Moored at Sea

Two Poems about Growing Up

2010-03-18T09:49:00.000-05:00

Two Poems on Growing Up

I

The recipe for 'grownup' is'nt complex -
Three things: the first a set of faces: one
For sneering, chuckling, shouting. Thing the next:
A roll of bandages for putting on
If you, by chance should graze your grownup blades
Across the tender skin beneath your wrist.
The last? You need a book, blank or pre-writ,
To exercise the parts you might have missed
When scalpelling out the withered child bits.
They're like the burn-marks on a frying pan -
You grind them down, but always leave that look
Of bloody-brown, like paint from ancient hands
Cluthched into walls of caverns. But a book
Will let the crackling remnants run their course,
Then shut them in their covers by sheer force.

II

The Cancer of Maturity
Metastizes slow
It splays across your bangs, at first
And creeps into your clothes.

It slips onto your lips at night,
Your throat, and then your breast
Then Lodges in your diaphraghm
And echoes with your breath.

The lungs rebel and bloom their youth
Into an angry mass,
A cancer as the cancer's foe -
The two begin to clash.

But youth imbues it's vital strength
Into a killing blow.
Adulthood reels, but lives, then waits,
Metastasizing slow.

(Image by Valerie Everett. Herein describing the inside of my wrist (which, no, I've never 'grazed' with 'grownup blades', and never intend to, no worries :D), this concludes my somewhat irregular tour of the pictures on the top of my blog. )

The Nature of Taste

2010-03-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

Last year, I started using Pandora when I am listening to random-music (iTunes is mostly for songs I want to listen to on repeat for hours at a time *cough Radiohead*, or if I want to listen to an album *cough Miss Saigon*). I have to admit that there is little part of my brain, that agonized every time I pushed a button on Pandora. If you've never used it, the interface is pretty simple: you choose a seed song or artist, and Pandora plays a song, and you mark it with a thumbs up or thumbs down, so Pandora can slowly learn your taste. Everytime I put a thumbs down, I felt this little twinge. What if Pandora thinks I don't like this whole genre? What if this artist has, like, lots of songs I'd totally love? What if the Pandora software thinks I'm a snob, or I'm being mean? Yes, my friends, I am aware that it would require a feat of programming currently beyond modern science to produce a computer that could resent you for your choice in music, but sense and reasoning aren't always part of my thought process.

So, I've had the same station for a long time, and I felt quite proud of myself. The music I was listening was about 80% people I'd never listened to before. This is it, I thought, I have become one of those cool people like Amanda and Nymeth and Chris and Debi who have distinct, individual taste, taste that they have cultivated so that they can feel excited about concerts and music and new albums and stuff! I have arrived!

So, this is great, right? Jason is diverse! Jason is creative! And then the other day I had a revelation. In tarot terms, I don't mean one of those shining, glorious, Sun revelations. I mean more like a falling tower revelation. The one where your imagination of how things are is dispelled. Where listening to Pandora, I realized that I actually could reduce my newfound taste into three simple rules:

1) I like sad or angry people, especially girls, playing the piano or guitar
2) I like Jack White, but hate everyone who sounds like Jack White
3) There is no rule 3

If you add to these rules that I like musicals, scat singing, and things that make me look cool, this actually explains at least 85% of my music collection. The remaining 15% is stuff Amanda likes that I've inherited out of sheer respect for her good taste.

No, this is not going to be a complaining post. Promise.

This is a Jason-philosophizes blindly post (hurrah! the crowd shouts sarcastically. That's much better!).

Now, the question here, as to how my taste could be distilled quite so simply into such easy, oddly specific rules is an interesting one to me academically. There's really two possibilities in my mind, either of which is intriguing. The first would be that I like these things because they are what Pandora plays for me. From a a human history standpoint, this is a remarkably complex consideration - because the world of marketing, and therefore the world of disseminated taste, is built on a Pandora model. Sometimes, of course, this is obvious. Look at, for instance, the recommendations that Amazon, or Goodreads, or any other search service hands over to you. With varying degrees of accuracy and complexity (but with a slowly increasing level of both, most of your internet browsing gently, invisibly makes assumptions about you, and uses those assumptions to guide your behaviours - targeted ads, suggested content, recommendations, even blogs like Daring Fireball that take one of your interests (Macintosh Computers) and connect them to other interests (design, Stanley Kubrick, writing). Nor is this ONLY a big brother-ish conspiracy. In the last example, Josh Gruber writes about those other topics because they are the things that interest him. The interesting thing is, however, that these create strange, trended cultures-within-a-culture, where our affetion for something slowly, slowly narrows and is reinforced into the particulars that an algorithm can derive about us. It is easy to at this point have a luddite reaction, but really, while the breadth may change, the depth of experience is intense and powerful this way - It is a tradeoff, but not necessarily a negative one.

But it DOES have ramifications, ones that are already slowly showing. There is, once business and government learn how, the ability to manipulate opinion (though it's notably more difficult to do this on a mass scale than it was with, say, 1950's television, or 40's radio). Additionally, it tends to segmentize society. Book blogging is a perfect example of this - it is very easy to find bloggers with very precisely similar interests - and in knowing those persons, your opinions become even MORE similar over time, as a group, on the trend. This makes these pockets of culture that at times can clash. Use cable news as an example: each year passes, and broadens the gulf between what it is that the news says on CNN versus Fox News, to where someone who watches one channel begins to find it difficult to have a conversation with the other - because the channels are built to encourage argument and righteous indignation instead of mutuality.

I said there were two possible reasons. The second is even more intriguing to me: perhaps, there is a reason I'm attracted to this very narrow band of musicians, independent of the medium that I find them through. Maybe there simply is something about sad female voices, or about an uncluttered piano, or (for whatever reason) Jack White, that speaks something to me. The INTERESTING thing then is, on the one hand, we normally discuss music in the same way as literature: we spend a great deal of time talking about the lyrics, or in trying to relate the music to a hard, verbal idea (or at least, I guess, I do). But, when I strip away to the shallowest level of the subconscious selection, I select on something that has nothing to do with the verbal world, I am attracted to certain aspects of the music itself, certain frequencies, certain qualities of sound and interplay of vibration. The question then becomes why don't we have a better vocabulary to talk about this? One can discuss it scientifically or clinically, discussing this or that scale or harmonic break, or whatever. But this is something like discussing the musicality of a poem by discussing linguistic theory - it's obtuse and useful for analysis but not expression.

The other interesting thing is that it's even POSSIBLE for me, someone who is very much a casual amateur, to even discover something this specific. 100 years ago, the music I heard would be the music that was available, the same music everyone around me heard. If I lived in a small town in the midwest, in middle class comfort, for instance, I'd hear whatever the latest popular sheet music, a small selection maybe fo gramaphone records, and the one or two concerts that travel through the town per year. Perhaps a calliope at the circus. I would hear the popular music of my particular culture, basically. Well, if there is, let's say, 3 girls in my town who play piano and sing, and the only sheet music they have has perhaps 15 out of 100 songs that are sad (and none of them are Jack White) I'm not very likely to discover something so specific - I may be attracted to particular songs, but in my MIND I will process this as an attraction to these specific songs, and will not be ABLE to analyze further and understand what it is about the songs that attracts me, as easily. Even 20 years ago, I was likely to choose some particular genre of music organically, that most closely fit my interests, and then I would simply hear whatever the radio station played. From there I would be able to pick out the bands I liked, and buy their albums, and I would become deeply attached to certain particular bands, through their good and bad (or suited to me and unsuited to me moments). To an extent, this is now changing. Where I 100 years ago would have liked particular songs, and 20 years ago particular bands, I now like particular sounds or modes. So there are certainly particular songs I like - but I like these because they express the sound I like. A band is the same way, or more so for me, an album. If I, for instance, heard one particular song off of Miss Saigon on the radio, I would probably not have been particularly fond of it. But, having partiuclar sounds and modes, I could pick out the echoes of that mode in the overall album, and then use that to understand the foreign things, that interact with it.

Music industry executives bemoan this - because generally what this means is that if a band doesn't change my life, I'll buy one of their songs, and be done with it. They speak darkly abuot the death of the album and a day of empty singles-driven music. I disagree - again, having an intimate relationships with the particular connects us deeply enough to a particular sensual self, that it DOES allow us, in the context of a 'true' album - one that tells a story, and explores the interplay between different themes - to understand things we WOULDN'T normally understand, and to form a relationship with music, rather than using an album, a band, a musician as a benchmark for our taste. And, again, this grows more and more so with every passing year, and musicians are beginning (I think) to pick up on this) - a Dresden Dolls album, for instance, is cautiously planned (at least it feels that way to me) and has pieces that wildly disparate from each other, and Palmer uses this as a tool to draw the listener's mind into directions that they wouldn't normally expect - so, where I would normally only like particular songs of hers, I can begin to understand a song like 'Girl Anachronism' which, the first time that I heard it as a single, I thought was... well, kind of awful, to be honest.

Isn't the future wonderful?

The Problem With Being a Raina

2010-03-06T14:31:00.000-06:00

I have had a number of friends read Blankets by Craig Thompson lately, and LOVE it. I read it this morning - it was a beautiful book, technically precise, carefully balanced, perfectly tuned. But I didn't enjoy it. This isn't to say I didn't APPRECIATE it, because I did. It was a wonderful book - if they book was less well done, I would have enjoyed it more, probably. As it was, with all things to tell the truth, it is only fun to read if the truth is something you'd like to know.

If you haven't read Blankets, and you don't like spoilers, stop reading. Seriously. It is a wonderful book, and you should read it. THEN come back and talk to me about it. This isn't a review, so it will do a poor job of protecting your ability to enjoy reading the book the first time.

The real beauty of Blankets, to me, was that, more than any of the comics I've read so far, this book did a pitch perfect job of combining art and text in a meaningful, surprising way. This book is, in my mind, the reason that graphic novels shoudl be written - because art and words both have their own unique power, and the synergy of those two powers creates something neither could create on its own. The most striking example in the book for me is the way Craig visualizes Raina.

The climax of Craig's relationship with Raina comes, for me, on page 337. In a playful/serious allegory, we see Craig as an Eastern Monk, kneeling before a shrine where the idol of his Muse, Raina, sits cross legged like a Buddha, surrounded by vestal fires, and by the curling shapes of Indian patterns. Look closely for a minute at those patterns - because they recur, over and over. Look, first, at the symbol of their relationship, the blanket that appears on page 182-183:

But, again, this theme isn't just something that shows up here and there. The paisley in particular (for me at least) raises it's head over and over as he thinks of her. Shadows of it, of the curve versus the angular, appear in their first meetings, intensifying as they get to their intimate quiet moment underneath the basketball hoop. The psalm on 310-311 is another beautifully realized, and very brazen appearance. The sex scene on 420-423 devolves to the point where the very frames of the comic have a paisley-esque fluidity, and her body itself seems to struggle to curve - the movement towards orgasm is, for me at least a continuous effort of him to wrap himself around that pattern, to work his own slouched angularity into the Eastern curvaceousness that he imagines of her.

But there's the problem. And don't get me wrong, this is totally realistic. But there are two Rainas in this book: Raina the goddess-muse-angel, and Raina the woman. The book is from Craig's point of view, and Craig sees what he needs to see - in his noble naivete, he sees what Raina could be, perhaps. But she isn't. She's a human. She fails to be a goddess, over, and over, and over. Amanda, when she read it, said she just didn't get Raina, like it seemed like she was always changing her mind. I understand Raina, I connected with her in a way that I was incapable of connecting with Craig: because I've been that person. And what she does makes perfect sense - only what she does and what Craig SEES her doing are very, very different things.

In the end, for me, that's what the book ended up being about - the moment where you learn that someone isn't what you thought. And that's why I didn't enjoy it. It was uncomfortable, because I have no idea what it is like to fall in love with someone and find out they don't exist - I had the good fortune to marry a Craig - someone who is unfailingly, completely, exactly who they are. Not that Amanda is perfect, but she is honest, and Craig is the same way - even when he lies, he's telling the truth. I HAVE been the opposite - someone who desperately needed the world to make more sense, someone who made up a story because it seemed to explain things - and then painted over it when it turns out that telling a story doesn't make it so. There's a moment, as I saw all the prints of his blanket seeping into his vision of Raina, that I wanted to shake Craig, physically, and shout at him "Don't you see? She didn't give you a blanket of her, she gave you a blanket of you!" But of course, you can't do that - in a sense, perhaps Craig had to look in someone else to find himself. But for me, this story was foreign, distant - the story that felt present is the story of Raina - who is she in the end? She can't learn what's right, just one more thing that's wrong - and the wrong isn't in Craig, or even in their relationship. Those things were healthy, it's Raina that wasn't healthy - if she were healthy, she could have, perhaps, been what she needed to be. You can only paint the wall so many times, her story whispers, you can only paint the wall so many times. One more coat of paint, now, but still I know. You can only paint the wall so many times.

In Defense of Happiness

2010-03-05T21:44:00.000-06:00

Having been generally grouchy lately (special apologies to Ms Nymeth, Ms Debi, and Amanda on that one...) I have noticed myself falling at times into an old trap - glamorising misery. It's a classic trick, as old as Greek Tragedy (and older), the tendency to believe that sorrow is greater than joy, that misery is a more real and powerful feeling than ecstasy.

Heck with that!

Happiness can be meaningful - I feel silly even having to SAY that. Happiness has it's gradations and variations, it's intensities and mysteries, it's secrets and ceremonies, just like sorrow. And sometimes, I think it's hard (especially for snotty nosed snob jerks like me) to remember that. So, here's a quick list of five books that are filled with happy, and pregnant with beauty and meaning, all at the same time:

1) Silas Marner - There are those who call this book saccharine, and it has been imitated so many times it's easy to read past. But Silas Marner has a gentle joy that suffuses it, even through a drug addled mother dying, a burglary, and an angsty secret. The book is beautiful because it accepts the sorrows of the world, accepts that there's no God waving his happy stick and making them all better, and nonetheless, in the end, shows how beautiful and joyous life really is. No book tells the healing and sanctifying power of love quite like Silas Marner.

2) Better Angel - I just read this book recently. It was written in 1931, and tells a very frank tale of what it was like to be a homosexual in the 20's. I honestly read this book fully expecting it to be a downer, and character after character was introduced that I fully expected to end up lettign me down. But Better Angel is filled with a passion and honest affection for romantic love that lets the author redeem men with sincerity and feeling. The scene in the book where the protagonist tells his best female friend (who's in love with him) that he's gay was one of the most bittersweet, but frankly love-infused moments of reading I've experienced in a long time.

3) The Arrival - Ms Nymeth just reviewed this recently, but in case you missed it, The Arrival is a graphic novel with no words, that tells a fantastical tale about emigration and immigration. The world Tan builds is a pitch perfect mixture of terrifying and exciting exoticism, where everything you meet has an equal chance of being filled with danger or filled with compassion and hope. And in the middle of the world is human beings who, through their mistakes, love each other, care for each other, take care of each other, in spite of the instinct for self-preservation. And by the end, you see some of the terrifying newness of the beginning transform almost magically into symbols of hope and joy. This is the most joyful book I read last year, I think.

4) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Another coming of age story, and ironically another story of immigrant life, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book that loves everyone. CArrying all the stock characters and situations of the worst of tragedies: drunken father, crushing poverty, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, childhood in the shadow of hopelessness - this book manages, by sheer force of will, to refuse to pity itself for even the shortest of seconds. And in the process, you learn what it is to love characters, even the ones you would normally hate, unconditionally and completely.

5) Emily Dickinson - When I told Amanda the books I was thinking of putting on the list, I mentioned Emily Dickinson and she looked at me funny. Yes, Dickinson wrote about Death. But she also wrote some of the happiest, most soothing and gently courageous poems in the history of mankind. She also had a wicked, winking sense of humor, and a cheerful unvarnished affection for beautiful things. If you've only read the ones they give you in school, try Emily again - it's where I turn when I need to cheer up.

So! I feel better! Do you have any favorite books that show how powerful joy can be? Feel free to leave them in the comments - or make your own list if you like. It's so easy to create this false dichotomy between Happy Books and Important Books. But, to be blind to joy in the world is just as crippling as to be blind to sorrow - and just as unfair and productive of injustice to those around you, really.

Luna, Manchester, and Why Political Correctness IS Important

2010-03-04T11:33:00.003-06:00

(Warning: This review makes occasional use of 'the f-word'. I don't use it OFTEN in life, but once in a while it finds it's way in. Sorry if I offend :/)

I recently read Luna, a book about about a transsexual girl - originally I had intended to write a more extensive conversation about it, but I don't think I could do so while maintaining my composure entirely (it was that good). And nobody needs that. I will only say that it was a beautiful book - it has it's faults, but fuck that, because it was beautiful and made me feel more awake than many a far more 'perfect' book. I don't know if it will affect everyone the same, but it did for me.

That being said, and my little store of comabtiveness being worn out...

I've actually had a number of places lately where I've been in contact with liminal things - those things which are neither this nor that, one thing or the other in our mind, and it has made me thoughtful on the idea.

Let me start with something that isn't as emotionally charged for us now: Victorian Manchester.

Manchester

Having just started a history of Manchester (Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City, by Gary S. Messinger), but having long been fascinated by the city, I found one of the early statements he makes very intriguing. Manchester (if you're not familiar with it's history) was the world's first truly industrial city, the first city that was built entirely around factories and industrial production (during the Industrial Revolution of early 19th century England). The city was a sort of shorthand for the horrors of modern living, as a result, for most of the Victorian period. And with good reason - people there lived in dire poverty, the rivers stank of chemicals and shone strange colors, the air was mired in endless smoke, the people were a mishmash of displaced immigrants, and the city government was forever trying to deal with problems it simply could not understand. This was early 19th century England - 'city' meant London, a mercantile city resting largely on the arms of merchants and tradesman, containing a (literally) medieval governmental structure. Manchester was something different, and it took a long time for people to find a paradigm to understand it:

Growth [in Industrial Manchester] posed fundamental problems of perception.... Educated Englishmen could have cited ancient Athens and Rome as more impressive than Manchester on all counts. Even easier were comparisons with the cities of the Low Countries... [or] London. Nevertheless contemporaries could find no complete precedent for Manchester.
To the present-day historian the reasons for this perplexity are clear. A modern observer can see that Manchester was the first predominantly industrial city in the history of the world... Contemporaries, of course, could not view matters in this perspective. But they did sense that Manchester's growth posed a challenge.

This challenge was, in many ways, a challenge of naming. People did not know what industry WAS, because they did not have the vocabulary we have now: simple words like 'blue collar workers' and 'urban growth'. Even words like 'industry', and 'wealth' had meanings that simply were not equipped to deal with these huge changes (consider that 'the spinning industry' pre-industrial revolution was something women did in the evenings in their homes, to earn extra money for their families, and a wooden spinning wheel was a complex, expensive piece of machinery).

The results of this phase shift are too complex to list hear, but they were deeply coloured by fear. Consider this is the period of the Luddites, who tried to destroy the machinery because it made it too easy to produce goods, reducing labor costs, for example. When the thing was an unnamed, belching smoke and displacing cultures, the thing was a monster, eating the green fields of England even as it bankrolled the empire. William Blake epitomized his horror in one of his poems, written as he calls for a struggle to return England to a state of New Jerusalem:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

That which is unknown and new is evil. The Faustian connection with science, progress and discovery is as old as the hills, and continues to hold resonance today (name me a movie about cloning that approaches the subject differently than a movie might approach a demon...). It was only, later, when we as a world had lived with the thing long enough to know it and to name it, and to learn what we meant with the name, that we could accept the new thing, and make it into something at least LESS disorderly. And in the end, industrialization has certainly had it's faults, but people live longer, more comfortably, and with a greater degree of equality than they did before the 'dark Satanic Mills' sprang up.

Before this could happen, though, people had to make a human, intuitive relationship with their new world. All the science, all the reason, all the evidence of the world couldn't win out UNTIL people had words and thoughts and history to understand themselves with.

Which is not to demean the science, reason and evidence - after all that's wher ethe words, thoughts and history CAME from. The industrialisation of England was accompanied by education - often feared and opposed by those in power, but in the end inevitable, and powerful. Common workers, put together in a small space, could take classes, discuss the world, come up with ideas, and make decisions about things larger than their own house. And for all that factory owners frequently feared that an educated populace was a cauldron of discontent, it was education that eventually saved the factories from public hatred. Education, after all, taught people to write and spell the names they had created, and taught them what the names meant.

Calpernia Addams

So, I know, that's oversimplifying a very complex issue, but turn now with to an (equally) complex issue that is more contemporary. In 1999, Barry Winchell, a PFC in the US Army stationed in Tennessee started dating a performer from Nashville. The two loved each other, they were happily dating, good sex life, the whole bit. The difference, the woman Winchell was dating, Calpernia Addams, happened to have a penis.

At this point, I find myself, paradoxically, in the same position that 19th century thinkers were in over Manchester: namely, what do I CALL Ms Addams? Is she a woman? Is she gay? Is she a she? I don't struggle with these names because I dislike transsexuals, but simply because there ARE no names that aren't terrifically loaded with meaning that I don't necessarily want to carry in what I'm saying. If I say gay, that implies something that doesn't exist in this case, for instance. Winchell was attracted to someone who he, and the other party, considered a woman. Winchell was asked, point blank, if he was gay, and responded 'no.' The same issue occured in Luna: the father asks if his son is Gay. Well, from the son's point of view? No, not at all. She's attracted to men, and in her mind, she's a woman.

With other words, there is just too much baggage. 'Transsexual' as a word, to me, feels either clinical (like a diagnosis) or derogatory (ie, the root of the word 'tranny'). Of course there are many transsexuals who don't feel this way, and in fact many words in a lot marginalized communities are derogatory terms that are being reclaimed as badges of pride (queer is a good example). But that's the thing: until the world has time to settle in, the world HAS baggage - negative or positive depending on the readers point of view, but baggage nonetheless.

This can make it uncomfortable, even dangerous to have the conversation. If I don't LIKE the word transsexual, then when you say it to me, the meaning of what you're saying changes, unavoidably. If the word Drag Queen has associations of ridiculousness to you, it's difficult to discuss someone who likes to wear women's clothing without marginalizing them, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, simply because our vocaublary is designed to marginalize people.

And the marginalization is sadly very effective. After being harassed by some of his fellow soldiers for his relationship, one of the harassers pounded his skull in with a baseball bat as he slept.

The immediate reaction in this situation is, for me at least, horror, abject and terrible. Followed by a deep desire to believe the murderer is, simply, a monster. But the problem is, believing men to be monsters is what created the situation in the first place. This isn't to remove any personal responsibility from the situation. The murderer is, DEFINITELY a murderer, and the act he committed is horrific. But, to make actions like this stop, just like making Luddite riots stop, we have to be able to name things, we have to be able to give people a vocabulary, because without a vocabulary, there is no world of ideas and thought, there is no change. You cannot get rid of monsters by killing monsters, you can only get rid of monsters by teaching them to be human.

Creating Names

Names are very powerful things. Consider the history of the last 10 years of the United States without the word terrorist, or the history of the holocaust without the words holocaust and genocide. Words DO matter - that's why I love to read, after all. The problem is that, naturally, the past has an advantage in loaded words over the future. When homosexuality became more public, it was the old word, first, that people knew: sodomy.

The trick is the future must find a way to make a new word. Sometimes, this is done, again, by subverting the old words, taking them back to make new meanings like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes it isn't - perhaps the old word is unreclaimable, perhaps the people affected want a fresh start. One way or the other, new language is created: 'Negro' becomes 'African American', 'sodomite' becomes 'homosexual'.

Of course, this new-word attitude is easy to lampoon, and can be overdone. This is where a lot of the animosity towards political correctness begins. If *I* say Negro without bias, why shouldn't I say it? Frederick Douglass said Negro. WEB Dubois said Negro. MLK said Negro. Why make a new word? Why be upset when people don't use your new word? It's a tricky balance, of course, but you have to remember that while you can control how you say an old word, you CAN'T control how someone else HEARS it. And even if using an unloaded word, using careful language feels awkward now, and even if it changes noone's mind, it educates a new generation with a new, more compassionate vocabulary - just as the old Mancunians had to learn a new way to describe a city, a factory, a world.

One of the truly painful things in the story about Addams and Winchell to me was that the two men most implicated in it were not designed to be bigots. One of them had a transvestite fetish and may have been homosexual. The other had known homosexuals in high school and had no problem with them. The issue is that the words still carried the weight of bias, and the stiuation provided no vocabulary to talk the situation over like humans. The argument: "You're a faggot!" "No, I'm not!" is, if you tease it apart, an argument over labels, a war of definition. The argument never made it beyond definition into conversation - partly because there IS no general definition for the situation Addams and Winchell found themselves in. Would the murderers have magically been nice guys who could have overcome their fear if there was a way to define the situation? Perhaps not. Perhaps the conversation would have solved nothing, perhaps it would have revealed only an irreconcilable hatred. But I wish they could have had the conversation, that they could have tried. And I wish WE could have the conversation, as a society, without having to struggle to define what it is we're even talking about.

Reviews, and the End Thereof

2010-03-03T08:59:00.005-06:00

I imagine anyone who WAS following my descriptions of the images in the banner of this blog has since lost interest. I apologize - I have a long standing tendency to begin things, and then not to finish them. I am writing today's, simply, because I need to write on the topic anyways. But my thoughts (as is the average for me), are unfocused, so perhaps a picture will help maintain some cohesivity throughout this .

The image underneath reviews above is a Polyphemus Moth. Moths of all animals are the ones I've identified most closely with. As a child, I remember seeing the moths at night, the way they threw themselves over and over at the porch light bulb. The mothe would circle, wildly, blinded I imagine by the light it was so attracted to, then throw itself against the heat, startle away, circle, throw itself against again. I remember wondering when they left - if they'd eventually give up, or if they waited, entranced until the light dissapeared. I remember, and I don't know when, one morning seeing the dessicated corpse of a dust moth, clinging desperately to the bulb.

It's that relationship with light and warmth that attracts me first to the moth. My life is more or less a long series of things I've fluttered blindly around, beat myself against, fluttered blindly - this is sort of the internal battle around the pattern I mentioned before - the beginning without the end. I have a tendency to love great works - works that are, unfailingly greater than my own capacity to perform them. This is how I review books. I don't like writing the classic starred review. I'm not opposed to these types of reviews, but they don't meet my needs as a writer - I'm too selfish to review for the benefit of my readers. The problem is that the only other way to write a satisfying review is something that I can occasionally imitate, but never accomplish, and frequently not even approach. At the moment, to offer perspective, I have 9 books that I haven't reviewed - which since I'm am much slower reader than most of my compatriots in the book blogging world, is a whole lot. Some of these books I loved. And, when I sit to review them, I stare at the lighted screen, beat myself against it for a while, produce nothing, flutter about, try again. It's not simple blogger burnout - it's simply that I want to be a reviewer I'm not capable of being.

The other thing that attracts me about moths, uncreatively enough, is the transformation, the cocoon. As a child, the more classic image of the butterfly meant more to me. Life, to me, has always felt cocooned, wrapped too tight and warm, a little crucible that noone can see inside of, and there's something irresistible in believing that, though the dark of the crucible hides it, that if one struggle hard enough to crack the cover, one will find struggle had SOME purpose, that there is a brightness and perfection that people will see and know.

I'm past those days, now. I don't even want to be bright winged and visible anymore, I'd like to be something small and dusty and quiet, to break out simply so as not to be wrapped so tightly, and flutter off unnoticed. A nuisance to the gardener, perhaps, but more or less inert, a quiet little creature to live it's day and lay it's eggs and quietly dissolve someday.

One way or the other - cocoon or dust moth - the way I review now (or the way I do all my great grand projects. Ask about my writing sometime, I'll laugh long and hard) is unsustainable. I'm no butterfly. When I TRY to be a butterfly, I become arrogant, stuffed-shirted (witness a rather snotty generalization I recently made on Ms Emily's blog, regarding experimental literature), as well as very insecure at being discovered as an imposter. I'm a smaller, drabber creature (thank god, I'm not made for the responsibility of great works). So, and I hope I don't offend or irritate anyone, but if I bore and drive away, I'm willing to accept that: I don't think I'll write reviews anymore. This will probably actually INCREASE the amount of writing about my books that I do, because I will be able to write little quiet dispatches of my experience reading, instead of trying to build grand constructions of budding wisdom. But, I can understand these dispatches may be less interesting. I am not a good place to come if you are looking for recommendations to read, or deep and meaningful insights into thought (for either, I can recommend a number of excellent resource - Ms Emily, Ms Nymeth, and my own Amanda all come to mind immediately, and many others I could also list). I'm really not sure WHAT you might get from my bookish thoughts.. But if you'd like to watch the moths around the bulb, I won't hold it against you. :)

From a business perspective, I'm not sure what this means for challenges I've signed up for - honestly I've done a rotten job of remembering them anyways, so I'm not much of a loss. Most challenges are rather review-centric, so I'll figure out how to manage that - but in short, I apologize for the irresponsibility of a mid course bearings change, to all those who I've committed. Who knows - I honestly have a long history of thinking I've figured out something, only to realize I'm being stupid: to flutter about blindly, as it were. I am still a moth, and I'll probably never escape the fatal desire to overreach my bounds. But I suppose I'll wait and see.

mother, cell, key

2010-02-18T21:06:00.000-06:00

every life
is a tiny room
with one door
and one key
and one order:
never turn the key

wait, it sneers
wait,
wait until
the key is turned for you.

(Image by angus mcdiarmid)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

2010-02-12T09:01:00.000-06:00

Having just read this book for the readathon last year and reviewed it here (though looking back it was an awful review, re-reviewing it seems kind of silly. Lord knows I had little enough original to offer in the first place - to do it TWICE? Not so much. I don't want to talk about Orlando as itself then, I would like to dicuss an interesting trend I noticed in the reviews of it.

Orlando, unlike the other two Woolf novels I've read, is funny - or to be more British about it, witty. Woolf's writing here is at time laugh out loud funny, frequently delivered with a quirking sneer you can feel stretching across her lips. The novel, after the stormy seas of To the Lighthouse, and the tidal wave of Mrs Dalloway, feels more like a fresh spanking wind over a playful sea. If you sail the seas of the other books, this book feels more like you roll up your pant legs and wade in it, or wait till noone is looking and skinny dip in it. Ms Frances over at Nonsuch Books talked about the issue behind a witty book in literary circles:

In college, fellow Woolf lovers would mock me a bit for saying that Orlando was my favorite Woolf novel. So many see it as the throw-away novel, something to pass the time in between her more serious works of literature.

I read this a few times this morning in one form or another - Woolf herself said this book was sort of her playtime after writing so many dark, heavy, carefully poetic novels.

But, as I mentioned I my previous review, I felt this novel very strongly.

Now part of this is for personal reasons not relevant to a discussion of the book, but that's not ALL part of it - Orlando, more than TTL or Mrs D made me feel like I knew something about Virginia Woolf. And I think this is inextricably linked to it's wittiness. Wittiness has a particular power that we as 'guardians of high culture' often forget - I realized this the other day, as well, while reading Plato's 'Apology', throughout which Socrates keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek. Gulliver's Travels is another example, as is Catch-22. Shakespeare was a master of this.

Of course, there is humor that is meaningless, and there's humor that is repellently arrogant. These things exist (just like there's drama that is voyeuristic and drama that is overflowing with it's own self-importance). There is two differences that make a witty work great for me: first, the author is not afraid to tell an honest story, with good and bad in it. Catch-22 is the perfect example of this. Real wit not only accepts the real world, it has real, honest human emotion in it, in all the multiple forms that human emotion takes. Secondly, true wit is not something for the author to hide behind - it makes the author more vulnerable, not less. (Honestly, and perhaps meaningfully, both of these statements could be applied to drama with very little modification).

Orlando, more than any of the other books I've read, lets me feel Virginia, rather than Mrs Woolf - tellingly, it's not that the book brings her down to my level, but rather it lifts me up to hers. It's a sort of inversion of Mrs Dalloway - in Dalloway, the author is an invisible god-like force and we drift between her various creations. In Orlando, we are invited into the kitchen of God, and chitchat with her as she cooks up a new batch. Chit-chat can be banal, sure, but it can also be honest, vulnerable, and filled with love and trust: intimate in a way that other ways of communication can't be. Mrs Dalloway, in places, serves as portraiture of Woolf - stiff and formal, carefully formed, methodically rendered. But, in Orlando, we knead bread with Woolf, hands plunged with hers into the self-same bowl.

Particularly in Modernism, the age of James Joyce who couldn't keep a straight face for 3 pages (Ok, I'm exaggerating a LITTLE), it amazes - and kind of saddens - me, how easy it is to dismiss wit and playfulness and humor as 'light', and 'charming.' Humor is a tool that it's easy to dismiss - but to do so shows a weakness in us as readers, not in the author, because humor can carry profound beauty.

Finally, just as a quick note - I don't think any of the reviewers I've read have been doing this, not at all - to the conrary, the reviews I've read have sparkled and danced just like the book did. Just that in several I felt just the slightest edge of defense, as if loving something funny had to be justified. I want to do my little bit to justify this myself, is all, because loving Orlando SHOULD be justified - or Catch-22, or Alice in Wonderland, or Edward Lear, or Finnegan's Wake. Anyway, off my soapbox for the day, and thanks to EVERYONE for the reviews today :).

Apology and Crito by Plato

2010-02-08T21:53:00.000-06:00

So, you may have seen my beloved wife the other day link to a list of books we got at the library sale, including a big box of old boring books from Encyclopedia Brittanica I picked up. I will not talk much about the series itself (though I could) here, but just wanted to say real quick AMANDA DOESN'T WANT TO READ ANY OF THEM AND THEY HAVE BIG MARGINS AND BEAUTIFUL PAPER SO I CAN WRITE ALL OVER THEM AND THAT TOTALLY KICKS TEH BUTT HURRAH! Okay. That's out of my system.

So, quick fact: I have never sat down and read any primary source in philosophy, ever. Not ever. This is what happens when you flunk out of college and go back for computers - you never read these things. I picked up bits, pieces, here and there, sure. But I've never actually READ a philosophy work, ever. So this is my first. So, if I talk loud and silly, plese just understand that I'm ignorant and doing my best.

Apology is actually Plato's transcription of the defense that his mentor, Socrates, made for himself before the Athenian court, where he was accused of corrupting the youth of the city. If there is a spoiler in this, here it is:

He loses. And they sentence him to death by being forced to drink hemlock.

Crito is a meeting in the prison between Socrates and his friend, Crito, who has come to say he has gathered up resources to bribe the guards so that Socrates can escape. The two discuss whether that is the best moral decision.

This sounds surreal and unrealistic, I know, two guys sitting going 'so, Socrates, do you think you ought to stay in prison or die, or leave prison, and not die? Just askin'...' But it isn't. It's actually, weirdly, human, so much so that I'm either impressed with Socrates writing skills or convinced that the transcripts are, at least in part, taken from life. There's also something immediate and powerful about reading philosophy that ISN'T just people abstractly discussing what they ought to do. The guy is living with real, palpable, extreme consequences of his convictions, and explaining why he won't abandon them anyway.

It's also creepily prescient of today. When Socrates talks about his accusers, and then about politicians, he says:

How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was -- so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me; -- I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence [when I'm obviously not eloquent]... unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!

Socrates is an interesting man to read, because one can imagine him as any number of men - arrogant or humble, pompous or self-deprecatory, playful and strident, detatched and intimate. The reason for this, is that he's none of these things: he simply always speaks the truth. When Socrates says he is wiser than the people he meets, it is, genuinely, because he met them, spoke to them,and saw their foolishness. There's no other agenda behind it, he's not trying to impress his listener, or demean the fool, he's simply stating a fact: I got a reputation for being wise, because the people I could find who said they were wise were fools and liars.

This is particularly interesting to me, because this way of living is so reminiscent of some of the powerfully intelligent left-brained people that I love in the technical industry today. I know, boring, feel free to skip this paragraph. But, the people who made the internet and technology what it is today were, in their roots, hippie philosophers (as was Socrates). Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, the very culture of the technorati, in it's seminal, and still central, form, is very much the reasoning idealist, who believes that if humans would analyze themselves enough, they'd learn to be happy and make the people around them happy. They call a spade a spade, because there's no benefit in telling it that it's a pitchfork, no matter how much it might wish to be one. Reading the interchanges between these people, they are acerbic, playful, arrogant and humble in turns. This is why it's so easy for the media to paint disagreements as great battles, to paint leaders as jerks. IT both is and is not that simple.

The real strength, after all, of Socrates is not in his answers, but in his questions. He has certain basic principles ("I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonourable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil." or "For wherever a man's place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger;") and they are powerful principles, but this isn't the Bible, and Socrates' goal is not to lay down laws - his laws come from his secret voice, an internal compass that tells him when he is doing evil. It is his own work in the world then to analyze these laws, to understand them, and then to make good choices from them.

It is the reader's work to look at the questions he's asking, and ask them to him or herself, to look at his premises and ask if they are sound, and if they aren't, to say what is sound - to have a dialogue with Socrates, though Socrates is dead and gone. Reading Socrates logic about whether we avoid humans who do evil led me into a long reverie about why I both agree and disagree with him, and why this speaks to, for me, the impossibility of an entirely benevolent god - not probably an interesting discussion here, but the sort of question I need to ask myself sometimes, the sort of thinking that I need to do.

As a teacher, Socrates is beautiful and almost perfect. As an ethicist, as a book to live by, this endless belief in reason and absolute law that makes him such a good teacher leaves him somewhat short to me. PErhaps perfect reason can be perfectly moral, but this is the same problem that the Utilitarians run into in my book - the assumption is that we are capable of making those decisions. I don't think it's possible for us to know sufficient information to make a fully informed decision on anything, ever. So decisions are endless combinations of reason and emotion, of knowledge and intuition, simply because we are not capable of a perfection of either faculty. And in some sense, even, I wonder if Socrates was right to die. I believe for him he WAS right, but I don't believe he HAD to be right, if that makes sense. But that's the paradox that Socrates life is in my mind - how can a thing be right (or wrong) if we cannot know perfectly what it's consequences will be? If Socrates had been killed and then forgotten (which could have happened simply by luck - it happened to so many of the great thinkers of the ancient world) then would his standing for his principles have been the most good he could have done for the world? We simply cannot know - it is impossible to know. To study knowledge in a world where the most basic knowledge is impossible to pin down is both terrifying and exciting - just like to study To the Ligthhouse is an exhilerating and terrifying view of the unknowable depths of human emotion and attachment. Socrates is a beautiful man to read and learn from - as long as we don't begin to feel compelled to agree wtih them. And given the choice between a Book of the Answer and a Book of the Question, perhaps a Book of the Question is better...

Sandman, Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

2010-02-06T08:40:00.004-06:00

(Note, I don't know how you're supposed to list comic books, so I just listed the writer, hopefully that's okay?)

A long, long time ago, I came across the second 'Sandman' story arc - A Doll's House. It still haunts me - in a good way, but also in a way that means I would need a lot of moral courage to pick up Sandman, ever, again. Or any Neil Gaiman - I've never read anything else by him except Blueberry Girl, which thankfully didn't seem to come from quite the same part of Mr G's imagination. I liked Doll's House - a lot. But the reasons I liked - it's strange ability to tap into your own subconscious, for instance - was also why I've since avoided it.

Just over the last little while, I (like probably everyone else on earth, I guess) have followed Mr Gaiman on twitter - he's an excellent tweeter, and the experience of listening to him has really made me feel like he's one of the nicest people. Twitter is nice that way, when used righ,t because it shows people for who they are, and who Mr Gaiman is, is a genuinely sweet person. Aside from seeing Coraline last year (AHHHHHHHHH!), I've thus been bombarded with the idea that maybe, just maybe I should try him again.

Well, guess what, I'm not sure Preludes and Nocturnes is the best book to convince me that I have developed sufficient moral courage to read Neil Gaiman.

I say that because there is some very, very, VERY intense ideas in here. If you do not want to be disturbed, this book is not recommended, because it is a genuinely disturbing read, particularly certain chapters of it (24 Hours! Ah!). I won't sugarcoat it. This book is hideously, deformedly ugly in terms of what happens.

And nonetheless, it was also beautiful, sweet, even playful at times. The last story has widely been hailed as the best in the book, and in the afterword, Mr Gaiman says he first found his own unique voice writing it. And he's write, I hear more of the Neil I hear twittering in this book: A little off perhaps, but clever, good-hearted, optimistic and realistic, quirky, irreverent. It's a sweet, meaningful story, not a perfect story, but a real one. And then peppered through the other stories there is tehse same bright moments. The scene with Constantine's old girlfriend was moving, for instance, and the scene in which the Martian Manhunter offers one of the other superheroes to come in and have some Oreos had that pleasantly quirky esotericism that I love in the author.

And in the darker parts, there are moments that are uniquely powerful. The disturbing stuff is, genuinely, disturbing, of course, but beyond that, he taps into some of the more subtly queasy parts of human nature. Take Dream's response to Lucifer (yes, that Lucifer), when Lucifer threatens to keep him captured in hell:

You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly. But-- you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you... what power would Hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of Heaven?

The power of the quote - and the power of the best of Gaiman's moments - is it's duality. On the one hand, sure, the demons he's speaking to stil maintain a semblance of humanity, because a part of their soul can still dream of heaven. It is their one comfort - and even if it is the comfort that makes them continue to suffer, it's also a real, meaningful comfort, it is teh 'hope' that earlier defeats the powers of Hell, to return Dream's helmet to him.

But then, on the other side, it is that same dream - a dream that is, after all impossible to come true - that teases the demons to do desperate, terrible wickedness. Love and Hope cannot live without a dream. But neither can hate - without the dream of revenge, of return, they could have no force to hate with. So it is with humans. Take the 'American Dream' in it's various forms over the years. IT's the dream that drove Edison to make the lightbulb, it's the dream that drove American soldiers to free the concentration camps. It's also the dream that drove American soldiers to slaughter the indians, and the dream that drives the consumerism that enslaves most of the world today. Dreams are messy, amoral things - as is Dream himself. Another example of this is in the scene where Rosemary is being held captive by Dee. The force of human connection is there throughout the whole section. And it's what makes us love Rosemary - who I really did love. Say Stockholm Syndrome all you like, but reading the pages as she drove John Dee to his destination, and slowly began to pity and understand him - as a human being, instead of a monster and a criminal - I felt the best of human nature, the ability to look past anything to see and love another person. Of course, that universal human love (SPOILER!)

ends up getting Rosemary killed, when there are several points if you reread the section, when she COULD have stopped him. At one point, the gun just sits on the dashboard between them - and it's clear that Dee is both not all there and deeply distracted - and it even feels for a while as if he's feeling a little more human himself. IT would have been so easy for her to take the gun, and shoot him. And it would have saved not only her, but countless others. Love is a double edged sword, and cold reason is as well.

(END SPOILER)

Of course, the search for Gaiman's voice in the book has it's negative ramifications. There are stories - and points in stories - that feel slow. Or overdone. Or hackneyed. The book is very imperfect, it's pacing is uneven and confusing sometimes, some of the stories feel gratuitous and childish, at moments. But, in a sense, I'm glad they feel this way. There is a sort of book-within-a-book, where you watch as an artist grapples with himself, with his faultless skill at mimicking other artists, with maybe even a little timidity and awkwardness over how to speak for himself, and in the end, you see him take the dangerous leap and become his own self. It's a powerful tale in itself, even if Gaiman I imagine reads through the book now and feels dissatisfied and frustrated with his mistakes.

Just as a side note, if you, like me, are a complete geek, there are fan annotations of every Sandman story at http://www.arschkrebs.de/sandman/annotations/. This can be particularly helpful if you, like me, know NOTHING about the connections made to the larger superhero world (I, for instance, had not idea who the heck the Martian Manhunter was). Sometimes the annotations are good, sometimes less so, but nonetheless, an interesting reference.

Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance

2010-02-06T02:00:00.002-06:00

By the end of the 1930's, the Harlem Renaissance as a cohesive cultural movement had largely run it's course. Many of the individual players continued on, of course, but the Great Depression disrupted the cohesivity of the movement in a way that was irreparable. The (approximately) 20 years of the Harlem Renaissance, then, are often treated as a sort of fluke - a bit of culture outside the ordinary stream of 20th century art. For many years - and in some ways even today - the renaissance has been painted as an essentially provincial, bordered thing, a sort of happy freak of artistry, closed in on itself, with a sharp beginning and end, the days when 'Negros were fashionable' as one commentator put it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Harlem Renaissance echoed not only through African American culture, but through the entire world for years to come. To speak about the entire legacy of the Renaissance would take a book - here I'd like to discuss just one legacy, and really only offer the barest introductions to it: the Negritude Movement.

In the 1920's, and into the 1930's, Paris was, arguably, the cultural capital of the world. The Left Bank and Montmartre parts of the city are deservedly famous for the expatriate culture of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. What is less discussed in standard American literary history is that the artists of the Harlem Renaissance visited or lived in Paris as well. The mark of this cultural cross fertilization was strong in French culture. Josephine Baker, a black music hall dancer, was among the most sought after figures in French Cabaret culture. French musicians like Django Reinhardt would define Jazz in Europe in emulation of Cotton Club alumni like Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And in literature, particularly, the work of poets like Langston Hughes had a strong influence.

France, as a colonial power, spread a vast diaspora of blacks across the globe, ranging from colonies in Senegal in Africa, to the famous Black Republic in Haiti. The diversity in these different colonial cultures was vast, but in many ways, the sheer nastiness of colonial rule gave them a certain binding identity - a history of slavery and maltreatment, of sexual pecadilloes, of inhuman, iron-fisted justice, of cultural destruction and discrimination. The legacy, in fact, continues to this day, with Algerians in France suffering blatant and miserable everyday discrimination. In the beginning of the 20th century, the diaspora began to search for a voice. A number of literary journals sprung up, featuring writing by black authors.

For poets Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Leon Damas, this journals didn't do enough. The writing in them was too 'assimilationist', too bourgeois. The writing in these journals, the three felt, simply acted to legitimize the injustices of the French rule. The three of them had read closely the writing of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and other Harlem Renaissance giants, and had even spoken to and listened to them in Paris. The vision of the Renaissance inspired them to think about what it was to be black, and inspired them to found their own journal, 'L'Eutdiant Noir'. It was shortly after that Cesaire wrote the defining poem of the movement: "Notebook of a Return to a Homeland". The poem begins mired in the ugliness the the colonizer forces on the 'natives':

(Niggers-are-all-alike, I-tell-you vices-all-the-vices-believe-you-me
nigger-smell, that’s-what-makes-cane-grow
remember-the-old-saying
beat-a-nigger, and you feed him)
among “rocking chairs” contemplating the voluptuousness of quirts
circle about, an unappeased filly

And the poem is never pretty. IT grinds along with a simmering, powerful anger. But it isn't just a diatribe, in it, he coins a new word: negritude: “my negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day”. The poem is not a simple argument that the French are cruel, but rather a statement that the very thing that the French hate in the Blacks is the thing that is powerful in them, and potentially beautiful. Negritude translates, roughly, to 'blackness', but it implies a cohesivity, an identity with a past and a future independent of a colonial master and worthy of the same consideration as the whiteness of Western Europe. It wasn't an anti-white platform - the fin-de-siecle French poets, for instance, were one of the greatest influences on the movement, and Jean Paul Sartre was close to the movement as well - it was simply a statement that blackness was beautiful as well.

The movement went on to have enormous resonance across the diaspora. Cesaire became the mayor of the capitol of his home country, Martinique. Senghor was the first president of Senegal after it's independence, and one of the greatest leaders of Africa of the 20th century. The poets would inspire philosophers like JEan Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon, the arts of Haiti, and in an ironic turnabout, the black literature of the United States through authors like Richard Wright.

Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe (NSFW)

2010-02-05T01:00:00.002-06:00

WARNING: Hero and Leander is an erotic poem from the Elizabethan period. This review contains references to sex and frank discussion of sexuality and erotica. If this makes you uncomfortable, don't feel obliged to read this post. When I was in high school, reading Shakespeare, our teachers (all of them) pointed out the dirty jokes to us. I remember this clearly, because I remember feeling like this was a sort of pat on the head - "well, they're just kids they can't enjoy this, so we'd better at least point out the dirty jokes. They'll like that". Dirty Jokes are not rare in Shakespeare. But normally they're just that - dirty jokes, nothing more. Shakespeare is frequently romantic, but in my limited experience, never erotic. Christopher Marlowe is an entirely different ball of wax. I will admit I had never read anything by Mr. Marlowe. I knew him as that guy who got killed in a barfight and wrote poems. Hero and Leander came up as a new recording on Librivox recently, I wanted to listen to a long poem while I was driving on a trip for work this week, and the powers converged. This was NOT what I expected. Witness this scene between Neptune and Leander, the male hero:

He clapped his plump cheeks, with his tresses played And, smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed. He watched his arms and, as they opened wide At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance, And, as he turned, cast many a lustful glance, And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye, And dive into the water, and there pry Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, And up again, and close beside him swim, And talk of love.

Or this, between Leander and Hero, his beloved, as she loses her virginity:

For though the rising ivory mount he scaled, Which is with azure circling lines empaled, Much like a globe (a globe may I term this, By which love sails to regions full of bliss) Yet there with Sisyphus he toiled in vain, Till gentle parley did the truce obtain. Wherein Leander on her quivering breast Breathless spoke something, and sighed out the rest;

The poem tells the story of two classically star-crossed lovers: the (ironically) virginal priestess of Aphrodite and Leander a man whose beauty Marlowe describes with a wanton luxury of words:

I could tell ye How smooth his breast was and how white his belly; And whose immortal fingers did imprint That heavenly path with many a curious dint That runs along his back, but my rude pen Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, Much less of powerful gods.

They fall in love, she tells him to come to her in her tower, and they... fool around, but don't fully consummate their love. She tells him to come back the next day, but his father finds out and forbids it. Unwilling to give up his love, Leander leaps into the waters of the Hellespont that separate the two, where Neptune, mistaking him for Ganymede, the beautiful cupbearer of Zeus attempts to seduce him. Realizing that the boy is drowning, Neptune figures out it ISN'T an immortal (always a good sign of that, drowning), and after talking to him about how lovely sex between men can be, finally gives up on the boy, and Leander arrives at Hero's tower - naked. Leander flees, to the shadows. Then to her stairs. Then to her room. Then to her bed. Yes, the implication is that she's not REALLY fleeing. The two of them consummate their amours, and the poem draws to a close as the sun rises (it was probably unfinished). I could talk about the beauty of Marlowe's language, I could tell you about the imagery he used, or the symbolic nature of the poem, I could dance endlessly around the central issue, but the central issue is this: this poem is about sex, and about how wonderful and exciting it is, hands down, no question. It's supposed to be a bit of a romp, yes, and admittedly, there is supposed to a bit of humor to Neptune trying to seduce the boy, but really, throughout the work, the poem is intense, erotic, and beautiful. And this is where I find myself stymied. Ironically, while our modern day talks incessantly about sex, there is a sort of code, that we can talk about it only in one of three ways: very clinically (like it's discussed on the news), very humorously (or at least with the attempt to be so), and talking 'dirty'. Our lexicon of sex tends towards the degrading, the angry. It's no coincidence that our words for the sexual act, or for the organs involved are either meant for textbooks, or used dually as descriptors and curse words. This is how sex is in our culture - it is either something we acknowledge logically, or something we're supposed to wallow in. Sex as beautiful gets paid lipservice, and some people really honestly fight for the beauty to come back to sex. But more or less? Sex is something we snigger about. More than anything else, listening to this, I was struck by sadness of that. Sex lives in the shadows of our lives - even of our private lives. Sex is associated with words like 'naughty' and 'dirty', if it's vocalized, often even within couples who have been having sex for ages. It brings up an interesting set of questions, really. For example, why is it hard for a person to tell their lover how great their sex was without either discussing tactics (clinical) or 'talking dirty'? Why is, say, a wife making a video of herself undressing or masturbating for her husband something 'naughty'? Maybe these things should be, I don't know. I certainly am not arguing that people should talk about their sex in the middle of a crowded restaurant the way they talk about the football game, or anything. But, when did 'private' begin to equal 'dirty'? When did 'honest' begin to equal 'clinical'? I don't know the answers, I'm just chewing on the questions

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2010-01-29T12:07:00.004-06:00

the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway were the first books of Woolf's I ever read. I don't remember which came first (I believe it was To the Lighthouse), but I remember the contrast in my experience of them. Mrs Dalloway was dark, far away, it did no seem to wish me to come in. As a book, it was forbidding and self-contained, a fortress of a book, filled I was sure with something beautiful, something which I could smell and hear at times, but which I was forbidden to see, simply because I was not worthy of the experience. (I've since peeked my eyes just over the fortress wall, mind you, but nonetheless...).

To the Lighthouse was none of these things. It was inscrutable perhaps, yes, but not inscrutable in the way that the interior of a fortress is, none of the feeling of being kept out of a thing. To the Lighthouse had the inscrutability of the sea - vast, eminently available, explorable, considerable, but nonetheless, unknowable - even as we know it. I feel about To the Lighthouse the way boys in old books felt about the sea: that it is a place where souls are forged, where experiences are had, a place with a certain home-ness to it. To the Lighthouse, like the sea, was a lover, or a harsh mistress. Mrs. Dalloway was a cloud, eminently arrayed but ever out of reach.

Over the past month, it's come to my attention from different people that this is not the normal way of things - that most people feel the opposite way, in fact. I want to tell you what I see in To the Lighthouse, that makes me feel at home - unavoidably my little essay will fail, because the very reason that the book is inscrutable is because the experience of immensity is supposed to be indescribable. That is, I guess, what makes it immense. But, I will have, at least, made the attempt.

For me, To the Lighthouse is a book about inbetween places and people. The lighthouse itself is a perfect example of this - it is a building that is at once of the sea and the sky, built on land that barely exists. It clings to earth - it is immersed in sea and sky. The house has a similar story, particularly in the second part, when it is invaded by the sand and the wind, and starts to decay - before being put aright again by the servants. Mrs Ramsay herself is, in many ways, the same sort of symbol - at once her hands are in the practical world, of raising children and worrying over molehills, of setting up love matches and entertaining guests, while her mind, at a moments notice, is lost in the immensities of thought, ranging over the great questions of philosophy with an easy authenticity that paints the efforts of her husband, or Charles Tannsley as what they are - gropings, accidental spelunkings obtained in pursuit of other ends. The towers of this novel are immensely tied into this to me, into this balance between the great and sensual sea, and the immensity of the sky.

Of course, I know that sounds like a kind of paragraph of nonsense, but there is a reason, for me, that it isn't. The lighthouse, the house, Mrs Ramsay (for everyone but herself), the sea, the sky, the tidal regions of the beach, all these twilit places would seem to tease an obvious question - what do they mean? OR to solidify the question more - these things are like life, halfway between the heavens and the grave, and inevitably bound for one or the other (or both, depending on your philosophy). Humans are, after all, this strange mixture of the sensual and the spiritual, and for eons, man has over and over asked the question - why? Why are we here? Why are we what we are? What are we, eminent strugglers, supposed to struggle against?

I think, though, in To the Lighthouse, this is a deceptive question: the very central point of the book, for me, is that the answer doesn't really matter. Asking the purpose of life is like asking the purpose of the sea, or the purpose of a painting, or the purpose of a child. They are things that simply are.

This may sound like simple old-fashioned Atheism - in a sense it is. It is and it isn't. The character of Charles Tansley shows this - he is the 'quintessential atheist' of the book (I put this in quotes because I don't mean to imply that atheists are like this, or like that, simply that the literary IDEA of an atheist is like Charles Tansley). Charles doesn't believe in nothing, rather he believes in believing in nothing. He believes there is no God, whereas the novel simply doesn't bother believing there is a God - or that there isn't. It accepts that there is a world, that is is here, that we are here, that we will die, and other people will live, that none of will accomplish immortality, and then gently, gently, ever so gently, whispers to us that we will live in it anyway. Like Mrs Ramsey, sometimes that will terrify us, sometimes it will comfort us. And that's okay, and there is no answer that will resolve it for us. In a world with no particular purpose, we must define our own, and we can never be wrong - and we can never be right. We simply will all live, try to do things we think are good, try not to do what we think is bad, and then, one day, we will die. We will paint, or write, or fix computers, and perhaps we'll be remembered for a very long time, or perhaps barely a moment, but eventually, we'll be forgotten. Our happiness will not last, but we will, in spite of that - or maybe because of that - be happy for our moment.

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople."
"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."

Florence Nightingale

2010-01-26T21:52:00.000-06:00

(The below is a sort of boiling down of some of the notes I took reading a recent biography of Florence Nightingale. The biography itself was excellent, I literally marked about 90 different places that I wanted to go back and sketch notes from. If you'd like to learn more about her, I highly recommend it, it's by Mark Bostridge)

After a week on the Nile river, Florence Nightingale's dress was crawling. Sand, heat, slithered up and down with each movement, and despite the tortuous confinement to the cabin, vermin probably shared these chases. To Florence, the filth was secondary - or more, the filth was symbolic - it was the tenuous fingers of the shoreline reaching to her, the shore where she saw men live in hovels to low to stand up straight in, digging through the refuse the tourists dropped off to support a meager diet, killing and dying like animals.

The idea of this was horrific in the immediate, of course. Florence, more even than most men at the time, understood the effects of poverty on health: mental, physical and spiritual. She was a statistician, a woman who would write glowing letters of thanks when she received books of government figures from friends, a woman who, upon meeting a mathematician a few years after the trip to the Nile, played the part of an awed worshipper. The spread of souls dissolving slowly into their own filth was a series of figures, a math problem with a very definite final product - death, decay, degeneration, the transofrmation of man into beast.

But, for Florence, it was more than this, for Egypt, to her, was history itself, was a portrait of a lost cause of God. With a sense of religious universalism uniquely her own, Florence saw the gods and progress of the Egyptians as reflections of the same truths she learned in terms of Christ and the Abrahamic God: after visiting the Temple of Isis at Philae, Florence had snuck back alone, to lie her crucifix in the sandy floor of the chamber of Osiris. For her, the call of Shelley's Ozymandias wasn't destiny, it was a warning, a spur to strive and strive, so that the monuments of her day would not dissolve slowly into the earth of England, so that her people would not stoop down again, to pick at the refuse of a future struggle.

The overpowering presence of Egypt for Nightingale was in it's brown-ness, it's sterility. The weight of the endless, hopeless stretch of the Sahara fell on her through the narrow windows of her cabin, mile after mile. The ship itself they had named Parthenope, after Florence's sister - she embroidered a banner with her sister's name, and it flew behind them in long, neat greek letters - the banner can be seen today, I believe in the British Museum. She had sewn it in good earnest, for the love Parthenope and Florence felt for each other had an intensity we would normally associate with lovers, not sisters - Parthenope herself was to say one day "I never thought to marry any one but Florence". But by 1850, as Florence sailed up the Nile, the fire of her sister's love - a jealous love by all accounts - had burned her almost to the very sterility of the desert. The trip had been, in part, to escape her home: a doctor was to proclaim that Parthenope's love for Florence was so intense that the two needed to be seperated lest it disrupt her own health. And Florence's mother and father struggled with the genius of their daughter, struggling, continuously to understand how someone in such a comfortable position could turn from marriage, could become so upset at the social world, at the drawing room (she was later to refuse to have a drawing room in her home, declaring it an instrument of torture for women). But Florence was simply not capable of supporting the life she was born into.

"Unconsiousness is all that I desire. I remain in bed as late as I can, for what have I to wake for? I am perishing for want of food... Therefore I spend my days in dreams fo other situations which will afford me food...

Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him. Oh weary days, oh evenings that never seem to end. For how many long years I have watched that drawing room clock and thoguht it never would reach the ten & for 20 or so more years to do this. It is not the misery, the unhappiness that I feel so insupportable, but to feel this habit, this disease gaining power upon me - & no hope, no help. This is the sting of death."

Her 'dreams of other situations' were more than simply the fancy of an lonely mind - they were intense, physical experiences, and experience at once addictive and dangerous. She compared the habit to 'gin drinking', said it sapped 'her vital strength', spoke of dreams and moonlight giving her a "A queer feeling... not to be quite certain of which is true and which is imaginary." The feeling persisted, even in Egypt, which was to be an escape from all of the lonely boredom of home: she described her hazy dreams as she floated the torpid Nil as her 'enemy', the 'constant murderer of my thoughts,' and abused herself as she felt the quickening force of the ancient splendor tug at her soul, for '[dreaming] even in the very face of God', begging God to free her from the 'enslavement'.

The weeks crawled, she dreamt and melted into teh slithering stillness of the river, or the hazy cabin windows, of her own skin. She left to shore to look at great and ancient sites she'd read of all her life, and dreamily wandered back on the ship, forgetting even what she'd seen. She read page after droning page of novels aloud to her companions, to the maid even. And then, just before they returned to Alexandria, she heard the voice of God.

To her, this voice was dramatic, and very real - and this was not the first time she'd heard it speak. She first heard it on the 7th of February, 1837, when it came and told her that she was to do a great and holy work in the world, to bring men closer to God. This closeness was, to her, not faith, in the sense of the CAtholic mystics, not a surrendering or even a worshipping action. Sanctity, goodness, was the process of digging out and discovering the laws of God, and following them - and this did not mean the Ten Commandments. To her, evil was all that made misery in the world, and holiness was all that made joy. To her, there was more godly law in discovering the laws of sanitation than in praying for things to happen. An enemy would later describe her sneeringly as finding Christ in a drainpipe, and it is a description that was not only apt, but for her, likely a compliment. This mixture of mysticism and practical effort was the very soul of her life - and as a result, the banal and the impractical were the enemies of her existence. God had called her to do, not to chat, to marry, to entertain.

The call came again there on the Nile, and her letters, previously almost daily letters, ceased for two weeks. Her journals paint this period as a long, Jacob-like, wrestling with God. At the end, she wrote that she had 'settled the question with god,' that, in the spirit of her faith, she had worked out what she was to do, not simply submitted in blind trust. In the ensuing week - a whirlwind tour of Greece - she was strangely at peace, able to enjoy herself. She bought a pet - an owl named Athena which she kept frequently in her pocket. She made jokes. She bantered with locals.

The year then was 1850. Within a few years, the first 'modern' war would begin between Russia and Great Britain, over the seaports of the Crimean Penninsula. By 1854, she was walking the floors of the Scutari Barracks, holding a lamp out in the deeps of night as she nursed the decimated British army (notably, the only actual mention of her using a lamp in her Nurse's notes was to chase rats from the hospital). By 1856, she was one of the great heroines of humanitarian history, and for the next 50 years, she woulud loom large as one of the driving forces in the growth of nursing and public health.

Poor Kitties Memorial Fund

2010-01-22T20:00:00.004-06:00

Neil Gaiman recently put up a very touching tribute to his cat-in-the-attic, Zoe, a blind, but very sweet creature who has prevented masterpieces from being written and had bathtubs installed on top of her (see here, here, and here). This isn't the only sad story about cats lately - our friend at Bookfoolery also lost a dear cat friend recently, a poor, blind old creature, and it broke her heart as well, I know. My kitties have been off and on sick, but are thankfully alive and well, though I have had sad kitty stories on the brain lately (hence my recent terrible poem on the subject). And then I happen to KNOW certain other friends (hr-hrm, nymeth debi chris) love kittehs too.

Well, long story short, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a little mini charity drive in memoriam of poor kitties? And, lo and behold The Neil even suggested a charity for it: The Great Lakes Bengal Rescue, which helps to rescue and find homes for Bengal Cats (which are beautiful by the way :). I have to admit, I originally thought it meant tigers!), which The Neal's friend @fabulouslorrain works with a lot. So, I'm not a great fundraiser, but I thought, why not throw up a link, and we can all try to give a few dollars to Help the Kittehs, as a way to say thank to all the Poor Kitties we've loved over the years? Feel free to donate, if you want to write something about your Poor Kitties, link to it, or just link to your blog, as you wish :). You can donate through Paypal, here. and if you give $35, you get a free laser pointer :).

BTW, does 'Poor Kitties' make anyone else think of the "Poor Claires" and give you an image of a lot of kittehs in white wimpels? Hurrah for the Abbess of Cats!

Hemostasis

2010-01-21T11:33:00.003-06:00

(This is still a draft, I know)

Tickling tips of leather whips
     The flagellant's cat gnaws -
A monster made of broken shards
     The flagellant beats on.

Some sins sink too deep for the stroke,
     Sink right into the bones.
Atonement is an empty room,
Atonement is a pretty tomb,
     Of endlessly-alone.

Put down the cat, I'll put down mine
     Come here, and take my hand.
And if God rips our hands apart
I'll give you pieces of my heart
And if God tears it from your chest
I'll put the pieces in my breast
And if God drives you down to death,
I'll carry you in every breath
And I'll refuse to be alone -
I'll make me bed beside thy own
And we'll dissolve into the earth
So fine, we'll both escape rebirth --
     We'll sleep, the self-same sand.

(Image by valeriebb, and isn't it beautiful?)

Black Juice by Margo Lanagan

2010-01-17T15:34:00.003-06:00

A long time ago, I took a creative writing class once (it was terrible, btw, but I'm afraid I can't blame my poor fiction skills on that...). Our instructor was a great believer in exercises. You know, like "Write a 26 line poem where each line starts with a different letter," or "write a story about Robin Hood, set in the old west."

Well, one of his favorite tricks was to take two random words or phrases, and make us write a story that combines them. Like 'treadmill' and 'pickles'. Or 'pistol' and 'nun'. I hated these exercises, probably in part because I wasn't very good at them. In fact, I'm not sure ANYONE was good at them. There was always someone who THOUGHT they'd done a fine job, and they'd stand up and you'd listen, and go 'why yes, that story DOES sound just like you were finding a way to include nuns and pistols in the same story beause some strange, wicked god told you you had to.'

Ms Lanagan, I think, was the exception. Ms Lanagan must have been very good at this game. 'Clown' and 'Sniper'. 'Accordion' and 'Progress'. 'Pretty, Pretty Princess' and 'French Revolution'. Because each of these stories, as strange, sometimes disturbing, as they are, feels at the same time convincing. Cohesive.

Of course, that makes it sound like Ms Lanagan's purpose is simply virtuosity, that these stories come across as clever or smug - they don't. Reading Ms Lanagan is more like Synaptic Tango - Invigorating and exhausting, strangely intoxicating, moving the synapses in ways you didn't expect you were capable, and absolutely gorgeous to participate in. Ms Lanagan takes a long step into a place where clowns and snipers belong together, and then dips you down in a slow, hard arc of the mental back, and murmurs 'There now, what do you see?' One can almost imagine the metaphorical rose in her teeth.

And the footwork is mesmerizing in this book. The first story ('La Brea Tarpits' and 'Fried Green Tomatoes') is one of the most gut-wrenching, vivid stories I have ever read, ever, somehow managing to simultaneously be as sickeningly horrific as Edgar Allen Poe and as starkly kind as Willa Cather. Yowlinin ('killer weasel' and 'caste system') hides combines a heavy handed sense of injustice with the gentle tickling reminder of the feeling of falling in love. Every story in here does this, reminding me with the violence and subtelty of a tango, that these conflicting things - love and fear, friendship and intolerance, blood and soul - exist, and HAVE to exist, in the same world, in the same instants of life, no matter how much we might like to imagine them forming separate narratives.

(Image by Sean Dreilinger)

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

2010-01-15T02:00:00.000-06:00

(NOTE: There is really only one 'spoiler' I imagine in Mrs Dalloway, but really, the spoilers in my opinion aren't the point. Said spoiler will be referred to throughout this review)
(NOTE 2: I'm not an expert on Virginia Woolf, so I quite possibly have no idea what I'm talking about.)
(NOTE 3: I use the word God in this review as a genderless word, neither male nor female)

A woman wakes up and prepares for a party. A man meets with his old friends. A former soldier struggles with (what we would now call, I imagine) PTSD. Much walking about the streets of London ensues. The woman's party goes off well. The man learns, more or less, absolutely nothing despite having the opportunity to do so. The soldier kills himself.

That's about it, that's the lump sum plot of Mrs Dalloway (OK, there's a few other small plots as well). The narrative voice maintains the same quiet distance from each of these threads of narrative, calmly switching between flowers and suicidal thoughts, between old memories and morning traffic.

If this sounds boring, or trite, please try the book anyway. If, like me, you don't 'get it' the first time you read it, try it again. If you persist in not understanding or missing the point, wait a few years, read lots of other books, and try it again. Reading Mrs Dalloway and having it 'click' for you is a transcendant, holy literary experience.

Septimus half rose from his chair... and with legions of men prostrate behind him he, the giant mourner, receives for one moment on his face the whole... The millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed. HE would turn round, he would tell them in a few moments, only a few moments more, of this relief, of this joy, of this astonishing revelation--

With most authors who write deeply, humanly charactered books, one senses the author hiding just behind at least one of the many masks scattered across the pages. In Hemingway, you feel him just behind the lead male, in pretty much every book. James Joyce is autobiographical to a fault. Dickens lies in the voice of his narrator - no matter who said narrator might be (even in Great Expectations where Pip really doesn't seem much like Charles Dickens, you still feel Charles inside Pip's first person narration).

In fact, Joyce is a particularly powerful comparison, because this is the powerful myopia of his work, for me - I wrote about this, in fact, a little bit in my review of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man last year, how one is so intimately engaged inside the narrator's skin that one feels in it the contours of one's own skin, one sees clearly things about themselves, without the protective displacement that fiction usually gives. Virginia Woolf, in a sense, is just the opposite: In a Virginia Woolf novel, one feels the author dissolve from the book, and the world - as small and 'petty' as that world might be - blooms into an existence with no lifelines, no points of reference, no escape into the author's life. Virginia Woolf does not write her soul into her characters because, with the true godlike power of the creator, she creates souls, free and independent of her own, then lets them into a world to live (and die) in.

Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman could be hungry. IT was her way of eating, eating with intensity, then looking, again and again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the table next theml then, when a lady and a child sat down and the child took the cake, could Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes... She had wanted that cake -- the pink one. The pleasure of eating was almost the only pure pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in that!

This was disorienting the first time I read the book, this dizzying feeling of continuously moving from one soul to another, from one internal world to another. You feel a sort of motion sickness, like you want to find that 'one character', the soul that is the voice of the book. Only there isn't one. Like life itself, the book exists without a central thread. It's messy, powerfully messy, and unresolvable. This is not an immediately gratifying experience - for me, it was easy to feel a certain... coldness I guess, the first time I read a Woolf novel, a certain sense that there is a God here, but the God simply does not care a straw what happens to her children.

I began to unravel this when I first read Eliot's 'Middlemarch', which Woolf famously described as the first book ever written for grownup people. At first blush I simply took this as a bit of snobbery (honestly, I imagine there IS a BIT of snobbery to the comment. Virginia was never a PERFECT person). But there is a certain truth behind the snobbery, because Eliot, in some ways, does this same thing - she creates a world, and populates with souls, whole, free souls, and then draws them out through simple mundanities to an inconclusive point of finishing.

And that's it to me. Reading, say, Wives and Daughters - a beautiful novel mind you, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing - one feels as if Mrs Gaskell is trying to teach us and help us, to guide us to her truth. Like a mother. Like we are her children, and she is teaching us. Dickens is this to the Nth degree - I love the guy, but he's a wee bit paternal...

Woolf is not. Woolf speaks to us as an equal. I think this is why I found her so intimidating, because she refuses to speak down to me, even though I'm not at her level. She simply tells the truth, the messy, nonsensical, irritating truth. Then, she steps back, and lets me build my own faiths inside of her truth. More than any other I've read, and in spite of the fact that I don't deserve it, I feel that Ms Woolf trusts me with her book. She allows me to make it what I will, not what she will.

The clock was striking -- one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the lock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs Filmer waving her apron... seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast... Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War. Of her memories, most were happy. She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields -- where could it have been? -- on to some hill, somewhere near the sea...

And so, I am not obliged to love or unlove, to hope or despair. I am simply given souls, and left withe only one instruction: to decide what I think of them. This is powerful for me in a very simple way - that because the author does not exist in the story, she does not obscure it. Dalloway is almost like journalism, only more perfect. It is like being able to, for a short time, see much more clearly than I am normally capable of. So, the characters shine with a vividity and clarity that few authors ever approach. The quote about Miss Kilman above typifies this for me, for example.

On the other hand, for me (and this, I suppose, may be my attempts to build a faith inside of the truth), because I am not told to be any certain soul as I read, but instead must be each soul, in turn, I feel, in a very sacred way, a soul not of any certain soul, but of a community. Where reading Joyce is a walk as deep into one's self as one can go, reading Woolf is a walk as far out of one's self as one can go, until you enter a sort of Nirvana, where you can, for just tiny glimpses of moments, feel what it is to be a world of souls. And, for me, it is there that I finally DO meet Virginia Woolf, the great creator, who stands above her creations with the cold, loving heart of a god.

Why GLBT Issues are Important to Me (NSFW, many trigger words)

2010-01-07T02:00:00.004-06:00

(Please note, this is a very ugly post, please navigate away if you're not okay with that)

fag - faggot - nancy - sissy - queen - dyke - homo - poof - poove - pouf - bulldyke - batty boy - bulldagger - Pansy - chicken - fruit - fairy - sprite - auntie - invert - bent - nance - pantywaist - ottoman - milksop - tabby - dam - cocksucker - cuntsucker - pussylicker - cuntlicker - dick licker - ass pirate - ass master - buttfucker - butt slut - pervert - Shirley - Judy - Dorothy - lesbo - shitpacker - fudgepacker - shit dicker - pussy-pop

Read the whole list again, out loud. Read it in the voice the words are said in. Look at your partner, lover, spouse, mother, sibling and read it again. Look at yourself in the mirror, read it again. Now, don't say anything, but close your eyes, and concentrate on that little spot just above your belly that feels sick at things that are ugly and wrong. Concentrate on how it feels. Read the list again.

That's why I support GLBT issues.

The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton

2010-01-07T02:00:00.002-06:00

I know I don't do a very good job of living up to my ideals, but social justice is a subject dear to my heart. This shows in my reading, I imagine - I love books that struggle with what it means to be a just society, that highlight injustice, that try to show the road to justice - Upton Sinclair, Victor Hugo, Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Karl Marx, Anne Bronte : each of these writers stirs me first and foremost as visionaries trying to imagine a world that is more equitable and just. Even in my admittedly humble work (I fix computers, if you didn't know), the thing that get's me to the office every day is the idea that somehow, my little drop labors might free people from the constraints of ugliness and dehumanization that is sadly such a big part of a post-industrial world. I like to dream, and social justice is the grandest, most beautiful of dreams.

In Fruit of the Tree, with the quiet impartiality of Dame Justice herself, Wharton carefully deconstructs what this dream costs, in real, human sorrow. This is not a story of revolution, but it is akin to one, in that it tells the tale of what must be sacrificed at the altars of progress, and how unsure the outcomes of that sacrifice really are. This doesn't make the book reactionary - Wharton really seems to champion the causes that the characters sacrifice for. But it is brutally, calmly realistic. If you cannot understand how the wealthy class in turn of the century America (or any inequitable society) can have be so blind to the misery that they extracted their wealth from, read this book - it opened my eyes, and gave me a new compassion for those who have wealth, but have a conscience at the same time.

**SPOILERS**

This is the story of two very idealized idealists: John Amherst and Justine Brent. Amherst is a socially-conscious engineer, working in the mills owned by the recently widowed Bessie Langhope. At the beginning an accident has befallen one of Amherst's workers, and he is being cared for by the intelligent, sympathetic young nurse, Justine Brent. The accident is due to the terrible conditions of the mill town, and when Bessie comes to visit the mills for the first time, Amherst sees the opportunity to try to change some of the inequities of the system. Beginning simply with the desire to open Bessie's eyes to the inequities, things progress quickly, and the two are married. The marriage is a difficult one, as Amherst comes to realize that he entered it in large part as a means to the end of improving the mills, and as Bessie ceases to be interested in his larger social questions. This leads to a painful series of events, and an ending that I won't ruin for you, even in a spoiler free section. But sufficeth to say, the book grapples with social justice, euthanasia, women's equality, the value of the individual, and the basic questions of what is and is not a moral act.

**END SPOILERS

This was Wharton's third novel, and lacks some of the polish of, for instance, Age of Innocence (a difficult standard to judge against...). The dialogue feels wooden at times, the characters too consistent, if that makes sense (the idealists are ALWAYS idealists, for instance). But the strength of this novel is that each one of the characters has, by the end of the book, a real soul, full of blacks, greys and whites, and deserving of human respect and pity, even at their ugliest moments. You see how someone can take away the chance for basic schooling and medical care for a town full of people, because they want to build a private luxury gymnasium, without just being a soulless monster. You see how a devotion to seeing good done on a social scale, can make someone treat the people closest to them abominably. You see how good people turn wicked, how morally ambiguous people can strice for moments of heroism.

And in a sense, the absolutes of this book - the extreme idealists for instance - are part of the point. While the book is presented as a tragedy, in a sense, it presents an ideal scenario for social change - the perfect idealist, obtains the means to effect change, then gains total freedom to enact his plans, then gets all the help he could ask for, and even succeeds in his aims, making thousands of lives infinitely better. And in the process, still takes away the greatest possible happiness he himself, and those he loves best, could have ever enjoyed. It's a novel that shows that you cannot really change the world simply through self sacrifice - you inevitably, unavaoidably sacrifice the people you love as well, and for that reason idealism itself takes a special sort of callousness and cruelty - even if it is the road to the best of all possible worlds.

And, while Wharton is NOT perfect, the writing IS vintage Wharton - beautiful, overgrown, rich with a deep layering of gorgeous, fragrant language:

There [the marsh] lay in charmed solitude, shut in by a tawny growth of larch and swamp-maple, its edges burnt out to smouldering shades of russet, ember-red and ashen-grey, while the quaking centre still preserved a jewel-like green where hidden lanes of moisture wound between islets tufted with swamp-cranberry and with the charred browns of fern and wild rose and bay. Sodden earth adn decaying branches gave forth a sweet odour, as of the aromatic essence embalming a dead summer; and the air charged with this scent was so still that the snapping of witch-hazel pods, the drop of a nut, the leap of a startled fron, pricked the silence with separate points of sound.

And her careful observation of what it is to be human is laced throughout the entire book:

Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in advance the advice she was perpetually seeking.

Fruit of the Tree was out of print for 90 years after it was first published (there is now an off-brand press edition available through Amazon, I believe). Different places on line describe it as a soap opera, and invariably as one of Wharton's lesser works. But, for it's unique comination of an acute eye, a deep knowledge of the upper class, and an earnest desire to understand why the world has so much trouble changing, this book deserves a revival.

(Image from Stitch)

Chamomile

2010-01-07T01:00:00.000-06:00

If I could sip dust and honey
      It would feel like this --
A flower -- of a fashion --
      If a penny is verdigris --
A solvent of emotions
      And a dessicant of bliss.
(Picture from annosvixit)

12 Grapes for New Years Eve, 2009

2009-12-31T23:42:00.004-06:00

(bomme)
pinpricks on my fingertips, and a new thimble
(bomme)
two-emma-tree-ozma-emmy-anna-moth-and-vulnerable
(bomme)
a book of souls I couldn't find, new souls now for the searching
(bomme)
building gods and giants out of ticking finger keyboards
(bomme)
tender morsels sappho sarah waters william blake
(bomme)
beautiful dreams of sleeping, sleeping, in lonely snowy fields
(bomme)
remember forget forget remember forget remember remember remember
(bomme)
persistent the ache just underneath the belly like a breath I can't exhale
(bomme)
a hoodwink with a doll and a flag and mother behind a paper screen
(bomme)
half completion is all failure days with hems I'll never stitch before they fray
(bomme)
remember forget forget remember forget remember remember remember
(bomme)
but everything, everything, everything is beautiful in the world.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfield

2009-12-25T21:09:00.003-06:00

This was my book for our family book club this month. As you may have guessed, Amanda drew my name, and chose a book for me. Hence Leviathan, which she chose largely, I think, because it doesn't have the raging giant worm action that is purportedly to be found in Peeps.

That being said.

This was my first experience with Mr. Westerfield, though Amanda is a devoted fan. I really was looking forward to the book. Leviathan is the first in what will be a trilogy, telling a steampunk alternate history of Europe, and encompassing the events that triggered World War I (one of the characters, for instance, is the son of Archduke Ferdinand). World War I is one of my favorite periods of history - as a child, we had a book in our library that (for some reason) had instructions on how to build a scale replica of the World War I trenches, and I always wanted to build it. I later wrote, in my head, an entire romance that centered around biplane pilots. Something in the conflux, the meeting of the old and new ways of war, of horse cavalry appearing on the same battle field as tanks and mustard gas, is beautifully blind and sad, to me. On top of this, the steampunk ethos is lovely to me, being a history fan anyway, and particularly a fan of Regency/Victorian/Edwardian history. A number of my favorite heroes are from the period, as well. I was a bit nervous, because Amanda had warned me not to take the book to seriously, but I AM capable of enjoying a book 'just for fun', really I am, so I was ready for a romp.

I didn't hate the book. I didn't even dislike the book. It was kind of just meh.

The premise was fairly clever, and the way that the competing branches of science are integrated with the Axis/Allies split of World War I was well thought out. The world building was fairly well done (if unquestionably geared to the technological over the sociological), and I found the setting to be interesting enough that I could argue with it - that's a good thing, I promise.

The characters, though - and I LOVE characters - were just kind of so-so, to me. The two protagonists (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, sorry), both felt kind of like stereotypes, there more for window dressing for their two technological backgrounds, than like real people. I was interested, sort of from a dispassionate point of view, in what happened to their machines, but honestly never got terribly fond of either of them. Or terribly unfond.

And the action kind of got tiresome. I am not saying the book was morally bad - there is a nice lesson in it about how people need to work together, and one of the heroes had a father who was a peacenik, more or less. But most of the big action scenes were pretty much just battle scenes. I'm not the biggest fan of battle scenes. I know they can be well written and engaging, and I have read some that felt meaingful to me. But by and large, even the best of them don't do a lot for me, personally, even in books that I love like Lord of the Rings or Dune. The battles are there, they're important, but they're not what I love. In this book, I felt like everything was a battle or a chase scene, and neither of those things were terrifically exciting to spend several hundred pages alongside, without first feeling like I really deeply cared what happened to the characters.

In short, I think the problem was me. I'm not a big huge fan of books where the clever premise is the main attraction (i.e. this felt like it was more about the technology and less about the people), and I'm not a big huge fan of battle and chase scenes, which were very well done here, and probably just in too thick a concentration for me. Oh well. But then, I didn't like A New Hope when I was a kid for much the same reasons, then I liked Empire Strikes Back, which had a lot more bridgey, character driven moments. So, maybe the next book (Behemoth, I'm told) will be more to my liking.

Holiday Business

2009-12-24T17:53:00.003-06:00

(Video originally posted by Caniad at Dwell in Possibility)

It's that time of year, the time when the year is ending and everyone finds some excuse to pass presents around to each other :). It's Christmas in our house (though admittedly not as a result of any deeply held religious convictions on the divinity of Jesus Christ), and we've been running around all day - and will run more tomorrow on Christmas Day! I have a little end-of-the-year-and-christmas business that I hadn't done, so I wanted to pop on quick and get to it.

Christmas Presents

First of all, I did get my present from the Book Blogger Holiday Swap. My Secret Santa was Sennebec, a librarian from, I believe, New England, who very kindly sent me an anthology of crime fiction from New England - I think he is one of the authors in it. It was very kind of him to think of me. Otherwise, just wanted to thank Amanda, Ms Amy, Ms Ana, Mr Chris, Ms Debi, Ms Eva, Ms Jen, Ms Jenn, Ms Jill, Ms Kelly, Ms Lena, Ms Lenore, and Ms Nicole, who have worked very hard to coordinate and organize the swap. Being incidentally married to one of these organizers (hint: it's not Mr Chris), I know the organization and coorination can be a headache, and I wanted them to know I appreciate all the work, and putting up with all us book bloggers - heaven knows we can be a cantankerous lot!

Also, a quick thank you to Ms Debi and Ms Nymeth, who both sent Amanda and I such wonderful presents. Ms Debi crocheted us a beautiful snowflake which is now hanging on our tree, putting our sometimes quite ugly other ornaments to shame :). Hopefully Debi will like me for another 75 years, and we can eventually cover an entire tree in her beautiful ornaments :D. Ms Nymeth sent us some beautiful handmade bookmarks and Alice in Wonderland bookplates. I'm almost afraid to use them, as the only bookmarks I ever don't lose are, say, gas station receipts and dental appointment cards (which I manage not to lose until I look for them in order to write the appointment down on my calendar), so my beautiful bookmark from a beautiful person would end up in someone else's book, and if Nymeth's bookmark were used so someone could read New Moon, I'm not sure she'd ever forgive me :P. Thank you both of you, I don't think I've ever had anyone send me a present that was not in a situation were they were to some degree obliged to by social convention, and both presents are very dear to me, especially from two such wonderful people. Hopefully Amanda never wises up and divorces me, because the custody battle over the snowflake and bookmarks would be very messy...

And finally, a big thank you to my wonderful wife, who bought me such lovely presents today, and didn't look horrified at any of the ones I gave her :).

Challenges

I've been meaning to sign up for several challenges, but had not gotten around exactly to DOING so, so I will do it here. I know I'm terribly late, and all you challenge holders out there, I apologize, I'm a terrible participant, prone to forgetting to update, etc. But there are a few challenges that are so meaningful to me that I can't bear to pass them up. I'm trying to limit my challenges this year, because there are other things I'd like to do with my reading that don't really have much to do with any challenges that I know of (that is, I have some interests that are probably boring to most folks...). So, I have five challenges that I'll be joining this year:

GLBT Challenge - I don't have a list made out for this one, but I can say there will be some Sarah Waters involved, and I have a number of other books I'm looking in. I'll be trying to help out a bit with this challenge to - not that the wonderful Amanda NEEDS help, but if she does ask, I might chip in here and there.

Women Unbound Challenge - I was going to fill out the meme for this here, but they are such BIG QUESTIONS! I'm afraid that will have to wait until a seperate post to address them, but I promise I will. In the meantime, let me just say that while I'm a terrible ignoramus and likely will say 10000 stupid things in the course of a day, this is a really important issue to me, and one I'm really looking forward to the challenge, to help me focus some of my little ideas, and maybe add something to such a hopeful, forward-looking dialogue.

Woolf Readalong - I read the major works of James Joyce this year, and that sort of immersion in an author was a really beautiful way to experience them. I'd love to do the same with someone this year, and I'm eyeing good Ms Woolf, intently. At any rate, I'd like to revisit the books in this challenge that I've alreay read, and then read The Waves, which I'm very excited about.

Graphic Novel - This is my trying-to-be-brave challenge. I don't know a thing about Graphic Novels, and my few attempts have had mixed results, but all these wonderful people with excellent taste keep telling me to try them again. So, I will. I don't know what level I will do the challenge at, I guess it depends on if I can find my 'groove' and figure out how to read them... but really HOW BAD can any challenge being thrown by Mr Chris and Ms Nymeth be? :)

Really Old Classics - I'm going to go ahead and do this challenge, because there are SO MANY lovely, very old books I'd like to read - this is actually the only one I've gotten started on already, as I finished Silence, and I'm looking forward to some of my other reads for it, as well!

Poetry Challenge

Since you all work so terribly hard in the blogging community, I thought I ought to do SOMETHING helpful, and the place I saw a hole is in poetry - I don't THINK there is any poetry challenges for 2010, so I thought perhaps I could be of use for that? I know Ms Lu has thrown one in the past, and didn't have a lot of participation, so I'm curious if this is even something people are interested in? If not, I'll just make myself one and be done with it - I'm a bit nervous about throwing one anyway, since I'm afraid it will make more traffic on my blog, which makes me nervous. But, otherwise, if people are interested, maybe Ms Lu and I (if she's still interested?) can come up with something.

Happy 10th Anniversary

2009-12-20T19:49:00.002-06:00

Perhaps you've noticed I kind of started to streeeeeeeeeetch out my description of my images on the front page. This is because I wanted to save my 'favorite person' button for today, the tenth anniversary of the greatest mistake of Amanda's life (that would her marrying me :P. It's for the best, though. Can you imagine if she'd married, say, Vladimir Nabokov? Between the two of them, they'd of given birth to evil supergeniuses, and you all know we don't want that! Someone had to temper the gene pool... ;) ).

I've never been good at public describing my wife. It's a difficult task, she's difficult to describe. So, I'm not going to do it. Instead, let me tell you a story.

I grew up in a Mormon household, and in the Mormon faith, you are baptized when you turn eight. This isn't automatic - the church teaches that by eight one is accountable for one's actions, hence this being the age of baptism. As such, you have to go meet with the Bishop, and they speak to you, and ask you if you believe in Christ, if you believe in certain core tenets of the church, if you are ready to be baptized. It's something like what Catholics do in Confirmation, I suppose. Of course, for most kids, this seemed to be just a matter of formalities - I mean, what, are you going to say no? Come out and say 'Dad, I decided not to get baptized?' You're eight, you just sort of do what you figure you're supposed to do.

I wasn't that kind of eight year old - I mean I WAS. I didn't have any deep moral courage. But I wasn't, in the sense that I thought too much, and the dishonesty of my agreeing bothered me. I remember, on my baptism day, this feeling of discomfort, even a little fear - if it WAS true, and I had lied, wasn't that sacrilege or something?

This sort of feeling of wrongness surrounded a number of things in my childhood. Most of the major 'coming of age' events of childhood, particularly felt wrong or miscreated. I felt this way about Kindergarten and the beginning of high school, I felt it about the other Mormon ceremonies I went through in my youth. I felt it about most of my friendships - not my friends, mind you, necessarily, but about me in those friendships. The first time someone asked me on a date, my Junior Prom (a funny story, that one, but still wrong). I used to make up stories about it, about misplaced spirits, and identical twins, about botched reincarnation, about wicked gods. I never believed these stories (at least not very much), but I couldn't shake the feeling that something, somehow was wrong about me. Something was misstaken.

The only thing I didn't feel that about was my first love - my only love. I felt *I* was wrong for her, often enough (I wonder it still, on occaision), but I knew and know now that she was and is perfectly right for me. Amanda is my one right, perfect thing. Somebody famous said once that to love something beautiful is the most ennobling of human activities, and in my life, I can say that the best of who I am is the product of loving Amanda. Amanda is, quite literally, my reason for being alive, my guiding star, and I am happy (that's not a very big word) she could be such a bright, beautiful, constant star.

The picture in my banner is a Keshalyi, one of the spirits under Anna, the queen of the good fairy spirits of Romany folklore. I won't bore you all with her story - I imagine I know the story in a way that isn't much like the original anyways - but in the way I know the story, noone can ever see Anna's face, it's a mystery. Everyone can recognize her, but noone can see her. That is what Amanda is to me, a radiant, beautiful thing, hidden away in a mere mortal body, that all can see, and noone can really, completely know. As a wandering Keshalyi of a soul, I am forever grateful that, even if my little brain and heart hasn't the capacity to hold all she is inside of them at once, that I privileged to plumb the depths so long :).