Can you be moved by 59 pages of text?
Yes, you can. I can, at least. For years, I have had that standard copy of Miss Lonelyhearts paired with The Day of the Locust. My father gave it to me long ago so I could read Locust, and despite having that story referenced repeatedly throughout my college career, I could just never read the damn thing. I started to, a couple of times, but just never kept going. Sometimes, with books, it's a complete mood thing. That's why I stopped reading Falling Man and Gravity's Rainbow partway through. Not because I was bored or frustrated, or because the quality was poor. Just because I need to be in the right head space.
Well, Friday I was in the right head space for Nathanael West. So I took up the book and read it on public transit. I didn't get to The Day of the Locust, ironically, because I thought maybe part of the reason I could never read the story was that I always felt as though I were cheating by opening a book to its middle instead of its beginning. Miss Lonelyhearts was a truly splendid treat. I even quote it in my sidebar, now -- look to your right.
The eponymous character is a pseudonym for an advice columnist. People write in to him asking for advice, and he doles it out under this cute nom de plume, trying to give heart to people whose lives are suffocating under layers of shit. Examples of these letters, their desperately human pleading and horrific grammar intact, are included in the narrative, and help you understand the changes that Miss Lonelyhearts goes through.
This story made me yearn for time periods like the 1940s, when it was perfectly okay for an author to write using directly religious language. At this stage of book production and marketing, as well as the political climate, such a style would be unheard of -- it would pigeonhole you as a certain "type" of author with a certain "type" of subject or audience. But this unabashed use of Christ and religious ideas is not offensive or divisive in anyway. Miss Lonelyhearts works for a newspaper after all, and if there's a more godless place in the universe, it probably has a lovely view of a lake of fire.
Miss Lonelyhearts is, through his job, directly confronted with the suffering of all people, on all levels of society. Their problems are real, and they inspire despair, pity, and anger in him. This story tracks his attempts to try and find a kind of inner peace, or solidarity, amongst not only the chaos of his readers' lives, but the chaos of his own. He eventually likens himself to a rock, and the insane drunken antics of others to a raging ocean.
However, his "rockness" also makes him blind to what drives others, what creates and fuels their misery, and this is eventually his downfall. By denying the undulating humanity of his own spirit, he fails to recognize the way it functions in others, and this leaves him incredibly vulnerable to attack. After all, a rock is initially unaffected by the sea, but eventually the relentless pounding of the waves will wear that rock down to nothing. It will, no matter its solidarity, be absorbed into a dramatic, repetitive, futile process.
The sea is one of my favorite things to personify, so for Miss Lonelyhearts to conceive of himself as a rival to the sea rang so many analytical bells in my mind that it made my head hurt.
There is a real moral at the heart of this story, leaving the quote I have at the right as a bit of a conundrum. Is it deluded or noble to strive for order in a world bound for chaos? Do we, as Chaucer's Nun's Priest (I think, I don't remember The Canterbury Tales very well, for shame) would tell us, only rational to give in to the irrational, or is a central tenet of fascist-leaning philosophies more practical -- try to control the "nasty, short, and brutish" tendencies of man and you will succeed?
Maybe not for everyone, but for me, this book raised valid philosophical questions about how to live in a world full of suffering and pain, where the suffering is impossible to laugh at or shrug off. How can someone in the modern world succeed if they develop compassion? Is Miss Lonelyhearts some kind of journalistic Big City martyr? And if so, what does that mean about contemporary living, or modern-day interpretations of age-old martyrs' tales?
I should have found a way to study this story in college, but all anyone ever talked about was Locust. It's things like that that lead to fanciful day dreams of myself as a professor.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Skin by Roald Dahl
This is a posthumous collection of Dahl's stories, which were originally published in the 50s and 60s, and I found it to be something of a let-down. The big standard, "Lamb to the Slaughter" is included, as well as a few other macabre tales. But, for many of the stories, I found the endings either predictable or anticlimactic. It felt as though Dahl had left early drafts of these stories lying around, and after he died some precocious niece found them and decided to send them off to a publisher. I much preferred Switch Bitch.
That said, this isn't bad collection, per se. I was interested. There was a very clever story about poaching that kept my attention. Dahl still has that talent of starting a story with you expecting it to be about the initial set of characters and circumstances, and then altering the focus as he goes along.
I'd say that the endings were still consistently unsettling, although they were certainly less surprising than those in Switch Bitch, and I plan to get another collection for comparison's sake.
For the love of God, don't read the back of this book. You will know the endings to a few of the stories that otherwise would have been genuinely surprising. It is lame.
There isn't really anything else to say about this book, except that the paperback cover of it is eye-catching enough to prompt people to talk to me while I am trying to concentrate.
And that is my completely thrilling commentary on the book. Whee!
That said, this isn't bad collection, per se. I was interested. There was a very clever story about poaching that kept my attention. Dahl still has that talent of starting a story with you expecting it to be about the initial set of characters and circumstances, and then altering the focus as he goes along.
I'd say that the endings were still consistently unsettling, although they were certainly less surprising than those in Switch Bitch, and I plan to get another collection for comparison's sake.
For the love of God, don't read the back of this book. You will know the endings to a few of the stories that otherwise would have been genuinely surprising. It is lame.
There isn't really anything else to say about this book, except that the paperback cover of it is eye-catching enough to prompt people to talk to me while I am trying to concentrate.
And that is my completely thrilling commentary on the book. Whee!
Thursday, April 24, 2008
I've completely lost my focus . . .
No one knows it, but that subject line is the punchline to one of my favorite one-panel comic strips of all time. I'll see what I can do about uploading it sometime.
I've decided that I should ease up on this blog a bit. By which I mean, not always restrict myself to posting when I have book reviews/commentary piling up in my brain. This should just be the place for my literature-minded comments, so look forward to more interesting links and musings mixed in with book reviews.
As I am in the middle of reading Roald Dahl's collection of stories, Skin, right now, and as I would consider Dahl to be one of the few writers who has fascinated me my entire life (as a child, I quietly celebrated his birthday by reading as many of his books as I could on September 13th, I hope I remember that date correctly), I now have a very serious reason to visit the UK.
Check it out: http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/
This guy is the pimp of children's books:
I've decided that I should ease up on this blog a bit. By which I mean, not always restrict myself to posting when I have book reviews/commentary piling up in my brain. This should just be the place for my literature-minded comments, so look forward to more interesting links and musings mixed in with book reviews.
As I am in the middle of reading Roald Dahl's collection of stories, Skin, right now, and as I would consider Dahl to be one of the few writers who has fascinated me my entire life (as a child, I quietly celebrated his birthday by reading as many of his books as I could on September 13th, I hope I remember that date correctly), I now have a very serious reason to visit the UK.
Check it out: http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/
This guy is the pimp of children's books:
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
and now for something completely different . . .
"Why I Have No Taste" by Ben Hecht, from A Child of the Century
I prefer fine books and an exalted style and masterful probings. But when I read the other books, the ones sprung from equally ardent but smaller heads, I feel no lessened pleasure. I supply, as well as I can, what is missing. I skip what is too untrue. I am content with their smaller ambition. I do not praise them after they are closed, but while I read them I am as pleased as if no better books existed.
When I was a literary critic in Chicago, writing in the most iconoclastic publication of our times, The Little Review, run by Margaret Anderson, I could never attack books. I wrote only of books I could praise. I was ready to undermine in print such institutions as marriage, democracy and heaven. But books I could never sabotage, any more than I could publicly hiss actors.
My chief drawback as a literary reviewer was not kindness, however, but an inability to read any book through the assaying scale of my culture. When I read David Graham Phillips I was not aware of having read Gogol. When I enjoyed Paul de Kock, I had no memories of the pleasures of Stendhal. Each one, at his own time, was as good as the other. And with such an attitude one can never go far as a critic.
I used to argue about this with my friend, Sasha. He was Alexander S. Kaun, a smoldering Muscovite come to Chicago after some ineffectual bomb-throwing in the north of Russia. Despite this political activity, he was, basically, not a politician but a man of letters. He later became Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California in Berkeley. I never saw him in his cap and gown, for he died before my travels led me to San Francisco Bay.
In his pre-professorial youth, we argued during all-night sessions such as only political caucuses hold nowadays. In that time, sweet pause before chaos, literature was a more burning issue than it is at present. It is now a bauble in the hands of publishers, critics and readers. It was then a secret flame in the hands of the dedicated.
My point of view infuriated Sasha. I professed not to see any difference between a beautiful object and an ordinary one. I said that I liked all books in the manner that I liked all girls who were presentable. When with a girl of moderate allure, I did not disdain her because there were lovelier specimens in the world. Rapture might be limited, but criticism was surely out of place. And what did one gain by making oneself constantly toe the mark of preference--except fewer delights? In loving, or reading, a man was a fool to sit in judgment when he might lie in pleasure.
This aesthetic was lineal descendant of my young self in the attic room where I had found no difference in the charms of Nick Carter and Hamlet, nor outside the room, between hired girls and high-school princesses. A mediocre book or woman never lessened my opinion of myself.
I have outgrown some of this wholeness. But culture that deprives one of the many joys of being uncultured still seems to me a misuse of the mind. I have railed often against books in discussions with their readers. But it was actually the readers I was fomenting. The books were innocent.
I prefer fine books and an exalted style and masterful probings. But when I read the other books, the ones sprung from equally ardent but smaller heads, I feel no lessened pleasure. I supply, as well as I can, what is missing. I skip what is too untrue. I am content with their smaller ambition. I do not praise them after they are closed, but while I read them I am as pleased as if no better books existed.
When I was a literary critic in Chicago, writing in the most iconoclastic publication of our times, The Little Review, run by Margaret Anderson, I could never attack books. I wrote only of books I could praise. I was ready to undermine in print such institutions as marriage, democracy and heaven. But books I could never sabotage, any more than I could publicly hiss actors.
My chief drawback as a literary reviewer was not kindness, however, but an inability to read any book through the assaying scale of my culture. When I read David Graham Phillips I was not aware of having read Gogol. When I enjoyed Paul de Kock, I had no memories of the pleasures of Stendhal. Each one, at his own time, was as good as the other. And with such an attitude one can never go far as a critic.
I used to argue about this with my friend, Sasha. He was Alexander S. Kaun, a smoldering Muscovite come to Chicago after some ineffectual bomb-throwing in the north of Russia. Despite this political activity, he was, basically, not a politician but a man of letters. He later became Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California in Berkeley. I never saw him in his cap and gown, for he died before my travels led me to San Francisco Bay.
In his pre-professorial youth, we argued during all-night sessions such as only political caucuses hold nowadays. In that time, sweet pause before chaos, literature was a more burning issue than it is at present. It is now a bauble in the hands of publishers, critics and readers. It was then a secret flame in the hands of the dedicated.
My point of view infuriated Sasha. I professed not to see any difference between a beautiful object and an ordinary one. I said that I liked all books in the manner that I liked all girls who were presentable. When with a girl of moderate allure, I did not disdain her because there were lovelier specimens in the world. Rapture might be limited, but criticism was surely out of place. And what did one gain by making oneself constantly toe the mark of preference--except fewer delights? In loving, or reading, a man was a fool to sit in judgment when he might lie in pleasure.
This aesthetic was lineal descendant of my young self in the attic room where I had found no difference in the charms of Nick Carter and Hamlet, nor outside the room, between hired girls and high-school princesses. A mediocre book or woman never lessened my opinion of myself.
I have outgrown some of this wholeness. But culture that deprives one of the many joys of being uncultured still seems to me a misuse of the mind. I have railed often against books in discussions with their readers. But it was actually the readers I was fomenting. The books were innocent.
A Treasury of Royal Scandals by Michael Farquhar
The full title of this book reads: A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors.
Damn.
How could it possibly deliver? The paperback cover is a little cheeky drawing of buxom female member of royalty, all done up in the proper attire, with a smirk and a raised eyebrow on her face, and an anonymous hand down her front. Scandalous, indeed.
First of all, I genuinely believe that anyone who isn't interested in the naughty behavior of the European monarchs is either a liar, or someone I'm not going to invite over for dinner. This kind of stuff is where gossip hounds and history buffs can finally meet, their skills and interests finally converging after years of teasing each other on the playground.
What matters here aren't the dates, but who did what to whom, whether the action in question is fuck, kill, excommunicate, behead, etc. is inconsequential - the stories are great.
I'm one of those people who would never in her right mind spend money on a gossip rag. I don't care enough about Angelina & Brad, or even Britney, to ever spend hard-earned money on one of those things. However, when I am waiting in line for something, or at someone else's house with idle time, I will make a beeline for those same gossip rags. In a way, Treasury is a compromise for people like me.
You can satisfy your gossipy half by reading about who married whom, and your intellectual half by telling yourself, "It's practically history." No wonder this thing is a national bestseller.
Farquhar arranges the stories by theme, rather than chronology, which also gives it a fresh feeling. First we have transgressions of various important personages coinciding with the seven deadly sins. Then a little of horrible marriages, followed by horrible family relations, then horrible papal behavior, then horrible deaths, etc. At first it was confusing, but I came to appreciate it by the end.
If you think you will like this book, you will. I had my standards set pretty high, but there is behavior detailed in this book that genuinely surprised and disgusted me. It was all really really interesting, too. The descriptions of the inbred royal family members is especially enlightening.
I couldn't single out a single act, or even a list, of my favorite things detailed in this book. If you want a STAR magazine version of European history, I highly recommend Treasury. It's an easy read that can be done in chunks, if necessary, it's very entertaining, and it has short chapters. Even illustrations from the time period. What else could you possibly want?!
Damn.
How could it possibly deliver? The paperback cover is a little cheeky drawing of buxom female member of royalty, all done up in the proper attire, with a smirk and a raised eyebrow on her face, and an anonymous hand down her front. Scandalous, indeed.
First of all, I genuinely believe that anyone who isn't interested in the naughty behavior of the European monarchs is either a liar, or someone I'm not going to invite over for dinner. This kind of stuff is where gossip hounds and history buffs can finally meet, their skills and interests finally converging after years of teasing each other on the playground.
What matters here aren't the dates, but who did what to whom, whether the action in question is fuck, kill, excommunicate, behead, etc. is inconsequential - the stories are great.
I'm one of those people who would never in her right mind spend money on a gossip rag. I don't care enough about Angelina & Brad, or even Britney, to ever spend hard-earned money on one of those things. However, when I am waiting in line for something, or at someone else's house with idle time, I will make a beeline for those same gossip rags. In a way, Treasury is a compromise for people like me.
You can satisfy your gossipy half by reading about who married whom, and your intellectual half by telling yourself, "It's practically history." No wonder this thing is a national bestseller.
Farquhar arranges the stories by theme, rather than chronology, which also gives it a fresh feeling. First we have transgressions of various important personages coinciding with the seven deadly sins. Then a little of horrible marriages, followed by horrible family relations, then horrible papal behavior, then horrible deaths, etc. At first it was confusing, but I came to appreciate it by the end.
If you think you will like this book, you will. I had my standards set pretty high, but there is behavior detailed in this book that genuinely surprised and disgusted me. It was all really really interesting, too. The descriptions of the inbred royal family members is especially enlightening.
I couldn't single out a single act, or even a list, of my favorite things detailed in this book. If you want a STAR magazine version of European history, I highly recommend Treasury. It's an easy read that can be done in chunks, if necessary, it's very entertaining, and it has short chapters. Even illustrations from the time period. What else could you possibly want?!
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