day Saturday. First off, I love the cover designed by Chip Kidd:

And before anyone reads further on my review, it might be more appropriate to look at Austin Kleon's review which he posted on his flickr page.

Now, onto my thoughts on David Michaelis' interpretation of Charles Schulz's life. I say "interpretation" as I do consider all biographies such and that the biographer is an active force in shaping the understanding of the subject. In many ways, a biographer is a harder task than that of a writer since a biographer is not dealing with inventions but with a human being who once lived (and occasionally are still living). Therefore, the final book is also a reflection of the biographer's ability to approach his subject with sensitivity and understanding while keeping a critical distance lest the biography become a hagiography.

David Michaelis had a large task in front of him as he is the first biographer of Schulz who passed away 2000. Moreover, as Michaelis tells us in his acknowledgments, Schulz did not believe in keeping drafts nor notes on his work and destroyed such items on a daily basis. What Michaelis had to work with were Schulz's letters, what Schulz's family, friends and acquaintances could tell about Schulz, and the Peanuts which Schulz penned up to a few months before his death.

In this regard, Schulz is not unique in becoming an enigmatic personality for a biographer to research; yet, such a loosely documented life tests the biographer's ability to weigh all evidence carefully. Unfortunately, Michaelis, while doing Peanuts-lovers a favor in researching Schulz's life and some of the inspirations for Peanuts, is a heavy-handed interpreter. Michaelis suffers from the psychoanalysis twitch. In this, he is not alone. Reading Schulz and Peanuts, I felt I could easily substitute Sylvia Plath's name for much of the psychoanalyzing: dead parent when young, ambition, unhappy marriage, and all this being used as fodder for the artist. Inasmuch as one should be careful not to presume in ever so delicately psychoanalyzing one's own friends, a biographer owes something (perhaps respect?) to his dead subject in not imposing a psychoanalytic trajectory that explains the artist too easily.

In essence, Michaelis' idea of Schulz can be summed up as such: Schulz suffered from his mother's cold and distant Norwegian demeanor. Therefore, when Dena Schulz died when Schulz was twenty, Schulz had yet to show his mother his accomplishments. The early death of his mother, combined with Schulz's feelings of inadequacy with his mother and his rough and tumble sardonic Norwegian relations, metamorphized in the young Schulz to a passive-aggressive ambition to become the best at comics while also creating a void which never allowed Schulz to feel satisfied with his accomplishments or his romantic life.

It might well be that Dena Schulz was a distant mother and that Charles Schulz felt that he never lived up to her expectations. However, this does not explain enough about Schulz's ability to create the world of the Peanuts, one which wasn't hermetic, as Michaelis seems to imply, but an imaginary world that reflected the true emotions of the world we inhabit. As such, while the children are cruel to each other, there are also lyrical moments of tenderness, music, dancing, philosophy, wit, and many of the humane ideas which balance out the cruelty and the awful sense of fatality in our lives.

In projecting his own psychoanalytic interpretation of Schulz, Michaelis fails to explore further all the aspects of the Peanuts (and possibly the many different aspects of Schulz) that made the Peanuts such a legendary comic strip.

Earlier, I mentioned Sylvia Plath and how the interpretation of her life is interchangeable with that of Schulz. The now entrenched viewpoint that Plath is a confessionalist poet whose works are a reflection of her inner turmoils has irreparably damaged much of the scholarship on Plath. Many scholars and biographers, insensitive to the technical brilliance that Plath brought to her poems, have wasted their energies on finding a one to one correlation between Plath's works and her life. However, a close reading of her poems reveals that while Plath interwove real aspects of her life into her work, she transformed events into a symbolic and often a mythical language that was influenced by writers such as T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and more. Such transmutation of life into fiction and poetry was not a cause to find a psychological disease in a writer until the recent decades; if anything, such transformations were seen as part of an artist's task.

Michaelis follows in the path of many contemporary biographers in looking corollaries between the Peanuts characters and the people in Schulz's life. For instance, Michaelis interprets Lucy as a pure transposition of Schulz's first wife, Joyce, who had an imperious manner and seemed to commander their marriage. In support of such a narrow understanding of Lucy, Michaelis interweaves strips (as he does throughout the whole book) of Lucy's domineering behavior. Yet, what he fails to mention are the strips when Lucy dances with Snoopy, when she can be surprisingly gentle or tender to Linus, or when she displays curiosity towards the world in such small things as watching bugs on the sidewalk. While it seems likely that a number of the strips about Lucy were inspired by Joyce and the Schulzs' unhappy marriage, it also seems possible that the character of Lucy was larger than that. In the same vein, Michaelis interprets Charlie Brown and Snoopy as two different aspects of Schulz himself.

Throughout his whole life, Schulz said that the Peanuts were his own creation, and Michaelis gives many instances when Schulz would not allow anybody's interference as to what should go in any of the strips. If Schulz maintained this artistic line, as Michaelis believes, then, aren't all of the Peanuts a reflection of different aspects of Schulz, or at least as Schulz understood the world?

What I dislike about finding narrow corollaries between a work and an artist's life is that it narrows our understanding of a work rather than enriching it. If I am to believe that Lucy is only Schulz's first wife, what then am I to make of the many instances when I sympathize with Lucy as she is on the page, as she was created by Schulz and then leapt off the page as a vivacious, crabby, loud, violent, funny character?

Peppermint Patty is attributed by Michaelis to be a take-off on Schulz's tomboyish cousin, Patty Swenson. Yet, later in life when Schulz married a second time to Jeannie Clyde, much of Jeannie's activities and words were transposed onto Peppermint Patty. It would seem that Schulz himself saw his characters in a more fluid manner where he worked some of the people onto the characters that were suitable.

In his groundbreaking work, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud posits that it is easier to emphatize with comic strip characters because their faces are such a quick sketch, a few lines with few deliminating characteristics, making them almost universal. In many critical writings on James Joyce's Ulysses, scholars note Joyce's telescoping of the specific onto the universal in plotting a son and surrogate father story onto an epic myth. One might say that it is necessary for any artist to strive to make her characters and feelings understood universally. After all, the task of an artist is to interpret his world and then offer it up to an audience so that the viewer or reader can use such works to better interpret his own life. In this, Schulz was triumphant. While Michaelis' biography has covered much ground in research, the interpretation seems lacking. It would be a shame if future Schulz biographers were to see The Peanuts in such a confessionalist manner, as has happened to Plath's work. Instead, I hope that other biographers will use Michaelis' research and follow up with a more broadening understanding of Schulz's life and his work.

OT: Snoopy Curry

2008-10-31T12:40:00.001-07:00

Just because....A friend posted this photo on her album after a visit to Tokyo.

The Economist Book of Obituaries

2008-10-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday over oysters and soup, a friend gave me a copy of The Economist Book of Obituaries. I haven't seriously read The Economist in years, mostly because I never really enjoyed the writing style. Being mostly a fiction reader, most non-fiction has to be gussied up into something more florid for me to get used to it (we all have our faults; the inability to read non-fiction well is one of mine). However, I had never read their obituary section, even though I've long enjoyed New York Times' obits. Boy, was I in for a pleasant surprise.

The obituaries in The Economist include what one would expect: the famous politicians, Princess Di, movie stars, famous musicians...the people who are always making the news. But, The Economist also has a policy, starting with the very beginning of their obit column, of favoring the lesser-known personality over the world famous figure. Hence, along with the stars are behind the scene political advisors, an oil-rig fire fighter, Alex the African Grey (famous for being able to construct real sentences with semiotic meaning), philosophers, sports figures, brewers, economists, the last survivor of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study who passed away in 2004, human rights activists, the forger of Hitler's diaries, gangsters, corrupt dictators...all the many people who have contributed to the world, whether for good or for the worse.

Written by Keith Colquhoun, a novelist, and Ann Wroe, a biographer, the obituaries are marvels of well-constructed and effective sentences. While each obit clearly has a decided perspective on the deceased person, it also judiciously lays out all the facts and sides to a personality. In many instances, though, the obituary writers hew to The Economist's tone of dignity (a sort of very British let's be worldly gentlemen sort of feel perhaps). One such example is the obituary of Princess Di:

One of the oddities of many of the articles written about Diana during the past week is that they dwell on her search for privacy. True, she had no privacy, but she appeared content to be constantly on public view. After Lenin died the Soviet government employed researchers to make a record of every day of his life. The reporters and photographers who made Diana their career did the same, and more efficiently. She mostly smiled on their dog-like attention and occasionally threw them a bone which would turn up in a tabloid next day as a "world exclusive."

Her friends were privy to her more intimate thoughts and those too would become public property. The princess went on television to give answers to the most searching questions about her life in a BBC programme that was sold around the world. As a product, Diana never palled. There was always some event to keep her public keen, a new lover, a new cause, some painful disclosure about her physical and mental health. Privacy is a luxury still available to the rich, albeit with difficulty. Princess Diana preferred to display her infinite variety.

It should be noted that the obit is accompanied by a photo of Diana before her fairy tale wedding, with the yet to be princess looking rather sulky, her shoulders rather slumped, face tilted and the hair casting a shadow over her eyes which brood up at the viewer in annoyance peevishly. The young Diana Frances Spencer is ill-dressed in a oxford shirt with a vest sweater and a seersucker skirt that hangs off her like a potato sack. The photo goes with the notion that such a Diana might have relished the stardom that being Princess of Wales instantly endowed.

Almost consistently, the writers are more generous and sympathetic to the lesser known figures. One that moved me a great deal was the writing on Bip, the character created by the mime, Marcel Marceau:

He [Pip] never spoke. Mr Marceau's father died in 1944 in Auschwitz, and Bip's silence was a tribute to all those who had been silenced in the camps. It was a recollection, too, of the necessary muteness of resistance fighters caught by the Nazis, or quietly leading children across the Swiss border to safety, as Mr Marceau had done. In one of his acts, "Bip Remembers", the sad-faced clown relived in mime the horrors of the war and stressed the necessity of love. In another, his hands became good and evil: evil clenched and jerky, good flowing and emollient, with good just winning.

I was struck to read time and again about the many people who were orphans. It reminds me that eighty or seventy years ago, mortality was much higher, diseased more rampant and the two world wars a major devastation to nations and individuals.

Besides learning about individual personalities, many of the obits on political figures around the world are informative in relating exactly the contextual political history of their times. As such, now I finally understand the basis of the civil war in Sri Lanka, some of the policies of the French government after World War II towards its colonies, and much much more twentieth history.

On one final note, I am gratified to note that the British style of quotation marks is exactly the way I have always believed that quotation marks should semiotically used.

Nancy Mitford and her sisters

2008-10-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

Really, they each deserve a heading of their own, but I am making her siblings contingent on Nancy Mitford as I started off my interest with Nancy Mitford's biographies. A couple of years ago, I read, in an article about Voltaire and his works, about Nancy Mitford's book, Voltaire in Love, detailing Voltaire's relationship with the Marquise du Chatelet, an unusually scientifically-oriented woman for her time. I haven't read anything by Volatire except for Candide. However, Candide is one of those books that everyone has: "The Book (or one of the books) That Changed My Life."

(Some of the books to make that list for me is Camus' The Plague, Dylan Thomas' Selected Poems, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Fareed Zakaria's Future of Freedom, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty. These books aren't even necessarily the books I consider the best written books I have read, nor always the most sophisticated in terms of intellectual thinking, even though most of them are intellectually stimulating. Rather, they are books that converged with a certain pivotal moment when much was changing in my life and where the books crystallized a certain change in my own thinking.)

I read Voltaire's Candide multiple times for classes. Like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it seemed to be required reading in every other class I took...possibly because I had such a fascination with the French Revolution during my college days. In all, there were four separate times when I read Candide. It says something about my lack of perspicacity that it took the fourth read for me to appreciate Candide and the notion of tending the garden at the end of Candide. That didn't happen until my second year in grad school where I was miserably not tending my garden, or more or less lackadaisically attending classes while uncertain of what to do with my life. Then, Candide hit me like a brick-of-walls revelation (it's for moments like this that the Joycean concept of epiphany seems the only apt description).

Reading Nancy Mitford's Voltaire in Love provided all sorts of biographical and historical details that are helpful in placing Voltaire in context, not only in terms of his personal and romantic life but also in terms of politics, his own oddly querulous but somewhat obsequious or provocative (in turns, depending on his position with the court) behavior towards the French court. The book is also good at giving colorful specifics on intellectual arguments, the back-biting between intellectuals, and the petty bickering that seems to be the grease of life everywhere and in every century.

Previous to reading Voltaire in Love, I breezed through Mitford's Madame de Pompadour about the beautiful mistress of Louis XV whose political intrigues are often blamed for the loss of the French monarch's popularity and as paving the populous road towards hate of the regency. The political action which Mitford cites as being the most unfortunate of Madame de Pompadour's well-intentioned but politically naive step was in being one of the primary instigators of France's alliance to Germany which led to the financially debilitating Seven Year's War. Interestingly, Mitford writes that Louis XV was very against war of any kind except in absolute need of national security. Along with other monarchs of that time, Louis XV saw war on the battlefield (not in the frontlines, but still he was on the battlefield unlike politicians in our time who visit soldiers at forts and bases but do not actually endanger their physical being) and appreciated that the sacrifice of human lives was enormous and not to be taken lightly. The other reason Madame de Pompadour is so notorious in history is that she was one of the rare commoners to become a monarch's lover, being born into a bourgeois family rather than an aristocratic one.

After reading both books, I became intrigued by Mitford herself. Both of the biographies have a light and funny voice that makes reading history fun rather than a tedious trudge through facts. While they might not be the books for serious scholars of French history or French intellectual history, they are perfect for a layman such as myself looking to learn more about Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour without committing myself to long tomes. From the sparkling wit of her tone, it was clear that Nancy Mitford must have been quite the social personality as well as being learned.

I had long had Mary S. Lovell's The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family on my bookshelf as a freebie from years ago when it was first published but knew little about any of the Mitfords, from the notorious Hitler-adoring Unity, Diana who married England's Fascist's party leader, to Jessica Mitford who literally fled her family to become one of America's top muckrakers and civil activist and Nancy Mitford who moved to Paris, in love with one of De Gaulle's advisors and sorting through various French archives for further research on other biographies, including one on Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. Among the lesser publicly famous sisters were Debo, the youngest sister who married into one of England's most prestigious families and helped restore the family's beautiful and stupendous estate, Chatsworth, and Pamela, known as the quiet Mitford or "The Woman," within the family, for her motherly ways.

Lovell's family biography is appropriate for Nancy Mitford as Lovell brings a human touch to one of the most tremendous times of the twentieth century when Facism and Communism were on the rise with Hitler remaking Germany after the financially disastrous Treaty of Versailles which held the ruined German government liable for the financial costs of the war to the allies. As a consequence, Germany lost its colonies (remember that this is still a time when colonies were deemed an appropriate holdings of a European nation) and ten percent of its own land. 12.5 percent of the German population suddenly found themselves no longer living in Germany. Furthermore, as the reparations continued, they crippled Germany's ability to recover from World War I. When Germany found itself so economically incapable that they could not continue reparations, French troops entered the Ruhr to demand payment. All these consequences of the first World War led to the downfall of the Weimar government and the rise of Hitler.

As Lovell's group biography capably shows, many in Europe at the time admired Hitler's ability to bring Germany out of such dire circumstances. Along with Hitler's command of Germany's domestic difficulties, the rise of Communism in Europe was seen as a threat by the wealthier and aristocratic British such as Tom Mitford, the one brother among the six sisters, who didn't agree with Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism but espoused Facism; he went so far as to do everything possible to be stationed away from Europe during World War II so that he wouldn't have to fight Germans.

It speaks to Lovell's abilities as a writer and her scope as a biographer that she is able to bring a perspective to why half the Mitford family actually liked Hitler. Besides the fact that Hitler's reign ended Germany's economic misery, they also knew Hitler personally. Unity, the fourth of the Mitford siblings, early had an infatuation with Hitler; once she was sent to Germany, as an attempt by her parents to get the disinterested adolescent girl engaged in her studies, she spent many hours in restaurants that Hitler frequented. Her efforts were rewarded by Hitler who finally noticed the tall Nordic featured girl who seemed to be everywhere he was and invited her to his table. Over the course of years, many members of the family, most notably Unity's parents and her sister Diana, were personally introduced to Hitler, dined with Hitler and held fairly normal conversations about the arts, food, and the everyday topics of polite discourse.

While Unity was in Germany swooning over Hitler (literally -- her contemporaries and friends have talked about Unity's body shaking whenever she saw Hitler), Decca (Jessica) Mitford felt smothered by the lack of stimulation on the Redesdale homestead (the Mitfords' parents were Lord and Lady Redesdale, in the confusing manner of British arisotcratic patronyms) and decided to run away with her Communist cousin, Esmond, who also happened to be Winston Churchill's nephew. All of the Mitfords were related, not by blood but by marriage, to Winston Churchill through their father who was Churchill's wife's cousin (David Freeman Mitford's aunt's -- on his mother's side -- daughter, Clementine, married Winston Churchill). Esmond began to harbor a hate of almost the whole Mitford family for their conservative politics as well as the Lord Redesdale's severing of ties with Decca during Esmond's lifetime (much as he had broken ties with Decca's older sister, Diana, for divorcing her husband, an heir to the Gusiness fortune, in order to have an affair with Sir Owald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF)). When Esmond died fighting on the British side of the war, Decca somehow came to believe that her sister Diana and her husband were personally responsible for the war and her husband's death.

Much as now, politics was personal intertwined with the ideological. Diana supported Fascism because her lover, later husband, was the leader of the BUF. Decca early sought out Socialism and Communism as a means of rebelling against her parents who, along with many aristocrats and commoners of that time, did not see any reason to send their daughters on for further education even as they sent their son to university. Nancy supplied information on Diana to the British government because she believed that the British must fight against the Germans. Lord and Lady Redesdale, split by ideological differences about the war (Lord Redesdale supported the war whereas Lady Redesdale insisted that Hitler was the nice man she had often lunched with while visiting her daughter Unity in Germany), eventually physically separated as well and never lived together again. Unity, whose adoration of Hitler was so overwhelming, came to believe that the purpose of her life was to unite Germany and Britain in diplomatic alliance somehow despite the fact that she was a young and naive woman rather than a diplomat and a politician. When war was declared, she shot herself in a suicide attempt that left her mentally impaired for the rest of her life.

It is inevitable that we look back towards World War II and see Hitler as a monster that, of course, should have been stopped. World War II, in retrospect, has all the force of all historic actions validated by historians. It was necessary. Yet, this is in hindsight, after the war has been won. During the Mitfords' time, when they were living the political uncertainties, the war was contested within the family with their individual ideologies, personalities, love affairs, passions and goals shaping how each understood the war. I recall reading a recent review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke where Baker was criticized for his portrayal of Churchill as a war-mongerer. Yet, independent of Baker, Lovell talks about this as a commonly understood portrayal of Winston Churchill by his political contemporaries, that Churchill was impatient for war and wanted it when there were other politicians who were not as eager for war so soon after the first World War I (interestingly, one of Diana's lifelong defensive points about her Fascist husband was that he was a pacifist who fought in World War I and did not want war again).

In thinking about war as understood by a nation's citizens in the time of war as opposed to understanding a war after the war is won, I wonder how historians will understand the current American war in Iraq. I am one of many who think that the war has been an aggressive act to secure a foothold in the Middle East at the cost of many lives, American and Iraqi as well as those of nations fighting on both sides. In thinking about the Mitford sisters, their divided stances on politics, and the light that Lovell sheds on the uncertainty of the future in any political situation, perhaps the only thing one can say is that future historians' understanding of this current war will be shaped by how the war is won or lost rather than by the uncertainties that accompanied this era.

OT: Sarah Palin's sentences diagrammed

2008-10-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

I stole these diagrams from Kitty Burns Florey's Slate article on diagramming Sarah Palin's sentences.

Sarah Palin during the Katie Couric interview:
It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?

Sarah Palin during the Charlie Gibson interview:
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

Sarah Palin on confusion:

Of Kitty Burns Florey's own sentences, I particularly admired and giggled over this one:
The sentences she uttered in interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and Katie Couric seem to twitter all over the place like mourning doves frightened at the feeder.

Mourning doves frightened at the feeder...hm, Palin or the voters?

OT: House says No to Bailout

2008-09-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

Graph of Dow says it all (graph from New York Times). I know this isn't even remotely related to books, but I find it all so depressing that I can't think of anything else.

Comic-con and getting rid of sexual harassment

2008-09-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

Please go read this by Bully and John on how to help get rid of sexual harassment at Comic-Con.

While I've never been to Comic-Con, having had John and Bully as friends for many years, I trust what they say (besides, they are the kind of folks you can trust). The comic and graphic novel scene is very neat, and it's a shame to let a few guys who can't behave ruin it for everyone else.

And Hurray! to John and Bully for doing something about it. Join the effort. Click on the link in the first paragraph.

Rant: Stupidity

2008-09-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well, we all knew it...the blog is just like the world in revealing the many aspects of human nature. But it happens to be different than the world in that any individual can have their ignorance and stupidity crystallized and revealed for the rest of the world in the way of all fast media.

Therefore, without further ado, I have the displeasure of outing this particularly self-insular and self-centered piece of writing by a young man who had never heard of David Foster Wallace until Wallace's recent sad death.

On the blog, as on in the real world, not knowing something doesn't always imply that the person is not famous; it can just be a pointer at one's own lack of knowledge in certain arenas. Given that all of us are necessarily limited in knowledge due to the limitations of the human brain and time on this earth (I fully admit my ignorance of all things related to pop culture, mathematics and science), there's no problem with that. However, what is a problem is mistaking a serious writer who suffered from a debilitating mental disease as a sensation- and fame-seeker.

Mr. Matthew T. Sussman could only have made such a mistake in ignoring his own ignorance of a very well-known American writer and foolishly deciding to turn his ignorance into a sensation- and fame-seeking piece on David Foster Wallace. He should feel ashamed for his lack of intellectual curiosity as well as a lack of intellectual honesty. In both traits, he is the exact opposite of David Foster Wallace whose writing is much admired for displaying an energetic curiosity towards all things and all beings in the world as well as the ability to work through intellectual questions in a discerning manner.

OT: obit of Joan Winston

2008-09-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Very interesting obituary on someone who sounds very neat...one of the original organizers for the Star Trek conventions.

Hope she finds an afterlife in outer space.

Cloudspotting

2008-09-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

I am totally crushing on The Cloudspotter's Guide, a book chockful of wonderful facts about clouds, including elephants....more later.

But, in the meantime, go join the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Violence and its representation

2008-09-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago, I was too tired from various reports at work to read too much, so I opened Gilbert Hernandez's Chance in Hell about a girl possibly abandoned by her parents in a surreal violent junkyard and rescued by a man who grew up in the said junkyard. Like previous Gilbert Hernandez graphic novels which I've read, Chance in Hell has a gritty social overlay; however, Hernandez also develops a more symbolic language to talk about the psychological effects of violence on his characters. Both trademark traits propel the plot of Chance in Hell in which the main character, Empress, is raped as well as watching people die in the surreal junkyard only to perpetuate an impulsive act of violence herself.

It is perhaps inevitable to be saddened and disturbed by such a book, particularly a graphic novel where the violence is visually rendered. One could argue, of course, that the visual representation of violence has been made quotidian through regular viewings on television and at the movies (and I must disclose at this moment that I gave up television a few years back and only watch television at friends'). However, I found myself startled by the violence in Hernandez's book; in retrospect, I wonder if part of that surprise and deep disturbance is the format of a graphic novel as opposed to a movie or a tv show.

In a book, whether it's a graphic novel, a poem, or a cookbook, one can return to different parts. While I am stating the obvious, I am intrigued in taking this ability to look again and again in conjunction with the fascination with violence and sex (by the way, on a very large theme...why is it that so much violence is often linked to sex in various plots, whether in novels, tv, movies, songs, etc.). In watching a movie or tv, the scene of violence moves. It is not static. Violence in photographs or art is static; it is "captured" in the singular moment or singular representation. Graphic novels takes the static and creates a moving plot...yet, one can replay the plot with a turn of the page. In this sense, violence, as represented in a graphic novel, can be viewed more easily many more times.

In thinking about violence, I am reminded of a friend who cannot watch any violent movies, including Hong Kong cop movies (some of my favorite movies are John Woo films). To me, such films, along with Quentin Taratino's riff on Hong Kong cool, are not real as violence due to the stylization which takes precedence over any pretense of representing reality. Yet, such violence when real, when enacted in life, is a negation of humanity itself. In saying that I don't mind stylized violence, am I unconsciously helping foster a "cool" view of violence? The very question smacks of morality, but I can't help but wonder what happens in an age and ethos when violence is so easy to represent with irony and style whereas tenderness and gentleness is almost impossible to represent without Hollywood sentimentality.

When considering tenderness and gentleness, I still think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," a movie I watch almost every year. It remains an emotionally moving film because it isn't saccharine. Instead, the movie ponders a very serious question about a good man on the verge of suicide after financial ruin. I don't necessarily think that "morals" are useful in thinking about the arts. Yet, I do want to consider carefully what is possible in various representations. Is it easy to represent violence? Is it difficult to represent tenderness? Is it easy to represent an evil person? Is it difficult to represent a good person? Or, perhaps even more complicated: how does one faithfully allow for the mix of both violence and tenderness, the mix of good and bad (evil always has such a metaphysical ring that it doesn't even seem to exist), the more likely reality that most of us encounter?

War and Peace, changes, and self-help books

2008-09-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've had the mental wherewithal to put a coherent posting, mostly because I've been trying to adjust to some major changes in my life as I just moved cities and switched jobs. Granted, I moved back to the city where I grew up and switched jobs back into an industry where I worked for a number of years...but still, there's all the usual adjustments of learning new commuting times, returning to a four-season climate (including the most hideous of humid summers), and just thinking about every new new thing.

As part of such changes, I just bought...2 self-help books. I can't help but feel somewhat addled and fluffy as a human being just admitting that I bought those self-help books, let alone saying that I am in absolute earnest about reading these books. However, as I recently admitted to a friend, I've learned many things about life from more shallow sources, particularly Agatha Christie's mysteries and Korean soap operas.

So, what have I learned from Agatha Christie's mysteries? As someone who started reading Agatha Christie as an adult (rather than all my middle school friends who were reading them when they were eleven), I loved her psychological portrayal of human beings. Granted, they aren't the deepest psychological portrayals, but I always felt they struck at the essence of certain personality quirks. And sometimes, having a quick thumbnail sketch of human psychology, rather than a long and involved book, is useful as a way of easily understanding certain traits.

In regards to Korean soap opera...I would say that the lesson is, contradictorily enough, the exact opposite: that certain situations and circumstances do not call for deep rumination on human motivations but rather behaving in a way to make the best of a situation. In that regard, Korean soap operas address the deeply pragmatic vein of Korean culture while still turning on all the tears for the melodrama. The other thing I love about Korean soap operas is how the best ones are detail-oriented and based on mores. In many ways, there is a similarity to earlier British novels such as Jane Austen's novels (many Korean soap operas are still about marriages) or something like Anna Karenina (the sprawling multiple family soap operas with large casts, differences in classes and various personality types, the one tragic figure, etc).

So, given that so much of what I know about life does not come from profound sources but Agatha Christie and Korean soap operas...I should be perfectly fine in saying that I just bought Pema Chodron's Comfortable with Uncertainity and Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit. Pema Chodron's book are brief essays (very brief, roughly a couple of paragraphs each) that takes a Buddhist approach towards life and how to accept different vicissitudes of living. While I am not Buddhist, I find certain aspects of the religion (in its ideal, not institutional, form) jiving with my own hopeful aspirations for myself such as getting rid of one's ego, cultivating gentleness, acknowledging one's flaws, compassionate living, etc.

Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit is about creativity as Tharp has thought about it in relation to her practices as a dancer and composer of dance pieces. Yet, I think that much of how one approaches life, and work as well, is improved in keeping creativity alive and part of everyday living. Certainly, trying to see, whether I am walking the same blocks everyday or on vacation, has improved the enjoyment of my life vastly. Some days, I think there's really nothing more wonderful than seeing a beautiful building; yet, I feel the same when I see a flower blooming during the rare hikes (I am all urban girl). In many ways, creativity is engaging the world with all of one's senses and then interpreting it through one's mind and sensibility. To learn to utilize the senses, sensibility, and the mind is a tremendous resource.

Lastly, I have wanted to buy Richard Pevear and Larissa volokhonsky's translation of War and Peace since it first came out; I loved their translation of Anna Karenina. And I saw a hardcover still available and displayed at a bookstore, so I snagged it. Although the hardcover is pricey, I think it's worth it. Could I have bought it on Amazon for cheaper? Yes...but when I buy a hardcover for $37, it has to be perfect in appearance. And occasionally Amazon delivers books that are not in its best shape, particularly for one so obsessed about making sure the cover is smirch-free, untorn, and pristine.

Michael Eastman, Vanishing America

2008-07-21T23:53:00.001-07:00

Dotty has it, Cairo, Il

Eddie's BBQ

Big Hole, Montana

Barn, La Crosse

Marcella's Resort

Cairo, Il

I could look at these images over and over again and not get tired of them one bit.

Unfortunately, the layout of the book (from what I can tell looking at pages on Amazon) does not treat the photographs as the work of an artist/photographer but rather as an Americana book. So, layout is bleeds, numerous photographs squeezed onto one page without margins. This is a bit disappointing given that Eastman's photographs are stunningly beautiful. However, I consider it still worthwhile to get the book after looking at these photographs on-line and will plunk down my credit card in a couple of weeks to get my copy. I will report further once I've perused the whole book.

OT: Moon Water

2008-07-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

This is such a beautiful image that I had to post it to my blog even though it's not remotely related to books. It appeared on the New York Times with the following explanation:

Moon water. The green spherules, made of glass, are pieces of the Moon, typically about one-fifth of a millimeter in diameter, that were erupted from the lunar mantle long ago. New analysis of these volcanic glasses, which were collected by Apollo 15 astronauts, indicate that they contained 745 parts per million of water before the eruption. That suggests that there could be water in the interior of the Moon, which would be unexpected. The Moon is believed to be the result of a collision between the Earth and a Mars-size asteroid, and that cataclysm would have left the Moon high and dry.

Photo credit: NASA.

Insular Literature?

2008-07-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

In the second volume of his history of Modern poetry, David Perkins talks about the differences between what New Criticism espoused as opposed to the actual way the New Critics had learned literature, including by reading literature in foreign languages.

I admit to being an heir to New Criticism thoughts in that I am not fluent in any foreign language, only knowing stray phrases here and there from various languages I studied ad hoc while in school. However, not knowing a language is no excuse for not reading a book in translation, including some of the most exciting poetry currently available.

Kevin Bezner in Oyster Boy talks about how New Criticism was a wrong turn in American poetry in that it espoused a natural diction in poetry rather than a language wholly different. While I don't necessarily agree with all of the review (particularly Bezner's contention that sonnet imposes a form on content; rather, in a good sonnet, the content should be chosen as suitable for the sonnet as should each word in its ability to burst out into the compressed form of the sonnet. This is what makes Gerald Manley Hopkins' sonnets so memorable along with the sprung rhythm. The contemporary practice of seeing content divorced from form has led to many unmemorable sonnets.), I think Bezner has a point. The use of almost wholly colloquial language in poems seems to be a mostly American practise.

Perhaps this points to a question I had in an earlier posting as to why the poets writing in Portuguese and Spanish have been influenced in a different way by the Whitmanian tradition than Americans have. The Portuguese and Spanish language poets seem to have encountering Surrealism at the same time that they were encountering Whitman as a poetic influence whereas Americans seem to have incorporated Whitman more along the lines of Mark Twain colloquialism meets the long line.

It could be that we are at a point where we are headed towards a cycle of insularity unless we can break off somehow. I say this when I think about my own generation of writers who seem too content with the current American poetry scene. I once heard Paul Muldoon say during a lecture that a poet is doing something wrong if he is not uncomfortable. There's so much placid acceptance that I would prefer some anger at this point.

I consider Paul Celan as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. It is hard to think of another poet from anywhere who remained so true to articulating truths about the world while still maintaining veracity to the art. He did not write of everyday comforts, but of the difficulty of seeing the world without a veil. When I read Celan, I feel that this must have been a tremendously difficult task for Celan, one that required careful and lengthy parsing of language as well as much time spent at considering each articulation of the world.

Currently, it is estimated that only 3 percent of books published in the U.S. are works in translation (3 percent is also the name of a new review website dedicated to foreign literature). For a vast publishing industry, this is too small a percentage and we lag far behind most nations with a robust book industry.

While it is important to listen to American voices and to read the representation of American lives, in a time when our presence on the international scene reflects how little we understand other cultures, it's important for current generations and future generations to read about other nations. Moreover, I would say that such understanding shouldn't be done through the interpretations of an American author, but rather that we should fully encounter the unfamiliarity and strangeness of other nations, their artistic sensibilities, their perspectives, and their interpretations on the world.

Besides the political scene, it is crucial for writers to read literature from everywhere. How else are we to continue growing, to be made uncomfortable?

Moby on Widgets

2008-07-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

This is what Herman Melville's Moby Dick widgets look like.

You can get Moby Dick widget t-shirts as well.

OT: Starlings!

2008-07-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

I've seen these birds swoop down in mass formations for years in my parents' neighborhood, and then later in the vicinity of my office, without knowing what they were. They make the most amazing formations, a pulsing swirling entity of perpetual motion. I can watch them for hours, in awe.

For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut

2008-07-01T17:20:00.001-07:00

I was lucky enough to read Takashi Hiraide's For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut in manuscript form a couple of months ago. It's a revelation in how to write small prose poems in beautiful language that interconnects into a larger poem with concrete themes that burst out into grander themes when read together. There's the regular commuter rails, minute observations of insect life, the wonder of fruit, rain falling into larger pools of water, the wonder of the universe encapsulated in each microcosm of living. A small bit of the book:

# 95
The battle of poetic forms, like a rag tossed on the pavement, is wet with recently spilled stars. What passes above it is a mechanism simply for passing by, a glance to be ignored. The formulaic camp remains blind to this section where each scenery emerges, but wrapped inside an old rallying call is rather a single section of acropathy patients eager to capsize the encircling cobblestones through the freedom of poetic form. They close their small eyes to the fact that a form of free verse is already a form at the disposal of political power, and that a rag waves no differently from a nation's flag.

Oh, and please admire the beautiful bilingual book design: recto English translation (trans. by Sawako Nakayasu), verso Japanese original.

Fantagraphics Sale!

2008-07-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Fantagraphics is having a backlist sale with many excellent books at 25% discount.

I recommend the following:
Francesa Ghermandi's Wipeout: weird shaped beings in a noir love triangle murder money story. Movie genre meets graphic novel. By the way, the noir has made a huge comeback in many different graphic novels.

Mark Kalesniko's Mail Order Bride: a comicbook-toy-geek orders a bride from South Korea only to have the submissive bride go through a journey of self-discovery and female emancipation in the land of Canada (cue Joni Mitchell).

Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong: an early early story even before the days of "graphic novel" being coined as a term, this is all the best sentimentality, melancholy, and body language of silent movies in graphic comic form. Don't miss it. There's nothing like it. One of my favorites.

Tori Miki's Anywhere But Here: I can't even explain these quirky little panels, so I am stealing this from Paul Harrison-Davies' blog:
Kangaeochi is form of Japanese stand up comedy where the laughter (assuming the jokes funny I guess) comes a couple of seconds after the jokes punchline. Now this isn't an extreme example of Japanese politeness, it's better explained by the english translation of kangaeochi, 'the thinker's punch line'. Basically you aren't supposed to 'get' the joke, at least not straightaway. ‘Anywhere But Here’ is a collection of one page comics that are the visual equivilant of kangaeochi, out of 90 pages I laughed, or smiled, or grinned, or nodded in appreciation, at maybe 10 pages.... the first time round. That's the thing, these comics are so strange, so odd, so removed from anything I've ever see, so charming and told with such beautiful and simple artwork that you have to look at them again, and again, and again... and then, you laugh. You get it, it's so obvious. And brilliant, did I mention that?

Summarize Proust...an Olympic sport

2008-06-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

Bully sent me this video link when I wrote my visualizing a la Proust post. I've been so hectic that I haven't had a chance to watch it until today. It's worth watching, particularly for Monty Python fans. Then, give the competitive summarization of Proust a shot yourself:

Crabby

2008-06-26T17:27:00.001-07:00

Not books, nor book-related...but I am sure you can use a book break occasionally as well.

Christmas Island Red Crabs - video powered by Metacafe

Moby hibernating?

2008-06-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I discovered the website mobylives.com, it was like stumbling on a motherlode, a veritable treasure chest of all things book-related that were bound to fascinate and awe me.

However, the website seems not to have been updated since 2006. My guess is that the founders, since venturing out into the perilous and exciting world of independent publishing, are too busy to post on their site. And who can blame them? Melville House is a wonderful addition to the industry, a great mix of eclectic, smart and fun books. Go check it out.

Booksellers and Independent Bookstores

2008-06-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last week, I've been spending a great deal of time talking with independent booksellers. I am lucky enough to be living in a city, San Francisco, with some of the most active independent booksellers.

When I try to explain to people outside of the book industry why independent bookstores are so important, people often don't understand. It could be that my view is so much as an insider that it doesn't connect with people who are not immersed in the book world as I am. However, I feel it is important to explain the necessity of independent bookstores and to try continuously to explain in the hopes that more people will support the independent bookstore in their neighborhood.

First off is the very general explanation for supporting independent businesses locally. Chain stores are not a good way to create a middle-class within a neighborhood because the majority of the money is sent to the headquarters. Even while such stores might employ local people, the profits will not be spent by locally. The employees will earn the salary, and given that we are talking about retail stores, most of these employees will not be earning a great deal whereas the larger profits will be given to headquarters and corporate employees who live in a different region of the country. However, if one spends money at a local store, the profit goes directly to someone who lives in that city or town and who will be spending the dollars within the community. Therefore, the cash flow remains within the community and helps to make a more stable middle class and one that is not based too much on flow in and flow out from other regions.

The second reason is how you, the reader, benefits from the expertise of people who live and breathe books for a living. When I started working in publishing, I started actively questioning all my friends and acquaintances on how they bought books, what compelled them to pick up a book in a bookstore and buy it. What surprised me is how many of them answered that the biggest problem they faced was that they didn't know what to buy. Generally, these were friends who are not writers, who read on a moderate basis, have subscription to the New Yorker, but do not actively follow the book reviews. They might happen upon a book review occasionally, but they do not see it as part of their weekend morning to peruse the book review to see what book might interest them.

For such readers, independent bookstores are a gift. There, the bookstore staff actively follows book reviews, knows what other people in the industry has recommended, but also, crucially, knows the local taste. On top of all that, they will often spend the time to talk with customers and make recommendations specifically based on your taste in books and what type of book you are looking to read at that exact moment. I recently watched a bookseller in action as I had inadvertently visited him at the busiest part of the day. He would be talking with me at the counter when a customer would come up and ask for a recommendation. He would give some ideas of his favorite books at that moment, ask the customer what she kind of book she was reading, and then start walking her towards different categories to show her a few books that might suit her. She ended up with two books that interested her.

For a serious bookreader, the need for independent bookstores is different. Possibly the last thing I need is more books. I have a bookshelf filled with double rows of books, books in stacks on top of the bookshelf, and stacks of books on the floor. Yet, books are an addiction, and I need to constantly replenish. If I know exactly which book I want, it would be easy. But like the casual reader, I want to be informed, but also excited, stimulated, and thrilled by falling in love for a new book. Here, independent bookstores that I know and trust serve as my drug dealers. We have a relationships. I might not even talk with a bookseller while I am there. Instead, I will spend several hours browsing, and end up with three books. I take this addiction very seriously; it is central to my very existence. When a bookstore that I rely on for such browsing hours close down, it is a catastrophe in my life. When Posman on University Place closed down, I was quite upset and talked about it for a year in confusion and sorrow. When Gotham closed down, not only was it upsetting on a personal level as I knew a number of the staff, but also upsetting as a lose of a known space. Each independent bookstore is distinct in how they choose to lay out the space, what kind of shelves they use, and the final atmosphere they achieve, from the small and cozy, to the large and spacious, from cluttered to neat, from the labyrinthine to rows of symmetrical shelves. Often I end up at a different bookstore based not only on my knowledge of the kind of books they are likely to stock, but also on what kind of space in which I want to spend my hours at that given moment. Each is an atmosphere that interacts with my personal needs. It is a dynamic that no chain nor online retailer can achieve.

Finally, I'd also like to say that for someone working in an independent publishing house as I do, independent booksellers are our front row of defense. They are the ones who promote our books, who take on risks to buy our books and sell it. In much the same ways that my company takes on a risk to acquire a manuscript by an unknown author and publish it, independent bookstores will take on the risk to promote an unknown author as long as they like the book. This is the kind of mentality that has made the book industry such a thrilling industry, and it is one that is in danger of fading when people start thinking that the industry should be about profit. Everyone in the industry needs to make their business work and to make a profit. Last thing I want to see is a business fail, whether it's a publishing house or a bookstore. However, I also think the central mission of our works are books. In saying that, I believe that we should all be dedicated to making the best books work.

I started off this post talking about my visits with booksellers here. I had previously worked as a sales rep, meaning that I once sold books to independent bookstores for a living. However, I found out that spending time socially with booksellers is a different phenomenon. A selling session is always rife with the certain tension needed to banter and to go back and forth focused on the actual selling. In a social setting, we are also freed of such business. Instead, we are people in the same business who also love books. And it turns out that booksellers are almost natural raconteurs, an often unseen and rare species of the extroverted bookworm. They talk for hours about their favorite books, their moments in the bookstore, the industry, and everything else on the planet. They happen to be among the best informed citizens of the world, having read about everything there is to read about and then discussing these things with their customers. They are a delight, real individuals and vocal citizens.

So, if you have finished reading this post and stayed with me throughout this lengthy push for one of my favorite things in my industry, please go to an independent bookstore and buy some books.

Visualizing Thoughts a la Proust

2008-06-17T00:24:00.000-07:00

The same friend (who was mentioned in the previous Visualizing Thoughts post) and I were discussing the difference between visualizing when reading as opposed to reading without visualization. She had read my post, and said that my post clarified what reading as an event was like for me (should one call reading an event or an act?).

We segued into discussing music and visualization. When I was in high school, my band conductor talked about a certain composer, whose name I have since forgotten, as evoking one image after another for me. I tried quite sincerely to listen to the same composer and to try to evoke images. I could not, but what I felt was a rush of emotions, similar to the sensation of reading. Now, when I hear a piece of music that I played when I was younger in high school band or orchestra, I often hear the instruments that sat behind me: the trumpets in band and the cellos in orchestra. Particularly during Bizet's Carmen, I hear the rough timber of the bow against the cello strings. Perhaps my love of the cello can be attributed to the years I spent sitting in front of them and admiring the grandeur of that instrument, hearing its deep resonance.

In reading the third portion of Swann's Way, I was struck by how Proust talks about language and visualization:

"Words present us with little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people--and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people--and image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets."

Here, Proust is talking of language as a categorizing function, particularly nouns. Yet, anything which is given a specific name is endowed with a identity which takes it out of a category and places it as unique, one of a kind.

However, I must say when I read the word "bird", I don't see "little pictures" but merely understand it conceptually while I am reading. For this reason, I tend to be very focused on characters in my reading rather than the plot. Non-fiction generally tends to be a more difficult category for me, particularly more fact based non-fiction such as history (as opposed to more conceptual non-fiction based such as philosophy or theoretical writings).

When I read fiction, the central character is the center of emotion, the one whose inner-life is the pivot of all action. One might say that I fall into the inner-being of the character, but it is one whose eyes are closed to the visual, whose ears are closed to spoken words. Instead, the book is a hermetic seal within the inner-life; this is how a book functions for me.

For this very reason, to read a book without a central consciousness nor one central character is much more difficult for me to focus on. Large works of history, which I try to read occasionally to understand important portions of history, tend to be difficult. Science books, where visualization is difficult. Philosophy, while requiring mental agility and clarity, is more appealing than a history book to me.

It was interesting to me to hear my friend talk about how visualization works for me. Even when she reads a non-fiction book where there isn't a visual scene that is a component of the fact being conveyed, her brain will come up with a visual component. If her brain does not immediately come up with a visual component, she will read the passage over and again until a visual component is arrived at.

In talking over the book as a hermetic seal, which is part of the argument that some critical theory is based on, I wondered how many critical theorists have thought about reading as conceptually based as opposed to sensory based. In thinking this, I realize that there are some early linguists (and of course Wittgenstein, as discussed in my previous post) that tied visualization to language. It's been a long while since I studied critical theory, but I don't recall this difference in reading as being discussed in any of the essays I read. If this difference in reading approaches was discussed and written about, would it change the way critical theorists wrote about the book? For instance, the phrase "field of language"...what does that mean for people who visualize? For me, it means the hermetic seal, the closed in world of the novel, the closed in play of language itself where language can be unmoored and played with through alliteration, syllabic counts, rhymes and off rhymes. But if language is moored to a visual orientation, how does the field play out for those readers? Interesting to wonder about.

Maupassant

2008-06-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

Now that my brain has stopped obsessing about Scottish terrier barrettes, I can talk somewhat intelligently about Maupassant.

Like so many people (or at least the majority of Maupassant reviewers on Amazon), I had read a couple of short stories by Maupassant, the most anthologized being The Necklace, during high school years and then never read him again. What a shortcoming it is of contemporary American culture that Maupassant is not better appreciated!

Reading "Mon oncle Jules et autres contes" (the bilingual Dover edition, even though my French is non-existent except for the usual Mon Ami, Mon Cherie with me being worried as to the feminine/masculine ending on even these slightest usage...and I even took French lessons in high school and college; one of these days, I will put together a post on how to take 5 languages and not retain a single one) was a revelation. Maupassant can take the briefest of descriptions and reveal the psychological makeup of a character. Here's a couple of sentences describing the central character, Hector de Gribelin, in On Horseback:

Then, at twenty, a position had been found for him and he had entered the Navy Department as a clerk with an annual salary of fifteen hundred francs. He had run aground on that reef like all those who hadn't been prepared early on for life's rough combat, like all those who see life through a mist, unaware of the necessary measures and staying power, those in whom no special aptitudes, particular faculties, or fierce energies for the struggle have been inculcated since childhood, all those in whose hand no weapon or implement has been placed.

How many Hector de Gribelins do we know, those who come to life without the necessary faculties and skills to negotiate their way? The description also points to a concern that is scrutinized time and again in this brief volume of stories: the human preference for self-deception and delusion over observation. Such delusions are tied in to notions of societal status (as in On Horseback), the ego, and justification of avarice.

It should be mentioned that Maupassant was part of the Naturalist group. He was mentored by Flaubert and knew both Zola and Huysman well. I assume he must have also been friendly with Balzac, whose analysis of human psychology seems closer to Maupassant than either Flaubert or Zola. Like Balzac, Maupassant uses every single episode, every single detail to show us how greed motivates dishonesty, and leads to justifications of cruel acts. One story that I found horrifying was Pierrot about a little dog that is taken on as a guard dog by an elderly woman when onions are stolen from her garden. The problem, though, is that the woman finds the cost of feeding the dog too dear and decides to throw the dog down a quarry where it seems that dogs were regularly thrown away in this Normandy town (quite a different Normandy than Proust's Normandy). Hearing the dog yelp in fear and in pain (the dog hurt something in falling down the quarry), her feelings are then thrown into guilt and she starts throwing food down to the dog in the quarry. Initially, she tries to get someone to go down the quarry and get the dog out, but the labor charge he cites is too dear. In the end, she finds a way to justify stopping feeding the dog and letting him die.

It's not so much the death of the dog that is horrifying but watching the vacillations of emotions, the vicious cycle of parsimony and self-justification that are the two poles of her true nature and her desire to justify her actions. In the end, it reveals human nature so minutely (the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt talks about) that it's rather horrifying...cynical, yes, but also true.

However, I will also say that not all the stories are so cynical, in the same way that Balzac's novels also contain characters of goodness. There's nothing more charming than the Bohemian friendship in Mouche, the humor in Toine, and nothing more touching than the Frenchmen in Two Friends.

But what is prevalent throughout it all is a close examination of how human beings actually behave, and the inner motivations for such behavior. It's no wonder that Henry James was such an admirer.

OT

2008-06-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

I could tell you about Maupassant, or I could tell you that this company makes me want to spend the most ridiculous sum of money on Scottish terrier barrettes with Swarovski crystals.

I will talk about Maupassant later. I am too busy window-shopping on the internet.

Borders, swan song?

2008-06-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

Speculations have been flying for the last year or so as to what would happen to Borders, whether they would be able to survive financially or be forced to sell themselves off.

Unfortunately, it looks like they might have to sell themselves off.
One potential buyer is, of course, Barnes and Noble. However, Border's major stockholder, William Ackerman of Pershing, is saying that Borders should approach Amazon for a buyout.

People are always surprised when I defend Borders. Many people consider Borders to be the same as Barnes and Noble. It's only within the last five years that Borders became very similar to Barnes and Noble in look as well as books chosen for their shelves; this was part of a decision to purposefully encroach on Barnes and Noble marketshare. It backfired for Borders with Borders losing their original customer base which was more sort of a young male geeky crowd (what does it say about me that I find myself more part of that demographic than others?).

I've always loved Borders' depth and range in Ancient Greek history and literature. Outside of a university store and online stores, they were the most reliable bookstore for this category. Additionally, their store on Park Avenue had an unusually large poetry section (had, I say, as that store is slated to be closed down). Also, they carried university press titles that Barnes and Nobles did not carry in the 90s. I remember going to a Barnes and Noble store in 1998 and trying to special order a university press title and being told that it was a service they didn't provide.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Borders. They were once a fascinating company, and the vestiges of their unique culture still remain in the older stores with deep backlist representation and wide variety of titles. I've bought Korean cookbooks there that are not available in other brick and mortar stores, philosophy titles, and many volumes of poetry in the Park Avenue store. In some ways, their stores complemented the independent bookstores as Borders often had large sections of categories that many independent bookstores do not. And of course, in other ways, Borders was another direct competitor to the independent bookstores in the categories that most trade bookstores cover (fiction, history, current affairs). It's a shame that Borders lost that commitment to books and decided to pursue greater profits in a change of mission that might cost them everything.

non sequitur

2008-06-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Because sometimes you need to take a break from reading to save bunnies:

Cure The Bunny

Click here to play this game

I think bunny is happier in heaven.

And then I decided a longer break was needed, visited Bully's website and stole this:

Alright, alright, I am actually going to read.

Bully says...

2008-06-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

"Your bow is not broken but you've run out of arrows. How can you fake being a bard?

It might be better to switch to being a poet. After all, things can go from bard to verse."

While I've always delighted in Bully Says Comics Oughta Be Fun, this was the first time I checked out his profile page. The quote above is what I found as part of his profile...a punning bull is one after one my own punning heart.

For those who read comics and graphic novels, make sure to check out Bully's blog. One of my favorite things is to look at the Ten of a Kind feature which matches comic book covers with the same theme.

Will Work for Books

2008-06-03T21:37:00.001-07:00

What's one thing that anyone in the book industry needs (besides books, that is): tote bags!!

And BEA is the best place to get many different kinds of tote bags specifically made to carry many many books. Sadly, I was pretty much chained to a booth to a whole time and could not roam around the floor to pick up one tote bag after another. The best tote bag I saw going around said: Will Work for Books (I think that's a wry shot at the book industry salaries).

While I did not get a chance to pick up many tote bags (although I did make one very quick trip to the Oxford University booth to pick up an Oxford English Dictionary tote bag. I must express my inner-geekiness!) I had many wonderful conversations with all sorts of industry people from those in publishing to bookstore people as well as some book reviewers.

Books are one reason to be in the book industry. The other reason are the people. Some of the smartest, nicest, and most interesting people are in the book industry (and I am lucky enough to know the best ones!). Plus, I am convinced that this industry is the one with the best conversations. I am all about the conversation.

Paper writing

2008-05-19T23:25:00.001-07:00

When I was in college, and then grad school, the most stressful, as well as most useful, periods were the paper times. They were usually due the week of midterms and finals. My strategy was generally to wait until the last minute possible to write the paper although I read and researched early on and up until the last minute. Then, I would pull an all-nighter with one page per one hour. The long papers, those that were 20 pages or over in length, required at least a couple of nights.

What does it say about my geekiness that I miss paper writing? I have neither the time nor the leisure to research a novel thoroughly now. The paper writing process forced me, as a student, to try to coalesce impressions, thoughts, ideas about a book, a writer, and the time period. I've done a few reviews but I don't find it as satisfying. There's the length limitation as well as the fact that book reviews, if they are to be published in most formats, are generally about contemporary writers.

Right now, I am not thinking much about specific contemporary writers. My head is floating amidst canonical writers such as Henry James, Shakespeare, Proust, the Ancient Greeks, and some philosophers. Most of all, I would like to write about Henry James, to think about Henry James in writing about him and his books. I am reminded again of Colm Toibin's tremendous novel about James. James' genius of writing, but even more importantly, his understanding of human beings are unparalleled. There is the important French influence: Flaubert, Balzac, Maupaussant. As with the French Naturalists, James is not sentimental. However, there is a generosity.

It's something to think about, that generosity and how that is different than sentimentality.

Proust

2008-05-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

I started reading Swann's Way in the translation by Lydia Davis a couple of months ago, and am meandering very slowly through it. Part of the reason for my slowness is because there is only one volume that is translated by Davis, and I fear that the other volumes will be...not necessarily inferior, but just different in tone. And so far, I am enjoying her translation very much.

I am now in the section dealing explicitly with Swann, and I feel rather bereft at leaving Combray behind. Even though the pace picks up in the portion dealing with Swann's love life, the slow and meditative texture of Combray, that feeling of Proust shifting through every little piece of memory, is not as present in the Swann in Love section. Even though the movement through the Combray section seems natural enough, in retrospect, one marvels at the amount of art and precision that went into weaving memories and intersecting lives through two different walking paths through Combray.

I was particularly moved by the story of the bourgeois piano teacher whose greatest pride was his daughter only to pretend that she wasn't holding lesbian intrigues, what was then considered a moral failing, and even more moved by the daughter trying to believe in her depraved nature as she recognized the grief she had brought to her father. It points to one of Proust's greatnesses, his gentleness in pinpointing a person's foibles, the sexual failings that are so human in each of us. While the piano teacher's daughter has a specific failing relating to gender orientation, yet, in the nature of desire, passion, and a very specifically sexual desire, her failure is part of a larger tapestry of human flaws that are revealed in the way each character construes their sexual desire for the other, the one.

Stuff White People Like

2008-05-10T21:02:00.001-07:00

A couple of months ago, several of my friends sent me a link to the blog, Stuff White People Like, which has since gone viral and will soon be out as a book. While the friends who sent me the link accompanied the link with words such as: "Ohmigod. Hysterical." "This is the funniest thing ever.": I found myself unamused, and, yes, offended.

The conventional wisdom has it that critics of the blog are not getting the humor, or are too close to being the kind of white person portrayed on Christian Lander's blog. I don't necessarily discount that, but I think it's worth examining further into the issue, or at least for me since I find myself rather deeply disturbed by the blog in a way that I cannot pinpoint.

First off, a short list of biographical details about Christian Lander:
1) He is a 29 year old white male.
2) He is originally from Toronto Canada, studied at McGill, and then went onto grad school somewhere in America's Midwest where he learned to resent the two coast Americans who thought of the Midwest as not-them (the us and them construct).
3) He now lives in LA, as part of "us", and works as an internet writer.
4) One can find him on Amazon where he writes about a MP3 player that is not an Ipod, because it's important to his sense of alternative hipster, to not own an Ipod but a nice MP3 player. His wish list includes a history of bicycle, a book on learning to dress for permanent fashion for men, along with assorted geeky computer games, and graphic novels, particularly by Adrian Tomine.

So, basically, he sounds like half my Jewish male friends in New York, except he's not Jewish and doesn't have a nasally accent nor an off the wall sense of outrageous humor. Instead, his humor is rather gentle.

And perhaps that's what I initially didn't understand about the popularity of his blog. I thought: okay, done that, thought that.

And I don't find the humor offensive, as it is rather infused with Canadian politeness. However, I am offended by the idea of the blog. Here's the way I am reading it in terms of power and race:

1) Lander is parodying the humor of black comedians (latino comedians and asian american comedians are basically following the same path black comedians pioneered), which is to use racial stereotypes, claim it, and therefore subvert the power dynamics of race. However, Lander as part of the mainstream power that be, white male working in the tech industry, can only reaffirm the current power dynamic by assuring white people of their privileges.

In writing about white people who go to liberal arts schools, who have black friends, who go to eat at "ethnic restaurants", isn't he basically claiming power? Ethnic and race comedians have been making fun of what they have and therefore, don't have. Besides the continual nonsense about affirmative action, what can a decently well-employed professional white person say he doesn't have in this country? (Although I did go to one party in Boston where one WASP woman told me about the lack of warmth in her family. Oh, and I suppose, along with everyone else, he can complain about the lack of a democratic government.)

2) Is Lander skewering the alternative hipster or gently mocking, and therefore loving his own kind? Overall, I am inclined to say he's loving his own kind. The worst his kind has done in his posts is have an inclination to fall for Asian chicks and be not fully learned. Otherwise, they seem like a conscientious group of people who recycle, ride bicycles, ride Prius, have ethical and intellectual goals....what's not to like about them?

3) In defining a certain sect of traits and claiming it for white people, where does that leave the rest of us who recycle, go to do grad school in the humanities, and ride bicycles? This might sound rather harmless, but it's actually quite pernicious. Tiger Woods supposedly said to Will Smith when Smith was doing Legend of Bagger Vance something along the lines of how much he, Woods, had done to get black people in golf noticed and Smith had to go play a black caddy. For decades, white people have been laying claim to different facets of culture, including all of high culture, a great deal of sports such as tennis, golf, gymnastics, figure skating. It's only in the last couple of decades that minorities have finally broken into those sports. When I went to college to study English, I was mocked by both my high school advisor as well as certain professors in my college department.

4) Perhaps this is what offends me most of all. As someone who has had to struggle for my privileges as a non-white person, who has had to pay a great deal of debt in order to attend college at a liberal arts college and then grad school, it's offensive to watch someone take their privileges as a white middle-class person and mock it. It's a little bit of a "screw you" while eating food right in front of a homeless person and making sure the homeless person is watching.

5) Finally, take some lessons from the great Jewish comedians. People like Sarah Silverman and Jerry Seinfeld because they are outrageous comedians, not because they are gently loving their own kind and reaffirming status.

Kumar recites a poem

2008-05-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

In the new Harold and Kumar movie, Kumar recites this fantastic poem which had me and my friends laughing so loudly and hard that I only caught half the poem. Here it is as found on the web:

The Square Root of 3

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

A Personal reading history of the New York Times

2008-04-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

When I first graduated from college, I read the New York Times as often as I could afford it. Given that I was a grad student living in the South, where the NY Times cost more per day, it wasn't that often. I was working for one of the med school departments as a gofer, and one of my daily duties was to pick up the NY Times for a few of the doctors so I would glance at the headlines during the walk back from the pickup place.

Then, when I lived with my parents for a couple of years while going to grad school in New York, I happily read the newspaper each morning since my father is a regular subscriber. In the days before the cell phone, the ipod and the iphone, it was common for almost every LIRR rider to have a NY Times on them (even if they were zonked out sleeping).

I eventually got a real job, moved out, and got my own subscription to the New York Times. It went well for a few years until I fell victim to that most New York of petty crimes: the daily paper thievery. This happens in New York more often than other places because of the following: New Yorkers are shameless, New Yorkers often feel anonymous, New Yorkers live in close confined spaces just inches away from their neighbors' doors. Hence, it was impossible to figure out which of my neighbors was stealing my newspaper.

However, between the regular receiving and the regular thievery of my NYTimes, 9/11 occurred. It is precisely because 9/11 was an event on such a large scale that I no longer wanted to read about what was happening in the world. I just stopped reading the newspaper altogether. Sure, let the neighbor take the newspaper.

It took me about four years to return to the newspaper. In the meantime, the war in Afghanistan took place, the war in Iraq started and was declared won, a presidential election...as well as more innovations on the internet. So, I returned to the New York Times on the internet (made easier later when they made all the articles available rather than just for their online subscribers).

Yet, there is a distinctly different feel to the internet reading of the newspaper:
1) I generally have several tabs open on my Mozilla browser, so I am continually hopping back and forth between various tasks
2) Long articles are unwieldy to read on a computer
3) There are links in the article and on the site that encourage jumping (jumping links but also jumping in the mind)
4) The most emailed list

The most emailed list:
This might now be said to be the news online. Let's take it as a metaphor for what happens on Yahoo and many commercially driven websites (not necessarily the newspaper sites, although it is interesting to see which kind of articles are the most emailed on New York Times site...I wonder if they have a chart of this across their categories) from which people now get their news. News is now "how to stock up on food", a recognition of people's most driven fears, their most recent curiosities (the top ten stars!), the most common human factors (how to tell if he really likes you; how to get him to ask you for a date; how to get to the second date).

Yet, is it news? Can Yahoo be said to deliver news when the news is streamlined to the mass interest rather than the news informing what the masses should know?

Here's a thought: if a president was assassinated today, can we know for certain that would be the top headline in Yahoo as opposed to a Britney Spear event?

Chocolate box novel

2008-04-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

On my most recent trip to New York, I was lucky enough to snag a copy of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, the famous novel with interchangeable chapters. Even though I haven't had a chance to read it yet (only merely glancing at the odd typography with empty spaces interspersed through sentences), I must enthuse immediately about the beautiful yummy chocolate box appeal. Take a look for yourself.

Play for the Poet

2008-04-09T22:42:00.000-07:00

Here and here.

Narrative Poetry

2008-04-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of years studying with the best narrative poets in America, yet immediately after my first year of my MFA, I started groping for a different approach. I want to take as fair and unbiased an approach in laying out what I perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of narrative poetry.

Advantages:

1) Narrative poetry is possibly the most accessible form of poetry, making poetry more understandable by the general public. In many ways, nothing could be simpler than a Ted Kooser poem such as:

A Happy Birthday

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

In the poem, there's only two uses of metaphoric language: "ride this day down" and "pale gray ghost of my hand." The rest of the poem is descriptive and atmospheric, a nice sort of passing away of time implied in language such as "light was gone," "book was no more." However, nothing in the poem requires mental agility. The mood of the poem is immediately comprehensible even without realizing what is making the setting for the poem.

2) Narrative poetry, due to its accessibility, is often used as a vehicle for political advocacy of many kinds. This includes political advocacy for racial equality, multiculturalism, understanding of the working class, women's rights, men's rights, pretty much any political position one can take including the conservative stance. Narrative poetry has much to do with the ever growing population of poets who are attracted to forming a short dramatic story.

3) Cathartic relief for the poet. While it's not true for every poet, I do feel that many narrative poets have written about subjects close to their heart and then felt unburdened by sharing their stories, lives, etc. As such, narrative poetry can be therapeutic for those writing about traumatic events. It's no wonder that Dana Gioia has a program teaching war veterans to write poems.

4) For all the reasons above, narrative poetry is also viewed as a democratic form of poetry.

Disadvantages:

1) First off is the question: is it a form? Having sat in workshops with many narrative poets, I never questioned this as a writing student until I heard a lecture by Richard Howard asking this exact question. He read out loud a Merwin poem, asked us all to write it down and break up the lines in the way each of us thought the poem should be. Of course, all of us broke up the lines differently. That was his point. Despite all the attention to the breaking up of the line insisted on by narrative poets, there is no difference in how the lines are broken since the point of narrative poems is the narrative. Besides lines, the other "craft" that narrative poets seem to discuss endlessly is voice, that very nebulous word. I understand voice, as used by narrative poets, to mean an individual style that distinguishes the writer. I am not convinced that an individual style is something a writer should strive for. Instead, I think a writer should strive to explore, to write as close to the experience as possible, and to use the language that will convey the experience as closely as possible.

2) Lack of intellectual intrigue. There are narrative poets who can offer intellectual turns. Donald Justice comes to mind. However, most narrative poems are often too much of one-mood. I believe that much of this comes from the contemporary education of writers where they read whatever they want. A close study of Shakespeare and his formal structure would help poets to understand how to structure a turn.

3) Lack of interesting language, lack of play. Jouissance, that term the post-modernists love so much. Is it any surprise that narrative poets are often vehemently against critical theory? Play in language is not elitist. Play in language is...play. It's wonderful when executed with joy. To read Queneau's Exercises in Style is to feel Queneau's exuberance, his love of language. As poets, shouldn't we love language, every single sound in it? Yes, we might question language and say it only approximates, never fully recreates...but it does create its own thing. And play is a celebration of language as its own creation.

4) Narcissism. Granted, narcissism can be executed in form, but in no other form than narrative poetry would it be so easy to spew out one's guts. Form requires a narcissistic poet to make a concerted effort to write about his or her life in a poem. In that effort, the poet might actually be forced to reflect along the way instead of merely spewing. Narrative poetry is even easier than prose writing. At least to write a piece of memoir in prose, it generally means a sustained effort (of course there's that short short fiction which gets more popular every year) over many pages. Narrative poetry, on the other hand, is a page or a few pages.

So, why am I writing about narrative poetry. I must admit it: it distresses me. The increasing laxity, the inability of American poets to understand form (including the Neoformalists who advocate form as some kind of hokey elitism and conservative "save culture" gig), the loss of craft and skill, the long hours spent looking for an American poet worth reading...all of it distresses me.

Poetry can teach more than a political democratic stance. When beautiful, narrative poetry can have a glimmer of Whitman, but it so often no longer holds that. If narrative poets in America could do with the Whitmanian tradition what Neruda, Lorca, and Pessoa have done with it...I wouldn't be writing this post.

Poetry is more than a dramatic story. It can teach the leaps of the mind. It is a cousin to philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote that "A good simile refreshes the intellect." Poetry can invite people into their imaginations. It can ask people to stop and consider a sensation, to consider the smell of the sea, the salty tang of the ocean in their mouth, the wind goosebumping their skin, the sun silvering the water, and how their inner lives might be like this sensation of being inside the ocean's vast deep.

Useless

2008-04-08T22:32:00.001-07:00

It's utterly useless. My brain has turned to mush from too much surfing of the internet. I spent way too many hours at www.awfulplasticsurgery.com where one can find out which actress has had her features redone (practically all of them). So, having nothing meaningful to report from the literary front, I offer two internet links instead.

I've always loved the title of this poem on Shakespeare.

Scroll midway down. How's that for a mug shot of the famous traitor!

Medieval Kitchens of The Eternal City

2008-03-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

I came across this while looking through some AP photos on Yahoo:

Rome's archaeological superintendent Angelo Bottini is interviewed by The Associated Press at a presentation of archaeological finds from digs for a new subway line in central Rome, on Friday, March 7, 2008. A sixth-century copper factory, medieval kitchens still stocked with pots and pans and remains of Renaissance palaces are among the latest finds unveiled Friday by archaeologists digging up downtown Rome in preparation for a new subway line. Archaeologists have been probing the depths of the Eternal City at 38 digs often set up near famous monuments or on key thoroughfares. Over the last nine months, remains including Roman taverns and 16th-century palace foundations have turned up at the central Piazza Venezia and near the ancient Forum where works are paving the way for one of the 30 stations of Rome's third subway line.

Edmund Dulac and Illustrated Fairy Tales

2008-03-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

The last few evenings, I've been perusing The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Maria Tatar and part of Norton's Annotated series. Like the rest of the series, it's a lavish book with entertaining and informative sidenotes. But what makes the book, as well as the series, so special are the beautiful illustrations. There are a number of illustrators worth mentioning, but this post is solely on Edmund Dulac, the French illustrator from the turn of the century to the end of his life in 1953. As with his contemporaries during the Golden Era of Illustration, Dulac has a distinct color palette and style that makes an illustration stand out as his work. I am particularly fond of his use of different nuances of blue, a longtime favorite color for me since I was a child.

In looking over these illustrations, I am reminded of the illustrated fairy tale book with which I grew up, a loose assortment of all sorts of European fairy tales peopled with characters in eighteenth century clothing that were richly colored. Most of all, I remember the rosy cheeks of the children, their tresses falling around their faces. I was particularly fond of The White Cat and Old Loke. For many years, I had no idea to what author or fairy tale collector I should attribute these tales...now, in reading the Hans Christian Andersen collection, I find Old Loke there. And now spurred to match the pieces, I did a quick google search, and see that The White Cat was originally written by a French woman, Comtesse d'Aulnoy and collected by Andrew Lang.

The illustrations by Edmund Dulac for Andersen's tales are detailed and sophisticated in a way that is rarely seen in children's books these days (even though many illustrations for children's books are wonderful in different ways). I think what I loved about my collection of illustrated fairy tales as a child was that the adults were beautiful and sophisticated; they lived lives of grandeur and opulence that only exists in history and the imagination now.

Personally, Disney's cartoons, nor the illustrated Disney fairy tales which I also had as a child, did not do much for me. The illustrations never seemed rich enough and my imagination did not reside there.
As an adult and seeing Dulac's illustrations, as well as the other illustrators of that time, reminds me how much there is to value in an ornate book.

Writing Advice?

2008-03-11T21:19:00.000-07:00

''First learn to write as if you were already dead,'' Mr. Tucci once wrote in a piece of advice to young writers, ''and then you will discover that you can write as if you were still alive.''

From the New York Times obituary on Niccolo Tucci.

Wow!

2008-03-11T21:02:00.000-07:00

How cool is this! A description of archives at Harvard's Hougton library for New Directions books...manuscripts and galleys with the authors' corrections.

Notable Book Designs

2008-03-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

I want to tip my hat off to some of my favorite book designers. One of these days, it could well be that we will all be reading books on the internet and the days of glorious book design will have passed away (by the way, perhaps someone like Henry James might consider such days already passed...in Princess Casamassima, he talks about the beauty of elaborate bookbinding which are no longer with us).

One of my favorite designs this year was the light pink and foil script/calligraphy cover of Neruda's Love Poems by Rodrigo Corral. He's also the designer for that eye-candy embellishing Javier Maria's Written Lives.

And, of course, there's Seth's moody tones for the Peanuts, helping us adults feel ever so chic while reveling in our childhood memories. But more importantly, the colors highlight the gloominess and solitude of childhood, particularly the childhood of Charlie Brown.

The Maakies are designed by the famous Chip Kidd with wonderfully chosen illustrations for the covers and elaborate endpapers.

And to round off this entry on book design, I must revere the amazing Alvin Lustig whose covers set a tone that correlated to the book with a minimal flair while being intellectually true to the book.

Wittgenstein, Silence passage correction

2008-03-09T19:11:00.000-07:00

It took a little bit of finding the right words for a google search and using the goggle translator for each word...but it does clarify that Wittgenstein passage.

In regards to silence, Wittgenstein writes:
darüber muß man schweigen

This literally means "more [therefore, moreover] one must be silent."

The "pass over" is a nice literary embellishment, but for someone who doesn't read German and tries to reflect on every single nuance of each word (what can I say: overtraining in lit crit classes), such embellishments can hinder the understanding of the passage.

Besides the "one must be silent", one should note the passage before it as composing a polar opposite. So to put it in a visually helpful way:

what can be said at all can be said clearly

therefore one must be silent

There's a nested logic movement in the first portion:

If it can be said, it can be said clearly.

Here, I feel that Wittgenstein is laying almost an imperative to speak clearly (I can almost hear an English professor beseeching me to speak more clearly).

But if it cannot be said (and if it cannot be said, it clearly can't be said clearly), then the only option is to be silent.

As Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerns itself with logic, it seems to be aligning logic with what can be said clearly. What is interesting is how much he leaves as being outside the realm of logic and the realm of language. Over and over in Culture and Value, he speaks about the limits of language.

I just found out that John Koethe, the poet, has written a book on Wittgenstein. To a good extent, this helps me to understand the questions that are propelling his poems.

Historical fiction

2008-03-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

Recently I went with a friend to see the Other Boleyn Girl with the all-star cast of Scarlett Johannsen, Natalie Portman, and Eric Bana. I was tired after a long week of too much work and wanted something relaxing and trivial. Well, the Other Boleyn Girl can be said to be trivial but it certainly was not relaxing.

After the movie, which portrays the Boleyn family as one driven by court ambitions and little else with Mary Boleyn being a saint while Ann is a scheming wench who betrays her sister for to become the queen, my friend and I discussed whether the movie bore any resemblance to history. After coming back home, I looked up Ann Boleyn on wikipedia and the wikipedia entry certainly makes the movie seem quite false. According to the wiki entry, the Boleyn family was a distinguished family with both Mary and Ann being quite sophisticated ladies of the court. Mary was known for having several distinguished lovers in her lifetime but finally opposed her family by marrying a commoner (it is generally accepted that she married for love as there was no financial or power gain for her in the marriage). And while the movie portrays the father of the Boleyn family as being weak and unable to provide for his family, the wiki entry says that he was a distinguished diplomat who sent his children abroad for the most sophisticated education available.

I looked up Phillipa Gregory's book on Amazon to see if the movie bore any resemblance to the book, and it seems that the book bears slightly more resemblance to the truth even though it emphasizes the rivalry between the sisters and also posits Ann as an ambitious wench.

Books and movies that distort historical figures have long troubled me. There are well written books that stick to the truth of a historical figure even while examining the life of that figure and giving their interpretation of that life. One such notable instance is Colm Toibin's The Master, a novel about Henry James life. The tremendous time-period novels by writers such as Peter Carey or Kazuo Ishiguro are also feats in creating realistic characters within certain time periods. Another way to use a historical basis for one's own writing is to display one's hand continually as to the literary endeavor, that it isn't history itself. This is what Anne Carson and Roberto Bolano do.

However, to write a book that is patently not true and to not acknowledge the many liberalties taken is to deceive the reader. Moreover, often it is to offer scandal in lieu of a more nuanced truth. I was horrified when I read about Geraldine Brook's March based on Bronson Alcott's life.

Let me disclose fully, at this point, that I haven't read Phillipa Gregory's Other Boleyn Girl nor Gerladine Brook's March. I've thought about doing so in order that I could think more coherently about this, but whenever I read the pages available in Amazon, I feel as though I don't need to waste time reading such books when there are so many books that are very brilliant and which I still haven't read.

I suppose I am writing about the plots as disclosed in reviews and other summaries provided by the publisher. At one point, I had to sell some historical fiction as part of my job. And mostly I found them somewhat embarrassing. It's as though these writers do not trust the readers with the more complicated truths, or that they themselves are incapable of dealing with the variables of truths and writing about it in an interesting way. Instead, the truth is distorted for the sake of a quick read, a good sell. In the end, such books will be relegated to the dustbins except for being a footnote or two in literary history.

Absurdities abound

2008-03-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

I am taking a break from Wittgenstein to finish reading Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas and the new Maakies. While vastly different in genre, there is a satirical absurd tone which joins the two.

Oh, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time this week goofing off on this website to create your very own super hero!
http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/...eroMachine2.asp

Moleskin journals

2008-03-01T14:56:00.001-08:00

I am a big fan of Moleskin journals for numerous reasons. One, they come in various sizes and formats (blank, ruled, grid). Second, that nifty little pocket in the back is perfect for keeping miscellaneous scraps of paper with jottings. And lastly, that elastic band keeps the larger scraps of place nicely tucked in the journal.

I enjoyed this little Moleskin display of journals of various artists and writers who use the journal:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.moleskine.it/eng/_interni/city/_img/artisti/Javier_Marias.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.moleskine.it/eng/_interni/city/exhibition.htm&h=197&w=260&sz=24&hl=en&start=17&um=1&tbnid=HKsIqgpVFPMLpM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=112&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwritten%2Blives%2Bjavier%2Bmarias%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Silence

2008-02-28T10:34:00.000-08:00

What one cannot speak of, one must pass over in silence.
Wittgenstein.

There are a couple of different ways to view this aphorism which shows up in the preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The first is that it is a truism. If one cannot speak of something, then silence is the apparent consequence.

However, I am intrigued by the construction of this sentence. Although I cannot read the German, all translations have the same "pass over in silence."

To be silent is a non-action. To speak is an action. Silence is the cessation of speaking.

However, to "pass over in silence" gives silence an agency as though silence is a movement that one chooses.

Then there is the first half of the sentence: What one cannot speak of. How does one decide on the subjects that one cannot speak of and what is the criterion of speaking?

Given that the sentence is within the preface to the Tractatus, there is the standard of pure logic which Wittgenstein is laying out. This would limit very much what one could speak of. However, in Culture and Value (and I assume elsewhere) are attempts by Wittgenstein to conceptualize and explore various problems without coming at a clear logic immediately. Culture and Value is riff with numerous attempts at the same problems, a stuttering of the subject. Wittgenstein wrote many times of how he felt he repeated the same topics over and over.

Simultaneously, Wittengstein writes of the limits of language, of the lack of communication. In many ways, the preface to the Tractatus might be said to be mostly concerned with the inability to communicate, whether the problem lies with the subject, the speaker, or the reader (or a combination of the three).

Kenneth Rexroth's translations

2008-02-26T22:12:00.000-08:00

I've been perusing through various volumes of Kenneth Rexroth's translations from the Chinese and the Japanese; I have six volumes of these mostly brief love poems that capture so quickly the essence of longing or the erotic. More than the romantic ones, I love the ones where the writing is so sharp that it's as though the moment has coalesced in a few brief lines.

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.

The Japanese transliteration:
Suma no ama no
Shio yaki ginu no
Narenaba ka
Hito hi mo kimi wo
Wasurete omowamu
(Akahito)

You say, "I will come."
And you do not come.
Now you say, "I will not come."
So I shall expect you.
Have I learned to understand you?

Japanese transliteration:
Komu to yu mo
Konu toki aru wo
Koji to yu wo
Komu to wa mataji
Koji to yu mono wo
(Lady Otomo No Sakanoe)

Even though I don't know Japanese, in looking at the transliteration, I assume that the word play in the poem by Lady Otomo No Sakanoe must be quite something. As it is, I will have to merely enjoy the way the sounds bounce off each other in that brief bit of a poem. What a sharp lady she must have been!

Visualizing Thoughts

2008-02-25T13:09:00.000-08:00

One of Wittgenstein's logic movements in the Tractatus is from picture to thought. As someone who almost never uses visualization unconsciously (but almost always with an intent to visualize) I had to ask a friend who is more visually-inclined whether her thoughts are visual. She confirmed that her thoughts are visual and that she could not imagine how it is to think without the visual component. For me, the majority of my thoughts are either language or mood based.

It also recalls an interesting conversation I had with a couple of friends at a bar where among the three of us I was the only one who did not visualize scenes while reading. Even when I am reading a description of a setting, I do not visualize but aim to understand the function of the setting within the scene. In the same way, if someone talks about a red dress, I won't even visualize the color red. I cognitively understand what is being said but there is no visual component unless I consciously decide to think about the dress as red visually.

It would be interesting to find out if there are different brain pathways in the way people think based on what their thought associations are, whether it's visual, aural, language, smell, taste, etc. For me, my thoughts are mostly a combination of language, mood and the not yet articulated. As such, the most frustrating part of this is the limits of language and seeking out the exact words that express what I am thinking. I wonder if this is part of the reason why words and books have such primary importance in my life as it is the vehicle of thought and communication. I wonder whether for those who have a sensory component to their thoughts if language is the dressing of thought rather than the thought itself.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus preface

2008-02-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

I am moving between Wittgenstein's Culture and Value and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I find Culture and Value more conducive to the brief morning commute when my brain is not up to the more pure and sustained logic of the Tractatus. However, as Tractatus was conceived as a whole work by Wittgenstein, and the only one such work published during his lifetime, it has a formal beauty not found in the brief thoughts that make up Culture and Value. Tractatus was written while he was in a prisoner of war camp in 1917 (by the way, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for bios of philosophers).

In his brief preface, Wittgenstein concludes with the following:

If this work has any value, it consists of two things: the first is that thoughts are expressed in it, and on this score the better the thoughts are expressed--the more the nail has been hit on the head--the greater will be its value.--Here I am conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible. Simply because my powers are too slight for the accomplishment of the task.--May others come and do it better.

On the the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of hte problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.

In 1930, in one of the tidbits collected in Culture and Value, he wrote:

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

Perhaps all writing should be judged by the preface of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that even if one should fail to meet the overall aim of the ambition posed by the question, one should still have communicated something unassailable and definitive. While I was reading Wittgenstein's preface, I was reminded of Henry James' preface for the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, his first novel:

...the private history of any sincere work, however modest its pretentions, looms with its own completeness in the rich, ambiguous aesthetic air, and seems at once to borrow a dignity and to mark, so to say, a station.

To strive for an organic unity and organic completeness in writing is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a writer. It requires patience as well as the discipline to cull away any word that is not part of the organic unity. It is impossible to define organic unity except to say that one notices when it is lacking. Organic unity is such a cohesion within a work of art that each part of it seems necessary. One of my musician friends once said about Mozart's works that it is impossible to conceive any note having been written differently in his compositions. Such is organic unity. And it is not applicable only to harmonic music but a criterion to all music, to all works of art.

As far as I have read in Tractatus (which admittedly is not far enough as it is a work requiring an abstract level of thought that I find difficult to sustain), there is a beautiful composition. It seems almost unearthly...odd to say about a work of philosophy, but there's an airiness to it. Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value of thought as flight: it [thought] is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is -- observing it from above, in flight.

Wittgenstein

2008-02-20T22:24:00.000-08:00

I am in the midst of writing a long posting on Henry James' Roderick Hudson which vaguely recalls my grad school days of sitting with my laptop (the wonderful IBM butterfly which sadly broke after three years) and writing lengthy papers that meandered at length. If only I could have footnotes in my blog....I recall one particular paper on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Sentimental novels that included a footnote roughly a page long in 8 point font and single spaced.

But nostalgia aside, I am taking a break from that posting to put up a briefer post on Wittgenstein whom I am reading for the first time. I first read about Wittgenstein in a wonderful novel called The World as I Found it by Bruce Duffy (now sadly out of print). And while I loved the novel and was intrigued by the character Wittgenstein in the fictionalized version of his life, I never went on to read any of his writings until now (I was in grad school then and spent most of my free time daydreaming about what it would be like if I could have more free time).

I am reading the University of Chicago Press's edition of Culture and Value, a collection of notes, memos, and other short writings found through Wittgenstein's papers. I was particularly intrigued by the following two entries:

People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. As long as there continues to be a verb `to be' that looks as if it functions in the same way as `to eat' and `to drink', as long as we still have the adjectives `identical', `true', `false', `possible', as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc. etc., people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up.
And what's more, this satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because in so far as people think they can see the "limits of human understanding", they believe of course that they can see beyond these.

Kleist wrote somewhere that what the poet would most of all like to be able to do would be to convey thoughts by themselves without words. (What a strange admission.)

It is nothing surprising to say that language is the medium of both communication and miscommunication. But what is more difficult to face is the limit of language, that language can only give approximate categorizations (and in this way is similar to all forms of human knowledge which can be recorded). Nothing can simulate the experience of the thing itself. We can only isolate and approximate.

Henry James, Roderick Hudson

2008-02-16T17:53:00.000-08:00

I've long been meaning to write about Henry James whose works I admire intensely, both for the craft and James' insight into human psychology (although James was before Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis).

Over the holidays, I read several of James' novels in a spate: The Bostonians, Roderick Hudson, and Princess Casamassima. Roderick Hudson is James' first novel, with The Bostonians and Princess Casmassima being written a little over a decade later in 1886. It's stunning to think that in the decade he would write The American, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady (one of my all-time favorite novels), and Washington Square. Even while being highly prolific, James continued to experiment different ways of writing the novel.

Briefly, Roderick Hudson is about a young sculptor who is patroned by another young man, the wealth Rowland Mallet, who invites Roderick to live with him in Italy with the notion that Roderick would become a great artists by living amongst great works of art. Instead, Roderick falls in love with a cynical young American, Christina Light, who has been raised in Europe by her mother with the express idea that her daughter must marry into aristocracy, and not just any aristocracy but the best of the European aristocracy.

There are several overall arching themes within the novel. The first is the notion of helping someone. It is Rowland Mallet whose consciousness defines the mores of this novel, and he is a sensitive, cultured, refined man, perhaps an alter-ego of James' himself at this age. But unlike James, Mallet has wealth without purpose (James came from a family on the downturn of wealth). Even while appreciating art, Mallet is acutely conscious that he does not have a goal in life; as such, in helping Roderick Hudson achieve the purpose of becoming a great artist, Mallet will achieve something in his own life.

Another key theme in the novel is the function of art and the making of art. Even though it is helpful in deconstructionist theory to consider the author dead (for the purposes of intent), in the creation of a work of art, the artist-author is palpably alive, and there is a dynamic interaction between the artist and his work. It is for such elucidation that the life of an artist can throw on his work that we continue to read biographies. In Roderick Hudson, Hudson's sculptures are examined carefully for the moral pathways Hudson has taken. Moreover, Mallet and Hudson have numerous discussions about art. And finally, Hudson's artist foil is an unassuming young painter, Sam Singleton, who has saved money for his brief European education in the arts and plans to return to his small American town to become a steady bread-earner for his family.

And, as always, James is interested in what it means to be an American in contrast to the Old World of Western European culture. It's noteworthy to consider that James specifically was thinking of Balzac while writing Roderick Hudson. My guess is that James would be thinking primarily of Balzac's Lost Illusions which also centers on a young man who leaves a provincial small town, full of promise and the center of his poor family, to go to the brilliant, cosmopolitan and corrupt Paris.

The heart of the novel centers on the three characters: Roderick Hudson, Rowland Mallet and Christina Light. There is almost a feel of a love triangle, of a struggle for ascendency over Roderick Hudson between Rowland Mallet and Christina Light. Rowland and Christina are radically different characters. In his preface to the New York Edition of Roderick Hudson when James revised the book, he talks of creating Roderick's fiance, Mary Garland (whom he leaves behind in America), as the antithesis to Christina; and James does bring Mary Garland as a substantial character in the latter portion of the novel for Roderick's downfall and also to be the unrequited love interest for Rowland. However, I would argue that Rowland is the true antithesis to both Christina Light and Roderick Hudson.

How can it be that Rowland is the antithesis to Christina Light and Roderick Hudson given that Rowland is one character while Christina Light and Roderick Hudson are two characters? In many ways, Christina Light and Roderick Hudson share so many of the same flaws and charisma that they seem mere gender counterpoints to the same idea. While Christina Light is not an artist in the sense of Roderick Hudson, she is a consummate production of the self, an artist in the creation of a self-drama. And in essence, this is what attracts Roderick Hudson (why is it so hard to think of him as just one name...it is as though his full name is more natural) so fatally to her. James attributes the beauty of both of them to their eyes (Roderick: "It was a generous dark grey eye, in which there came and went a sort of kindling glow which would have made a ruder vissage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson's harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty" (p . 64); Christina: "A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes" (p. 209), "She turned upon him a moment the quickened light of her beautiful eyes" (p. 233), "judging by the light of her beautiful eyes" (p. 290)). Beyond such physical attributes, they are both individuals each driven by their own capricious moods, an irregard for others around them, a selfish and self-absorbed streak and a distinct knack for telling the uncomfortable truth. Yet, for all that, they are both highly intelligent beings who are charming and much admired by others.

As Christina and Roderick are naturals at creating a drama, Rowland is the consummate spectator. While Christina and Roderick are cut vividly from the first introductions of them, Rowland, even while being the first character introduced in the novel and being the conscious from whose viewpoint the reader understands the emotional stakes of the plot, and his qualities are first addressed by his cousin Cecilia in a socially conventional manner:

...you know what I think of you. You have a turn for doing nice things and behaving yourself properly. You have it in the first place in your character. You are an amiable creature. Ask Bessie [Cecilia's young daughter] if you don't hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers.'
`He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson.' Bessie declared roundly. (p. 51)

So, while our attention is immediately drawn to Christina and Roderick's physical beauty and energy when on their entrance into the story, we are given a rather bland, boring assessment of Rowland upon our first meeting with him. Yet, what matters in this introduction is his niceness, his conscientiousness, and the gradual drawing into his unassuming but extraordinarily close observation of life. As I noted previously, he could well be the young James' alter-ego. It is because Rowland behaves properly that the question of intruding in another life is one morally rife. It's worth considering that such a moral dilemma is not delineated in the sentimental novels that were popular in James' period, whether in America or Britain. Instead, in these novels, it is assumed in a matter of fact breeziness that it is right for the wealthy to help the worthy poor. However, what is not considered in sentimental novels is that such patronage involves leaving one's domestic circle, a sudden socioeconomic rift within the family (the one being patronised suddenly has access to a different level of privileges and opportunities than the rest of the family), as well as a complicated relationship between the patron and the patronised. From the very moment Rowland decides to take Roderick with him to Italy, his action is questioned, both by Roderick's mother and cousin as well as Rowland's cousin. James captures the situation vividly in the words of Mary Gardener: "`...it is like something in a fairy tale...Your coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud'"(p. 91).

Rowland's defense of his sudden patronship to his cousin Cecilia contains mixed motivations having to do with a genuine love of art but also his own desire for more meaning in his life:

`I only wish to remind you,' she [Cecilia] went on, `that you are likely to have your hands full.'
`I have thought of that and I rather like the idea; liking as I do the man. I told you the other day, you know, that I longed to have something on my hands. When it first occurred to me that I might start our young friend on the path of glory, I felt as if I had an unimpeachable inspiration. Then I remembered there were dangers and difficulties, and asked myself whether I had a right to drag him out of his obscurity. My notion of his really having a great talent answered the question. He is made to do the things that we are the better for having. I can't do such things myself, but when I see a young man of genius standing helpless and hopeless for want of capital, I feel -- and it's no affection of humility, I assure you -- as if it would give at least a reflected usefulness to my own life to offer him his opportunity.' (p. 80)

On hearing Rowland's reasons for taking Roderick Hudson with him to Italy, his cousin demands that Rowland vouch for Roderick's moral security: "`His moral, his sentimental security. Here you see, it's perfect. We are all under a tacit compact to keep him quiet. Perhaps you believe in the necesssary turbulence of genius, and you intend to enjoin up on your protege the importance of cultivating his passions.'" (p. 81)

This dialogue between Rowland and Cecilia resonates in several different ways. First, the history of the novel at this moment bears recalling: there's James' own avowed interest in Balzac (In Lost Illusion, the young protagonist Lucien is immediately dropped by his patroness as soon as they land in Paris, and like Roderick, Lucien is immensely gifted but mercurial and undisciplined. The situation of Lost Illusions arises from taking a tempermental gifted young man and plopping him in the corrupt and fascinating environment of Paris. With Roderick Hudson, it is Europe that tempts him with gambling, drinking, and the American who has already conquered Europe -- Christina) but there's also the backdrop of the sentimental novel so popular during James' lifetime. James certainly read Charles Dickens carefully, but The Bostonians also bear witness to James' knowledge of popular political movements that based their appeal to the populace on sentiment and dramatic histrionics. Therefore, Cecilia's words about a sentimental security is in part about American morals. Europe is unsafe; it is the wide wide world and unknown to most Americans with its corrupt old aristocracy, its Catholicism, cultural sophistication as well as a different value system.

On the contrary, the very fact that James is lightly structuring Roderick Hudson on Balzac's novels (Balzac also wrote numerous religious stories and novels that are not as popular today) reveals that the Europeans have a moral value system, one that prizes a similar set of values related to home ties as well as to the necessity of discipline and hard work where art is concerned. The ending of Lost Illusions has Lucien returning to his hometown only to lose his soul to the devil, in a sense, with further moral and sexual corruption implied in his meeting with Carlos Herrara.

What is one to make of a decidely odd situation where a man is responsible for the moral well-being of another man? Moreover, Roderick Hudson has been spoiled by his mother and is unused to bearing with the outcome of his actions. As Roderick deteroriates emotionally, all but ignoring his mother and Mary who have come to Italy for the purpose of invigorating Roderick with a renewed sense of his former self pre-Christina (a tactic straight out of an American sentimental novel; consider the scene in Little Women where Amy chastises Laurie for not doing more with his life), the situation becomes even stranger with Mrs. Hudson, Roderick's mother, staring accusingly at Rowland for her son's demise. Of course, the problem is not with Rowland but with Roderick who refuses to live in any other fashion but one that follows the whims of his moods. As much as Roderick lacks discipline as an artist, so too does he lack discipline in his life. As a consequence, those who care for him inevitably do everything they can for him but are unable to understand him.

James was known to dislike Jane Austen's novels; however, he makes a similar sort of distinction in his characters. There are decidely characters who make moral scrulpes and there are characters who lack the ability to make such distinctions. The difference between James and Austen is James' larger view of the world where his interest is for when moral characters make the wrong decision. Additionally, James' most flawed and corrupt characters, such as Christina Light, are attractive. In this regard, such characters reflect James' own observations of society. James' most explicit statement of a moral character in Roderick Hudson is a description of a more minor character, Madame Grandoni, a companion to a woman artist:

Madame Grandoni...was an excessively ugly old lady, highly esteemed in Roman society for her homely benevolence and her shrewd and humorous good sense. She had been the widow of a German archaeologist who came to Rome in the early ages, as an attache of the Prussian legation on the Capitoline. Her good sense had been wanting on but a single occasion, that of her second marriage. This occasion was certainly a momentous one, but these are by common consent not test cases. A couple of years after her first husband's death she had accepted the hand and the name of a Neapolitan music-master, ten years younger than herself and with no fortune but his fiddle-bow. The marriage was most unhappy, and the Maestro Grandoni was suspected of using the fiddle-bow as an instrument of conjugal correction. He had finally run off with a prima donna assoluta, who it was to be hoped had given him a taste of the quality implied in her title. He was believed to be living still, but he had shrunk to a small black spot in Madame Grandoni's life, and for ten years she had not mentioned his name. She wore a light flaxen wig, which was never very artfully adjusted; but this mattered little, as she made no secret of it. She used to say, `I was not always so ugly as this; as a young girl I had beautiful golden hair, very much the colour of my wig.' She had worn from time immemorial an old blue satin dress and a white crape shawl embroidered in colours; her appearance was ridiculous, but she had an interminable Teutonic pedigree, and her manners in every presence was easy and jovial, as became a lady whose ancestor had been cup bearer to Frederick Barbarossa. Thirty years' observation of Roman society had sharpened her wits and given her an inexhaustible store of anecdotes; but she had beneath her crumpled bodice a deep-welling fund of Teutonic sentiment, which she communicated only to the objects of her particular favour. Rowland had a great regard for her, and she repaid it by wishing him to get married. (121-122)

I have been in liberal in quoting the lengthy description of Madame Gradoni as it displays much of what is attractive about Rowland as a character as well. Like Madame Gradoni, Rowland is an astute observer of people and personalities. Both are able to be spectators partly because they are not glamorous (there's one very funny scene where Christina declares she doesn't like Rowland because his face reminds her of an Austrian count whose face "measured from ear to ear at least a yard and a half" (p. 164)); not being the center of attention by virtue of physical beauty and not being observed, they are able to learn the art of observation (and indeed observation as practised by James and his characters is an art). Most crucially, in drawing the attention away from their physical characteristics to the point of ridiculing their physical being, James is able to delve into their inner lives and to make their inner lives shine forth. Much the same holds for the painter Singleton, the hardworking artist who spends his summers traveling and painting while Roderick fritters time gambling; Singleton is continually ridiculed by Roderick as the small man. However, in the end, Singleton is able to sustain himself. And it could well be that what invests us as readers in James' characters is their ability to sustain themselves emotionally.

As the plot deepens, Madame Grandoni and Rowland share observations on Christina, Roderick, and the situation between Christina and Roderick. And as much as Madame Grandoni and Rowland agree that Christina is a femme fatale purposefully and falsely entangling Roderick, they both voice a pity for her fate as an object to be blackmailed into a society marriage by her mother. Their conversations function on several levels:

1) as a moral viewpoint, although not a narrow moral viewpoint but one that examines the situation with a sophisticated understanding of the world
2) as foreshadowing of the most likely outcome
3) as conversation between more ordinary beings discussing extraordinary beings with extraordinary fates

It is because Rowland is not beautiful but observant that we are able to enter the novel through his viewpoint. Indeed, it would be impossible to enter the novel through Roderick's viewpoint as his is such a singularly focused expression of immediate desires.

Balzac Mania

2007-11-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

Last Christmas holiday when I visited my parents, I found an old copy of Balzac short stories that I had read while I was in college. My sophomore year in college, I had taken a French Literature in Translation class which introduced me to the novels of Zola, Balzac along with some other French novelists of the nineteenth century. And since then, while I had read a few more Zola novels, I hadn't read much of Balzac. To be honest, I think I was too naive and idealistic to appreciate Balzac's sharply honed observation of society. Reading Balzac over a decade later, I was amazed by the thickness of his description of life in nineteenth century Paris, his ability to skewer vanity, sanctimony and other obnoxious behavior with one quick turn of the phrase, as well as the immenseness of his plots.

Since that Christmas holiday, I've gone on to read Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, Dark Side of Paris, Eugenie Grandet, and, most recently, Cousin Bette.

In Cousin Bette, I was struck by Balzac's different descriptions of the two courtesans, the middle-class sanctimonious Madame Marneffe and the singer Josepha. The most telling difference is in their treatment of Baroness Hulot, the wife of the man to whom they were mistresses, Josepha being Hulot's former mistress and Marneffe the current mistress.

As Hulot becomes increasingly entrenched in financial woes due to spending all his money on one mistress after another, he also brings his family down with him. At one point, Baroness Hulot appeals to Hulot's former-friend-now-enemy, Crevel, to lend her money. Moved by Baroness Hulot's goodness and saintliness, Crevel casts aside thoughts of vengeance against Hulot and agrees; however, on his way to get the money, he visits his mistress, Valerie Marneffe (who keeps four different lovers simultaneously) who mocks Crevel for being taken in by an act by Baroness Hulot.

In contrast, when Baroness Hulot comes to appeal to Josepha to help her find Baron Hulot (Hulot left his family when he realized that his lenders were in pursuit of him), Josepha dresses in her finest clothes to meet the great lady:

"She pushed forward an easy-chair for the Baroness, and herself took a folding-chair. She saw that this woman had been beautiful, and was moved by profound pity as she watched her nervous shaking, that the least agitation made convulsive. She could read in a single glance the saintly life that Hulot and Crevel had long ago described for her; and she not only lost all idea of matching herself against this woman, but bowed before a greatness that she could recognize. The sublime artist admired what the courtesan might have mocked."

This scene points to one of the greatest differences between contemporary culture and Balzac's period. While Balzac's ironic mode is in fine form today, who would dare to write so easily of sentiment in the same way that Balzac could?

I have a friend who says that the downfall of literature these days is the lack of courage on writers parts to express feelings, to even allow themselves to feel fully. Irony and cynicisim can be easily done as it brings down everything around them. Granted, it takes a sharp wit and cleverness to do such. However, isn't part of Balzac's greatness that he could differentiate between different vices and virtues?

Yes, it's sentimentality, and sentimentality was much in favor during Balzac's era. However, is it enough to say it's sentimentality?

I find it interesting that Balzac posits Josepha's ability to distinguish a woman of virtue due to Josepha being a great and "sublime" artist. The Online Etymology Dictionary entry for sublime originates the word sublime from the Latin sublimis for "uplifted, high, lofty" and also denotes a 1586 definition "expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner." In Elaine Scarry's brief but important book, On Beauty, Scarry argues that beauty is important because it lifts one outside of one's self, and therefore beauty is one of the agents of compassion: we are lifted outside of one's self, we think of something outside our self, we think of someone outside our self, and to think of the other is an exercise of compassion.

This has been an expressed aim of Sentimental Culture, to make the reader be pulled along by their very sentiments for a character. Yet, one hesitates to go along blindly with many of the novels written in the nineteenth century which expressedly tried to reform society with sentimental novels. However, should one condemn the use of sentiment completely because it had been ill-used by novelists? How are we to distinguish between vice and virtue?

Even the act of distinguishing between vice and virtue seems fussy and old-fashioned. However, do we not practise it in our everyday lives? Do we not say: this person does not have the same values as me? Fine for them, but we don't have to be friends.

We might no longer use the words vice and virtue but we do so distinguish. We say things like: that person is shallow. He's into appearances. He's a man-whore. On and on in a mocking tone that is meant to express our own sophistication, our secular beliefs, and our worldliness.

Balzac makes me question all such contemporary poses. After all, here is one of the worldliest, most sophisticated and urbane novelists, and he dared to express his belief in virtue even while he noted the ways in which virtue could be disdainful, naive, or could ultimately fail. Yet, he does not question the worth of virtue itself.

I suppose I am wondering what the value of goodness is in contemporary society. In Balzac's period, goodness/virtue can be expressed through the troupe of religion. All his virtuous women are religious. They are otherworldly. We live in a secular period. Goodness is those who are aligned with our political beliefs, our mores that are unexpressed, our niggardly mannerisms. In the face of that, Balzac's scene where the virtuous Baroness meets the courtesan singer Josepha has a grandeur that seems inexpressible, nay, even inexplicable in our times.

Is Balzac being self-referential when he talks of Josepha as a sublime artist? Or at least pointing to a function of the artist? I think he must be. In considering the function of art in my life, be it visual art, music, novels, poetry, architecture, or films, I do want the recognition of something worthwhile in life. I find art as that which is most worthwhile in living. To see the luminous paintings by Gerhard Richter, to hear a lofty aria in an opera...to be moved by human expression, to hear a human sentiment worth sympathizing with. That which is worthwhile to be lifted.

It's not to say that human beings should be saints in the mode of Baroness Hulot. But it's to recognize that compassion, forgiveness, charity, self-sacrifice are still worthy traits. No one is Baronnes Hulot. She's a character in a novel. But in the midst of human flaws, in the midst of contemporary cynicism and irony, can we still find a way to express worthy traits? Can we express the complexity of expressing these contradictory modes together or does irony have to negate sentiment these days?

Charles Schulz bio

2007-10-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Oh, I really want to get my hands on the new biography of Charles Schulz. I've been a fan since first reading Peanuts as a child when my father used to buy me these large format paperback volume compilations of the strip. Wall Street Journal has an insightful review by Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame.

Rearranging stacks, lost book, new books, and Gardner

2007-10-13T20:17:00.000-07:00

I spent several hours trying to rearrange my books so that they would all fit...on top of my bookshelf. My current bookshelf's 25 cubbies have been completely packed, double booked, since I first bought it 2 years ago. Since then, I've been putting book on top and stacking books on the floor by my bed. I am also holding off on buying another bookshelf as I am considering whether to move in a year or not.

One of the most distressing things I realized during my book-rearranging is that I've misplaced Frank Kermode's book on Shakespeare's language. I've been reading Shakespeare at the rate of a couple of plays per year for the last couple of years, and Kermode's essays are a perfect companion to such a venture. I spent a hour looking for the book through the 11 stacks currently on top of my bookshelf without any success. Urgh. This means I might have to go and buy another copy.

Sadly, I just spent a large sum of money on four books at Borders. While I generally like to shop at independent bookstores, particularly as independent bookstores in San Francisco are plenty and well-stocked, I was at Borders doing a little scouting for a freelance gig I have with a publishing house. This retail venture cost me more than I will earn. The books I bought were as follows:

Latest issue of Foreign Affairs
William Easterly's White Man's Burden, looking at why aid to developing nations have failed
Alain de Botton's Architecture of Happiness. I enjoyed de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy when I read it years ago; it's a good introduction to some of the main philosophers. I like architecture, but don't know enough about it even in spite of the many architecture books I own from having worked with art publishers. So, I thought this would get me caught up a little on the topic.
And a real gem: Discovering Korean Cuisine, Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in Los Angeles. I only own one Korean cookbook, mostly because it's difficult to find exciting Korean cookbooks. The one Korean cookbook I own is one I bought when I lived in Korea for a few months, and covers more home basics. Discovering Korean Cuisine is wonderful in that it has innovative recipes from chefs in LA. I am particularly excited about the rice cake recipes as I love rice cakes and have long wanted to make my own. Additionally, Discovering Korean Cuisine also has recipes that include using Stone Pots which I've always been curious about. I am looking forward to making many of the porridge and hot casserole dishes as we head into the rainy season here.

Finally, some last thoughts on Gardner's Nickel Mountain. I finished the book this afternoon after a nap, and enjoyed the beautiful prose and compelling characters thoroughly. One aspect I appreciate in this novel is Gardner's attention to human emotions and human motivations. An example of this occurs after the main character, Henry Soames, believes he has caused the death of a man staying in his house. Soames falls into a depression, and his closest friend, George Loomis says this to Henry and Henry's wife:

George reached over, not even looking up, and put his hand on her shoe. "No, wait," he said. "It's true. He says he made a choice, the choice to go on yelling, which makes him to blame for Simon Bale's dying. But he knows that's only word games. He didn't know Simon would fall downstairs, and even if he did, it's one time in a thousand you kill yourself that way. It was an accident. Henry was the accidental instrument, a pawn, a robot labeled Property of Chance. That's intolerable, a man should be more than that; and that's what Henry's suffering from-- not guilt. However painful it may be, in fact even if it kills him, horror's the only dignity he's got."

Which makes me wonder about horror and our reaction to it. Many years ago, I attended a lecture by Edward Said. Oddly, more than the lecture, I remember the man giving the introduction to Said, a fellow professor at Columbia, who said something along the lines of irony as a strong action against atrocities. Over the last couple of years, I have wondered if helplessness is the last thing we want to face in ourselves as human beings, particularly in America where so much of the culture is embellished with optimistic dream-making. Yet, I feel that if we faced that part of our lives is about being helpless, it would make it easier for us to help others and to be compassionate towards others. But I do agree that there is horror too, for there are situations for which there does not seem to be any solution, particularly considering the war in which we are enmeshed.

And one final passage from Nickel Mountain. This concerns the rebuilding of Henry's diner into a restaurant at the behest of his wife, Callie. The description of the relationship is worth considering:

He'd felt a kind of awe, watching the place [the new restaurant] go up: not only awe at the looks of it (a gabled building like an old-fashioned Catskills barn, twice the size of Henry's old diner, with planter-boxes inside and out, and twelve tables, and fireplace at one end), but awe, too, at what his wife had done to him, scooping up his old life like wet clay and making it over into her own image, and awe at how easily she managed it all and how easily, even gladly, he had accepted it, in th eend. It was as if it was sojmething he'd been thinking all along and had never quite dared-- though God knew it wasn't. Her idea had given him the willies, ,set in his ways as he'd been by then, and they'd probably have given him the willies even if she'd caught him younger; but he'd found there was no stopping her: She was hard as nails and mean as her mother when there was something she had to have. So he'd given in, and when he'd done it, not just in words but totally, freely choosing what he couldn't prevent, he'd felt a suddent joy, as though the room had grown wider all at once (which by that time as a matter of fact it had), or as if he'd finally shoved int he clutch on the way down a long straight hill it was no use resisting.

John Gardner's Nickel Mountain

2007-10-11T21:49:00.001-07:00

Right now I am reading John Gardner's Nickel Mountain. The descriptions of the hills are particularly evocative to me as I lived in central New York during my college years, and seeing the hills on a misty morning always made me feel a little melancholy but also glad to see and experience such beauty. The rural areas of New York, outside the affluent Hudson Valley towns, have a good deal of that melancholy; it's small farming dying in America.

I love the character Henry Soames, a morbidly obese middle-aged man who runs a diner and ends up marrying the pregnant teenager that works at the diner. Even before the advent of the "sensitive man," Gardner captured all the thoughtful and often somnambulant qualities of a person who does very little but think about human life and human interactions. Soames takes after his father, a man who died early weighing 360 pounds and was bitterly mocked by his wife for his "feminine" qualities. Sometimes, Soames thoughts on being human, and the sadness of being human, become too much for him and he will break into a rant to an old Polish man who frequents his diner in the middle of the night for a spot of hard liquor with his coffee.

This one part, which Gardner places in parenthesis, when Soames listens to a teenaged boy speaking about his ambition to be a race car driver captures Soames' character perfectly:

Henry was not convinced of it [that the boy would become a race car driver], though even to himself he'd never pinned down his doubt with words; he knew only that the boy had a certain kind of nerve and a hunger to win and the notion-- a notion that everyone on earth has, perhaps, at least for awhile -- that he was born unique, set apart from the rest.

Shipment of books and other books from friends

2007-10-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lately, it's as though I am simultaneously blessed and cursed with books: blessed because so many of them are wonderful books I want to read and are sent by friends who are thinking of me, but cursed because I don't have enough time to read them all.

While I was in New York recently, I saw a friend who works at Palgrave MacMillan and she gave me a memoir by an Italian young woman who survived Auschwitz along with the new book by Wesley Clark. Some other friends gave me the collection of poems, Field Russia, by Gennedy Agyi, the Chuvashian poet. Just saying Chuvashian is a novel experience rolling off the tongue. I haven't had a chance to do more than take a brief look at one or two pages, but it looks promisingly like Paul Celan in it's interior approach to language. My most prized freebie while in NY is the upcoming novel by Roberto Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas, supposedly true biographical entries about writers in the Americas who had some sort of contact with or admiration for Hitler and/or the Nazis. They are so funny and absurd. If you are not familiar with Roberto Bolano, who was one of the most important writers of South America in the new generation, check out the New Yorker which has one of his short stories online:

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction

It should be enough to have received 7 books while in New York. However, in the two weeks since, it's been like Christmas. As soon as I returned from my vacation, I found on my work desk: Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro (translated by Chris Daniels). Reading the very first lines of this volume:

I've never kept flocks,
But it's like I've kept them.
My soul is like a shepherd,
It knows the wind and the sun
And it walks hand in hand with the Seasons,
Following and seeing.
All the peace of Nature without people
Comes and sits at my side.
But I get sad
As the sunset is in our imagination
When it gets cold down in the plain
And you feel night coming in
Like a butterfly through the window.

Reading those lines, I wondered why the Whitman influence has had a more interesting impact on Portuguese and Spanish speaking poets than English speaking poets. Over the past few years, I've grown increasingly disenchanted by the first person persona of the everyday that has taken over the American poetry scene. But that's a larger topic to be explored some other post.

One book of poems I haven't done more than crack open is Giscomb's Road which a friend from Chicago sent me. The reason is because it looks complex, something to think on for hours. I would like to get to it as it's accompanied by a note from my friend talking about Giscombe as being a different kind of poet than many poets currently dominating the scene.

Among the most unusual books I've received in my lifetime is a charming and eclectic paperback entitled: How to Build an Igloo. At first I thought it was a joke along the lines of a Chronicle gift item. Instead, it's a genuine Do It Yourself igloo instructions written by an engineer. Accompanied by line illustrations, the instructions include such invaluable tidbits as how to dress for igloo-building, creating light in your igloo by using a polished block of ice, joining two igloos together for a roomier igloo, and other structures that are not necessarily igloos but also built out of snow/ice.

There are so many new books I've received that I am going to have to do a post number 2 on the same topic later.

Mission Statement

2007-10-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

For awhile now, I've been thinking about how to think about books in a different way than by writing in my journal or by writing a review. Generally, I find that my journal entries about books and writers, and the thoughts they inspire, tend to be free association and amorphous. On the other hand, the few reviews I have written for established publications, whether online or in print, have been formal and required a good deal of time and energy.

I am exploring the blog format as a way of quickly spending some time on books that I am reading and find interesting, but also as a way of thinking somewhere between the formal and the informal. Furthermore, I would be intrigued to hear from people who are reading the same books (or have thoughts on what I have written on this blog). Should be a fun experiment.