May 22, 2011
A prose that is altogether alive
“But I do mean that most contemporary novels are not really “written”. They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of prose which is no more alive than that of a competant newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.” –T.S. Eliot, in an introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, which I love for the honesty of a paragraph beginning, “When I first read the book I found the opening movement rather slow and dragging…”
May 1, 2011
The Common Reader
I really enjoyed the essay Narcissus Regards a Novel, about how readers read to be entertained, about how there is no longer cultural authority, media doesn’t shape taste but simply reflects it, good is what makes us feel good, what affirms our ideas about who we are. I particularly liked the last half of the essay, which posits that perhaps there still exists some readers in possession of that “strange mixture of humility and confidence” that allows the invitation of influence, the possibility of second thoughts. (I believe this was called “flip-flopping” in the 2004 American presidential election.) Irresoluteness is not commonly regarded as a virtue in our society, though I actually find it kind of attractive. Mark Edmundson, the essay’s author, thinks so too, and he thinks we’re all out there waiting for the right works to deliver us from our Narcissism: “… the truly common reader—this impossible, possible man or woman who is both confident and humble, both ready to change and skeptical of all easy remedies”.
And this is not a yes, but. If anything it’s a yes yes yes yes yes!, but, because I love the idea of the moveable reader, and of reading as the antidote to a society of prescriptive consumerism, but the beginning of the essay still rankles me. Because while our reluctance to judge the value of artistic works has certainly lowered the cultural tone, the alternative is even more disgusting (and I think of Parley Burns in Elizabeth Hay’s new novel: “What a ranking, comparing, depressing mind he had.”) I think of literary critic William Arthur Deacon who was also obsessed with determining what was great and what wasn’t, and how history has determined he was wrong, wrong, wrong. (I hope he knew it too, somewhere in his heart, before he died a painful, lonely death. He was a horrid man.) Who gets to be the decider? I’m not saying that everything I love is brilliant, but some of it is, and critics would still leave it out of the canon.
The beginning of the essay also gets me, because I wonder about anyone to tell me how I read, why I read, let alone how I should read. I do desire to be Edmundson’s elusive common reader, but so what if I didn’t? Who is he to tell me how I should be? Or what literature should do, as though books ever only do just one thing (and if they do, please don’t let it be to “be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.” I hate the violence of that image, and my sea isn’t even frozen).
I was thinking about this even before I read this essay, as I rode the subway on Tuesday evening and watched the woman across the train from me reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She was coming home from a job that required her to wear attire that didn’t suit her, which I knew because her casual/sporty jacket did not go with her skirt and nylons. Over her nylons, she was wearing socks and running shoes, which meant her daytime footwear didn’t suit her physical needs either. It was 6:45, which is late to be commuting downtown, and I thought, “Wow, you can have your book. You don’t get to pick your own clothes, or your schedule, so surely I’ll grant you your book.” I thought, “Office lady in the running shoes. You read whatever you damn well please.”
I am lucky that I can afford to be elitist, because I don’t want to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and because I once tried to read The Da Vinci Code, but I thought it seemed long and more than a bit boring. I am also lucky because I get to spend a lot of my life doing creative, fulfilling things, but I think that kind of life can put one more than a bit out of touch with reality. And so I do like to check my snobbery from time to time, and stay irresolute about most things, such as what’s great and what isn’t, and who’s allowed to tell who to read what and what for.
March 31, 2011
Something happens
“That is why I have ignored email and the Internet long enough to write and, as importantly — perhaps more importantly — to read. To read and read books, more books, beautiful books that smell of old paper and sometimes mildew and ink. Crisp new strangely confident books. I know that a good novel can change a life. Books changed my life. But as importantly, they have given me so much pleasure. Something happens when the right pages are opened at the right time; that invisible liquid lifts, flows up off the page, and the enters the reader’s mind and heart.” –from Karen Connelly’s essay “How to Swim in a Sea of Shit” from Finding the Words
January 10, 2011
The Bob Dylan of children's authors
“This may sound disingenuous, but here’s the thing: When you are a small child besotted with books, the books themselves– especially the ones you love the best–are autonomous things, concrete yet abstract, like the stuffed animals and building blocks that help you travel to places where only you can go. At bedtime, you don’t ask your mom, “Read me some E.B. White.” You ask for Stuart Little, or Charlotte and Wilbur. You ask for a dog story; for Pippi, Babar, or–nowadays–Toot and Puddle. Your favourite characters–you know them. From a mile away, you could spot the Man in the Yellow Hat, Mrs. Mallard, Olivia or Ferdinand the bull; but H.A. Rey, Robert McCloskey, Ian Falconer, and Munro Leaf–who the heck are they? Authorial celebrity is sabotaged yet further when picture books lose their jackets… they shed their authors’ biographies as well. Many prolific children’s authors are also prone to changing dance partners–that is, illustrators– making their books even harder to see as distinctly their own. (Dr. Seuss may be the exception to this rule. Children become aware of him as a uniquely creative individual, perhaps because they hear their parents call the guy “a genius”. He’s the Bob Dylan of children’s authors, too eccentrically, definitively… well, Seussian… to be confused with anyone else.) “– Julia Glass, “Roar and More” from Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Books.
December 16, 2010
It does all the time in a city
“How does life disappear like that? It does all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after weeks of you passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. This liquor store that was the Paramount will probably, unnoticed, do the same thing in three or four years, and the good times Jackie’s mother and father had here–the nights when nights weren’t long enough, when they all ended up at a blind pig on St. Clair Avenue because they couldn’t go to sleep with so much life lighting up their beautiful bodies, or at Fran’s on College, eating greasy eggs at three or four in the morning–all this, their lovely life, they would not be able to convince anyone it had existed.” –from Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.
December 14, 2010
Knowledge had to be fought for
“All this affected my formation as a historian: I became addicted to the thrill of the chase, the excitement of the game of matching your wits and will against that of Soviet officialdom. How boring it must be, I thought, to work on British history, where you just went to the PRO, and polite, helpful people gave you catalogues and then brought you the documents you wanted. What would be the fun of it? Knowledge, I decided, had to be fought for, achieved by ingenuity and persistence, even – like pleasure, in Marvell’s words – snatched ‘through the iron gates of life’.” –Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives (full text available!).
November 28, 2010
How one guy is
“Fiction isn’t about guys and girls, or any other convenient category by which we can divide the population into large groups, except in the minds of people who can’t actually read. Fiction, unlike political rhetoric, is never about the general case. It deals in specifics. A work of fiction is never “about pornography”; it is about its own story, carried by its own internal logic and adhering to its own internal rules. The story may depart from reality in any number of ways, but we can only say the writer got it wrong if the work fails as fiction. And fiction’s sole obligation, beyond being interesting, is that it be accurately observed and true to its own rules. Fiction isn’t about how guys are; it’s about how one guy is.” –AJ Somerset, “Mine Clearance for Dummies. Or, What Kind of Idiot Writes About Porn”
November 22, 2010
To become a card-carrying learner
“To be the holder of a library card is to take an early step towards citizenship. Before the bank account, before the drivers’ license, before the legally purchased beer, or the opportunity to vote, comes the chance to advertise one’s curiosity about the world. To become a card-carrying learner. Is there not something noble, something irreplaceable, in that?” –Susan Olding, “Library Haunting” in The New Quarterly 116. (Photo of Harriet, aged six weeks, the day her card was granted. Please excuse the baby acne. It was fleeting).
November 17, 2010
That mythical village
“The novels are, of course, paradoxical. They deal with violent death and violent emotions, but they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on the library floor. And, in the end, by the grace of Poirot’s little grey cells, all will be well– except, of course, with the murderer, but he deserves all that’s coming to him. All the mysteries will be explained, all the problems solved, and peace and order will return to that mythical village which, despite its above-average homicide rate, never really loses its tranquillity or its innocence.” — P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction
November 16, 2010
How to get hold of a book
“…I went off to work, stopping on the way at Kensington Public Library to get a copy of John Henry Newman’s Apologia, which I had long promised Maisie Young. She could quite well have procured it for herself during all those weeks, disabled as she was, but she belonged to that catagory of society, by no means always the least educated, who are always asking how they can get hold of a book; they know very well that one buys shoes from a shoeshop and groceries from the grocer’s but to find and enter a bookshop is not somehow within the range of their imagination.” — from Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent
