A Life Measured Out With Coffee Spoons

One of the Reasons Why

2007-03-03T13:20:00.001-05:00

Your silence will not protect you. -Audre Lorde

Zbiegnew Herbert

2007-02-16T22:55:00.000-05:00

(excerpted from Mr. Cogito:)

Mr. Cogito's Alienations

Mr. Cogito holds in his arms
the warm amphora of a head

the rest of the body is hidden
only touch sees it

he looks at the sleeping head
strange yet full of tenderness

once again
he notices with amazement
that someone exists outside of him
impenetrable
like a stone

with limits
which open
only for a moment
then the sea casts it up
on the rocky shore
with its own blood
strange sleep
armed with its own skin

Mr. Cogito removes
the sleeping head
gently

not to leave
on the cheek
the imprints of fingers

and he goes away
alone
into the lime of the sheets

Remembering my Father

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood
so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands
given to belief not forgiving faults
because he cleared out woods and straightened paths
he carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would sit at his right hand
and we would separate light from darkness
and judge those of us who live

—it happened otherwise

a junk-dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart
and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born for a second time slight very fragile
with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage
he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed
to be reconciled

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards - they will win
they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don't need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

(excerpted from Barbarian in the Garden:)

The sun gave him a stone
capable of speech and truth
so people called it a creature of the mountains

It was hard strong black and thick

its sides were marked with streaks which resembled wrinkles

So he washed the wise stone in the living spring
clothed it in pure linen
fed it like small child
made offerings as to a god

With powerful hymns he kindled life

Then he lit a lamp in his clean house
swayed it in his arms
as a mother embracing a son

You who want to hear a god's voice
do the same
ask him about your future
for he will speak the truth

(trans.1985)

....This man's poetry nourishes my soul.

Change:

2007-02-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

a moment like a gun going off: too much, and too final, to ever guess the reasons why.

The Waste Land I

2006-04-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

(courtesy of Bartleby.com)

I. Burial of the Dead

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering	5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,	10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,	15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,	25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	35
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,	45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.	50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.	55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,	60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.	65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!	70
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!	75
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

Wire in the Blood

2006-03-23T21:00:00.000-05:00

These are things only I can tell you.

The shape of your arms, for example,
carving through water, while behind you
the tangled seaweed of your black hair
shows you are drowning.

In this way I am selfish and have always been.
My passion, my desire, my fulfillment.
Not, as you recall, your privacy, your
childhood, which I raped
mercilessly, time and again,
looking for clues of you in a past you could not photograph.

Or, if you are musical, you know
phrasing can change with a breath.

What you do not know is that punishment is not limited
merely to a physical form; it may assume a guise
of phoenix-gold, though beneath its plumage is ash.
The fickle mind trades for comfortable peace, yielding up
the bounty of its ocean: the drowned-dead, the groping hands,
the clipped angels strung by wire to the walls.
And a voice behind me rambles on and on
about the skeletal branches of trees, the coming noxious New York spring,
and the electric power of the third rail.

I am told this is the good place,
where the cliff's edge seems to recede,
but the words begin to fail. What I have lost over the years
is not the stalking Darkness with its hobnailed boots,
but the slipshod ghost of Sympathy that used to wander these halls.
Oh, she puts in appearances, here & there, when least expected, or
so I am told.
Meanwhile her stepsister Pretense, rail-thin and meek,
has since grown fat and strong.

(In this case time is retrospection.
Darkness is the proper noun for the collection of demons I sow,
like wild oats in the thick night, when I deem it right.
Sympathy is what she has always been.
And Pretense is not her stepsister but, more horrible still,
her mother.)

Lithium.
Ativan.
Haldol.
Halcyon.
The last is a phoenix, and the first
possibly that phoenix's name.

You. You were the one
in the orange shirt and black glasses
that compressed your eyes into squares. I dreamt
your eyes would be beautiful and large without them, because
your name is an estate. I was the girl with the timid face,
the chewed mouth. I sat behind you.
For two long hours I considered stabbing you,
right above your clavicles where
bones and blood celebrate the long column of breath.

At a point in the upper arm the blood
beats with such force
that, if ruptured, a man will expire in two minutes.
It quickens my pulse, that.

So it is also with the image of that young man,
boylike in his sedate posturing
bent broken over the hood of a car,
his mangled face in the burst windshield.
Even now I can recall how long his back seemed
taken against the inviting nature of his left hip,
which flirted with the viewer, asking only
for one last handhold before we go.

The thing I need to know from you is how long it will take
before burning hounds appear on the roads again
and the elevators fill with blood
and my nose recalls the damp smell of lime
and every night, mercifully, we all cease--

Review: Regeneration

2006-03-01T20:42:00.000-05:00

Regeneration
Pat Barker

"Rivers was roused from [his] thoughts by the crunch of tyres on gravel. He reached the window in time to see a taxi draw up, and a man, who from his uniform could only be Sassoon, get out. After paying the driver, Sassoon stood for a moment, looking up at the building. Nobody arriving at Craiglockhart for the first time could fail to be daunted by the sheer gloomy, cavernous bulk of the place. Sassoon lingered on the drive for a full minute after the taxi had driven away, then took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.
Rivers turned away from the window, feeling almost ashamed of having witnessed that small, private victory over fear." (9)

I finished this book all of two minutes ago. I feel the need to review this while it's still fresh in my mind, before I've "digested" it, and while I'm still fresh from my inexplicable crying.

I don't have the words to describe how impressive a read this was. I'll be the first to admit that books often drag all kinds of emotions out of me: love and sentimentality, fear and despair, a rare joy. I can count on one hand the number of books that have compelled in me a truly visceral reaction: Where the Red Fern Grows back in 4th grade, A Streetcar Named Desire in my freshman year or so of college, The Prince of Tides in that murky transition period between sophomore and junior year. It's interesting that the former two pulled an unstoppable flood of tears from me (which failed to make me put the books down), and the symptoms of the latter didn't manifest except in front of friends. Now to this list I have to add Regeneration, and unlike the other novels on this list, I can't trace a definitive thing that made my emotions tangle and snap. The seamless play of this novel, its unforgettable characters--even those who appear for only a paragraph or two--, the way their personal conflicts unfold and are shown to be inextricably connected in ways that seem unimaginable at the novel's outset: these elements and more place this book on a very influential pedestal for me, personally and as a writer.

The story is set during World War I and very loosely revolves around the committal of the noted poet and renowned British war hero Siegfried Sassoon to Craiglockhart War Hospital, an institute for soldiers classified "mentally unsound." Sassoon is committed for writing a declaration stating his belief that "the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it [...and...] that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest" (3). The narrative is told from several viewpoints, primarily that of Rivers, the neurologist and social anthropologist in whose care Sassoon (along with most of the other patients in this novel) is placed; Sassoon himself; the mutist and asthmatic second lieutenant Billy Prior; Sarah, a working girl who eventually becomes Prior's lover; the noted poet Wilfred Owen; etc. etc.

This is a work of historical fiction and it is brilliantly executed. The voice is in perfect keeping with the times; dialect is unobtrusive; the extensive knowledge and depiction of wartime shell-shock and various forms of war trauma and its treatment are incredible. I don't know how much research it took for Barker to write this; I know I never could. It is beyond my writerly understanding how Pat Barker managed to make so many of these characters so incredibly sympathetic without spending forever on each one of them. For instance, you never get into Burns's head, yet he was one of the most sympathetic characters for me, and not merely on account of his suffering and the revolting experiences and strain that led to his breakdown. The depiction of his room in rural Suffolk was enough for me to start crying (from there, I didn't really stop until I finished the book, just now).

Rivers himself is a compelling, heartbreaking character and I was with him from the beginning. His duty is to "cure" Sassoon of his anti-war belief and send him back to the war. He only does it because it is his duty. And Sassoon, who lacked a father figure and very quickly begins to look up to Rivers, is influenced... but I won't spoil the plot for you. Let me just say that I vehemently didn't support Rivers's so-called "duty," but it didn't stop me from sympathizing with him completely, and even from being a little in love with him by the end of the book, enough to have to give myself a few minutes to clear my eyes and catch my breath.

...Despite its subject matter, this book is not a depressing one. It is not melodramatic, it is powerful without asking for tears, it seems to entirely reject the idea of armchair-empathy and demands a more qualitative response that I have no background to give. What I'm saying is that this isn't a "tearjerker novel" and despite my near-public crying jag while reading, I'm inclined to believe it is anything but.

I am in awe of Barker's ability to juggle so many issues and themes in divers characters without being obvious or preachy. He addresses issues of writing, male-male companionship, and from there to the very veiled theme of homosexuality (Sassoon, Owen, and many minor characters in the novel are homosexual); he discusses friendship, surrogate fathers, heterosexual love; he takes the psychiatrist-patient relationship one step further by illustrating how like a father-son relationship it is, how intimately tied together the two are: Rivers, despite his contrary thinking, can't seem to break away from his patients, visits them when they ask him to do so even after they've been discharged; he goes on helping Burns after Burns has been discharged and seems for the first time truly deranged. Rivers's self-sacrificing is so believably real, it came as a great shock to me so I won't spoil it here. Barker's choice of placement of information and diction and pacing... incredible.

I could go on forever about this, also I'm still shaky and need to sit still for a moment or two. I wish I could write this book. As is, I can only go out and buy the two sequels in this trilogy: The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. I strongly recommend you do the same.

Go Ahead and Laugh.

2006-02-21T02:18:00.000-05:00

Carmen Sandiego is hottttt.

It's 3:30 a.m. right now, my weekend has been so mentally exhausting I crashed in my 20-person seminar at 6:00 p.m. and then again at 8:00, woke up at midnight, about to go back to bed... workshop submission still not done, but I'm a little woozy and unbalanced from weird caffeine intake (or lack thereof) today. I'm so brain-dead and tired I think I'm allowed to have some weird musings.

So I was fucking around online searching for a red trench coat and fedora--no, this is not an unusual thing for me--and got to thinking: 80s cartoon shows and video game media had some strikingly strong female characters grounded in intelligence and physical/moral strength. Seems like it should be the other way around, considering nowadays a lot of cartoon-character or video game women (granted, with exceptions) seem very physically stereotyped or play weaker/secondary roles to the male lead. Too brain-dead right now to think of many concrete examples, and now that I'm trying to think I'm just slowly horrifying myself at the sheer volume of anime-esque stuff the U.S. has assimilated. I guess Kim Possible is an awesome example of a strong woman character, even though personally I never liked that she was a cheerleader--but she pulls it off well, I guess, even if it does feel a bit cookie-cutter at times.

Maybe it's just that back when I was a kid and didn't know any better, Carmen Sandiego, along with a surprising number of her female henchmen, was the epitome of original "strong woman." Also, I was secretly in love with Carmen Sandiego and have been so since the third grade. (Seriously. If she were alive, I'd go gay for her in a heartbeat.) I mean, hey, she was damncool, and she didn't need to flaunt anything to pull off her coolness. She hid her figure under the trench coat and you only saw her face a coupla times in the cartoon series. And I mean, the basic premise for her ditching for a life of crime was that she was smarter than everyone at the mostly-male-run ACME Detective Agency. Looking back on it now, I kinda remember several of her female henchmen being billed as physically stronger than a lot of the men, some of them looking bulked-up and very butch in the dossier profiles (I think this was the "Where in the World" series?) Sarah Nade, the really butch punk-rocker, or those female "strong-women" who pulled off a lot of the capers involving hard physical labor. Bustin' up stereotypes left and right, man. And this was--1983? 'S pretty cool. Especially since the model for Carmen Sandiego was Indiana Jones, who's definitely high up on the Top 10 All-Time Coolest List.

Thing is, if you think about other prominent female characters of the time (and were there even that many...?) Daphne from "Scooby Doo" was very much the "delicate female," but Velma was very much the nerd so maybe that balanced out. Daphne very rarely participated in any of the conflict resolution, though, if I remember right... Judy Jetson in "The Jetsons" also just kinda seemed to be there as the random teenage girl character, though I didn't follow that religiously so I can't really say. Jessie from "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" later on is more the modern female, with an average bust and the same build as Jonny, but she tends to wear a lot of pastels and never puts her hair up even for the stickiest situations, though that might just be me being nit-picky.

Same for male chars, too--even the guys nowadays are sometimes stereotyped as super-macho or super-dorky. Again, floundering for concrete examples. I'll have to get back to this. But what happened to the more thoughtful or liberal or original/unique characters with a little bit of personality behind them? Back then emphasis wasn't so much on breast size or clothing style or ditziness or machoness; it took a little more to make a good character. Carmen and her henchwomen rocked the liberal/feminist agenda back then; Zack and Ivy weren't half-bad either. Jonny Quest (and I do mean the original 1986 one, although the Real Adventures wasn't so bad, and Jessie rocked) had a pretty good balance of physical/mental capability. Fuck, even "Captain Planet" had that one episode where Wheeler picks up a whore in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and Linka goes off in a tizzy. But "Captain Planet" was chockful of overt stereotypes--Wheeler the apathetic, insensitive American for one, and Linka's reactions to his advances (she could be a bitch, but she acted like she liked it). Gadget in "Rescue Rangers" was pretty cool, but she got thrown into the distressed-damsel role way too many times. And speaking of Gadget, Penny in "Inspector Gadget" was awesome--a girl and a kid who pretty much solved most of the crimes going on and let Gadget take the credit. How cool is that?? And Punky Brewster... is annoying as fuck in retrospect, but I guess she did have her own thing going on.

And of course, before I get severely flamed, She-Ra was the coolest EV4H.

Of course, in terms of characters anyway, the 80s and before had a lot to apologize for. "Captain N"? That Ruby Spears Megaman cartoon? Super Mario? That Zelda spinoff? Okay, I admit to having watched all three out of sheer little-kid fandom, but Jesus H. Christ were they bad, bad enough that I knew they were bad at the time. But seriously, people. I miss those strong characters. In fact, I'll have to come back to this thought when I'm a little more rested and coherent.

Anyway. Carmen Sandiego is hot :-)

Celebrity Sighting #1

2006-02-16T16:37:00.000-05:00

1:30 p.m., Claremont and 118th: I'm hurrying to campus so I can get one of the good seats for my lecture class, on the phone with Mom ranting about class and what will be my crazy-busy weekend. Feeling a little pissy and antisocial and hating humanity, and I haven't managed to down even half of the large coffee in my hand. So when I see the crowd of people on the sidewalk near the Barnard entrance I just angrily plow on through.

As I'm plowing through, I notice that most of these people have on headsets or are moving sound booms or cameras. Looks like the setup or removal of a film set. It begins to occur to me that maybe I shouldn't be walking through here, but you know, I've already come too far to go back, so I skirt people as best as I can while keeping a tight grip on my coffee. Almost run into some guy moving a sound boom, mutter an "excuse me" and dodge to the left, and then pretty much almost collide with Jesse L. Martin (Detective Green on Law & Order for all you non-aficionados, I think he was also in one of my fave X-Files episodes--the one about baseball, not to mention Rent and Timon of Athens on Broadway) and come perilously close to spilling said coffee all over myself and/or Mr. Martin. Thank God I am apparently not that much of a klutz. It does take me a moment to register who I just ran into though, at which point I blush, look like a moron, half-smile and apologize and turn around to continue onwards, to class... and stop just short of walking into Dennis Farina (in this scenario, Law & Order's Detective Fontana, but also of Snatch, Get Shorty, Manhunter, and Saving Private Ryan fame).

I can't say I get much into movies or star-worship or anything like that, but I have to say, Law & Order being one of the few television shows I religiously follow... I'm a teensy bit star-struck and happy right now :-)

Poetry: Mark Strand

2006-02-15T23:24:00.000-05:00

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,
the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

The Mailman

It is midnight.
He comes up the walk
and knocks at the door.
I rush to greet him.
He stands there weeping,
shaking a letter at me.
He tells me it contains
terrible personal news.
He falls to his knees.
“Forgive me! Forgive me!” he pleads.

I ask him inside.
He wipes his eyes.
His dark blue suit
is like an inkstain
on my crimson couch.
Helpless, nervous, small,
he curls up like a ball
and sleeps while I compose
more letters to myself
in the same vein:

“You shall live
by inflicting pain.
You shall forgive.”

The Door

The door is before you again and the shrieking
Starts and the mad voice is saying here here.
The myth of comfort dies and the couch of her
Body turns to dust. Clouds enter your eyes.

It is autumn. People are jumping from jetliners;
Their relatives leap into the air to join them.
That is what the shrieking is about. Nobody wants
To leave, nobody wants to stay behind.

The door is before you and you are unable to speak.
Your breathing is slow and you peer through
The window. Your doctor is wearing a butcher’s apron
And carries a knife. You approve.

And you remember the first time you came. The leaves
Spun from the maples as you ran to the house.
You ran as you always imagined you would.
Your hand is on the door. This is where you came in.

The Guardian

The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?

You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death,

preserve my absence. I am alive.

(from the collection Reasons for Moving)

Review: Survival in Auschwitz

2006-02-15T22:37:00.000-05:00

Survival in Auschwitz
Primo Levi
transl. Stuart Woolf

"[T]his was the sense, not forgotten either then or later: that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness[.]" (41)

I am not going to review this book in the sense that I've done the others. I find it extremely difficult to pick apart narratives that "bear witness": The Reawakening, Levi's so-called sequel to this novel; Hope Against Hope and its sequels, by Nadezhda Mandelstam; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia with its killer last line. Anyway Survival in Auschwitz is a book that I think everyone has, or should, read, because Levi's language is simple and does not overdramatize or preach; he merely tells the story of what he lived through as he lived through it, and if he does often muse on the inner workings of man he does so in an unobtrusive fashion. He isn't out for pity or catharsis. This is essentially a work written to forever fix a terrible incident in history.

I will say that as a book I found The Reawakening to be more powerful, and I'm sorry I can't quote concrete examples; I left that book at home over break. Read as a pair, I think Levi's real power is in the simplicity of his expression, which (as I've been told) the translation tends to needlessly spruce up with extra language and/or descriptors. (Actually, I've heard this translation isn't so good, and that it's best read in Italian, so if you know Italian, read it in its original form and get back to me on that.) The fact that the reader recognizes that Levi doesn't have some ulterior motive in his language or expression, that he isn't trying to wring tears or provoke guilt, contains some kind of raw power.

That and the fact that (though this comes across more clearly in The Reawakening) he never fixes the blame on anyone. His capacity for forgiveness--no, that isn't right; his ability to understand and to explain with an objective eye how both the Germans and the Jews had devolved under camp conditions to something less than human; his ability to refrain from pointing the finger at Germany and leaving blame out of the question entirely--is what lends the memoir its most striking power. You start reading expecting some hint of anger that you never find. And actually, I think, in Philip Roth's Shop Talk Levi admits that he had no "literary intentions" but had an intense wish to understand. He takes the scientific chemist's approach to a lot of the material without sacrificing any of the emotional power of his story.

His accessible contemplations on man and the ways "in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties" (181) are what made the memoir work for me. Read it. It does make you think.

Review: Lolita

2006-02-09T01:46:00.001-05:00

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." (9)

I don't want to beat this dead horse again by gushing about how wonderful and brilliant Nabokov is. I recently read Pale Fire, another one of his amazing novels (perhaps better than Lolita), and his short story "The Vane Sisters," which if I remember right was initially rejected by the New Yorker because they failed to see the clever twist he inserted in the concluding paragraph. But I digress, and I haven't even gotten started.

For the past few days while I was reading this book, I was infatuated with a little girl named Lolita. I understood exactly what it was about nymphets that was so unbearably alluring; I knew why Lo's maturation would be a tragedy. The cover art of the book spoke to me. Nabokov paints Humbert Humbert's love and obsession in such a human manner that it is impossible not to sympathize with him for at least part, if not all, of the novel. The cover of the Second Vintage International edition 1997 includes a quote from Vanity Fair: "The only convincing love story of our century." I thought it was bullshit before I started reading; now, I'm inclined to agree. But here's the dead horse again, and here I am happily beating it. I'll move on.

So because I have a habit of discussing craft, I'll talk about that. I was most impressed by Nabokov's ability to pick such a dancing, whimsical writing style and remain true to it for the entire book, even during emotionally charged scenes where H.H. is clearly losing control--he still retains writing mannerisms such as word-play, name-play, associative literary leaps, etc. The murder scene, for example, or better still, the moment when Lolita leaves. I appreciated that Nabokov resisted the temptation to turn this story into a "claim of innocence" and left it simply as it is, the ultimate confession of taboo love given by a semi-trustworthy narrator who is in the end as human and pathetic as the next guy.

For me, the best moments of the book were where Humbert intentionally played with the reader's emotions and loyalties. I remember thinking as I was reading and wondering who the murdered victim would be: "Well, this guy's a creep, but he seems like a good guy, he isn't going to kill Charlotte, he isn't going to kill Lolita, he loves her." That thought was vindicated with regards Charlotte. Then on page 280, I realized how much more fickle I was compared to Humbert:

" "One last word," I [H.H.] said in my horrible careful English, "are you quite, quite sure that--well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but--well--some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope" (to that effect).
"No," she said smiling, "no."
"It would have made all the difference," said Humbert Humbert.
Then I pulled out my automatic--I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. " (280)

I about had a heart attack when I read those last two lines. My immediate assumption, of course, was to trust Humbert and so I gullibly believed that he pulled out his automatic--and then when he corrected himself and addressed himself to the "fool reader," I realized that Nabokov was pointing out how easily the reader trusts and mistrusts a narrator, and how superficial my sympathy for H.H. was, and how precarious the whole Lolita situation had been all along. That moment was when I realized the full tension of the entire novel. It was a brilliant move on Nabokov's part. I don't think it was the only time he played a card like that, but this was the one that I found most striking.

I also enjoyed the word- and name-play a lot--I can't say I caught all the literary references, but his fun with words--e.g., "We had breakfast in the town of Soda, pop.1001" (220), and too many more to count--added another dimension to the novel, helped to humanize him, give him a personality outside of his love for Lolita. Also an impressive move on Nabokov's part, since otherwise it would be difficult to distinguish Humbert apart from Lolita--and even though he is almost always with her in the novel, his humor and means of expression give him a distinct identity.

My one qualm with the book was that, somewhere near the middle, I lost Humbert. We were no longer on the same page; he hadn't changed his obsession of course, Lolita did not speak much, and it was tiresome to see her in the same light through the same lens for most of the novel. To have her introduced that way, and to view her changing self that way, that was fine. It's a minor problem in light of the book's many strengths, and one that didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. There was another distinct moment when I lost Humbert, I think it was the first or second time he slept with Lolita, or around the time he started having her on a regular basis, and her withdrawal became noticeable--at that moment I remembered that this was a sort of sexual abuse and not merely the boundless, unbreakable love Humbert made it out to be. Of course by then I sympathized too strongly with Humbert to pull back far enough to hate him. Another great move. To state the patently obvious, Nabokov really is a brilliant writer.

I do have to say, though, I think the most effective part of the book is the final paragraph:

"Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much a part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to live at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." (309)

Moved me almost to tears, that one. Not so much because I knew what Humbert presumably didn't, that Lolita died giving birth to a stillborn girl, although that affected me too, but because that last line just--oh. It got me. Especially because the entire novel up until the last paragraph is addressed exclusively to the reader, Humbert's sudden and unclear switch to addressing Lolita at the beginning of the last paragraph is highly effective. It was as though suddenly he was speaking to me with all the hapless, helpless, Humbert tenderness, love, and obsession he possessed throughout the novel. As the reader, I was privy to his confessions, and suddenly privy to the last recorded bald statement of his love for Lolita, addressed to Lolita, who would never read it as per his wishes.

Right, I'll stop beating that dead horse now. So, all in all, Lolita is a gorgeously written, wonderful novel, and of course I definitely recommend it. It really is one of those books everyone should read. What a perspective. What a way of writing.

Review: Atonement

2006-02-09T00:05:00.001-05:00

Atonement
Ian McEwan

"The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all." (350-1)

Warning: spoilers ahead. If you haven't read the book, and want to read it without knowing how it turns out (not like this is an involved mystery novel, but there is one point that shocked me at the very end that I am going to have to give away here), then read no further. Come back when you're up to speed.

I was actually joking when I said I would try to talk about this book, but Christine expressed interest, so this is pretty much for Christine (Hi, Chris!), who I hope won't be put off by the very writerly perspective I took to this book, although this is a novel that facilitates that kind of perspective.

I didn't want to immediately show my hand by using the quote above, but I realized on flipping through this book again that not much of the language or insights jumped out at me (or at least I made no note of them). There were some beautiful phrases that I did mark--the description of a migraine as "a heaviness [in her brain], the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal" (60), the idea that "a story was a form of telepathy" (35), and several striking lines in Part Three concerning Briony's nursing stint: "What she dreaded, more than the removal of the dressing, was the look of reproach in his large brown eyes. What have you done to me?" (284), or "Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended" (286-7). I finished this book a week or so ago, and the part about the injured French soldier Luc is still haunting me: not the language so much as the image of Briony talking to this dying man without realizing his condition, then loosening his head bandages only to discover that a large portion of his skull was blown off and his brain is exposed. That terrible moment when he asks her, thinking she is someone else, if she loves him, and she replies that she does, because "[h]e was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die" (292).

That aside, I wasn't compelled by most of the language, and I wasn't particularly interested in the story at first. McEwan begins Part One with little to no tension, and builds up the story very slowly. It's all necessary information, character introduction, etc., but it went too slowly for me and I almost lost interest near the beginning. I also personally had trouble with the metafictive aspect of the narrative; it was almost too self-aware even filtered through Briony's writing experience. I cringed in Part Three when she received the rejection letter--not because I felt bad that her manuscript had been rejected, but because the use of such a device seemed so trite. For a while I couldn't help but think that Parts One and Three were excuses or justifications for McEwan to write about writing--whether it's a politically viable tool, how much one should draw on those who came before, what constitutes a "good" story, and so on with the same old writerly questions. Not to say I didn't find his views intriguing, but I was drawn out of the story each time. Briony's revelation about writing "maturely" when she is thirteen; the fact that her rejected manuscript is about the fountain incident that is a major focal point of McEwan's novel; the fact that Briony's novel is at the end, as is expected, the novel McEwan has published.

This isn't to say I'm against literature with metafictive aspects. I just think it has to be carried off very well in order for me to completely buy into it. Successful examples include Nabokov's Lolita or particularly his Pale Fire, Cunningham's The Hours, Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (even if this book just primarily didn't work for me, though I appreciated what it was trying to do), much of Borges's work, etc. Less successful examples include Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (such a great premise, though) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. There're probably several others to add to both lists, but you get the general idea. I personally feel that the use of metafictive elements has to be extremely relevant to the novel as a whole, as it is in Pale Fire and if on a winter's night a traveler, both of which are specifically about reading and writing, the former through the use of a heavily and ambiguously footnoted analysis of a long poem, the latter through use of the second-person present. McEwan's writing about writing seemed almost superfluous to me except for two key points: Briony's devastating lie, and the novel's conclusion.

Even Briony's lie, though, is easily explained by other factors. She is a young impressionable girl; she lives in her thoughts whether writing or not; she saw the word "cunt" in Robbie's note and believed that Robbie was a madman, not knowing any better. Perhaps the ease with which she placed Robbie at the scene of the crime stemmed from her writerly habits. But I felt I could mostly blame her falsehood on environment, living in a house that is supposed to be prim and proper and rich when really it is filled with junk, and her mother Emily refusing to acknowledge her husband's infidelity. When dishonesty is a norm in the household, it's natural to assume it'll crop up in the kids. Still, I can see why McEwan wanted to implement the use of writing here, so I can take it. I also wasn't sure why the metafictive element was necessary to the story, since Briony physically goes to her sister and Robbie and admits she was wrong and expresses the desire to help. In-the-flesh forgiveness. That's all the story needs. Additionally, McEwan only explains the novel as an impossible attempt at atonement at the end of the book. Or maybe my problem was that I was too far ahead of him, and didn't understand why he wasn't revealing anything. I knew Briony was trying to be forgiven through her writing; I knew (through personal experience, heh) that it wouldn't work, it never does. As McEwan points out, "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350) The key for me was learning that Briony also knew it was impossible, and that that was the point. Suddenly her character made complete sense to me.

However, that last-minute enlightenment made the whole book worth it for me. I can't fault McEwan for placing it at the end, because there's nowhere else to put this detail: that despite Part Two, which chronicles Robbie's struggle to return home from the war, and Part Three, in which both Cecilia and Robbie appear as happy lovers living together, both of them are dead. As Briony admits on the second-to-last page: "It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade the reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending?" (350)

...and then it clicked. And the book wound up very nicely with the first quote I have at the beginning of this review. This is what writing can do to alleviate what we go through; it is an impossible atonement because it can't bring forgiveness. But it may quiet something, and it may give something back. I don't think I can articulate it better than McEwan did, so I'll leave it at that.

Apologies for this long, rambling, senseless post. I'm tired and suffering severe writer's block, also this book has been bothering me as a writer and as a human being. It was rough (in a good way!) having to flip through it again just now. At any rate, I recommend this book, but just make sure you can get through metafictions and Part One all right. After that, the motivations are set up and everything moves along just fine.

Review: Castle to Castle

2006-02-08T23:16:00.000-05:00

Castle to Castle
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
transl. Ralph Manheim

"Frankly, just between you and me, I'm ending up even worse than I started . . . Yes, my beginnings weren't so hot . . . I was born, I repeat, in Courbevoie, Seine . . . I'm repeating it for the thousandth time . . . after a great many round trips I'm ending very badly . . . old age, you'll say . . . yes, old age, that's a fact . . . at sixty-three and then some, it's hard to break in again . . . to build up a new practice . . . no matter where . . . I forgot to tell you . . . I'm a doctor . . . A medical practice, confidentially, between you and me, isn't just a question of knowing your job and doing it properly . . . what really counts . . . more than anything else . . . is personal charm . . . personal charm after sixty? . . . there might still be a future for you in the wax works, or as an antique vase in a museum . . . a few old fogies in search of enigmas might still take an interest . . . but the ladies? Your dapper graybeard, painted, perfumed, and lacquered? . . . Doctor or not, practice or no practice, the old scarecrow will stick in people's craw . . . If he's loaded? . . . well, maybe . . . hmm, hmm, . . . he'll barely be tolerated . . . but a white haired pauper? Take him away." (1)

If you must know, I am stuck with my writing right now, so I've decided to take some time out of my life to rant about this book, because in my humble experience it might just be the worst book I've ever come across. Unfortunately this book is at home in my basement, as I would not be caught dead with it in my room, so I will be unable to quote from it as extensively as I would like to. But this is probably better for you, dear readers, as the book is one giant elliptical sentence that not only never ends but has no point. Think of the most irrational, senseless person you know, then imagine him/her in a state of hysterical fury irately attempting to express hatred for everyone and everything. It's going to sound something like total incoherence, albeit with a lot of raw emotional hating power. That's pretty much the only thing this book has going for it--raw emotional hating power, that is--and even that gets old after 10 chapters of the same damn thing.

A little bit about it... this supposedly falls into the class of historical fiction, though it seems more like a glorified eloquent rant at its best and a raving diatribe at worst. I don't want to criticize Celine too harshly, as I haven't read Journey to the End of the Night, which is allegedly his "best work" (though compared to this, I think anything might be). I've also heard Death on the Installment Plan wasn't bad. I don't know for sure. I'd love it if anyone could qualitatively tell me that something Celine wrote is good, because I don't want to hate him as an author on the basis of one book but am finding it very hard not to.

The novel is autobiographical; Celine is the "I" who is a Nazi sympathizer and is yet destroyed by them during World War II. He describes his departure from France in 1944 and also describes, with bitter pleasure, the decline of the Vichy government in exile. The novel discusses his experiences at a castle in Sigmaringen, Germany, where the Germans installed remnants of the French collaborationist government after the Allies landed. Celine makes it clear from the outset that he hates everyone, especially publishers (especially his own). It's the first of a trilogy that runs much the same way. And that's pretty much it. Nothing really happens in the book except for him ranting. And yet the translation won a National Book Award and this novel is applauded for its dark cynical wit...

There were two defining moments for me in this book. The first was when I riffled the pages before starting to read it and was astounded to discover that it worked something like a flip-book animation with all the little ellipsis dots and the profanity and obscenity; it was like watching the word "fuck" ripple across the page like a little scurrying mouse. Quite aesthetic. The second, and perhaps more in-context, defining moment was the recurring image of what I have affectionately termed "the shit toilet."

That may seem redundant to many of you. Let me explain that Celine describes "the shit toilet" as he encountered it in this one inn where he stayed. The inn was infamous for the poor quality of its food and drink, which would immediately give the consumer an explosive case of diarrhea. However, during the war, people in exile like Celine and the Vichy people had to take what they could get. So there ended up being a large number of people desperate to piss and shit around mealtimes every day, resulting in long lines for the bathroom, mass panic and shrieking for the toilet usurper to hurry up, and people crapping their pants. The owner got so fed up of people clogging the toilet he refused to let them use it, so finally the people broke the bathroom door down and dragged the toilet to the top of the stairs, where they all proceeded to use it at one and the same time, bums vying for position, shit flowing everywhere and finally overflowing from the toilet and down the stairs so that you couldn't walk without essentially stepping in your own and/or other people's shit. A lovely image. It kept recurring. Other recurring themes included Celine's fervent desire that the Vichy government rape each other or get anally raped, that Jews would all die, and something about a woman with a riding crop and an old woman who was a patient of his.

Now, I grant you I did keep falling asleep when I was reading this book, mainly because the thought never finishes. It's like he's going somewhere, and then the train derails off a bridge into the sea, and then when you're waiting for an explosion it just floats around in ocean for a while and starts running on the ocean floor, and then it ends with a whimper and not a bang, not like you're expecting anything because your eyes are swimming from all the dots. Or maybe it's just me.

I'll say this for Celine: he can be damn funny when he wants to be, in a very cynical way, and I appreciated his humor. I also thought he had some very cutting insights on the worlds of politics and publishing. I didn't even mind that he spent most of the book raving, or that the ellipses never stopped. But I couldn't manage to stay focused when the book itself seemed to have no focus. That, I think, was its major and greatest flaw, and one I just couldn't get over. I still don't know how I managed to finish reading it.

I wish I had the book so I could quote and sound a little more rational in my hatred for this book. I do encourage y'all to pick it up at the library and flip through it, though, if only to be amused by "the shit toilet" scenes, or maybe to prove me wrong. And if anyone out there read and enjoyed this book, I implore you to post a comment here and explain to me why you found it enjoyable. In fact, I dare you to explain it. Bring it, bee-yatches ;-P

Review: The Castle of Crossed Destinies

2006-01-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Italo Calvino
transl. William Weaver

"We began to spread out the cards on the table, face up, and to give them their proper value in games, or their true meaning in the reading of fortunes. And yet none of us seemed to wish to begin playing, and still less to question the future, since we were as if drained of all future, suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to end. There was something else we saw in those tarots, something that no longer allowed us to take our eyes from the gilded pieces of that mosaic." (6)

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is essentially a two-part book made up of "interconnected" short stories or vignettes narrated by a group of travelers through tarot cards. The idea is that the travelers have magically lost the power of speech, and so they attempt to tell each other their histories-in-brief using different interpretations of the tarot cards. Part One of the book, "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," used the Italian Bembo deck (now obsolete), while Part Two, "The Tavern of Crossed Destinies," uses the French Marseilles deck. The difference is crucial since Calvino bases his interpretations primarily on the individual pictorial illustrations rather than on the usual "mystic" interpretations used in reading an entire tarot spread. Although the stories told in both Parts One and Two share thematic similarities, the different decks introduce variations in Calvino's invented and retold tales. Calvino also shows the illustrated cards in the margins of the stories, in the order that they appear in the narrative. The stories are "told" in two files, horizontal or vertical, and interconnect at points--hence my use of "interconnected" at the beginning of this paragraph.

I bought this book because of my recent passionate love affair with Calvino, rekindled by a re-reading of if on a winter's night a traveler and by the brand-new experience of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, all of which I absolutely adored. [See the earlier review of Cosmicomics somewhere in my archives...] Again, reading Calvino is a lot like drinking heavy cream; either you love it or its too rich and smothers you. I have to admit, The Castle of Crossed Destinies was vaguely disappointing, but I am still an ardent lover of everything Calvino does. I have a lot to say about this book, but for the sake of space and my poor dying wrists, I'll try to keep it short.

Reading this book, I uncovered two major premises that Calvino was working with, the first and more obvious being the use of tarot cards to tell a story in pictures. I thought that premise was brilliant, but I did think that the execution was lacking, more so in "Castle" than in "Tavern." To me, "Castle" didn't pull me in as much as it could have; it seemed too relaxed, and I didn't see the desperation of a group of mute travelers urgently wishing to tell their stories. I got more of that in "Tavern," when each story seemed to possess an undercurrent of desperation, and Calvino keeps reiterating that "it is difficult to fit one card to another [...] because for every new card the young man tries to align with others, ten hands are outstretched to take it from him and insert it in another story each one is constructing" (65). Although Calvino doesn't take pains to develop these characters--and understandably so since it isn't at all what he's trying to get at--I sympathized/empathized with them more in "Tavern." I have other reasons for liking Part Two also; I'll get into that in a minute.

Despite being vaguely disappointed in the execution, I do think Calvino delivered in terms of ideas. In Part One, I loved the idea of selling a city's soul "The Alchemist Who Sold His Soul," and "The Doomed Bride" was interesting, and I thought the pivotal stories of Roland were written beautifully. But there is, as always, the problem of losing something in the translation between written and pictorial art. I have a working knowledge of tarot readings and common interpretations, and I tried to find larger images of the cards Calvino was working with, but the Bembo deck is pretty much obsolete, so I ended up giving myself eyestrain trying to study and interpret the illustrations in the margins of the book. The "Tavern" ran a little differently since it's fairly easy to come by illustrations of the Marseilles deck, and I had fun going back and retelling the stories myself through different interpretations, reversals, etc. I really enjoyed just about all the stories in "The Tavern," especially "I Try Also to Tell My Tale" (but maybe that's me as a writer!). I also love that Calvino encourages "authorial instinct" by including his method of spreading the cards, e.g. from Part One "The Castle":

thus allowing for new interpretations reversing Calvino's stories, or altogether new stories told along the diagonals and around the square. His tarot spread in "The Tavern" more explicitly tells many more stories using more of the available space and most of the possible directions... So, "The Tavern," then.

Now, this could be my personal reading of the book and of Calvino's intention, but what I really enjoyed about The Castle, particularly Part Two "The Tavern," was the less apparent premise that all stories are one. In "The Castle" Calvino makes clear references to literary figures like Faust and Roland but portrays them in a different light or under different circumstances (though Roland, I believe, is more or less a straight retelling? I don't know about Astolpho). In "The Tavern," Calvino invents his own stories and then relates them in detail to literature and mythology: the stories of Hamlet, Oedipus, Justine, Perceval, Lady Macbeth, Faust (again!), Helen of Troy, and King Lear. He also makes references to St. Jerome and St. George and the dragon in his own tale, "The Writer's Tale," which judging by the scarcity of marginal illustrations relies only lightly on the tarot cards and instead tries to explain the purpose of storytelling. And this, I think, is the pivotal story of the entire novel.

In that story, "I Also Try to Tell My Tale," figures from all of the other stories appear even though the anonymous narrator here has not narrated the other stories. The characters do not belong to him. He then spends pages describing how he believes the extroverted St. George and the introverted St. Jerome can be made out to be each other, "in the way painters and writers have of believing in a story that has gone through many forms, and with painting and repainting, writing and rewriting, if it was not true, has become so" (108). I think because the execution of his premise in "The Tavern" became so lucid, I enjoyed Part Two more thoroughly than I did Part One, although in retrospect, once I'd figured out what he was going for, I liked the whole book very much.

The unspoken question here is perhaps what I found most intriguing about the book: how many stories exist in the world, and what if we run out of them? As a writer, I subconsciously worry that one day all the stories will be told, or maybe they have been told already, and then what am I going to do? Is it inevitable, can it be avoided? Do stories possess a limitless capacity for retelling, reworking; do they ever get old? I don't know. Calvino admits in "The Writer's Tale" that he also doesn't know. But he offers a possible solution, and the possibility of many retellings, as compensation, and once I figured out what he was saying, the writer in me really appreciated that.

Maybe it's because of that little worry of mine that I did, by the end of the novel, enjoy it so tremendously that I immediately reread it and studied the tarot cards to make up my own versions. I have to admit I found something intensely freeing about Calvino's conclusion, "And perhaps they really are one story, the life of the same man: maturity, old age, and death" (109). That it's all right that all stories emerge from one another, take new shape in their own reversals, can be reworked across tangent diagonals and at crossroads with other people's stories. Who would have thought that King Lear could also exist in Hamlet? But it does.

Review: Pale Fire

2006-01-24T17:23:00.000-05:00

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (33)

This excerpt is not representative of Pale Fire. I try to choose excerpts that are, but I was at a total loss with this novel. So I'll just try to describe it as best I can.

Pale Fire reads like a critical analysis of a long poem written by a fictional poet, John Shade; the also fictional author of the critical work, Charles Kinbote, writes a Foreword to the poem, titled "Pale Fire," and then includes the four Cantos of Shade's poem, and ends with a very long, in-depth Commentary and close-reading of almost every line in the poem. The Commentary ends up being very reflective of Kinbote's past and his character, and reveals certain aspects about him that make the novel worth reading. The premise is that "Pale Fire" is the last poem John Shade wrote and he was shot by an unlikely assassin the night he completed it. Kinbote drew up a contract with Shade's widow saying that the right to analyze and publish the poem was exclusively his. Unfortunately I'm afraid to say too much more, since the Commentary, which makes up the main part of the novel, also gives away Kinbote's story bit by bit. I can say that there is a great deal of suspense and intrigue in the book, and the gradual revelation of Kinbote's strange character is chilling but at the same time oddly understandable. He idolized the poet, and because we see the poet through his eyes, some of Kinbote's actions and extravagances concerning Shade seem perfectly normal, albeit with a slightly creepy tenor.

Nabokov's prose is as clever as always, and the way he unobtrusively works the major theme of "literary idolatry" into the novel is amazing. The ending felt a little inconclusive considering the gradual, momentous buildup of the rest of the story, but that's a small complaint in light of the novel's strange beauty. It's an incredibly fresh look at what it means (to some, anyway) to love literature, worship authors, and look critically at an author's work. It also raises the ever present, never voiced questions about the reader's desire to find herself in the work, and tacks on theories about how far that reader might go, given the chance.

English majors and critical English people--this is definitely the book for you. But I also highly recommend for anyone who loves to read and who at any time in their lives (like I used to) put her favorite authors on a pedestal and loved them, too.

James Frey

2006-01-13T20:08:00.000-05:00

…is single-handedly undermining the memoir genre, and I hate him for it. I don’t care how powerful his book is, or how much Oprah supports him, or even if (to be temporarily elitist here) readers call in on NPR and CNN to say that it really doesn’t bother them that he lied about this or that. I promise you, this doesn’t personally concern you half as much as it concerns me. I mean, fuck, there’s a reason we have clear delineations of fiction and non-fiction, and why memoir exists in the first place. The power of memoirs is their truth. The reader accepts the writer’s words as truth, or close enough truth—I’m not going to pretend that things don’t get confused or lost in memory. I’ve tried a memoir before (half-finished and now indefinitely on hold) and sure, I was interpreting things differently and misremembering things. But Frey saying that he purposely stretched the truth to make his experiences exciting and believable—saying that he was going for shock value to sell books—saying that people wanting to read about alcoholism and drug abuse wouldn’t read his memoir unless he had some kind of shock value in it—that sickens me.

It’s false journalism on some level, purposely lying to a trusting audience. To be honest, I could give less of a shit about being lied to, but it undermines the non-fiction genre. I’ve been overhearing less than intelligent conversations about how you just can’t trust any book, all authors exaggerate everything, etc. That puts us in a bit of a fix. Frey could have just called his book fiction if all he was trying to do was get across a message that would sell. I don’t mind the lying so much as his motives for doing so, and the way he deceived his audience in order to do so. RARRRR.

I'm starting to lose coherence, so I’m gonna quote one of my professors, Nicholas Christopher, from an interview he did about this on NPR: "[...] you know, Mr. Frey said something to the effect, "Well, the definition of memoir"--and perhaps it's the third or fourth one--"is story, and this is my story." Well, if someone said that to you over a cup of coffee in your everyday life, after telling you a whopper, you'd think that's ridiculous. If you're remembering something, you're remembering it as best you can, and you're giving me the facts. And you're perhaps dramatizing them or enhancing them with fine language, with musical language, whatever, but you're not distorting them completely and telling me it's true. If you're doing that, put a different label on it. I mean, I really don't think this is a complicated issue. I think it's being made complicated by people backtracking, whether it's the author, publishers, whoever, and trying to concoct, you know, all kinds of pretty ways of putting this when, in effect, it really was a con job."

Amen. Now for the love of God, call a spade a spade and put the fucking issue to rest.

Review: Cosmicomics

2005-12-25T02:39:00.000-05:00

Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino
transl. William Weaver

“All these eyes were mine. I had made them possible; I had had the active part; I furnished them the raw material, the image. With eyes had come all the rest, so everything that the others, having eyes, had become, their every form and function, and the quantity of things that, thanks to eyes, they had managed to do, in their every form and function, came from what I had done. Of course, they were not just casually implicit in my being there, in my having relations with others, male and female, et cetera, in my setting out to make a shell, et cetera. In other words, I had foreseen absolutely everything.
And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.” (153)

As one of my professors said, reading Calvino is a lot like drinking heavy cream: good and rich for some, too rich for others. I’m personally in a love-hate relationship with him, begun when I agonized over my first reading of if on a winter’s night a traveler only to be enlightened and amazed at the ending, at which point I re-read the novel on the spot. He’s a brilliant writer, though I can easily see how his style can be off-putting to some, and his imagination is boundless. I’m jealous of the ease with which he expresses his ideas. It takes me hours to wade through his prose, but for me at least, the reward is well worth the battle.

Cosmicomics, like much of Calvino’s writing, defies summary, but you can say it’s about the creation of a universe. The novel consists of short chapters that can stand as individual stories concerning the beginning of a nonspecific universe, playing with ideas of continuous creation, the expansion and contraction of matter, form and function, physiological evolution, etc. Each chapter begins with short excerpts from something like an astronomy textbook describing scientific phenomena like the Big Bang theory, steady states, redshift and the Doppler effect. The characters are named like unpronounceable mathematical formulas, the major narrator being Qfwfq and some minor characters being G’d(w)^n, Mrs. Vhd Vhd, Ayl, Lll, etc. The real power of the novel lies in these characters and their ability to imbue “dry scientific” ideas with a certain humanity.

Qfwfq tells stories that offer insights on theories, both correct and disproved, about the formation of the universe and the evolution of man, but he also sheds light on the human condition with his flaws and mistakes and his overwhelming love for life. He tells stories of life as a mollusk (i.e., the passage quoted above), life as a being evolved from fish into a more terrestrial creature, life as the last living Dinosaur after the dinosaurs have become extinct, and so on. Calvino’s characters play with atoms like marbles, create galaxies and race them through the universe, make bets on the outcome of events billions of years before they happen, fall into voids with no bottom, and are watched by the universe as they live their lives. Their reactions are what make the characters seem so human. When one of the characters sees a sign hanging on a distant galaxy saying “I SAW YOU,” he agonizes over a multitude of responses like “DID YOU REALLY SEE EVERYTHING OR JUST A LITTLE BIT?” or “LET’S SEE IF YOU’RE TELLING THE TRUTH: WHAT WAS I DOING?” or “WHAT OF IT?” He then struggles to show his best face all the time to the other galaxies that have apparently been watching him in a comic but very true and all-too-human display of concern for his appearance.

For me, the most interesting parts of the novel weren’t the characters that were pared down to interesting essentials. I was intrigued by the basic concepts that seemed to fuel each story—ideas about the act of creation and the response to change, if and how one goes on living when one is the last of one’s race and the existing races prove petty and low, and so on. The stories are almost archetypal, culminating in the final story with the passage quoted above, every man as a creator capable of (retrospectively) foreseeing events and justifying his act of creation, aligning form with function.

There really isn’t much more I can say about Cosmicomics. Like Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler and Invisible Cities, this novel reveals its power through its ideas and its dense but gorgeous prose. Like heavy cream, yes—intense, at times mind-bogglingly difficult to read, but worth every word. Calvino’s a master, and his creativity is astounding. Another strong recommendation—along with Invisible Cities and if on a winter’s night a traveler—and I’ll be reading The Castle of Crossed Destinies soon, so expect a review of that (though I have to get through Borges’s Labyrinths first). Calvino and heavy cream are awesome. :-)

Damn, I'd forgotten how late I was posting this--merry Christmas, people! Hope you get everything you wanted! Me, I'm just wishing for some rest, the ability to relax, and a little peace of mind :-)

Review: A High Wind in Jamaica

2005-12-17T21:34:00.000-05:00

A High Wind in Jamaica
Richard Hughes

"Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection. Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil" (140).

I doubted it at first, but now I'm a believer: Golding's Lord of the Flies pales in comparison to Hughes's novel.

A High Wind in Jamaica, Hughes's first novel, basically tells the story of a group of young children, ages ranging from 4 to 13 (the focus being mainly on a 10 year old girl named Emily), who are captured by pirates en route from Jamaica to England. And as in Lord of the Flies the children--in order of increasing age: Laura, Rachel, Harry, Edward, Emily, John, Margaret--turn out to be more capable of remorseless violence and cruelty, more so than the pirates, who are actually portrayed as somewhat compassionate and kind.

Hughes's exploration of children's capacity for cruelty is striking in his illustration of the children's actions and thoughts. Hughes has an uncanny knack for understanding the often random, dissociated thought processes of small children, their associative leaps and the conversations that often contain most of their meaning in between the lines. The children's actions and thoughts are shown like this, with no explanation, which both complicates and facilitates Hughes's storytelling approach--it's sometimes hard to sympathize with the children since, as adults, we are unable to understand everything they say and do and think, but at the same time the believability of the children as young, innocent, but often completely indifferently cruel characters helps us get into the narrative. This is exemplified by Laura's actions when her brother Edward is being threatened by a pirate wielding an iron rod and when the pirate captain is beating her sister Rachel:

"When [Laura] tripped and fell, she roared till her bumps ceased hurting. Then, with no perceptible transition, her convulsions of agony became an attempt to stand on her head. This she kept up throughout Edward's flight up the stay, throughout the electric appearance of Rachel. During the latter's punishment, having happened to topple in the direction of the mainmast, and finding her feet against the rack round its base for belaying the halyards to, [Laura] gave a tremendous shove off--she would roll instead. And roll she did, till she arrived at the captain's feet. There she lay all the while he was smacking Rachel, completely unconcerned, on her back, her knees drawn up to her chin, humming a little tune" (198).

Worse incidents swiftly happen and just as swiftly pass out of the children's memory, among them quite a few significant deaths. I won't spoil the moments because, though Hughes doesn't rely on surprise, these moments are so elegantly crafted that they are surprising--like the children, the reader forgets, and rediscovers them towards the end when the grownups are attempting to make sense of things.

FYI, A High Wind in Jamaica isn't nearly as grotesque as much of the imagery in Lord of the Flies, so for those of you who don't like Golding's novel because of its overt violence and described gore, no worries. Hughes details maybe one or two violent images but leaves most of the incidents to the imagination of the children-characters and to the imagination of the reader. The ending is completely mundane and formal, and utterly horrific. Great book on the innocent depravity of children in certain circumstances. I highly recommend.

Hughes is a great author on the human condition, too. I also highly recommend The Fox in the Attic, a historical fiction novel set around World War II. It's the first novel I've read that involves Hitler as a character and doesn't turn him into a psychopathic caricature, but delineates his evil in a much more human and compellingly terrifying way. Hughes is a master of characters, and his WWII books are more evidence of it. I plan to pick up the sequel and its unfinished third part, The Wooden Shepherdess, while I'm at home so I can polish off the body of his work. He didn't write much, unfortunately; he was a very slow, methodical, and thorough writer. It's a pity he died before he finished the WWII trilogy. But the books he did write testify to his amazing ability to characterize people and shed insight on the human condition.

Review: Cronopios and Famas

2005-12-14T13:19:00.000-05:00

Cronopios and Famas

Julio Cortazar
transl. Paul Blackburn

"INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO WIND A WATCH

"Death stands there in the background, but don't be afraid. Hold the watch down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly. Now another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that burgeon the air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell of bread.

"What did you expect, what more do you want? Quickly strap it to your wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is about to corrode the watch's veins, cankering the cold blood and its tiny rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive beforehand and understand it's already unimportant." (25)

...I don't like prose poetry.

I read Charles Simic's World Doesn't End. I read Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. Pretty lines, interesting ideas, nothing that grabbed me and refused to let go. Julio Cortazar, however, has made of me a complete convert. His poems are witty, insightful, cleverly crafted, and brilliantly haunting. The poem I excerpted for you above hasn't left me, and I finished the book maybe half a week ago. I find Cortazar's prose poetry simply amazing.

The thing I found most interesting about Cortazar is that his language (judging by the translation, anyway) is very plain and down to earth, and as such gains the reader's trust. At times, Cortazar spends paragraphs detailing something as foolish-sounding as putting a single strand of hair down the sink, then immediately trying to find the hair by taking the sink apart--however, the reader's trust in him is such that she keeps reading, expecting his explanation or illumination of the exercise, which inevitably comes: if you should find the hair trapped in the drain before having to take apart the U-pipe etc., "think of the happiness this would give us, just the sheer astonishing realization of the efforts saved by sheer chance" (41).

In addition to the trust he compels, his descriptions of mundane activities are overwhelmingly beautiful without being overwrought (a fine line to play sometimes, you writers know what I mean). The first section of the collection, "The Instruction Manual," begins with a description of the daily morning routine, including lines like: "Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the doorknob, that act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex. See you later, sweetheart. Have a good day" (3) and "Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee" (4).

Cronopios and Famas is very Borgesian in tone and style, whimsical but immersed in serious observation, suffused with humor. Cortazar breathes life into the "strange animal" that, in Charles Simic's words, is prose poetry. I highly recommend this book to anyone, fictionistas, poets, readers, whatever.

Review: The Master and Margarita

2005-12-10T15:46:00.000-05:00

So I was thinking, I'm really getting too much reading done this term to not be reviewing what I'm reading so's y'all can decide whether or not you wanna dip your toes into the literary pool and sample some of the stuff on my academic and personal reading list. There's a lot of books I've read this semester that I've read and should share thoughts on (Jesus' Son, Invisible Cities, etc.) but since I just finished The Master and Margarita two days ago I figured I'd start with that.

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
transl. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor

"...and so who are you, after all?"
"--I am part of the power
which forever wills evil
and forever works good."
--Goethe's Faust

Like many of the great Soviet writers whose work I've been reading lately (e.g., Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam; Anna Akhmatova; Nikolai Erdman), Mikhail Bulgakov was also writing under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. A crucial difference here is that Stalin liked one of Bulgakov's works, which may be a reason why the author wasn't arrested or forced into exile for writing novels likeThe Master and Margarita or Heart of a Dog, neither of which was published during his lifetime.

Master and Margarita was published 26 years after Bulgakov's death (Heart of a Dog wasn't published until 60 years after his death), and even then it appeared only in censored form. On a very simplistic level, the novel is purely entertaining: the story basically chronicles the series of events that occur when Satan and four members of his retinue appear in Moscow and begin haphazardly wreaking havoc. Bulgakov's humor is incredible; it's difficult to believe that he himself suffered under the constrictions of 1930s Russia but is able to easily poke fun at it and at himself. Satan, who in the novel is a tall swarthy gentleman by the name of Woland, has come to Moscow to throw a Spring Ball and has come with his servants: a wall-eyed redhead with a fang named Azazello; a garrulous jovial man in a cracked pince-nez and checks who goes as Korovyov or Fagot; Hella, a beautiful naked witch with a scar on her neck; and Behemoth, a large, talking, irrepressible black cat with a penchant for showing off and playing the clown. In addition to these characters, several minor characters pop in and out of the novel as they are killed, pranked by Woland and his crew, brought back to life, transported as far Yalta in nothing but their underwear, etc. Interestingly enough, the Master and Margarita do not appear until the latter half of the novel. Theirs is more a romance and a story paralleling that of Yeshua and Pontius Pilate than a comedy. Not that this is a bad thing; The Master and Margarita is absolutely wonderful from start to finish.

Most of the influence of the book comes from Bulgakov's own interest in religion and his passion for the opera, particularly Goethe's Faust, which he saw over 40 times. The name "Woland" is derived from the opera, and music and singing are common themes in the book. Margarita is a lot like Gretchen in Faust though certainly not as innocent and perhaps willing to take many more risks. The Master is more of an enigma, somewhat two-dimensional to Margarita's dynamism and robustness, but taken in context of the Pontius Pilate chapters he is certainly intriguing. I was particularly taken by Ivan Nikolayevich, a writer who gradually shifts from a silly author of bad poems to the traditional Russian folktale character Ivanushka. His slightly schizophrenic musings on his run-in with Woland and the incidents that have been occurring all over Moscow are not only hilarious but insightful into the novel and 1930s Russia. Bulgakov's first-person narrator is also refreshingly entertaining, wise in retrospect but forgiving (of most) of the characters in the novel, none of whom are even close to perfect.

I found it interesting that the narrative is peppered with glaringly obvious references to the condition of life in Stalin's Soviet Union. (No wonder the book didn't get published in Bulgakov's lifetime.) For one, the devil's successful arrival in Moscow seems founded on the fact that Communism has done away with religious belief; the Muscovites, who do not believe in God or Satan, have become for the most part corrupt and despicable and often deserving of the punishments and practical jokes that Satan metes out to them. There are two characters, both writers, Ivan Nikolayevich "Bezdomny" and the man who is simply called The Master, who write religious material and are criticized or publicly condemned for it. Even the slightest characters are wonderfully fleshed out, so much so that I found myself simultaneously sympathizing with Woland and his gang (particularly Behemoth--come on, how can you not love a Satanic jokester of a black cat?) as well as their confused victims.

"Well, as everyone knows, once withcraft gets started, there's no stopping it" (63). After Woland appears, superstition and deviltry take an active role, as does religion/religious philosophy. The Master, who in the novel is in a mental asylum, wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate that addresses the eternal conflict between black-and-white optimism in the form of Yeshua and pessimism in the form of the Roman procurator. Religion and themes of power recur in declarations like "[...] every kind of power is a form of violence against people and that there will come a time when neither the power of the Caesars, nor any other kind of power will exist. Man will enter the kingdom of truth and justice, where no such power will be necessary" (22). This sort of belief that tyranny will be deposed keeps popping up and becomes a specific theme among the writer-characters who are oppressed by Communist rule and the secret police. The issue of religion and religious belief, especially with regards to Kant, Manichean philosophy, and a little Zoroastrianism, pervades the novel and is done remarkably well. Bulgakov never once drills religion into the reader but makes a fine case for the existence of God and the Devil through his characters alone. Woland makes some fine speeches about religion, and he and Yeshua seem to have some kind of working relationship.

For the record, this is not a book about the supremacy of good over evil, or vice-versa. Woland is powerful, but Yeshua is at work as well and intercedes on behalf of Pilate and the Master and Margarita. Rather, I think the humanity with which Bulgakov endows the demons is amazing--I found myself slowly falling in love with Azazello, who is repeatedly described as having some deformity or other, a blind eye or a limp or a fang or all three at once. Once Margarita begins admiring his marksmanship with a rifle, and once he is seen interacting with his "friends" (co-workers at the very least), he becomes so sympathetic his flaws are forgotten. Of course, he turns out to be the demon of death and the waterless desert, Azazel, with a white white face and empty black eyes and a perfect body, but what can you do. Korovyov and Behemoth make a perfect team and paint the town red with their destructive antics.

The most interesting thing I pulled from The Master and Margarita is the notion that the greatest sin is leaving a job half-finished. This idea shows up in the characters of Pontius Pilate, who allows Yeshua to be killed without finishing a crucial conversation with him, and in the Master, who never finishes his criticized novel about Pilate and instead ends up in a mental asylum. Once he finishes the novel, both he and Pilate are to some extent free, though many other factors play into that. I just thought it was an interesting take on things.

Because of the everchanging background cast of characters, and the skill with which Bulgakov makes each one seem significant, it's difficult to summarize the story as a complete narrative. So I won't say any more, because if I get too far into the plot I'll spoil one or more of the things that happen to many of the characters. Buy it and read for yourself! The Master and Margarita plays with notions of religion, gives compelling characters, contains enough humor to keep me awake and laughing at 5:00 a.m. after 24+ hours without sleep, and has a touching love affair in it to boot. I think I've been largely incoherent in this so-called review, but I'd highly recommend this book to just about anyone. It's definitely a page-turner.

"...And the centuries surround me with fire."

2005-12-08T12:04:00.000-05:00

Since this body
was forgotten
by the one who promised to come,
my only thought is wondering
whether it even exists.

--Ono no Komachi, Ink-Dark Moon, Hirshfield transl.

The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm.
The apple trees are in flower. He's making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching. There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him.
It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.

--Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End

Dreams used to come in the brutal nights,
Dreams crowding and violent
Dreamt with body and soul,
Of going home, of eating, of teling our story.
Until, quickly and quietly, came
The dawn reveille:
Wstawach.
And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our home again,
Our hunger is quenched,
All the stories have been told.
It is time. Soon we shall hear again
The alien command:
Wstawach.

--Primo Levi, The Reawakening, Woolf transl.

A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different shapes,
triangles, squares: all things change when we do.
The first word, Ah, blossomed into all others.
Each of them is true.

--Kukai, Ink Dark Moon, Hirshfield transl.

Clutching in my fist a worn year of birth,
Herded with the herd, I whisper
With my bloodless lips: I was born
On the night between the second and third of January
In the unreliable year of eighteen ninety something or other
And the centuries surround me with their fire.

--Osip Mandelstam, excerpted Hope Against Hope, Hayward transl.

Book Recommendations!

2005-10-05T23:55:00.000-04:00

Because I'm an incorrigible dork. Last random post, I promise!

I've just been reading so many good books lately, I thought I'd list them for those of you who are literarily inclined. Mostly short stories and poetry, but amazingly good, and I tend to be picky with the poetry I like:

Zbiegnew Herbert, Mr. Cogito (may be out of print, but his other stuff is good too)
Yannis Ritsos, Parentheses, Repetitions (trans. Edward Keeley)
Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (can't believe I hadn't read this already)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (re-read it, it depresses me every time)
Jack London, "The Shadow and the Flash" (re-read this one, but it was just as amazing as the first time)
Saki, "Sredni Vashtar"
various Ambrose Bierce short stories
more Guy de Maupassant short stories than I can count, after I found an online database of all his work
and some others I'm forgetting. I'll post as I remember :-)

Right now I'm in the middle of Roberto Calasso's Ka, pleasure-reading and research for my Karna story. Very richly written. Also picked up Adrienne Rich's--

Holy shit, I forgot to mention! Adrienne Rich was here to give a reading last Thursday, and I went and heard her read, and it was amazing. I loved that when she walked to the podium, she was assisted by a friend and used her cane, but after she got her book out and had cleared her throat, she threw her cane down and said, "We don't need this now, do we" or something like that... she was very subtly theatrical, in a good way. I picked up a copy of her Collected Poems and got it signed, and I was such a dork I thought I would swoon when I standing in front of her. SIGH. A friend who went with me was petrified but I managed to stammer out something like, "Thank you for all your work," and she sort of smiled and said, "There are things you have to do." It was amazing. I love this city so much.

Anyway, so I have to read through that book of poetry now, and I also bought Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, Garcia-Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and (here's the big project for the semester now) the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. And let's not forget Pomegranate Soup for the little book club I've set up with Dartmouth friends. Did I mention that I like pain? Because I'm going to suffer like no other with all this reading and writing to do. Gives new meaning to hurts so good.

Yay literature!

A Writer's Nightmare

2005-09-18T17:41:00.000-04:00

Had to share this.

Thought I'd do some productive fucking around and started re-reading Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. I'd forgotten about the story "The Exiles." Truly horrific for us writerly or artistic types.

I won't spoil it. Get a copy of the book and read it. More of it is sci-fi than I like, but he has some great character insights. "The Veldt" stayed with me for years, and so did the two stories about rain on Venus. But "The Exiles"! Goddamn.

Anna

2005-09-18T14:18:00.000-04:00

This weekend I did something daring, or at least daring for me if you consider that up until recently I had a phobia of telephones and communication in general.

Anyway, I tend to be haunted by even the most mundane past unfinished business--i.e., falling out of touch with people without any closure. There were a couple of times that happened in high school, but I got back in touch with Marie and with Amy, and while we don't communicate regularly it's enough for me to put my conscience to rest. In my memory those friendships didn't end very well when I moved to Missouri, so it's good to be talking to them again.

That said, the one relationship I've always wanted closure for dates back to grade school. Her name was Anna Boskovski and she was probably the first and best friend I ever had. You really never do have friends like the friends you had in grade school. We both went to Mary C. Greer Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia and I think we had the same homeroom class in 4th grade. We stayed friends until the beginning of 6th grade, at which point she moved to Centerville, Ohio and I moved to Louisiana.

This was before Charlottesville became as urban as it is now. She lived near a creekbed, and whenever I went over to her house, we would walk to the Barracks Road Market (which I always romanticized in my head because of it's "standard", a rearing black horse on a white background) and bought Lil' Debbie cakes that we split down the middle. We'd walk down to the creek and "island hop" between the little sandbars dotting the water, trying to keep our footprints perfect and preserved. We may have written our names in the sand with a stick, attempting immortality for a day, but I might be imagining it. Funny the details you add to your own history the longer you think it over.

Anyway, we'd get back to her house covered in mud, our sneakers sloshing with water. Her grandmother (whom I called Baba, just like she did--or some diminutive like that, my memory's vague now) made me take my sneakers off and put them on the radiator to dry, and sent me home in an old pair of Anna's sneakers. Anna's parents were divorced; her father lived in Florida and once when Anna visited she'd brought back a beautiful conch shell that they kept on the tank of the toilet in the bathroom. I thought her mother was beautiful, or maybe I've made her beautiful in my memory: she was slightly pale, thin, wore wire-frame glasses, and had soft-looking dark hair that curled in wisps at her forehead. I think Anna didn't like her father, but I can't remember, and that could all have very well changed by now.

I thought Anna was beautiful. This I'm sure I'm not making up. She had long brown hair that she usually wore in a braid, though strands were forever escaping it, and I remember thinking at the time that she could have been a model for winter fashion. She wore a red beret to school sometimes, and a multicolored scarf with a fringe. My little sister Anji, upset on the bus one day, sat with me and Anna, and Anna cheered her up by telling Anji the names of all the individual strings on the fringe of her scarf. She was crazy and good like that.

She told me her family was crazy and good too. Supposedly her grandmother would take the time to bury roadkill, often dead deer, in the woods near their house. I was never sure if that was true or not, but I wanted to believe it, and I generally did believe everything she told me.

There was another friend we had, Kristen something-or-other, who apparently thought of Anna as her best friend. Maybe I'm making this up too to make myself feel better (but I remember it so vividly!), but I remember Anna telling me out by the creek that Kristen could be so bossy, and I was a better friend. I think that's when we "officially" became best friends? I don't know. I remember being surprised by that conversation because I always thought Anna was tough; it seemed like she was always the one coming to my rescue in social situations (yes, my ineptitude is innate and set in at an early age) and comforting me when things went wrong. And let's face it, things always go wrong when you're in fourth/fifth grade. It can be a rough time.

At one point, Anna's mother had a friend over, a punk motorcyclist (as an impressionable fifth-grader, I thought she was so cool). The motorcyclist offered to take us on a ride. Anna went first, and then I went. I remember being so proud because the motorcyclist complimented me on my courage, saying that Anna had held on to her so tight she could barely breathe. I on the other hand was exhilarated and wanted to take the bike for another spin. I thought that it made me Anna's equal, or something.

She moved to Ohio some time after that. We called once or twice. Neither one of us was good on the phone. The last conversation I remember having with her was about music; I think she recommended an early REM CD, Monster I think, or whichever one has "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" on it. The next time I called her, I couldn't get through. I thought she'd moved and expected her to call, but she never did. I sent a letter once, I don't know if she ever got it, but it never came back Return-to-Sender.

After that I sort of put her in the back of my mind, not quite forgetting but never quite able to track her down. A couple of times while at Dartmouth I tried Google, but never could find her. I thought maybe she'd changed her last name to her mother's name, which was Polish and I'd never remember it in a thousand years. She's not listed on Classmates.com and she's not on The Facebook.

And then as I was fucking around yesterday, I Googled her name and found something for the first time--an interview for the University of Cincinnati campus newspaper. They quoted an Anna Boskovski, a third-year student of Fashion Design at their DAAP department (oh, I could see her as a fashion design major!) talking about all-nighters and the last weeks of school. The article was dated June 2005. I'm not sure if she's a third-year undergraduate and took a year off after high school or between years, or what the deal is with that. That made me doubt that it was really her. I searched the college directory and found nothing, either her email isn't listed or she graduated and alumni emails aren't listed. I would have killed for something like a DND look-up at that point. But then I tried a couple more places and finally found a listing for one Anna Boskovski in the entire country. Listed as a resident of Ohio.

Looking further, I found that her current age would be about 22, which seems about right, and her contact information was listed too. It took me hours to find it, so I wrote it down and then (here comes the daring deed) I called her. The answering machine came on--a guy's voice listing three names, one of which was Anna--and so I left a message and a call-back number.

That was maybe 3:00 p.m. yesterday. I don't really expect her to call me back, it's entirely possible she doesn't remember me or doesn't want to make the effort, or a number of good and valid reasons. Maybe she doesn't recognize my name. Still, I'm hoping she calls. I'm secretly hoping that one day she Googles her own name and maybe comes across this page and remembers me. I don't know what I'm hoping. I guess just for a little closure. At the same time, I hope she doesn't call--I don't know what to expect, and I'm worried she won't live up to the ideal I've crafted in my head over the past 10 years or so.

I guess a lot of people would say that this whole saga was stupid, but I feel a lot better just having called and left that message. At least now no one can say I didn't try. And if she does call back, well--that's the last ghost I have haunting me. If I can put that to rest, maybe I really can go on being (er--trying to be) a normal human being. We'll see. I'll keep you posted. Cross your fingers for me.

Almost Famous?

2005-08-14T00:09:00.000-04:00

Well, well, well—looks like I got me a screenwriter! But I suppose I should be considerate and begin at the beginning.

The fact is that Invictus, as I wrote it when I was fifteen, has sort of been my claim to fame, and so I was interviewed about it once or twice in the campus newspaper The D, once in the alumni newsletter, and once in The Valley News, a local newspaper. These interviews were also the first and only times I ever managed to be somewhat photogenic. Dartmouth being renowned for its wonderful alumni (to whom I owe my first “official newspaper” interview and this movie deal business), I was contacted by two alums who had read the article in the alumni newsletter. Turns out they were creative producers starting their own company and wanted to read some of my material to see if I had anything they might be interested in adapting to the screen. So I sent them Invictus, the Lucifer/Michael/Raphael stories from novel(s)-in progress “Stigmatized”/“Spiritualized,” and a short story “From the Disconnect.” I didn’t have much hope for the “Stigmatized” excerpt; I’d been gently let down by an agent about the manuscript, and we all know that “gently let down” can sometimes be a euphemism for “felled by rapid crushing blows to the kidneys and repeatedly kicked in the crotch once down.” Of course, a short story doesn’t have enough substance to become a movie and takes a lot more thought, time, effort, and caution. And I had even less faith in Invictus due to a misplaced and not-so-secret embarrassment… but come on, I’m justified. I wrote the thing 7 years ago; it reads nothing like what I write today. Which is fine; I’ve since come to terms with it, but every once in a while the feeling flares up and I don’t know what to think about it. Phalanx and Exodus will always be my babies and the characters who won me passage into the world of publishing, but they do date back to that insecure adolescent period that I really don’t like thinking about.

Anyway, so imagine my surprise when the producers—John ’99 and Jethro ’03—emailed me within days and gushed about Invictus for a full page. Then repeated themselves on the phone during the first conference call and repeated the sincere desire to turn the book into a “summer blockbuster.” Now I’m not one to get my hopes up, especially about something as uncertain as a movie deal offer, but I agreed to talk it out with them. One conference call later, they’d come up with a whole bunch of ideas and a possible screenwriter. Asked me if I wanted to write the screenplay myself, and when I demurred, they insisted I be as involved as possible with the screenwriter they found. The woman’s name is Eileen and apparently she’s, in John’s words, “hot stuff” in the film world right now and just got through writing a screenplay for a movie called “Mirror World,” which is currently being pitched to Disney as a live-action film and to Pixar as an animated one.

Now to return to my original point: the third eagerly awaited conference call happened today, and Eileen not only agreed to work with me on adapting Invictus but expressed how “passionate” (in her words) she was about the novel. So, if I may come full circle, I now have a screenwriter.

Not like that makes any of this official but it means that John and Jethro are taking the next step, which will make it all more official. They’re going to contact my publishers this or next week and negotiate optioning the novel, after which—if everything goes smoothly—they’ll give Eileen the go-ahead to start writing the outline for the adaptation. From there, the writing/adapting continues until everyone’s satisfied, and—provided everyone is satisfied—then the script gets pitched to producers and studios. Only after the studio agrees to finance the project does it become really official. So my paranoia that the whole deal might fall through will have me slightly on edge until that happens.

All in all, a good ending to a fairly decent day. I never did get around to getting that new cell phone or the external hard drive I’m hankering after. In other news, I have to mow the jungle that is our backyard tomorrow. Went outside to survey the fenced-in wilderness and inadvertently nudged a fallen branch with my toe. It is testimony to the ups-and-downs balance of my life that the patio instantly began swarming with recluses. Did you know that a bite can cause tissue decay as large as the span of your hand?

Movie deal or no, I swear as long as I’m in this house, I am never sleeping peacefully again.

Surrendering With Grace

2005-08-11T08:22:00.000-04:00

By which I mean to say I’m not kicking and screaming this time around. Nope, this time I’m in the online game for good, as can be proven by the solid logic I provide below:

1. Inertia. I am living proof of the theorem that the human body, left to its own devices, naturally tends towards a state of laziness, however pressing the deadline or dire the consequence.

2. Too many people send me emails and letters wanting to know about the humdrum that comprises my day/week/past summer/entire lifetime. The result: overwhelmed by the sheer volume of mail in my inbox, I drop out of sight in a classic Deer in Headlights maneuver, inspiring aforementioned mailers to send even more mail demanding to know why they haven’t heard from me. It’s a damn vicious cycle, let me tell you.

3. As many of you know, despite the fact that I still hunt-and-peck using only my index fingers, my typing speed is something around 80-90 words per minute despite my chronic tendonitis (carpal tunnel, anyone?).

Now, I’ll give you a moment to finish your gasps of shocked amazement. I’m sure many of you would consider this and then ask incredulously, “But Vy—why is that a problem at all? You could hammer out pages of emails in minutes!” And I would mull over your question thoughtfully and politely inform you that I am finally teaching myself how to type properly using home-row keys, both hands, all fingers, and that my WPM has dropped to about 50. Then I would probably utter a scream of despair and throw myself off the nearest cliff. Losing speed in typing must be a writer’s worst nightmare. Or one of many nightmares. Hm. There’s a thought for a future post.

4. I am insomniac. Also, I am violently allergic to productivity and staying on top of things, which I proved beyond all doubt by getting most of my undergraduate work done a day or two before the deadline—except for my undergraduate thesis, which took maybe a week of writing and revising if you add all the time together. Still managed to turn it in right before the deadline though. So I look for excuses to procrastinate, the upshot of this tangent being that a blog should provide ample opportunity for procrastination.

5. In conclusion, I lack the speed, willpower, and wrist stability to write a response to each and every darling friend who sends me mail. So they’ll have to settle for this poorly written, soon to probably be poorly updated blog.

So in short, it looks like I'm stuck with this, much as I hate jumping on the bandwagon. The only thing worse than jumping on the bandwagon is jumping last, or maybe altogether missing the sawdust lining of that godforsaken creaking cart and landing on your ass in the churned mud turned up by the wooden wheels. It’s a pretty close call in my opinion. Anyway, chances are this won’t last too long either, but I’ll give it my best shot. The change of environment and the fear of grad school may just force me to stick with it.

Today I put my sister on the plane to UVA for her sophomore year after packing both of her suitcases without a working weighing scale in the house. 50 lb cutoff—and I packed both to 48.5 lbs exactly. By feel alone. I am a god. Also a little insane and OCD when it comes to packing. I don’t leave for another two weeks and I’m already mentally throwing clothes into my suitcases. But I suppose as a writer I can afford the extra eccentricity.

Speaking of, in two days I have my third conference call with John and Jethro, the Dartmouth alums-turned-movie producers who are looking into turning my first novel Invictus into a (and I quote verbatim) “summer blockbuster.” They found a potential screenwriter—I think her name’s Eileen—to work with me on adapting the novel into a movie; she’ll probably be in on that call too. I’ve managed to put it all out of my mind while my sister was home, but now that she’s gone back to college, I’m getting butterflies all over again. Telephones terrify me. Big future-making career-creating opportunities terrify me.

I’m really going to have to get over myself one day, but currently I’m still trying to figure out this typing-with-two-hands thing. My index fingers are most unhappy with this new arrangement, being the erstwhile dominant digits. They don’t seem to like being demoted from their Most Holy and Essential Post as Vy’s Typing Instruments.

In other news, the summer reading list went reasonably well, considering that I didn’t really expect to get through it. Finished the new Harry Potter book recently and wasn’t really satisfied, though I haven’t been since the fourth one, but I guess I’m picky. Her changing tone as the series moves to its close makes me wonder about the target audience, but that’s neither here nor there. Unexpected page-turner: Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane. Beautifully crafted family story from the POV of a boy as he grows up and tries to make sense of family secrets in the midst of Ireland’s internal political/religious strife. Also finished The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which has made me a lot more appreciative of some freedoms and a lot more suspicious of others, not to mention just more paranoid in general. And I subsist on atmospheric, groundless paranoia, particularly in the form of X-Files reruns and urban legends. On my side-table right now are Siddartha, Nine, Novena, and The God of Small Things, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I need to get all my pleasure reading done well before I fly out to grad school on August 26. Four classes all in fiction-writing + job + (hopefully) an internship = no free time for anything but class reading and writing. Not that I’m complaining; the book lists are unusually good. But more on that later; I think I’ll save the descriptions of classes and discussion of grad school expectations later.

Well, my wrists hurt and my insomnia seems to be wearing down, so I think I’ll give it a rest for now and lull myself to sleep with a couple of B horror movies and early morning cartoons. All in all, not a bad start here though. But knowing me, I predict the volume of these posts to begin dwindling beginning tomorrow.