Fifty Books in Fifty Weeks
In Which the author switches her non-fiction addiction and reads some of the best books since the invention of the printing press.Archive for April, 2008
Ulysses: original & redux
Ulysses is based on the Odyssey. It’s worth taking a small look at the source material to get a firmer grip on the novel. The Odyssey was intended to be sung, and so it is necessarily a work concerned with the rhythms of language. Clearly, Joyce used this concept to craft Ulysses. The Odyssey has a non-linear plot which depicts the cleverness and arrogant beauty of Odysseus, but also highlights the smart choices of women and outsiders rather than focusing solely on the fighting men of the dominant class. Odysseus is out of the picture for ten years while Penelope and her son Telemachus fend off suitors who assume her husband is dead in the great war. Meanwhile, Telemachus struggles to keep control of his household by will and wit until his father returns; Penelope remains faithful and wards off all comers with her tricks and schemes.
Telemachus is supposed to be Stephen Dedalus. The only connection I can see in that (correct me if I’m wrong) is in Bloom’s longing for his dead son and his use of Stephen as a kind of replacement, made apparent in a scene in Book III in which Bloom rescues a drunken Stephen and eventually offers him his daughter’s hand in marriage.
If Odysseus is Leopold Bloom and Penelope is Molly, this contrasts with Ulysses in that the husband is gone for a mere 24 hours and Molly has a lover in for the afternoon. Where there is contrast to a work that a subsequent work is based on, we should pay attention. The other major contrast is in the reaction of the hero to the usurper. In the Odyssey, Odysseus slaughters all of the men who were found attempting to woo his wife; it’s a bloodbath. In Ulysses, Bloom returns quietly to the wife he loves despite her foolishness and betrayal. And in the end, she transforms into the loyal Penelope with her famous soliloquy.
The point of these differences is that Bloom, too, is a hero. He does not engage in fits of rage or vengeance; instead he maintains. He decides what is most important to him and allows what *is* to *be* and he continues as if it does not affect his world. Who of us could do that in Bloom’s situation?
Leopold Bloom is Joycean hero, at an ideal level of transcendence without conscious effort at transcendence. We have Stephen Dedalus to contrast him with: Stephen the striver, the failure, his genius used as entertainment for his friends rather than enlightenment of the world. Stephen Dedalus, who is the protagonist of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is based in that novel on the mythical figure Daedalus, designer of the Minotaur’s unnavigable labyrinth, an artist in the classic sense. He is also Icarus, who builds wings to escape the maze, the transcendental artist who ultimately causes his own ruin. Portrait was conceived, written and published before Ulysses, and one reason I have felt so connected to Stephen Dedalus is because in Ulysses, we see that this is what he has become: a failure at his artistic pursuits, still trying to retain his youthful grasp on the transcendental with one foot mired in his day job and his poverty. Ulysses is partly an extension of the tragedy of Stephen Dedalus. Contrast Bloom’s quiet acquiescence to the ebb and flow of the universe, and his knowledge that it is not up to him to change the world but to be in it; this contentment appears to be the primary trait of Joyce’s version of the archetypal hero.
The Question of Art
I once took an upper level lit course where the professor required us to discuss “the question of art” in every novel we read. Oddly enough, a unified theory of the meaning of art could be found in all of the 15 or so novels we read that semester. Ulysses is no exception.
Joyce devotes an entire chapter in Book II to Dedalus and friends discussing Shakespeare as Hamlet. Someone namedrops Mallarme, which caught my attention because I remember from my college lit days that Stephen Mallarme is the French dude who moved to Paris to become a poet, eventually hosting artist salons attended by Proust! And Andre Gide! However, he was criticized by some of his contemporaries for his dense literary theories. One of these was that a “purified language” (complete with alternate and precisely nuanced meanings for words we thought we knew) provides a purer meaning for the piece, which we can see may be a theory shared by James Joyce.
The kind of conversation which occurs in the chapter would occur in Mallarme’s salons, and this chapter functions as a dissection of art. Joyce concludes: “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring,” which is almost a statement of purpose for the novel in its entirety. The Odyssey is inspiration for Ulysses, and Ireland’s “epic” lies in its daily rhythms, which Joyce illustrates in elevated language fitting for the epic masterpiece. It’s a day in Dublin, frozen in time. Style is key to this novel’s meaning, in that it forces the reader to slow down, think more thoroughly, pay attention to details and make connections that might be overlooked if it was written in a style one could skim at times. This demands the reader’s complete attention, and possibly even study aids. But the payoff is well worth the effort.
The Afterlife Diet
What, you ask, have I been doing the last few days? Well, not reading classics. I read a bad mystery novel that left a bad taste in my mouth. I paged through Padma Lakshmi’s cookbook which made me miss bacon (;vegetarianism is difficult only when one is confronted with a dish laced with or wrapped in or accompanied by bacon.) And then I read The Afterlife Diet.
NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater is a prolific children’s writer (“chapter books”, as the small ones call them). I know this because I shelve his 3,840,000 kids’ books pretty often at the library. I guess he’s popular.
I recently heard about this book he wrote for grown-ups called The Afterlife Diet, which the reviewer said had flavors of Vonnegut. It is a satire of the diet industry, and though all of his characters eat far more prodigiously than any fat person I have ever known (or been), Pinkwater still manages to not be offensive, is kind of hilarious at times and includes a little body acceptance 101 for the uninitiated (see: Shapely Prose at kateharding.net for a primer). Pinkwater inserts these facts and statistics in such a way that, if you didn’t know they were true, you’d just think they were entertainment. There’s a doctor who tells one character that his blood tests are all good, that he is fit as a fiddle; the patient responds, “But I should lose weight, right?” The doctor keeps telling him that there is no need to lose weight, that he is well and healthy. The doctor tells him that he could stand to cut down on the cigarettes, get more exercise, eat more vegetables, but not worry about weight at all since it is a non-issue when it comes to health. The patient says that health without thinness just wouldn’t be enough. Moral of the joke? The weight loss industry is about aesthetics, not arteries.
So, the premise is that this kind of selfish, scoundrelly guy called Milton is killed and goes to the afterlife, where it seems that everyone is as fat or fatter than he is. At one point, Milton thinks it would be a good idea to start a diet club in the afterlife. I won’t tell you how it turns out. Throughout, we bounce back and forth in time between the life and death of this dude, who appears to be at the center of this strange sci-fi conspiracy but is so distracted by his constant dieting that he doesn’t know what’s going on half the time, and the other half he’s being disingenuous or downright obnoxious, which eventually leads to his death.
In the most brilliant scene, Milton postulates to his shrink that his fat is an insulator, a barrier between himself and emotional threat and/or attachment. Psychologist Plotkin, the voice of reason and a primary consumer of mass quantities of food (this guy could be the older brother of Ignatius J. Reilly) says, “No. It is not so. The reason you’re fat is that you’re fat. That’s all. You’re fat for the same reason people have big noses, or red hair. It’s one of the shapes people come in. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
The cast of characters is extensive and various: there are the self-loathing, the self-loving, the literary, the bizarre, the kind, the vile, the duped, the dumped; there’s a weight loss guru who won’t allow her large son to diet because it’s unhealhty, there’s a weight loss guru who hires someone to play him in the commercials because he’s actually quite rotund, there’s a weight loss guru who uses principles he learned during his work in concentration camps to starve his patients to thinness, there’s a weight loss guru who injects people with water and tells them to binge every third month and then go back on the 500 calorie diet in perpetuity.
I won’t go so far as to say that this is destined to be a classic, but it was a good read, a nice break from the literary stylings of Mr. Jas Joyce. It’s not a classic, so it doesn’t count in the project, but it was a necessary diversion before diving back into Ulysses, as I did today and plan to do on my day off tomorrow. It’s supposed to rain, so I’m staying in with Leopold Bloom and S. Dedalus for more brilliant headnoise. Hopefully it will elicit a little of my own brilliant (or at least semi-literate) headnoise.
The Red & The Black
The theme of this novel, the “moral of the story”, as it were, is that unchecked pride, when combined with an unchecked ambition, create a well-disguised sociopath. It’s kind of like Pride & Prejudice with a darkness: the characters’ mistakes and fatal flaws are more tragedy than comedy in The Red & The Black. Julien Sorel, a peasant in a provincial town, gets elevated and celebrated because of his good looks and his genius (he can recite the entire Bible in Latin – not read it, recite it). However, Julien has a secret. He doesn’t feel things unless he feels them through the lens of his pride at who he “should” be, financially and socially. He uses people to get a step closer to his goal. See? Sociopath.
Julien gets almost to the pinnacle of his ambition how? By sleeping his way to the top, of course. This is no Wuthering Heights, no story of star-crossed lovers caught in the web of the prejudices of society and bad timing. Julien inspires love in the naive and in the melodramatic of the upper classes. I mean, he’s too cute to be a pathological freak, right? His genius is a sign of his goodness, right? If there’s anything we’ve learned from history, it’s that the more perfect and worthy a person appears, the more potential for wreaking havoc he has in his reach. There are those who are worthy, but there are also those who have figured out that to appear worthy is to be trusted implicitly. And how can you tell who’s who? This is why we have constitutional checks and balances. Even the most idealized, well-loved, perfectly intelligent leader still needs someone to check his math, to point out that this idea is not one of his best. This is why our best historical leaders surrounded themselves with those who opposed them on one or several fronts, or at least disagreed enough to build a debate, rather than assembling a cabinet of yes-men.
My conjecture is that this is what Al Gore likes about this novel: the lesson that humility is key for the rich and powerful, that when you have the advantages of birth or the luck of a meteoric rise to fame and fortune, you need to be even more careful than the rest of us. I mean, maybe I have a small politics crush on Mr. Gore, so I ascribe the best intentions to him like all the high society girls did Julien Sorel, the original LL Cool J. But this is a good guess.
LL Cool Julien admires his lovers, his “followers”, but he cannot feel for them. He can’t know them or really see what they’re about. In fact, he cannot emote at all. Julien’s entire personality becomes a facade for the sake of politics and advancement. He knows how to talk, how to act, but he doesn’t know or care how the things he does affect those individuals playing an unwitting part in his ambitious rise. ”How can I get…” ”I will do this in order to get…” ”My self-respect requires that I get…” This trap, I surmise, is what a person of quality ambition will aim to avoid.
The oddest thing about reading this book is that you see Julien as a confused kid most of the time rather than expecting him to come to the bad end he does come to. He’s like every teenager looking for meaning in heroes and anti-heroes. He means well, but he is blinded by a royalist pride in his idolized hero, the fallen Bonaparte, and by extension, in himself. He is confused by his upbringing, by his present circumstances, by his extensive reading without experience, by his all-consuming ambition. He despises his peasant ancestry. He despises the society folk whom he charms with his developing ability to tell them what they want to hear. But there’s one little problem: he also wants to fit in with them. He thinks he would be a better elite and would spend his riches more wisely. He thinks he would lack their shallow self-absorption. He aims to overcome them in a social battle which, in his mind, parallels the battlefield wins of his hero Napoleon Bonaparte.
He is certain that Bonaparte had far more dignity than these provincials; this novel details the idea of the “nouveau riche”, those with “old money” versus the newly rich, a class within a class. As we have heard, the love of money is the root of all evil. But even Julien’s drive for money is a goal in service to another goal: his desire to be on par with Napoleon, royalty in a society who has banished it to the annals of history. Julien’s pride allows him to overlook that he would be one of the nouveau riche if he achieved his goals; he wants what has made them “pigs”, but he’s sure that he would retain the dignity he feels has been imparted to him by his studies of Napoleon: he despises progress, yet he aims to share in the spoils produced by it. This is the classic attitude of the young, the seekers, the idealistic. We’re looking for answers in the past rather than the present. And Julien? Yeah, he does find that he fits in with old money too. But guess what. He despises them as well. Julien’s bad end is a direct result of his ability to navigate within society, but to be a hidden force for destruction, and self-destruction, once there.
One cool thing about this novel is that Stendhal was inspired to write it by a couple of newspaper articles, unrelated crimes that he found engrossing and then spent a few years imagining what the criminals’ lives consisted of to bring them to their own bad ends: a prime example of current events inspiring works of enduring worth.
Inspiration is everywhere.
Caught in the Act (a self-portrait)
Okay, so I’m playing mySims on DS instead of reading.
le Rouge et le Noir
At one point during the 2000 presidential elections, George W. Bush and Al Gore were asked to name their favorite books. Bush said his was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a children’s book by Eric Carle which is much-favored by the pre-K crowd. Gore took the question more seriously (or perhaps has a more extensive reading history to choose books from) and named his favorite book as The Red and the Black by Stendhal. I’m reading it right now, partly because reading someone’s favorite book kind of tells you something about them, and I’m nosy.
It also made me think. People don’t often consciously decide on our “favorite book”; but when we do, on what grounds do we choose it? I tried to determine my favorite book and came up with a list too ridiculous to include in full here. Virginia Woolf, Amy Hempel, Donna Tartt, Sarah Vowell, Mary Roach, Anne Sexton. Gah! I can’t choose between authors, let alone books!
How do you choose your favorite book? Is it the one book that, had you not read it, you would be a completely other person? Is it the book that makes you laugh so hard you cry no matter how many times you read it? Is it the book that lets you travel somewhere else every time you pick it up? Does your favorite book inspire you or provide an escape? Or, like me, do you find it impossible to choose just one?
The Crying of Lot 49
Is it a mystery, a thriller, a satire? All of the above. I read this book yesterday and although it is about 50% shorter than the other books I’ve read thus far, I have way more notecards, full of my questions as the plot progresses, notes on expressed themes, interesting character issues, good quotes, et cetera. I mean, how can you not love a book with a character named Genghis Cohen? Dr. Hilarius? Tony Jaguar? Mike Fallopian? Way weird, way entertaining. This book was written in 1966 but you would never think so. It feels post-post-modern and unencumbered by setting. I read that Pynchon doesn’t like this novel much, which makes me want to read everything else he wrote. If this is the crappy novel, I’m keen to read the good ones.
The story, I think, is about the blurry line between certainty and delusion. I mean, probably. Who can know. In the beginning, I thought the “lot” referred to Mucho Maas’s car lot, but found out I was dead wrong. This was my first experience with the assumption vs. reality aspect of this novel. Then there was the question of why Oedipa’s ex makes her executrix of his massive estate, which we expect to be the point of the novel, but Mr. Inverarity is not the point.
I started off looking at the characters and their motivation; each character is supposed to want something, according to Vonnegut and pretty much every awesome writer in the universe. So what does Oedipa want? Escape from Rapunzel’s tower. Hilarius? Escape from the secrets of his internship. Mucho? Escape from a passionless future. What happened when I tried to discern motivation of the principal characters? I discovered theme.
In the first chapter, Oedipa remembers a trip to Mexico that she took with Inverarity, where they stumble into a museum during a storm. She finds a painting of several women shut away, weaving the universe outside their tower. This is the first indication that Oedipa finds it difficult to determine what is real and what she has woven underneath her own feet like the tapestry in the painting. Then when she meets Rudolph Driblette, he gently mocks her curiosity about his directorial choices for the play that has just sparked her obsession, highlighting the theme of illusion, delusion and the role of perceived certainty. He points out, “…You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.” (Note that W.A.S.T.E. will come into play later). Oedipa takes this as a challenge and sets out to do just that. She exists to interpret Inverarity’s will to the world as Driblette has interpreted the play – a director creating worlds.
Inverarity had been with Oedipa when she lost her certainty and she doubts her ability to determine reality & fiction when he has posthumously presented her with the will, the role, the clues. The idea of him is wrapped up in her loss of her direction, her ability to trust and engage in communication – communication being another theme, most explicitly explored in the activities of W.A.S.T.E., and in the meaning of the title (the crying). There are also a few strange lines that step outside the narrative to speak directly to the reader about the characters, mini-asides like: “Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.” These stray sentences are modes of communication outside what the reader has been used to and it jars your attention, kind of delights you when it happens. There’s a feeling that Oedipa can no longer speak for herself, the commentary is necessary. As she loses contact with the people she can confide in, the themes of communication, isolation and unreality get tangled in the action. Theme is expressed in the imagery, the characters in their motivation and dialogue, in the plot, in the style: an added layer in a well-crafted and well-planned story.
I don’t want to say too much, but I can’t say enough. Suffice it to say that this book will make sense to you if you, like every character in the book, are seeking “…a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie.”
Dracula is eligible, rich and handsome. I think there’s a reality show in that somewhere.
Jonathan Harker is kind of a geek. He’s obsessed with technology (typewriters, phonographs, stenography). Early in the novel he’s philosophizing that: “Despair has its own calms.” He’s actually sort of a wuss until…well, I’ll let you read it & find out.
I won’t go into the particulars here, but this novel has a lot of melodramatic dialogue, I mean a LOT. Like, y’know, a Dan Brown novel or something. But somehow in Dracula, it works: it’s a page-turner in part because of the villain.
The first thing to note about developing a really creepy miscreant is that he needs to have a cool, scary name. Bram (he and I are on a first name basis) reputedly just sort of stumbled upon this name “Dracula” without knowing it to be attached to Vlad the Impaler, whom we are all pretty well aware of today. He thought, “That’s a cool, scary name for a monster. It’s exotic. It means dragon. Kind of awesome.” (disclaimer: not a direct quote from Mr. Stoker).
The second thing to remember is that you need to establish 1) what others say about the antagonist 2) what he says of himself and 3) what the protagonist observes about him. This is the formula in Dracula, in any case. There are rumors from the lips of townsfolk while Harker travels to the castle. As soon as we meet Count Chocula, I mean Dracula, we are impressed with his haughtiness in the way he ignores what he doesn’t want to address and in the fact that his words and his physical reactions do not always accord. Harker quickly trusts and respects him despite these clues. And then the evidence begins to mount that the Count is indeed a villain, and not just a learned, attractive rich dude. After several scenes that make the reader feel uneasy about the trust assigned to him, Stoker narrates an event that makes it impossible not to realize that the bad guy is planning to eat the naive guy, and then the bad guy abruptly disappears from the scene for like…the next 200 pages.
The Count is onstage physically only in the beginning and then again briefly toward the end, pre-climax. His influence is apparent, and we see effects of the things he does offstage, but he doesn’t get much dialogue from there on in. Then toward the middle, he gets to deliver his last real scene, a speech that freaks us the f%!k out and also gives away some crucial secret to the brain of the expedition. It’s also kind of important if you have a super-crazy (or super-natural) villain that one of the characters be the brain to explain stuff to the reader. Somebody has to be studied up on more than a few aspects of the antagonist’s pathology and/or satanic abilities. You might even consider multiple viewpoint characters like Stoker did, so the reader gets many facets of the story, but all are limited. I might even go so far as to say that if you’re going for suspense, never use the “omniscient” point of view, since the suspense lies in not knowing enough to totally understand what is going on.
I have to admit, it was hard not to picture a painted Bela Lugosi when I read the Count’s scenes, but I tried to think of Vlad himself or, like…Adrien Brody in a tux & cape or something to sort of cleanse my vampire palate. The only physical characteristics B.S. drills into us are that Dracula is tall and thin and sort of charming, so you can pick whomever you want. Just not Bela. And if you can manage to suspend the Dracula-as-theme-park idea for a sustained period of time, to be honest, the story is still scary, partly because one of the victims is ever-present & you don’t know what her outcome will be until out it comes in the last few pages.
That’s the last thing to remember about villains. It matters who their victims are. So I guess that’s the moral of the story: an effective villain requires a sympathetic victim.
Wrong as rain…
So, what I had been planning to do for weeks now tonight was: go see my friend play a rock show. Last time I was going to see him play, I was deterred by a blizzard. Tonight? Flash flood warnings. Clearly, Thor is a huge fan of his band. On the walk home from work, I had to slosh through several ankle-deep puddles in flats and fishnets (stupid girls wear dresses to work on days when rain is expected). Rain is my achilles heel, my rigid terror, my fontanelle. Everyone knows, I melt in the rain. Maybe I was a cat in a former life. I mean, I do really love to take naps. Anyway, the point is: I am suckerrific. Just call me Sucky Suckenstein. Triple suck with a side of suck. I could not bring myself to wait for the bus in the cold dark outdoors. I heard the cars plashing around on the street eight stories down and I was paralyzed by a horror of getting soggy & shivery. But that doesn’t feel like a very good excuse to be home, ruddy-cheeked and wrapped in a blanket wearing velvet trackpants & kneesocks, finishing up Dracula when I should be out seeing an awesome show and catching up with my friend whom I haven’t seen in awhile. For what it’s worth, the gods did punish me by making my ceiling leak. In 50 books news, I finished Dracula, book report in progress.
Who needs linear structure!?
Ulysses needs a leisurely pace. I want to relish it, not rush it. I dislike reading Ulysses at work because there are too many distractions and time constraints; e.g. 15 minute breaks provide just enough time to really get into the scene and then you have to abruptly go back to shelving and patrons. Henceforth, Ulysses will be my “weekend book” until I’ve finished it. (Hey, I make up the rules here.)
Last week I thought more about Ulysses than I read from it, which is what makes me want to take longer with it. So (drumroll) today at work I rented Dracula. The only prior knowledge I have of this book is a) the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Dracula arrives in Sunnydale to seduce Ms. Summers b) Elizabeth Kostova’s meta-fiction awesomeness (The Historian) and c) Weekends with Vlad, one man’s obsessive quest for the Dracula of fact and fiction.
Apparently, Bram Stoker spent seven years writing Dracula, which is the same amount of time it took Joyce to write Ulysses. But Dracula is like…300 pages shorter and Bram had a day job while he wrote this book (rumor has it that Joyce joked that a good day of work was one that yielded seven perfect words). I plan to finish Dracula within the week, paying special attention to the creation of an effective villain. What? Did you think I was just reading without any kind of strategy as to what I wanted to learn from each of these books? Pah! Rest assured, I am a girl with a scheme.
