“The horror. The horror.”
tags:
classics, Conrad, fiction, Heart of Darkness, literature, modernism, novels
Conrad’s singular phrase from the turn-of-the-century novella, Heart of Darkness, says it all. So many have borrowed from it, the best known work being Apocalypse Now, which is set in Vietnam instead of the Congo. Most people find the book a challenging read, but with…
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leave a comment Joshua Ferris does a solid for GenX: a book review in margin notes
tags:
And Then We Came to the End, corporate life, dotcom boom, dotcom bust, GenX, Joshua Ferris, literature
AND THEN WE CAME TO AN END by Joshua Ferris …arch, smarmy, hilarious (a laugh a page, at least) …totally relatable (Ferris must be talking about the place where I used to work in Chicago! Or maybe a blend of my workplace and my spouse’s)…
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The Bodies Exhibit: Why We Read Frankenstein
tags:
fiction, Frankenstein, Human Bodies Exhibit, literature, museum exhibit, reading, romanticism, Shelley
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, usually credited as the first true work of science fiction, stresses the fairly common themes of man’s overweening pride, his error in overstepping boundaries, and the often horrific events that follow such actions. In Shelley’s day, early 19th century, many in the…
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1 commentAyn Rand’s early unpublished fiction
tags:
Ayn Rand, books, fiction, literature, Peikoff, reading, writing
I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy. He…
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Digitized reads
tags:
books, ebooks, etexts, libraries, literature, online reading
I discovered Manybooks,net four years ago when I was venturing outside the publisher’s literature anthology in search of readings that would better suit my students’ needs. The site is clean, only a few ads, and easy to navigate. Matthew McClintock maintains the site as a…
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“How do I love Thee?”—not like that!
tags:
Browning, literature, love, modern poetry, Nims, poetry, sonnet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented poet (Sonnets from the Portuguese), but her best known poem, the sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” is not her best. I suspect it’s her most popular because of—let me count the ways 1.…
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For Those of us who keep Journals
tags:
Journals, Literature, Memory
Vol. 44: Friday 1/11/08 After 5576 pages (since 1987… earlier volumes destroyed), nothing could be clearer. My journal in no way aspires to “literature.” And never has. Another enterprise. As though the words come from different universes. To be sure, there are moments--caught up in…
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The College Papers: Orange Juice and Basil (Short Story)
tags:
literature, short stories, the college papers, writing
The following is the first installment of The College Papers. This is a collection of all the short stories/poems I wrote during college. Most of these I wrote outside of class; actually, I only completed 2 short stories my entire college career, and I did…
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The Tales of Beedle the Bard and Other Great Fatalities
tags:
death, literature, writing
It’s got to annoy you: “LONDON (AFP) - A hand-written book of stories by J.K. Rowling—the British author’s first since the blockbuster Harry Potter series—sold for 1.95 million pounds (2.71 million euros, 3.97 million dollars) at auction Thursday. ADVERTISEMENT Auctioneers Sotheby’s had thought “The Tales…
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An Eye With a View
tags:
Art, Autobiography, Cinema, Disability, French Language, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Literature, Painting, Schnabel
Don’t miss this unexpected masterpiece—Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon)—directed by Julian Schnabel, which screened at the Mill Valley Film Fest, based on the French language novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby. Schnabel concentrates his megalomaniac sensibility by restricting it to the view…
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The Well-Suitedness of the Book
tags:
books, literature, writing
Dead Beat, as you know, has that old streak of engineering in him, and so has for years wondered how e-books or e-magazines or e-papers should work. About eight years ago he decided that it would require a flexible screen. Imagine the cover of a…
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Introducing the Sunday Salon
tags:
literature, salon
Recently a bunch of us participated in a 24-hour read-a-thon, hosted by Dewy at The Hidden Side of a Leaf. It was a big success, and it got Clare Dudman and me thinking that we would like to do something like that more often, on…
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Periodically Speaking
tags:
essays, fiction, literature, poetry, readings
Listen to what’s coming up—for free—at The New York Public Library, thanks to The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses [clmp]. On Tuesday, October 9th, the group kicks off its Periodically Speaking reading series. Each event (the October reading is one of three) will present…
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Scott Esposito—interview
tags:
criticism, lit-blogging, literature
At Conversations in the Book Trade, an interview with Scott Esposito—lit-blogger at Conversational Reading, critical essayist at The Quarterly Conversation, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Enquirer, and elsewhere: Q:Literature is in trouble—that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence…
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Philip K. Dick: American Original
tags:
book review, literature, science fiction
What’s this? Philip K. Dick has been admitted to the pantheon. Four of his novels will be re-issued by the Library of America, alongside American masters such as Melville, Hawthorne, Roth, et al.
As a longtime fan who for decades has bent people’s ears about the literary merit of Philip K. Dick, I am as proud today as if a good friend were chosen for this honor. With one major misgiving: The Library ignored three of his very best books.
The Library chose four mainstream Dick novels: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The latter three are excellent choices. (The first, Man in the High Castle is an odd choice, given it was one of Dick’s early novels and not his strongest.) But for some reason, the Library dismissed the trilogy he completed near the end of his life: the so-called VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
The reason why is probably best summarized in a recent New York Times article, in which Charles McGrath dismissed the VALIS trilogy as Dick’s “Finnegan’s Wake—a book that’s more fun to talk about than to read.”
When I read that, I almost spit out my coffee. (I also take issue with McGrath’s description of Blade Runner as the best film adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel. Perhaps he hadn’t seen the movie since the 1980s. It has not aged well.)
Then I calmed down and wondered: Am I just too much of a fan? Have I become such a PKD nut that I find enjoyment in a science-fiction Finnegan’s Wake?
Actually no. I recently re-read VALIS, and recalled why Dick’s books have always moved me so deeply. It is not the mobius-strip weirdness that Hollywood finds so compelling (wow, what if robots became so human-like that we couldn’t tell the difference?) On the contrary, it is the fact that Dick used these storytelling loops as a springboard to explore the nature of reality, and in particular, the questions of what it means to be human. Philip K. Dick was a spiritual seeker trapped in the science-fiction genre.
In 1974, after years of drug abuse (mostly amphetamines to fuel his writing), he underwent a mystical experience that he described as “an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind.” He quit the drugs that had fueled his hyperactive writing. He wrote a moving elegiac novel dedicated to the friends he had lost to drugs (Through a Scanner Darkly). And then he wrote three books (The VALIS trilogy) in which he tried to deal directly with the topics he had touched upon all through his career: Is there a divine consciousness, and if so, how does it manifest itself in us, or to us?
Contrary to McGrath, the trilogy is straightforward and pleasurable to read. True, there are narrative quirks such as a character named Philip K. Dick, and a familiar-seeming writer named Horselover Fat. But such old-fashioned meta-fiction tricks hardly equal the linguistic labyrinth that is Finnegan’s Wake. The VALIS trilogy compares better to reading Philip Roth’s Patrimony after having enjoyed the narrative hide-and-seek of the Zuckerman series. For once, the author has dropped his artifices and is telling it to you as straight as he can. The result is stark and deeply moving.
By no means would I suggest Philip K. Dick compares to Philip Roth. A speed freak, he probably never slowed down enough to give structure or style a second thought. But whatever his faults, he was a writer with a stunning imagination, a durable gift for storytelling, and a deep longing for answers to the eternal questions. His VALIS trilogy has the tragic beauty of a lifelong seeker who is finally coming to the end of his search.
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Dividing The Seamless Robe of the World
tags:
literature
the alchemy of reading, part I
tags:
Alberto Manguel, books, Jeanette Winterson, literature, maitresse, Nancy Huston, reading
“It is part of the alchemy of books that the written word rewrites itself on the reader and that one thing becomes another as it passes through various states of change while remaining itself. Don’t tell me that books are not mysterious – they are.” --Jeanette Winterson
Last night, I settled into bed around eleven o’clock with the novel I started reading over the weekend. It wasn’t long before I realized my apartment had a curious sense of presence-- as if something were in the apartment apart from me and my dog. On cue, Baxter started to bark in the other room. Starting to get a little freaked, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and cautiously opened the bedroom door. I caught a glimpse of movement across the room and jumped out of my skin, then realized I was seeing my own reflection in the mirror hanging on the bathroom door, which I had left open. Baxter barked again. I told him to calm down and go to sleep (trying to convince myself of the same thing). I went back to my bedroom, shut the door firmly behind me, climbed into bed, and slipped back into my book. I read for another half hour or so and then, putting the closed book on my nightstand, quickly turned out the light and pulled the covers over my head. If they can’t see me, I thought, the same thought I’ve had since childhood, falling asleep under similar circumstances, they can’t get me.
All that because I’m reading a book about vampires! The opening chapters of The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, lay the groundwork for the plot in teasing, thrilling chapters that so far include mysterious appearances and disappearances, and a father who is too terrified to recount the story of his encounters with Dracula to his daughter and so can only do it in short increments. The text is aware of its place in the scaffolding of the Dracula myth, from the fifteenth century to the present day, but it is no less unsettling for this acknowledgment.
This kind of terror is what Jeanette Winterson alludes to in her recent article in the Times. In this essay, she observes that there are far too many books being published these days for anyone to read all of them, and indeed, quite few that are worth reading. How is one to cut a swathe through the literary bracken? The only real way to read, Winterson writes, is to “follow [your] eccentricities,” wherever they may take you. For example, here’s where Winterson says her own eccentricities have recently led:
I have just been reading Captain Cook’s Journals, which made me read Robinson Crusoe again, which made me think about island narratives, and has run me towards Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Marianne Wiggins’s wonderful novel John Dollar and to Diana Souhami’s award-winning Selkirk’s Island, which made me order Coconut Chaos, her new book on Pitcairn.
Isn’t reading fun?
However, I have to disagree with her on one point: her outright dismissal of books on how or what to read, likening them to the “menu turistico beloved of nervous holidaymakers in foreign parts.” I take issue with this statement on several levels.
In the first place, my eccentricities have led me to the work of Alberto Manguel. Here’s how: While perusing in my local Barnes and Noble years ago, I came upon a paperback with an alluring name: The Mark of the Angel. I read the back cover and found it took place in Paris. Sold. An intellectual fascination (and something more, something more personal) with Nancy Huston was born. Last fall, hearing Huston would be on a panel at Festival America with Margaret Atwood and Edmund White (whose book on Paris I decidedly did not appreciate), I took my little self out to Vincennes to hear her. And there beside her was a deeply philosophical Argentinian-Canadian, whose comments and works mark him as the heir to Borges and Benjamin. “Je ne construis pas la vie sans lecture,” he said; when we read, the book becomes part of our “bibliothèque intérieure.”
It’s true: if you want to know who someone is, you can tell a lot from the books they own. And I don’t mean this as an elitist judgment-- it’s not to say that people who don’t keep books aren’t interesting people, or that people who buy and read chick lit aren’t intelligent, but that much can be gleaned about that person’s relationship to their mind and to ideas from their bookshelves.
After the panel, I went to the book tent, where I bought Une histoire de la lecture(1996) and La Bibliothèque, la nuit (2006) as well as a short work on Borges and added them to my “to read” pile at home. (Manguel also has a book called A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflection on a Year of Books(2004) that I’m hoping to add to my library.)
A few months later, they’re still in my “to read” pile; I’m thinking I may get to them in April or perhaps over the summer. Because I’m so interested in Manguel’s understanding of literature, and the alchemical process of reading, this provides a good reason for me to read his reading diary. If I respect a writer, such as Manguel, Winterson, Huston, then I will be interested to know what I can learn from their reading habits and journals that could in turn help my own reading and enlarge my understanding of literature and the world we inhabit. And I’m sure that Manguel will lead me other places, to writers I haven’t read, or to consider those I have in a different light. [Speaking of world we inhabit, Manguel now lives in a farmhouse in Poitou-Charentes. I wonder how I might angle for an invitation...]
I suspect, however, that Winterson was not alluding to works like those of Manguel, but perhaps to something like How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton (2006), Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read Poetry and Why, by Josephine Hart (2006) , How to Read and Why, by Harold Bloom (2001), or So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson (2004), which best seems to prove Winterson’s point: if there are so many books to read and not enough time to read them, why spend time reading about Nelson reading?
Which brings me to my second point, which will consider why we should in fact read Eagleton and Nelson on reading. But I’ve gone on long enough for now; that’s a post for another day. To be continued…
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Great Writing - A Product of the Mind
tags:
Literature, Writing, writing process
Mapping and analogy. Go back and re-read if you have forgotten. This is important stuff, Dead Beat does not lie.
Remember Hofstadter is concerned with developing computer models of how human thinking works. You see this is the core of it. We can talk about form in writing. We can ‘instruct’ in the craft - characters, setting, line, imagery, rhythm and so on, but how do we utilize it? What is happening in the minds of writers?
Why do two people with the same understanding of form produce different ‘qualities’ of work?
What makes a great poet great? We know what is happening on the page - we can see formally what has occurred? But what happened in the mind to allow this to occur? What processes were at work? And if we could model them, could we then ‘teach’ them?
Could we become better writers?
Dead Beat says, you bet!
Keep in mind that ‘the great poet’ probably does not really know what is occurring in his or her mind.
So analogy. Here is what Hofstadter says: One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.”
So what is analogy and how can we utilize it to improve our writing abilities:?
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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Fragments Blown from Mt. Lassen
tags:
Documentary, Literature
I finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on a back porch in Chico, in someone else’s home, on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, the day before Barack Obama announced his presidential bid. The Road is like a long prose poem leading up to an exercise in…
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