Category Archives: books
the 19th century is NSFW
Beautiful, Aesthetic, Erotic
Because I’m at work, I can’t enlarge the pictures accompanying this article to see if they really do include shadowy genitalia. Would the New York Review of Books lie about something like that?
(What else can’t I do at work? I think the filters block pages with "post" in the title, meaning that I can read, but not comment. I’m sure there are many ways around filtering, but I’m ok with the limits, especially amazon. It’s really good for my bank account that there are 8 hours every day during which I can’t shop online.)
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
Edward Burne-Jones isn’t concealing anything in this picture. I feel like I now know too much about his personal tastes and standards of hygiene.
this should be something you can google
I’ve spent too much of my free time yesterday and today staring at the Charles Dickens google doodle and trying to figure out who the characters are. The "behind the scenes" isn’t much help: We see Nell and her grandfather in the The Old Curiosity Shop, many characters from Little Dorrit, Oliver and his friends from Oliver Twist and Estella and Pip from Great Expectations. Even a certain French aristocrat graces the doodle, sitting inside the uppercase “G” — a reference to his near death by guillotine. And no tribute to Dickens would be complete without Ebenezer Scrooge and a vivid depiction of London in the background.
Those are the one it’s easy to identify! Or is it saying the one in the uppercase G is Charles Darnay? I thought the Tale of Two Cities reference was only in the background of the G. If that is supposed to be Charles Darnay, then who is the sidekick? So confused. It looks like the woman in the bonnet is supposed to be Amy Dorrit, but I’ve decided that it’s Esther Summerson because I love her and I haven’t read Little Dorrit yet, so I don’t know if she deserves such a prominent placement.
I did finish Nicholas Nickleby before coming to work today – my first impression is that if Kate Nickleby was the main character, it would be an awesome, proto-feminist novel, but unfortunately she is not the main character.
Why read Charles Dickens?
Children can’t read Charles Dickens, yet they do, at least when forced to by their teachers. So much dismay over modern attention spans, but given the literacy rate during the time period when he was writing, I would say that people are more equipped to read Dickens now than in the Victorian era. It’s nice to imagine some bygone era of common reading, but people back then had many distractions, only their distractions were things like dying of consumption or getting stuck in chimneys, not Skyrim and Twitter. The proposed cures sound worse than the disease, and I am really becoming suspicious of teachers whose answer to everything is iPad. The answer to distraction isn’t more distraction, and the kind of attention an iPad requires is different from a book and uses different skills.
Also, Oliver Twist with zombies is a stupid idea. Fagin’s gang are clearly vampires.
There are several reasons why I decided to read all of the novels of Charles Dickens this year. Every now and then I go through reading slumps, where everything I read is unsatisfying and fails to provide either escapist entertainment, inspiration for my own writing, or a new perspective on life. That’s not much to ask from a book, is it? Usually, books only provide the first, escapism. As long as the prose isn’t too awful and the characters are plausible, reading a book is like watching TV, something to relax with at the end of the day. Dickens is notorious for "writing too much" and "getting paid by the word," so I thought reading his novels, with their detailed descriptions of clothes and houses, would be an immersive experience. Also, I wanted to read something that wouldn’t make me feel bad about writing. When I read writers who are really good, I feel like I can’t write at all, but when I read ones that are mediocre/awful, I feel unhappy about my mostly unpublished state and wonder if there are just too many words in the world.
Pickwick Papers – finished
Oliver Twist – finished
Nicholas Nickleby – 6 chapters left, the moneylenders still have to be punished and everyone has to get married
letter writing and Berlin
notable authors give snail mail a boost
Yes, another article about the great letter writing revival. For most people, letter writing is a charmingly retro hobby, like buying records or making vintage owls for etsy. I would love for letter writing to be a thing, but for most people, posting updates on facebook is all the communication they need. I’m not anti-twitter* or anti-tumblr, but it’s not the same kind of communication. They’re designed for quick messages, and in the case of tumblr, they’re more visual than verbal. If I had a better phone, I would probably be more enamoured of twitter/tumblr since they are perfect for tiny screens. I have selfish reasons for wanting a general revival of letter writing. Letter writing is private. I work in an open plan office with my back to the door and anyone who walks by can see what I’m doing. When I write on paper, I can think about what I’m writing without worrying that in an unlucky break, someone who can read English will pop up behind me. It’s easier to concentrate when I’m not trying to discreetly keep on eye on the room. I like to have two projects on my desk so I can switch between them, but that doesn’t leave me very aware of what’s going on around me. For example, I’m writing this, and I have a lesson plan I’m working on open in another window, but if you were to ask me how many people are in the room with me right now, I wouldn’t know.
(Just looked around. Four people are in the office right now.)
I am very much in love with the excerpts from Berlin Stories that the New York Review of Books has been running:
A city like Berlin is an ill-mannered, impertinent, intelligent scoundrel, constantly affirming the things that suit him and tossing aside everything he tires of. Here in the big city you can definitely feel the waves of intellect washing over the life of Berlin society like a sort of bath. An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to stop up his ears and sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Rather, he must constantly pull himself together as a human being, and this compulsion encircling him redounds to his advantage. But there are yet other things as well.
In the Electric Tram is the most joyful piece I’ve read about public transportation is a long time. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.
Any large city can be like that when you’re young. But some cities are more welcoming than others. I went to London right after I graduated from college, and it was huge mistake. It was cold, both the people and the weather, and very, very expensive. At that time, I was more in love with the idea of being a writer than I was with writing. Is that still true? I still want the life of the urban writer – mornings spent writing and afternoons spent pretending to be Mozart on the bus.
*Am definitely anti-facebook
still reading Nicholas Nickleby
Nicholas Nickleby was supposed to be finished by the end of January, but it’s going to take an extra day or two because my ambitious reading and writing plans for the weekend were derailed by procrastination (Saturday) and illness (Sunday and Monday). And, once again, I have failed to learn a lesson about procrastination.
I stayed home yesterday because I was too exhausted and dizzy to walk to work in the snow. Today, even though I feel much stronger, I still managed to slip on the ice and arrived at work with my legs bleeding. I wish I was the kind of person who could handle such situations gracefully, but I’m not, so I sniffled with pain during the morning meeting, and then limped off to be bandaged.
How would a Dickens heroine have handled such a morning? Unless she was very cute, probably without tears. Kate Nickleby only cries when she has a really good reason, like when her uncle tries to pimp her out. Otherwise, she handles all of the drama at her job and all of her mother’s crazytalk* with fortitude. Fortitude, even the word sounds properly Victorian.
I want to write more about Kate Nickleby, but I don’t have my paperback of Nicholas Nickleby with me and looking at my kindle notes, I realize that I haven’t marked very many lines about her. Although Jonathan Franzen is a dick, he is a little bit, only a little bit, right when he laments the advent of the ebook. It’s easier to read long books on the kindle, and I’m much more likely to mark things, but it is not good when you’re in the mood for random inspiration. If I had to drag the paperbacks around town with me, I wouldn’t be reading Dickens this year, I’d be reading a pithier author, maybe Muriel Spark. Page numbers are another weakness of the kindle. Free books, like the ones from Project Gutenberg, don’t have page numbers like the ones from publishers do. It seems weird to say I’ve read 80% of Nicholas Nickleby, how many pages is that? It’s Dickens – I could have hundreds of pages left!
*"accustomed to give ready utterance to whatever came uppermost in her mind"
The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll* was born on January 27th, and I celebrated by ordering The Hunting of the Snark. It’s available on Project Gutenberg, but this edition looks fantastic.
*Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born, presumably, "Lewis Carroll" was born much later.
Angela Carter
Review your favourite Angela Carter novel is something I would be doing right now if I had my copies of her books with me here in Japan, or if I could buy electronic copies. There’s also Angela Carter: a portrait in postcards, which is apparently an excerpt from an upcoming book. I still haven’t read The Passion of New Eve or The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – I’ve heard they are both filled with crazy, apocalyptic feminism, which sounds like it is what I should have read last during the brief time I was interested in reading science fiction. Instead, I found a copy of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis at Goodwill, which killed my science fiction mood. It was well-written, with a strong political subtext, but years of anime/manga has made me unable to take tentacle things seriously.
Every time I read Angela Carter, I want to write like her, but since I lack her skill, all that comes out is purple prose and melodrama. Her novels and stories work because of the conviction she brings to her material and her precise language. "Purple prose" is generally used to describe writing that is excessive and lacks control, or a style where adjectives and adverbs pile up in mangled bunches.
It is midwinter and the robin, friend of man, sits on the handle of the gardener’s spade and sings. It is the worst time in all the year for wolves, but this strong-minded child insists she will go off through the wood. She is quite sure that wild beast cannot harm her although, well warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses. There is a bottle of harsh liquor distilled from brambles; a batch of flat oak cakes baked on the hearthstone; a pot or two of jam. The flaxen-haired girl will take these delicious gifts to a reclusive grandmother so old the burden of her years is crushing her to death. Granny lives two hours’ trudge through the winter woods; the child wraps herself up in her thick shawl, draws it over her head. She steps into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas Eve. The malign door of the solstice still swings upon its hinges, but she has been too much loved to ever feel scared.
Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with, so they work hard and grow wise, but this one, so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little latecomer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who’d knitted the red shawl that, today has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell, her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforth, once a month.
from "The Company of Wolves" in The Bloody Chamber
The "excessive" feeling in Carter’s prose comes from her choice of words rather than from using too many and from the way she chooses images that appeal to the senses. The red and white of the bird leads to the red and white of the girl; the meal in the girl’s basket leads to the girl herself.
a day spent reading Patti Smith and various other poets
Until ten minutes ago, I thought the line after "Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine" was "midnight party thieves," but it isn’t. "Melting in a pot of thieves" is far more New York than "midnight party thieves," which suggests frat boys raiding a kegger.
So much love for these Guardian comments with people showing off lines from their favorite poems, prompted by this: 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry. I love how some of the lines quoted are slightly wrong, which means they were typed out from memory and not from google. Since I was at work today, with its reliable, although filtered, internet, I spent much of the day googling my favorite poems. Poets.org has "Leda and the Swan" listed under Poems About Animals and Pets, which makes one question how they’re defining pet.
This morning, I got an unwelcome phone call: Hello. Did you forget to come to work?
Forget? I was never told! You would think that yesterday when I said "see you next week," it was an opportunity for the coworker I attended the conference with to say something, something like, "Next week? Tomorrow." I probably was told about it in Japanese, but that hardly counts. I should probably stop doing the Serious Listening Face during the morning meeting and do Confused Yet Hopeful instead, like a cat who really hopes that all of the talking is going to end with a refill of the food bowl.
An Evening of Long Goodbyes – Paul Murray
An Evening of Long Goodbyes starts out as a Wodehouse parody, but then Charles Hythloday wakes up with a hangover
My main problem with An Evening of Long Goodbyes is with the ending. Murray ruthlessly parodies intellectuals who romanticize working class lives, but the book ends with a romanticized and sentimental approach towards working class life that is more than reminiscent of the ending of the movie Office Space. Yes, he ends with a moral: a life of honest manual labour is more fulfilling than a life of alcoholic languor. Is this true? Maybe for some people, but I find it condescending, especially considering the audience for this novel.
