tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2800989312510875082024-03-11T18:11:24.277-04:00Conquering the ClassicsI gave myself the task of reading 100 "classic" novels. After six years, I finished those 100, and have moved on to tackle another 100.
Here are the rules I designed:
(1) I must start AND finish every book.
(2) I must read every book, including the ones I've already read.
(3) I'm required to read all books in a series. No exceptions.
(4) I'm not allowed to blog about a book before I've finished it; each book deserves its fair shot, cover to cover.Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.comBlogger231125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-80949547390224984732024-03-11T18:07:00.003-04:002024-03-11T18:09:44.700-04:00Memory returned like spring.<p><i>The Optimist's Daughter</i> by Eudora Welty, first published in book form in 1972</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Optimist's Daughter</i> is a story about a small and somewhat unique family trio - a father, his daughter, and a very recent stepmother - who are navigating a health scare, and then sadly, the death of the father, in the deep South somewhere in the 19XXs? I'm honestly not sure if there are any date ranges or references, but I'd say maybe 1940s/1950s? The story was initially published in excerpt form in the New Yorker in 1969, I believe. Maybe it's supposed to be earlier, I can't totally tell. Here are the main characters:</p><p>Judge Clint McKelva (from Mississippi) + Becky (from West Virginia, d.), then Fay (from Texas)</p><p> ==Laurel, daughter of Clint and Becky (from Mississippi) + Philip (d.)</p><p>There's also a Doctor in the mix, Dr. Courtland, who is both a former neighbor and old friend and a respected doctor in New Orleans, it seems? He is put in charge of Clint's eye surgery, which somehow ends up being fatal. He doesn't die in surgery, but after, kind of just never recovers. Laurel's mother Becky also apparently died of some sort of eye injury? Not sure what's going on there, or if eye injuries were more precarious in previous years, or if it's just dramatic coincidence. </p><p>The book follows Clint, Laurel, and Fay, and then later just Laurel and Fay as they navigate Clint's passing. We start in New Orleans for Clint's eye surgery, and find our way back to Mount Salus, Mississippi, Laurel's hometown and where Clint and Fay reside. It's not a plot-heavy book, so not much more happens other than the neighbors supporting Laurel as she processes having lost both of her parents, and Fay's somewhat wacky family from Texas descending and whisking her away for a bit. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>I liked this book, on the whole. It's fairly contemplative, and gentle, but I enjoyed it for what it was, and was pleased to read a woman author, although I am woefully under-read when it comes to BIPOC women authors, especially from the South.</i></p><p><i>Here are some thoughts!</i></p><p><b><u>The Cast of Characters</u></b></p><p><b>Clint - the Judge, first Becky's, then Fay's husband, Laurel's father, beloved neighbor</b></p><p><i>The Judge was an interesting character, particularly because he's only in the narrative for a short while, and then mostly present through Laurel and the neighbors' memories of him.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Judge McKelva was a tall, heavy man of seventy-one who customarily wore his glasses on a ribbon. Holding them in his hand now, he sat on the raised, thronelike chair above the doctor's stool, flanked by Laurel on one side and Fay on the other. <i>I liked the way Welty painted with words, telling me where each person and each item in the room could be found.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait - as if he had to catch up. He didn't try any more to hold her in his good eye.<i> It was very sad to watch the Judge deteriorate (and so rapidly) after his mysterious eye surgery. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Still clinging to the first facing pages were the pair of grayed and stippled home-printed snapshots: Clinton and Becky 'up home', each taken by the other standing in the same spot on a railroad track (a leafy glade), he slender as a wand, his foot on a milepost, swinging his straw hat; she with her hands full of the wildflowers they'd picked along the way. <i>I liked the scenes of Laurel remembering her parents and thinking about 'up home', which for Becky was her family's homestead in West Virginia. It reminded me of seeing old pictures of the family farm at Rosehaven.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her father in his domestic gentleness had a horror of any sort of private clash, of divergence from the affectionate and the real and the explainable and the recognizable. </li></ul><div><b>Becky, Clint's first wife and Laurel's mother, beloved neighbor</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><i>We didn't get a lot of information about Becky, as she has already died when the book begins, but I liked this line of someone remembering her: </i></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">'Up home, we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it. We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms wide open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.' During the very bursting of a tornado which carried away half of Mount Salus, she said, '<i>We</i> were never afraid of a little wind. Up home, we'd welcome a good storm.'</div><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>Laurel, the optimist's daughter, Becky's only child, Fay's sometimes-nemesis</b></p><p><i>Laurel is an interesting character. She's not terribly present in the narrative, in my opinion, but acts more as a vehicle for discovering and unearthing the memories of her parents. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Laurel McKelva Hand was a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark. She wore clothes of an interesting cut and texture, although her suit was wintry for New Orleans and had a wrinkle down the skirt. Her dark blue eyes looked sleepless. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. <i>Fay has been taking over the house and doing things that seem upsetting to Laurel, like painting her nails on the fine furniture. ;)</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>(Wanda) </b><b>Fay, the silly stepmother, Clint's second wife, of Texan origin</b></p><p><i>Fay is by far the most interesting character in the novel. She is depicted as a sort of wild card, undeserving of the Judge in his staid home. She initially lies and says her family is dead, and then they inconveniently show up to mourn her husband's passing and she has to admit that they are all very much alive. Here are some Fay-isms:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Fay, small and pale in her dress with the gold buttons, was tapping her sandaled foot.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Fay laughed - a single, high note, as derisive as a jay's.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On finding out her husband will need an eye operation: '</i>Just for a scratch? Why didn't those old roses go on and die?' <i>He at first thinks he's sustained an eye scratch from the rose bush in trying to prune it. I love Fay's response. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'I don't see why this had to happen to <i>me</i>.' <i>lololol.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'What's the good of a Carnival if we don't get to go, hon?' <i>Fay is very salty that they have come to New Orleans and end up spending Mardi Gras in a hospital.</i></li><ul><li>It was still incredible to Laurel that her father, at nearly seventy, should have let anyone new, a beginner, walk in on his life, that he had even agreed to pardon such a thing.</li></ul></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Doctor Courtland: </i>'He collapsed.' <i>Fay: </i>'You picked my birthday to do it on!' <i>There's a theme of things happening TO Fay, in case you hadn't picked that up ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Fay, to Doctor Courtland: </i>'All I hope is <i>you</i> lie awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'All on my birthday. Nobody told me <i>this </i>was going to happen to me!'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>When Fay's family arrives: '</i>Get back! - Who told <i>them</i> to come?'</li></ul><div><b>The neighbors, a bunch of biddies and a random husband here and there, Laurel-friendly, anti-Fay</b></div><div><i>The neighbors are sort of a collective character in that we spend most of the second half of the book in Clint and Fay's/Laurel's home, and the neighbors have invited themselves over to organize things.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Miss Tennyson:</i> 'Are we all going to have to feel sorry for her?'</div><div><br /></div><div>'I hope I never see her again,' said Laurel. </div><div>'There, girlie, you got it out,' said Miss Tennyson. 'She's a trial to us all and nothing else.' <i>On how they really feel about Fay.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>To Laurel</i>: 'Once you leave after this, you'll always come back as a visitor. Feel free, of course - but it was always my opinion that people don't really want visitors.' <i>This was interesting. The neighbors are all pretty insistent that Laurel stay in Mount Salus and try to sort of wrest the home from Fay, but Laurel is apparently an artist and lives in Chicago, so she's not swayed.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><u>Some stand-out moments</u></b></div><div><b>But when are the big floats coming? </b></div><div><i>I loved this exchange: </i></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">'What a way to keep his promise,' said Fay. 'When he told me he'd bring me to New Orleans some day, it was to see the Carnival.' She stared out the window. 'And the Carnival's going on right now. It looks like this is as close as we'll get to a parade.'</div><p></p></blockquote><p><i>Because it reminded me of when I went to visit my sister in New Orleans while she was living there. I didn't really want to go to any of the big Mardi Gras parades because I thought they'd be overwhelming and they're not really my scene, but there are many parades that happen in the weeks leading up to the main events, and so we decided to go to one of those. One of the major parades is 'Rex', so Diana took me to a parade called 'tit Rex' (like a short form of Petite Rex, or little Rex). They call themselves a 'microkrewe' and the parade floats are all miniatures, wheeled on children's playwagons and such. Diana and I were happily enjoying this parade when a couple emerged next to us and told us how they had to see a Mardi Gras parade and had driven something like 14 hours from Kentucky overnight. And they looked at us, and looked at the floats, and said, "When are the big floats coming?" And I felt very sad for them because the major parades were not for a few weeks. But it was also a hilarious moment. Fay's distance from Mardi Gras reminded me of that.</i></p><p></p><div><b>Are you a lady?</b></div><div><i>I think in various posts I've talked about whether I'd make a good XYZ based on the book's parameters, including things like a whaler, a fisherman, etc. For this book, a made a list of seeming requirements to be a lady:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Can you...</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Make a bed (<i>yes! I make mine every day)</i></li><li>Play bridge (<i>erm, sort of, long story; parents both played)</i></li><li>Separate an egg (<i>yes!)</i></li><li>Cook Sunday dinner (<i>yes!)</i></li></ul><div><i>So I guess I'm 3/4 of a lady! ;)</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>Mount Salus, Laurel's hometown and the location of Clint and Fay/Becky's home</b></div></div><div><i>I loved this description of the town:</i></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.</div><p></p></blockquote><p></p><div><b>The chimney swift, aka intruder alert, who lets itself into the home when Laurel is alone</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Windows and doors alike were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside the door in the upstairs hall.</div><div> What am I in danger of here? She wondered, her heart pounding. <i>This was an interesting scene, maybe a metaphor for the world coming in to break up Laurel's nostalgia, maybe just a silly bird!</i></div><p></p><p></p><div><div><b><u>Words or ideas new to me</u></b></div><div><b style="font-style: italic;">Straw Hat Day -</b> the day designated for men to switch from winter hats to the straw hats of spring and summer – quietly started in New Orleans in the late 1910s. In April of 1922, Mayor Andrew McShane decided to make it official, issuing a Straw Hat Day proclamation and urging men to “put the old felt lid away and crown your bean with nifty, up-to-the-minute headgear.” Stores filled their windows with straw hats, resulting in record-breaking sales. <i>Straw Hat Day is casually mentioned in the book and I thought, is this a thing I am supposed to know about? </i></div></div><p></p><p></p><div><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></div><div><i>This is the section of my blog where I talk about books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referent) or after (reverberation). </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>This line about Laurel and Fay keeping watch over Clint at the hospital:</i></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">It meant that Laurel and Fay were hardly ever int he same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining - really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord's strip of wallboard. Where there was no intimacy, Laurel shrank from contact; she shrank from that thin board and from the vague apprehension that some night she might hear Fay cry or laugh like a stranger at something she herself would rather not know.</div></blockquote><p><i>Reminded me of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Charlotte says that her path rarely crosses that of her husband, Mr. Collins, and that she encourages him in pursuits that keep their paths parallel rather than perpendicular. </i></p><p><i>And I enjoyed that Laurel has this scene:</i> </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i> on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father. <i>as Nicholas Nickleby is waiting for me to read it on my kitchen table.</i></div></blockquote><p></p><div><b><u>Lines I Particularly Liked</u></b></div><div><ul><li>Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty saraband, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.</li></ul><ul><li>This was like a nowhere.</li></ul><ul><li>In the waiting room, Fay stood being patted by an old woman who was wearing bedroom slippers and holding a half-eaten banana in her free hand.</li></ul><ul><li>She walked on, giving them the wide berth of her desolation. <i>I love this line.</i></li></ul><ul><li>The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house.</li></ul><ul><li>Set deep in the swamp, where the black trees were welling with buds like red drops, was one low beech that had kept its last year's leaves, and it appeared to Laurel to travel along with their train, gliding at a magic speed through the cypresses they left behind.</li></ul><ul><li>Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? <i>Laurel feels less certain of her enmity for Fay when she catches her dozing, and I loved this line.</i></li></ul><ul><li>From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning flickering now in the western sky, like the feathers of birds taking a bath.</li></ul><div><i>I'll leave you with a few of my special favorite moments, blobbists. </i></div></div><p></p><div><u><i>#1 - </i><i>On the title:</i></u></div><div><i>Judge: </i>Well, I'm an optimist. </div><div><i>Dr. Courtland: </i>I didn't know there were any more such animals. </div><div><i>Judge: </i>Never think you've seen the last of anything. <i>:)</i></div><div><br /></div><div><u>#2 - <i>Laurel, on her parents reading to her and to each other:</i></u></div><div>She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.</div><div><br /></div><div>Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father's and mother's. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. <i>These were some of my favorite lines in the novel.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><u><i>#3 - </i><i>On Laurel and Phil watching the birds: </i></u></div><div>All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world. </div><div> And they themselves were a part of the confluence.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Enjoy being in the confluence today, dear blobbists! This member of the confluence is off to 18th century France and the world of satire. Keep safe!</i></div><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-80315372163340798672024-02-22T18:33:00.000-05:002024-02-22T18:33:03.115-05:00I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.<p> <i>Middlesex </i>by Jeffrey Eugenides, first published in 2002</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Middlesex </i>is a story about coming and going, a tale of making and unmaking. It follows the life of Cal, who was AFAB (assigned female at birth), raised as a girl to the age of 14, then discovered that he was intersex and identified as a male from that point forward. It is a fictional story, which I think is generally the case on this blob, but useful to remember, as it does not reflect the experiences of an intersex person, nor does it speak on behalf of or allude to the experiences of all intersex folks. In today's world, Cal may have identified as non-binary or changed their pronouns, but this book came out over 2 decades ago (I know, wild to think that 2002 is that long ago) so it is a product of its moment. Here's the family tree... </p><p> Euphrosyne, mother of</p><p>Lefty (Eleutherios) and Desdemona, parents of ---- Cousin, Sourmelina, married to Jimmy Zizmo</p><p> Milton <span> and</span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Zoe<span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Theodora (Tessie), daughter to Sourmelina and Jimmy</span></span></p><p>Milton marries Tessie, they are the parents to</p><p>Cal + Chapter Eleven</p><p>If that family tree looks incestuous in its growth pattern, then you hit the nail on the head. Again, to be clear, in this work of <u>fiction</u>, Cal's hormonal/chromosomal status is impacted by inbreeding, but this should not be taken to suggest that that is the case for intersex folks writ large. The internet varies in its definition of the term/its expected prevalence, but it seems about 1.7% of the world's population, on the high end, is intersex. </p><p>But I digress. The novel follows Cal (with an omniscient version of Cal serving as narrator) from his ancestors in Greece (Lefty and Desdemona, siblings and then Cal's grandparents), to his parents (distant cousins), to his early life, and then later jumping to his adult life in Germany.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Well hello, blobbists! </i></p><p><i> I am <u>potentially</u> trying to finish up this blobbety blob around my 38th birthday, which is about a month away, so we'll see! There may be more entries in the next few weeks for those who care to read them ;)</i></p><p><i> I enjoyed reading Middlesex, as it is a very beautifully written (imo) book. It won the Pulitzer Prize, so I think other people think it was very written as well. I thought Cal was a very relatable and intriguing protagonist, and the cast of characters with Lefty and Desdemona through to Cal was engaging. I think my only complaints about the book are (and sorry if by some Freak chance you read this, Mr. Eugenides, feel free to ignore my opinions as a mere reader):</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The book follows Detroit's history after making its way from a small part of Greece (now Turkey), and while I thought there were some beautiful Detroit historical nuggets, there were times when it felt a bit too much like I was reading a fictionalized history of Detroit. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>While I believe that anyone should be able to write books from any perspective, and I see the skill and empathy required to do so, there was a part of me that couldn't get over the fact that this book about an intersex, potentially now non-binary person, was written by a cis straight man. More on this later. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>In the end, I was a little bummed we didn't spend more time with Cal. We ended up rewinding all the way to his grandparents, and then fast-forwarding a bit to see him in the present, but the book kind of wraps when Cal ages back up to 14, so there was a whole wide gap of Cal's adulthood that was absent.</i></li></ul><div><b><u>An introduction to some of the cast of characters</u></b></div><p></p><p><b>Father Mike, jilted lover of Tessie, and surprise last minute villain</b></p><p><i>I'll let you read the book to find out the villain part, but I liked this line about him: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.</li></ul><div><b>Desdemona, lifetime worrying, long-suffering, gender prognosticating grandmother to Cal</b></div><div><i>Desdemona was my favorite character. She had such beautiful complexity to her, and I loved her from the moment we saw her sitting with her silkworms in (then) Greece. I know it probably sounds weird to say it, but I kind of ship an incestuous romance if it's written well (we all know how I feel about Hotel New Hampshire) and while there are obvious social and biological reasons why this is taboo, I also understand how close a sibling relationship can be, and it doesn't seem THAT wild to me that occasionally it would translate into something different, something more, for some folks. Here are some of my favorite Desdemona moments:</i></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Desdemona would have felt no more ashamed had she herself been for sale, displayed naked on the green sofa, a price tag hanging from her foot. <i>This is after Lefty gambles away their money and they have to have a big yard sale and move in with their son, and it was just such a lovely image.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The worst had happened. For the first time in her life my grandmother had nothing to worry about. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>To anyone who never personally experienced it, it's difficult to describe the ominous, storm-gathering quality of my grandmother's fanning. Desdemona had six atrocity fans. <i>I loved this - Desdemona fans herself with historical fans about Greek atrocities, which is obviously not a laughing matter. But the image of it is just so poignant and perfect. </i></li></ul><div><b>Lefty, later</b></div><div><i>Lefty is many different men throughout the book, but I liked him best in his later years, after he experienced speech paralysis after a stroke. Here's a line of how Cal describes their relationship. </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Although he never said a word to me, I loved my Chaplinesque <i>papou</i>. His speechlessness seemed to be an act of refinement. It went with his elegant clothes, his shoes with woven vamps, the glaze of his hair. And yet he was not stiff at all but playful, even comedic. When he took me for rides in the car Lefty often pretended to fall asleep at the wheel. Suddenly his eyes would close and he would slump to one side. The car would continue on, unpiloted, drifting toward the curb. I laughed, screamed, pulled my hair and kicked my legs. At the last possible second, Lefty would spring awake, taking the wheel and averting disaster.</li></ul></div><div><b>Desdemona and Lefty, star-crossed lovers who keep their secret (mostly) by pretending to re-meet as strangers when they immigrate to the US</b></div><div><i>I love this line:</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Early on, the emotional sympathy she'd felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she'd sometimes forgotten they were separate people. <i>It reminds me of times when my sisters would cry when we were little and I would just plop right down next to them and start crying, too, because obviously we had something to cry about. ;)</i></li></ul></div><div><b>Cal - </b><i>NOTE: I will make reference to Cal's name when he was younger because he does so throughout the novel, but I want to acknowledge that for many trans folks (which Cal does not identify as, per se, but there are similarities of experience) this is considered a 'dead name' and it should not be used. </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When Calliope surfaces, she does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or checking her nails. It's a little like being possessed.<i> This was such an interesting idea, and I'm sure one that many folks who experience any kind of gender or identity shift have to navigate.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>And here is where my first dates generally go wrong. I lack sufficient data. <i>I loved this line from Cal when he's trying to date a woman named Julie in Germany. She references an ex, and he fears that he will then be asked to share his laundry list of exes, only to be outed as not really having any. I feel this way about many of my dates, and while I could, of course, make up data, it would be so much easier from a societal pressure standpoint, to simply have some!</i></li></ul></div><div><b>Milton, son of Desdemona and Lefty, husband (and cousin) of Tessie, father of Cal and Chapter Eleven</b></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He possessed a flinty self-confidence that protected him like a shell from the world's assaults. <i>What would it feel like to have this, I wonder? Cal wonders at one point looking at German nudists what it would feel like to be so free with one's body without fear of retribution or rejection or ostracization, and I wonder what it would feel like to wear self-confidence like armor. I mean, I'm not un-confident in my self, but sometimes I see people who have this Milton-esque self-confidence and I wonder from whence it came. </i></li></ul></div><div><b>Tessie, aka Theodora, daughter to Sourmelina and Jimmy Zizmo, cousin to Desdemona and Lefty, wife to Milton and mother of Cal and Chapter Eleven</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><i>Tessie and Milton have a bit of a 'star-crossed lovers' vibe as well, since Desdemona is aware of how much the family is inter-mixing and wants to 'right her wrongs' at this point. They find their way to each other in the end, anyway, but I loved the scenes of them courting each other as teens. Milton plays the clarinet in an attempt to seduce and amuse Tessie, and we find out that she has picked up the accordion, partly to spite her mother.</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The accordion seemed nearly as big as she was and she played it dutifully, badly, and always with the suggestion of a carnival sadness. <i>I love this sentence so much.</i></li></ul><div><b><u>A few general reflections</u></b></div></div><div><b>Smyrna, a city that no longer exists in the same way, a kind of Brigadoon</b></div><div><i>I loved the descriptions of Smyrna, in part because they were so cosmopolitan and lovely, but also because my grandmother was born in a free city that now has a different name, so I think I've always found something quite romantic about being born somewhere that technically no longer exists. Smyrna, for reference, is where Lefty and Desdemona find themselves en route to the US, and it is undergoing a tumultuous time, including Armenian genocide. Dr. Philobosian, later a good family friend, meets and helps Lefty and Desdemona at this time, after which his family is tragically slaughtered.</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In Smyrna, East and West, opera and <i>politakia</i>, violin and <i>zourna</i>, piano and <i>daouli</i> blended as tastefully as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>(And did I mention how in the summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan... and the smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)</li></ul></div><div><b>Balls of yarn to say goodbye</b></div><div><i>I think this was my favorite moment in the book. I don't know if it truly used to happen, but I love the idea of it either way. When Lefty and Desdemona board a ship, the Giulia, for America, this scene takes place.</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the <i>Giulia</i> blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing on shore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.</li></ul></div><div><b>Who do we write as, does it get weird, and why?</b></div><div><i> I jotted this note down in my book as I was reading, and I'm still marinating on it. Like I said earlier, I think it's <u>so</u> important that we not dictate who writes as who, and that there is a desire and ability to write from many different identities and perspectives. That being said, there was a part of me that asked about Eugenides' motivation for writing this book, centering on this character. I think in particular I feel that there is still such an underrepresentation of the work of authors who identify as intersex, trans, and/or non-binary, and so it felt a little bit like a space was created for an important conversation, but in another way it was also taken away from someone for whom the story would be more authentic and more true. The cynical part of me also felt a little bit like, well, this feels like a fictionalized memoir of Eugenides' life, with some more historical heft and the 'twist' of an intersex character, since it needed something splashy to get a Pulitzer. But maybe that's harsh! In doing a very small amount of googling about this, I have found things like this: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>As a whole, the community agrees that Middlesex's intersex protagonist is not believable. Most significantly, the intersex community has had issue with the author's decision to make Middlesex's fictional protagonist intersex due to his grandparents being brother and sister.<i> </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I definitely see the problematicness (is that a word?) of this, and portraying it as a sort of scientific basis for Cal's state of being.</i></div><div><p><b>Hair</b></p><p><i>I liked the way that hair came up in the novel, first for Desdemona, and later for Cal. </i></p><p></p><ul><li>These braids were not delicate like a little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail. Years, seasons, and various weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. <i>I had a friend who kept her hair very long for a very long time, and I like thinking about all the years and moments that were living in those fibers.</i></li></ul><ul><li>Hair safely restored beneath her hairnet, Desdemona glowered around the yard, submerged in a despair too deep for tears. </li></ul><div><i>Cal, later</i>: "Cut my hair? Never! I was still growing it out. My dream was to someday live inside it. <i>I loved this line. </i></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Emotions, and how hard it is to express them</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness', joy', or 'regret'. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age'. I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants', as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. <i>I love this paragraph, and I do wholeheartedly agree.</i></li></ul></div><p></p><p><b><u>Unanswered Questions</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Why is Chapter Eleven called that? </i>OK, so I consulted the interwebs, and apparently Eugenides explains this (on page 512) because Cal's brother bankrupts the family, and that's the reference to Chapter Eleven, but that is all they ever call him. But that doesn't make sense because he wouldn't do that until he was much older, so what did they call him before? And also I'm a pretty close reader and I 100% missed the explanation, so maybe it could have been a bit clearer. It felt a little too 'twee' to have a character with a wacky random name when it didn't really have that much meaning in the end.</li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>There were a few books in particular that this book reminded me of as I read it. </i></p><p><i>(1) Proust/In Search of Lost Time - this line from Middlesex: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my father had it rained that night.</li></ul><div><i>Reminded me of this line from <u>The Guermantes Way,</u> on why we wake up each morning as ourselves and no one else </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? It is not clear what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings we might be, it is the being we were the day before that we unerringly grasp.</li></ul></div><div><i>(2) Hotel New Hampshire - for many reasons, not least of which the siblings/lovers storyline. For some reason this line in particular made me think of HNH:</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>For a while we lived with a single lightbulb, which Milton carried from room to room. 'This way I can keep track of how much power we're using', he said, screwing the bulb into the dining room fixture so that we could sit down to dinner.</li></ul><div><i>(3) The Night Watchman - there's a section in the later part of the novel where Cal runs away, not wanting a medical surgery, and ends up being an exhibitionist (Hermaphroditus) of sorts to make a living in San Francisco. It reminded me of a part in The Night Watchman, a Louise Erdrich novel, where Patrice is kidnapped and forced to 'exhibit' herself as Babe the Blue Ox with some excessive cleavage and a skintight suit.</i></div></div><p></p><p><u><b>Lines I Liked:</b></u></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Automobiles were the new pleasure domes.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Despite my grandmother's corrective lenses, the world remained out of focus.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Generally speaking, American's like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. <i>This is specifically in reference to Americans not wanting a Greek president/the failed attempt of Dukakis.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I never know what I feel until it's too late.</li></ul><div><b><u>Words that were new to me:</u></b></div><div><i style="font-weight: bold;">rebetika - </i>Rebetiko, plural rebetika, occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico, is a term used today to designate originally disparate kinds of urban Greek music which in the 1930s went through a process of musical syncretism and developed into a more distinctive musical genre</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Well friends, there you have it! Onwards to Ms. Welty and <u>The Optimist's Daughter</u>. </i></div><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-77277406314759754982024-02-12T14:47:00.001-05:002024-02-12T14:47:03.736-05:00Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human.<p> <i>Nightwood</i> by Djuna Barnes, first published in 1936</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>This book <u>sort of</u> has a plot. That's not loaded with any good or bad opinions on that, it's just, imo, the truth. It's very lyrical, and very moving, and while a few big things here and there 'happen', it all kind of feels like it's taken place somewhere in the background, and what's really most important is the poetry of the prose. </i></p><p><i>Here's our cast of characters: </i></p><p><i>Hedvig and Guido Volkbein, parents of...</i></p><p><i>Felix Volkbein, the 'Baron' (not really a baron, long story), who eventually marries -- Robin Vote </i></p><p><i>And who together have a son that they name Guido.</i></p><p><i>But then Robin leaves Felix for a woman named -- Nora Flood, and for a while they are very passionately in love, until Robin leaves Nora for a woman named == Jenny Petheridge. Nora is still very much in love with Robin, btw. </i></p><p><i>Everyone has a mutual friend named Dr. Matthew O'Connor, who appears throughout and tries to console the jilted ex-lovers of Robin, and the story mostly takes place in three cities: Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.</i></p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Hello, blobbists! </i></p><p><i> It is a not-so-crisp day in February, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on my latest book. I finished Nightwood a while ago, and while there isn't much in the way of plot, as I mentioned, there's a lot of exquisite writing, so I found myself taking my time with this post. I don't know that I particularly liked reading Nightwood, but I am very glad that I read it, if that makes any sense. ;) </i></p><p><b><i><u>My thoughts on the introduction</u></i></b></p><p><i>My copy of the book starts off with an introduction by Jeanette Winterson, who seems to be a rather famous British author. As you know if you read my blob regularly, I don't like to read things that aren't the book before I read the book, so I read the introduction afterwards, and I found it quite surprisingly enchanting, and quite spot-on in terms of the reflections on the book. Here are some of my favorite of Winterson's lines:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Nightwood</i> is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined. <i>Isn't this a beautiful image?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Robin's passivity, Jenny's predatory nature, and Nora's passionate devotion make an impossible triangle. The daily assaults of selfishness and self-harm do not offer a picture of love between women as anything safe or easy. <i>Oooh, this one really stuck with me. I've definitely seen the book described as a lesbian 'cult classic', and I can see why, and how revolutionary it must have been to emerge in the 1930s featuring so many versions of love between women.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Nightwood </i>is not afraid of feeling. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The best texts are time machines; they are of their moment, and can tell it, and they can take us back there later. But they are something more, too - they live on into the future because they were never strapped into time.<i> This is just lovely. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Nightwood</i>, peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves.<i> Again, such stunning prose! Perhaps I must find myself some Jeanette Winterson to read!</i></li></ul><div><i><b><u>General reflections</u></b></i></div><div><i><b><u><br /></u></b></i></div><div><i>Okay, well enough of other people talking about the book. Let's discuss what <u>I</u> really liked about it. </i></div><p></p><p><b>Writing (like Proust) about music</b></p><p><i>Something I've come across in reading 'classic' novels is more prose specifically written to describe classical music, and as a classically-trained cellist, I find it so enchanting. Maybe there's more prose out there in contemporary fiction that discusses music, but it seems to have been more 'au courant' at certain periods to describe things like operas, symphonies, and small quartets, like Proust's spectacular descriptions of music at Madame Verdurin's house. Here's a line I loved:</i></p><blockquote><p>Three massive pianos (Hedvig had played the waltzes of her time with the masterly stroke of a man, in the tempo of her blood, rapid and rising - that quick mannerliness of touch associated with the playing of the Viennese, who, though pricked with the love of rhythm, execute its demands in the duelling manner) sprawled over the thick dragon's-blood pile of rugs from Madrid.</p></blockquote><p><b>What you drink based on where you are</b></p><p><i>There's a great line about beverages and geography that I loved.</i></p><blockquote><p>Austria and tea could never go together. All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them. <i>What do you think the beverage of your city or town is, blobbist? Do you agree with this sentiment? If Philly had a drink, I think it would be...water ice? LOL. I don't think that counts as a beverage but whatever. It's sort of liquid.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Zeugma</b></p><p><i>Again, if you've been following along, you know how much of a sucker I am for zeugma. Here's how the internet defines it: <b>zeugma - </b></i>a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (<i>e.g., John and his license expired last week</i>) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (<i>e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts</i>).</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">His chest was as heavy as if it were supporting the combined weight of their apparel and their destiny.</p></blockquote><p><b><u><i>The cast of characters, presented in vignettes</i></u></b></p><p><b>Guido #1, on hiding his blood</b></p><p><i>The elder Guido is hiding from his wife and family that he has Jewish roots, which I thought might end up playing a larger part, but ultimately served as a sort of brewing/festering family secret in a time when anti-Semitism was agressively present. (Not that it's nonexistent today, tbh.)</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>on 'family portraits' that are hung on his wall: </i>The likeness was accidental. Had anyone cared to look into the matter they would have discovered these canvases to be reproductions of two intrepid and ancient actors. Guido had found them in some forgotten and dusty corner and had purchased them when he had been sure that he would need an alibi for the blood. <i>I love so much about this - it's basically the equivalent of putting up photos with their stock photo in them and being like, yeah, those are my grandparents/cousins/etc. I also think 'alibi for the blood' is a stunning phrase.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>'Baron' Felix</b></p><p><i>Felix is not, in fact a Baron, as his father has made up his lineage as part of his attempt to hide his roots. I don't think Felix actually knows this, though.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Felix was heavier than his father and taller. His hair began too far back on his forehead. His face was a long stout oval, suffering a laborious melancholy. <i>Wow. What a stunning portrayal of a man. ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was usually seen walking or driving alone, dressed as if expecting to participate in some great event, though there was no function in the world for which he could be said to be properly garbed; wishing to be correct at any moment, he was tailored in part for the evening and in part for the day. <i>This is so spectacularly sad, and paints such a perfect picture of Felix, who seems to be living in a sort of permanent stage of FOMO.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In nineteen hundred and twenty he was in Paris (his blind eye had kept him out of the army), still spatted, still wearing his cutaway, bowing, searching, with quick pendulous movements, for the correct thing with which to pay tribute: the right street, the right cafe, the right building, the right vista. <i>Again, Felix is so perfectly portrayed as a man without a home, without a real sense of self, always trying to find where he fits.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Nora Flood</b></p><p><i>Nora is the first woman to be Robin's lover, and the one she leaves Felix for. Nora and Jenny are, imho, significantly more likable than Robin, but perhaps that's something about how love works; it doesn't always attract us to the kindest people, and we cannot always control our desires.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The strangest 'salon' in America was Nora's. It was the 'paupers' salon for poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine; all these could be seen sitting about her oak table before the huge fire, Nora listening, her hand on her hound, the firelight throwing her shadow and his high against the wall. Of all that ranting, roaring crew, she alone stood out.<i> Don't you just want to drop everything and go to Nora's salon? I sure do!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own descent. <i>I'm still not really sure what this sentence means, but I love it.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>One missed in her a sense of humour. Her smile was quick and definite, but disengaged.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Matthew, to Nora: </i>'You never loved anyone before, and you'll never love anyone again, as you love Robin.' <i>This seems to be the case for anyone who loves Robin, which seems to be unlucky for them in the end.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Nora, to Matthew: </i>'There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can't, I can't wait for ever!' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart!' <i>So sad! So heartbreaking!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Jenny Petherbridge</b></p><p><i>Jenny Petherbridge kind of steals Robin out from under Nora, although again, I'm not so sure Robin is a such a prize. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jenny Petherbridge was a widow, a middle-aged woman who had been married four times. Each husband had wasted away and died; she had been like a squirrel racing a wheel day and night in an endeavour to make them historical; they could not survive it. <i>I love this line so much. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She had no sense of humour or peace or rest. <i>Apparently Robin is attracted to women without a sense of humor. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The books in her library were other people's selections.<i> This is a real black mark on her character in my book. But at least she has a library!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was avid and disorderly in her heart. <i>Oooh, I love this line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing.<i> And this one. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Little Guido, son of the 'Baron' Felix and Robin</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Mentally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. <i>This is such an amazing sentence to capture little Guido. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>The Doctor (Dr. Matthew O'Connor), an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>the Doctor</i> - My mind is so rich that it is always wandering. <i>ME TOO, Matthew, ME TOO.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. <i>Lololll, what makes a liar valuable, I wonder?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Oh,' he cried. 'A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves <i>and</i> a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my kind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives?' <i>I love this so much. Matthew is talking to Nora, who is complaining of her heartbreak from Robin, and this is Matthew's comeback. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? <i>Well? Are you? ;)</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Robin Vote, the center of the love triangle (or love square?), who may or may not be worth the fuss</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She hates everyone near her. <i>WOW. What a real catch!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. <i>OK, that's not difficult or problematic at all. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it <i>is</i> in the way. <i>What a force! I love this line, because I feel like it so perfectly captures her aura.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><u><i>And now allow me to present: the three eras of Robin</i></u></b></p><p><b>1 - Courting Robin/The Robin and Felix era</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man's image is a figure of doom. Because of this, Felix found her presence painful, and yet a happiness. <i>Isn't that just Robin in a nutshell? Painful, but also a happiness?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Robin took to wandering again, to intermittent travel from which she came back hours, days later, disinterested. People were uneasy when she spoke to them; confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning.<i> God, this is such a beautiful line. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Felix, later: </i>Why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark for the rest of my life. <i>Poor Felix! Like Nora, and later Jenny, I think everyone is a bit worse for the wear after loving Robin!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>2 - The Robin and Nora Era</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nora closed her house. They travelled from Munich, Vienna and Budapest into Paris. Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget. <i>This is just so stunning, and feels like such an apt capture of their relationship.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humours. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home. <i>I love this so much, as if Robin is a pet that needs to have a constant scent of home to stay rooted.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>To keep her (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew now that there was no way but death. In death Robin would belong to her. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce. <i>God, I love this line. I mean, that is a serious and likely often painful kind of love, but just stunning prose.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Surprising, isn't it, I'm happier when I'm alone now, without her, because when she was here with me, in this house, I had to watch her wanting to go and yet to stay. <i>This seems to be the case with many of Robin's lovers, where the absence of her brings a kind of peace, but also a deep sense of loss.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Matthew</i> - Oh, for God's sweet sake, didn't she ever disgust you! Weren't you sometimes pleased that you had the night to yourself, wishing, when she did come home, that it was never? <i>LOLOLOLOL I love this line so much. Matthew is talking to Nora, who can't stop waxing poetic about her time with Robin, and he's finally just like, come on, didn't she ever just GET ON YOUR NERVES?!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? <i>There are so many sentences in this book that I feel like could be starters or prompts for entire novels. There's another introduction by T.S. Eliot, who championed this book and its publication, and I can see why he loved the poetry of the lines so much.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Robin can go anywhere, do anything, because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.<i> Wow. So powerful. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>3 - The Robin and Jenny era</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin. She was a 'squatter' by instinct. <i>I love this description of how Jenny covets and then steals Robin. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jenny knew about Nora immediately; to know Robin ten minutes was to know about Nora. Robin spoke of her in long, rambling, impassioned sentences. It had caught Jenny by the ear - she listened, and both loves seemed to be one and her own. From that moment the catastrophe was inevitable. <i>Again, a whole novel could start with that: "from that moment the catastrophe was inevitable".</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She (Jenny) did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence. Jenny walked up and down her darkened hotel room, crying and stumbling. <i>Again, sadly it seems like winning Robin's love is not such a great prize, but Jenny must find this out on her own, just as Felix and Nora did.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>This is the section where I talk about books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referents) or after (reverberations). </i></p><p><i>There were two things that this book really reminded me of: </i></p><p><i>(1) Proust - The way Proust writes about love, especially unrequited, or jilted love, felt so familiar as I was reading these descriptions of Felix and Nora and Jenny's love for Robin, and their feeling that something absolutely life-alteringly bad would happen if they didn't pursue it, even at their own peril. Here's one of Proust's lines as a reminder: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">And this malady which Swann's love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.</p></blockquote><p><i>Also, the way Barnes described music was very reminiscent of/made me nostalgic for the way Proust writes about classical music. </i> </p><p>(2) <i>The Hours</i>, <i>by Michael Cunningham, particularly the Virginia Woolf narrative - something about the way that Robin was simultaneously desperately desired by her partners but also kind unable to be fixed in place or time felt very reminiscent of Woolf's wanderings and unwillingness/inability to stay moored to her husband. </i></p><p><u style="font-weight: bold;">Lines I Liked</u><i> (this is a trimmed down version, because there were so many!)</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Hedvig had liked things in twos and threes.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She seemed to be expecting a bird.<i> I love this line so much. What does it mean to be expecting a bird? I love it. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He moved with a humble hysteria. <i>Mm. This line is just so fantastic.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The last muscle of aristocracy is madness.<i> Again. So great.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The darkness is the closet in which your lover roosts her heart. <i>This was really in contention for the title, but ultimately I felt like the title captured Robin's intensity better.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Bend down the tree of knowledge and you'll unroost a strange bird.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Do you think there is no lament in this world but your own? <i>Again, could be a whole novel!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If you don't want to suffer you should tear yourself apart. <i>God, so eloquent. </i></li></ul><div><i>I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines, describing some of Robin's intense attachments. </i></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">They were so 'haunted' of each other that separation was impossible.</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The louder she cried out the farther away went the floor below, as if Robin and she, in their extremity, were a pair of opera glasses turned to the wrong end, diminishing in their painful love; a speed that ran away with the two ends of the building, stretching her apart.</p></blockquote><p><i>With hope that you experience love, but perhaps never a love so passionately painful as that of falling in love with Robin Vote, I'll leave you to return to the rest of your day! Keep passing the open windows, keep safe, and keep reading! I'm on to <u>Middlesex</u>.</i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-45460741297683857312023-12-08T19:29:00.005-05:002023-12-08T19:29:26.194-05:00Fancy inviting guests and not treating them properly!<p> <i>A Passage to India</i> by E.M. Forster, first published in 1924</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><u>A Passage to India</u> explores what happens when worlds collide. It centers around the experiences of an Indian man and doctor, Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Fielding, and two British women, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested. Mrs. Moore has come to Chandrapore from England with Miss Adela Quested, who is considering getting together with Mrs. Moore's son, Mr. Ronny Heaslop. Mr. Heaslop is a local government official under Britain's colonial reign. Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore are anxious to taste the 'real India', but when Dr. Aziz takes them on a journey to the local Marabar Caves, the 'real India' (or maybe just the CRAZINESS IN THE AIR) gets to Miss Quested, and she accuses Dr. Aziz of attacking her in one of the caves. </p><p>Dr. Aziz is arrested immediately, and the Brits and Indians are stoked into a fervor and frenzy. Mr. Fielding is the only one to stand against his peers, attesting continuously to his friend Dr. Aziz's innocence. Mrs. Moore believes Adela has made everything up, but she won't say so publicly, and she dies on a return trip to England. Ultimately, in a bizarre twist, and after we are sure in several moments on our own with Miss Quested that this is the case, she admits that she made the whole thing up (or maybe she hallucinated it? It's quite unclear) WHEN SHE IS ON THE WITNESS STAND (drama much?). </p><p>Dr. Aziz is released, but of course this has completely poisoned his attitude toward the British, with whom Dr. Aziz and his friends had previously had a sort of tenuous-not-quite-almost-working relationship. Aziz begins to doubt Mr. Fielding's loyalty, especially when Mr. Fielding takes Adela Quested under his wing after her bizarre actions at the trial. Aziz and Fielding drift apart, and eventually Fielding returns to England. After a miscommunication, it seems Fielding has married Adela back in England, and Aziz is furious, feeling utterly betrayed. In the final scenes of the novel, Fielding returns to India, where Aziz discovers that Fielding has in fact married one of Mrs. Moore's younger children, Stella. This still feels like a betrayal as Fielding is still friendly with Heaslop and has married his sister, but they reach a fragile reconciliation just before Fielding returns home to England. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbers, </i></p><p><i> Since so few people read my blob in a consecutive sort of way, I'm going to go ahead and blob on the next novel on the list. As I said in my last blob, it was trippy to read this book, a British white man's exploration of colonial rule in India, right after reading Lahiri's collection of stories centered on Indian experiences, but that's just the way the (<strike>random list of books selected</strike>) cookie crumbles!</i></p><p><i>I liked the writing of this book, and the questions it made me ask myself, but I can't say I enjoyed reading the second half of it, once Dr. Aziz was imprisoned. It was more like I went from a gentle read in the beginning to frantically reading to the end to see if things would be put right. But maybe that's exactly how I was supposed to experience it! Anyway, here are my thoughts, as usual in a bit of a hodge podge! I have a lot of thoughts, and Forster is a lovely writer, so buckle up and grab a cozy cuppa!</i></p><p><i><b>Chandrapore, a city of gardens: </b></i>They rise from the gardens where ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples. Seeking light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds. <i>I loved this description of the city.</i></p><p><i><b>The whimsy of before</b> - Like I said, the first half or third of the book has a playful, almost whimsical quality. Here are some of my favorite examples, many of which are foreshadowing for more darker moments ahead.</i></p>'Mr. Mahmoud Ali, how are you?'<br /> 'Thank you, Dr. Aziz, I am dying.'<br /> 'Dying before your dinner? Oh, poor Mahmoud Ali!'<br />'Hamidullah here is actually dead. He passed away just as you rode up on your bike.'<br />'Yes, that is so,' said the other. 'Imagine us both as addressing you from another and a happier world.'<br /><div style="text-align: left;">'Does there happen to be such a thing as a hookah in that happier world of yours? <i>lololol.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">'Saying nothing?' He had as a matter of fact said, 'Damn Aziz' - words that the servant understood, but was too polite to repeat. One can tip too much as well as too little, indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has not yet been minted. <i>hagh.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>I thought this was funny, but then later it was not so much.... </b></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">They were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">'I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike. Do you not agree with me?'</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Poetry:</b> </i>They listened delighted, for they took the public view of poetry, not the private which obtains in England. It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. <i>This was such a beautiful moment.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>What makes an exile an exile? </b></i>It was the Anthem of the Army of Occupation. It reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile. <i>I thought it was odd that the Brits called themselves 'exiles', when in fact they were essentially colonial overlords. But I guess most of the time colonists don't refer to themselves directly as 'colonial overlords'. ;) Interesting how it gives them a kind of victim mentality in their head, when in fact, they're wresting control of an entire country away from its own people.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>On being obligated to name race:</b> </i>Ronny was ruffled. From his mother's description he had thought the doctor might be young Muggins from over the Ganges, and had brought out all the comradely emotions. What a mix-up! Why hadn't she indicated by the tone of her voice that she was talking about an Indian? <i>This was a great moment. Ronny is mad that his mother told him a story (about Aziz) and didn't immediately clarify that he was Indian. It reminded me of several times I've referenced in this blob how POC writers are often expected to name the race of their characters explicitly and immediately, yet so many readers (esp. white readers) assume whiteness unless otherwise stated.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Home is not where you hang your hat</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>'</i>You never used to judge people like this at home.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'India isn't home', he retorted, rather rudely. <i>Ooh, this was such an interesting exchange between Ronny and his mother. I liked that Forster created British people who were trying to essential not be 'the worst', but who were still flawed and still on a journey that felt reasonable. Ronny is not on a journey, but his mother is.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>I already hated Ronny, and then... </b></i>Ronny had repressed his mother when she enquired after his viola; a viola was almost a demerit, and certainly not the sort of instrument one mentioned in public. <i>RUDE! Obviously violas are THE BOMB.COM. My sister is an excellent violist, in case you didn't know, as is one of my very best friends, and they also sit closest to the cello section so obviously there's a kind of kinship. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>On posing as gods</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">'We're not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly!' </div><div style="text-align: left;">'What do you mean?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'What I say. We're out here to do justice and keep the peace. Them's my sentiments. India isn't a drawing-room.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Your sentiments are those of a god,' she said quietly, but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Trying to recover his temper, he said, 'India likes gods.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'And Englishmen like posing as gods.' <i>OOh, this was another great exchange between Ronny and his mom. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Mangoes, mangoes! Juicy juicy mangoes!</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">'Visitors like you are too rare.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'They are indeed,' said Professor Godbole. 'Such affability is seldom seen. But what can we offer to detain them?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Mangoes, mangoes.' <i>haghaghahgha. I loved this line.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>A robin. A swallow. A crow!</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">'Do you know what the name of that green bird up above us is?' she asked, putting her shoulder rather nearer to his.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Bee-eater.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Oh no, Ronny, it has red bars on its wings.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Parrot,' he hazarded.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Good gracious no.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">The bird in question dived into the dome of the tree. It was of no importance, yet they would have liked to identify it, it would somehow have solaced their hearts. <i>I loved this exchange, even though Ronny and Adela were a very weird couple during the times that they were on. As a bird lover, I love that they were bonding over trying to name the species, and how it pulled them into a kind of reverie together.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Did your hands brush against each other in a garden?</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">Ronny's face grew dim - an event that always increased her esteem for his character. Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers' quarrel. Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable. And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars. <i>Again, not shipping Ronela (or Adenny?) but this was a wonderfully beautiful moment. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>What about love?</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">'What about love?'...Not to love the man one's going to marry! Not to find it out until this moment! Not even to have asked oneself the question until now. <i>Perhaps part of Adela's bizarre accusations of Aziz stems from her own existential crisis. These are the questions she's asking herself in the cave just before things go down.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Guests, or prisoners?</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">He would prefer to give breakfast to all four; still, guests must do as they wish, or they become prisoners. <i>I love this line so much. 'Guests must do as they wish, or they become prisoners'. So fantastic.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Mrs. Moore & Mr. Fielding</i> </b>- They knew one another very little, and felt rather awkward at being drawn together by an Indian. The racial problem can take subtle forms. In their case it had induced a sort of jealousy, a mutual suspicion. He tried to goad her enthusiasm; she scarcely spoke. <i>Forster wrote really poignantly about race, and race relations, in a way that I haven't seen a lot of white authors do. he also centered dual protagonists in Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding, which allowed him to not otherize the Indian experience, but also not to lay claim to it as his own, which I thought was really artfully done.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Why can't our besties be besties?</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">Loving them both, he expected them to love each other. They didn't want to. <i>I love this line. It's so true! Sometimes we bring our favorite people together and assume they'll love each other because we love them both, but sometimes it just isn't so!</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Sheeple sheeple sheeple</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">He was still after facts, though the herd had decided on emotion. Nothing enraged Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. <i>I can't imagine Forster was all that popular in England after publishing this, since his stance is pretty clear, and he's fairly vicious about the Brits. This made me like Forster all the more.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Using the n-word</b></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I've never seen the n-word used to describe non-Black people, so it was a surprise to see it pop up several times in this work in relation to the Indians. Such vitriol and hate in the word.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>The hexus</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;">The evil was propagating in every direction, it seemed to have an existence of its own, apart from anything that was done or said by individuals. <i>This was so poignantly done, the idea that the evil was just growing and festering without direction or leadership, per se, and it reminded me of the hexus in Fern Gully.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><b>Palestine</b> - </i>Her friends kept up their spirits by demanding holocausts of natives, but she was too worried and weak to do that. <i>There were several moments after the Brits were supposedly attacked via Adela that reminded me of Israel and Palestine in this moment. It felt like the British response was deeply out of proportion with the 'alleged' crime, and while there are of course also Israeli hostages of Hamas, there are times where the response from Israel has felt not so far off from 'demanding holocausts of natives'.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>The last throes of friendship</i></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>This is the final scene between Aziz and Fielding, during which they are, very dramatically, both on horseback.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">'Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then' - he rode against him furiously - 'and then', he concluded, half kissing him, 'you and I shall be friends.' </div><div style="text-align: left;"> 'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. It's what I want. It's what you want.'</div><div style="text-align: left;"> But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet', and the sky said, 'No, not there.' <i>Such an eloquent conclusion. Aziz's sentiments also reminded me of RRR (so named for its actors, but also translated in the English version as Rise-Roar-Revolt), a fantastic period drama by S. S. Rajamouli, who co-wrote the film with V. Vijayendra Prasad. I watched it last year because watched as many Oscar-nominated films as possible, and the song "Naatu Naatu" from RRR was nominated (and won!) the Oscar for best original song. It's a rather long film by American standards (3 h 7 m) but I high recommend!</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><u><b>Terms New to Me </b>(this is just a smattering, as there were many)</u></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOy9523PkSxw68wYIBntsqYbk3NoRGZFBVUakeSG3nO_d0KKTpZ45NXcNklNFGK3LWQoiQbjdL33OwdESYgEPQXrRR2XBgl9ON-dar4dVhHFZ0w05Yc9Xa69AiEo4473HAygaYu02ZvcCISScZg28UTaa5fBJhS3vxqkByA-hpcG0PpTdlYhJK2zy4l1U" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="440" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOy9523PkSxw68wYIBntsqYbk3NoRGZFBVUakeSG3nO_d0KKTpZ45NXcNklNFGK3LWQoiQbjdL33OwdESYgEPQXrRR2XBgl9ON-dar4dVhHFZ0w05Yc9Xa69AiEo4473HAygaYu02ZvcCISScZg28UTaa5fBJhS3vxqkByA-hpcG0PpTdlYhJK2zy4l1U=w133-h200" width="133" /></a></div><i>bulbul - </i>a tropical African and Asian songbird that typically has a melodious voice and drab plumage. Many kinds have a crest. (<i>I LOLed at the 'drab plumage'. Mean-spirited! I'm sure it's not drab, bulbul.)<br /><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>chuprassi (alt. chaprassi) -</i> an official messenger : functionary, overseer, servant, porter, bearer.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>howdah - </i>(in South Asia) a seat for riding on the back of an elephant or camel, typically with a canopy and accommodating two or more people.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>izzat</i> - honor, reputation, or prestige.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>nautch - </i>(in South Asia) a traditional dance performed by professional dancing girls.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>pan (probably paan) - </i>an Indian after-dinner treat that consists of a betel leaf filled with chopped betel (areca) nut (Areca catechu) and slaked lime </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>purdah - </i>the practice among women in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of living in a separate room or behind a curtain, or of dressing in all-enveloping clothes, in order to stay out of the sight of men or strangers. <i>In looking back at <u>The Home and The World</u>, by Rabindranath Tagore, I see he was essentially describing purdah, though I can't recall if he called it that specifically. I liked that later, Fielding and Aziz discussed their pasts, and when Aziz showed Fielding a picture of his (deceased) wife, it was a very big deal because it was, in essence, lifting a purdah for Fielding. Here's his response:</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">He looked back at his own life. What a poor crop of secrets it had produced! There were things in it that he had shown to no one, but they were so uninteresting, it wasn't worth while lifting a purdah on their account. <i>What would you reveal to someone to share vulnerability? Where would you lift purdahs looking back at your life?</i></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>pukka (informal British) - </i>genuine; of or appropriate to high or respectable society; excellent.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfXJZILXMXmAMiKGJxO4Aupw22NG7gThpTnMz7HH-kLe5M_a44ZOJ47hB7eJ5e2mVu2R7QUkgua3r1vY1GF-HtbVcRcr4gCu0jTE0BZNvEWePBCFjT30hr8tKfD2-SnWnU-a3HZmyV2-MOsaq7VIh3eDbvhLO1EeXLAq3gynV2nKQj1FEDt3LgVjQgrUI" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="542" height="117" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfXJZILXMXmAMiKGJxO4Aupw22NG7gThpTnMz7HH-kLe5M_a44ZOJ47hB7eJ5e2mVu2R7QUkgua3r1vY1GF-HtbVcRcr4gCu0jTE0BZNvEWePBCFjT30hr8tKfD2-SnWnU-a3HZmyV2-MOsaq7VIh3eDbvhLO1EeXLAq3gynV2nKQj1FEDt3LgVjQgrUI=w200-h117" width="200" /></a></div><i>shawm - </i>medieval and Renaissance wind instrument, forerunner of the oboe, with a double reed enclosed in a wooden mouthpiece, and having a penetrating tone.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>topi - </i>When worn by itself, the taqiyah can be any color. However, particularly in Arab countries, when worn under the keffiyeh headscarf, they are kept in a traditional white. Some Muslims wrap a turban around the cap, called an ʿimamah in Arabic, which is often done by Shia and Sunni Muslims. In the United States and Britain, taqiyas are usually referred to as "kufis". "Topi" is a type of taqiyah cap that is worn in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and other regions of South Asia. Many different types of topi caps include the Sindhi cap, worn in Sindh, and the crochet topi that is often worn at Muslim prayer services. The topi cap is often worn with shalwar kameez, which is the national costume of Pakistan. <i>(from Wikipedia)</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What does unhappiness matter when we are are all unhappy together? <i>Reminded me of both the opening of Anna K and a Proust line about only being unhappy for a day at a time.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>India had developed sides of his character that she had never admired. <i>Such a great line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When English and Indians were both present, he grew self-conscious, because he did not know to whom he belonged. For a little he was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended, and he belonged to no one but himself. <i>This was such an incredible moment when a group disbanded and a servant sorted out his identity before moving along with his day.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>On twittered the Sunday bells; the East had returned to the East via the suburbs of England, and had become ridiculous during the detour.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The heat had leapt forward in the last hour, the street was deserted as if a catastrophe had cleaned off humanity during the inconclusive talk. <i>Again, this is such a visually stunning line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Astonishing even from the rise of the civil station, here the Marabar were gods to whom earth is a ghost. <i>The Marabar are the caves where Aziz takes the women on a tour.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was early in morning, for the day, as the hot weather advanced, swelled like a monster at both ends, and left less and less room for the movements of mortals. <i>STUNNING.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous. <i>lololol this is in reference to the fact that many animals hibernate, or just take a portion of the year to rest up, be a little salty if they want, and how humans are perhaps the worse off for not doing so.</i></li></ul><div><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></div><div><i>This line, about a benevolent Indian called the Nawab Bahadur - '</i>Despite my advanced years, I am learning to drive', he said. 'Man can learn everything if he will but try.' <i>reminded me of Mrs. Sen from <u>The Interpreter of Maladies</u>, and how in different worlds, different types of cars, different timescapes, they were struggling with the same thing.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>This line: </i>Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? <i>reminded me of this line, from Proust, Volume V, The Captive: </i>"But are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world?"</div><div><br /></div><div><i>This line: </i>Every third servant is a spy. <i>reminded me of my blob title for <u>To Kill a Mockingbird</u> - </i>Every third Merriweather is morbid.</div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>This line: </i>Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. <i>reminded me of </i><u>The Hobbit</u>, and this part of that post: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">Gandalf is responsible for getting Bilbo involved with the adventure (of course; Gandalf is always involved in the "I have an ulterior motive but it's in everyone's best interest" kind of mind games) and Bilbo is having NONE of it at the beginning. "We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" He's almost gotten Gandalf to leave and he says, "Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. Not today."</div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">[But sneaky Gandalf puts a mark on his door that says BURGLAR LIVES HERE LOOKING FOR AN ADVENTURE (okay, I looked it up and it's actually "Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable reward" - close enough!) - only some compact, runish form of that phrase - and the adventure comes looking for Bilbo anyway.] <i>No punctuality from adventures! Make you late for dinner!</i></div></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Mrs. Moore, Adela, Mr. Fielding</i></div><div style="text-align: left;">'I like mysteries but I rather dislike muddles,' said Mrs. Moore. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'A mystery is a muddle.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Oh, do you think so, Mr. Fielding?' <i>I loved this exchange. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">To shout is useless, because a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own. <i>Creepy!</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. <i>Well blobbers, I'll leave you, then! I'm going to start a hygge cozy winter book bingo next, I think, so there may be a delay before I return for my next entry! In the mean time, keep safe, keep warm, and keep cozy! And keep reading!</i></div>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-46538934675538365192023-12-06T22:21:00.004-05:002023-12-06T22:21:56.966-05:00I was hoping you could make me feel better, say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.<p><i>Interpreter of Maladies</i> by Jhumpa Lahiri, first published in 1999</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Interpreter of Maladies </i>is a series of collected stories that center on Indian experiences across a multitude of geographies. The stories examine everything from love lost to the deep-rooted growing pains of moving across the world and trying to adjust. They are touching, poignant, and carry a kind of universal weight that leave you marked. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over (but not really, and you know it ;) - Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Well hello, dear readers!</i></p><p><i> I finished this story collection a little while ago, and have actually already started and finished <u>A Passage to India</u>, which was a fascinating book to read right after this one. More on that in the next blob! Here are my thoughts!</i></p><p><i>Jhumpa Lahiri has also published three books in Italian. WOW. Anyone who can not only be fluent in multiple languages, but PUBLISH NOVELS in more than one language, and write the way Lahiri writes, is just... chef's kiss! My hat is off to you. </i></p><p><i>I enjoyed this collection of stories, though if you have read my blob, you know story collections are really not my favorite. I decided I would give you little snippets from each of the stories, as there are only nine total. </i></p><p><b>A Temporary Matter, </b><i>or when</i><b> </b><i>Shoba and Shukumar lose their son and try to find each other in the dark</i></p><p><i>In each of these, the bold is Lahiri's actual title, and the italics are my rendering of the plot. This first story is about a couple who have suffered the tragic loss of their child-to-be, and how they rekindle pieces of their relationship during a series of scheduled blackouts. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He looked now for something to put the birthday candles in and settled on the soil of a potted ivy that normally sat on the windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand straight. <i>Planting a candle in the pot made me think of one of my favorite short stories from when I was younger, The Heat Death of the Universe, by Pamela Zoline - </i>Someone has planted a hot dog in the daffodil pot. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He wondered would Shoba would tell him in the dark.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.</li></ul><p><b>When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,</b><i> or w</i><i>hen East Pakistan (and Mr. Pirzada) ceases to be a part of India</i></p><p><i>In reading this, I was reminded again how little I know about the history of other countries, and I felt like I really need to do another round of World Studies and World History, so we'll just cue that up for somewhere down the road. This story is about Mr. Pirzada, who is away from home, and how he becomes an extended member of an Indian couple and their young daughter, during a time when things are explosively unsettled in India.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In search of compatriots, they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world. <i>This was such a beautiful line, and reminded me how privileged I am. Never have I felt so foreign in my home that I searched a phone book for familiar surnames. What a beautiful way to find community.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Mr. Pirzada - </i>Each evening he appeared in ensembles of plums, olives, and chocolate browns. He was a compact man, and though his feet were perpetually splayed, and his belly slightly wide, he nevertheless maintained an efficient posture, as if balancing in either hand two suitcases of equal weight. His ears were insulated by tufts of graying hair that seemed to block out the unpleasant traffic of life. <i>God, I love that line about the ear hair blocking out the traffic of life. :)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Mr. Pirzada brings candy to the young girl, and she always thanks him, to which he replies once: </i>'What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.' </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Now that I had learned Mr. Pirzada was not an Indian, I began to study him with extra care, to try to figure out what made him different. <i>This story was such an artful and thoughtful way to examine a historical event through the eyes of a child. Of course, nothing about Mr. Pirzada or the girl and her parents has actually changed, but the political world shifts and then poof! Just like that, he is no longer 'Indian'. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Interpreter of Maladies, </b><i>or the exoticization of a home country and love, unrequited</i></p><p><i>This one was beautiful but also made me so sad. It centers on a family, Mr. and Mrs. Das, and their three children, and Mr. Kapasi, a man who drives them on a tour to see famous places in a part of India. Mr. Kapasi, it turns out, does interpreting at a doctor's office for patients who speak other languages, and when Mrs. Das is alone with Mr. Kapasi, she tells him she's been feeling unwell, and asks for him to say something. When he has nothing to offer, she says:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I was hoping you could make me feel better, say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.</li></ul><p></p><p><i>Mr. Kapasi falls in love with/becomes enamored with Mrs. Das during their little jaunt, and happily imagines a world where they become romantic pen pals, after he takes a photo with them and she offers to send it along to his address. Later, though, he takes them to another place and the monkeys are overwhelming to the Indian-but-no-longer-used-to-India family, and the address floats away in the wind.</i></p><p><b>A Real Durwan, </b><i>or Boori Ma's wrongful expulsion from her only home by her supposed 'neighbors'</i></p><p><i>This story chronicles the sad tale of Boori Ma, a woman who has supposedly become homeless and attached herself to a small collection of apartments after partition. The neighbors claim to have her interests at heart, but when they get a communal cistern tap and it is stolen, they turn on Boori Ma and she is expelled from their midst. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Such comforts you cannot even dream them. <i>This is a line Boori Ma says, allegedly about her life before. I love the line. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was true that prickly heat was common during the rainy season. <i>I had to look this up - apparently prickly heat is a kind of itchy heat rash. Boori Ma is told perhaps she has a bad case, but she's sure that she has little insects living in her bedding. (I FEEL YOU, Boori Ma! When I had bedbugs it was the PITS.)</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Sexy,</b> <i>or Miranda's dalliances with Dev (and India) and eventual compassion for Laxmi's cousin</i></p><p><i>Sexy was interesting. In some ways it felt a little out of place to me, or like it was from a different collection. It was probably my least favorite, but that may also have been because I don't feel a lot of empathy or connection to a character who is sleeping with another woman's husband. It follows Miranda, a white British woman, during her affair with an Indian man, Dev, and at the same time Miranda is consoling a co-worker, Laxmi, whose cousin's husband has just left her for a woman he met on a plane. The worlds collide eventually when Laxmi's cousin comes to town and Miranda ends up watching Rohin, the cousin's son. He tells Miranda that she looks 'sexy', trying out a word he's heard his parents use, and this seems to break the spell of Miranda's affair.</i></p><p><b>Mrs. Sen's, </b><i>or the intense growing pains and excruciating adjustment period of immigration</i></p><p><i>I think this might have been my favorite story. It follows Eliot, a young white boy, during a time when he is baby-sat by a recent Indian immigrant, Mrs. Sen. She is trying and struggling to adjust to life in New England, and her husband is attempting to get her to learn to drive independently so that she can do more things and move about more freely, but she is terrified. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come? <i>This reminded me of when my nephew's father first moved to the US from Senegal. He described the suburbs to me once as so lonely, and asked me why people would want to live so isolated from each other. I had never thought of them like that before, and most of the time in the city, I hate how many people are around. But I understand that as someone habituated to family compound living, being in places where you have relatives and old friends around every corner, the American 'dream' could feel so empty.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Brimming bowls and colanders lined the countertop, spices and pastes were measured and blended, and eventually a collection of broths simmered over periwinkle flames on the stove. <i>I wanted to eat everything that Mrs. Sen was cooking. </i></li></ul><blockquote><i>Mrs. Sen, when she's trying to enter an intersection: </i>'Impossible, Eliot. How can I go there? <br />'You need to wait until no one's coming.'<br />Why will not anybody slow down?'<br />'No one's coming now.'<br />'But what about the car from the right, do you see? And look, a truck is behind it. Anyway, I am not allowed on the main road without Mr. Sen.' <i>I felt so deeply for Mrs. Sen here. When I first learned to drive, I was terrified. My sisters used to joke that I'd drive for half an hour before the auto-lock went off, because I'd be going less than 15mph that whole time. I still remember the first time I went on a highway. It was with the school's Driver's Ed instructor, and she had the perfect temperament for it, but it still stands out as one of the scariest moments of my life. And I <u>know</u> how many roundabouts there are in the Boston area, and entering those can be like a nasty game of Double Dutch (something I've never been skilled at).</i></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'My sister has had a baby girl. By the time I see her, depending if Mr. Sen gets his tenure, she will be three years old. Her own aunt will be a stranger. If we sit side by side on a train she will not know my face.' <i>This was such a beautiful and painful line. </i></li></ul><p></p><p></p><p><b>This Blessed House, </b><i>or a young Hindu couple's fierce battle over Christian paraphernalia</i></p><p><i>This story was about Twinkle and Sanjeev, a young Indian couple who have recently moved into a home in Connecticut, and discover all kinds of Christian paraphernalia. Twinkle is endlessly amused by it, building a shrine to every surprising knickknack, and Sanjeev is (in my mind, quite understandably) confused about why she wants to honor things she doesn't hold any belief in. They compromise in the end. It was not my favorite story.</i></p><p><b>The Treatment of Bibi Haldar</b><i>, or a desperate woman's non-traditional path to becoming whole</i></p><p><i>I liked this one - it was another one of my favorites. Somewhat similar to Boori Ma, Bibi Haldar is a kind of social pariah, living with her brother and his wife in an apartment building. She is prone to attacks and bizarre medical incidents like seizures, and this makes her generally deemed as unfit for marriage. She's stuck sort of pingballing around the building, desperate to advance to the traditional stages of womanhood.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'I will never dip my feet in milk,' she whimpered. 'My face will never be painted with sandalwood paste. Who will rub me with turmeric? My name will never be printed with scarlet ink on a card.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores. <i>God, this is a beautiful sentence.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>To get her to quiet down, Haldar placed a one-line advertisement in the town newspaper, in order to solicit a groom: 'GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.' <i>LOLOL. Yes, Haldar, that will definitely bring the men in droves.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was rumored by many that Bibi conversed with herself in a fluent but totally incomprehensible language, and slept without dreams.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>The Third and Final Continent</b><i style="font-weight: bold;">, </i><i>or a young man's journey from solo immigration to center of a family</i></p><p><i>This story was also one of my favorites. It centers on a man who is originally from India, goes to school in London, and then ends up at MIT in America. He wants to rent a room for a time before his wife is to arrive, and so he encounters Mrs. Croft. Here's one of their exchanges.</i></p><p></p><blockquote><p>For a moment she was silent. Then suddenly she declared, with the equal measures of disbelief and delight as the night before, 'There's an American flag on the moon, boy!'</p><p>'Yes, madame.'</p><p>'A flag on the moon! Isn't that splendid?'</p><p>I nodded, dreading what I knew was coming. 'Yes, madame.'</p><p>'Say, splendid!'</p><p>This time I paused, looking to either side in case anyone were there to overhear me, though I knew perfectly well that the house was empty. I felt like an idiot. But it was a small enough thing to ask. 'Splendid!' I cried out. <i>He knows Mrs. Croft is old, but it turns out she is 103. Her daughter comes and leaves her soup in the refrigerator, because Mrs. Croft can't open the cans herself. Mrs. Croft is spicy and for sure a bit demented, but the man grows to love her. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Mrs. Croft's was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she had left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return.</li></ul><p><b><u>Lines I Really Liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What resulted was a disproportionately large hole the size of a lemon, so that our jack-o'-lantern wore an expression of placid astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise above a vacant, geometric gaze.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.</li></ul><div><b><u>Words New to Me</u></b></div><div><i><b>durwan - </b>a porter or doorkeeper; a person whose job is to guard the entrance of a large building</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Well, blobbists, there you have it! I'm off to blob on another adventure centering on the experience of Indians, this time from a British white man's perspective. I'll leave you with a line I particularly liked from the man in the last story.</i></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.</div></blockquote><p><i>Sending love to all of you, and hoping that you live lives beyond your own imagination. Good night!</i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-69052709285116684652023-11-15T18:53:00.004-05:002023-11-15T18:56:33.000-05:00But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.<p><i>The Hours</i> by Michael Cunningham, first published in 1998</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Hours</i> follows three women over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf, the famous writer, Clarissa Vaughan (aka Clarissa Dalloway, but not the original fictional one), and Laura Brown, a housewife who is reading Virginia Woolf's <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>. If it sounds meta, that's because it is. Our women are in three different time periods, in three different geographies. Here's the breakdown:</p><p><b>Setting 1: </b>Richmond, a suburb of London, 1941 - Virginia Woolf; we follow a day in her life, watching her write <u>Mrs. Dalloway,</u> hosting a tea party for her sister and her nieces and nephews, inhabiting her sense of suburban claustrophobia</p><p><b>Setting 2: </b>Los Angeles, 1949 - Laura Brown; it is her husband's birthday, so she makes several cakes, runs away from her life briefly to a hotel to read <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u>, returns and feels intensely trapped</p><p><b>Setting 3: </b>New York City, late 20th century - Clarissa (Dalloway) Vaughan; Clarissa is throwing a party for her close friend, Richard, who is a famous writer and living with advanced AIDs</p><p><i>Note: they are listed in chronological order by year, though they happen in various orders throughout the book.</i></p><p><b>Spoiler (Not Really) Over (But Let's Pretend): Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Hello, dear blobbists!</i></p><p><i> If that seems like a rather sparing summary, well, there you have it. The book doesn't contain a lot in the way of plot (OK, there's a 'party' or a hosting of people happening for each woman, several cakes are baked, flowers are bought, a friend dying of AIDS throws himself out a window, and Virginia low key tries to run away to London proper) or rather I guess I should say it's not particularly <u>driven</u> by the plot, which, if you know me, is typically not my favorite kind of writing. </i></p><p><i> I will also say, quite frankly, that I did not care for this book. I thought I would like it, as I am a big Virginia Woolf fan, and I read <a href="https://conqueringtheclassics.blogspot.com/2022/12/she-too-was-going-that-very-night-to.html" target="_blank">Mrs. Dalloway earlier on the list</a>. While I didn't like that book quite as much as I love <u>To the Lighthouse</u>, I would still say Woolf is one of my favorite authors. I think precisely because that's the case, I didn't like this literary exploration. It felt a bit like I was reading a creative writing prompt, like, "what if I extrapolated this 'one day' concept to three inter-related versions of a woman?" And maybe that's interesting to some people, but it didn't resonate with me. I'm honestly kind of surprised it got the fame and clout it did, and I wonder if he hadn't centered Woolf's work, if that still would have been the case.</i></p><p><i> That said, I shall blob on it just the same. Here are my overall reflections, in no particular order. </i></p><p><b>Writing as a (famous) person in a fictionalized way</b></p><p><i>I think my biggest issue with this book was that Cunningham decides to include Virginia Woolf as one of his three characters, and then writes from her point of view, which feels, to me, presumptive at best, and offensive at worst. Sure, he's claiming this is a 'fictionalized' version of her, but he also carefully made all the particulars around her true to her life, so does he honestly not think he's impact people's perception of her actual life? </i></p><p><i>He references her migraines and hearing voices, as well as depression, and I know that he did research on and gathered notes from various journals and sources, but as a person who lives her own life with depression, anxiety, and OCD, I wouldn't want anyone else speaking for me. And the fact that he starts the book off with the day of her suicide just seems really icky to me, like how dare you assume you know or can imagine what may have been running through her head? He also uses a lot of her own work - pages from <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u>, parts of her suicide letter to her husband - and while it's clearly legal, it seems like freeloading to me.</i></p><p><b>A little too 'cutesy' for my taste</b></p><p><i>OK, nothing about this book is cutesy, but I couldn't think of a better word. What I'm referring to here is the way that Cunningham creates these symmetries and circular components by doing things like renaming characters with the same first letter of their names from <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u>, or introducing a side lesbian love interest to mirror the one in <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u>, or SPOILER - when we find out at the end of the novel that 'Richard', of Clarissa's world, is Laura Brown's toddler, Richie. It just fit together a bit too neatly for my taste, which also leans itself to that sort of 'writing a thesis'/'creative prompt' vibe.</i></p><p><b>Not just depressing, somehow much worse</b></p><p><i>I love reading literature by great female authors who also struggled with depression because I see reflections of myself in their work. Somehow, this book was not so much depressing as it was, overwhelmingly dark. At one point, Richard's cloistered apartment is described as '</i>having, more than anything, an underwater aspect'. <i>I think that describes how this book made me feel. I suppose it's a special ability of a writer to make you feel so deeply uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but it wasn't an experience I enjoyed. Here are some examples of this murky darkness.</i></p><blockquote><p>He will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. (<i>ok, that's nice, right?) </i>He will always know precisely when and how much she has failed. <i>oh, ok, that's where we were heading.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>She herself is trapped here forever, posing as a wife. She must get through this night, and then tomorrow morning, and then another night here, in these rooms, with nowhere else to go. She must please, she must continue. <i>Says who? I don't know that I fully bought this supposed trapped housewife claustrophobia. It felt like Cunningham was just writing based on a reading of "The Feminine Mystique".</i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>For an instant, no more than that, she has imagined some sort of ghost self, a second version of her, standing immediately behind, watching. It's nothing. <i>This. There was so much of this in the novel.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>It would be as simple as checking into a hotel room. It would be as simple as that. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer matter. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer worry, or struggle, or fail.<i> </i></p></blockquote><p><b>Hard to tease out what Cunningham's writing was actually like</b></p><p><i>Something else I struggled with, which was very apparent by the fact that I initially underlined some lines I liked, and then underlined almost nothing from the second half of the novel, was really teasing out Michael Cunningham's writing. I mean, sure, ostensibly, the whole novel is his 'creation', but if you take out the cutesy <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u> fan-fiction gimmicks, and you take out Virginia Woolf's actual (sacred) life, where is Michael Cunningham? And I think I just kept getting really caught up in the little tricks and twists and it really kept me from getting to know or really enjoy his personal writing style, which ended up feeling obfuscated.</i></p><p><b>The women, in a nutshell</b></p><p><i>Here's each woman encapsulated in one line.</i></p><p><i>Clarissa</i></p><blockquote><p>Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too...Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?</p></blockquote><p><i>Laura</i></p><blockquote><p>In another world, she might have spent her whole life reading.</p></blockquote><p><i>Virginia</i></p><blockquote><p>I'm taking a walk. (<i>Real talk, she's running away.) </i>Does it seem mysterious?</p></blockquote><p><b>The way we smell</b></p><p><i>Blobbists, do you think we have a particular and unique smell? There's a line where Clarissa reflects on Richard's personal smell, and a friend of mine mentioned that a boyfriend didn't like her natural smell, and I really just feel like I've never thought of a person and thought, yes, that's their SMELL. I mean, sure, if they wear perfumes, or use specific lotions or soaps, but do we really have an US smell?</i></p><blockquote><p>She goes to him, kisses the curve of his forehead. Up close like this, she can smell his various humors. His pores exude not only his familiar sweat (which has always smelled good to her, starchy and fermented; sharp in the way of wine) but the smell of his medicines, a powdery, sweetish smell. He smells, too, of unfresh flannel (though the laundry is done once a week, or oftener) and slightly, horribly (it is his only repellent smell) of the chair in which he spends his days.</p></blockquote><p><b>A bit of levity</b></p><p><i>So, don't read this book if you're looking for laughs. Here's the one time I laughed, which turns out to actually be quite morbid in the end. </i></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>Clarissa: </i>'Good morning, my dear', Clarissa says again.</p><p><i>Richard: </i>'Look at all those flowers.'</p><p><i>Clarissa: </i>'They're for you.'</p><p><i>Richard: </i>'Have I died?'</p></blockquote><p><b>Special people who make you feel special</b></p><p><i>Okay, so Clarissa ends up taking the parts of this that seem like a compliment and making it more about how Richard is egotistical, which is not at all true in my case, but the initial parts of these lines reminded me of my good friend, Mar:</i></p><blockquote><p>Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for that reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. It is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities...and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has. <i>This is how I always feel after talking to her or spending time with her, and I loved that the line made me think of her. <3</i></p></blockquote><p><b><u>Lines I liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Don't we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the morning heat of June, with the robe whisked away, the chair in its bold new fabric seems surprised to find itself a chair at all.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She is the animating principle, the life of the house. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The apartment has, more than anything, an underwater aspect.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She has caught up with herself.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Richie, on his mother</i>: He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He looks insane and exalted, both ancient and childish, astride the windowsill like some scarecrow equestrian, a park statue by Giacometti.</li></ul><div><u><b>Referents and Reverberations</b></u></div><div><i>Certainly this book had some obvious referents, like <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u>. In addition, two lines stood out.</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I seem to have fallen out of time. <i>This line reminded me of a line from <u>Slaughterhouse-Five</u>, by Kurt Vonnegut:</i> Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You don't need to charm or entertain. You don't need to put in a performance. <i>This line reminded me of a line from Virginia Woolf's </i><u style="font-style: italic;">A Room of One's Own</u><i>: </i>No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.</li></ul></div><p><u><b>Words I Learned</b></u></p><p><i>equipoise - </i>noun - balance of forces or interests; verb - balance or counterbalance (something)</p><p><i>Well blob-friends, I'll leave you with a few lines from Richard, who I think was ultimately my favorite character. </i></p><blockquote><p>Richard smiles wistfully. 'Oh well, omens,' he says. 'Do you believe in omens? Do you think we're taken that much notice of? Do you think we're worried over like that? My, wouldn't that be wonderful? Well, maybe it's so.' </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>'I took the Xanax <i>and</i> the Ritalin. They work wonderfully together. I feel wonderful. I opened all the blinds, but still, I found I wanted more air and light. I had a hard time getting up here, I don't mind telling you.' <i>lollll</i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>I'm afraid I can't make the party. <3</p></blockquote><p> <i>I think I found the scene where Richard falls out of the window particularly resonant because of <u>Hotel New Hampshire,</u> and that book's line, 'Keep passing the open windows.' Here's my blob bit from that book, which was the first on this second list of hundred, so many books (and 8 years!) ago:</i></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "Crimson Text"; font-size: 16.5px;"></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: "Crimson Text"; font-size: 16.5px;">'Keep passing the open windows' is a reference to a sort of morbid but optimistic catchphrase the family passes on to each other from time to time -- it's an allusion to an artist who jumps out of an open window and commits suicide, but leaves a note proclaiming, "Life is serious but art is fun. It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious." I love the confusing poetry of these lines, and the idea that, even in times of great darkness, we can remind each other to simply 'Keep passing the open windows'. [</span><i style="font-family: "Crimson Text"; font-size: 16.5px;">2015 - Survive Alive!</i><span style="font-family: "Crimson Text"; font-size: 16.5px;">] Because Irving is a realist and not remotely bound to the perfect happy ending, one member of the family doesn't manage to keep passing the open windows. But the harmony in the novel's outcome and its ultimate triumph is not in the glamour of a simple and comfortable traditional happy ending, but the messy and raw, yet stunningly brilliant beauty of a complex and nuanced denouement.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: "Crimson Text"; font-size: 16.5px;"></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Crimson Text;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16.5px;">So with that, I'll leave you, reminding you all to keep passing the open windows, and embark on <i>Interpreter of Maladies, </i>after which I'll be on my final ten books.</span></span></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-61973907540514542902023-10-19T23:14:00.005-04:002023-10-19T23:29:55.618-04:00Behind him's the fawn. Before him's the buck.<p><i>The Yearling</i> by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, first published in 1938</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Yearling </i>is a tender tale of hearts being full to the brim, broken in two, and the intensities of affection and longing in the wilds of Florida in the early 1900s. Our cast of characters is listed below. </p><p><u>The People:</u></p><p>The Baxters (Ezra/Penny/Pa, Ory/Ma, Jody)</p><p>The Forresters (Ma, Pa, Lem, Buck, Mill-wheel, Fodder-wing)</p><p>The Huttos (Grandma, Oliver)</p><p><u>The Creatures:</u></p><p>Flag (a deer/the yearling), Old Julia, Rip (hunting dogs), </p><p>Old Slewfoot (a persnickety and mean-spirited bear)</p><p><u>The Florida Scrub:</u></p><p>A particular corner of the universe that includes Jody's home (Baxter's Island) and a few neighbors near the town of Volusia</p><p>This story is, I think, rather well known, so you may well know what happens, but I'll share a few pertinent details anyway. Jody is a young boy, about 12, I think, living a homesteading sort of life in Florida with his parents, Penny (Pa) and Ory (Ma). They are a happy trio, for the most part, though life is rough, and they largely live hand to mouth. They hunt for their meat, grow their own crops, keep their own livestock, and get water from a local sinkhole, as they don't have a well. They have one set of neighbors a few miles away, the Forresters, who are a rambunctious bunch, and are all men (or boys) except for Ma Forrester. The youngest Forrester, Fodder-wing, so named because of an ill-fated attempt at flying that left him crippled, is Jody's best friend. We follow Jody through a year or so of his adolescence, as he learns to hunt and track with his father, how to tend the crops, and the hardships and difficult choices that need to be made when living so close to nature. Jody longs for a companion, as an only child (his siblings all passed when they were young), so he eventually manages to get his parents to allow him to adopt a baby deer when it is stranded without a mother. He raises the fawn as his own, and eventually names it Flag. They are bosom friends, and Jody feels a joy he has been seeking his whole young life. As Flag ages, though, he becomes more and more like the buck he is growing into, and his shenanigans, once considered cute or annoying, become downright life-threatening to the family. Flag eats the seedlings of the family's crops not once, not twice, but three times, and when a six-foot fence fails to keep him out, Jody's father tells him he must kill the deer. They can't afford to lose another whole season of crops, Penny is ailing, a flood devastated the local game, and Flag is too attached to the family and to Jody to survive in the wild. Jody refuses, of course, and desperately looks for a way out. When he is unable to find one, he returns home with Flag, and his mother, frustrated and feeling like she's out of options, tries to shoot Flag herself. She's a poor shot, though, so she only injures the fawn, and in the end, Jody must race after his injured best friend and kill it. There's a clear symmetry between Jody coming of age and the fawn becoming a yearling, and the brutality that life hands us sometimes as we come into maturity.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Well, blobbists, </i></p><p><i> I finished this book about a week ago, but I needed an emotional break before I could even consider blobbing about it. Real talk, I cried for about an hour after I finished the book. I made the smaller and cuddlier of my two cats, Pixie, sit with me for a long time, and I marinated on why it was hitting me so hard. I mean, the book is a work of art, imho. If you haven't read it, even knowing how it ends, I STRONGLY recommend you pick up a copy. It's one of the tenderest stories I've ever read. Finishing it felt a bit like having my heart and soul bared for all to see, and I felt so vulnerable and raw. </i></p><p><i>I think part of what hit me was reflecting on the intensity of affection we can develop for pets or fur family, and I thought, well, at least I didn't have to kill my pet! But then I kind of did, because I had to make the difficult decision to put down my previous cat, Suzy Chubsters, after a serious illness and an extended period of her not eating or drinking. It wasn't as violent or graphic as Jody's situation, but he also only knew Flag for a year, and Suze was my girl for 10 years. </i></p><p><i>Whew. Tearing up. Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be reminded of her, or of how much I loved her and still love her. It's just emotional, is all. That said, here are the rest of my thoughts on the book, in no particular order. This is another long one, and I won't apologize. (I will not apoloGize for what I have aWOken in you, Sookie!) The book deserves it. <3</i></p><p><b>The book of LOLS and aws</b></p><p><i>If you follow my blob, you likely know that I like to write in my books, a habit I started in emulating my cool next-door neighbor. ;) Some people find it distracting that I've written in my books, but I think every book I read is a conversation between me and the work, and I love knowing that I've left the mark of how a book made me feel along the way. Common margin notes of mine include "HMPH" or "BARF" when something is racist/misogynistic/icky, but if I had to summarize the notes of this book, it would be the book of "LOLs" and "awws". There are so many funny zingers and so many great characters, and there are even more moments of expected and then wholly unexpected tenderness in this harsh wilderness. </i></p><p><b>The Florida scrub, an essential character in the novel</b></p><p><i>I read a bit about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings after I finished the book (I don't like to know much in advance), and it seems that she was writing for a long time, but really sort of came into her writerly self when she moved to a 72-acre orange grove in Florida. She got really deeply connected to the land and its natural flora and fauna, and developed close relationships with its human inhabitants. Some of the people she met were the inspiration for the novel. I have to say, I've never considered myself a big Florida girl, what with my exceedingly pale skin and my visceral dislike of heat, but this book made me want to frolic and ramble in the Florida wilds. Here are a few lines that I think capture the Florida scrub and the Baxters' homesteading lifestyle well. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that the indigenous inhabitants of this present-day part of Florida have been wiped out, the Timucua and Mayaca peoples, and remind my readers that homesteading was not started on a blank slate of land uninhabited by others, as romantic as that notion may be. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The Baxter's smokehouse: </i>The smoke-house was dark and cool, odorous with the smell of hams and bacons, dusty with the ash of hickory. The rafters, studded with square-headed nails for the hanging of meats, were now almost bare. Three shoulders of ham hung, lean and withered, and two bacon sides. A haunch of jerked venison swung beside the smoked alligator meat. <i>Just in case you forgot we were in Florida, there's that GATOR MEAT!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The clearing, the island of tall pines, made up the world. Life in other places was only a tale that was told, as Oliver Hutto told of Africa and China and Connecticut. <i>This resonated with me, as I feel like my hometown felt like the whole world for a long time.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, to his Dad, on choosing the land to settle on: </i>'How come you to pick it, Pa?'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody's dad: </i>'I jest craved peace, was all.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Human beings were a stranger sight in the lonely place of live oak islands and saw-grass ponds and prairies than the creatures.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The sun came out. The clouds rolled together into great white billowing feather bolsters, and across the east a rainbow arched, so lovely and so various that Jody thought he would burst with looking at it. The earth was pale green, the air itself was all but visible, golden with the rain-washed sunlight, and all the trees and grass and bushes glittered, varnished with the rain-drops.<i> Don't you just want to be there with Jody, and live in that day?</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Jody Baxter, our protagonist, a tender-hearted, frolicsome boy</b></p><p><i>I think it's interesting that this book has been cast as a YA novel in today's world, though YA wasn't a genre when it was first published. I have a lot of complicated feelings about that. I guess my most prominent thoughts are: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>I would be terribly sad to think that only young people would ever read this novel. I think people of all ages could have incredible reading experiences with it, and I read it at 37, and it was deeply powerful. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>I don't want to underestimate what young people can process or handle, as I know that the reality is our young people are fierce, talented, incredible, multi-layered humans, and they have immense capacity for feeling and art. That said, this book is heavy. It <u>wrecked</u> me, and I'm not sure I would have been emotionally prepared for it when I was a typical YA reader's age.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><i>That said, here are some of my favorite lines about Jody, to sketch out his character for you. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He would like anything that was his own. <i>This motif is so poignantly painted, and it's underscored by the fact that Jody's siblings have all died when they were young, leaving him the only child, but also the only young thing, in his home, a fact which makes his heart ache with loneliness.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He lay for a moment in torment between the luxury of his bed and the coming day. <i>Ooh, that's me every day.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>His father was the core of safety. <i>Jody's connection to and love for his father is another critical part of this story, and I think Rawlings does such an incredible job of showing how precarious this thread can be in a life as rough and wild as the one the Baxters were living. Penny survives the novel, but he has several extremely close calls, and as a reader, you wonder how Jody would learn the essential wilderness skills his father is teaching him were something to happen to Penny.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Again Jody longed for something of his own. Fodder-wing would give him the fox squirrel, even, he believed, the baby 'coon. But past experience had taught him not to aggravate his mother with another mouth, no matter how small, to feed. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, reflecting after hunting and killing a deer with his father </i>- He wondered by what alchemy it was changed, so that what sickened him one hour, maddened him with hunger the next. It seemed as though there were either two different animals or two different boys. <i>This was one of my favorite passages in the book.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody's exchanges with his mom are so great. Here's one of his first efforts:</i> "Ma, we got milk a-plenty. Cain't I git me a leetle ol' fawn for a pet for me? A spotted fawn, Ma. Cain't I?'</li><li><i>Ma</i>: "I should just say not. What you mean, milk a-plenty? They ain't a extry drop left from sun to sun. <i>Ma is painted perfectly; she's hard, and sometimes seems hard-hearted, but she is a practical woman living a hard kind of life, through and through.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody does NOT like to be teased about girls, and he very adorably and hilariously gets annoyed when some of the older boys have big battles over women. Here's Jody just before he throws a potato at a girl he has been accused of liking. "</i>Jody glowed with a sense of virtue. He longed to be good and noble. (<i>throws potato) </i>He was humiliated. Yet if he had to do it over again, he would throw another potato at her, a larger one. <i>lololol. This was so well done. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Pa, to Jody, after throwing the potato:</i> How on earth come you to do it? </li><li><i>Jody:</i> I just hate her. She made a face at me. She's ugly.</li><li><i>Pa: </i>Well, son, you cain't go thru life chunkin' things at all the ugly women you meet. <i>LOL.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>When Oliver asks Jody to get a message to Twink, his girl, and Jody initially says no. Oliver: </i>I thought you were my friend. Being friends, Jody thought, was a nuisance. <i>heheheheheh. Here's the note he writes back to Oliver:</i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>Dear ollever; yor ol twinkk has dun gode up the rivver. im gladd. yor frend jody. He read it over. He decided in favor of a greater kindness. He crossed out 'im gladd' and wrote in its place 'im sorry'. He felt virtuous. <i>I love this note so much.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Without Penny, there was no earth. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>But Flag lived in a secret place in his heart that had long been aching and vacant.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Without Penny, there was no comfort anywhere.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Fodder-wing, Jody's bestie and youngest of the Forrester clan, tender and parent to many animals</b></p><p><i>Okay, so I know I've mentioned this elsewhere in the blob, but my spoiler alerts are not really a perfect system. In order to tell you how I felt about a book and share it's most beautiful nuggets with you, I am invariably going to spoil parts of the plot. So, #sorrynotsorry</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Fodder-wing dies in the book. It's painfully sad, and I cried for a solid half hour at this part, too. Jody comes to visit his friend, knowing he was sick, but not knowing he has died, and then he ends up helping the family grieve, though he has no idea how to go about it. </i>Jody whispered 'Hey'. Fodder-wing's silence was intolerable. Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer. Fodder-wing would never speak to him again.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Pa Forrester: </i>'The one we cain't spare was the one was takened. And him a swivveled, no-account thing, too.' <i>The Forresters, a sturdy, boisterous, often troublesome brood, are broken by the loss of Fodder-wing, and it's absolutely heartbreaking to witness. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Ma Forrester, to Jody: </i>'You pore lamb.' She began to cry again. 'Wouldn't my boy of loved to seed your fawn. He talked about it and he talked about it. He said, 'Jody's got him a brother.' <i>Jody has brought Flag with him (in fact, Fodder-wing is the one who ends up naming him, having thought of Flag before his death) and there's something so desperately poignant about these two boys connecting over their devotion to woodland creatures.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, reflecting on Fodder-wing's death after watching a family of raccoons: </i>Suddenly it seemed that Fodder-wing had only now gone away with the raccoons. Something of him had been always where the wild creatures fed and played. Something of him would be always near them. Fodder-wing was like the trees. He was of the earth, as they were earthy, with his gnarled, frail roots deep in the sand. He was like the changing clouds and the setting sun and the rising moon. A part of him had always been outside his twisted body. It had come and gone like the wind. It came to Jody that he need not be lonely for his friend again. He could endure his going. <i>Well, and just when I had stopped crying this set me going again. I think I'd like this line read at my funeral. It's just so cyclical and natural and moving. I would like to be where the wild creatures feed and play.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, on seeing Eulalie Boyle flirting with a ferry boy</i> - Jody was swept with resentment, not of her, but of the ferry-boy. Eulalie in a remote fashion belonged to him, Jody, to do with as he pleased, if only to throw potatoes at her. <i>LOLOLOLOL. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Penny Baxter, short and sturdy, sure-footed and star tracker and huntsman, humble and brave</b></p><p><i>I think the ending of the novel, where Penny tells Jody he has to kill Flag, is so gut-wrenching in part because we have spent the novel <u>idolizing</u> Penny with Jody. He is kind, he is so sweet to Jody, he humors his fancies, and he takes his side when Ma is being hard-hearted or overly practical. He doesn't make decisions lightly, and he loves the wilderness he shares breath with, and so when he is the one to make this proclamation, we know, deep in our hearts, that there must really be no other way. Here are some of my favorite Penny bits.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Tell the truth, Jody,' he said, 'and shame the devil. Wa'n't the bee-tree a fine excuse to go a-ramblin'?' <i>The opening scene is Jody having gone 'a-ramblin' as his dad puts it, aka basically ignoring his chores and frolicking in the woods. I think all children should get to go 'a-ramblin', and I would like to do more of it myself. :)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>But Penny's bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more than his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>His father was stern about not taking more of anything, fish or game, than could be eaten or kept.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, to Penny, after a terrible snake bite:</i> How you comin, Pa?</li><li><i>Pa</i>: 'Jest fine, son. Ol' Death gone thievin' elsewhere. But wa'n't it a close squeak!' <i>I love this line so much. Death gone thievin' elsewhere. But a close squeak!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Ma Baxter, voice of reason, arbiter of the milk rations, maker of delicious pone and biscuits</b></p><p><i>Ma is definitely cast as the 'bad cop' of Jody's parents quite often, but I loved her character, and thought she was really artfully and thoughtfully fleshed out. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jody's mother had accepted her youngest with something of detachment, as though she had given all she had of love and care and interest to those others. <i>Like this - what an intricate detail to show the intensity of loss borne by a mother who buried so many of her previous children. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her good nature rose and fell with the food supply. <i>Let's be honest, so does mine, and mine is nowhere near as precarious as the Baxter's. I went camping with my sisters once on a road trip, and when it was suggested we share a can of lentils for a dinner one night, I went ballistic. I'm probably not the best candidate for wilderness living, at least not without the ability to stockpile crops, canned goods, etc. ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody</i>: Ma, Pa says I kin go bring back the fawn.</li><li>She held the coffee-pot in mid-air. </li><li>'What fawn?' <i>Lololol. I love the image of the coffee-pot floating mid-air.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody</i>: 'Ain't his eyes purty, Ma?'</li><li><i>Ma</i>: 'They see a pan o' cornbread too fur.'</li><li><i>Jody: </i>'Well, ain't he got a cute, foolish tail, Ma?'</li><li><i>Ma:</i> 'All deer's flags look the same.'</li><li><i>Jody</i>: 'But Ma, ain't it cute and foolish?'</li><li><i>Ma</i>: 'Hit's foolish, a'right.' <i>lolololol.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jody waited eagerly for the rest of the tale, then understood that was all there was to it. It was like all his mother's tales. They were like hunts where nothing happened. <i>LOL. I loved this line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She would not have gone empty-handed even to the house of an enemy.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Grandma Hutto, not actually Jody's Grandma, but kin nonetheless, and Ma Baxter's nemesis</b></p><p><i>It's not totally clear what the connection is between Penny and Grandma Hutto, but they have a deep affection for each other, and Ma Baxter does NOT share this warm and fuzzy feeling for her. Their interactions are hilariously spicy.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody:</i> 'You'll love Flag, Grandma. He's so smart, you kin learn him like a dog.'</li><li><i>Grandma Hutto</i>: 'Course I'll love him. Will he git along with Fluff?'</li><li><i>Jody:</i> 'He likes dogs. He plays with ourn. When they go on a hunt, he slips off another way and meets up with 'em. He loves a bear hunt good as the dogs.'</li><li><i>Penny:</i> 'You tell her all them things, you'll leave nothin' good for her to find out about him. Then she mought find out some o' the bad.'</li><li><i>Jody</i>: 'They's nothin' bad about him,' he said passionately. </li><li><i>Ma</i>: 'Only jumpin' on the table and knockin' the tops off the lard cans and buttin' oer the 'taters, and into ever'thing worse'n ten young uns. <i>heh heh heh heh heh</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Penny asks after Grandma Hutto, to which she replies</i>: 'You know I'm made outen whalebone and hell.'</li><li><i>Penny:</i> 'Ain't the whalebone gittin' a mite limber?'</li><li><i>Grandma Hutto:</i> 'Tis, but the hell's hot as ever.' <i>God, I love this exchange. I would like to tell people I'm made out of whalebone and hell. Maybe I'll start. ;)</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>The crane dance - Magic birds were dancing in a mystic marsh.</b></p><p><i>If you read my blob, then you probably know that I've become an avid birder. If I'm not reading, I may well be out in the marshes, watching the birds. Since this is the case, I had a particular affection for this scene, when Jody and Penny come upon a crane dance.</i></p><blockquote><p>The cranes were dancing a cotillion as surely as it was danced at Volusia. Two stood apart, erect and white, making a strange music that was part cry and part signing. The rhythm was irregular, like the dance. The other birds were in a circle. In the heart of the circle, several moved counter-clock-wise. The musicians made their music. The dancers raised their wings and lifted their feet, first one and then the other. They sunk their heads deep in their snowy breasts, lifted them and sunk again. They moved soundlessly, part awkwardness, part grace. The dance was solemn. The outer circle shuffled around and around. The group in the center attained a show frenzy. </p></blockquote><p><i>And then after: </i>They had seen a thing that was unearthly. They were in a trance from the strong spell of its beauty. </p><p><b>Flag, our titular yearling, Jody's bosom buddy, affectionate, mischievous, loving, and wild</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The fawn was alone in the night, as [Jody] had been alone. The catastrophe that might take his father had made it motherless. It had lain hungry and bewildered through the thunder and rain and lightning, close to the devastated body of its dam, waiting for the stiff form to arise and give it warmth and food and comfort. <i>I'm only now realizing the symmetry here also, in that Jody worries he'll lose his crucial parent, just as Flag has lost his. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Suddenly Jody was unwilling to have Mill-wheel with him. If the fawn was dead, or could not be found, he could not have his disappointment seen. And if the fawn was there, the meeting would be so lovely and so secret that he could not endure to share it. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, on getting the fawn to trust him: </i>His heart thumped with the marvel of its acceptance of him. <i>Haven't we all felt this as pet owners or parents? This marvel that a creature would trust us, accept us, love us?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He remembered his father's saying that a fawn would follow that had been first carried. He started away slowly. The fawn stared after him. He came back to it and stroked it and walked away again. It took a few wobbling steps toward him and cried piteously. It was willing to follow him. It belonged to him. It was his own. He was light-headed with his joy.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody: </i>'Look, Ma, I found him.'</li><li><i>Ma</i>: 'I see.' <i>LOL.</i></li><li><i>Jody: </i>'Ain't he purty, Ma? Lookit them spots all in rows. Lookit them big eyes. Ain't he purty?'</li><li><i>Ma:</i> 'He's powerful young. Hit'll take milk for him a long whiles. I don't know as I'd of give my consent, if I'd knowed he was so young.'</li><li><i>Penny:</i> 'Ory, I got one thing to say, and I'm sayin' it now, and then I'll have no more talk of it. The leetle fawn's as welcome in this house as Jody. It's hissen. We'll raise it without grudgment o' milk or meal. You got me to answer to, do I ever hear you quarrelin' about it. This is Jody's fawn jest like Julia's my dog.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>When Jody first gives his milk to Flag: </i>The fawn blew and sucked and snorted. It closed its eyes dreamily. It was ecstasy to feel its tongue against his hand.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>When Jody brings Flag inside the cabin after a bear attacks their livestock: </i>Its sharp heels clicked on the wooden floor. Its ribs lifted and fell with its breathing. He had been cudgeling his wits for an excuse to bring the fawn inside at night to sleep with him, and now he had one that could not be disputed. He would smuggle it in and out as long as possible, in the name of peace.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It had to be shut in the shed when the Baxters ate. It butted and bleated and knocked dishes out of their hands. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Jody, on his mother: </i>She could not understand how clean the fawn was, and would not admit how sweet it smelled.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He loved him more than ever, in his sin.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Referents and Reverberations</b></p><p><i>I suppose some of these aren't surprising, but some of them caught me unawares. The notes reminded me of Joe in Great Expectations (wot larks!), the parental relationships reminded me of the young boy in Winesburg, struggling to connect with his mother, the southern dialects and somewhat mischievous young boy antics reminded me of Huck, and the intensity of the relationship between Flag and Jody reminded me of how important the garden feels to Mary.</i></p><p><i>Great Expectations, </i>Charles Dickens</p><p><i>Winesburg, Ohio, </i>Sherwood Anderson</p><p><i>Huckleberry Finn</i>, Mark Twain</p><p><i>The Secret Garden</i>, Frances Hodgson Burnett</p><p><b><u>Lines I Loved</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The afternoon was alive with a soft stirring.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A mark was on him from the day's delight.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He stood now in the close odorous dusk of his store like a captain in the hold of his ship.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Watchfulness lived sentinel in his brain.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was all the better for being secret.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>They had seen marvels, and the older they were, the more marvels they had seen. He felt himself moving into a mystic company.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>They sat smothered under the thick air of sorrow that only the winds of time could blow away.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Dinner and supper had both been meager and indifferently cooked, as though she took her revenge from behind her own citadel, the cook-pot.</li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>Words That Were New to Me:</u></b></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">clabber - </b>noun <i>- </i><i>milk that has naturally clotted on souring. </i>verb<i> - </i><i>curdle or cause to curdle.</i></p><p><b><i>feist - </i></b><i>a small hunting dog, descended from the terriers brought over to the United States by British miners and other immigrants</i></p><p><b><i>fetter-bush - </i></b><i>an evergreen shrub, Lyonia lucida, of the heath family, native to the southern U.S., having clusters of fragrant, white flowers</i></p><p><b><i>furbelow - </i></b>noun<i> - </i><i>a gathered strip or pleated border of a skirt or petticoat. </i>verb - <i>adorn with trimmings.</i></p><p><b><i>mumbledepeg - </i></b><i>a game in which the players try to flip a knife from various positions so that the blade will stick into the ground</i></p><p><i><b>tar-flower</b> - </i><i>(Bejaria racemosa) a woody evergreen shrub that produces fragrant and showy white to pinkish flowers</i></p><p><i>Well, blobbers, we've done it! I've cried at least two more times while crafting this, but I have MADE it to the end of this entry. I'll leave you with a few closing lines.</i></p><p><i>Pa to Jody, on wishing Grandma Hutto really was his grandmother. </i>Folks that seems like kin-folks, is kin-folks. <i>Yes. Folks that seem like kin-folks is kin-folks. Period. Friendfam, foundfam, bosom buds. Kinfolk, all.</i></p><p>He could go neither forward nor back. Something was ended. Nothing was begun. <i>This is how Jody feels at the end of the book, and it feels so relatable.</i></p><p>It was unbelievable, Jody thought. He was wanted. <i>Jody tries to run away after Flag's death, but he gets overwhelmed and frightened, and then begins to worry his parents actually aren't looking for his return. But he finds his father waiting with open arms, and he aches with warmth, knowing he is wanted. </i></p><p><i>And so I'll leave you to your beds, dear readers, hoping that you have kin-folk of your own, whether real or imagined, and that you lay your heads on the pillow tonight knowing you are wanted, at least by me. Sweet dreams, keep each other safe, keep passing the open windows, and keep safe. Good night.</i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-64656939407838956472023-09-30T19:40:00.002-04:002023-09-30T19:41:33.362-04:00Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.<div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Winesburg, Ohio</i> by Sherwood Anderson, first published in 1919</div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of stories that center around the denizens of a small town in Ohio in the early 1900s. It takes us into the hearts and minds of the local characters, revealing not just their daily habitudes, trials, and tribulations, but also their quirks, their idiosyncrasies, and their darkest secrets. The characters occasionally intertwine in the various stories, and the whole work is knit together as a kind of 360 degree panorama of a slice of life at a moment in time. I'm sharing my attempt to make sense of the connections between the characters below. </i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEieoLqZrv_r6zgqvsxmJfQh1XLGB7Vbh1EwXalTKoIpd5S86p90LzW-ee_klU06cNEmt5xTbJlMovbeeIo33YBfWi_2DlHkoXsUqYODFNSqs2vCTsEnJzRhbhp-YH5W5NoHtJHpNyiX2KNSb-IllK30DvpeHikvI5Ecy4m9c4LbXLim7LyBQPRnU435eO4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEieoLqZrv_r6zgqvsxmJfQh1XLGB7Vbh1EwXalTKoIpd5S86p90LzW-ee_klU06cNEmt5xTbJlMovbeeIo33YBfWi_2DlHkoXsUqYODFNSqs2vCTsEnJzRhbhp-YH5W5NoHtJHpNyiX2KNSb-IllK30DvpeHikvI5Ecy4m9c4LbXLim7LyBQPRnU435eO4=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div></blockquote></blockquote><p> <b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Well, well well, dear blobbists,</i></p><p><i> It has been some time since my last blob, and as usual, I've read many other books between this one and the last blob entry. <a href="https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/authors-and-books/book-bingo/2023-book-bingo" target="_blank">This is my latest book bingo</a> (I think the eleventh I've undertaken, now) and I've really been enjoying the last few books. I'm going to do a blob post at some point about all the various book bingos, so we'll save my thoughts on those books for later. </i></p><p><i> For now, let's focus on Winesburg. I have to say two things: (1) I stopped, started, re-started, and re-read this book probably six different times. To be fair, short stories are really not my favorite genre. That being said, (2) I <u>loved</u> this book. It definitely took me a few tries to get squarely into the world of Winesburg, but when I did, I was totally hooked. I know Sherwood Anderson is not a name I knew before reading this book, so I let myself read the introduction to my edition, and here are some nuggets I found interesting. </i></p><p></p><blockquote><p>At the age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the 'Chicago Renaissance'.</p><p>It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with but also to release his affection for the world of small-town America.</p><p>Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live.</p></blockquote><p> <i>Irving Howe wrote those lines, and I think they're very poignant. I felt a real kinship with Sherwood as I read and re-read this novel. I, too, grew up in small-town America, and the middle of Pennsylvania is really not so different from the middle of Ohio. I, too, relocated to a larger city, and I, too, feel I must both 'settle accounts with' and 'release affection for' my hometown, especially in recent years and political times. </i></p><p><i>Okay, so fair warning, this blob entry is on the long side, but I promise it's worth it. Because Sherwood Anderson lays out his novel as 22 'grotesques' or 'vignettes', I've chosen to give you little windows into my favorite ones, which, as it turns out, is almost all of them. #sorrynotsorry </i></p><p><i>So grab a mug of tea, a pumpkin spice latte (they're 20 years old, did you know? ;)), or your cozy beverage of choice, and come with me to a world of pure imagination! Wait, strike that, reverse it! Come with me to small-town Ohio, and let's meet the Winesburgians together.</i></p><p><b>The Book of the Grotesque, </b><i>aka the faces of Winesburg [For each vignette, I'll list Anderson's title in <b>bold</b>, and the italics are my take on it]</i></p><p><i>I love that Anderson references the 'grotesque' style, which, if you didn't know, means this: a style of decorative art characterized by fanciful or fantastic human and animal forms often interwoven with foliage or similar figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness, or caricature. </i></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>From Merriam-Webster: </i></p><p>During the Italian Renaissance, Romans of culture took a great interest in their country's past and began excavating ancient buildings. During their excavations, they uncovered chambers (known in Italian as <i>grotte</i>, in reference to their cavelike appearance) decorated with artwork depicting fantastic combinations of human and animal forms interwoven with strange fruits and flowers. The Italian word <i>grottesca </i>became the name for this unique art style, and by 1561 it had mutated into the English noun "grotesque." The adjective form of "grotesque" was first used in the early 17th century to describe the decorative art but is now used to describe anything bizarre, incongruous, or unusual.</p></blockquote><p> <i>Here are some lines I liked from the opening story:</i> </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque.</li></ul><p><b style="font-weight: bold;">Hands</b><b>, </b><i>aka Wing Biddlebaum's worst enemy</i></p><p><i>One of the things I loved most about Winesburg was the names. They feel so perfectly fictional and yet also so perfectly apt. Wing Biddlebaum was one of my favorites. Wing Biddlebaum was a school teacher, beloved by his male students, but after one of his students has a nightmare and recounts a (fictional) story of Wing Biddlebaum acting inappropriately with him to his parents, the families run him out of town. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they also began to dream.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. <i>This is such an amazing line.</i></li></ul><b>Paper Pills, </b><i>aka Doctor Reefy's written musings and perseverations as a man in love</i><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and lent her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.</li></ul><p></p><p><i>The name of the town itself is so poignant as well, as the orchards and farms and fields are woven into the narrative.</i></p><p><b>Mother, </b><i>aka Elizabeth Willard, wife of the local hotel owner</i></p><p><i>Elizabeth Willard, if you consult my perfectly sketched out character map (LOL) is George Willard's mother. George is about the closest thing we have to a protagonist in this novel, though other people's opinions of him in the town vary. I felt for mother. She comes up again, so stay tuned.</i></p><p></p><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><p></p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li> It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The hotel was continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'He is groping about, trying to find himself', she thought. 'He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself.'</li></ul><p></p><p><b>The Philosopher, </b><i>aka Doctor Parcival, a man with plenty of money but very few patients</i></p><p><i>I loved Doctor Parcival because he reminded me of my sister, who is currently an excellent doctor, but struggling with a deeply broken system of primary care that's leaving her burned out and overrun again and again. Doctor Parcival may have found a magical solution, though I don't think he's sharing his secrets ;0)</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor's head playing with the cord.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients...There is a reason for that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much of medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients.' <i>See! Simple! He doesn't want patients!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Nobody Knows</b>, <i>aka George Willard's secret late night rendezvous</i></p><p><i>There are quite a few romantic/courtship tales in this book, but this was one of my favorites.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In his mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid the adventure on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would lose courage and turn back.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth in her hand. 'How do you know I want to go out with you,' she said sulkily. 'What makes you so sure?' <i>lolololol.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The letter was brief. 'I'm yours if you want me', it said. He though it annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was nothing between them. 'She has a nerve! Well gracious sakes, she has a nerve,' he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of vacant lots where corn grew. <i>haghaghaghaghaghagh. Louise is like note? What note. Nope. Wasn't me. But she does come out and smooch George a bit. ;)</i></li></ul><b>Godliness</b>, <i>aka Jesse Bentley's greed for glory and its supposedly biblical repercussions</i><p></p><p><i>This story veers away from the others a bit in that it's broken into four parts. I won't go into the specifics of what happens in all of them, but it centers around Jesse Bentley, mostly in his old age, as a farm owner, father and then grandfather, and man of God.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The Bentley farming men</i> - A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. <i>What a beautiful line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could master others but he could not master himself.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He would have given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained only six hundred acres. <i>Pish posh! Just six hundred acres! Jesse's a bit of a tough cookie to like, if you hadn't picked that up yet.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>David Hardy, Jesse's grandson, after running away</i> - He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With her own hands Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food...He thought that he would have been willing to go back through the frightful experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become. <i>Louise is Jesse's daughter, and for various reasons, she doesn't exactly shower David with affection. I so felt for little David when he got found after running away and finally felt his mother's affection and care.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Later when he drove back home and when night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint for him some heroic task to be done. <i>Jesse gets a little (okay, a lot) obsessed with what God's plans are for him, and it gets a little creepy and eventually scares David away, much to Jesse's chagrin.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Louise, on trying to fit in</i> - It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed with the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of her association with people something quite different, and that it was possible by such an act to pass into a new life as one opens a door and goes into a room. <i>Man, don't we all feel that way sometimes? I know I sure do. I walk by houses that are lit warmly at night in the city, and I think, just one simple set of steps and I could be over that threshold, thrust into that warmth. </i></li></ul><b>A Man of Ideas, </b><i>aka Joe Welling, self-proclaimed journalist extraordinaire</i><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Joe Welling</i> - Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his ideas was uncontrollable.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Although the seizures that came upon him were harmless enough, they could not be laughed away. They were overwhelming. Astride an idea, Joe was overmastering. His personality became gigantic. <i>There's something so artistic in the way Anderson writes; he paints with words, and this is a great example.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Joe, giving advice to George Willard, on how to write newspaper articles for the Winesburg Eagle - </i>Becoming more excited Joe Welling crowded the young reporter against the front of the feed store. He appeared to be lost in thought, rolling his eyes about and running a thin nervous hand through his hair. A smile spread over his face and his gold teeth glittered. 'You get out your note book', he commanded. 'You carry a little pad of paper in your pocket don't you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought of it the other day. Let's take decay. Now what is decay? It's fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that? Of course not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street they're all on fire. They're burning up. Decay you see is always going on. It doesn't stop. Water and paint can't stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That's fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up. They'll say you're a smart one. I don't care. I don't envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. You got to admit that... I should start a newspaper myself, that's what I should do. I'd be a marvel. Everybody knows that. <i>This cracked me up. Got that, everyone? All newspaper articles should just start with THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, and then go from there. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Adventure</b><i>, aka Alice Hindman, clerk at the dry goods store, left behind by Ned Currie</i></p><p><i>There are a lot of characters I felt empathy for and maybe some concern about their well-being, but I don't want to give the impression that this is a sad book. It's contemplative, and raw, and true, but it is also warm, and vivid, and full of care. Alice's story was like that. She falls for a man named Ned Currie and he moves to a big city and then doesn't return for her like he said he would. She ends up living with her mother, and she won't let herself fall for other men. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>After running around in the rain at night and attempting to offer herself to a nearly deaf old man</i> - 'What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful', she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.</li></ul><b>Respectability</b><i><b>, </b>aka the opposite of disgusting, vile, misogynistic Wash Williams</i><p></p><p><i>This story was hard to read, because, as you can see from my character map, Wash Williams is an asshat. I did like the description of him, though.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled.</li></ul><b>The Thinker</b><i>, aka Seth Richmond, destined to play second fiddle to George Willard</i><p></p><p><i>How are you doing, blobbists? Need a break? Take a break! Stretch, get a snack, pet a cat or whatever animal you may or may not share your home with. Come back when you're ready!</i></p><p><i>Seth Richmond is one of a few people about town who have some strong feelings about George Willard. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Seth's mother, on trying to scold him - </i>So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she would not allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and paper and wrote down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going about the garden and saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part. <i>I loved this image. She can't bring herself to scold her son, and he always has a good excuse for his behavior, so she tries to practice in the garden to be mean.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was lonely and had begun to think that loneliness was a part of his character, something that would always stay with him. <i>This loneliness, or disconnectedness, is a running theme in Winesburg, but like I said, it's not depressing. I think it more so speaks to the idea that we all have periods of of our lives where we feel invisible, or misunderstood, or apart from the masses.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>With calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in what was going on, and sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested in anything.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was depressed by the thought that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'George belongs to this town... It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not make a fuss about it, but I'm going to get out of here.' <i>Interestingly, lots of people think George belongs to the town, and fits with the town, though George himself wants to leave Winesburg.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>George tells his friend Seth to go flirt with Helen on his behalf, which Seth doesn't want to do, so he goes out with Helen himself instead - </i>Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play, disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm of night flies. <i>God, this is maybe one of my favorite passages in literature of all time. It just feels so intimate and so magical. It reminds me of when Montag first meets Clarisse in Fahrenheit-451: </i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered.</p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see [Helen's] face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. <i>lololol. That's right, Seth!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Tandy</b><i><b>, </b>aka the quality of being strong to be loved</i></p><p><i>This story is bizarre, and mostly takes place as a conversation between a stranger and a man sitting with his five-year-old daughter.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He wanted to cure himself of the habit of drink, and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living in a rural community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the appetite that was destroying him. His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than ever.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>To Tom Hard and his five-year-old daughter</i> - 'Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted. There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.' <i>Isn't that a great line? </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'There is a woman coming. I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may be the woman. It would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as this, when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is as yet only a child.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'They think it's easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know better. I understand,' he cried. 'Perhaps of all men I alone understand. I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and they do not get.' <i>Okay, so I obviously don't think it's easy to be a woman, but I loved this exchange.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Loneliness, </b><i>aka Enoch Robinson and his room when his shadow people all left</i></p><p><i>Enoch was another one of my favorites. His story is about a time when he lived in New York, and first he had people over to his apartment all the time, but then, after a while, he decided to stop letting people in. Here's how it plays out.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He never grew up and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something that understood all about such things. <i>Okay, so I know this makes Enoch sound pretty unhinged, but as an introvert, I was kind of like, I get it! Just make up your OWN people, Enoch! ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There must have been two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with me.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On trying to let a woman into his life - </i>'I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Things went to smash. Out she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my people away.' </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone.' <i>Poor Enoch!</i></li></ul>"<b>Queer"</b><i>, aka what Elmer Cowley wants under no circumstances to be</i><p></p><p><i>Elmer Crowley is another member of the Winesburg community who doesn't care for George Willard. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On a salesman pitching them on fasteners instead of buttons - </i>"You better grab your things and get out! We're through being fools here! We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and listening. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Elmer, to his father, explaining his harsh reaction - </i>"Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough." Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. 'I'll be starched,' he said softly. 'Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!' <i>I loved this so much. I'm going to start saying this. I'll be starched! I'll be washed and ironed and starched! I mean, I haven't starched anything in like 2 decades, but it's a great saying.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the thought. <i>Aw, Elmer, no one should go through life without friends! You could be friends with Enoch! Or Alice!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>The Untold Lie</b><i><b>, </b>aka what Ray Pearson can't or won't bring himself to say to Hal Winters</i></p><p><i>This story was interesting. Again, a little or maybe a lot misogynistic, in that it's about how trapped men feel when they get a woman pregnant and feel obligated to marry her, but still poetic.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Hal Winters, to Ray Pearson, an older man - </i>'I've got Nell in trouble. Perhaps you've been in the same fix yourself. Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out like an old horse? Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come on, you tell me, Whatever you say, Ray, I'll do.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal Winters, son of old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own training and all the beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but for his life he couldn't say what he knew he should say.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Hal, when Ray finally decides to share his thoughts - </i>'You came to tell me, eh? well never mind telling me anything. I'm not a coward and I've already made up my mind. Nell ain't no fool. She didn't ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want to settle down and have kids.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Ray, to himself - </i>'It's just as well. Whatever I told him would have been a lie.'</li></ul><b>Drink</b>, <i>aka Tom Foster's night of thrilling fantasy</i><p></p><p><i>I loved this story about a sweet boy, Tom, getting drunk. It reminded me of when David gets drunk in David Copperfield. </i></p><p></p><blockquote><i>Davy, on the first night he gets really drunk out with Steerforth and friends: </i>Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as 'Copperfield,' and saying, 'Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn't do it.' Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked drunk. <i>Oh yes, Davy, just your hair looked drunk, I'm sure. ;)</i></blockquote><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to Winesburg did not want to get off. <i>I felt so bad for his grandma! Things work out okay for them, after all, but what a shock that would be!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In an odd way [Tom] stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>[Tom] had always the power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose, was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery they would be roasting coffee on a Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still, filling his being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with happiness. 'I like it,' he said gently. 'It makes me think of things far away, places and things like that.' <i>Yes, Tom! I couldn't agree more! I love the smell of coffee.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li> And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for Tom's outbreak. In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk. The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Tom Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost excited. 'It was like making love, that's what I mean. Don't you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange. That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught me something, that's it, that's what I wanted. Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see. That's why I did it.' <i>Tom adorably tells George Willard that he's been gallivanting about with Helen White, with whom he is smitten, and George gets upset because he knows for a fact Helen White has not gone out with Tom at all that evening, but Tom is just on cloud nine with his little fantasy ride</i></li></ul><b>Death</b>, <i>aka one of Elizabeth Willard's lovers</i><p></p><p><i>'Mother' is back. She has a brief, almost non-existent love affair with Doctor Reefy (his wife has long since died) that mostly consists of very deep conversations.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. <i>Gah, this is such an exquisitely complex line!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Elizabeth, on feeling stuck - </i>'I wanted to get out of town, out of my clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.' Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone walk before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him. When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. 'You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!' he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman. Doctor Reefy did not see the women he had held in his arms again until after her death.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Elizabeth's father gives her $800 as an 'escape fund' when she is first married - </i>As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. 'I jammed up the corner of the bed against it,' she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms. <i>Alas!</i></li></ul><b>Sophistication</b><i>, aka George Willard's coming of age</i><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the streets of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.<i> This line reminded me of this moment in the last Proust installment: </i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.…Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” and almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon the two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Marks’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place–from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge–in the series of forgotten days. <i>As you know, Proust can be a bit verbose, but something about the boy walking through his hometown, measuring his steps and his thoughts, echoed for me.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that had come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Departure, </b><i>aka when George leaves Winesburg in his rear view</i></p><p><i>Well blobbists, we've reached the last vignette I'm highlighting! And sooprize! George is actually not so delightfully happy in Winesburg, he's ready to move up and out. Here's how Anderson recounts George's last day in town:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike, He had been in the midst of that great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. 'Hey, you George. How does it feel to be going away?' they asked.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>After George counted his money he looked out the window and was surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg. The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of his life, began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did not come into his mind. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He thought of little things - Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. <i>This is the last line of the novel.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><u><i>Lines I Particularly Liked</i></u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I was a Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the old days they fairly hunted us with guns. (<i>Tom Willard, father to George, husband to Elizabeth</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>As he grew more and more excited the red of his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood that had dried and faded. (<i>Tom Willy, local bartender</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Have you ever thought it strange that I have money for my needs although I do nothing? (<i>Doctor Parcival</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Louise and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. (<i>Louise Bentley, daughter to Jesse, mother to David Hardy</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the darkness it will be easier to say things. (<i>Louise Bentley, trying to find the courage to flirt with John Hardy</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure. (<i>Ed Handby, in love with Belle Carpenter</i>)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. (<i>George Willard and Helen White, the night after the fair</i>)</li></ul><b><i><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></i></b><p></p><p><i>In case you've forgotten, this is the section where I mention what books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referent) or after (reverberation).</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The Good Earth, </i>Pearl S. Buck</li><li><i>Housekeeping, </i>Marilynne Robinson</li><li><i>David Copperfield, </i>Charles Dickens</li><li><i>The Catcher in the Rye</i>, J.D. Salinger</li><li><i>Fahrenheit-451, </i>Ray Bradbury</li></ul><p></p><p><i>Now, before I leave you to the rest of your evening, I'll share my favorite passages. </i></p><p>In her bed, during the long hours alone, the little fears that had visited her had become giants. Now they were all gone. 'When I get back to my room I shall sleep,' she murmured gratefully. <i>Elizabeth Willard</i></p><p>There in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. <i>I love sleeping with the windows open at my mom's house, hearing the wind and the insects and the birds.</i></p><p>It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors. In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the sidewalks, Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran madly about, children become lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself. <i>I love this description so much. The county fair is a big part of my life, and the description some century later hasn't changed all that much.</i></p><p>George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind whispered among the dry corn blades. <i>As a girl who grew up walking and running around fields of corn, I loved this line.</i></p><p>There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes. <i>This feels quintessentially Sherwood Anderson - it's complex, a bit haunting, but also full of an intense affection and warmth. </i></p><p><i>Here's hoping that when you go to bed tonight, blobbists, your fears are no longer giants, all sounds are pleasant sounds, the wind whispers among the dry corn blades, and you love life so intensely that tears come into your eyes. </i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>I'm off to my next book. </i> </p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-34699274658914407322023-01-31T18:02:00.000-05:002023-01-31T18:02:07.460-05:00Little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don't want to lose them.<p> <i>Breath, Eyes, Memory</i> by Edwidge Danticat, first published in 1994</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Breath, Eyes, Memory</i> takes place first in Haiti, in the small town of Croix-des-Rosets, and later in New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, and finally back in Haiti. It chronicles three generations of Caco women - Sophie (our protagonist), Martine (Sophie's mother), Atie (Sophie's aunt), and Granmè Ifé (Sophie's grandmother). The story begins in Haiti, with Sophie finding out she is to be moved to the United States to live with her mother, after spending the first twelve years of her life living in Haiti with her aunt (Tante Atie) and her grandmother. Sophie is understandably dismayed by this news, and has mixed feelings. She ends up in New York with her mother, Martine, who loves her, but struggles throughout her life with nightmares and PTSD from the rape that led to Sophie's birth. Martine carefully guards Sophie's virginity as part of a generational practice, and tests to see if Sophie is still pure as she ages, which causes Sophie understandable trauma. Eventually, Sophie elopes with a man named Joseph to go live in Providence. The book jumps forward in time to Sophie making an unexpected visit to her aunt and grandmother in Haiti with her own daughter, Brigitte. Sophie and Martine are eventually reconciled to a degree, and Martine gets pregnant a second time with her boyfriend, Marc. Unfortunately, this pregnancy only heightens and worsens Martine's existing trauma, and as she wavers between aborting the child and trying to love the fetus, she eventually kills herself and the baby in the process. Sophie takes her mother's body back to Haiti with Marc and she, Atie, and her grandmother bury her in her hometown on the hill, feeling that she is at last, free from being haunted.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p></p><p><i>Well blobbers, it has taken me a while to be able to blog on this because it was very heavy content, as I'm sure you saw if you read the plot summary. It is not, in any way, this book's fault that I was reading it after <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u> and looking for a more uplifting experience, as how could the book know or be responsible for what I read before or after it? That being said, it was a rough pair to read back to back for me.</i></p><p><i>Since I have read only a handful of books by Haitian authors, I want to share part of the afterword that Danticat wrote, before I reflect on my experience with the book.</i> </p><blockquote><i>To Sophie - </i>You are being asked, I have been told to represent every girl child, every woman from this land that you and I love too much...I have always taken for granted that this story which is yours, and only yours, would always read as such. But some of the voices that come back to me, to you, to these hills, respond with a different kind of understanding than I had hoped. And so I write it to myself, praying that the singularity of your experience will be allowed to exist, along with your own peculiarities, inconsistencies, your own voice.</blockquote><p><i>This is just to say that I hope you embrace this book and my responses to the book as simply that, and that you don't walk away from the blob with generalizations or misconceptions about life in Haiti. This is a work of fiction, and one story, and one person's response. </i></p><p><i>Okay. Now that that's been said, I'll share my thoughts. I thought this book was beautifully written, and the characters were tender and lovingly crafted. It was a heavy book to read because of the material it dealt with, but it was an eloquent portrait of the Caco women. Here are some thoughts, in no real order. </i> </p><p></p><p><b>Letters on cassette</b></p><p><i>While Sophie is living in Haiti as a young girl, her family receives cassette tapes from her mother that act as letters or updates. I loved this, and it reminded me (I know, hilarious connection) of the TV show Felicity, as she is always recording and listening to cassettes for Sally. </i></p><p><b>Saying goodbye amidst turmoil</b></p><p><i>There's a tension when Sophie leaves because Haiti is all she knows and it is her home and she loves it, but her aunt and grandmother and mother have concerns about safety and the political climate. At the airport, Tante Atie points to a violent scuffle between the police and a young woman and says: </i>Do you see what you are leaving? </p><p><i>To which Sophie replies: </i>I know I am leaving you. <i>I thought this was so beautiful and so lovingly juxtaposed.</i></p><p><b>Thirst</b></p><p><i>I love this exchange when Sophie is back in Haiti with her daughter:</i></p><p><i>Driver: </i>While you wait for your people, would you like something to drink?</p><p><i>Sophie: </i>I could drink an ocean. </p><p><i>Driver: </i>If Mademoiselle over there is selling an ocean, I will surely buy it for you.</p><p><b>Chagrin</b></p><blockquote><p>To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize. </p></blockquote><p><i>This reminded me of conversations I've had with other people about malaise, or maladies, or agues, in countries outside the US, and the way it feels like it feels a space we can't quite put our finger on. Oh, I don't know, I have chagrin today. </i> </p><p><b>Kin</b></p><p><i>I think what I liked most about this book was the narrative arc connecting the Caco women across various generations, and exploring the wide variance in their lived experience. This was my favorite moment: </i></p><blockquote><i>Granmè Ifé: </i>'Do you see my granddaughter?' she asked, tracing her thumb across Brigitte's chin. 'The tree has not split one mite. Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?' <i>What an amazing sentence. </i></blockquote><p><b>Friendship</b></p><p><i>I also loved the friendship between Tante Atie and her bestie, Louise, in this small town in Haiti. Louise wanted to escape, and get away to America or elsewhere, and Tante Atie is very sad at the prospect of losing her, which leads to this exchange.</i></p><p><i>Tante Atie: </i>'When you have a good friend, you must hold her with both hands.'</p><p><i>Sophie: </i>'It will be hard for you when she leaves, won't it?'</p><p><i>Tante Atie: </i>'I will miss her like my own skin.'</p><p><i>I consider myself very fortunate in that I have many friends that I miss like my own skin when we are apart. I hope you have this, too, blobbists, and that you hold your good friends with both hands.</i></p><p><b>Sisters</b></p><p><i>As someone who has two sisters, I liked reading the exchanges between Atie and Martine, as they felt familiar to me. </i></p><p>'Sa k pase, Atie?' asked my mother.</p><p>'You', answered Tante Atie fanning the flames. 'You're what's new.' <i>I love how underwhelmed Atie seems to be at the return of her sister Martine to Haiti. Martine flees Haiti after the birth of Sophie, as it's too painful and triggering, but when she returns after some 20+ years, her sister is just like, oh, you're back? Mmkay. ;)</i></p><p><b>Languages - what do your languages sound like to you?</b></p><p><i>I heard an interview recently with Mila Kunis talking about how other people hear Russian when she speaks it versus how she hears it. She said other people think that she's fighting, or angry, and she feels at home and warm and cozy, or something to that effect. It reminded me of this moment in the book:</i></p><p>We were speaking to one another in English without realizing it. </p><p>'Oh that <i>cling-clang</i> talk', interrupted my grandmother. 'It sounds like glass breaking.'</p><p><i>I think it's fascinating that we can hear languages in different ways, and perceptions, meaning, nuance, and feeling, are all attached in different ways. </i></p><p><b>Ghost criminal</b></p><p><i>Martine's ongoing trauma from her rape was really painful to experience with her, but so eloquently expressed. I loved this exchange, after Martine tells Sophie her nightmares are worsening.</i></p><p><i>Sophie: </i>Have you told Marc?</p><p><i>Martine: </i>He thinks my body is in shock from getting pregnant.</p><p><i>Sophie: </i>You should tell someone.</p><p><i>Martine: </i>You cannot report a ghost to the police.</p><p><i>How do you find closure, or justice, or peace, when you have no recourse to the person who wronged you?</i></p><p><b>Deep feels</b></p><p><i>This line resonated with me (and I think, might also resonate with Clarissa Dalloway): </i></p><blockquote><p>'Us Caco women', she said, 'when we're happy, we're very happy, but when we're sad, the sadness is deep.'</p></blockquote><p><b>Are<i> </i>you free? </b></p><p><i>Martine's funeral and burial in Haiti is heart-wrenching but also provides a full circle moment, as she is buried near the fields where she was raped. Her sister, Atie, calls out to Martine's body, as the villagers call out to each other earlier in the book - </i><i>Ou libere? - which means 'are you free? In response, Granmè Ifé says to her daughter, Ou libere - you are free.</i></p><p><i>As the book comes to a close, Granmè Ifé says to Sophie:</i></p><p>There is a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: '<i>Ou libere?</i>' Are you free, my daughter?'</p><p>My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.</p><p>'Now', she said, 'you will know how to answer.'</p><p><i><u>Words I Did Not Know:</u></i></p><p><b><i>flamboyant tree</i> - </b>amusingly, the two words I had listed were this, and poincianas; it would appear they are both names for the same tree: Native to Madagascar, royal poinciana trees are known for their showy flowers. The botanical name is derived from the Greek words delos (meaning conspicuous) and onyx (meaning claw), referring to their appearance.</p><p><i><u>Lines I Liked:</u></i></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Sophie, to Atie:</i> Would it not be wonderful to read?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Atie, to Sophie: </i>As long as you do not have to work in the fields, it does not matter that I will never learn to read that ragged old Bible under my pillow.</li></ul><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You look like someone who is going to be sad.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We are a family with dirt under our fingernails.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You must never forget this. Your mother is your first friend.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Louise</i>: Have you come to buy my pig?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Martine, on being pregnant with Sophie:</i> I tried to destroy you, but you wouldn't go away.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I kept my eyes closed so the tears wouldn't slip out.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too. It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. </li></ul><div><i>I'll wrap up this post with two of my favorite passages from the book.</i></div><blockquote><div>There is always a place where women live near trees like that, blowing in the wind, sound like music. These women tell stories to their children both to frighten and delight them. </div></blockquote><blockquote><div>The mid-morning sky looked like an old quilt, with long bands of red and indigo stretching their way past drifting clouds. Like everything else, eventually even the rainbows disappeared.</div></blockquote><p><i>I'm off to Winesburg, Ohio, and I'll let you know how that adventure goes. Keep safe! Keep faith! Good night. ❤</i></p><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-77739444839321080932022-12-21T16:28:00.000-05:002022-12-21T16:28:09.121-05:00She, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.<p> <i>Mrs. Dalloway </i>by Virginia Woolf, first published as a novel in 1925</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> is the story of one day. This day is in the 1920s, in London, and we see it as viewed by Clarissa Dalloway, a fifty-something housewife who is preparing to throw a party that evening. She runs errands for the party and takes in the world around her, which we see with a kind of omniscience, diving into the back stories and lives and complications of the people she passes by. Clarissa is married to Richard Dalloway, but she had previous paramours, including one, Peter Walsh, that she thinks of often, and he ends up stopping by to pay a visit and then coming to the party. Clarissa and Peter both spend the day marinating on what might have been, and whether they're happy with the choice they've made not to be together. </p><p>Clarissa and Richard have one daughter, Elizabeth, who is a young woman (maybe late teens? I can't recall if we know her age) who is enamored of her governess, Miss Kilman, a rather severe and godly woman. Clarissa despises Miss Kilman (and the feeling is mutual) and there's a kind of battle going on over Elizabeth. Clarissa also spends part of the day reflecting on a time when she fell in love with her best friend, Sally Seton, and then, in another surprise, Sally ends up attending Clarissa's party also. Everyone reconnects and reflects on the ways that their friends and previous loves have changed, and the novel ends with Peter and Clarissa coming together at the party, possibly still in love.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Well, blobbists. This was a much shorter read than <u>The Magic Mountain</u>, roughly a tenth of the length, so I am back here writing to you much sooner than before. </i></p><p><i>I don't know if I can say I enjoyed reading this book, but there were many exquisite moments in it. I think if I were to describe the book in one word, it would be 'precarious'. Clarissa seems to be in a tenuous mental headspace, floating in and out of herself, as do several other characters in the novel, and while that was fascinating to explore, it also made me feel very on edge, as if I was watching an disaster unfold in slow motion. I still very much love <u>To The Lighthouse</u>, of Ms. Woolf's works, and it remains my favorite of hers, though I'm glad I read <u>Mrs. Dalloway</u> and had the chance to experience it. Here are some thoughts!</i></p><p><b>Big Ben as a character</b></p><p><i>I've said in other blob entries that I love the way certain writers write about specific things - the way Pasternak writes weather, the way Murasaki Shikibu writes the seasons. I would like to add to the list that I love the way that Virginia Woolf writes about time. Here are two (imo) incredible passages about Big Ben tolling:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The sounds of Big Ben striking the half-hour stuck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. <i>Isn't incredible that she paints such an image with something so simple as the chiming of a clock?</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Daybreak</b></p><p><i>Another thing I love about Virginia Woolf's writing is the way she paints pictures with her words. I told my mother in describing this book to her that it felt like a painting of a scene where we dove into and out of different images and characters. </i></p><blockquote><p>One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung.</p></blockquote><p><b>The flower shop</b></p><p><i>We follow Clarissa around town as she goes about her errands, and I loved this exchange at the flower shop: </i></p><blockquote><p>And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when - oh! a pistol shot in the street outside! </p></blockquote><blockquote><p> 'Dear, those motor cars', said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all <i>her</i> fault.</p></blockquote><p><b>On might maybe mayhap having seen the Queen</b></p><p><i>Just after the flower shop, everyone in the area is abuzz because they think someone famous has stopped by, possibly the Queen. There was a poetic patriotism to how Woolf described each person's internal dialogue at this prospect: </i></p><blockquote><p>Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing - poor women waiting to see the Queen go past - poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War - tut-tut- actually had tears in his eyes. <i>It made me think of how there were lines miles long to see the Queen when she passed away recently, and how I don't know if there's anyone in American society who gets so much reverence on a national scale. </i></p></blockquote><p><b>Seasons</b></p><p><i>Murasaki Shikibu can be our main seasons writer, but she can collab with Virginia Woolf. ;)</i></p><blockquote><p>June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that. </p></blockquote><p><b>Houses</b></p><p><i>Oh, also, I LOVE the way Virginia Woolf writes about buildings and their relationship to their inhabitants. In <a href="http://conqueringtheclassics.blogspot.com/2013/12/perhaps-you-will-wake-up-and-find-sun.html" target="_blank">my blob on <u>To the Lighthouse</u></a>, I share several scenes describing the house getting ready for the family and being brought back to life. </i></p><blockquote><p>Strange, she thought, pausing on the landing, how a mistress knows the very moment, the very temper of her house! Faint sounds rose in spirals up the well of the stairs; the swish of a mop; tapping; knocking; a loudness when the front door opened; a voice repeating a message in the basement; the chink of silver on a tray; clean silver for the party. All was for the party.</p></blockquote><p><b>Clarissa</b></p><p><i>If you read the flower scene quote carefully, you probably picked up on some of the precariousness I mentioned in Clarissa's mental state. Here are some lines that I think paint a vivid picture of Mrs. Dalloway - a bit lost, quite vain, uncertain of how or if she fits in the world.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one more day. <i>As someone who experiences depression and anxiety, I think Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath's writing style resonates very deeply for me, because their articulations of the experience are so resonant. That can make it very difficult for me to read their work, or to want to read their work, as it can throw me into a bit of a mental funk. But I think their voices are such valuable contributions to our understanding of ourselves.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Clarissa's husband reflecting on her nature: </i>Possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. <i>I thought this was an apt imagination of her thinking - Clarissa seems to be actively drowning, but she's also making sure that the flower arrangements and the china and the silverware are all JUST right on the sinking ship.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She had perhaps lost her sense of proportion. <i>God, I love this line. It feels so spot on for how I feel when I spiral into a depressive or OCD headspace, like I can't properly give things the proportion that they should have, and my emotional responses are being reflected through a funhouse mirror that I can't trust.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>But why should she invite all the dull women in London to her parties? <i>LOL. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Doris Kilman, on Clarissa - </i>Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. <i>OUCH. Miss Kilman and Clarissa DESPISE each other. They approach life as women in polar opposite ways, and there's a kind of fascination and jealousy, I think, that undergirds their mutual obsessive distaste for each other.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was extraordinary how Peter put her into these states just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see herself; exaggerate. It was idiotic. <i>I loved seeing this side of Clarissa, because it softens her, I think, to the reader, to know that she feels so silly about still being in love with her old boyfriend.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every one was unreal in one way; much more real in another</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? <i>Interestingly, some of the guests bring up the death (by suicide) of someone they've interacted with earlier in the day, and Clarissa is horrified that they have the audacity to discuss death at HER party. But it's amusingly hypocritical because she of course has spent the whole day thinking about death herself. Which is evidenced in how she reflects on this moment at the party:</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li>That young man had killed himself. Somehow it was her disaster - her disgrace.</li></ul></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><ul><li>She felt somehow very like him - the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. <i>Honestly, I was surprised that the book didn't end with Clarissa killing herself, as it seemed like we were dancing on the edge of a cliff with her for most of the day. </i></li></ul></ul><p></p><p><b>Miss Kilman</b></p><p><i>Miss Kilman was an interesting side character, who gave us a sense of the 'professional' woman of the time. And yet, like Clarissa, she was, in fact, barely holding it together. </i></p><blockquote><p>When people are happy, they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble. <i>This is how I have felt in bouncing back from responding to COVID and its impact on our society. Like I never got the chance to really fill my reserve back up, so I'm just a wheel without a tire being jolted by the smallest thing. </i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific.</p></blockquote><p><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I prefer men to cauliflowers. <i>:)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. <i>Like I said, precarious.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>They spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe. <i>This line is just so beautifully poetic.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On Clarissa's feelings for her friend, Sally Seton - </i>But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. <i>This was one of my favorite lines.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Last time they met, Peter remembered, had been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight.</li></ul><div><i>Well friends, this blob entry has been a pensive one, and Mrs. D certainly gave me a lot to ruminate and marinate on. That said, I'll leave you with a line I particularly liked, one of the few rather happy moments in the novel: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>On coming home</b></div><blockquote><div>The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to the old devotions. The cook whistled in the kitchen. She heard the click of the typewriter. It was her life, and bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life, flowers of darkness they are, she thought (as if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only); not for a moment did she believe in God; but all the more, she thought, taking up the pad, must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries, above all to Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it - of the gay sounds, of the green lights, of the cook even whistling, for Mrs. Walker was Irish and whistled all day long - one must pay back from this secret deposit of exquisite moments, she thought, lifting the pad, while Lucy stood by her, trying to explain how.</div></blockquote><div><i>I like to think of us all having a secret deposit of exquisite moments. I often store them in my memory as they happen, and think, wouldn't it be nice if I could live here, in this particular moment, stretched out into forever?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I'm off to read many novels, some for the blob, some for fun, some for book bingo. Must dig into some good reads! Wishing you all a very happy holidays for whatever you celebrate at this time of year, if anything, and a reminder to keep safe and keep faith. Good night!</i></div><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-23587263889472140432022-12-07T17:59:00.001-05:002022-12-07T18:05:27.588-05:00We don't feel the cold.<p> <i>The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) </i>by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)</i> is a tale that follows Hans Castorp during his stay at a rest cure at the top of a mountain in Germany. It takes place in the years prior to WWI (roughly 1907-1914, I'd guess?) and features almost entirely characters who are either workers at, or patients at, said rest cure. Initially, Hans comes to the International Sanatorium Berghof by train to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, who is suffering from tuberculosis (and as we know, tuberculosis is not contagious (JK)). At first, Hans is ill-adapted to the rest cure life style, which involves a great deal of eating and a great deal of lying down outside on the balcony, but he quickly adapts, and becomes quite at home. Some might say, TOO at home. </p><p>Hans finds a reason to stay by developing a very low grade fever, and happily settles in, deciding that this life is much preferable to his 'flatland' life, where he had just finished apprenticing to be a shipbuilder. He has debate partners to discuss existential philosophy with in a patient named Settembrini, and later his acquaintance, Naphta, and the lead doctor at the Berghof, Hofrat Behrens, happily supports the general desire to never get better. Hans and Joachim both have lady crushes (on Madame Claudia Chauchat (yes, did you catch the Madame there?) and Marusja) who are also patients at the rest cure, and spend most of their days very coyly attempting to interact with them in hilariously small ways. The rest cure is a sort of mildly sick Hogwarts, where holidays are celebrated in grand style, and some form of house elves seem to provide constant delicious food and libation, and so of course, Hans eventually decides he never wants to leave. </p><p>Hans is dismayed when his crush, Madame Chauchat, leaves, but it is very common for people to get sick again and return, so he holds out hope. Joachim eventually tires of waiting to get better and decides he simply must enlist in the army, his life's dream. He does so (against Hofrat Behren's advice) and returns a few months later, having had a brief stint in the army, and once again (or perhaps still) sick. Madame Chauchat eventually returns, but with a lover in tow (to Hans's consternation), Mynheer Peeperkorn. Hans wants to resent Peeperkorn, but he ends up respecting him too much as a peer and becomes his very good friend. Joachim succumbs to his illness, and Peeperkorn eventually dies. Claudia leaves the mountain, and Hans basically barnacles to the Berghof. According to the narration, he stays another six years or so, and only leaves when WWI basically erupts on the mountain, forcing him out. He enters the war, and seems moderately happy, and the book ends panning away from him on the battlefield, telling us it doesn't really matter if he lives or dies (which I thought was a bit odd).</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>WELL WELL WELL, blobbists. It has been QUITE some time since I blobbed, and this time, my excuse is (a) this book is very long (892 pages, at least in my copy) and (b) I was enjoying it, so I took my time. As Grandma said, no blobbing in a rush! I look forward to sharing my thoughts on this book with you momentarily, but as a word of warning, I have many thoughts to share, both because the book was long and because the book was, imho, excellent. The narrator says it's ok, though, see?</i></p><p>We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.</p><p><i>YES, YES, we must endeavor to be EXHAUSTIVE to be interesting. So here's an exhaustive look!</i></p><p><b><u>General Opinions</u></b></p><p><i>I loved this book. I think it's one of my new favorites, despite the fact that very little happens in it, and if you follow my blob, you know that I like at least a Wee bit of plot. That being said, this book just demanded my affection in the most beautiful, gentle way, reminding me of Proust in the warmth and dryness of the prose, and the way that even the most prosaic moments felt essential and eloquent. I think I originally put it on the list because I remembered my Latin teacher in high school mentioning it, Mr. Lausch, and then later, I think it came up as a pivotal example of the <b>bildungsroman</b>: </i></p><p><i>From Wikipedia -</i> a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education", alternatively "forming") and Roman ("novel").</p><p><i>I think the bildungsroman might be one of my all-time favorite genres, actually! Here are some other examples that I read for this blob (and liked):</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><u>David Copperfield</u>, Charles Dickens</li><li><u>Great Expectations,</u> Charles Dickens</li><li><u>Little Women</u>, Louisa May Alcott</li><li><u>Jane Eyre</u>, Charlotte Brontë </li><li><u>The Catcher in the Rye</u>, J.D. Salinger</li><li><u>A Separate Peace</u>, John Knowles</li><li><u>To Kill a Mockingbird</u>, Harper Lee</li><li><u>Dune</u>, Frank Herbert</li><li><u>Harry Potter</u> series, J.K. Rowling</li><li><u>The Once & Future King</u>, T.H. White</li><li><u>The Kite Runner</u>, Khaled Hosseini</li><li><u>The Bell Jar</u><i>, </i>Sylvia Plath</li><li><u>The Invisible Man</u>, Ralph Ellison</li></ul><p></p><p><i>and the one I really disliked: </i></p><p><u>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</u>, James Joyce</p><p><i>Seems like a pretty white, European-dominated genre in the beginning, or, more probably, there are examples across a wide variety of authors, but they aren't making these lists. Anyhoo, enough on that thread!</i></p><p><b>On Hans, aka our young noodle</b></p><p><i>I loved Hans. He was just delightfully a bit goofy, and erudite, and kind of aimless, and smart, and loving, but also kind of a loner, and his vibe just sat really perfectly with me. I enjoyed picking him up and hanging out with him. Also, the narrator referred to him as our young noodle, which I found hilarious. Here are some lines to give you a snapshot of our lovely protagonist.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He always ate a good deal, out of pure self-respect, even when he was not hungry.<i> LOL. I love this line so so much. It makes me want to eat a good deal out of pure self-respect. ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was neither genius nor dunderhead. <i>also LOL. I think he's quite smart, but then again, I feel kind of dumb in comparison to the average wealthy, well-read person of the early 1900s, so there's that. Maybe we're getting dumber? I do hope not.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He had the greatest respect for work - though personally he found that he tired easily. <i>LOLOLOLOL. This is just the most spectacular line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I have the feeling that once I am home again I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had! That shows you how tired I sometimes feel. <i>HAGHAGHAGh. He is so tired! He must REST from his REST! Do you see why I love Hans? He INVENTED <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/goblin-mode-oxford-dictionary-2022-1.6674878" target="_blank">goblin mode</a>!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Is it possible he could leave me alone up here - me, who only came on a visit to him? <i>If </i>I am left up here, it is for ever; alone I should never find my way back. Never back down to the world again. <i>I love this reflection of Hans's, when he realizes Joachim is thinking of leaving. His predicament is, in a way, ridiculous, and of his own making, but also sort of poetically sad.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Isn't tuberculosis contagious?</b></p><p><i>I ask you this, blobbists. I mean, OBVIOUSLY it is. But I suppose at some point in time it was thought to be a GOOD idea to invite healthy people to visit sick people in an open environment, without any precautions...</i></p><p><b>On colds</b></p><p><i>Hilariously, it is quite frowned upon to be sick with something OTHER than tuberculosis or a fever. Here's what Joachim has to say about Hans when he thinks he is coming down with a cold:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">'Very vexatious', Joachim said, 'and most unfortunate. Colds, you know, are not the thing at all, up here; they are not reçus. The authorities don't admit their existence; the official attitude is that the dryness of the air entirely prevents them. If you were a patient, you would certainly fall foul of Behrens, if you went to him and said you had a cold. But it is a little different with a guest, - you have a right to have a cold if you want to.' <i>LOLOLOL. Since you're a guest, you may have a cold. Just. this. once.</i></p></blockquote><p><i>and later, an offhand comment hilariously made to a guest: </i>'It is not advisable to fall ill up here; you aren't taken any notice of.' <i>I love that the rest cure is ALL about sickness, but if you have a 'non-sanctioned' illness, you are completely ignored. </i></p><p><b>On terms of address</b></p><p><i>There are a few other languages that make their way into this book (which is to say, that in my copy, which was obviously a translation from the original German, as I don't (yet) read German, some parts were left untranslated in French and Italian) and the group is quite international. I loved the playfulness of discussing the formal and informal terms of address: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Hans, to Settembrini:</i> "You will kindly address me with the accepted form employed in the educated countries of the West, the third person <i>pluralis</i>, if I may make bold to suggest it.' <i>lololol.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Being at the Berghof</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Everything up here is out of the ordinary. The spirit of the place, if I may put it so, is not conventional. <i>this reminded me of several other books, places where we feel sort of stranded out of time.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Herr Hofrat, a.k.a, the main doctor</b></p><p><i>He was quite a hilarious character, so here are some little snippets:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">I, for one, have never come across a perfectly healthy human being. <i>hagh!</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">'What are you doing here?' demanded the Hofrat, and goggled his eyes. 'Shall I get an extra-special copy of the house rules printed for you? Seems to me this is the rest period. Your curve and your x-ray don't justify you in playing the independent gentleman, so far as I know. I ought to set up a scarecrow to gobble up people who have the cheek to come down and walk about in the garden at this hour." <i>I loved this so much. At first, Hans is sort of just rule-breaking by going on adventures, and then later, he's definitely NOT REALLY SICK so it doesn't matter, but the Hofrat still tries to boss him around about the rules.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>LOLing at lolling</b></p><p><i>I loved this moment between Joachim and Hans: </i>'That is exactly what she called it, isn't that priceless?' They lolled in their chairs, they flung themselves back and laughed so hard that they shook; and they began to hiccup at nearly the same time. <i>it amused me to think that they were LOLing and lolling at the same time.</i></p><p><b>The Half-Lung Club</b></p><p><i>There's quite a bit of early medicine taking place in this book, and not all of it would be considered sound today, I'm sure. Here's one of my favorite whimsical (and rather horrifying, though seemingly very real) examples - some of the patients have had a procedure done that leaves a hole in their pneumothorax from a very large needle. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">They have formed a group, for of course a thing like the pneumothorax brings people together. They call themselves the Half-Lung Club; everybody knows them by that name. And Hermine Kleefeld is the pride of the club, because she can whistle with hers. It is a special gift, by no means everybody can do it. I can't tell you how it is done, and she herself can't exactly describe it. But when she has been walking rather fast, she can make it whistle, and of course she does it to frighten people, especially when they are new to the place. </p></blockquote><p>"<b>horizontallers"</b></p><p><i>This is how they refer to themselves at the Berghof. I would like to enter goblin mode and be known as a horizontaller. #kthanxbye</i></p><p><b>Porter does a body good</b></p><p><i>One of the many things I love about Hans happens when we first meet him:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>At every place stood a large glass, probably a half litre of milk; the room shimmered white with it. </p><p>'No', Hans Castorp said, when he was once more in his seat between the seamstress and the Englishwoman, and had docilely unfolded his serviette, though still heavy with the earlier meal; 'no, God help me, milk I could never abide, and least of all now! Is there perhaps some porter?' <i>I can just see the new slogan coming now: Porter - it does a body good.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Time</b></p><p><i>One of the most beautiful things about this book, to me, was the playfulness and the exploration of time. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He had the feeling that he had been out of touch with yesterday since waking, and had only now picked up the threads again where he laid them down. <i>This line reminded me of a line of Proust - </i>"Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark."</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Our smallest unit is the month. We reckon in the grand style - that is a privilege we shadows have. <i>There was something wonderfully stealthy and kind of anarchic about the community, and I felt that in this passage.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He had brought no calendar with him on his holiday, and did not always find himself sure of the date. Now and then he asked his cousin; who, in turn, was not always quite sure either. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What is time? A mystery, a figment, and all-powerful. <i>I <u>love</u> this line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Is time a function of Space? Or space of time? Or are they identical?</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Frau Claudia Chauchat</b></p><p><i>Allow me now to introduce to you, Hans's crush, Claudia Chauchat. Perhaps you have picked up on it with the Frau or the Madame, but she is, yes, ALSO married. She is Russian (sits at the 'good' Russian table, according to Hans) and apparently it's not an issue for Hans (or later, Mynheer Peeperkorn) that she is already spoken for.</i></p><p><i>Hans, on his first interaction with her: </i>'She ought to learn how to shut a door,' Hans Castorp said. 'She always lets it slam. It is a piece of ill breeding.'</p><p><i>When Hans begins to fall for her: </i>She wore a white sweater and blue skirt, and had a book from the lending-library in her lap.</p><p><i>she and Joachim chatting about appointment times: </i>Thus they conversed, and Hans Castorp listened as in a dream. For his cousin to speak to Frau Chauchat was almost the same as doing it himself - and yet how altogether different!... they two might meet on a conventional footing and carry on an ordinary conversation in articulate words; because nothing wild and deep, mysterious and terrifying, held sway between them. <i>I love this. They both translate at various points for each other when communicating with one of their crushes, because they're too verklempt to speak themselves, which I found heartwarming and sweet.</i></p><p><i>When Claudia leaves, Hans gets, not a portrait of her, but a magical, mystical, x-ray: </i>It was Claudia's x-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh. <i>They are all adorably fascinated by the x-ray as it is in its nascent years, and there's something so strangely romantic to me about Hans treasuring her x-ray.</i></p><p><i>When she leaves: </i>No longer might he expect that rattle and crash at the beginning of each of the five mighty Berghof meals. Somewhere else, in some far-off clime, Claudia was letting doors slam behind her, somewhere else she was expressing herself by that act, as intimately bound up with her very being and its state of disease as time is bound up with the motion of bodies in space. <i>I love this so much.</i></p><p><b>Lending a pencil, then eleven pages in French - what happens in Carnaval</b></p><p><i>Imagine my surprise when, after several HUNDRED pages of light flirting and deep romantic interest on Hans's part, he is lent a pencil by Claudia Chauchat when the Berghof is celebrating Carnaval, and they finally have a meaningful conversation, and it is PRETTY MUCH ALL IN FRENCH. I mean, at times like these, I'm very glad I learned what used to be the diplomatic language, as otherwise I would have been VERY DISAPPOINTED by the lack of translation. I think it's interesting, and I wonder whose choice it was, to translate all the German, but leave in the French and Italian. Was it just for my copy? Was it because the 'average' reader was expected to know French and Italian, but not German?</i></p><p><b>Tutoyering - 'Eh bien, est-ce que tu as l'intention de me tutoyer pour toujours?' </b></p><p><i>If you know French, you know what 'tutoyer' means; if you don't, it means to use the informal "tu" form with someone. It generally means you're on less formal, or more intimate terms with someone. I really loved the exchanges between Claudia Chauchat and Hans about whether or not they would address each other formally. It felt kind of hilarious and high school-y, and also very endearing.</i></p><p><b>'Mais oui. Je t'ai tutoy</b><b>é</b><b> de tout temps and je te tutoierai éternellement. </b><i>They playfully choose when to use the "tu" and when not to.</i></p><p><i>This magical connection between Hans and Claudia lasts only one night, and only happens because inhibitions are down a bit for Carnaval, and Claudia is leaving the next day. Hans is still completely thrilled to find that she likes him as well, so he doesn't really care that it's so ephemeral. I love this description of her leaving the room: </i>Over her shoulder she said softly: "<i>N'oubliez pas de me rendre mon crayon." </i></p><p><i>I think this felt adorably poetic but also amusing from a language-learning perspective, because I feel like you're always taught weird sentences like, "Où est le crayon de mon oncle?" (Where is my uncle's pencil?) as if you'd ever want to ask that question. But there's just something so adorably sassy and sexy about her whispering "Don't forget to give me back my pencil" in French.</i></p><p><i>Also, because I speak and understand French, I was amused to see that while Claudia briefly 'tutoyers' Hans, she goes back to 'vousvoyer-ing' him (the formal equivalent), much to his chagrin. </i></p><p><b>International atmosphere</b></p><p><i>I love this exchange:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>Why do you suddenly begin talking French?</p><p>Oh, I don't know. The atmosphere up here is so international. <i>:)</i></p></blockquote><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>Here are some bits that reminded me of other bits from books I've read, a section I like to call referents and reverberations.</i></p><p><b><i><u>Pale Fire</u>, Vladimir Nabokov</i></b></p><p><i>This line, spoken by Hans: </i>I only feel really fit when I am doing nothing at all. </p><p><i>Reminded me of this line, from John Francis Shade, in</i> <i><u>Pale Fire</u>:</i> </p><p>Asthmatic, lame and fat,</p><p>I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.</p><p><b><i><u>The Bell Jar</u>, Sylvia Plath</i></b></p><p><i>This line, from Hans: </i>One thing there was which pleased him: when he lay listening to the beating of his heart - his corporeal organ - so plainly audible in the ordered silence of the rest period, throbbing loud and peremptorily, as it had done almost ever since he came, the sound no longer annoyed him.</p><p><i>Reminded me of this line from the Bell Jar:</i></p><p>I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.</p><p><b><i><u>The Harry Potter series</u>, J.K. Rowling</i></b></p><p><i>Why I got Hogwarts feels </i>- "the tree in the dining-room burned, crackled, and dispensed its fragrances, waking the minds and hearts of the guests to a realization of the day...The menu was choice. It finished with cheese straws and bon-bons, to which the guests added coffee and liqueurs. Now and then a twig would flare up on the Christmas-tree; there would be work to put it out, and shrill, immoderate panic among the ladies." <i>don't you want to spend Christmas there?</i></p><p><i><b><u>The Tale of Genji</u>, Murasaki Shikibu</b></i></p><p><i>This description of the seasons changing: </i>Then what lovely apparitions of the springtime revealed themselves! It was unheard of, fairylike. There lay the broad meadows, with the coneshaped summit of the Schwarzhorn towering in the background, still in snow, and close in on the right the snow-buried Skaletta glacier. </p><p><i>Reminded me of the way that each season is so completely and delicately conveyed in Genji.</i></p><p><b><u>Real Life Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>Blobbists, are you still here? Are you not DIVERTED by my exhaustive blobbing on this book? ;) Here's a new section, one I will call 'Real Life Reverberations'. Often when I'm reading a book, there are a multitude of ways where I see connections or parallels between the characters and my own life, sometimes expected, more often unexpected. This book was swimming in these moments, so I'll tell you about a few.</i></p><p><i><b>Locales - </b>I began this book on a cruise with my mother, my aunts, and my dear friend, Mar, on the Adriatic Sea. I was amused to see these locales referenced: </i>Adriatica (<i>the Sea)</i>, Fiume (<i>the town where my grandmother was born)</i>, and Piraeus <i>(the port where our boat ended the cruise).</i></p><p><i><b>Hans and I getting sick together - </b>On a less fun note, I got COVID when I returned from my cruise (I tried to be safe, I promise! And I was boosted, too!) and while this was, at the time, almost unbearably depressing, and very un-fun, it felt like at least I had a companion in Hans.</i> "Hans Castorp was in an agony of snuffles and cleared his rasping throat continually." </p><p><i>And then, I started to feel like the ONLY way to read this book was sick. Because even though Hans was only very lightly ill, if at all, he went through all the trappings of sickness. So it felt right to be ill as a reader.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When we are ill - all the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself. <i>Who hasn't felt this when sick?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It seemed to him that from the beginning of time he had been lying and looking thus. <i>I, too, became a horizontaller.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The night was the harder half of the day, for Hans Castorp woke often, and lay not seldom hours awake; either because his slightly abnormal temperature kept him stimulated, or because his horizontal manner of life, detracted from the power, or the desire, to sleep. <i>This was a problem for I, too.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><i>October </i></b>- <i>I know it is only randomness that allows for me to sometimes be reading books in the same time frame that they are taking place, but I liked that we entered October together as well. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"October began as months do: their entrance is, in itself, an unostentatious and soundless affair, without outward signs and tokens; they, as it were, steal in softly and, unless you are keeping close watch, escape your notice altogether. Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.</p></blockquote><p><b><i>Marking our books </i></b>- The young man answered that it was quite a different thing to read when the book was one's own; for his part, he loved to mark them and underline passages in pencil. <i>As you know if you've read my blob a long time, this is a habit I picked up in trying to emulate the effortlessly cool HS Anna Light, my next door neighbor and bosom bud, and have never stopped. </i></p><p><b><i>On raising our hands outside of school - </i></b>Hans Castorp, like a schoolboy, put up his hand. <i>I do this all the time, as the child of two teachers. It's how we got attention at the kitchen table!</i></p><p><b><i>On falling in love with winter - </i></b>And yet Hans Castorp loved this snowy world. <i>This is how I felt about winters in New Hampshire. I love (and miss) the snow.</i></p><p><i><b>Taking the funicular</b> - Hans does it often on his illicit ski trips, and we did it in Croatia on our cruise!</i></p><p><b><u>Lines I Loved</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>May I bask in the sunshine of your well-being? <i>I'm going to start using this as an introductory line with new people.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The sun and the waning moon both hung high up in a lucent heaven. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Besides, you are confusing two catastrophes. <i>This feels like it wants to be its own short story.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I am, and I continue to be, life's delicate child!</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Evenings he gazed at the stars.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The snow-fall was monstrous and immeasurable, it made one realize the extravagant, outlandish nature of the place.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In a twinkling he was as solitary, he was as lost as a heart could wish, his loneliness was profound enough to awake the fear which is the first stage of valour.</li></ul><div><b><u>Words That Were New to Me</u></b></div><div><b><u><br /></u></b></div><div><i><b>cinchona -</b> an evergreen South American tree or shrub of the bedstraw family, with fragrant flowers and cultivated for its bark</i></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><i><b>gammon - </b>ham that has been cured or smoked like bacon</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_XgGQ01AqHciPF2sZKE7MpN1o_he3v8mrQgdIT6cBsiucW-ZwM2JmMlxBNDfvrARvJoGVXtQPszxAn5hApWlyUlxLR9bQzUvPjdWvy5cJ2T7_iX2Y798V9D3H94iiK9p84mtbLZFIm7uGUzFBBV7p_cdM6ZUVYdRhlGzsSyUpnFfrwqOMN-9pAqi8" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="261" data-original-width="330" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_XgGQ01AqHciPF2sZKE7MpN1o_he3v8mrQgdIT6cBsiucW-ZwM2JmMlxBNDfvrARvJoGVXtQPszxAn5hApWlyUlxLR9bQzUvPjdWvy5cJ2T7_iX2Y798V9D3H94iiK9p84mtbLZFIm7uGUzFBBV7p_cdM6ZUVYdRhlGzsSyUpnFfrwqOMN-9pAqi8=w200-h158" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A double-kerneled almond</i></td></tr></tbody></table><b>lanceolate - </b>shaped like the head of a lance; of a narrow oval shape tapering to a point at each end</i></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><b><i>philippina - </i></b><i>a German custom in which nuts containing two kernels are saved and one of these double kernels (called a philippina) is given to a person of the opposite sex</i></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><i><b>phthisical -</b> of, relating to, or affected with or as if with pulmonary tuberculosis</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>pleonasm</b> - </i><i>the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g. see with one's eyes ), either as a fault of style or for emphasis. </i>This is delightful! I did not know there was a word for this!</div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><i><b>sybaritic</b> - </i><i>fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent. </i>AKA, goblin mode.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><b>voluptuary -</b> a person devoted to luxury and sensual pleasure<br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Well, dear readers, if you have made it all this way, we're nearing the end of this exhaustive and TRULY interesting blob. ;) </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I'll leave you, as usual, with a few of my favorite passages. First this one, which feels wonderfully wintry:</i></div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">There was no stir of air, not so much as might even lightly sway the treeboughs; there was not a rustle, nor the voice of a bird. It was primeval silence to which Hans Castorp hearkened, when he leaned thus on his staff, his head on one side, his mouth open. And always it snowed, snowed without pause, endless, gently, soundlessly falling. <i>I do hope we get some good snow this year!</i></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><i>And then this one, which hilariously recalls Hans's seating arrangement: </i></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Seven years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here... Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the 'bad' Russian table, and his company there two Armenians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. <i>I love the national table-naming.</i></div></blockquote><p><i>And finally, I'll leave you with this sign-off, a hilarious comment that Hans makes one night to his companions:</i> </p><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">'Good-night', he said; 'I'm falling over.'</p></blockquote><p><i>Here's hoping that you fall over into your beds with happy smiles tonight, dear blobbists, perhaps with a book as excellent as this lovely sojourn with Hans. Hoping for snow, and hoping for some happy winter surprises this upcoming (for me) holiday season. </i></p><p><i>Keep safe! Keep faith! Nighty-night! I'm off to meet Clarissa Dalloway.</i> </p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-76930338665634886072022-09-07T18:51:00.001-04:002022-09-07T18:51:20.667-04:00I still thought of myself as a man just passing through.<p> <i>A Bend in the River </i>by V.S. Naipaul, first published in 1979</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>A Bend in the River</i> is a tale of displacement, where we follow Salim as he finds and loses himself in cycles as an expat in Central Africa. (To be clear, I'll continue to refer to this country he's in as central Africa, because he does not name it as a specific country, but references nearby countries like Uganda. In my head I imagined it loosely as taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but that was just a placeholder in my mind.) Salim seems to be Indian by origin, but has long lived on our near the east coast of Africa, for reasons that were sort of unclear. Salim comes to a small town at a bend in the river in central Africa to take over the running of a small shop that used to belong to a family friend, Nazruddin. During the book, only about a year takes place, but the town transitions into a rebellion, a new governance structure, another rebellion, a takeover, and yet another leadership change, all reflections of the greater country's happenings. Salim has only a few friends, fellow expats Shoba and Mahesh, a couple, and later Yvette and Raymond. Most of the characters we interact with are not African by birth, with the exception of Zabeth, a female trader that Salim interacts with and sells to, and her son, Ferdinand, who attends the local school. Salim's former family servant, Metty, is sent to live with him, and they live together in a sort of wary and uneasy peace. When things get messy for maybe the third time, Salim tries moving to London and plans to marry Nazruddin's daughter, Kareisha, which has long been the plan, but he tires of the city and feels out of place so he returns to his town, only to find that it is not safe for him, so the final scene follows Salim as he departs secretly on a nighttime barge, floating down the river. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>My dear blobbists, </i></p><p><i> I know. I have been away for an extended period. Again. My excuse is that I keep getting caught up reading summer book bingo lists, like <a href="https://lectures.org/community/book-bingo/" target="_blank">this one</a>, and reading those 20+ books distracts me from reading my blob list. Also, I made the mistake of putting this book into the book bingo square "Read While Outside", and then I never wanted to be outside again because it was SO HOT and humid. So after reading this book in the car with the windows down by my gym, at a remote camping site on a farm that turned out to be rather overrun with mice, and at a beach where it was so windy I couldn't concentrate, I finally caved and let myself finish it in the comfort of the indoors. It'll be our little secret.</i></p><p><i> Oh, and in case there are typos in this post, let it be known that I am down a finger temporarily. Suffice it to say that one should be very careful after replacing one's rotary cutter blade. Now off we go!</i></p><p><i> I enjoyed this book, albeit sort of in the way one enjoys a long epic tone poem. It's beautifully written, and full of complex and thoughtful reflections on the world, but as far as plot goes, simultaneously a lot and very little takes place. The village goes through multiple rebellions, people are murdered and executed and affairs take place, but Salim also kind of floats noiselessly along through the ether, which gives everything a sort of surreal vibe. I have never been to any of the countries in Africa, so I have no reference to compare his reflections to, but it felt like a realistic outsider's portrayal to me. </i></p><p><b>On time</b></p><p><i>I think this was the first book I've read where someone is not of a culture/country they're inhabiting, but also not trying to colonialize or take over the culture/country they're inhabiting, which is part of what makes this book feel special, I think. It's really a kind of observer's experience, but it doesn't pretend to be journalistic, or telling you the definitive truth. We just simply see the world as Salim does. Here's a line I loved that gets at this:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The ruins, spreading over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn't dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>On rebellions and neutrality</b></p><p><i>While the content of the book is heavy, and at times, quite dark, there's a certain eloquence in how Salim sees it. Here are a few lines I think capture this well.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The second rebellion: Having destroyed their town, they had grieved for it. They had wished to see it a living place again. And seeing it come to a kind of life again, they had grown afraid once more.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In post-colonial Africa everybody could get guns; every tribe could be a warrior tribe.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>No, in this war, I was neutral. I was frightened of both sides.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>On dancing </b></p><p><i>Salim kind of falls under the spell of Yvette and Raymond, who have close ties to the then-President of the country, and I loved this scene where Salim goes to a dinner party at their house: </i>I had never been in a room where men and women danced for mutual pleasure, and out of pleasure in one another's company.</p><p><i>It made me wonder if he had been in other kinds of dancing rooms, and what those rooms would have looked like. </i></p><p><b>On fluidity</b></p><p><i>There are many reasons why I can't imagine myself stepping into Salim's shoes, but this description of life is one of the big ones:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">But in the town, where all was arbitrary and the law was what it was, all our lives were fluid. We none of us had certainties of any kind. Without always knowing what we were doing, we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we where surrounded. In the end we couldn't say where we stood.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>On travelling to London</b></p><p><i>I loved hearing Salim's reflections in London, in part because he feels as out of place, or perhaps more out of place, than he did at the small town in the bend of the river. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">I woke up in London with little bits of Africa on me - like the airport tax ticket, given by an official I knew, in the middle of another crowd, in another kind of building, in another climate. Both places were real; both places were unreal.</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Indar had said about people like me that when we came to a great city we closed our eyes; we were concerned only to show that we were not amazed. <i>I love this line.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>On seizing opportunities to see beauty</b></p><p><i>Salim is often reflecting during one period what he will do in another: </i>During the days of the rebellion I had had the sharpest sense of the beauty of the river and the forest, and had promised myself that when the peace came I would expose myself to it, learn it, possess that beauty. I had done nothing of the sort; when the peace came I had simply stopped looking about me. And now I felt that the mystery and the magic of the place had gone. <i>How true is this for you, reader? Do you make promises to see something for all that it is in one moment, but when you have the chance, forget your promise? I know I do.</i></p><p><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></p><p><i>I pulled these lines out at random, but now that I see them in a stream, they make a kind of digested chronology, which I like.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All I could do was to hide from the truth.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I couldn't protect anyone. No one could protect me.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I could be master of my fate only if I stood alone.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What you must always know is when to get out.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa: everyone is a villager.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The bush runs itself.</li></ul><div><b><i><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></i></b></div><div><i>This book reminded me of Everfair, a sort of steampunk reimagining of the origin story of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Also one line in particular when Yvette first asks Salim out reminded me of </i><i>Gatsby - </i>And at the door of the Tivoli, before we went out again into the heat and the light, during that moment of pause we make before we finally go out into the rain, she said to me, as though it were an afterthought, 'Would you like to come to lunch at the house tomorrow?'</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I'll leave you with a few lines that resonated with me: </i></div><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I felt burdened by the bareness of my days. <i>I feel this acutely right now. Something's missing, and I'm still trying to figure out what.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Who wanted philosophy or faith for the good times? We could all cope with the good times. It was for the bad that we had to be equipped. <i>#facts</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I knew that I had travelled far, and I wondered how I had had the courage to live for so long in a place so far away. <i>I've felt this when I lived in NH, and in France. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness, and men lived in a perpetual dawn. </li></ul><div><i>I'm off to tackle The Magic Mountain on a scholarly cruise through the Adriatic! I know (gasp!) exciting stuff! Keep each other safe while I'm gone! Keep faith (for the good and the bad times). Good night!</i></div><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-22902537677100062212022-03-22T17:41:00.000-04:002022-03-22T17:41:41.562-04:00Is it a crime to try and look my best when you come here?<p> <i>Vanity Fair (A Novel Without a Hero) </i>by William Makepeace Thackeray</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Vanity Fair</i> follows the path of two young ladies in early 19th century British society, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. When we first meet them, they are just being released from 'finishing' school, and Amelia is beloved and Becky delighted to be rid of the place. Becky's parentage is less than desirable for high society (her mother may have been an Opera singer! gasp!) while Amelia's future is all but settled with a young gentleman of excellent parentage, George Osborne. Also in the cast of characters are William (Dob) Dobbin, a good friend of George's from their school days, Joseph Sedley, Amelia's portly brother who is in and out of India being a busy colonizer and whatnot, and Rawdon Crawley, the nephew of a wealthy gentlewoman, Miss Crawley. </p><p>I won't divulge all the dirty details here, as they're far too numerous to share (it was originally published in something like 19 periodical installments) and I don't want to give everything away. But suffice it to say, there are any number of ups and downs, and the fortunes of our two main 'non-heroine' heroines swap places more than once. Marriages take place, children are born (rather silly little boys in this case), and some people (!) die. Most everyone runs out of money at some point, and we have a grand time following the machinations of the inhabitants of Vanity Fair. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p>Greetings, blob fans! </p><p> Once again, it has been a long time since I have blobbed. My only excuses are that (1) this is a very long book and (2) I have been slow-walking reaching the end of my second list. I may very well just end up making a new list (lucky YOU!), but until then, I am taking care not to 'blob in a rush'. :)</p><p>I had never read Vanity Fair before, and I certainly enjoyed the wit of the narrator. The characters weren't terrible lovable (see subtitle above re: novel sans hero) so that made it a little hard for me to keep motivating myself to come back. I think I would much prefer to have been in 19th century society, reading the book as its installments were released, minus the overt racism and mistreatment of Black people. On to my thoughts!</p><p><b>What or where is Vanity Fair?</b></p><p><i>I thought Vanity Fair was an idea at first, like "oh you vain Vanity Fair!" but it turns out it is a term that, according to Wikipedia: </i>"originally meant “a place or scene of ostentation or empty, idle amusement and frivolity”—a reference to the decadent fair in John Bunyan's 1678 book, The Pilgrim's Progress."<i> With that in mind, this line makes much more sense. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. </li></ul><p></p><p><i>I found this line equally cutting, when people would come and go from the story: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Who is ever missed in Vanity Fair?</li></ul><p></p><p><b>I wanna get serial. serial. </b></p><div><p><i>Also according to the interwebs: </i>It (Vanity Fair) was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society. Can I politely request that we bring this fad back? I loved reading the HPs as they were released (Rowling TERF-iness notwithstanding) and would be super down to have some chapters drop the way they drop new episodes of Love is Blind. (#noregrets #lovethatshow)</p><p><b>Now I would like to give you some snapshots of each of the characters, starting with our non-heroine heroine, Becky Sharp. </b></p></div><p><b>Becky Sharp</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nobody cried for leaving <i>her</i>. <i>Lol. RUDE, but also turns out to be quite true. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Becky: </i>Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural. I'm no angel. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If Mr. Joseph Sedley is rich and unmarried, why should I not marry him? I have only a fortnight, to be sure, but there is no harm in trying.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On the Napoleonic advance into Belgium: </i>If the worst comes to the worst, my retreat is secure, and I have a right-hand seat in the barouche.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I have passed beyond it because I have brains, and almost all the rest of the world are fools.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When attacked sometimes, Becky had a knack of adopting a demure <i>ingénue </i>air, under which she was most dangerous.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>To her husband Rawdon</i> - I have your interests to attend to, as you can't attend to them yourself. I should like to know where you would have been now, and in what sort of a position in society, if I had not looked after you?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>William Dobbin, on Becky</i> - She brings mischief wherever she goes.</li></ul><div><i>That gives you a pretty good picture, methinks. She's a bit of a rascal, and occasionally we sympathize with her, but not terribly often. Let's pivot to her girlhood companion, Amelia.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><p></p><p><b>Amelia Sedley</b></p><div><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Amelia was overpowered by the flash and dazzle and the fashionable talk of her worldly rival. <i>Jee, can you guess who that might be? ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Why did you come between my love and me? <i>To Becky, when it turns out she was flirting HARD with George before he (spoiler!) died in the war.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Almost all men who came near her loved her; though no doubt they would be at a loss to tell you why. She was not brilliant, nor witty, nor wise overmuch, nor extraordinarily handsome. But wherever she went she touched and charmed every one of the male sex, as invariably as she awakened the scorn and incredulity of her own sisterhood.</li></ul><div><i>So yes, that's Amelia. Eminently.... forgettable. #sorrynotsorry</i></div><div><i>Here's her hubby: </i></div><p></p></div><p><b>George Osborne</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy, languid and fierce. He looked like a man who had passions, secrets, and private harrowing griefs and adventures. His voice was rich and deep.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I can't change my habits. I <i>must</i> have my comforts. <i>I </i> wasn't brought up on porridge, like MacWhirter, or on potatoes, like old O'Dowd. <i>LOL. I loved this line, when he realizes he will not be super-wealthy if he ends up going forward with his marriage to Amelia. He wasn't brought up on porridge, MMKAY?</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How unworthy he was of her. <i>in reference to Amelia; you can say that again.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Captain Dobbin</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He was so honest, that her arts and cajoleries did not affect him, and he shrank from her with instinctive repulsion.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She would not see that he loved her. <i>Oh, by the by, Dob is rather hopelessly in love with Amelia. I won't tell you if they end up together or not, but Dob is probably the closest we have to a likable character.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Joseph Sedley</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Warriors may fight and perish, but he must dine.</li></ul><div><i>LOL. #enoughsaid</i></div><p></p><p><b>Rawdon Crawley (jr)</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I dine in the kitchen when I am at home. <i>Oh yes, the unlovable Rebecca Sharp has a baby and proceeds to scorn it for the entirety of his life. He is surprised when he's given the option to dine at the table when they visit relatives, because, as he says, at home he is to dine in the kitchen. Poor dear!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Rawdon Crawley (sr)</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On Becky: </i>He thought with a feeling very like pain how immeasurably she was his superior.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He did not know how fond he was of the child until it became necessary to let him go away. <i>At least Rawdon jr. gets one parent who loves him!</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>19th century zingers</b></p><p><i>The narrator was by far my favorite character. Here are some of (in my opinion) his best lines: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In music, in dancing, in orthography, in every variety of embroidery and needlework, she will be found to have realized her friends' <i>fondest wishes</i>. In geography there is still much to be desired. <i>loololololololz</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one (although there are some terrific chapters coming presently)</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was the author's intention, faithful to history, to depict all the characters of this tale in their proper costumes, as they wore them at the commencement of the century. But when I remember the appearance of people in those days, I have not the the heart to disfigure my heroes and heroines by costumes so hideous; and have, on the contrary, engaged a model of rank dressed according to the present fashion. <i>hagh!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We must now take leave of Arcadia, and those amiable people practicing the rural virtues there, and travel back to London, to inquire what has become of Miss Amelia. 'We don't care a fig for her', writes some unknown correspondent with a pretty little handwriting and a pink seal to her note. 'She is <i>fade</i> and insipid.' <i>haghaghaghaghaghaghaghaghaghagh</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Every reader of a sentimental turn (and we desire no other) <i>so great. so spicy.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>On actual red tape</b></p><p><i>Okay, so I already knew that our current term 'cutting through red tape' was a reference to actual red tape that had to be cut through, not just metaphorical bureaucracy, but it was still fun to read it here!</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">The old gentleman's eyes were wandering as he spoke, and he was thinking of something else, as he sat thrumming on his papers and fumbling at the worn red tape.</p></blockquote><p><b>On recommending a governess, should you require one</b></p><p> <i>This description was fantastic, and also, can we please talk about how women (white women) were expected to know like a bazillion things but also had essentially no power or professions, outside of being a governess or a wife? Like yes, honey, please do the dishes, and also, before you do that, just tutor our son in constitutional law, mmkay?</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Either of these young ladies is <i>perfectly qualified</i> to instruct in Greek, Latin, and the rudiments of Hebrew; in mathematics and history; in Spanish, French, Italian, and geography; in music, vocal and instrumental; in dancing, without the aid of a master; and in the elements of natural sciences. In the use of the globes both are proficients. In addition to these, Miss Tuffin, who is daughter of the late Reverend Thomas Tuffin (Fellow of Corpus College, Cambridge), can instruct in the Syriac language, and the elements of constitutional law. But as she is only eighteen years of age, and of exceedingly pleasing personal appearance, perhaps this young lady may be objectionable in Sir Huddleston Fuddleston's family. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"> Miss Letitia Hawky, on the other hand, is not personally well-favored. She is twenty-nine; her face is much pitted with the small pox. She has a halt in her gait, red hair, and a trifling obliquity of vision. <i> OH YES, we'd much prefer the ill-favored Miss Hawky, lest anyone get too excited by Miss Tuffin!</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Predicting snapchat</b></p><p>There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document after a certain brief and proper interval... The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else. <i>So basically Thackeray predicted snapchat. ;)</i></p><p><b>On debt</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds. <i>Rawdon and Becky are continuously in debt, and aside from a brief stint in debtor's prison for Rawdon (from which Becky does not rush to save him, I am sad to say) they are largely unscathed by it. There's even a chapter amusing titled "</i>How to live well on nothing a year". <i>It reminded me of the parties in debtor's prison in several Dickens novels. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i><b>Gretna Green - </b>Becky and Rawdon run off to Gretna Green for their secret marriage, and I have to think it was something of a 19th century Las Vegas, since it comes up often in Austen novels when people are running off to be married on the double. </i></p><p><b><i>Sackville-Bagginses </i>- </b><i>the ongoing feud between the various Crawleys and Pitt-Crawleys and this line in particular: "</i>what the deuce can she find in that spooney of a Pitt Crawley?" <i>for some reason put me in mind of the Sackville-Baggins clan at the end of the Lord of the Rings.</i></p><p><b><i>Spinster women</i> - </b>this passage about Jane Osborne, George's unmarried sister, reminded me of several sections of <i>The Good Earth</i> where the woman of the house cared for and tended to every last need of the men of the house.<b> </b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">She had to get up of black winter's mornings to make breakfast for her scowling old father, who would have turned the whole house out of doors if his tea had not been ready at half-past eight. She remained silent opposite to him, listening to the urn hissing, and sitting in tremor while the parent read his paper and consumed his accustomed portion of muffins and tea.</p></blockquote><p><i><b>But surely they were not thinking you would give them money? </b>This line made me think of the introduction to Sense and Sensibility, when the brother and his wife continuously negotiate downward the amount of support they will give to the Dashwood women. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Pitt Crawley thought he would do something for his brother, and then he thought he would think about it some other time</p></blockquote><p><b><u>Words that were new to me:</u></b></p><p><i><b>amanuensis -</b> a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts</i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEOfLwE_Ty0ivDAZswxbCT_q4cQnGYPZGqcL4lS32B_O8617IrLzW0B5C91AcSH0e6XAYDcFCsS3VPbhsxFpVbP_VGrJMODGqMJb-0jVeBeV8dEkF1kX3LMSqJtZ6CTDczVAzB_MsDB9xF4zh3j7_3EG1PaV4E3yL8IcuiGoRQtCGQnGD5nI4G7_wf" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1600" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEOfLwE_Ty0ivDAZswxbCT_q4cQnGYPZGqcL4lS32B_O8617IrLzW0B5C91AcSH0e6XAYDcFCsS3VPbhsxFpVbP_VGrJMODGqMJb-0jVeBeV8dEkF1kX3LMSqJtZ6CTDczVAzB_MsDB9xF4zh3j7_3EG1PaV4E3yL8IcuiGoRQtCGQnGD5nI4G7_wf=w200-h133" width="200" /></a></i></div><p></p><p><i><b>lazzaroni - </b>one of the homeless idlers of Naples who live by chance work or begging.</i></p><p><i><b>nabob - </b>a Muslim official or governor under the Mogul empire; </i><i>a person who returned from India to Europe with a fortune.</i></p><p><i><b>rack-punch</b> - </i><i>a mixed alcoholic punch made with a black liquor called arrack, a form of rum produced in Asia, distilled from the sap of palm trees. </i>(this is a bit of a guess, but it does seem fit the picture with Joseph having returned from India recently)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXhRwSg5G4Hw-BneKtelXw3D8toV010x-jNVJbqPztD760asEUo_-3BKmJnOttnJ8_dafGjqXQkS-p31DNktQ6RyVa4yGC6-Dd-Y_BsmxrqIOEDg-cWak-fTxQW2VT4NSGMc-uVVM6JYaBWpqr-r9_2mUJhhQOGLtcQ8pXRY2CsQ5-2bYBNgMaPbix" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="312" data-original-width="428" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXhRwSg5G4Hw-BneKtelXw3D8toV010x-jNVJbqPztD760asEUo_-3BKmJnOttnJ8_dafGjqXQkS-p31DNktQ6RyVa4yGC6-Dd-Y_BsmxrqIOEDg-cWak-fTxQW2VT4NSGMc-uVVM6JYaBWpqr-r9_2mUJhhQOGLtcQ8pXRY2CsQ5-2bYBNgMaPbix=w200-h146" width="200" /></a></div><i><b>Semiramis</b> - </i><i>Semiramis was the mythological Lydian-Babylonian wife of Onnes and Ninus, who succeeded the latter to the throne of Assyria, as in the fables of Movses Khorenatsi</i><p></p><p><i><b>stanhope</b> - </i><i>a light open horse-drawn carriage for one person, with two or four wheels.</i></p><p><i><b>vilipending</b> - </i><i>regarding as worthless or of little value; </i><i>speaking slightingly or abusively of</i></p><p><i><b>wherry</b> - a large light barge</i></p><p><b><u>Phrases we should start saying (pretty pretty please?)</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Are you in your senses?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Mofy! Is that your snum? I'll gully the dag and bimbole the clicky in a snuffkin. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nuffle your clod, and beladle your glumbanions. (<i>I am particularly fond of this one.)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>No candles after 11 o'clock, Miss Becky - Go to bed in the dark, you pretty little hussy!</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. (<i>the MOST absurd!)</i></li></ul><div><u><b>Lines I liked:</b></u></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history? </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Who has not seen a woman hide the dullness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>To how many people can one tell all?</li></ul></div><div><i>Well, blob friends, it has been a pleasure! I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines: </i></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">And as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of. </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Miss Crawley, on hearing that Becky has run off to Gretna Green in the night: </i>Gracious goodness, and who's to make my chocolate? Send for her and have her back; I desire that she come back. <i> Honestly, who will make my chocolate?! </i> </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Ah! <i>Vanitas Vanitatum! </i>which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? -come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.</div></blockquote><p><i>This play is all played out, so we're off to the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight. Don't forget to nuffle your clod, and beladle your glumbanions! And no candles after 11 o'clock, you hear! </i></p><p><i>I'm off to the Bend in the River. Keep safe, keep faith, good night!</i></p><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-32889654249259510732021-12-20T15:50:00.001-05:002021-12-20T15:50:27.565-05:00Ah, I have heard of a Revolution, but I have been too busy in my life to attend to it. There was always the land.<p> <i>The Good Earth </i>by Pearl S. Buck</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Good Earth</i> chronicles the life of a peasant farmer, Wang Lung, in rural China in the early 1900s. When we first encounter him, he is living with his father on a small plot of land, and has just decided to 'take a wife'. He goes and gets a slave from the House of Hwang, a well-to-do house in town, and takes her home to be his wife. Her name is O-lan. We follow the pair through decades together, with Wang Lung continually focused on getting more land and doing what is necessary to feed his growing family. O-lan bears him several children, and after a stint in the south when they must beg for food for weeks, they get a windfall from looting during an uprising, and return to the north and buy more land. </p><p>Wang Lung continues to expand his land and becomes a wealthy man, and his wealth attracts others to him, including an unwanted uncle and his family. Wang Lung can't get rid of the leeching uncle because it turns out he works with the Redbeards, a clan of looters/raiders, and has been secretly protecting Wang Lung, so Wang Lung decides to turn the uncle and his family onto opium use. Wang Lung becomes dissatisfied with O-lan and buys a concubine, Lotus, from a teahouse in town, and moves her into his estate. O-lan eventually falls ill and Wang Lung feels guilty, caring for her until she dies. His children are continually dissatisfied with what he provides them, and make plans to sell his land when he dies, much to his chagrin. The final scene ends with Wang Lung begging them not to sell the land, and them promising they won't, but smiling behind his back.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>HOKAY, blobbists, it has been a minute. I will freely admit that in my attempt to make a more inclusive second list, I included more women, but I realize that this did not account for the issue of people writing stories that aren't their own, so I ended up with books like this, which were groundbreaking at the time, but also problematic. </i></p><p><i>So. I read the book anyway, because I want to make relationships with all books that are my own, not founded on anyone else's opinion, and I will share some interesting reflections that I came across in the 'reader's excerpt' in the middle. </i></p><p><i>In case it was not obvious to you/you did not know, Pearl S. Buck was a white lady from America, born to missionary parents, who was raised largely in China. Some people thought that it was super swell that she told the world all about agrarian life in China, but lots of other people were like, hey, lady - that's not your story! And also, that's not all of China! (This is a DRAMATIC oversimplification, I am aware.) Here are some interesting niblets I found in my copy that I found enlightening (and which I read, true to my form, after reading the book, as I didn't want to be influenced by context). </i></p><p><i>From a NY Times Book Review, from Professor Kiang Kang-Hu, of China</i></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Her portrait of China may be quite faithful from her own point of view, but she certainly paints China with a half-black and half-white face, and the official button is missing! Furthermore, she seems to enjoy more depicting certain peculiarities and even defects than presenting ordinary human figures, each in its proper proportions. She capitalizes such points, intensifies them, and sometimes 'dumps' too many and too much of their kind on one person, making that person almost impossible in real life. In this respect Mrs. Buck is more of a caricature cartoonist than a portrait painter. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>As long as a Western cannot himself or herself read Chinese texts and, as long as he or she depends chiefly on Chinese coolies and amahs as the source of information and as first-hand translators, there is little hope left for him or her to really understand and truly interpret China, even though he or she be born and live always in China.</p></blockquote><p> <i>This felt really apt after reading the story - it was like reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, in that the characters had movement and feeling, but they were also caricatures of human beings, in a way that had deeply harmful potential for stereotyping and ongoing ignorance of a broader range of experience. I also want to point out that he uses some derogatory terms that aren't OK in today's parlance (coolie), so he's got some classism going on there as well. Here's Ms. Buck's response to this way of thinking, from a speech she gave: </i></p><blockquote><p>One of the isolating factors of my own experience has been that some of the morbidly sensitive modern Chinese, especially those abroad in foreign countries, have not liked it that I have written of the everyday life of their people. In China itself it was accepted without dislike except that it was a foreigner who wrote it. It was often said there, 'It is a book which a Chinese should have written.' Apparently with the simplest purpose in the world, namely, merely to write novels, surely a harmless necessity for a novelist, and without any sense of wrongdoing, I was able to infuriate an astonishingly large number of people. </p></blockquote><p><i>This statement was CRINGEWORTHY for me to read as a white woman in the 21st century. She's basically saying, hey, I was just writing a book, and I had totally good intentions, so that's enough, right? I can understand that living in China for so much of her life made it it a rife subject for her fiction writing, but my main concern (of many concerns, tbqh) is that <b>she</b> is nowhere to be found in this book, and it's a work of fiction that was clearly taken as nonfiction/a study or portrait of life in China. </i></p><p><i>Now I don't think you have to base all fiction in yourself because that's nonsense, but I do feel like she sort of sat across the room from her experience in China and wrote about what she saw on the wall in the way that a photographer does, which means that she could only see things through her Westerner, missionary lens. It feels like Buck really failed to capture nuance, and when she should have drawn in pencil, she used a Sharpie. And of course, because of the way our society works and because of racism and imperialism and oppression, she got a Nobel prize for doing it. Because when you feed into the system of oppression you get a cookie. I also just feel like she missed this amazing opportunity to take a risk and really tackle her OWN subject material; what was her experience like straddling these worlds? How did she create her own identity? </i></p><p><i>Anyway, I will now respond to the book itself, with the disclaimer that I am responding to the book as a <b>work of fiction</b>, not as a representation of Chinese life. I have also walked away from this experience realizing that I must add Chinese fiction authors to my list, as I am woefully lacking in this area. Understandably I will have to read translations, but there's still a WIDE world to discover.</i></p><p><b>It starts with a Proust quote...</b></p><p><i>So Ms. Buck started off with a Proust quote. And you all know I love me some Proust. But I just didn't really understand why it was there, or what it had to do with the novel At. All. It was a quote about the little phrase, for the Proustians out there, and I just couldn't for the life of me see what it had to do with Wang Lung's experience or life. If you're going to use a quote (and especially a Proust quote) make it connect!</i></p><p><b>Casual misogyny</b></p><p><i>Again, this is a response to the representation in the novel, not Chinese life writ large. </i></p><p><i>It was hard to read this book, as generally in this narrative, woman = slave. O-lan is literally a slave who is sold to Wang Lung, and repeatedly throughout the book, women are property, not people, but they are also expected to be superhuman. I suppose in some way Ms. Buck was trying to highlight this contradiction, but it still ended up reading as cringeworthy to me.</i></p><p><i>Here are some examples of this misogyny/where woman also = badass. Note, I'm using 'the woman' for effect, not to de-humanize her.</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When the woman (O-lan) stops in the middle of her labor to prepare Wang Lung dinner.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When the woman (O-lan) works beside her husband in the fields and also keeps the house and home, throughout the duration of her many pregnancies.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When the woman (O-lan) kills their ox to feed their family because Wang Lung can't bring himself to do it.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When the woman (O-lan) bears him child after child after child, despite being starving herself.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>When the woman (Wang Lung's daughter) does not weep, though she is in pain from foot binding:</li></ul><p></p><div></div><blockquote><div>'Now I have not heard you weep,' he said wondering. </div><div>'No,' she said simply, 'and my mother said I was not to weep aloud because you are too kind and weak for pain and you might say to leave me as I am, and then my husband would not love me even as you do not love her.'</div></blockquote><div><b>When O-lan has been sick for months and he doesn't see it</b></div><div><i>Poor O-lan, who is the REAL protagonist of this story, gets sick and increasingly sicker and basically no one (including Wang Lung) notices. Here's his response to himself:</i></div><blockquote><div>'Well, and it is not my fault if I have not loved her as one loves a concubine, since men do not.' And to himself he said for comfort, 'I have not beat her and I have given her silver when she asked for it.'</div></blockquote><div><i>Oh yes, Wang Lung, that's such a high bar. Not beating her and giving her silver when she asks. This is one of those Sharpie examples - how many foreigners walked away from this novel assuming that most Chinese peasants beat their wives? We're clearly meant to believe that Wang Lung is unique in this regard. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The land</b></div><div><i>For Wang Lung, everything comes back to the land, and I have to say that this is a place that really touched me. I know that land ownership is complex given that much of the land currently occupied was taken from other peoples. There is, however, something so pure and affirming about having a plot of land to farm and create the food you need to survive. This part of Wang Lung was something I loved and connected with, but it felt like no amount of land was ever enough, which I guess was his fatal flaw. The book is full of lines like, "</i>We must get back to the land."<i> and "</i>As long as there was the land!" </div><div><br /></div><div><b>When O-lan wants to keep the pearls</b></div><div><i>O-lan finds a stash of jewels in the looting post-uprising, and while she gives them over to Wang Lung, she asks if she can keep a pair of pearls. When he asks her what she would do with them, she says, simply: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I could hold them in my hand sometimes. <i>This line killed me. Wang Lung (being the asshole that he is) later takes the pearls from her to spend on his concubine, I think.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>No food to eat vs. no food</b></div><div><i>This was a fascinating realization/heartbreaking understanding to reckon with that came up in this book. Wang Lung and his family have to leave their land and go south to beg for food at one point, because there is simply no food to be had in the country in the north. I guess I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the different ways one can be food insecure, and as a westerner in a very wealthy country who lives in a city, I'm used to the idea that food of some kind exists somewhere. But at several points, Wang Lung and his family are starving, or trying to make dirt or a few beans stretch for days of sustenance, because there is simply no other food to be had. Here's a line that I thought captured this eloquently:</i></div><blockquote><div>Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the hand was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was. </div></blockquote><div><b>The place where a mother used to be</b></div><div><i>So like I said, O-lan was the real hero of this novel, and it unfortunately takes her being on her deathbed for the rest of the family to realize it. I was also reading 'Crying in H Mart' while I read this book, and it was a beautiful counterpoint, as it deals with a daughter's grief and attempting to fill the space her mother did. I know I would be LOST without my own mother, and I'm so grateful for all the times she has made comfort and continues to make comfort for me and my sisters. Love you, mom!</i></div><blockquote><div>All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she had made comfort for them all and they had not known it.</div></blockquote><div><b><u>Words New to Me</u></b></div><div><b>geomancer - </b>a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand<b>.</b></div><div><b><u><br /></u></b></div><div><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></div><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A small soft wind blew gently from the east, a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain. <i>God, I loved this line. This was probably my favorite line in the whole book.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Hunger makes thief of any man.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Wang Lung was afraid of his happiness.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Everything seemed not so good to him as it was before.</li></ul><p></p><p><i>Well, blobbists, I'm off to read Vanity Fair, and add more Chinese authors to my ongoing list. Feel free to shoot me recommendations! </i></p><p><i>I'll leave you with this tidbit, which is a note from Ms. Buck which I quite liked. </i></p><blockquote><p>I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within the reach of everybody.</p></blockquote><p><i>On this, Pearl, we can agree! Books should be within the reach of everybody! Happy holidays blobbists, whatever you are celebrating, and I'll see you in the new year! Keep safe, and keep faith! </i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-52952932894365566022021-11-29T17:54:00.000-05:002021-11-29T17:54:02.850-05:00Don't you know that putting yourself in the position for disaster is the surest way in the world to bring it about? <p> <i>Sanctuary</i> by William Faulkner</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Sanctuary </i>is a story about risks, calculated and unforeseen. It centers around Horace Benbow, a lawyer in the American South (in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi) in the later part of the era of Prohibition (1920 to 1933 is the window for that, in case you, like I, were unsure) and his eventually failed attempt to prove a bootlegger innocent of a murder he didn't commit. </p><p>At the center of the case is Temple Drake, a debutante who happens into a situation at the bootlegger's farm where she is very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. Left to fend for herself by a drunken beau and spend the night at this rather unruly 'home', Temple tries and fails to prevent herself from being raped. A man, Tommy, is killed as he attempts to protect her. Popeye, one of the bootlegger's men, is responsible, but the bootlegger, Lee Goodwin, takes the blame. </p><p>Popeye kidnaps Temple, takes her to Memphis, and makes her his 'kept woman'/sex slave, and since he's impotent, he brings another man, Red, in to do the deed with Temple while he watches. Horace eventually finds Temple and gets the real story out of her, including some rather disgusting parts where the (as it turns out) impotent Popeye used a corn cob in place of his penis, but when the case comes to trial, Red is dead (killed by Popeye), Popeye is long gone, and for reasons unbeknownst to us, Temple points the finger at Goodwin. </p><p>In the end, the town is outraged over the incident, and Goodwin is found guilty and set to hang. Impatient for justice, a mob lights the jailhouse on fire and burns it down with Goodwin inside. Popeye is arrested on his way to visit his mother in Florida for killing a policeman (aka the one man he didn't actually murder in this story) and is hanged for the supposed crime. In the final scene, we see Temple strolling the streets of Paris with her father, seemingly unconcerned.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbers, </i></p><p><i>Once again, I feel as though I have taken quite some time to blob for you. But then again, Doris said, don't blob in a rush! So no rushing here, just a slow and steady pace. </i></p><p><i>I did not care for this book. I found it less confusing than other Faulkners, but also less lyrical, and less satisfying. I think this is the fourth Faulkner I've read. I'm not sure why I chose it for this second list, to be totally honest, but I finished it and so I will share my thoughts with you! As always, make your own decisions about where to devote your reading time, but I can't say I'd personally recommend you spend yours on this particular tome. </i></p><p><i>I would like to congratulate myself on understanding correctly what happened in the novel, despite Faulkner's best efforts to the contrary. I think this is the first Faulkner I read where my understanding of the events was actually the same as the internet's conception of the events. I really don't like writers that make you work that hard to assess what the words you read actually mean. I'm sure it's some amazing stylistic technique, and I'm just too uncultured to appreciate its brilliance, but I feel like the book should at Least meet you halfway. Now, here are my thoughts, in lighly alphabetical order. </i></p><p><b><i>On places you shouldn't be after dark</i></b></p><p><i>One that that I did really like about this book was the setting of the bootlegger's abandoned mansion/farm. It felt wonderfully creepy, and when several people started telling Temple and her beau, Gowan, that they shouldn't be there when dark fell, reminded me of The Haunting of Hill House and stories like The Fall of the House of Usher. Here are two lines I liked: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A moment later, above a black, jagged mass of trees, the house lifted its stark square bulk against the failing sky.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The gaunt ruin of the house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless, desolate, and profound.</li></ul><p></p><p><b><i>On prohibition, and how weird it seems to me now</i></b></p><p><i>I'm sure that as time passes, many things that made sense, or at least had clear origins, seem nonsensical to us in the present. Prohibition is one of those things to me. I'm not surprised we had antiquated and Puritanical alcohol laws, but the fact that we went so far as to ban it completely, and only for 13 years did so, seems positively wild to me. Faulkner was 23 to 36 during that time, so I suppose it's no wonder that it features so heavily in some of his works. Maybe it seemed wild to him, too. ;)</i></p><p><b><i>On punctuation, which is apparently only sometimes necessary (and maybe reeks of male white privilege?)</i></b></p><p><i>So, this wasn't my first Faulkner or anything, but I can't say that Ive ever come around to the way he writes. See how much that missing apostrophe bothers you?! I can barely stand to leave it in for dramatic effect! I understand the stream of consciousness technique, but I really fail to see how a dropped apostrophe here and there makes the work feel more like it fits that style. Honestly, it sort of feels lazy and careless to me, and I get that he was this epic, groundbreaking author and all, but would a woman or a writer of color get away with that and be lauded as GROUNDbreaking for violating basic rules of punctuation? I'll just leave you to marinate on that while you read this (obnoxious) example.</i></p><p>'You can get a better criminal lawyer than you are. She wont know it. She wont even care. Cant you see that she is just leading you on to get him out of jail for nothing? Dont you know that woman has got money hidden away somewhere? You're going back into town tomorrow, are you?' She turned, began to dissolve into the blackness. 'You wont leave before breakfast.' <i>Faulkner's biography title: To Apostrophe, or Not to Apostrophe</i></p><p><i><b>On ra</b></i><i><b>cism, misogyny, and anti-semiticism</b></i></p><p><i>It ALMOST goes without saying that when one is reading Faulkner, one must be prepared for a not insignificant amount of this delightful trio. And I know that we can't assign present-day expectations to figures of the past. But I CAN and WILL just go ahead and say that there's a LOT of these three things in this book, and I didn't feel like there was a ton of irony in the way Faulkner's characters expressed them. </i></p><p><i><b>On rapes, and in particular, missing when they happen in literature</b></i></p><p><i>To be clear, I do not in any way wish to downplay the intensity, the trauma, the deep emotional, physical, and psychological hurt of a rape. I will say, though, that apparently I am not terribly skilled at picking them up when they happen in famous works of literature. When this one happened, the wording was so oblique that I honestly thought that Temple had just narrowly AVOIDED being raped, when in fact it was the exact opposite. Perhaps this is once again due to the Puritanical nature of American writing, and the desire not to sensationalize the reader, but it sailed right over my head.</i></p><p><b><i>On sanctuary, schmanctuary</i></b></p><p><i>I'm really not sure where the sanctuary was in this book. I suppose you could argue that Horace gives sanctuary to the bootlegger's common law wife and her baby while he's in jail; or you could say that the bootlegger mansion is a kind of sanctuary from the strict Puritanical world; or you could say that Temple ultimately finds sanctuary in a kind of fictionalization of her experience; or that sanctuary is to be found in justice ultimately prevailing on Popeye? OR MAYBE you could just say that it wasn't really clear why the novel was named that, because it didn't feel like there was any sanctuary for Temple when she needed it. </i></p><p><b><i>On telling you things you need to know AFTER you needed to know them</i></b></p><p><i>Not much to say here, other than that Faulkner really likes to do this, and I really like to HATE when Faulkner does this. Like how I didn't really know what happened to Red, and then the next chapter was his funeral, and like halfway through that chapter Faulkner reveals that Red died. Oh, well isn't that HELPFUL information? I guess we're not on the 'need-to-know' list.</i></p><p><b><i>On Temple, who isn't the main character (but should be, imho)</i></b></p><p><i>I think one of the things that confused and upset me about this book was that even though it supposedly centers on Temple's experience, she isn't what I would call the main character. Horace Benbow, the lawyer, is the main character - the book opens with him and his story, and the action seems to end with him returning to the wife and stepdaughter he left temporarily. Sure, Temple is there, but she really just feels like a puppet whose strings Faulkner is pulling, and that left me feeling kind of icky, tbh. It felt like he wanted to write a story about rape and sensational creepy violation, but he didn't want to actually reckon with her full experience. I did like that we got to hear her rendition of the night's events, and I thought it was fascinating the way she kept distracting herself by believing she was going to, at any moment, turn into a boy and render herself protected. It made me feel both epically sad that being a woman made you that vulnerable in that time, and equally sad that women are still so vulnerable and unsafe in so many ways and places and spaces, especially if they identify as WOC, Trans, or Trans WOC. </i></p><p><b><i>Lines I Liked</i></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>His back still shook with secret glee. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You can feel people in a dark room: did you know that? You don't have to see them.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The insects had fallen to a low monotonous pitch, everywhere, nowhere, spent, as though the sound were the chemical agony of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed.</li></ul><p></p><p><b><i>Referents and Reverberations</i></b></p><p><i>Horace has a sister named Narcissa, which of course made me think of Draco's mom, Narcissa Malfoy, in the HP series. </i></p><p><i>All the King's Men - In general, this novel reminded me a lot of that one, in the kind of languorous Southern space that it created and the evil underbelly we peel back. </i></p><p><i>Tess of the D'Urbervilles - So, it reminded me of this book because it is another example of when a rape in literature went right over my head. I think in that one it was something about the flower or the blossom or the seed, and I was like, oh, ok, gardening, and then in the next chapter, she was pregnant, and I was like, WAIT, How?! Again. Rape is not a laughing matter, but apparently I am not that adept at spying it in the world of fiction. </i></p><p><i>Well blobbists, I hope that you are tucked in somewhere cozy tonight, and that you are able to enjoy some reading time, whatever book you've chosen to tackle. I'm off to The Good Earth, and hopefully I'll be back here in not quite so long a spell. </i></p><p><i>Keep safe! Keep faith! Good night.</i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-78591987463236181502021-09-14T17:36:00.003-04:002021-09-14T17:36:50.376-04:00She wanted something to happen - something, anything; she did not know what.<p> <i>The Awakening </i>by Kate Chopin</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Awakening</i> is a story of love lost, regained, and lost again. But more than that, it is a story of self-exploration, an examination of the female experience, and a warrior's battle cry. It chronicles a brief period of time in the life of Edna Pontellier, a relatively young woman and mother of two, first at Grand Isle, Louisiana, and later in New Orleans, in the early 20th century. As the novel begins, we're joining a group of wealthy families (self-designated as Creole, but in a sense that mostly refers to them having been descended from French folk and living in the American South, which I found a bit confusing, thinking that Creole had a racial aspect/designation) as they summer by the Gulf of Mexico. Edna is followed at every turn by Robert Lebrun, a young single man and son of another family staying there. The summer is full of lightness and affection, but when they return for the season to New Orleans, Robert announces his intention to move to Mexico to seek job prospects. Edna is dismayed, but can't convince Robert to stay. </p><p>After Robert leaves, Edna begins to 'awaken', so to speak. She sends her children to be with her mother-in-law, she decides she does not wish to be tethered to anyone, and she tells her husband she intends to close their large home (he is away for work) and move into a small house adjacent to live by herself. Her husband is confused and displeased, but manages to smooth things over socially by claiming they are doing 'major repairs' on their home, and assumes/hopes she will eventually return to 'normal'. Edna develops a new friendship with another single man, Alcée Arobin, who falls completely in love with Edna. She enjoys his affections, but her heart is still longing for Robert, so poor Arobin slots into a sort of sad second place. Robert unexpectedly returns, but he spurns Edna, and she is bereft. She accidentally stumbles upon him and tries to rekindle their flame. It seems like they might be getting back together, but Robert leaves in the night and says he can't accept this limited version of Edna's affection (she would stay married, be his mistress but not his wife, etc.). Edna travels back to Grand Isle to "see the sights" in the off-season, and goes for a solo swim in the Gulf from which she does not return.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbies, </i></p><p><i>Do you like my new name for you? Blobbies? Ah well, I like it, so that's all that matters. ;) Anyway, I thought I'd continue my latest phase of actually reading books in a timely fashion and so I've already finished <u>The Awakening</u> and I'm ready to blob on it. </i></p><p><i>General reflections: I liked this novel a lot. I remember that I once had the opportunity to read it in high school - I think it was a choice between this book and <u>Portrait of a Lady</u> and I kind of wish I'd read this book instead (sorry, Henry James). This book had tons of flavor and nuance to it, and I always LOVE reading books by women or female-identifying authors, especially when they're from a time when almost no women were getting published. Apparently this book was not well received when she wrote it, and lots of folks were like, "ladies don't/shouldn't act this way" which makes me feel like they really missed the point. So anyway, just want it to go down in the record that I see you, Kate Chopin, and I loved this book. I think it's gotten a fair amount of acclaim in later years post-publication, but I'm sure it's frustrating to not have your work feel seen when you're alive and there to stand by it. </i></p><p><i>My thoughts!</i></p><p><b>On sunshades (and how we should bring them back)</b></p><p><i>Mr. Pontellier uses a sunshade and several people reference them, and I was like, UM hello can we please bring these back? I walked around the bird refuge with an open umbrella in the middle of the summer to protect my oh-so-pale skin from the sun and everyone looked at me like I was a nutbar.</i></p><p><b>Connection points</b></p><p><i>As I've mentioned in many of my last posts, I'm always amazed at how connected I feel to books, regardless of when they're written or by whom. This book was no exception. Here are a few of those links I saw in this one. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Am I reading a book or taking a French exam? </b><i>Amusingly, the copy of the book I bought was an inexpensive version from Amazon, and there is a ton of French in the novel, but it was all missing accents. So as I was reading, I kept trying to add in accents where I thought they were missing (an accent aigu here, accent grave there, circonflexe there) but it ultimately felt like I was taking a French exam. This reminded me of the fact that my mother used to write letters to her grandmother in French, but instead of responding in French, my great-grandmother would return the letters or notes with corrections. I must say that I was, on the whole, quite glad that I was a French speaker as I read this book, as it had a ton of untranslated French in it.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Perhaps a bit of bouillon? </b><i>At one point, Mrs. Pontellier is looking tired, and someone offers her a cup of bouillon, and I just about dropped my book. My grandmother when she wasn't feeling well used to ask for 'just a bit of bouillon', and I legitimately thought this was just one of her things. Turns out, the whole world used to ask for bouillon!</i></li></ul><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Old Madame Pontellier </b>- <i>I loved this line below about Edna's children and their grandmother, because it made me think of my mom and G, and I think she shares the same sentiments.</i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">She was hungry for them - even a little fierce in her attachment. She did not want them to be wholly 'children of the pavement', she always said when begging to have them for a space. She wished them to know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom, so delicious to the young. She wished them to taste something of the life their father had lived and known and loved when he, too, was a little child.</p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>There was the whistle of a railway train somewhere in the distance, and the midnight bells were ringing.</b> <i>This one is just a personal note - I love hearing trains at night, and I love that I can hear them at home in the country and here in the city, depending on the level of overall city noise. I think my afterlife would always have a midnight bell and train in the distance.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>Mrs. Edna Pontellier</b></p><p><i>Since she is really the center of this work, I wanted to give you a few lines to give you a sense of her. </i></p><p><b>In appearance...</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was rather handsome than beautiful. <i>I don't know if this is a compliment or a dig?</i></li></ul><div><b>As a parent...</b></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them...Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her. <i>I loved the exploration of this. I mean, certainly has dark ramifications for the children concerned, but I think it's under-explored to see mothers who didn't really intend to be, or don't feel it fits them completely.</i></li></ul><div><b>As a wife...</b></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The acme of bliss, which would have been a marriage with the tragedian, was not for her in this world. As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams. <i>There was such sadness in this line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>When Madame Ratignolle says it's a pity Mr. Pontellier doesn't stay at home in the evening, and Edna replies</i>: "Oh! dear no!,' said Edna, with a blank look in her eyes. 'What should I do if he stayed home? We wouldn't have anything to say to each other.' <i>!! </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>As a music enthusiast...</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth. <i>Ooh, I loved this line, it gave me chills. Totally reminded me of the way Proust talks about music and music appreciation.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>As a lover...</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was so much more natural to have him stay when he was not absolutely required to leave her. <i>There was such poignancy in the relationship with Robert, which was really quite chaste on the whole, but also deeply intimate.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.</li></ul><div><b>As an individual...</b></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself. <i>I loved this.</i></li></ul></div><p></p><p><b>A doctor's opinion</b></p><p><i>Some people in this novel were less thrilled about Edna's awakening. For example, Mr. Pontellier. I really enjoyed this moment when he consulted the family doctor about Edna's "strange behavior" which included things like taking the streetcar and arriving home late at night, and paying no attention to household chores. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism... And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. <i>OH YES, you know us women and how whimsical and moody we are. </i></li></ul><p></p><p><b>On ennui</b></p><p><i>Part of the beauty in this novel for me is this fine line between female independence, existential exploration, losing or finding oneself in love, and depression, and the uncertainty of where or what is driving this 'awakening'. Here are some of the lines that capture this feeling:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, -when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. <i>This is admittedly a very dark line, but I liked the visceral nature of it, and how it reminded me of The Bell Jar, but also when Proust says things like, 'I was only unhappy for a day at a time.' </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'The years that are gone seem like dreams - if one might go on sleeping and dreaming - but to wake up and find - oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.' <i>This is one of the central questions of the novel. Is it better to wake and find oneself in a sort of nightmare, or to stay sleeping and dreaming? </i></li></ul><div><b>On the sea</b></div><div><i>The way that Chopin writes about the water is so lovely. Here are some lines I loved.</i></div><p></p><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.</li></ul></div><div><b>Things I did not enjoy</b></div><div><i>While I really enjoyed this book on the whole, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about the bits I did not like. </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>References to 'the quadroon' - there were no meaningful Black characters in this novel, and they were frequently referred to like this, by the 'proportion of their blackness'. I know this is representative of the time that Chopin inhabited, but it felt awful.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>I couldn't help but reflect that there was not a huge gap between this novel and Black Boy in terms of timeline, so when I read the scenes of Edna's party and the Black folks working it, I thought of Richard going hungry behind the smiling white faces. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The few times that Black people were mentioned, it was for things like this: </i>A little black girl sat on the floor, and with her hands worked the treadle of the machine. <i>Madame Lebrun is sewing and a little Black girl is literally on the floor pushing the machine. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Comments about 'the Mexican people' as treacherous, their women as promiscuous - this came up as a theme several times. Obviously racist and ignorant.</i></li></ul></div><p></p><p><b>Words that were new to me (many of which are actually French but a bit obscure)</b></p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">befurbelowed </i>- ornamented with frills</p><div><b><i>friandises</i> - </b>candies, sweet things</div><div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><i style="font-weight: bold;">houri</i><b> - </b>a beautiful young woman, especially one of the virgin companions of the faithful in the Muslim Paradise</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9gN_nKFK4SOUhVEpB9RgVYrrIWcUJVMZurB-WvhqEqGdKiY0JVdJ-o4qwXbsvzxr4E0F__hDnaX905jFh8jGMwrTSASv_9x0Ke8KGDKokUfGXKtG4SOKA3lihW9VL-WfZ3-ENzmjbg_E/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="800" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9gN_nKFK4SOUhVEpB9RgVYrrIWcUJVMZurB-WvhqEqGdKiY0JVdJ-o4qwXbsvzxr4E0F__hDnaX905jFh8jGMwrTSASv_9x0Ke8KGDKokUfGXKtG4SOKA3lihW9VL-WfZ3-ENzmjbg_E/" width="320" /></a></div><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div><i style="font-weight: bold;">lateen</i> - a triangular sail on a long yard at an angle of 45° to the mast<br /></div><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">peignoir</i> - a woman's light dressing gown or negligee</p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">pirogue - </i>a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk, especially in Central America and the Caribbean</p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">tabouret</i> - a low stool or small table</p><p><b>Referents and Reverberations</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>I don't know if it was a particular scene as much as it was an overall feeling, but I got real echoes and reverberations of The Age of Innocence as I read this. I suppose The Age of Innocence is actually the echo, since it was published about 20 years later. ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>There's a parrot in the opening scene, which reminded me of Dr. Urbino's parrot in Love in the Time of Cholera. It also reminded me of some ridiculous TikToks I've been watching that feature a yellow parrot that keeps saying to itself "Good Girl!" when it's obviously misbehaving. :)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>This exchange:</i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Edna: </i>How long will you be gone? <br /><i>Robert: </i>Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things.<br /><i>Edna: </i>Well, in case it shouldn't be forever, how long will it be?<br /><i>Robert: </i>I don't know.</div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>reminded me of A Farewell to Arms, and this scene: (I'm not sure why.)</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"> "What is it, darling?"<br />"It's all right, Cat. Would you like to get dressed right away and go in a boat to Switzerland?"<br />"Would you?"<br />"No. I'd like to go back to bed."<br />"What is it about?"<br />"The barman says they are going to arrest me in the morning."<br />"Is the barman crazy?"<br />"No."<br />"Then please hurry, darling, and get dressed so we can start."</div></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The Ratignolles' soirées musicales reminded me of Proust, and the parties at the Verdurins and the musical accompaniments.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>Lines I Particularly Liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. <i>This was one of my favorite lines.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was very pleasant to stay there under the orange trees, while the sun dipped lower and lower, turning the western sky to flaming copper and gold. The shadows lengthened and crept out like stealthy, grotesque monsters across the grass.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. <i>God, I love this line.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate.</li></ul><div><i>Well, my dear blobbies, I must away to another fictional experience, this time I'll look for sanctuary in Faulkner, I think (hagh). I'll leave you with a few lines I enjoyed. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(1) </i>The children were sent to bed. Some went submissively; others with shrieks and protests as they were dragged away. They had been permitted to sit up till after the ice-cream, which naturally marked the limit of human indulgence. <i>Naturally. ;)</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(2) </i>The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. <i>My favorite time of day.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>and (3) this exchange between Edna and Arobin about </i><i>Mademoiselle Reisz, a quirky and talented pianist and friend: </i></div><div><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><i> </i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>"'She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don't notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward.' </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div> </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>'For instance?' </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div> </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>'Well, for instance, when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.' Whither would you soar?'"</div></blockquote><p><i>Perhaps our dear Edna did not remember to check on the strength of her wings in the end. So blobbies, if you plan on soaring above the plain of tradition and prejudice, don't forget to check your wings! And of course - don't let your arms get tired! ;)</i></p><p><i>Keep each other safe, keep faith, and have a wonderful evening, dear blobbies!</i></p><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-63487832609094431022021-09-06T18:08:00.000-04:002021-09-06T18:08:05.201-04:00What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?<p> <i>Black Boy </i>by Richard Wright</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Black Boy</i> is a poignant, often painful, brutally honest look at growing up as a young Black man in the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century. Wright takes us nearly all the way from infancy to his early twenties, and we follow him from place to place as his family (and later mostly his mother) looks for work and stability in a hostile world. We spend time in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and later Chicago, and briefly New York City. While Wright is constantly surrounded by some family member, from a younger brother to various aunts and uncles and grandparents, his father leaves his mother early on in his youth, which makes the family income a constant struggle. Coupled with the existing state of poverty that his family finds themselves in, Wright spends a significant portion of his youth starving or scheming ways to get food. He bounces from place to place, his mother eventually falls ill (no doubt in some part due to the stress), and points out that he doesn't complete a single full year of schooling without a move until somewhere around 9th grade, I think. </p><p>Despite having to work from a very young age to support his family, Wright manages to get to and through high school, and graduates first in his class. He has few options outside of teaching Black children, and though he wishes to go to college, it is not open to him. He decides to leave the South and moves first to Memphis and then Chicago, eventually saving enough money to bring his mother and brother along. He scrapes by, but things are always excruciatingly difficult, and as he develops his racial consciousness, he finds himself isolated both from whites and from his peers because he believes in racial equality and that Blacks should have rights, respect, jobs, education, etc. He struggles to keep jobs because they are always for whites and always involve degradation, whether implicit, explicit, or both. </p><p>He eventually joins a Communist group which provides him with a community of more like-minded individuals, but he is still one of the few Black people in the group, and finds himself more and more at odds with them because he is branded an 'intellectual', which is counter to their worker mentality. He is eventually forced out of the group, and finds himself desirous of departing from them anyway, as he wants to devote himself to writing. While this is revolutionary for a Black man at the time, Wright carves out the space, time, and energy to practice writing and draft novels. We leave him contemplating the futility of this effort, but determined to write just the same.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear readers, </i></p><p><i>It has been TOO LONG, I know. Many of you have probably forgotten about this blob, or wondered if I was, in fact, ever going to blob again. Well here I am! It took me a while because once again I got caught up reading a set of books I created for a book bingo, but I finally made it to this novel. It was definitely a tough read. Painful to hear and wear and share Wright's incredibly uphill battle of adolescence, and to wonder how much of the system and circumstances in this country have really changed for Black men since then. This is only the second Wright novel I've read - Native Son</i> <i>was on the blob list as well. I'd like to read more, though I would want to space them out, only because the content is so harrowing to navigate through. </i></p><p><i>That said, there were many parts that resonated with me, so I'll share those with you now, and you can decide if and when you choose to explore this work for yourself. As usual, there's no particular order to them. </i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On school and learning<br /></b>Already my personality was lopsided; my knowledge of feeling was far greater than my knowledge of fact. <i>I loved this line. It's painful, because it points out how much living he has been asked and forced to do before he is educated, but beautiful in its poignancy.<br /></i><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On selling papers but not reading them<br /></b><i>For a while, Richard learns that he can get papers to read by selling them, much to his delight, as books are hard for him to come by. His friend says: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i>'Hurry up and start selling 'em,' he urged me. 'I'd like to talk to you about the stories.' <i>Which I thought was super endearing. The stories are in the magazine sections, and these are all that Richard reads, as he peddles the papers out to his community. One day, an older Black man finally points out to Richard that he's selling Klan propaganda; horrified, Richard reads the papers he's been selling and not reading, and realizes he has to stop immediately. This was such an intense and heartbreaking moment.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On writing</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Richard, like many protagonists in writers' somewhat fictionalized autobiographies, is coming to being as a writer. Here are some of my favorite lines of his about writing. </i></div><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nobody can tell me how or what to write.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his notion of direction, his senses?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'You'll have to prove your revolutionary loyalty.'<br />'That's what I'm trying to do through writing.'<br />'That's not the way to do it,' he said. 'You must act.' <i>This tension was so beautifully explored, and felt so absurd and nonsensical. And yet, also so real - how many presidential candidates have been deemed 'too intellectual'? But I love that Wright's is a writing revolution, even if others can't see it.</i></li></ul><div><b>Lines I loved</b></div><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one? <i>This is in reference to the fact that a new Communist Party member who has recently wreaked havoc on the group turns out to be an escapee from an insane asylum. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Comrade Nealson,' I said, 'a writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person. Now, I'm in that category. Yet I think I can write. I don't want to ask for special favors, but I'm in the midst of a book which I hope to complete in six months or so. Let me convince myself that I'm wrong about my hankering to write and then I'll be with you all the way.' <i>I loved this exchange because it's very similar to how I feel as an aspiring/early writer. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Writing had to be done in loneliness and Communism had declared war upon human loneliness.</li></ul><p></p><ul><li><i><div style="font-style: normal;">Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what to say.</div></i></li></ul><ul><li><div><i>On going north and joining the Communists: </i><span style="font-style: normal;">I had fled men who did not like the color of my skin, and now I was among men who did not like the tone of my thoughts.</span></div></li></ul><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On being Black in America</b></div><div style="text-align: left;">Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they somehow lived in it but not of it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On hunger</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Hunger is (sadly) a recurring them throughout the novel. What I loved was not that Richard was so often hungry, but how beautifully he captured this state of being. Here's one of my favorite scenes. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">When supper was over I saw that there were many biscuits piled high upon the bread platter, an astonishing and unbelievable sight to me. Though the biscuits were right before my eyes, and though there was more flour in the kitchen, I was apprehensive lest there be no bread for breakfast in the morning. I was afraid that somehow the biscuits might disappear during the night, while I was sleeping. I did not want to wake up in the morning, as I had done so often in the past, feeling hungry and knowing that there was no food in the house. So, surreptitiously, I took some of the biscuits from the platter and slipped them into my pocket, not to eat, but to keep as a bulwark against any possible attack of hunger. Even after I had got used to seeing the table loaded with food at each meal, I still stole bread and put it into my pockets.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I won't list every other way that hungerness and starvation are captured, but I will say that this topic included: </i>Serving food to whites that Black folks were not allowed to eat themselves, eating leftovers from white lunch deliveries, living at an orphanage where they got only stale bread with molasses twice a day, and failing the postal exam because he weighed <u>only 110 pounds as a young adult.</u></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On fear</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Another theme throughout the novel is the fear with which Richard lives his life as a Black boy in southern America. Again, while this is not something I celebrate, the way Wright describes it is painfully epic: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>When his uncle is lynched by white men for 'doing too well' at his business: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;">There was no funeral. There was no music. There was no period of mourning. There were no flowers. There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear. I did not know when or where Uncle Hoskins was buried. Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>When Richard hears of other young men in his acquaintance being murdered by white men: </i>The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worth-while to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>And later, this exchange with his Black friend: </i>'Do you want to get killed?' he asked me. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'Hell, no!'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Then, for God's sake, learn how to live in the South!'</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On social awkwardness</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Poor Richard is bounced so many places within his family and the larger world as a boy, and whether his discomfort with social interaction is related to this or not is unclear, but it was adorable and hard to watch him try to navigate new homes. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">'Good morning, Richard,' Aunt Jody said. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'Oh, good morning,' I mumbled, wishing that I had thought to say it first. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'Don't people say good morning where you come from?' she asked.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Yes, ma'am.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'I thought they did,' she said pointedly. <i>This reminded me of when my host dad in France always used to say 'Bon soir' or 'Bonjour' when he saw me, and somehow I always chose the wrong one. </i></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On learning whiteness protocol</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Part of what makes this book and Richard as a person so incredible is that he stands outside the norm, and then shouts it from the rooftops. While this is revolutionary and stunning, it's also really hard for Richard. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">I knew what was wrong with me, but I could not correct it. The words and actions of white people were baffling signs to me. I was living in a culture and not a civilization and I could learn how that culture worked only by living with it. Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In my dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted; I had to think out what others felt. I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On battles on the home front</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>One of the most difficult parts of reading this book for me was how often Richard is beaten by members of his own family. I recognize that discipline in Black families is a super complex subject, and one in which I generally don't have the right to weigh in on, but it was really hard to read how often his mother, or his aunt, or his grandmother, or his uncle, or his father, wanted to beat him with a switch. I thought this line captured some of the chaotic nature of this: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passes understanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>The sunken place</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>As Richard gets older, he struggles with watching how his own race responds to the white world. This reflection reminded me of the sunken place in Get Out: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">I began to marvel at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them were not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. Yet I knew that in some period of their growing up - a period that they had no doubt forgotten - there had been developed in them a delicate, sensitive, controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo. Although they lived in an America where in theory there existed equality of opportunity, they knew unerringly what to aspire to and what not to aspire to. Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On games</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Richard, on watching other boys play craps at work: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Gambling had never appealed to me. I could not conceive of any game holding more risks than the life I was living. <i>Man, this line gets me. </i></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On talking to southern white men</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Code-switching and navigating racially charged conversation is, I'm sure, still extremely prevalent for Black folks, but it was part of literally every interaction for Richard. I loved this line from an exchange with a southern white man, because it made it clear how many landmines there were all around Wright conversationally: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Was this a trap? He had mentioned a tabooed subject and I wanted to wait until I knew what he meant. Among the topics that southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United states; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On empathy</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I've written on this blog before about how much I love that books and reading instill empathy in readers. I thought Wright's exploration of this was fascinating and challenging:</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me. </div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>On the difficulty of getting books to read</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Richard has to work SO HARD to get books in his hands (he ends up getting a white co-worker to share his library card, but still has to fake notes and pretend he's getting books for the man) but I love the way he describes reading: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Crossovers</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>As I've said many times before on this blog, I never cease to be amazed at how each book touches or intersects with my life somehow, no matter how seemingly disparate our worlds are. This book was no exception, whether it was Richard's response to his deeply religious upbringing and school companions, to the books he reads (he reads Stein's </i>Three Lives<i>, which I just read for this blog), or the way he feels about writing, I felt a lot of kinship with Richard. I think the most intense example of this for me was when he read Proust, which my blobbist readers will know I have a deep affection for after having read it for this blog: </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">I spent my nights reading Proust's <i>A Remembrance of Things Past</i>, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic of death and decadence. But it crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people in my environment with an equal thoroughness, and the burning example before my eyes made me feel that I never could. <i>Richard, I think many have likely already said this, but you absolutely have done that. You have given your people that same thoroughness, and you are your own burning example for us to live up to.</i></div></blockquote><p><b>Referents & Reverberations</b></p><p><i>I like to call out places where this work speaks to works that came before or after, at least in my head. </i></p><p><i>There were several places and times when Richard had to fight his family or his environment so hard to be able to read, and these reminded me of both Proust as a young boy and Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird. </i></p><p><i>These moments from this work: </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>On talking to a woman, Ella, and eventually getting her to read him some of <i>Bluebeard and His Seven Wives</i> - 'Your grandmother wouldn't like it if I talked to you about novels.'</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On the helpfulness of his grandmother's illiteracy because her religious nature makes her wary of all books: </i>Oh, boy, how lucky it was for me that Granny could not read!</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>My excessive reading puzzled Aunt Maggie; she sensed my fiercely indrawn nature and she did not like it. Being of an open, talkative disposition, she declared that I was going about the business of living wrongly, that reading books would not help me at all. </li></ul><div><i>Reminded me of these moments: </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>In To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout gets in trouble for reading too much at school, and reflects:</i> Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>And in Remembrance of Things Past, when the young boy's great aunt comments: </i>What! still amusing yourself with a book? It isn't Sunday, you know! <i>because she thinks reading is only appropriate on a day of rest.</i></li></ul></div><p></p><p><i>The other book this novel reminded me of, which obviously came after it, was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This interaction in Black Boy: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">'Well, I want to be a writer,' I mumbled, unsure of myself; I had not planned to tell her that, but she had made me feel so utterly wrong and of no account that I needed to bolster myself.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'A what?' she demanded. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'A writer,' I mumbled.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'For what?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'To write stories,' I mumbled defensively. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'You'll never be a writer,' she said. 'Who on earth put such ideas into your n* head?' </div><div style="text-align: left;">'Nobody,' I said.</div><div style="text-align: left;">'I didn't think anybody ever would,' she declared indignantly.'</div></blockquote><p><i>Reminded me of this moment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when Malcolm tells his favorite teacher he wants to be a lawyer: </i></p><p>You've got to be realistic about being a n*. A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a n*. You need to think about something you can be. You're good with your hands - making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don't you plan on carpentry?</p><p><i>The difference in time was maybe 40 years, but how many Black children (and Black boys, in particular) are still being told by their largely white teachers that they can't be what they want to be? We all bear the responsibility of breaking this narrative.</i></p><p><b>Lines in the running for title of this blog</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How could I ever learn this strange world of white people?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Was I always to hang on the fringes of life?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Could a Negro ever live halfway like a human being in this goddamn country?</li></ul><p></p><div><i>Whew. Well I know this has been a lengthy post, but I hope you have enjoyed it! I'll leave you with three final thoughts from Mr. Wright. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(1) I think his reflections on America are SO spot-on, and particularly relevant and telling as we look back at the last few years. Here's a somewhat condensed version of this, underlining my own.</i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task...Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion...<u>Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid</u>, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. <u>It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.</u> Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.</p></blockquote><p>(2) <i>I love that Richard is so willing and so desperate to fight for the right to write, even when society is trying so hard to exclude him from the space. Here's how he ends the novel: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.</p></blockquote><p>(3) <i>And last, but not least, I'll leave you with this exchange between Richard and his classmates after his fiction story is published in a paper, which so brilliantly typifies the idea that writers don't write because they want to or they're told to, they write because they HAVE to. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">'Did you really write that story?' they asked me. </div><div style="text-align: left;">'Yes.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Why?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Because I wanted to.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Where did you get it from?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'I made it up.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'You didn't. You copied it out of a book.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'If I had, no one would publish it.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'But what are they publishing it for?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'So people can read it.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Who told you to do that?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Nobody.'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Then why did you do it?'</div><div style="text-align: left;">'Because I wanted to.'</div></blockquote><p><i>So write because you must, read because it makes us feel each other's lives in a way that is not otherwise possible or plausible, and if you're in a country that celebrates it, enjoy this day of Labor which we celebrate with time off. I really will try not to take so long to blob on the next book, I promise! Stay safe, keep faith, and good night.</i> </p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-62485721902015600102021-05-19T14:12:00.004-04:002021-05-19T14:12:39.728-04:00Most women were interfering in their ways.<p> <i>Three Lives</i> by Gertrude Stein</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Three Lives </i>is a set of three discrete stories - <i>The Good Anna, Melanctha, </i>and <i>The Gentle Lena - </i>and each story follows the life of the titular person. The lives are distinct, if in many ways unremarkable, and do not seem (imho) to be connected at all. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>If it was not clear from my extremely short summary, I did not care for this book. I wanted to like Gertrude Stein, perhaps for no other reason than a romantic memory of her oft-quoted, "America is my country, and Paris is my hometown." </i></p><p><i>The first story was fine, if uninspiring, but the second story was so blatantly racist it took me WEEKS to get through it. The whole thing together is only 200 pages, and we know I've tackled FAR longer works than that in less time, but it was just so painful to read it was excruciating. This is probably the closest I've come to not finishing a book for this blob. </i></p><p><i>And sure, yes, Gertrude Stein, like anyone, was a product of her time, and there are some who say that as a lesbian and a Jew, her outsider's perspective on race is more nuanced than a simple ascription of 'that's so racist'. But let's just say I'm not one of those people. The middle story, Melanctha, is about a mixed race woman who is Black and white, and it's chock full of denigrating comments and preposterous broad statements about 'colored people' and other offensive terms, and I can't for the life of me understand why Stein felt compelled to tell the story of someone whom she held in such obvious disregard FROM HER POINT OF VIEW. Weirdly all three of these stories were intimate but not fully letting you in to the person being described, which made them (a) BORING and (b) hard to connect to. So sure, maybe it was revolutionary and all, and I'll have to check out The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is about Stein's partner, but on the whole, I am left feeling deeply un-wowed. </i></p><p><i>Here are a few snippets from each 'life': </i></p><p><b><i>The Good Anna</i></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was some months now that Anna had been intimate with Mrs. Drehten. <i>I thought the casual lesbianism was cool, and I'm sure very revolutionary in its time. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was wonderful how Mrs. Lehntman could listen and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what she was asked and yet leave things as they were before. <i>I thought this was a great sentence. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She hired Lizze for a second girl to be with her and soon they were all content. All except the parrot, for Miss Mathilda did not like its scream. <i>lololol. I lived briefly in a house with parakeets, and I must admit I was also not a fan of their screams.</i></li></ul><div><b><i>Melanctha</i></b></div><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Melanctha Herbert had always had a break neck courage.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Melanctha needed badly a man to content her. <i>Melanctha also needed badly to have a name that felt less trip-worthy on the tongue, imo. I mean, everyone should have a name that feels right to them and I support all names and cultures around naming, etc. etc., but that C in the middle just kept gumming up my mental pronunciation and it did NOT help the whole already hating the racism of the story thing.</i></li></ul><p></p><p><b><i>The Gentle Lena</i></b></p><p><i>Am I the only one who noticed that Lena and Anna, anglo-Europeans, get positive adjective descriptors, and Melanctha just gets her name in the title? </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lena was patient, gentle, sweet, and German.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Poor Lena was so scared and weak, and every minute she was sure that she would die.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lena went home all alone, and cried in the street car. <i>Oh yeah, did I mention that on top of being mostly boring, both Melanctha and Lena were just MISERABLE for basically their whole lives and frequently discussed suicide or 'disappearing into death'? So that was super fun, too. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lena never seemed to hear what anyone was saying to her.</li></ul><p></p><p><u><b><i>Terms That Were New To Me:</i></b></u></p><p><i><b>Struldbrug - </b>Okay, so I read Gulliver's Travels for this blog, so I must have known this term at some point, but I had forgotten. Stein makes a casual reference to it, so I'm sharing the reference below: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>"In Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name struldbrug is given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal. However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging. Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot above their left eyebrow. They are normal human beings until they reach the age of thirty, at which time they become dejected. Upon reaching the age of eighty they become legally dead, and suffer from many ailments including the loss of eyesight and the loss of hair. Struldbrugs are forbidden to own property. As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal."</i></p></blockquote><p><i>Well, blob friends, here's hoping that by the time we connect again the world looks a bit more open and still safe. I'm off to Richard Wright, and have much higher expectations of enjoyment of his work. Happy reading!</i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-77420085040047999222021-03-20T16:41:00.001-04:002021-03-20T16:41:20.722-04:00Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.<p><i>All the King's Men </i>by Robert Penn Warren</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p>We're in the deep South, in the 1920's, I believe, and we're following the trajectory of one Willie Talos, originally a country boy who becomes a supremely powerful politician (and Governor of the state). It's not stated clearly, I don't think, but I believe it is Louisiana, and my mother tells me that the story is a sort of fictionalized memoir of Huey Long, who perhaps you know of (I did not). Willie Talos, aka the Boss, cares about his community, but also enjoys the machinery and machinations of politicking, and eventually his varied interests and commitments (and a bit of incestuous intertangling) gets him kilt. Our story is told to us by Jack Burden, a newspaper man who finds himself attached to Willie Talos and his political machine. We see the shift from dedicated statesman to power-hungry egotist, and follow the perils, pitfalls, and triumphs along the way.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b> </p><p><i>Dear blobbists, </i></p><p><i>I can't believe it's been something like five months since I blobbed! Here's the secret: I've been reading behind your back. You see, I started doing these book bingos a few summers back, and I got totally hooked on the concept. So when this new year started, I was working on two bingos - one to celebrate (last year's) Day of the Dead and one to celebrate Intersectional Feminism. So you see, since we've last connected, it's not like I have only read this one book (although, to be fair, ATKM was a long one). I've actually read something like...37? </i></p><p><i>So yeah. I'm going to do a blog post at some point about all the book bingos, because they've been a delightful romp and serve as an excellent distraction from ye ole pandemmy-ennui. But for now I'll tell you a bit more about my experience with this book!</i></p><p><i>I liked this book. I'm not sure that I got the same resonance from it that folks got who knew the context of Huey Long and that moment in time, but there were certainly still some very beautiful parts of it. It apparently won the Pulitzer prize and got made into multiple movies and such, which feels like kind of a lot to me, but I guess people were really into it! </i></p><p><i>I didn't love some things, like the frequent use of the n-word, the obvious racism, the erasure of black identity, and the lack of any real, meaningful female characters who weren't sexually connected to the men. But here are some of things I did like. </i></p><p><b>On the sentence and paragraph structure - neither wholly circuitous nor direct</b></p><p><i>If I was going to try to describe Robert Penn Warren's writing style, I think it would go something like this. Hemingway meets Joyce in the middle of the street, and just as they're almost across the road they tumble into Proust, who laboriously joins them. There's something sort of stream of consciousness, but also straightforward, about the prose, that I found lilting and enchanting, and made me see why it was a hit. I tried to find a few good examples. Here they are: </i></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Perhaps that was the moment when Slade made his fortune. How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>There wasn't any sound for what must have been three seconds, but seemed like a week while a mourning dove down in the clump of trees in the bottom where the hogs were gave a couple of tries at breaking his heart and mine. <i>I really loved this line. </i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Inside the court house, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing into yourself the last shrunk-up whispers still hanging in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years - well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. </p></blockquote><p><b>On the narrator - muckraker, dirt-digger, truth-teller</b></p><p><i>I suspect (and will have to settle for suspecting, because you know I don't like to research too much about my books) that the author wrote from Jack Burden's perspective because it mirrored his experience. In any case, the storytelling angle is very powerful, because we're just behind the veil of this monolith, Willie Talos, and his political engine. Here are some Jack lines I liked: </i></p><blockquote><p>A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound hairy, white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss's eyes. </p></blockquote><p><b>On being on vacation - from yourself</b></p><p><i>There's a fair amount of existentialism, which really reminded me of Proust's reflections. Here's one of my favorites: </i></p><blockquote><p>They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. </p></blockquote><p><b>On multiple yous - the you which you just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place</b></p><p><i>And this one: </i></p><blockquote><p>You ought to invite those two you's to the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you's with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other. Oh, very. Oh, rather. Oh, definitely. Oh, yes, indeed. <i>hehehe.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>On Model-Ts - their form and function</b></p><p><i>I just thought it was amazing that they were driving Model-T's because they were new vehicles, since my only image of a Model-T is the one my next-door neighbor growing up, Mr. Light, has been tinkering at forever. I still remember him occasionally popping into the tiny little car and driving around the street on the rare occasions that it was in working order. </i></p><p><b>On sitting with the old ones - on a bench in the town square</b></p><p><i>I loved this description of Jack's when he goes to find some dirt and sits in the town square with 'the old ones' of the town: </i>Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away.</p><p><b>On dress - just like Zoom</b></p><p><i>At one point, someone's look is described as: </i>Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes. </p><p><i>I loved it because it made me think of the way we dress in the pandemic - business from the waist up, and jammies from the waist down, more often than not. ;)</i></p><p><b>On persimmons - here, there, and everywhere</b></p><p><i>I loved this line: </i>But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat. <i>Do you find this is the case, reader? Are your teeth on edge from the persimmon you didn't eat today?</i></p><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>This book reminded me of several books. Initially, it definitely rang of...</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Atlas Shrugged - </i>naming, cronyism</li><li><i>Faulkner - </i>any and all</li><li><i>The Heart is a Lonely Hunter</i>, Carson McCullers</li><li><i>On the Road</i>, Jack Kerouac - <i>the line below, in particular - </i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>So they sat there in there common knowledge, while the chunk on the heart stewed and hissed and crumpled, and were together in the down-beat and pause of the rhythm of their lives. </p></blockquote><p><i>Reminded me of lines like this one: </i></p><blockquote><p>Are we straight in the deepest and most wonderful depths of our souls, dear darling? </p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Proust</i> - <i>so many lines reminded me of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Passed. Here's one: </i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a <i>tick, </i>and the <i>tick</i> would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the <i>tick</i> would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the <i>tock</i> would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish. <i>I love this line because we have a grandmother clock in my mom's house that isn't getting any younger and tends to lose time over the week, and we also had many metronomes that swung a bit heavily to one side. This reminded me of both of those things. </i></p></blockquote><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>The Master and Margarita</i>, Mikhail Bulgakov - <i>this passage describing love - </i></li></ul><p></p><blockquote><p>We didn't say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn't sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>In a peculiar way those late autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which it surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn't lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn't know. I did not even wonder. </p></blockquote><p><i>Reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from The Master and Margarita: </i></p><blockquote><p>During the Maytime storms, when streams of water gushed noisily past the blurred windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes. The potatoes steamed, and their charred skins blackened their fingers. There was laughter in the basement, and in the garden the trees would shed broken twigs and white clusters of flowers after the rain." </p></blockquote><p><b><u>Words I didn't know (or maybe knew at some point but forgot)</u></b></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">catalpa - </b>Catalpa, commonly called catalpa or catawba, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to warm temperate and subtropical regions of North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia</p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">litotes -</b> ironic understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary (e.g., you won't be sorry, meaning you'll be glad ) - <i>I feel like I knew this for the GRE or the SAT, but forgot. ;)</i></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">lob-lolly - </b>a porridge or stew, coming to mean swamp. It is used in the names of: Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), a tree. Loblolly-bay (Gordonia lasianthus), a tree. Loblolly boy, an assistant to a ship's surgeon.</p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">sebaceous - </b>relating to oil or fat <i>[this one's from the Latin, Mom, so I should have known that - 'sebum', meaning tallow']</i></p><p><b style="font-style: italic;">thunder-mug - </b>old slang for a chamber pot</p><p><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>What they had in common was a world of wordless silence by the fire.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>So I decorously withdrew my gaze from the pair, and resumed my admiration of the dying day on the other side of the hog lot and the elegiac landscape.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep brown eyes, the kind that make you think of telling secrets in the gloaming.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>By the time I got out to my car, the sky was curdling blue with dawn.</li></ul><p></p><p><i>I'm off to play a rousing game of Wingspan with seesters (if you haven't played it, you really should, #birdlover) but I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite passages. It reminded me a bit of how I think we're starting to feel as we begin to creep at the edges of an ending to the pandemic. </i></p><p>I drifted over to the window back of the Boss's desk and looked out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glimmering reflection. The whole world, the bare boles of the other trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.</p><p><i>Sending everyone (and especially the AAPI community) love, health, rest, relaxation, and comfort. I'm on to Gertrude Stein. </i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-34831179221125755422020-10-31T17:14:00.005-04:002020-10-31T17:19:22.514-04:00To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.<p> <i>Midnight's Children </i>by Salman Rushdie</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p>Dear reader, here is what I choose to share by way of 'summary' for this book: </p><p>Saleem Sinai, Narrator. Born in Bombay; 1947. Nasal telepath. Child of midnight. See family tree below.</p><p>India. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Kashmir. </p><p>Muslim. Hindu. Sikh. Jain. Buddhist.</p><p> Dr. Aadam Aziz || Naseem Ghani</p><p> | | | | |</p><p> Alia Mumtaz [Later, Amina] Hanif Mustapha Emerald</p><p> || || || </p><p> Unmarried Nadir Khan, then Ahmed Sinai </p><p> | | </p><p> Jamila Saleem </p><p><b> </b><i>[Actually, Shiva]</i></p><p><i> ||</i></p><p><i> </i> Parvati the Witch</p><p> |</p><p> Aadam</p><p>If you're good and confused by that, then you're pretty much right on track! I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of each plot particular, because there are far too many to detail, and I simply don't feel like it.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbists, </i></p><p><i>It has been some time since I have lost blobbed! In truth, I finished this book a while ago, and I drafted the notes for the blog a while ago as well, but it has been a busy couple of weeks, and what with the world being mostly a dumpster fire and all, I just wasn't inclined to race back. </i></p><p><i>This was my third Rushdie novel (Satanic Verses was on my list, and I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories on my good friend Danielay's recommendation) and I would say that this is my ranking of these books by personal preference: </i></p><p>1) <i>Haroun and the Sea of Stories</i></p><p><i>2) Midnight's Children</i></p><p><i>3) Satanic Verses</i></p><p><i>This was the kind of novel where I fell in and out of love with the lyrical and complex prose that Rushdie used, and the ongoing (sometimes neverending) metaphors between characters and nations/nation states in and around India. I loved the concept (Saleem is one of many children born exactly at midnight on the night India becomes independent and they have abilities, more below) but ultimately, it took me forever to get through the book because the prose was so circuitous and the plot kind of spiralled into chaos, à la Joyce, which, if you've read any of my other blobs, you know is <u>not my jam</u>. </i></p><p><i>That being said, this book won <b>tons</b> of awards and was widely acclaimed, and then won awards for being the best of the best of those awards, so please feel free to make your own reading relationship with it! There are certainly many ways in which it is simply stunning and magnificent, and I don't want to downplay those aspects. </i></p><p><i>Here are the rest of my thoughts, as usual in no particular order. </i></p><p><b>The boatman, Tai</b></p><p><i>I really enjoyed this character, and the trips that Tai takes with Aadam Aziz in the beginning reminded me a great deal of the things I love about Haroun and the Sea of Stories. By the way, if you haven't read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, drop everything and go read it now. Seriously. It's an all-time favorite. </i></p><p>Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. <i>I love the idea of choosing to stink. It cracks me up.</i></p><p><b>Keeping family history halal</b></p><p><i>There's so much brilliant playfulness with concepts and religion and ethnicities and sub-ethnicities, and I loved this idea of keeping dietary laws for historical references. </i></p><p>Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on. <i>Like I said, lots of superb parts!</i></p><p><b>Who can rely on the police? </b></p><p>The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims. <i>This line felt really à propos, considering the events of the last few years (and really, since the origins of the police). With Walter Wallace and the insane things that have been happening (by which I mean the inappropriate response, to be clear, not the protests, which I support) I've been sitting with some heavy pain and sadness, and its proximity to me and my family and where they lay their heads at night makes it all the more searing. </i></p><p><b>Zeugma</b></p><p><i>On a lighter note, y'all know how I feel about zeugma. I LOVE IT. It's my favorite. Apparently Rushdie likes it, too. ;)</i></p><p>He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art. </p><p>And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings - by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks. <i>God, what a fantastic line.</i></p><p><b>Switched at birth</b></p><p>In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts. <i>Because I didn't get into the deets in the plot summary, you don't know that Saleem is actually not Saleem. In a very 'it was and it was not so' moment, Saleem was actually switched at birth and should have had the life of this other boy, Shiva, who basically becomes his arch-nemesis. But I thought it was interesting that ultimately his family couldn't reconceptualize him as not being their son. It made sense, too, in a way.</i></p><p><b>Midnight's Children</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Understand what I'm saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 - between midnight and one a.m. - no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary) - at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. What made the event noteworthy...was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence (although synchronicity on such a scale would stagger even C. G. Jung), endowed with features, talents, or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though - if you will permit me one moment of fancy in what will otherwise be, I promise, the most sober account I can manage - as though history, arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time. </p><p style="text-align: left;">But it is Kali-Yuga; the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good. <i>Again, I LOVE this line.</i></p><p><b><i><u>More Great Lines</u></i></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. <i>lololololz.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Is it possible to be jealous of written words?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Does one error invalidate the entire fabric?</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There can be no retreat from the truth.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Without passport or permit, I returned, cloaked in invisibility, to the land of my birth.</li></ul><p></p><p><i><u>Lines In the Running for Title of this Blob:</u></i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I have been a swallower of lives.</li><li>He had come for stories - and with one question had silenced the storyteller.</li><li>Follow your nose and you'll go far. </li><li>Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.</li><li>We all owe death a life.</li><li>Please believe that I am falling apart.</li><li>The baby in my stomach stopped the clocks.</li><li>I communed with them every midnight, and only at midnight, during that hour which is reserved for miracles.</li></ul><div><b>Referents and Reverberations</b></div><div><i>This book reminded me of lots of books, but I'll give you the short list: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>- David Copperfield </i>- we start at Saleem's birth, so that felt very Davy Copperfield. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>- Hotel New Hampshire - </i><i>This line - </i>Is it possible to trace the origins of unnatural love? <i>and the semi-incestual love between Saleem and his sister/not-bio-sister reminded me of John and Franny. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>- Love in the Time of Cholera - Much of the feel of this book reminded me of LITTOC - the sweeping multi-generational story, the unrequited love, the magical realism. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>- Pale Fire - This book (MC) took work to read, and took commitment to complete, which reminded me of Pale Fire. There's also something playful about the prose, though, that definitely reminded me of Nabokov.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>- Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Like I said, I felt this story hiding or lurking under the beginning of Midnight's Children, and it made me smile. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><u>Words that were new to me:</u></b></div><div><i>cheroot - </i>a cigar with both ends open and untapered.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw20EGDf7YMSQD1XeYrWzksT0kbSGPglzm0bQQ7_CDKfchHcIGb_5hnvbMqFcPw_oLzZuB_Y1zyAo3A4e6z7_NSE9__KvScBWkZdxflURiggDC1pJMDu-OdDVw6HDbU9366GywZFW9MIU/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1447" data-original-width="1000" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw20EGDf7YMSQD1XeYrWzksT0kbSGPglzm0bQQ7_CDKfchHcIGb_5hnvbMqFcPw_oLzZuB_Y1zyAo3A4e6z7_NSE9__KvScBWkZdxflURiggDC1pJMDu-OdDVw6HDbU9366GywZFW9MIU/" width="165" /></a></div><i>dhoti - </i>a type of sarong that outwardly resembles trousers. It is a lower garment forming part of the national or ethnic costume for men in the Indian subcontinent.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>exegete - </i>an expounder or textual interpreter, especially of scripture.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>nautch - </i>a popular court dance performed by girls in India. The culture of the performing art of the nautch rose to prominence during the later period of Mughal Empire, and the British East India Company Rule.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>paan - </i>betel leaves prepared and used as a stimulant.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>shatranj - </i>an old form of chess, as played in the Sasanian Empire. Its origins are in the Indian game of chaturaṅga.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1xuWsr_Q3L6B9UgVSKtUuo0ROZJkGY3bWp8Sw0A7yEfh1RZoP1gF6ZzwB60cPX19YgKxccdsm-gIkNFLPXYEehuyxYAUVeFpl5Os7qEffx-u9Mpw6OyBKTUiwQ3FYSlk9vqnw_2L70w/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="878" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_1xuWsr_Q3L6B9UgVSKtUuo0ROZJkGY3bWp8Sw0A7yEfh1RZoP1gF6ZzwB60cPX19YgKxccdsm-gIkNFLPXYEehuyxYAUVeFpl5Os7qEffx-u9Mpw6OyBKTUiwQ3FYSlk9vqnw_2L70w/w258-h187/ShikaraIV2.jpg" width="258" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><i>shikara - </i>a type of wooden boat found on Dal Lake and other water bodies of Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir, India. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>solecism - </i>a grammatical mistake in speech or writing; or, a breach of good manners; incorrect behavior</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Sundarbans - </i>a mangrove area in the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>verruca - </i>a contagious and usually painful wart on the sole of the foot; a plantar wart.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Well readers, with that, I'm off to a Halloween celebration. I'll leave you with another of my favorite passages: </i></div><div><br /></div><div>But a more depressing withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rusting, decayed imagination. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>I love the image of a rusty imagination - get some grease in there and oil it on up! Wishing you all an imaginative Halloween and an excellent Día de los Muertos! </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Keep safe, keep faith, and have a spooky night!</i></div><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-90169988660073768822020-09-22T20:06:00.001-04:002020-09-22T20:06:22.886-04:00It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.<p><i>Housekeeping </i>by Marilynne Robinson</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>Housekeeping</i> is a story about leaving and being left behind, and what happens to the echoes of our souls when our centers are disrupted. Our protagonists are a pair of sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, but we're closer to Ruthie because she's narrating the story. They are young girls who are abandoned by their mother and left to be raised in their grandmother's home in Fingerbone, Idaho. (To be fully transparent, I don't know if she ever explicitly places Fingerbone in Idaho, but according to the interwebs this is where it is. It makes sense since I had it somewhere between Washington and Montana in my brain.)<b> </b>Ruthie and Lucille's mother, Helen, drives her neighbor Bernice's car off a cliff after dropping the girls off at her mother's house (with graham crackers, of course). Sylvia, their grandmother, looks after the girls fairly well, having raised three daughters of her own (Helen, as mentioned; Molly, a missionary; and Sylvie; hold, please). Sylvia's husband died in a railroad accident (the train went straight into the lake) so she has no one but herself to rely on. Sylvia eventually dies, being no spring chicken, and her sisters-in-law Lily and Nona, a pair of equally old ladies, come to care for the house (and the girls). They are not interested in this life at all, considering they had a cozy home at a hotel with no little girls before, and so they are constantly hoping for Sylvie to return, assuming her youth will make her more fit to raise her nieces. </p><p>Eventually, Sylvie does indeed return, and as the aunts had hoped, she agrees to take over the duties of the house and the girls. Ruthie and Lucille grow up somewhat wild, having such a wide variety of caretakers and often very little (or no) supervision. Ruthie doesn't particularly mind not having other friends or not doing well in school, but Lucille wants increasingly to be 'normal' and fit in. The girls grow apart, and Sylvie, though still physically present (most of the time) is increasingly absent. Ruthie moves out to live with the school's home economics teacher, and after an incident involving a stolen boat and a frozen night spent outside, the sheriff comes to let Sylvie know there will be a hearing about Ruthie's care. Sylvie tries briefly to clean up her caretaking act, but it's too little, too late, and Ruthie and she both know it. They make a rather haphazard attempt at lighting the house on fire (hoping everyone will assume they died in it) but it doesn't really take, so they make a precarious escape by walking across the railroad bridge over the lake in the dead of night and catching the morning train out of town. No one thinks they could have survived, so they are presumed dead, and they become a pair of itinerants, caroming from town to town for short spells at a time, lost but also found.</p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbists,</i></p><p><i>How are you? I know things have been nuts lately, and not in a good way. I hope you have a moment of comfort today, tonight, this week - something that brings you hygge in the midst of this strange world we're living in. </i></p><p><i>I'm not sure how I felt about this book. I mean, I didn't love the experience of reading it (though there were many parts I very much enjoyed) but when I was writing about it to summarize the plot, there were many things I realized I liked. So maybe it's the kind of book that grows on you? I'll speak from the "I" perspective and say it grew on me. Here are some reflections for you. </i></p><p><b>On mothering</b></p><p><i>Even though Sylvie is sort of 'mothered out' by the time Ruthie and Lucille make it to her, I love this description of her with her three daughters. It reminded me of so many things my mother did that did, indeed, seem like grace. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails filled with wind. </p></blockquote><p><b>On knowing people</b></p><p><i>I loved this line of Ruthie's, as she thinks about what she wishes Sylvie would tell her about her mother, Helen. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? </li></ul><p></p><p><i>It reminded me of </i><i><u>Le Petit Prince</u>, and the way he chastises grown-ups for not asking the right kinds of questions of their new friends: </i></p><p>Quand vous leur parlez d'un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l'essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais: <<Quel est le son de sa vois? Quels sont les jeux qu'il préfère? Est-ce qu'il collectionne les papillons?>></p><p><i>When you last told an adult about a new acquaintance, did <u>you</u> lead with the sound of their voice? Their laugh? Their face? Did you talk about how they collect butterflies and think about their favorite games? I like the idea of us shifting to this new method of introduction: </i>"Here is my new friend, XYZ - she loves the smell of a campfire and playing Hearts, and her voice sounds like wind chimes."</p><p><i><b>On remembering their mother as two different people</b></i></p><p><i>I loved the way that Ruthie and Lucille reflected on the loss of their mother, as painful as it was. </i></p><p>We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released.</p><p><i>She talks about how she and Lucille have two different versions of their mother, and that they are not at all the same. It's so true that when we reflect back our memories of someone, they rarely conjoin in their entirety. </i></p><p>My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance. <i>Admittedly, one of the things I loved about this book was the way it captured mental health. It's not given any clear names, but it's apparent from Helen's suicide, Sylvie's behavior, and Ruthie's habits that there's a strain of something - depression, bipolar, OCD - floating in their family line. I thought this description Ruthie wrote about her mother was one of the closest written descriptions of how I sometimes feel as I navigate the world. </i></p><p>It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned. <i>Ruthie has a very difficult time with school (and socializing in general) but I loved that she felt at home in Latin class, alphabetically assigned, especially since my mom is a beloved Latin teacher, and her alphabetical class (half on blue days, half on grey) is probably one of the only familiar places in a human group for many children these days. </i></p><p><b>On looking after each other</b></p><p><i>I loved the circularity of the fact that first Ruthie and Lucille's upstairs neighbor Bernice tries to keep an eye on them - </i>She looked after us by trying to sleep lightly enough to be awakened by the first sounds of fist fights, of the destruction of furniture, of household poisoning.</p><p><i>And then later Ruthie and Lucille find themselves keeping tabs on Sylvie - </i>But as surely as we tried to stay awake to know for certain whether she sang, or wept, or left the house, we fell asleep and dreamed that she did.</p><p><b>On sisters</b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams.<i> I loved this line. The bond of sisterhood was something that really resonated with me, too. </i></li></ul><b>On Nona and Lily</b><p></p><p><i>The description of Nona and Lily was one of my favorite things about this book. Here's how she describes their communication style: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">They shouted, for the sake of the other's comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister's hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, 'What a lovely dress', it was as if to say, 'She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!' And when Nona said, 'You look very well', it was as if to say, 'Perhaps she'll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!'</p></blockquote><p><i>Here's a hilarious sampling of their dialogue:</i> </p><p>'A pity!'</p><p>'A pity, a pity!'</p><p>'Sylvia wasn't old.'</p><p>'She wasn't young.'</p><p>'She was old to be looking after children.'</p><p>'She was young to pass away.'</p><p>'Seventy-six?'</p><p>'Was she seventy-six?'</p><p>'That's not old.'</p><p>'No.'</p><p>'Not old for her family.'<i>lololololz. I love it. </i></p><p><b>On Sylvie</b></p><p><i>I love that even though Sylvie ends up being a bit of a loose cannon, she seems like perfection to Ruthie and Lucille. </i></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We were prepared to perform great feats of docility to keep her.</li></ul><p></p><p><i>Here are some things Sylvie likes: eating cold food, dining in the dark. Not exactly selling herself, eh? ;)</i></p><p>Sylvie did not want to lose me... She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her - this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.</p><p><b>On the house</b></p><p><i>I loved the way the house figured in the novel. It reminded me of Beloved and To the Lighthouse, and stories where the house is as much a character as the people who inhabit it. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">What could it matter? It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon.</p></blockquote><p><b><u>Absolutely Fabulous Lines</u></b></p><p><i>Marilynne Robinson is a master of the writing craft. Here are some of her most spectacular turns of phrase. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He held this post for two years, when, as he was returning from some business in Spokane, his mortal and professional careers ended in a spectacular derailment. <i>I'm not sure if this counts as zeugma, but that's probably part of why I love it so much. ;)</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. <i>I love this line so much.</i></li></ul><b>Referents and Reverberations</b><br /><p></p><p><i>This book reminded me of many books:</i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>To The Lighthouse</i>, Virginia Woolf</li><li><i>We Have Always Lived in the Castle, </i>Shirley Jackson</li><li><i>Dandelion Wine, </i>Ray Bradbury</li><li><i>Hotel New Hampshire</i>, John Irving</li><li><i>I Capture the Castle, </i>Dodie Smith</li><li><i>The Bluest Eye</i>, Toni Morrison</li><li><i>Mandy, </i>Julie Andrews</li></ul><div><i>Speaking of growing on me, I realize looking at this list that they are some of my all-time favorite books. Not a complete list, by any means, but still. Perhaps that's why I wanted to like this book?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I loved this line:</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>For whatever reason, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. </li></ul></div><div><i>It reminded me of this line from Hotel New Hampshire: </i></div><div>'You see,' Franny would explain, years later. 'We <i>aren't </i>eccentric; we're <i>not</i> bizarre. 'To each other', Franny would say, 'we're as common as rain.' And she was right; to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines that I found particularly fitting for the present times. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><i>Goodness, don't you feel like time has felt this way lately? All the days and moments blurring together, but also somehow spinning off kilter? </i></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair. </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><i>This is such a fantastic image, and it makes me want to dance in the moonless cold and then demand deep-dish apple pie. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>I'll leave you with this last one, from Ruthie, at the end of the book: </i></div><div> </div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">Someday when I am feeling presentable I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon, for such days are rare now.</div></blockquote><p><i>That's about how I feel on the regular; someday when I'm feeling presentable I'll join the real world again. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but we'll get there. ;) </i></p><p><i>Keep each other safe, keep faith, and keep </i><u><i>on reading!</i></u> </p><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-12341380573347270772020-09-06T11:50:00.005-04:002020-09-06T11:52:10.325-04:00Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known.<p> <i>The Known World</i> by Edward P. Jones</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>The Known World</i> is a story of duality. Slaver and owner. Love and pain. Freedom and capture. It chronicles the plantation owned by Henry and Caldonia Townsend in Manchester County, Virginia, in the mid-19th century. Henry and Caldonia are both Black; Henry was a former slave, Caldonia was born free. How Henry comes to own slaves himself is a complex and yet also simple path; the emotional weight of the decision is heavy, but the economy of the South makes it almost natural that he would become a slaveowner himself, once free. His parents, Augustus and Mildred Townsend, former slaves who are now free (Augustus worked to buy each one's freedom), don't approve of Henry owning slaves, but Henry decides to move forward with his own life plan, and eventually amasses a plantation and collection of slaves. The book opens with Henry's death from an unknown illness, and we follow Caldonia in the days and weeks to come as she attempts to keep the plantation up and running. The book is written from a variety of viewpoints, so we hear from Henry's previous owner (William Robbins), the overseer of Henry's plantation, Moses, other slaves living there (Elias, Celeste, Zeddie, to name a few), children of a slave and an owner (Dora and Louis, born to Philomena and William Robbins), and slave patrollers, who come into being around the time this all takes place (Skiffingtons - John and Counsel, Harvey Travis, Oden Peoples). The story comes to a close many years after Henry's death, as Caldonia's brother Calvin encounters three escaped slaves from the plantation now living in New York. </p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Dear blobbists, </i></p><p><i>Greetings! I hope this message finds you well. I must admit I finished this book some time ago, but I find that in writing about books about slavery, I need a little emotional respite in between the steps of finishing the book, taking notes for the blob, and actually blobbing. On the whole, I think I wanted to like this book more than I actually liked this book. It has a nuanced conceit; exploring Black slave ownership isn't something I've spent much time thinking about, to be honest. But I got a little lost in the sheer number of viewpoints that Jones was speaking from, and eventually I found the constant shifting made it hard to really connect with the characters on a deeper level. To be clear, this novel won a Pulitzer Prize, so this is just one gal's opinion, and definitely not representative of the critical sphere. Here are some of my thoughts!</i></p><p><b>Cognitive Dissonance</b></p><p><i>I kept coming back to this idea as I was reading, because it was a real mental twist to process the idea of Black people who had been enslaved now owning slaves. Here are some lines I thought captured this well. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and a father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore? </p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Fern Elston, a free Black woman</i> - "'I did not own my family, and you must not tell people that I did. I did not. We did not. We owned...' She sighed, and her words seemed to come up through a throat much drier than only seconds before. 'We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>The same Fern Elston, in dinner conversation - </i>I realized all over again that if I were in bondage I would slash my master's throat on the first day. I wonder why they all have not risen up and done that.</p></blockquote><p><b>Slave Patrollers</b></p><p><i>Obviously given current events I've been doing a lot of reflecting on the police force in America, and reading the section of this work about the early days of slave patrolling really drew that through line. </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible.</p></blockquote><p><b>Putting Rita in a Box</b></p><p><i>There were some crazy scenes in this book, but one of the craziest was when Augustus and Mildred end up packing Rita, their friend and former slave, into a box with some of Augustus's walking sticks that were going to be shipped to a seller in New York, to get her to freedom. I can't even begin to imagine the number of similar scenarios and unthinkable things that helped slaves get to the North (or try to, at least). </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Augustus moved a stick just where her head would be. He was surprised at the ease of how he worked, no trembling of the hands, as if he had been born just to put a woman in a box and send her to New York.</p></blockquote><p><b>Augustus and Mildred visiting Henry</b></p><p><i>When Augustus buys his freedom, his wife and son are still enslaved, and he has to decide whose freedom he wants to purchase first. He decides to buy his wife, Mildred, first, and then save up to buy his son, but in later years he wonders if his decision to leave his son longer in slavery contributed to his 'normalization' of the enterprise. I loved the tenderness in Augustus and Mildred's visits to Henry:</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.</p></blockquote><p><i>What emotional trauma to a family to not only suffer enslavement but to share such small snippets of time together, stolen here and there. </i></p><p><b>Foreshadowing</b></p><p><i>Jones was a big fan of the foreshadowing, but he sort of took it one step beyond Dickens. Which I found interesting at first, but then very confusing as time went on. The novel was already written in a non-linear fashion, with a variety of times happening concurrently that were actually chronologically discrete, and reading things like "but little did he know he wouldn't feel this way 90 years later on his deathbed" was just jarring, especially when we never followed up with those people. Why do I care how he felt when he died if we're not even going to be there when he does? Ultimately, just felt a little too trippy for my taste.</i></p><p><b>Moses</b></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life. </p></blockquote><p><i>I admit I loved the opening, where we come in on Moses, the overseer, a slave, and we see him tasting the dirt. </i> </p><p><b>Is he really dead?</b></p><p><i>I loved this exchange between two of the slaves after news of Henry's death came to them:</i></p><p>"Tell Celeste that Henry be dead."</p><p>"You stick a needle in him to make sure?' Elias said. "You poke him and poke him to make sure?"</p><p><i>I'm sure it was actually not a laughing matter to make sure one's master was really dead, but it made me think of putting down my cat, Suzy, and me asking my friend Phyllis to 'make sure she was dead' before we could leave the room. Her eyes were still open and she looked just the same, so how was I to be sure? ;)</i></p><p><b>Travis eating Augustus's free papers</b></p><p><i>It's a bit too long to capture in full here, and there's a lot that builds to this moment, but the scene where Harvey Travis, one of the slave patrollers, eats Augustus's free papers (yes, you read that right) just to spite him and sell him back into slavery was epic in its poignancy. It spoke to the impermanence of freedom, the total impotence of the Black person at that time, and the deeply arbitrary bigotry and hatred that some of the white folk leveraged with the power of the 'law'. Again, echoes of every police brutality incident caroming around in my brain.</i></p><p><b><u>Referents and Reverberations</u></b></p><p><i>While I wasn't much for Caldonia as a character overall, I liked this moment she shared with Henry, just before he died:</i></p><p>'Shall I sing?' Caldonia said, and reached over and touched his hand resting at the side of the bed. 'Shall I sing till the birds wake up?'"</p><p><i>It reminded me of this exchange, from Fahrenheit-451, when Faber offers to read to Montag: </i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"Would you like me to read? I'll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like, I'll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear."</p></blockquote><p><b><u>Terms I Learned</u></b></p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">hobbling (a slave)</i> - I can't find an exact definition, but the way Jones describes it, it's slashing the Achilles Tendon of a slave (one or both feet) so that they can never run away again. It happens to Moses at the end of the book. <i>There's nothing that isn't barbaric about slavery in America, but this feels especially brutal.</i></p><p><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></p><p></p><ul><li>For the moment, death was giving all the orders.</li></ul><ul><li>It seemed to Loretta that Maude rose each and every morning with the heat under her blood and a sword in both hands, and even her own children had to make known their loyalty to her all over again.<i> I love this line.</i></li></ul><ul><li>Better open your eyes or you'll fall off Texas.</li></ul><ul><li>I give yall the work I done and my foot for free.</li></ul><p></p><p></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was the kind of day made for running away.</li></ul><p><i>I'll close with an exchange between Augustus and his son, Henry, just after he has purchased his freedom.</i></p><p><i>Augustus, to his son, Henry: </i>"You feelin any different?"</p><p><i>Henry: </i>"Bout what?"</p><p><i>Augustus: </i>"Bout bein free? Bout not bein nobody's slave?"</p><p><i>Henry: </i>"No, sir, I don't reckon I do." He wanted to know if he was supposed to, but he did not know how to ask that. </p><p><i>Augustus: "</i>Not that you need to feel any different. You can just feel whatever you want to feel." </p><p><i>Then later:</i></p><p><i>Augustus: </i>"You can just go on and do whatever it is you want to feel. Feel sad, go on and feel sad. Feel happy, you go on and feel happy."</p><p><i>Henry:</i> "I reckon."</p><p><i>Augustus: </i>"Oh, yes. I know so. I've had a little experience with this freedom situation. It's big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time."</p><p><i>I know it's no comparison to being enslaved and then being freed, but it felt like an apt description of life in the current moment. So blobbists, feel what you need to feel, whenever you need to feel it. We'll keep riding the waves, big and little, up and down, all at the same time, together. </i></p><p><i>Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Keep reading. I'm off to <u>Housekeeping</u>. </i></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-75820176109908081942020-08-23T14:31:00.000-04:002020-08-23T14:31:17.303-04:00The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!<p> <i>The Age of Innocence </i>by Edith Wharton</p><p><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></p><p><i>It's the 90s! The 1890s, that is. We're in high society in New York City, and our protagonist/narrator, Newland Archer, is about to marry May Welland and cement his status as part of the elite class. In the months leading up to his marriage, though, Newland is re-introduced to an childhood acquaintance, May's cousin, Ellen Olenska. Ellen married a count in Europe, but has left her husband (scandal!) and wants to begin anew in her hometown of the Big Apple. At first, she is not terribly well received (too bohemian, not the 'right' sort of wealthy, a separated woman, etc.) but eventually May's family stands up for her and she is lukewarmly welcomed back into NY society. Newland falls for Ellen (and vice versa), but for a variety of reasons, their love is not meant to be, and Newland marries May and has several children with her. Ellen moves to Paris (to live independently, not to return to her husband) and their lives diverge forever. </i></p><p><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></p><p><i>Okay, so I gave you a little snapshot of the plot; there's obviously a lot more that happens, but those are the most salient points. If you're wondering about the book's feel, it's basically Gossip Girl from a hundred years ago. I really enjoyed Wharton's writing style, as well as the forbidden love story; if you haven't read it, I highly recommend! Here are some highlights from my point of view. </i></p><p><b>Portraits of People</b></p><p><i>Wharton does an excellent job of capturing the essence of each of these high society characters. Here are a few of my favorites:</i></p><p><i>Mr. Sillerton Jackson</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">In addition to this forest of family trees, Mr. Sillerton Jackson carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years. </p></blockquote><p><i>Mrs. Henry van der Luyden</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death. <i>lololololz.</i></p></blockquote><p><i>Ellen Olenska (née Mingott)</i></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts, such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs to a guitar. <i>this was Ellen as a young girl, though the description still fits her as an adult. ;)</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own fashions? </p></blockquote><p><b>Female author, male protagonist</b></p><p><i>My biggest issue with this book was that the narrator/protagonist was Newland. AKA, a man. I'm sure it was revolutionary enough to write and publish as a woman in the early 20th century, and who knows what forces were at play, but I wish Ellen could have been the real heroine of this book. Newland felt more like a 3rd party observer, which has its own allure and adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the novel, but I couldn't help feeling like Edith was hiding somewhere under Ellen's surface. </i></p><p><i>If you've read my blob, this is not the first time I've made this complaint. Other 'offenders' from this blob include, in chronological order:</i></p><p>(Edith Wharton)</p><p>- Flannery O'Connor</p><p>- Isabel Allende</p><p>- J.K. Rowling</p><p><i>Newland stands up for women's issues, saying things like: </i>Women ought to be free - as free as we are. <i>But it wasn't enough for me to feel satisfied. I still felt a bit like Ellen was muted, which felt like a reflection of misogyny/sexism.</i></p><p><b>Moments that reminded me of Proust/Swann</b></p><p><i>There were many, which I admit I found quite endearing, since you know how much I love my Marcel. </i></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. </li></ul><div><b>Murakami moments</b></div><div><i>Several of Archer's reflective moments reminded me of Murakami, in particular <u>The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle</u>, in their sort of existential despair/displacement. Admittedly, I felt I needed to lean away from these sentiments since being in the middle of a pandemic when one is forced to stay at home 98.4% of the time could bring out many of these feelings in me if I let it. ;)</i></div><p></p><ul><li>He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain. </li></ul><ul><li>The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.</li></ul><ul><li>What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment, you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring - that's all.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Since [that day] there had been no farther communication between [Newland and Ellen], and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgements and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent - that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this. </li></ul><p></p><div><b>Sinecure <i>(a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit)</i></b></div><div><i>This was a word on a Latin test Mr. Lausch gave us back in high school, and I got it wrong. He had planted a tricky fake-out choice, something about a poison without a cure, and I was fooled. For a long time, I wondered what an example of a sinecure would be. This description of Newland's job feels like it perfectly fits the bill: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and 'conservative' investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading. </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><b>Where shall I dine to ameliorate my gout?</b> </div><div><i>There's a savage kind of wit in how Wharton describes high society, which I'm sure is part of what made this book successful. I loved this discussion of how one had to balance one's dinner invitations to have a rounded diet of nutrition and mental stimulation. </i></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">You couldn't have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and "The Marble Faun"; and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape. Therefore when a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer, Mr. Jackson, who was a true eclectic, would usually say to his sister: 'I've been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts' - it will be do me good to diet at Adeline's.</div><p></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably finish his meal on Ellen Olenska. <i>This was one of my favorite lines in the book.</i></p></blockquote><p><b>Zeugma (a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts )</b></p><p><i>In another high school flashback, shout out to Mrs. Wagner (I think? Sorry, I'm blanking on the name and she left the district pretty soon after) for teaching us figures of speech in AP Language and Composition. I fell in love with zeugma and it's still a delight to me whenever I stumble across it. </i></p><p>As Archer mustered [Madame Olenska's] modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions. <i>Zing! Zeugma!</i></p><p></p><div><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fictions, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>'Well, we need new blood and new money - and I hear she's still very good-looking', the carnivorous old lady declared. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians, and 'people who wrote'.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>There was something perverse and provocative in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing room, and in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably pleasing. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. <i>I love these alliterative "p" pairings!</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime. </li></ul><div><b><u>Title possibilities for this blob</u></b></div></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as Society left. </li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It was just for such distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while he smiled at it.</li></ul><div><b><u>Words New to Me</u></b></div><div><i style="font-weight: bold;">vaticination - </i>the act of prophesy; prediction</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Well, dear readers, I'm on to the next. I'll leave you with a few of what I'm calling 'love lines'. In reading about love, I think about what I would want in a partner, and this book had several things to check off. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(1) </i> <i>Newland, on his wife May's clashing sense of taste - </i>His only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased - which would be, of course, with 'sincere' Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass doors. <i>Ahh, yes. I will, of course, need to arrange my library as I like. I want to buy a house just so I can have a dedicated library. </i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>(2) </i>Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation. <i>This moment between Ellen and Newland reminded me of the scene in <u>To the Lighthouse</u> where Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are reading. Here's my note from that blob: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div><i><b>When reading is like dreaming</b></i></div><div><i>One of my favorite scenes in the whole novel is when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, whose relationship is complicated, but affectionate, simply sit together in his study and read, each attentively drawn in to their own book. As mentioned above, Mr. Ramsay is reading Sir Walter Scott, and Mrs. Ramsay has picked up a book lying nearby.</i></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer? She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another.</i></div></div></blockquote><p><i>Yes, please. I would like someone who can read with me, and with whom I can enjoy reading. </i></p><p>(3) How shall I explain? It's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again. <i>I love this line. Harder to articulate what it would mean in a desire for a partner, but I think I'll know it when it's there.</i></p><p><i>(4) </i>'I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like [mistress] - categories like that - won't exist. Where we shall simply be two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing and nothing else on earth will matter.'</p><p> She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. 'Oh, my dear - where is that country? Have you ever been there? </p><p><i>It's a romantic notion, but hey - a girl can dream! ;) </i></p><p><i>Sending you all rainy day vibes, cozy pre-fall feelings, and happy cups of tea. We may be looking for other realities these days, but at least we can fantasize about designing our own libraries! I'm off to tackle The Known World. Keep each other safe! Keep faith! </i></p><p></p>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-78678026985527735402020-07-30T19:32:00.000-04:002020-07-30T19:32:34.397-04:00The universe knows someone is missing, and slowly it attempts to replace him.<i>The Sandman</i> by Neil Gaiman<div><br /></div><div><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><i>The Sandman </i>is about a failed attempt to kidnap and control Death and all that happens afterward. Instead of capturing Death, a secret society captures Dream, Death's brother. They try to harness his power, but their attempts are futile, and he eventually breaks free and wreaks vengeance on them for stripping him of his totems and leaving him imprisoned for decades. Dream must undergo a series of challenges to retrieve the totems which help him to wield his power, but after he is successful in getting them back, he feels empty. He discusses his feelings with Death, his older sister, and this is where the first volume comes to a close. </div><div><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><i>Dear blobbists, </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> Perhaps I needed to read more than just the first installment (my edition called it "Preludes and Nocturnes) but I didn't really get into this one. I loved the concept, but it overall felt really dark and gory and a little bit gross. I also felt like it fell into the category of the somewhat icky male gaze, where there was a weird amount of gross female nudity/sexual commentary but it felt very one-sided.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> That being said, the intro to my copy waxed poetic about how revolutionary and amazing and fantastic this series is/was, so maybe I was just coming in with my expectations set too high. I still feel like we need wayyyyyyyyyyyyy more graphic novels by women, POC, and everything in between and inclusive of those identities. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> Genuinely no offense meant to those who love this series - I may well come back to it and read more volumes in time, but I wasn't inspired to at this particular juncture. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> I don't have much else to say about this one. I often feel really guilty after finishing a graphic novel because it seems like something that would take a tremendous amount of work and yet I consume it in almost no time at all. Maybe there's a different way to read graphic novels, or maybe that's part of the experience, and just something the writers/illustators are habituated to. Like gymnasts who vault for a millisecond and then are done competing for another year. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i> Well, I'm off to tackle the Age of Innocence. Join me if you like!</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Stay safe, keep faith, good night!</i></div>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-280098931251087508.post-86859485791116937482020-07-02T17:44:00.001-04:002020-07-02T17:44:58.979-04:00Somebody to run to. It seem too sweet to bear.<i>The Color Purple </i>by Alice Walker<div><br /></div><div><b>Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary</b></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>The Color Purple </i>is a story about identity, longing, resilience, racism, and the ability to thrive despite all barriers and obstacles. It follows the tale of Celie, and we start with her as a pregnant teenager, a situation for which her father is responsible. We're in the deep South (rural Georgia) in the 1930s, and we learn quickly that Celie's life is far from pretty. Her sister Nettie is her only friend and bright spot, but soon Celie is married off to a Mr. _____ (I'm not being withholding, that's just how he's referred to in the work) when she is all of fifteen. Both of her children (for she was pregnant once before, also by her Pa) have been taken from her, and she is unsure if they have been killed or given away. Through a small-town coincidence, Celie sees a young girl she believes to be her daughter with another black woman, Corinne, at the local store. The girl doesn't recognize her, and later Nettie ends up seeking out this woman, Corinne, because she leaves home and has no money to her name. Nettie ends up following Corinne, her husband Samuel, and the two children (Olivia and Adam, who turn out to both be Celie's children) to Africa (a few different countries within the continent) and set up as missionaries in a small town in Liberia with the Olinka people. </div><div><br /></div><div>Celie's life is no better with Mr. ______ than with Pa; he beats her frequently, tells her she's ugly, and forces her to care for his several children. Celie writes letters to God, and then to Nettie (never mailed, for she doesn't know where Nettie is) and Nettie writes back to Celie, but Celie doesn't get the letters until many years have passed, because it turns out that Mr. ________ tried to have his way with Nettie just before she left. She fought him off, and he said as punishment that Celie would never get her letters. </div><div><br /></div><div>Shug Avery enters the picture, a very fashionable and wealthy black woman who has been Mr. ________ (Albert is his first name)'s lover in the past. Celie falls for Shug, and Shug develops a deep love for Celie. When Shug finds out Albert has been beating Celie, she does everything in her power to put a stop to it. Albert's son, Harpo, marries a woman, Sofia, who ends up brutally beaten and sentenced to 12 years in jail because she 'sasses' a white woman (the mayor's wife) and hits her back after the woman slaps her in the face. Sofia ends being released from prison to work out her sentence by working for this same family as their maid. Around the time Sofia is finally freed and returned to her children (who no longer know her) Shug takes Celie off to Memphis. They have a happy time for a while, but Shug eventually falls for a young man, and Celie is heartbroken. Celie returns to Georgia when her Pa leaves her a home unexpectedly. She learned prior to his passing that he was, in fact, her stepfather, and that her real father was lynched. Nettie eventually returns from Africa, and though we think for a little while that the ship she and the rest of the family have returned home on has sunk (she marries Samuel after Corinne dies in Africa), they arrive at Celie's new home, and finally, after decades of sorrow, pain, loneliness, and sadness, Celie is whole again.</div><div><b>Spoiler Over: Continue Here</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><i>Dear Blobbists, </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I loved this book. I can't believe I had never read it, since it's definitely considered a classic, but I'm very glad that I had the chance to engage with it and enjoy it. In retrospect, I'm not sure I was ready for this book when I was younger, so perhaps this was the perfect time for me to find it. I have many thoughts...</i></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>On Shug Avery</b></div><div><i>I love the way Celie describes Shug. Lots of people are in love with Shug (short for Sugar) and I can totally see why. She's particularly striking because, unlike all the other black women in the story, she's wealthy, she's respected, and she's deeply loved. </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Now when I dream of Shug Avery, She be dress to kill, whirling and laughing.</li></ul></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>She look so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themself up tall for a better look.</li></ul></div><div><b>On getting 'big'</b></div><div><i>This is how Celie refers to getting pregnant. I can't imagine being pregnant so young, and the incalculable trauma of it happening at the hands of her sole caretaker, and a man she believes to be her father.</i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The first time I got big Pa took me out of school. He never care that I love it. <i>I felt terrible for Celie, and I wanted to give her back her chance to stay in school. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Nettie still don't understand. I don't neither. All us notice is I'm all the time sick and fat. <i>The only thing scarier than being pregnant that I can imagine (personal thing - pregnancy freaks me out) is being pregnant and not knowing what was going on. What incredible resilience and what a traumatic thing to live through.</i></li></ul></div><div><b>On resilience</b></div><div><i>A common theme in this book is the idea that as a woman, and as a black woman, survival is really the only reasonable goal. At one point, Celie is asked why she doesn't fight back when Mr. ______ beats her. Here's her response: </i></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.</li></ul></div><div><i>And this mentality is cruelly internalized in Celie, so that when Harpo comes to her for advice on how to handle his wife, Sofia, who won't 'mind' him, and Harpo's dad, Mr. ______ says: </i></div><div>Wives is like children. You have to let 'em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do that better than a good sound beating. </div><div><i>Celie, after marinating on it, says to Harpo, about Sofia:</i></div><div>Beat her. I say. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>And while I was saddened and horrified by this, this exchange then illuminated all that Celie was feeling: </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Sofia: </i>You told Harpo to beat me. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>No, I didn't. </div><div><i>Sofia: </i>Don't lie. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>I didn't mean it. </div><div><i>Sofia: </i>Then what you say it for? </div><div><i>Celie: </i>I say it cause I'm a fool. I say it cause I'm jealous of you. I say it cause you do what I can't. </div><div><i>Sofia: </i>What's that? </div><div><i>Celie: </i>Fight. </div><div><i>Sofia: </i>She stand there a long time, like what I said took the wind out her jaws. She mad before, sad now. All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men. But I never thought I'd have to fight in my own house. <i>This was such an intense exchange, but also so beautifully articulated this complex jealousy in Celie and her desire for others to be brought down the way she was. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>This exchange was also intense, between Shug and Celie:</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Celie: </i>He beat me when you not here, I say. </div><div><i style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1860" data-original-width="1240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibrMZ_-O2_lSZAML6UiUuQ_0qD5aVlwOmrblQXb0gtB7bT3TeMphf3eLGCkII0f4SMrjkE3GlG7herxx81ntAM_pvS7p36lPayGtwMuxM7gDatCJWhHfRg_hrM0jvuu7ee1SOjEbq9-10/s320/7e2ddf675e61e21ce4028d551857b13b.jpg" style="font-style: normal;" /></i><i>Shug: </i>Who do, she say, Albert? </div><div><i>Celie: </i>Mr. ______, I say. </div><div><i>Shug: </i>I can't believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop. What he beat you for? she ast. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>For being me and not you.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I think one of the things I loved most about this book were the continually unfolding layers of nuance. Alice Walker is not content to let you put "x" character in a box, or let you believe you know the outcome or the morality or the content of someone's character purely based on one assessment. Everyone is constantly changing in your mind as a reader because they are all products of their environment, and they're all subject to external factors that force you to reassess them. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On quilts</b></div><div><i>I loved that one of the bright spots for Celie was quilt-making. Here's how Sofia and Celie make up after their exchange from above:</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Sofia: </i>Let's make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains, she say. </div><div>And I run git my pattern book. (<i>The quilt pictured features a block Celie uses - Sister's Choice)</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Then later...</i></div><div>Me and Sofia piecing another quilt together. I got bout five squares pieced, spread out on the table by my knee. My basket full of scraps on the floor. </div><div><i>There's a nice through line here, in that we see this in Liberia:</i></div><div>The Olinka men make beautiful quilts which are full of animals and birds and people. And as soon as Corrine saw them, she began to make a quilt that alternated one square of appliqued figures with one nine-patch block, using the clothes the children had outgrown, and some of her old dresses. </div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>On Sofia</b></div><div><i>Sofia is a badass, and because she is a black woman in the South in the 1930s, this is a recipe for an extremely difficult life. The exploration of black women and how they were both protected by and endangered by their own communities, as well as victimized and murdered by white people, is so painstakingly explored. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>When Sofia is attacked and placed in jail, Celie goes to see her. And Celie, who has been raped, abused, and beaten by her (step)father, and has been beaten over and over by her husband, is in a state of shock: </i></div><div>When I see Sofia I don't know why she still alive. They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose loose on one side. They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her tongue the size of my arm, it stick out tween her teef like a piece of rubber. She can't talk. And she just about the color of a eggplant. </div><div> Scare me so bad I near bout drop my grip. But I don't. I put it on the floor of the cell, take out comb and brush, nightgown, witch hazel and alcohol and I start to work on her. The colored tendant bring me water to wash her with, and I start at her two little slits for eyes. <i>This is obviously a deeply difficult scene to read, and one that immediately brings names like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd to mind, among the numerous others over the centuries, and it makes my heart hurt to think that black women, in particular, are still so endangered by their everyday existence in America. We must continue to educate ourselves, activate our power and privilege where we can, and protect the Sofias and Breonnas and Claudette Colvins of the world. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>And then disturbingly, but naturally, Sofia's response to working in the prison laundry: </i></div><div>Every time they ast me to do something, Miss Celie, I act like I'm you. I jump right up and do just what they say. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>But later, as Sofia gets more of herself back. </i></div><div>I dream of murder, she say, I dream of murder sleep or wake.<i> And all I could think was, who wouldn't?</i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>On seeing her children again</i> - Nobody told them I was coming, so they don't know who I is. <i>The agony of this, the theme of children taken from their mother by agents beyond their control, is so poignant. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>And Sofia, on her boss, the mayor's wife, after this unexpected "gift" of the visit:</i></div><div>I spent fifteen minutes with my children. </div><div>And she been going on for months bout how ungrateful I is. </div><div>White folks is a miracle of affliction, say Sofia.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>On Squeak going to see the warden</b></div><div><i>Things only go from bad to worse for women of color in the novel. While Sofia is in jail, Harpo is with another woman, Squeak. They try to get Squeak to go to the warden to try to get him to lighten Sofia's sentence, because, it turns out, Squeak is related to the warden (though of course he doesn't recognize or acknowledge being related to a black woman). To her dismay, he is not only unreceptive, he is violent: </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>He took my hat off. Told me to undo my dress. She drop her head, put her face in her hands. </div><div>My God, say Odessa, and he your uncle. </div><div>He say if he was my uncle he wouldn't do it to me. That be a sin. But this just little fornication. Everybody guilty of that. </div><div>She turn her face up to Harpo. Harpo, she say, do you really love me, or just my color?</div><div>Harpo say, I love you, Squeak. He kneel down and try to put his arms round her waist. </div><div>She stand up. My name Mary Agnes, she say. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>This is another example of that nuance, and the complexities of blackness here; I wanted to hate Harpo because he beat Sofia, but he was only doing what his father told him to do. And then I wanted to resent him for moving on from Sofia, but he loves Squeak, and he cares for her in a way that she deeply needs, and they fight for Sofia, only to have Squeak get raped by her own uncle. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On existence</b></div><div><i>So if you haven't come to this conclusion yet, you might be thinking, how can they stand it? How can black people then (and maybe sometimes now) not just want to murder us (white people) in their sleep? </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Sofia say to me today, I just can't understand it. </div><div>What that? I ast. </div><div>Why we ain't already kill them off. </div><div>Three years after she beat she out of the wash house, got her color and her weight back, look like her old self, just all time think bout killing somebody. </div><div>Too many to kill off, I say. Us outnumbered from the start. I speck we knock over one or two, though, here and there, through the years, I say. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>I thought of all the layers of pain and suffering and how much power and personhood was routinely taken from black people through slavery and afterwards, and I found myself thinking, I'd kill us, too. </i></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>On meeting Grady</b></div><div><i>On a lighter note, I enjoyed Celie's response to meeting Shug's husband (who comes before her young man lover later on): </i></div><div><br /></div><div>This Grady, she say. This my husband. </div><div>The minute she say it I know I don't like Grady. I don't like his shape, I don't like his teef, I don't like his clothes. Seem like to me he smell. <i>lololololz. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On learned ignorance</b></div><div><i>Another layer of nuance is Walker's exploration of missionary activities in Africa, as well as exploring American blackness in Africa. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I loved this line, from one of Nettie's letters, about learning more Black history:</i></div><div>I hadn't realized I was so <i>ignorant</i>, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to <i>know</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>And this revelation later:</i></div><div>Oh, Celie, there are colored people in the world who want us to know! Want us to grow and see the light! They are not all mean like Pa and Albert, or beaten down like Ma was. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>On Africans</b></div><div><i>But again, Walker drops in that oozing nuance, and explores more layers. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Nettie, on Africans:</i></div><div>Why did they sell us? How could they have done it? And why do we still love them?</div><div><br /></div><div>No one else in this village wants to hear about slavery, however, They acknowledge no responsibility whatsoever. This is one thing about them that I definitely do not like.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Nettie, on first exploring Sénégal:</i></div><div>Celie, try to imagine a city full of these shining, blueblack people wearing brilliant blue robes with designs like fancy quilt patterns. Can you picture it at all, Celie? Because I felt like I was seeing black for the first time. And Celie, there is something magical about it. Because the black is so black the eye is simply dazzled, and then there is the shining that seems to come, really, from moonlight, it is so luminous, but their skin glows even in the sun. <i>I can't imagine the kind of power and wonder and magic this moment must have contained. </i></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>On getting a marker</b></div><div><i>When Celie confronts her stepdad (Alphonso) about her real parents, he's blunt and cruel. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Where my daddy buried, I ast. That all I really want to know. </div><div>Next to your mammy, he say. </div><div>Any marker, I ast. </div><div>He look at me like I'm crazy. Lynched people don't git no marker, he say. Like this something everybody know. </div><div>Mama got one? I ast. </div><div>He say, Naw. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>How many people are buried in this earth with no marker to show they lived? No marker to show that they mattered, that they loved, that they were humans? How many of these people are indigenous? Or black? It makes me want to find all their stories and trumpet them to the world; it won't undo the harm done, but at least I could celebrate their personhood. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>On hand-me-downs</b></div><div><i>There were several moments that reminded me of Sophie's Choice, and this one in particular, from Nettie, reminded me of how horrified Sophie was when she realized that any 'nice' things being worn around at Auschwitz had been taken from dead Jews. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I have never been able to bring myself to wear one of these dresses, which all seem to have been made with giants in mind, so I was glad to have Corrine's things. At the same time, I dreaded putting them on. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>On not writing to God any more</b></div><div><i>After writing letters to God for some time, Celie decides to write to Nettie instead. She doesn't post the letters, but she has strong logic for the pivot. Here's the exchange with Shug:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Celie: </i>What God do for me? I ast. </div><div><i>Shug: </i>She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won't ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. </div><div><i>Shug: </i>She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.</div><div><i>Celie: </i>Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you. <i>Where's. The. Lie?</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On getting gone</b></div><div><i>I <u>loved</u> when Celie finally got to put Mr. _______ in her rearview (though again, with the nuances of Walker and the complicated layers of blackness, he ends up being allowed back into her family as a reformed sort of friend). </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Mr. _______: </i>What wrong now? I thought you finally happy. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>You a lowdown dog is what's wrong, I say. It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>and later, at dinner:</i></div><div>Mr. _____ reach over to slap me. I jab my case knife in his hand. </div><div>You bitch, he say. What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after? </div><div>Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me. <i>YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS KWEEEN. Is all I have to say.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On the way Celie talks</b></div><div><i>I've been reading a book called Everyday Antiracism (and I highly recommend, very very good read - targeted at educators, but really valuable though pieces for anyone to work through) and this conversation reminded me of the explorations of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and how to honor it in the classroom while also teaching students to codeswitch as necessary in and out of 'standard' English. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Celie is an entrepreneur, making pants that are wildly popular in Memphis, but one of the women who helps out with the business, another black woman, disapproves of Celie's way of speaking. She says Shug must be ashamed of the way her girlfriend talks. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Shug not shame no how, I say. But she don't believe this the truth. Sugar, she say one day when Shug home, don't you think it be nice if Celie could talk proper? </div><div>Shug say, She can talk in sign language for all I care. </div><div>But I let Darlene worry on. Sometimes I think bout the apples and the dogs, sometimes I don't. Look to me like only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind. <i>I loved this so much. And it made me love Shug even more.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>On making pants</b></div><div><i>I loved this exchange between Albert and Celie later on, after she's returned from Memphis. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Albert: </i>How you make your living up there? he say. </div><div><i>Celie: </i>Making pants, I say. </div><div><i>Albert: </i>He say, I notice everybody in the family just about wearing pants you made. But you mean you turned it into a business? </div><div><i>Celie: </i>That's right, I say. But I really started it right here in your house to keep from killing you.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>On returning to America from Africa as black children</b></div><div><i>This line was gut-wrenching, from Nettie, in a letter to Celie, about the children Olivia and Adam:</i></div><div>How will they manage the hostility towards them, having grown up here?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>On Eleanor Jane and love</b></div><div><i>Sofia ends up being close to Eleanor Jane, the daughter of the mayor and his wife, largely because she is generally kind to Sofia and her family is kind of a disaster zone. But when Eleanor Jane brings her baby to Sofia's house and waits for her to dote on him, this is how Sofia responds:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>I love children, say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><u>Lines I Liked</u></b></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>You better not never tell nobody but God.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I don't even look at mens. That's the truth. I look at women, tho, cause I'm not scared of them.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On seeing her daughter in town: </i>I think she mine. My heart say she mine. <i>God, I love this line. So much tenderness.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On Mr. _____ </i>- One good thing bout the way he never do any work round the place, us never miss him when he gone. <i>LOLOL. </i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Shug, to Celie - </i>If you was my wife, I'd cover you up with kisses stead of licks, and work hard for you too. <i>emoji heart explosions.</i></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Shug - </i>You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>On finding out Shug is in love with a young man: </i>Well, I say, if words could kill, I'd be in the ambulance. <i>awwwwwwwwwwwwwww, Celie!</i></li></ul><div><i>Okay, well I'm heading off to the country and to take a tiny human camping for the first time, so I'll leave you with some parting moments. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. <i>This broke my heart, when Celie was looking at herself in the mirror and mourning the loss of Shug and her momentary joy. Happiness wasn't just a trick! It shouldn't be a trick for any black woman, and we must work to make this true. </i></div></div><div><br /></div><div><i>On living without Shug</i> - I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have.<i> So tender. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><i>On why we're here: </i></div><div>I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>On Shug in the end:</i></div><div>If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. </div><div>And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>I'll leave you to marinate on this line, as we go into the 4th of July: </i></div><div>White people busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don't have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>However you engage with your American-ness this weekend, stay safe, keep faith in the possibility and the ability of us to make a better, more equitable, more happiness-filled world, and celebrate each other with love and kindness. I'm off to the world of graphic novels. </i></div>Meerkathttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14876458387063287174noreply@blogger.com1