Month: January 2014

Carol Bly. Letters From the Country.

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Photo by McGhiever, Murray Township, Minnesota

(Also read: My Lord Bag of Rice and Backbone, both excellent!)

This collection of essays deserves to be read on the merits of “A Gentle Education for Us All” alone, which provides the best defense of a liberal arts education I’ve ever read. Although the late, great Bly wrote these essays in the late ’70s for a specific agrarian Minnesota audience, her criticisms and recommendations remain topical and useful for, say, a person living now in a major Eastern metropolis (to take just one example, anybody who follows sustainable farming in the U.S. will recognize some of her arguments). Her moral and political outrage, intelligence, humor, and compassion made her voice stand out anywhere. She was anti-apathy, anti-complacency, anti-smalltalk, anti-ignorance, anti-war. She was pro-dissent, pro-judgment, pro-arts, pro-feeling, pro-action, pro-farmer, pro-sustainability, pro-local-theater-productions, pro-conversation….. She wanted to talk with children and teenagers and old people about contemporary art and music and politics and farming. And she proposed solutions to the problems she identified, starting at the very grassroots level, with 4-H meetings, church groups, and the town parade committee, and urging people to seek accountability from Washington. She demanded respect for people living in Minnesota farms and small towns, and she demanded that these people learn to respect themselves, by which she almost always meant to educate themselves. That goes, of course, for everybody.
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A.S. Byatt. The Children’s Book

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Photo: William Henry Goodyear, Paris Exposition: unidentified exterior view, 1900. Brooklyn Museum Archives

How can I not love a book about the V&A, ceramics, the writing life, and the Victorian social reform and aesthetic movements? This is Byatt in top form, with what I think is her best book since (here I’m invoking her chronology in writing, not mine in reading) 1992’s Angels & Insects. (Which is not to say that I didn’t read her collections of tales with immense pleasure, or the last two volumes of the quartet in a white heat of agony, suspense, and fulfillment.) This is a perfectly beguiling exploration of Victorian progressives’ invention and embrace of a modernity which they constructed, in part, out of nostalgia for the “primitive,” the “natural,” and the “childish.” Read on the heels of A Whistling Woman, it’s obvious that this dream of modernity is a recurrent one, and that the nostalgia recurs, too. Watch Byatt evoke To the Lighthouse, Smiles of a Summer Night, Das Rheingold, The Princess and the Goblin, and every creepy thing that’s ever been thought about marionettes–and then send Emma Goldman and Oscar Wilde strolling in–and swoon, swoon, swoon.
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Ernest Hemingway. The Complete Short Stories

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Ernest Hemingway 1923 passport photo, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

This book contains some marvelous stories, including, in The First Forty-nine, a run of several that, by themselves, earn the collection four stars and support all the claims about Hemingway’s mastery of the short story form. Among these stellar stories are “In Another Country” (a physical therapy story!), the much-anthologized “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” (a story about La Spezia, where we started our Italian vacation in 2010!), and the lovely “Big Two-Hearted River.”
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Ben Marcus. The Flame Alphabet

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photo by Smiley.toerist

This is more accessible stuff Marcus-wise, but if you don’t read experimental fiction on a regular basis, you should start elsewhere, or work your way slowly into this book, or else you’ll get infuriated and frustrated and give it a 1-star review full of defensive ranting and attacks on people who people who sit around in writing classes talking about writing. Of course, for some of us, there is pleasure in sitting around thinking and talking about words. We don’t do it to be superior; we do it because it stimulates and challenges us and makes us happy. And we don’t do it because we have an immediate, intuitive grasp of a writer’s project; we do it because working our way toward understanding, even if it takes weeks or years, makes the world a little bit bigger and brighter. I didn’t understand everything in this book, but it’s my job, as a reader, to try to figure out why Marcus made the sometimes baffling and alienating choices he made. It’s not his job to stop baffling and alienating me. Sometimes, frustration can be illuminating.

Read: Jan. 2014

Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way & À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

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Hojotoho! Heiaha! This post is a resuscitation of a 2013 review: I just finished reading À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, as some translators would have it, or In a Budding Grove: anyway, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu/In Search of Lost Time) yesterday [in 2013!] on the subway. How do we take an impression of experience, when experience is as fleeting as light–and we’re trying to capture it at the remove of distance and time?

I remember that I read Swann’s Way in English in 2008. By the time I’d decided to tackle Jeunes filles en fleurs in the original language (ha!), I found I had virtually no recollection of the previous volume, which I’d thought I’d loved but couldn’t recognize now at all (kind of like when the narrator wonders whether or not it’s even POSSIBLE to tell a young girl you’re in love with apart from any other girl at the beach) (which, sustained over two hundred pages, becomes increasingly amusing) (SPOILER ALERT: the answer is, finally, “kind of.” But for some reason, it’s really super easy to pin down every single detail of the face, clothing, voice, manner, and genealogy of your best guy friend). My memory of French is a similarly broken and shifting thing (my web browser tells me that I’ve looked up the word “ôter” oh, about fifty times, without ever remembering it from the previous encounters. It would seem that it, and the French language in general, just ôtent themselves out of my head. It took me over a year to finish Jeunes filles, though I should say in my defense that during much of that year I was too busy eating French candy and having fights with customer service reps in French department stores to actually learn French. So I just keep on keepin on, like a baby monkey on a pig, but nowhere as speedy. Or cute). My next language project will be rereading Swann’s Way, but in French this time, which will provide funny memory echoes and yet be entirely new at the same time, which is appropriate.
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