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May 22nd, 2012
03:49 pm - ...torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges...
Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a strange, lyrical, difficult, beautiful, and complicated book. Is it a novel? Woolf called it a "play-poem," and it seems to me that it is perhaps a mixture of all three forms: a novel that is built like a play, written in the form of a long prose poem. Or perhaps it's something else entirely. It is a book about consciousness, and like its subject, its true nature is slippery.
The Waves is made up of the entwined inner monologues of six characters, broken occasionally by short, italicized sections describing in careful detail a scene on the coast of England at various points from sunrise to sunset. These descriptive sections mark the passage of time in the lives of the six characters, but Woolf shows very little interest in the events of their lives. Some of them marry, some have children, some become lovers or poets or businessmen--where other authors would construct major scenes or whole plots out of any one of these events, Woolf gives them only glancing mention. Instead, Woolf focuses on the struggle of each of her characters to know themselves, to know others, to understand themselves in relationship to others, to understand the changing world and their own changing place in it. It is a book about the pain of identity: the first half (my favorite half, when the characters are young) is about the pain of forming an identity; the second is about the pain of one's inevitable isolation within that identity.
This was the most challenging book that I've read in quite a while, and although I wanted to love it in the way I loved To the Lighthouse last summer, I couldn't quite. I was blown away by Woolf's ambition and by her determination to write about those elusive elements of thought and experience that resist being set down in words. Her sentences are unfailingly gorgeous, she brings an equal, startling precision to her observation of both the natural world and the human psyche, and there are deep insights and moving moments in The Waves. But those insights and moments of emotional connection are often surrounded on all sides by abstraction, and I frequently found my attention drifting as Woolf's lovely sentences flowed past my eyes. Some days I had no trouble staying focused and connected to the narrative, but on others I continually found myself at the bottom of the page with no awareness of how I had gotten there. So although there is much to admire (more even than I have enumerated here! I have barely scratched the surface!), I remained stuck in admiration and never made the leap to love.
But this is not a book that reveals itself fully on a first reading. I know that I should return to it someday, and that I will experience it differently when I do.
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April 21st, 2012
12:47 pm - Quiet Saturday
It has been a busy few days for Ms. E, and consequently a quiet time for me. She has had evening events at school, commitments with friends, and an all-day stint representing her school at the Philadelphia Science Festival today; I have had thrown-together dinners for one, a little work in the garden, an afternoon of baking, an extra yoga class, and solitary evenings. It's been nice--I like spending time by myself--but it will also be nice tonight, when she will be home from the science festival in time for dinner, and we'll get to talk to each other for more than just a few minutes before bed.
Hawthorn tree in bloom
This coming week will be my last week of teaching--perhaps for good, although I hesitate to make a statement with such finality. I haven't given much thought yet to what will be next. It seemed better to finish the school year before I really began searching and planning. Perhaps it will be different once Friday gets here, but for now I have no strong emotion about this ending. I'm just working my way slowly though my last stack of grading, and feeling ready to be done.
( Baking, books, more photos... )
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March 28th, 2012
08:27 pm - "...Philoctetes / in woman's form, limping the long path..."
Adrienne Rich, poet who changed me when I heard her work at sixteen years old, poet whose words I turned to when I first fell in love, poet of grief, poet of anger, poet of ardor--Adrienne Rich died today.
XVII
(from "Twenty-One Love Poems")
No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.
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March 26th, 2012
12:16 pm
I have been reading Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three short novels written by Katherine Anne Porter in the 1930s. I picked up the book on a whim in a used bookstore while Ms. E and I were in Vermont last summer--Porter's name was familiar to me, and I've been interested in fiction of intermediate lengths ever since taking a novella class in grad school. Now I know that Porter herself would reject the term novella; she wrote in the introduction to her Collected Stories, "Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels." So these are short novels, then, or perhaps long stories--as far as I know, Porter didn't specify the precise length of each of her four forms.
I originally intended to wait and write about the book as a whole once I was done with it, but yesterday I finished "Old Mortality," the first piece in the collection, and it filled me with so many thoughts that I wanted to write about it alone. So:
"Old Mortality" fascinated me first with its structure and the glancing way that Porter approaches her themes. It is a story of family history that begins with two little girls who have only a dim grasp and dimmer interest in that history. They hear the stories of their genteel Texas ranching family and the history is palpably important to the adults around them, but to the girls it is just stiff figures in photographs and old letters that their grandmother cries over from time to time. Porter skips lightly across a period of many years, alighting whenever the girls' lives are brushed by the story of their glamorous, scandalous, long-dead Aunt Amy. In this way we--along with the girls--learn about Amy: the known facts, the disputed facts, the aftermath of her life that continues to have consequences after her death. We catch glimpses of the girls as well, at ten, at fourteen, at twenty; we can sense their development throughout the story, but Porter is much more concerned with their relationship to the history of their family than with the events of their own lives.
Porter handles all of this material with tremendous subtlety. I don't even know how she does it, but very indirectly she makes us feel how vital these past events are to the adults in the story. The girls' father, their grandmother, their aunts and uncles and older cousins--they all return to the story of Aunt Amy because it involved them all, it was the central drama of their youth, the sort of protean moment in which their lives were formed. Yet to the girls it is not that, and its meaning is fogged and strange. And the dead woman at the center of it, always talked about but always out of reach... And Porter makes us feel so keenly the passage of time, the way each generation supplants the ones that have come before, the slow march of those preceding generations toward the grave, the march of the old family stories further and further into the mist. And all of this exists in the heart of the story, obviously present yet never touched, like negative space in a painting. Remarkable.
There is more I could write, but it is slipping away from me now. This is a story that I will certainly need to return to, and try to tease out the threads of Porter's story-telling.
Here is a very striking picture of Katherine Anne Porter:
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March 16th, 2012
12:48 pm
Cool and damp today, the weather feels like true spring after the run of early summer days with which we began the week. I have had a type of quiet morning that I really enjoy: puttering around the house by myself, straightening and setting things right as I go, doing some light chores, folding a basket of laundry, refilling the bird feeder... And now I am about to go have a type of afternoon that I don't enjoy: working my way through the pile of grading that must get done before spring break. But before I consign myself to that fate, a couple of photos:
An incredibly mild winter and an early spring mean that my camellia is in bloom about three weeks earlier than it was last year.
Of course I could not resist bringing a blossom inside. I love having flowers in the house and this is the first one this year.
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January 2nd, 2012
11:07 am - 2011: The year in books
When I made my annual reading list at the end of 2010, I was terribly disappointed to realize that I had only read 22 books that year. So in 2011, for the first time ever, I set a numerical goal for my reading: 30 books. I made it, though not by much; I read a grand total of 32 books in 2011. It was interesting to read with a goal in mind. I don't think it made much difference in my overall reading patterns. I still chose books by whim and according to mood, and I still went through phases when I got on a roll and read a ton, and other phases when I got bogged down in particular books and read much more slowly. But I stayed aware of the fact that I was counting books this year, and there were occasions when I knew I was falling behind and so deliberately chose short books or books I thought would be quick reads. I would never want to let a goal like that keep me from reading long or difficult books, but overall I thought it worked well enough that I decided to set a new goal for next year: 33 books since I'm 33 years old.
Enough prefacing! Here is the list! Books marked with an (R) are books that I re-read this year, and links lead back to whatever post most closely resembles a review of each book:
1. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín
3. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
4. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
5. The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
7. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
8. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
9. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
10. East Wind Melts the Ice by Liza Dalby
11. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
12. At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
13. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
14. Here We Are in Paradise by Tony Earley
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
16. Tinkers by Paul Harding
17. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
18. Regeneration by Pat Barker (R)
19. The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker (R)
20. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (R)
21. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
22. Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
23. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
24. Maurice by E.M. Forster (R)
25. Close Range by Annie Proulx (R)
26. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
27. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
28. Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
29. The Snapper by Roddy Doyle
30. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
31. Micro Fiction ed. by Jerome Stern
32. Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers (a post about this book is forthcoming!) (R)
Not a bad list, all in all. As usual, there is very little nonfiction (Dillard, Dalby), a few short story collections (Tóibín, Earley, Proulx, Stern), and a huge preponderance of novels (everything else). I re-read far more books than usual this year, and also read more work in translation than I often do (Schlink, Kawabata, Mahfouz, Hrabal).
These were my favorites:
The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell: a lovely and often overlooked little gem of a novel about a friendship between two boys in Chicago in the 1920s. Maxwell tells a fairly simple story with great tenderness and subtlety.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Woolf's prose is always gorgeous but none of her books have moved me until this one. This book performs a wonderful act of alchemy by which the ordinary matter of every day is somehow transformed into the loftiest mysteries of life. A haunting book.
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster: Oh, how I love Forster. This books is a clever comedy of manners under which lurks a deeper story about the need for authenticity, the difficulty of breaking with convention, and the transforming power of love.
Happy 2012 to all of you!
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November 16th, 2011
03:59 pm - If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh…
Originally published in Czechoslovakia in 1976, Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal tells the story of Hanta, a man who has spent thirty-five years compacting wastepaper with a hydraulic press. He spends his days in a cellar full of every kind of paper product: blood-soaked butcher's paper, newspapers, encyclopedias, rare editions of the classics of philosophy and literature. Although Hanta seems to have no (or very little) formal education, he has an infinite capacity to be moved by the written word. He saves the books that pass through his cellar, taking them home and filling his little apartment with them until his apartment comes to resemble his mind--filled to bursting with works by Kafka and Camus, Sophocles and Lao-tzu.
Too Loud a Solitude is a short book--only a hundred pages--and there is very little plot. Instead, it takes the form of Hanta's lament: a lament for the books and paper he's forced to destroy, for the mice who build homes inside his piles of wastepaper and end up crushed by his press, for the two lost loves of his youth whom we see in dream-like snatches of memory, and eventually, once Hanta and his press have been replaced by the Brigade of Socialist Labor and their high-tech crushing machine, for his own lost way of life.
It's a strange little book, and it didn't rouse any particular passion in me, but there is a sort of beauty in it. Hrabal's descriptive writing can be very effective; it's only after he has shown us the clean, uniformed workers of the Brigade of Socialist Labor and the sterile efficiency of their workplace that we realize the true beauty of Hanta's dark cellar with its mounds of decaying paper, and of Hanta's strange and intense relationship with the books that come into it. It reminds me a bit of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. In both books, the images carry all the power while the details of plot and character fade into the background.
Although I haven't really loved either of the books by Hrabal that I've read, I think I liked this one better than I Served the King of England. In many ways they two books are opposites. I Served the King of England is full of plot--one madcap event after another, piled up on top of each other until the story becomes impossible to believe. Hrabal's writing style seems better suited to the dreamy, imagistic world of Too Loud a Solitude.
Sometimes I think that the best part of finishing a book is getting to decide what to read next. I took a long, rainy walk to the library this morning and came home with three books that I'm excited about: The Snapper by Roddy Doyle (sequel of sorts to The Commitments), A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, and Life Times, a big volume of collected stories by Nadine Gordimer. I think I'll start with the Roddy Doyle because I feel like I haven't quite pulled out of my Palace Walk-induced reading funk, so I could do with something quick and funny.
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November 14th, 2011
04:45 pm
I. Birds
My interest in birds began with water birds. I think this is true for many people; after all, if you start your bird-watching career by trying to sort out all the different species of sparrow, you will spend your time staring at tiny brown birds that flit through the underbrush without ever seeming to sit still, and you will most likely quit in frustration before you even begin. Water birds, on the other hand, tend to be larger and slower, and they float or wade through ponds or lakes where they're easy to spot. They provide good practice for the skills of observation and identification that you will need before attempting to tackle the sparrows.
Because they were my first birds, there's some nostalgia tied up in my appreciation of water birds. But that's not all it is--there is also something serene, something perfectly autumnal about watching a lake full of ducks and geese. So I was very pleased on Sunday when I took a hike at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge and found that all the migrating water birds were in town. There were hundreds of Canada geese, of course, and plenty of run-of-the-mill mallards, but I saw some more special ducks as well: a pair of Northern pintails, some Coots, a few little Pied-billed grebes, several Northern shovelers, and, from afar, a little group of ruddy ducks with their unmistakable stiff tails waggling behind them. Lovely!
II. Books
After Palace Walk drained away so much of my reading energy, I've had to work to get back in the habit of reading. I started Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude mainly because it was such a slim and sleek little book--seemingly the opposite of the giant brick of Palace Walk. Even so, it didn't grab me right away, and it took me a week to work my way through the first fifty pages. But just when I thought I had signed myself up for another slog (though a shorter one, this time), I finally felt the book click. Ah. It may never become my new favorite book, but last night I finally found the beauty in it and, although I was tired when I started reading, I stayed up and read for longer than I meant to. It's been ages since that's happened, and I missed it so!
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November 10th, 2011
09:50 am - Some loveliness for Thursday
So. It seems there has been a lack of beauty lately. I spent all day yesterday working with agonizing slowness to claw my way out from under a mountain of end-of-quarter grading. In the larger world, the events unfolding at Penn State this week are spewing so much ugliness that I want to tear up my resume and burn my diploma.
Clearly the solution to this is to spread beauty instead. So here are some beautiful things for you, my friends:
Poetry
Here is a beautiful blog, called pizzicati of hosanna, and composed entirely of recordings of poems read by Nic Sebastian. I don't know who Nic Sebastian is other than a person with a gorgeous voice, but I could listen to these readings for hours. My favorite may be the reading of "Orchard" by H.D., but they are all wonderful: soothing and lovely.
Painting
I recently came across the work of Japanese painter Matazo Kayama, who was born in Kyoto in 1927 and died in 2004. I have only seen reproductions of his work, but I would love to see these paintings in person.
( Beautiful, no? Here are two more. )
Singing
Perhaps this video has already gone viral and everyone has seen it before, but I had never seen or heard it before my mother shared it on facebook this morning. If something has already made its way to my mother, there's a good chance the rest of the internet is already aware of it. But I wasn't aware of it, and the sound of these three voices was just the sort of loveliness I needed this morning.
Enjoy! And please feel encouraged to share any beauty that you've come across lately.
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July 21st, 2011
05:24 pm - The ghost around the one it haunts / the want around the thing it wants...
Oh, love. Oh, Forster. Oh, is there anything more perfect than Forster on the beauty, the necessity, the transforming force of love? It's enough to make me fall in love with Forster himself. Last night I finished A Room with a View; I wanted to love it and love it I did.
I think my appreciation of this book is due in part to my previous reading of Forster--call it the Maurice effect. When I read Howards End I found it a bit cold; it was clear that Forster had a point to prove, and the novel seemed more like an intellectual exercise than a truly compelling story. It took Maurice (about which I was over the moon a year ago) to show me that Forster's intellectualism is inextricably linked to emotion, and that if he has a point to prove it's only because the point is so deeply felt. So when I opened A Room with a View and in the first chapter found Lucy Honeychurch saying, "About old Mr. Emerson--I hardly know. No, he is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time--beautiful?" my heart rose, and I knew what sort of book I was in for and that I would love it.
A Room with a View begins in Florence, where Lucy is traveling with her cousin. Lucy is a young woman who has led a conventional life, but, because this is Forster, she must wake up out of conventionality and into an authentic life. This is easier to do in Italy, where Lucy meets and falls in love with a strange young man named George Emerson, and harder once she's back in England--Forster does an excellent job of showing us just how hard it is for Lucy to leave the safety of propriety.
It is possible, I suppose, to read A Room with a View primarily as a comedy of manners. It certainly contains enough humor, and Forster is clever enough at satirizing his cast of oh-so-English tourists in Italy. But since I suffer from a life-long case of terminal sincerity, the comedic aspects mattered less to me than the soul-stirring aspects. I believed completely in Lucy's struggles, and in their importance. I loved the delicate touch with which Forster set his most important scenes, and the life he breathed into his best characters. I liked that fact that even Cecil Vyse, representative of all that is repressive about society, turned noble in defeat--his final scene in the novel is really quite touching. I liked the ending too--I should have been able to predict it, but each time I thought I knew what was going to happen some uncertainty crept into me and I questioned.
Really a lovely book. It won't displace Maurice as my favorite Forster, but I'm so glad I read it. I've been having a run of very good reading luck lately: first To the Lighthouse, then Tinkers, and now this!
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