This Book and I Could Be Friends

Muted Malmö

2012-01-23T13:31:00.007-05:00

A flat owned by Nina Bergsten in Malmö, Sweden. Furnishings are a mix of family heirlooms, IKEA, and Paris flea market finds.

Residents Magazine, via Emmas designblog and Apartment Therapy

You win one free Internet!

2012-01-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

PROTEST

2012-01-18T18:12:00.005-05:00

SOPAStrike.com

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit (and Wikipedia) and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits. If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to say something reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it." But you know what? Screw that. Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings. The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It’s more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

"This crisis too, like all others, finally subsided and the alley returned to its usual state of indifference and forgetfullness."

2012-01-17T18:59:00.005-05:00

". . . It continued, as was its custom, to weep in the morning when there was material for tears and resound with laughter in the evening. And in the time between, doors and windows would creak as they were opened and then creak again as they were closed." (284-285)

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988. He is best known for his novels about the evolution of modern Egyptian society. Mahfouz's early exposure to Western literature influenced his innovative development of both the Arabic novel and colloquial Arabic prose. Another inspiration was his lifelong interest in democratic politics and social justice.

Zuqāq al-Midaq (Midaq Alley, translated by Trevor Le Gassick) was published in 1966. It follows the lives of various characters who live and work in the eponymous Cairo alley. Kirsha the café owner is a gay drug addict. Husniya the bakeress routinely beats her husband Jaada with her slipper. Uncle Kamil the good-natured sweets seller is fat and sleepy. Salim Alwan is a wealthy businessman embittered by a heart attack. Zaita is a sadistic cripple-maker held in fear and esteem by professional beggars. Sheikh Darwish is a half-mad former English teacher who left his job after a demotion to roam the streets. Saniya Afify is a middle-aged landlady looking to remarry after years of independence. Dr. Booshy is a self-proclaimed dentist with a shady background. Hamida is a beautiful but selfish (and not to mention sociopathic) young woman obsessed with riches and Abbas the barber is the poor sap in love with her. And so forth. With World War II raging in Europe, Abbas and his friend Hussain Kirsha have left Midaq Alley to work for the British.

That's basically the whole plot right there: the interactions of various over-the-top personalities in a timeless locale only now starting to show the tremors of the twentieth century. The denizens of Midaq Alley are generally apathetic towards politics, viewing the whole matter as little more than a spectacle, and therefore lack any recognition of the social forces at play in their lives. Everything is up to fate and the will of God. Midaq Alley is very much a surface novel where things are as they are, arranged in place by a higher being (whether that's God or Mahfouz himself in the metafictional sense). Unfortunately, this also means that the story is bogged down by the same issues that plagued the Cairo Trilogy. It's exposition overkill and the inability to follow the "show, don't tell" rule which should be engraved on a plaque above every writer's desk.

Now I'm told that Mahfouz's original Arabic is renowned for its eloquence and how it captures everyday speech. Alas, this rarely seems to come through in translation. (And Midaq Alley and the Cairo Trilogy both had different translators.) "Arabic is, of course, a language far different in syntax and sounds from English and gives expression to highly distinctive people and a complex culture," Le Gassick says in his introduction, going on to explain how this leaves the translator with almost too much flexibility with regards to vocabulary and arrangement. "The present translation offers an approximation of how Mahfouz might have expressed himself had English been his native tongue" (xi). The situation is not entirely hopeless, however. I still do recommend the scenic, sporty Miramar, which either had a superior translator or was the product of a good day for Mahfouz. Oh, the travails of the monolingual bibliophile.

The Joy of Books

2012-01-15T09:35:00.001-05:00

"When we are Lovecraftian, we are ourselves - utterly."

2012-01-11T20:11:00.012-05:00

I have read that Lovecraft is a mask I wear, that as an author I am not myself. What wondrous idiocy. I am never more "myself" than when I am Lovecraftian, for he has molded what is best within me. I came to him as a child, wide-eyed and ignorant. I am wide-eyed still (but hopefull a wee bit wiser). Through my Lovecraftian vision I have seen the verdant Sesqua Valley, that sequestered place of wonder that exists only as a symbol of Lovecraftian passion. To have found it was a rich reward. At the end of lonely day, I drift in dream to the valley, and there I find the freedom to be myself absolutely. - from "The Saprophytic Fungi" (The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams)

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire (1951-) is an author of poetry and short stories set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. He began writing fiction while serving as a Mormon missionary in Ireland, encouraged by his correspondence with Robert Bloch, creator of Psycho and fellow Lovecraft protege. Today, Pugmire, the self-proclaimed "Queen of Eldritch Horror," is widely considered the finest Lovecraftian writer of the modern era. He is published primarily by small presses and has appeared in many anthologies.

Thus far I have read two Pugmire books. The first one is Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (2008), which I received for Christmas. I opened it on Christmas Eve and enjoyed it so much that I immediately ordered The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams (2006) the next day with the B&N giftcard I received. Many aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos are so iconic that it's easy to fall into the trap of pastiche, but I found Pugmire's works to be very much his own. His primary contribution to the Mythos is Sesqua Valley, a hidden region on the West Coast accessible only to individuals of sufficient aesthetic persuasion. Its native denizens are born out of the mist at the base of Mount Selta, where they eventually return after venturing into the greater world to "locate those rare souls who have tasted the dark secrets." Sesequa resembles Innsmouth somewhat in its isolated, magical locale and its people's unique "Sesqua Look," which calls to mind a wolf or toad. Their progenitor is the charismatic Simon Gregory Williams, a skilled sorcerer and player of the enchanted flute. He is grotesque and seductive, a lover of mischief and adventure reminiscent of Anne Rice's Lestat. Altogether the most memorable character I have encountered in some time.

As his nuanced portrayal of Williams indicates, Pugmire's approach to Lovecraft is one of subversion. The staid world of academia and New England aristocracy is largely absent. Our protagonists are the monsters and outcasts the Gentleman from Providence so disdained: Goths, witches, drug addicts, struggling artists, zombies, and the inhuman spawn of the Valley itself. Strong women abound too, something sorely needed in the Cthulhu Mythos, and sexuality tends to be fluid. Instead of simply cosmic terror - although there certainly is that - Pugmire evokes rich, textured atmospheres of pagan mysticism that recall the best of Arthur Machen. While the dread Old Ones dream beyond the reach of three-dimensional space, there is fear and wonder in crumbling books of arcane lore and in dances at midnight in the deep forest. Calling it "magic realism" feels trite but there is very much an openness and acceptance towards the terrible beauty of the universe where Lovecraft only saw madness, horror, and doom. Sesqua Valley is not a cesspool like Innsmouth or Dunwich but a sanctuary for visionaries and lonely creative people who stumble upon it by chance.

In the works of W.H. Pugmire I have experienced that rare sensation of kinship with an author. I drank in eagerly his haunted settings and journeyed into other realms alongside his many enraptured humans. I'm afraid I simply cannot pick and choose any individual pieces to discuss, as is properly done in reviews of short story anthologies. Instead I can only say that I look forward to reading more, particularly those Innsmouth and Dunwich stories he says he is currently writing. (Guess what my two favorite Lovecraft tales are.) There are several additional Pugmire stories available online courtesy of the Lovecraft eZine (here and here) and I strongly recommend them all. Metal fan I am, I will end by dedicating to Sesqua Valley this song by Satyrian.

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New Art

2012-01-08T17:19:00.003-05:00

A framed 8x10 photograph of a lake at sunset. I bought this today for $10 at a local antique store whose crowded shelves and clutter I enjoy browsing every weekend. The scene itself is one of serenity yet the black-and-white coloring, dominated by dark tones, creates a sinister feel.

Now all I need to do is figure out where to put it. . . I love having a tiny studio but it does come with its difficulties with regards to all this art I keep finding. . .

"The bicycle is a vertical vehicle. . ."

2012-01-05T12:17:00.002-05:00

The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Svetislav Basara
Translated from Serbian by Randall A. Major
280 pages
Open Letter Books
March 20, 2012

. . . If we look at a simplified graphic representation of the bicycle, we can see that the device has an abundance of religious symbols; two wheels, two circles, symbolizing the two faulty infinities (time and space) connected by the true eternity of the Trinity, represented by the triangle of the frame. At the same time, when represented like this, the bicycle has the shape of metaphysical glasses with which it is possible to correct spiritual myopia. But that is not all. If we take a birds-eye perspective (which is the viewpoint of the Holy Ghost), the bicycle has the shape of a cross, where the handlebars are the crossbars of the cross. A man who rides a bicycle is, in fact, crucifying himself. (214-215)

Svetislav Basara (1953-), former Serbian ambassador to Cyprus, is also a major figure in contemporary Serbian literature, having authored dozens of novels, essays, plays, and short stories. In 2006 he received the NIN Award for his novel The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease. At this time, only two of Basara's works are available in English: the novels Chinese Letter (1985) and The Cyclist Conspiracy (1988).

Fama o biciklistima (The Cyclist Conspiracy) is a patchwork compilation of historical documents, scholarly papers, photographs, short stories, and poetry concerning the Order of the Evangelical Bicyclists, an esoteric, transhistorical cabal that meets secretly in dreams. Psychoanalysis combines with Plato and Augustine's City of God in a theology that knows no temporal restraints, manipulating history from the future in a plot to reunite humanity and the heavens. Chronological time figures prominently as a social construct that locks the unenlightened into regimented rigidity; a favorite recurring activity of the Little Brothers is the smashing of public clocks as they speed through European capitals on their sacred vehicles. To the Little Brothers, as the cyclists call themselves, the waking world as essentially broken, an invisible prison that enslaves human souls to corrupt worldly institutions. To consolidate and subsequently purge the evil plaguing the City of Man, the Evangelical Bicyclists are seeking to construct a Grand Insane Asylum for some 20,000,000 patients - an inverted Tower of Babel that lies partly underground.

Though largely metaphysical, The Cyclist Conspiracy also bears the influence of twentieth-century Yugoslavian and Eastern European history, with Stalin as the emblem of ultimate capitulation to the world of "technology": the brutish social order of government, institutions, and science that "lies in opposition to the real world" as "nothing other than a false world, the world of deception" (92). Basara is quite satirical on this subject. The exalted goals of the Evangelical Bicyclists are at times expressed in terms of violence and destruction, as seen in the fictional Serbian journals Vidici and Student (which appear as the subjects of an academic article). As parodies of those underground political rags put out by angry radicals, Vidici and Student, despite their Nietzschean overtones, seem to recall the promises of communism that culminated in Soviet totalitarianism. Rich irony lies in the disparity between utopianism and its means. The Grand Insane Asylum is, after all, a "hospital . . . structured like a country and all its citizens are only potentially crazy" (260). One is reminded of the internment of Soviet political prisoners in mental hospitals under contrived diagnoses (such as "sluggishly progressing schizophrenia") that began under Stalin's regime.

That the world of technology (or Augustine's City of Man) is one of chaos is probably Basara's point, as a contrasted to the perfected realm of God that we glimpse only through the lens of our fallen nature. As one high-ranking Little Brother explains to a neophyte:

"I can't help you get rid of your prejudices because even what I know belongs to the sphere of prejudice. Actually, they are at a higher level, but that doesn't change anything, if you're climbing the stairs leading to eternity, it is absolutely the same if you are at n + 1 or n + 25. No one knows the real purpose of our Order. No one can tell you whether we are doing good or evil. We're simply doing what we have to. You should know that the Order is more of an interesting hypothesis than an organized institution or power. That's good, too. That is the power of our community that has been maintained for a thousand years, due to the fact that it has never been constituted and, let's say, it hardly exists at all; it was created to not exist, but to disappear. A rigid organization only offers the illusion of strength, but it is not strength." (136-137)

The Order is nebulous because it is a manifestation of humanity's perpetual search for transcendence. The bicycle is essentially a dadaist symbol (dada originally being French for "hobbyhorse") reflecting the absurdity of trying to conceptualize the divine in tangible form, an undertaking that is never anything but subjective and prone to acrimonious debate. The Cyclist Conspiracy broaches such lofty regions and builds itself a labyrinth of possibilities surrounding unknowable things. It is a difficult, Borgesian work overall, and not one likely to have broad appeal. Still, its thought-provoking creativity is rewarding and every reader is guaranteed a different interpretation.

Review Copy

2011 Retrospective

2012-01-02T15:30:00.002-05:00

I'm back. No really, I mean it this time. One of my New Year's resolutions is to get back on my feet with regards to blogging and reading, both of which have fallen off precipitously. Compared to the previous two years in which I have completed the following meme, my stats have revealed themselves to be quite pitiful. All in all, 2011 was not a good year.

How many books read in 2011?

Only 39. *sigh*

How many works of fiction and non-fiction?

Three were works of non-fiction.

Male/Female author ratio?

I read 9 books by women and 5 short story anthologies that were mixed. The remaining 23 authors I read were men.

Favorite books of 2011?

The short stories of Robert W. Chambers and Arthur Machen, W.H. Pugmire's Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (got it for Christmas, will review soon!), The Girl Who Played Go, and Memoirs of Hadrian.

Least favorite?

Ugh, Herland. Terrible example of feminism.

Any that you simply couldn't finish and why?

None this year.

Oldest book read?

The Subjugation of Women, published in 1869.

Newest?

Two anthologies from the Innsmouth Free Press that came out earlier this year: Historical Lovecraft and Candle in the Window.

Longest and shortest book titles?

Snow had the shortest title in terms of letter count. Leaving out anthology titles such as The White People and Other Stories: Vol. 2 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen, The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames was the longest.

Longest and shortest books?

The Robert Chambers anthology was the longest at 643 pages. I didn't read every story in it, however. House of Leaves was 662 pages but probably doesn't count either due to its unconventional structure and extensive notes, illustrations, and so forth. That leaves The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at 590 pages.

How many from the library?

9 from the library, down from a high of 15 last year. But then, I read far fewer books this year so maybe it's proportionally the same.

Any translated books?

20 total, well over half the total number read.

Most-read author this year, and how many books by that author?

Naguib Mahfouz, thanks to the Cairo Trilogy read-along. Machen and Chambers tie in the short story department.

Any re-reads?

Yep. I re-read quite a few Machen and Chambers stories. They are absolute musts for any Lovecraft fan. I almost liked them better!

Favorite character of the year?

Simon Gregory Williams, the gloriously flamboyant spawn of Sesqua Valley. He is the creation of W.H. Pugmire, a modern Cthulhu Mythos author whom I will be reviewing shortly.

What countries did you end up visiting?

So many! In terms of authors' nationalities, I visited Japan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Egypt, China, Sweden, Denmark, South Africa, France, Turkey, Great Britain, Lebanon, Argentina, and Canada.

What books wouldn't you have read without someone's specific recommendation?

None. I didn't stray too far from my comfort zone this year. Maybe that will be another New Year's resolution - explore new books!

What authors were new to you in 2010 and you now want to read more works of?

W.H. Pugmire. In fact, I used the $30 Barnes & Noble gift card I got for Christmas to order yet another one of his books, which I just received today and am already halfway through.

What books are you annoyed you didn't read?

I didn't participate nearly as much in the Year of Feminist Classics as I should have. Very disappointing.

Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read?

Machen, Chambers, Pugmire, and Stanley C. Sargent, thanks to my ongoing Lovecraft obsession.

Complete stats here.

Winter/Holiday Musical Grab-Bag

2011-12-19T20:11:00.007-05:00

"For some reason there's always death around us."

2011-12-13T12:13:00.005-05:00

". . . My parents, my grandfather, my grandmother . . . your real mother, even Eriko. My god - in this gigantic universe there can't be a pair like us. The fact that we're friends is amazing. All this death . . . all this death."

Banana Yoshimoto (1964-) is the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto. Her father is the famed poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto, while sister Haruno Yoiko is a well-known cartoonist. Yoshimoto describes her favorite motifs as "the exhaustion of young people in contemporary Japan" and "the way in which terrible experiences shape a person's life." Kitchen, her debut novel, was released in 1988 and 1993 in English translation by Megan Backus.

Kitchen actually consists of two works: the novella Kitchen itself and a companion short story called "Moonlight Shadow" featuring different characters but exploring similar themes. In the former, a student named Mikage Sakurai has just lost her grandmother. Already orphaned in early childhood, she finds herself alone in the world until she receives an unexpected invitation. Mikage subsequently moves in with Yuichi and his father, a trans woman named Eriko, and spends several happy months with a new family. Shortly after moving out, however, she hears of Eriko's death at the hands of a stalker and Yuichi's ensuing depression. Kitchen is ultimately a coming-of-age story about the process of overcoming tragedy. For Mikage, this is carried out through the her love of cooking. She had long been fond of kitchens as centers of the home, but has now gained a greater respect for food as both nourishment and a vital aspect of social life. The time and care that go into preparation and the immediate appeal to the senses communicate volumes in a simple, tangible manner. It is through food that Mikage expresses her concern for Yuichi and eventually draws them closer. Kitchen ends on a wiser, hopeful note.

"Moonlight Shadow" centers more on the issue of closure. Satsuki has lost her boyfriend Hitoshi in a car accident that also killed Yumiko, the girlfriend of his brother Hiiragi. Jogging over Hitoshi's favorite bridge one morning Satsuki encounters Urara and is intrigued by both the depth of pain in Urara's face and her promise to show her something wonderful. Unlike Mikage's gradual development, Satsuki's experiences, as befitting the short story format, are revelatory and more immediately transformative. The added element of fate in the meeting between Satsuki and Urara gives the "Moonlight Shadow" a mystical quality that compliments the more down-to-earth feel of Kitchen.

With their straightforward prose and quiet settings, both Kitchen and "Moonlight Shadow" leave an impression of that airiness and precision common to Japanese prose. Unfortunately, Megan Backus's translation reveals the potential only, not Yoshimoto's actual delivery. Not only are her syntax and word choice clunky but several Amazon reviews familiar with the original claim she cut out entire sentences. There are two poignant stories here but they've been underserved. Still, each is short and sweet and easily relatable as expressions of a universal dilemma: how to break the emotional paralysis of grief and continue on.

Banana Yoshimoto's website, including her English journal, may be found here.

Excerpts from Vertical Motion

2011-11-28T17:24:00.001-05:00

By Can Xue
Translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Open Letter Books

Because this book of bleak urban surrealism is impossible to explain.

"Vertical Motion"
When we stop digging, we don't move. We're like pupae as we dream in the black earth. We know that our dreams are similar, but our dreams have never been strung together. Each of us has his or her own dreams. During those long dreams, I can bore deep into the earth and fuse into a single body with the earth. In the end, my dreams are about only the earth. Long dreams are great, for they are sheer relaxation. But if this goes on for a long time, I feel vaguely discontented, because a dream of earth can never give me the joy I most want to experience.

"Red Leaves"
After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn't made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.

He waited awhile longer, but the worker didn't do anything, he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco shreds. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn't seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.

"Rainscape"
It could be said that I had "turned a blind eye" to this building for years. The granite wall was very old with dark watermarks on it. This was a deserted building. I heard a key turn twice in the lock, and the door opened with a creak. I went inside without a second thought.

A person with his back to me was standing in the empty corridor. In the dim light, I couldn't get a good look at his face. I thought he was crying.

"On the 18th of April, you saw the beginning and the end of the matter," he said, his bare head gleaming and closing in on me. I still couldn't see his face well. I waited for him to go on talking, but he didn't: it was as if something had struck him. Bending over, he began to sob softly.

"Papercuts"
Wumei told her that the last time she went to the market to sell papercuts, a group of women had surrounded her. They wanted a hundred of her works. Those countrified women seemed to come from a remote mountain area. There were two blind people among them.

"Did they buy your interlinked rings?" asked Mrs. Yun.

"Yes. They wanted to take them home and learn how to make the rings. When I asked them where they came from, they just mentioned a strange place name. It definitely isn't in our province, and yet I could understand their accent. One of the older ones told me that the sun shines there all year long, so they like black and they like circles."

Mrs. Yun took stock of Wumei's bathroom wall. Now there were no longer black rings pasted there, but many yellow ants. Looking at them was nauseating. Wumei was truly spirited and skillful. Such tiny ants: she could cut them out they were so lifelike. But why didn't she cut some pleasant things?

Review Copy

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T09:53:00.001-05:00

Art

2011-11-22T19:41:00.000-05:00

My ~300 square foot studio is full of art. My favorite thing about this city is its vibrant arts scene with its numerous galleries and events, from the outdoor summer festivals to the artisan fairs that pop up every weekend during the holidays. Open year-round are the thrift and antique stores full of unique items at great prices. In addition to the high ceilings, southern exposure, hardwood floors, and old building, the best part of my apartment is art.

Over the dresser. Three original photographs, a woodblock stamp, and a ceramic piece from a funky independent boutique.

An original watercolor from a local Mid-Century Modern antique shop. Over Bookshelf #1.

My grandfather painted this. Leaning against the wall on Bookshelf #2.

My grandfather painted this too.

A pencil sketch of me drawn by a random guy at the coffeehouse in exchange for a hot chocolate.

Authentic original print by Hasui Kawase. Purchased dirt cheap at an antiquarian book fair. Restoring and framing with proper archivist materials was not cheap.

Mounted photo dated 1989, showing an interesting architectural detail from a Russian Orthodox church in Maynard.

Handmade letterpress poster from a festival.

Small piece of cardboard I hand-pressed at a local printing company. Pen and ink sketch from a thrift store.

Top 10 7 Unread Books on My Shelf

2011-11-15T17:47:00.004-05:00

It's been forever since I've done one of these. This is a particularly interesting topic because I just weeded out a ton of old books from my shelves, mostly college history texts. So I do plan on getting to all of these or else I wouldn't have kept them.

7. Dan Simmons, Ilium

Hey look, it's 700+ pages. I didn't love the Hyperian Cantos THAT much.

6. Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

This one's only 152 pages. Really, I have no excuse.

5. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

I loved Oryx & Crake and got it signed when I saw Atwood at a local college last year. I actually started this but abandoned it for some reason, even though the premise was intriguing.

4. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

I've seen him live too, along with Salman Rushdie. Unlike Atwood, who was very humorous and engaging, Rushdie and Eco were so dull I actually don't remember anything they said or did. But still, I've heard many great things about this book.

3. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

2. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

I love Thomas Mann. I've read many short stories by both him, as well as novellas by his contemporary Hermann Hesse and yet I still can't bring myself to crack open either of these two thick tomes. I'll get to them eventually, I promise - I even spared them my recent Book Purge. Someday.

1. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Srsly, WTF. This book has everything I love - experimental Modernism, New York City, the early twentieth century - and I've read The 42nd Parallel twice. And this has been on my shelf for, what, two years now???

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists! Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

Wonderful News

2011-11-14T17:47:00.006-05:00

As many of you have doubtlessly noticed, I've been pretty much absent since July. While previously the glorious summer weather was to blame, beginning in September the problem was a sudden lack of Internet. At first it wasn't such a big deal - I now had an excuse to visit my favorite coffee haunts more often! Except if you're going to sit in a business for two hours and jack up their power bill, you'd better buy something substantial. Alas, $10 daily for a latte and a sandwich started to add up.

So. The girl in the apartment next door has agreed to split wireless, which means no more lugging my laptop and cord up the street in the dark. I suppose I'm lucky no one mugged me.

"the question of occupation."

2011-11-11T19:33:00.002-05:00

Though few will ever agree on the meaning of the configurations or the absence of style in that place, no one has yet to disagree that the labyrinth is still a house. Therefore the question soon arises whether or not it is someone's house. Though if so whose? Whose was it or even whose is it? Thus giving voice to another suspicion: could the owner still be there? - An excerpt from The Navidson Record

Anyone who understands this work in its entirety understands, in its entirety, Neon Genesis Evangelion. (This is a law, not an assertion.) Thus, House of Leaves is Evangelion-complete. - TVTropes.org

Mark Z. Danielewski (1966-) is the son of Polish avant-garde film director Ted Danielewski and the brother of singer-songwriter Annie Decatur Danielewski, better known as Poe. He has a graduate degree from the USC School of Cinema-Television and has worked on sound for the documentary Derrida. House of Leaves, his 2000 debut novel, combines his interests in film and experimental art and has attracted a considerable cult following. Poe's second album Haunted was released simultaneously as a companion work.

House of Leaves is a dual novel following two distinct stories. Framing the work is the first-hand account of Johnny Truant, an apprentice tattoo artist in LA with a freewheeling life of sex, drugs, and hard Hollywood partying. His friend Lude invites him to the apartment of a recently deceased neighbor known only as Zampanò. A blind, solitary man who nevertheless unnerved the building's Herculean superintendent, Zampanò turns out to have been an imaginative and prolific writer who left behind a strange manuscript called The Navidson Record. Truant sets out to edit the many scattered leaves, some scribbled on the most unlikely of places such as the backs of stamps and envelopes, only to find that the thing is consuming him, sending him on a downward spiral of madness and paranoia. There is a monster afoot, lurking just out of the corner of his eye when he looks up from the pages, hiding in those hidden pockets without sound. It's always there. Concentrate on these words. Don't let your eyes leave the page.

The Navidson Record is a scholarly work discussing the titular film by photojournalist Will Navidson. Will, his girlfriend Karen Green, and their two children Chad and Daisy, age eight and five, have left New York City for an old farmhouse in rural Virginia. Will and Karen hope to repair their relationship, which has become strained due to his sudden, frequent, and often dangerous overseas assignments. To make the most of his new downtime, Will seeks to combine his craft and new circumstances in a film that will follow his family's adjustment to life in the country. But The Navidson Record is not the film he set out to make. Imagine returning from vacation to find a closet where there wasn't a closet before. The house, they learn, is bigger on the inside than on the outside. And it can get even bigger. In the miles of corridors and winding staircases, perpetually shrinking and expanding, something growls.

Beyond that, hell if I know.

Others more qualified than I have tried to explain this labyrinth of a book, where the text changes color and position and the footnotes frequently overwhelm the narrative. It is obviously, first and foremost, a postmodern work of psychological horror that explores the interaction between humans and the spaces we inhabit. Zampanò's imaginary scholarly sources interrogate Will Navidson's film from every angle imaginable, offering interpretations of the house that range from the Freudian to the pop cultural to the theological. The source of the growl is offered up as either the sound of the house shifting - similar to the groans of the Arctic ice that haunted stranded explorers - or a ~~Minotaur~~ that stalks unseen. The monster's presence is overwhelming in both The Navidson Record and Johnny Truant's story. Its perpetual threat destroys the sanity of both Truant and Holloway Roberts, an experienced outdoorsman who descends into a homicidal frenzy in the freezing halls of the house. And yet we never so much as glimpse the ~~Minotaur~~. Its alleged existence functions as an amalgamation of the fears and anxieties of various characters, giving it very real power as a negative entity. For all its supernatural trappings, House of Leaves is driven by its human characters, both the players in the stories and the academics plumbing a vast array of myths and social complexes to account for such a thing as the house.

It should be noted, however, that Zampanò's body was found besides a series of strange, deep gorges in the floor.

The book is Mind Screw like that. Like I said, hell if I know.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves was The Wolves' reading selection for October. (This post was very late.) Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

The Empty Truck: A True Story of Paranormal Activity

2011-10-31T00:00:00.002-04:00

I did not write this. This story was posted on Jezebel's "Send Us Your Scariest Ghost Stories" on Friday, October 28 by SorciaMacnasty. The title is mine. Please note that they specifically asked for true stories. What terrifies me about this one, other than that it's apparently true, is the same thing that unnerved me about Silvia Garcia-Moreno's story "Flash Frame": those loose ends left dangling and sense of malignant forces at work. The unexplained is always far, far more disturbing than having a nice, neat answer that allows things to make sense. Oh and did I mention this story is supposed to be true?

Update January 2012: Here is Sorcia's blog.

We have never figured this out. And now, the three living witnesses have to be good and fucking druuuunk to discuss the whole thing.

I was 7, my brother 10, my mom in her early 40s, my grandmother (her mom) in her 60's. So we were all cogent. No one was too young or too senile to not recall this nonsense. Yet, still no bloody answer.

Grandma lived on an isolated country road in NC that was named after her family since they were the only crazy fuckers who lived on the land for about 1000 acres. And I *do* mean crazy. We have stories about relatives that start with, "You remember that time Uncle Bob was in the ditch with a shotgun?" "WHICH TIME?!"

Her house had been empty for several weeks while she'd been visiting us in Florida, but we were all back, spending the weekend with her before trekking back to the Sunshine state. The house is in the foreal country, literally over train-tracks, past a salvage yard and her nearest neighbor (a cousin -- everyone is related to everyone who owns a house on the road) ain't within screamin' distance. Yes, that seems to be a real system of measurement -- "screaming distance."

It's early in the AM, like just before daybreak. We're awake because these are farm freaks who wake at the crack of dawn from sheer ingrained habit. We're eating cereal when we hear someone pull up outside. Curious, we all run to the big picture window that looks onto the front yard. There is a strange truck there. No one seems to be behind the wheel, though the engine is idling. The truck is... well, old, for one thing. It's old-timey like from maybe the 1930's? You could picture the Joad Family heading to California in this thing. It's rusted but it was probably once painted blue.

We stare at the thing, bewildered. Mom asks grandma if she knows who that is. Nope, not a clue, says grandma. She runs to get the phone to call her cousin and ask him to come up -- she thinks maybe it's a hired hand and he's just at the wrong farm. Just as she asks him to come on down, the phone goes dead. Well, that's unsettling.

All at once, there is a loud, insistent banging on the front door. We all scream. My grandma, who is terrifyingly resourceful, huddles us all into the living room, away from a window where anyone can see us. Then, while mom, me and my brother tremble there on the couch, she grabs a serrated bread knife from the kitchen and cautiously approaches the front door. She peeks out a side window, very stealthily. She turns back to us and looks confused. She shakes her head, like, "No one is there." We all kind of breathe easier.

Then EVERY goddamn door in the house is banging -- relentlessly. I can still hear it. Rhythmic and terrifying, like all the doors are about to splinter and crack. There were two doors in the basement beneath us, so the sound is also a reverberation at our feet. The three ground-floor doors are shaking -- we can see them trembling and jerking on their hinges from our vantage point on the couch. Finally, mom runs to the window -- either from a psychotic break with reality or terror, I have no clue. She cries, "Oh thank Christ -- Cousin is here!" We run to her and peek out the picture window -- there is no one that we can see in the yard, but we can't see all the doors from our viewpoint.

Cousin walks by truck with a shotgun in his hand. Cousin, it should be noted, has pretty much every gun ever made. He looks puzzled, looking at the rear of the truck, then he glances in the cab window and he stops. He goes pale, runs a hand down his face. Then he RUNS towards to house, towards us.

My grandmother flings open the kitchen door as she sees him coming. He shouts, "Everyone get behind the couch! Get DOWN!" He runs past us as we bolt for the couch. The banging starts AGAIN, all the doors and now we can hear the windows rattle. It's like a tornado or the end of the world. We are too scared to even scream. Cousin flings open the front door and fires the huge shotgun, once, BANG, deafening. As he does, the truck roars into life and it sounds like a train. We scramble up; the banging stops, mercifully. Cousin is advancing onto the lawn, gun leveled at the truck. We run behind him, wanting to be out of that shaking, quivering house and near the dude with the gun. The truck peals out, backwards, cutting across the yard and racing into a breakneck speed. Tires sqeal, rubber is burned. Cousin fires again and we all cower behind him. He blows out the back window with the sound of a thousand plates smashing into linoleum but the truck never even hiccups, just roars down the road. No tags, not even a vanity plate on the back.

There was NO ONE behind the wheel of that thing.

We all had a clear view. Everyone agreed. Not a driver in the cab.

Well.

Not anything we could SEE, anyhow.

The police were called. The phone line had been cut. There was not a single boot print in the entire yard except Cousin's, from where he'd run into and out of the house. Cousin reported that there had been no plate but when he looked into the cab, it looked like "something from a horror movie." He said there were all kinds of weird restraints -- handcuffs, c-clamps, nylon straps -- and he said the floorboards looked covered in what "smelled like" blood to him (Cousin was famous for his keen sense of smell and the window was down, so it's possible).

Cousin said he thought he saw a blur of something out the picture window and ran to fire the first shot, but "missed" because, once he stood there, nothing or no one was on the lawn or in the truck. Then it shot backwards out of the yard and out of our lives, leaving no answers, just a deep sense of unease every time we'd visit.

Grandma and Cousin have passed. Deeply religious people, they stuck by their unchanging versions of the story until they died. My brother, mother and I have never been able to figure it out -- neither did the cops, I think it should be noted. We don't know how all the windows and doors were banging, and we don't know why we never saw a SOUL anywhere or how they could get around the sides of the house without leaving a trace in the damp earth.

In a subsequent comment, SorciaMacnasty stated the following:

What's really insane is that I live about 20 miles from that house now in an old (early 1900's) farm house myself. Because I am clearly a glutton for punishment.

ALSO: Just a couple of years ago, we found out something that *may* help explain the mystery, but it would be a purely supernatural explanation and we're not really sure. Apparently, there was a farm hand during the Depression who was fired by my great-grandfather because the guy weirded-out the livestock. That dude was fucking pissed and stole some tools before he left. Well, we kinda knew that part of the story. BUT, we recently found out that after he was lynched by a small town mob a few years later because they suspected him of raping and torturing a family -- a family that consisted of a mother, her two kids, and an elderly grandmother.

EXACTLY the same fucking family that was in our house that day.

Riddle me that, motherfuckers.

Cthulhurotica

2011-10-21T20:19:00.008-04:00

The movie began to play. . . It was a procession. Men held torches to light the way. One could glimpse men and women copulating in the background, behind the rows of slaves with the torches. If you looked carefully, you might see that some of the people writhing on the floor were not making love to anything human. - from "Flash Frame" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

So Emily did this post recently on sex scenes in literature and got a record number of comments. Most of my comment was concerned with trigger warnings vs. pearl-clutchers but just for the hell of it, I also brought up the Cthulhurotica anthology. Yes, it is indeed an anthology of Lovecraftian erotica. This thing exists and I have read it. Since it is nearing Halloween I have decided to review this thing which I have read.

Before we begin, I would like to dispense with a particular concern the fair reader may have. Specifically, that genre which is called tentacle hentai which involves tentacles, as does Lovecraft, who has tentacles but not love. Cthulhurotica contains exactly three instances of girl-meets-cephalopod and one guy-meets-octogirl but the action either happens offscreen, is vaguely implied, or briefly glimpsed by a third party who is then rendered unconscious. If you are a fan of such action, this is not the book for you.

So anyway, Cthulhurotica was published last year and edited by Carrie Cuinn, who had long wondered at the near-complete lack of any sort of romance, sexuality, or even female characters in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His heroes are invariably chaste, bookish Anglo-Saxon men from New England who stumble upon nameless horrors in the pages of ancient Latin texts in musty libraries. Women, when they appear, are background characters who get taken out of the story pretty quickly - think "The Colour Out of Space" or "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." Two important exceptions occur in "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Thing on the Doorstep," semi-sequel to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Those three stories are also the only ones Lovecraft wrote (other than "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," which I haven't read) concerned with marriage, children, and reproduction, which he portrays as harbingers of degeneracy and doom. Lavinia Whateley has twins (somehow) by the alien god Yog-Sothoth who plot to open a gateway to extradimensional horror. Asenath Waite turns out not to be a woman at all but a man inhabiting the body of his daughter in a body-surfing attempt at immortality. Her family is from Innsmouth, a town ruined by interbreeding with a race of grotesque fish-frogs who worship Cthulhu. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is generally accepted by critics to be an allegory for miscegenation.

In reading his stories, it is easy to see Lovecraft as a repressed and neurotic individual with complexes upon complexes. He had original ideas that have influenced the entire scope of twentieth-century horror but for all his alien geometries and mad revelations, he's either neglected or twisted one vital part of the human experience. As Emily puts it,

. . .The way I see it, sex is an integral and enjoyable component of human existence. There is no reason a scene depicting sex can't be just as subtle and revealing of human character as a scene in which characters prepare a meal together, or get ready for a party, or fight in a war. Furthermore, it seems to me that to exclude sexual activity from the literary scene in any kind of systematic way would be to restrict unnecessarily the palette with which we paint our own existence. Most people, at some point in their lives, have sex. Shouldn't it therefore be a valid literary subject? Peoples' sexual lives can sometimes reveal aspects of their psyches difficult to depict in any other way: after all, many people are at their most vulnerable during sex, and some expose aspects of themselves which they hide away at all other times. . .

Jennifer Brozek in her essay "The Sexual Attraction of the Lovecraftian Universe" agrees, pointing to common elements of Lovecraft's fiction that welcome an erotic interpretation. The most obvious is the attraction of the forbidden and the powerful and the myriad ways such power dynamics can be explored, subverted, and deconstructed. Atmosphere is also important: Lovecraft is known for his lush descriptions of decaying towns, dark forests, and arcane ruins that become veritable Scenery Porn. "''Food porn' and 'woodworking porn,'" Emily points out, ". . . can get as gratuitous as they want: there is no cultural stigma around watching cooking shows or looking at craft magazines, so we don't feel we need to apologize." Hell, there's even a site called Bookshelf Porn. "In my case I think this gets a NSFW designation," said one of my post's comments.

Thus, Cthulhurotica was envisioned not so much as a collection of sex stories but as an exploration of a possible human responses to Cosmic Horror left untouched by the traditional Cthulhu Mythos. In fact, quite a few of the stories are pretty PG-13 and I don't think any of them qualify as all-out X. They're a diverse bunch, some directly inspired by specific Lovecraft works (such as "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Silver Key") while others are more subtle in their influence. The book is divided into three sections but there doesn't seem to be any sort of theme uniting each one. The opening piece, Gabrielle Harbowy's "Descent of the Wayward Sister," does a great job setting the tone for the rest, turning Lovecraft on his head by centering on a bold female character who greets the monstrous with open arms (literally). An unapologetic thief and prostitute, she's a rule-breaker on the margins of Victorian society already, as opposed to some stuffy New England aristocrat. Don Pizarro's "The C-Word," on the other hand, is a quiet modern tale of two lovers, a young man and a woman seventeen years his senior. Except she lives in Innsmouth, which adds another layer to the issues of aging and physical change that have caused her to push him away.

Richard Baron's "The Cry in Darkness" is a semi-sequel to "The Dunwich Horror" featuring secondary character Mamie Bishop, whose new husband is perplexed at her obsession with pregnancy and sleepwalking episodes that routinely take her into the dark rural night. The ending is one of those wham! conclusions, similar to that of the great escape in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," that fades to black and assumes the unreal quality of a dream. "Transfigured Night" by K.V. Taylor had a potentially silly "castaway on a deserted island" premise but quickly redeemed itself with its mood of sinister expectancy and a truly disturbing instance of the "last man on earth hears a knock at the door" variety. It also subverts Lovecraft's favored motif of intellectual seduction through crumbling tomes and hidden history. Leon J. West's "Amid Disquieting Dreams" was a deeply disturbing study of addiction and masochism, while "Le Ciél Ouvert" by Kirsten Brown ends the book with a rapturous blend of cosmic revelation, sexual transcendence, and all-out reality-warping.

My favorite story by far was "Flash Frame" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, publisher at the Innsmouth Free Press. As I mentioned at Emily's post, "Flash Frame" is best described as a cross between The Ring and The King in Yellow. Creepy, creepy, creepy and just perfect for Halloween. I won't spoil it for you but suffice to say, this one is exactly what Lovecraft (or Chambers) plus erotica should look like. Unnerving, commingled disgust and perverse fascination, hints of an uncanny wrongness and secret malignant forces at work. (A lot like Roberto Bolaño, come to think of it.) Moreno-Garcia has just become one of my favorite people working in the Cthulhu Mythos today. Do check out the Innsmouth Free Press if you haven't already.

The rest of the book didn't do much for me, unfortunately, although I did come away from Cthulhurotica with the feeling that Carrie Cuinn had accomplished what she had set out to. I've read a few Lovecraft anthologies over the past year, mostly from Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu fiction line, and after awhile they do tend to blend together and become predictable. There's only so much you can do in following Lovecraft too closely and writing about mind-shattering discoveries and towering monsters and lurking doom in the family tree. There's also the risk of merely perpetuating Lovecraft's many, many Unfortunate Implications by failing to do any deconstruction, alternate interpretations, or exploration of new angles. I also applaud Cuinn for selecting a large number of female authors and authors from different culture backgrounds, both sorely needed in the Lovecraftverse.

Cthulhurotica also includes a few illustrations by various artists and three essays: "Cthulhu's Polymorphous Perversity" by Kenneth Hite, "Cthulhurotica, Female Empowerment, and the New Weird" by Justin Everett (discussed in my Arthur Machen post), and Brozek's "The Sexual Attraction of the Lovecraftian Universe." All of them quite thought-provoking and a great way to round out the book. According to its website, Cthulhurotica, despite the initial squick reaction it doubtlessly inspires in many, has received such a successful and positive reaction that plans for a second volume are in the work. Submissions will be open later this year. *thumbs up* I support this endeavor.

Baiting Richard

2011-10-04T07:46:00.000-04:00

"Ghostflowers" by Otep. Unusually for me, this is an American band.

"I perceived differently my relations with the divine."

2011-10-02T17:27:00.000-04:00

I could see myself as seconding the deity in his effort to give form and order to a world, to develop and multiply its convolutions, extensions, complexities. I was one of the spokes of the wheel, an aspect of that unique force caught up in the multiplicity of things; I was eagle and bull, man and swan, phallus and brain all together, Proteus who is also Jupiter. (146)

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. In 1980 she became the first woman elected to the Académie française. She published her first novel Alexis in 1929 and moved to the United States a decade later to escape the outbreak of World War II. Mémoires d'Hadrien was published in 1951 to great critical acclaim.

Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from French by Grace Frick in collaboration with Yourcenar, is a fictionalized autobiography of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from 117 to 138. He was one of the Five Good Emperors praised by Niccolò Machiavelli. Edward Gibbon, in his famous work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, characterized their rule as an era when "the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of wisdom and virtue." Hadrian did in fact write an autobiography but it has since been lost. Yourcenar portrays him as the quintessential "enlightened despot": a deep thinker and well-rounded, experienced statesman who directed his power toward the public good.

At times he seems almost too perfect, but such is probably in keeping with his personality as he composes the history of his own life. Hadrian's appreciation for the highest gifts of civilization - art, philosophy, rule of law - combines with breathtaking prose to recreate an Elysium that reigned briefly before the Dark Ages. The lost world of the Roman elite is one of palatial villas on the shores of the Mediterranean, deeds of daring on the barbarian frontier, and the ancient cults of Egypt and the Near East. Hadrian's conception of divinity extends from his secular knowledge, imagining the gods as innately connected to the various facets of human life. He is especially enamored of beauty in all of its forms, from poetry to soaring architecture to the vitality of youth. The climax of his story is the early death of his lover Antinous by suicide, although for all his rhapsodizing it appears that Hadrian loved him physically but not quite as a full individual. Antinuos was a Tadzio who manifested an ideal or exalted concept. Hadrian had him deified after his death, a megalomaniacal move that nevertheless transcends mere egotism and becomes poetry itself - an epic tale of love lost and the death of beauty in full bloom.

The breadth of Hadrian's lifetime, extending from far-off battles and travels to the depth of his learning, gave Marguerite Yourcenar a large canvas with which to work. She takes maximum advantage of the material offered to her and the result is a brilliant book and homage to what was seen centuries afterwards as one of the Golden Ages of Western civilization. A fascinating and rewarding read.

Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian was The Wolves' reading selection for September. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

"Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist:"

2011-09-30T20:03:00.003-04:00

The action lies between the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his disillusion. (176)

Naomi Wolf (1962-) is leading spokeswoman of the Third Wave feminist movement. In addition to her work as a political consultant, she is also the author of several books, including The Beauty Myth, Promiscuities, Misconception, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty.

The Beauty Myth (1991) argues that the titular myth developed in the 1970s as a backlash against the Second Wave feminist movement. It is not a deliberate conspiracy engineered by a shadowy cabal but a collective impulse to control women when the grip of other myths – such as domesticity and sexual purity – has been loosened. Fueled by advertising and mass media, the Beauty Myth conditions women to believe that their physical appearance is paramount above all else, including autonomy, authenticity, and personal identity. Adopting the metaphor of the Iron Maiden - an archaic torture device in which the victim was sealed in a coffin shaped like a smiling woman - Wolf articulates a kind of neo-Platonic ideal that coalesced out of the constant bombardment of advertising and mass media. The Iron Maiden represents a marriage between misogyny and consumer capitalism in which women are driven to spend and spend in pursuit of perfection that never comes, at the expense of their own well-being and place in society. Woman's pursuit of beauty is not frivolous but literally a matter of survival.

Wolf's words are vivid and violent, giving a work of cultural theory the feel of a twisted fairy tale. She likens the department store makeup counter to the born-again experience of a cult conversion, mixing the desire for redemption with spiritual destruction. A thousand different emotions pour through her writing, ranging from slow suffocation to intoxicating freedom, from the college girls in a self-imposed famine to a vision of youthful health who "might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn. . ." (217). She goes deep into the trenches of our shared subconscious, a dystopic place akin to Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, where the human body can actually be mass-produced as a prosthetic "shell." His work introduced the old Greek paradox of the Ship of Theseus, in which the effort to preserve a famous war vessel results in it being gradually rebuilt as board by board requires replacement. Is it still the same ship in the long run? What becomes of woman-made woman when there is man-made woman? Likewise, what Wolf describes is no less than a tug-of-war between women as humans and women as disposable blow-up dolls who signify sex, submission, and interchangeability. Barbies who can be played with, pulled apart, and thrown out. Not surprisingly, the Beauty Myth can also be linked to a rise of violent sexual imagery directed at women, and a dangerous shift in cultural attitudes toward sexual assault. According to a 1988 report from Ms. magazine, only 27% of women who experienced coerced sex at the hands of an acquaintance could even identify their experience as rape, possibly due to the normalization of sexual violence against women in movies and music videos.

While her gaze into deadly cultural undercurrents is piercing and critical to a fine-tuned point, Wolf, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman before her, falls short in one crucial area. Her relentless focus on gender oppression ultimately precludes her from recognizing where she does have privilege in our hierarchical society, and herein lies an enormous oversight in an otherwise gripping book. For all her contributions to Third Wave feminism, Wolf seems to have adopted little of its intersectionality. The Beauty Myth purports to be about Western women, particularly those living in Britain and the United States. Unfortunately, this "Western woman" Wolf so frequently refers to is a monolith coded as white.

When tracing the history of Western misogyny, for instance, Wolf describes the older myths of female invalidism ("Victorian Novel Disease") and the Angel of the House as though they were universal to all women and not just middle-class white housewives. While I understand that she is speaking of collective ideals propagated by the ones with the power, rarely does she address the situation of women completely outside of the Beauty Myth and its previous incarnations: women of color, disabled women, and lesbian/bisexual and trans women.. How do these myths impact women who must negotiate other sites of oppression? In the section on "Work," Wolf argues that

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete. We can better understand how insidious this development is if we try to imagine a racial discrimination suit brought in the face of a powerful technology that processes, with great pain, nonwhite people to look more white. A black employee can now charge, sympathetically, that he [emphasis mine] doesn't want. to look more white, and should not have to look more white in order to keep his [emphasis mine] job. We have not yet begun the push toward civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say she'd rather look like herself than some "beautiful" young stranger. (55)

This passage is problematic because she is basically saying that misogyny and racism are two separate issues. Note Wolf's use of the male pronoun to refer to the hypothetical black employee. In a book of over 300 pages she scarcely addresses the intersection of white and male supremacy that spawns an Iron Maiden far more oppressive than one that merely demands youth and thinness. Reality is -

The Iron Maiden is a white woman.

In the section "Eugenics" in the chapter "Violence," Wolf makes an intriguing connection between cosmetic surgery to correct female "deformities" (fat, wrinkles, small/sagging breasts) and the attacks made by the medical community on other historically marginalized groups. The white male is standard and anything that deviates from him ugly, useless, and essentially inhuman.

Women are surgical candidates because we are considered inferior, an evaluation women share with other marginalized groups. Nonwhite features are "deformities" too: The Poutney Clinic's brochure offers "a Western appearance to the eyes" to the "Oriental Eyelid," which "lacks a well-defined supratarsal fold." It admires "the Caucasian or 'Western' nose," ridicules "Asian Noses," "Afro-Caribbean Noses ('a fat and rounded tip which needs correction'), and "Oriental Noses" ('the tip . . . too close to the face')." And "the Western nose that requires alteration invariably exhibits some of the characteristics of (nonwhite) noses . . . although the improvement needed is more subtle." White women, together with black and Asian women, undergo surgery not as a consequence of selfish vanity, but in reasonable reaction to physical discrimination. (264-265)

Unfortunately, she only carries this premise for two pages and then abandons it, despite the fact that white people are a worldwide minority with an overwhelmingly dominant media presence. The concerns of women of color are not a mere axillary issue to those of white women. Skin lightening creams, for example, are widely used in India and parts of Africa and Latin America. Colorism is entrenched in the African-American community, a legacy of white racism reinforced today by the black Beauty Myth. Hip-hop videos feature predominantly light-skinned models, a preference expressed by several rappers including Lil Wayne and Kanye West. ("If it wasn't for race mixing, there would be no video girls.") According to this article, skin lightening creams may contain high levels of the steroid corticosteroid (typically used to treat eczema and psoriasis and can only be safely used for up to two weeks), the steroid hydroquinone (banned in the EU for potential to cause skin cancer), and even mercury.

For years, Allison Ross rubbed in skin-lightening creams with names like Hyprogel and Fair & White. She said she wanted to even out and brighten the tone of her face, neck and hands. Mrs. Ross, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, also said that she used the lightening creams “to be more accepted in society.”

After months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores. . .

Users are not necessarily immigrants, said Dr. Eliot F. Battle Jr., who has a dermatology practice in Washington, where he treats side effects from lightening creams “not only containing corticosteroids, but mercury,” a poison that can damage the nervous system. The patients are “Ph.D.’s to women from corporate America, teachers to engineers — the entire broad spectrum of women of color,” Dr. Battle said. (New York Times)

While Wolf rightfully points to the use of computer manipulation to alter women's bodies to a surreal extent, never does she mention what can be done to redesign and erase an individual's racial and cultural identity.

Via Womanist Musings
Wolf points to the economic costs of the Beauty Myth as additional money drained from women for extra maintenance to appear socially and professionally presentable. Apparently she hasn't noticed that black women worldwide – who on average earn even less than their white counterparts – are all but required to spend hundreds of dollars over a lifetime on heat styling and chemicals to alter their hair. These processes can burn the scalp and lead to permanent hair loss in the long term, leaving many black women in a "damned if you do damned if you don't" position. From the blog What Tami Said:

My beautiful, straightened hair came at a price. It meant ears burned by slipped hot combs and scars from harsh chemicals. It meant avoiding active play and swimming pools, lest dreaded moisture make my hair "go back." It meant having a relaxer eat away at the back of my long hair until barely an inch was left. It meant subtly learning that my natural physical attributes were unacceptable.

If beauty is a prerequisite for employment, it would be pertinent to bring up the historical controversy surrounding natural black hair – a controversy that affects black women primarily because it is they who usually wear their hair long. Natural black hairstyles, such as dreadlocks and the Afro, are seen as messy, "savage," or overtly political and therefore unsuitable for a professional setting.

Asian women, meanwhile, are more likely to have cosmetic surgery than any other group.

We’ve all had those awful moments of realization: We have our mother’s moon face. A third-world flat nose. Our dad’s beady-little almond eyes. Sausage knees. A flat ass. Non-existent cheekbones. Five feet of tiny height. Or whatever else is wrong with us, that can be magically assessed in a highly unforgiving full-length mirror.

If you want to discuss the dehumanization of women into living Barbie dolls - mass-produced and commercialized - you would do well to bring up the fetishization of Asian women as geisha dolls and inscrutably exotic Dragon Ladies that persists to this day.

Looking back, I think Naomi Wolf laid the groundwork for other women to build upon. She erases and oversimplifies (she exaggerates at times and some of her eating disorder statistics are obviously inflated) but the foundation is there. The Beauty Myth angers and inspires but is by no means anti-beauty: on the contrary, she celebrates the innate drive in all of us to adorn, take pride in our appearance, and own our sexuality. Unfortunately, she does go deep enough and The Beauty Myth is best read alongside other, similar, later works. Feminist/womanist blogs are a great place to start. Any other recommendations?

A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . . What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

"I kept wishing Snooky had come back to teach at Kahana. . ."

2011-08-30T19:45:00.003-04:00

I'd go to talk to him. He was the only guy who helped you to see things as they were out there. The others ignored your questions or what they saw out there, or tried to make you see only the things they wanted you to see. He talked of freedom, while everybody else talked of duty and obligation.

Milton Muryama (1923-) was born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrants. When he was 12 his family moved to a sugar plantation at Pu'ukoli'i, a company town that no longer exists. His writings later drew much inspiration from there, including 1975's All I Asking for is My Body. Muryama received his B.A. from the University of Hawai'i in English and philosophy in 1947, followed by a master's in Chinese and Japanese from Columbia in 1950.

All I Asking for is My Body follows the life of Kiyo from fourth grade to his entry into the armed forces to fight on the European front in World War II. His father is an unsuccessful fisherman turned plantation worker and his mother sews kimonos. Despite their hard work, the family struggles to get by, with an inherited debt of $6,000 hanging over their heads. As Kiyo grows older, the proverbial "East-West" divide is increasingly pronounced and emphasized by the explosive outbursts of his older brother, Toshio. Their parents stress filial piety, obedience to rank, and social harmony, while mainstream culture promises personal independence. The subsequent dilemma is familiar to anyone who has read other works by second-generation Americans such as Anzia Yezierska, who, like Toshio, struggled violently against what she perceived as the limitations imposed upon her by the customs of the Old Country.

She was acting too damn haolified [white/American]. Whenever anyone spoke goody-good English outside of school, we razzed them. "You think you haole, eh?" "Maybe you think you shit ice cream, eh?" Lots of them talked nasally to hide the pidgin accent. At the same time the radio and haole newspapers were saying over and over, "Be American. Speak English." Pidgin was foreign. And whenever there was a debate about statehood for Hawaii over the radio, they always came back to the same question, "What about the Japanese and Japanese-Americans? They're foreign, their language and culture are foreign, they can't be assimilated, they can't even speak English after eight years of grade school. What if there's a war with Japan? Whom will the AJA's fight for?" Of the 350,000 people in Hawaii, 150,000 were Japanese.

Pointing out elsewhere that practically the only options for educated Japanese-Americans were as teachers or small business owners, Muryama also brings to light an issue glossed over by Yezierska, a Jewish Russian-American. While she would have faced oppression as a Jew, an Eastern European, and a woman, she has passing privileges and would eventually have white privilege as well (see Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color). A person of color does not, and will always be seen as an outsider, particularly if one is of East Asian descent. Ronald Takaki, another Japanese-American from Hawaii, opens A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America with an account of a taxi driver who complimented him on his English and asked where he was from. Takaki's family has been in the United States for almost a century.

The issues of heritage and assimilation faced by ethnic/non-white Americans, particularly recent arrivals, are evident in Murayama's very title. All I Asking for is My Body is pidgin English spoken by the Japanese- and Filipino-American sugar plantation workers. As Kiyo explains, he and his friends speak three languages: Japanese at home, "goody-good" English at school, and pidgin for casual conversation. As with Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrative voice is standard English which contrasts sharply with the dialogue, a disparity argued by Henry Louis Gates to represent a psychological fragmentation similar to W.E.B. Du Bois's ideas of the double-consciousness. As the narrator in this case is Kiyo - as opposed to Hurston's omniscient third person - his colloquial voice renders the divide more organic and less jarring. In fact, it seems to be a synthesis of sorts. All I Asking actually won Muryama praise for his skillful use of pidgin in a manner that was still understandable to a general readership. Kiyo can be said to represent someone who holds the possibility of success, even in a country that Others his body. The ending of All I Asking for is a hopeful one that promises new beginning.

Though not well received when it was initially published, All I Asking for is My Body received critical acclaim when reissued in 1988 and went on to win that year's American Book Award. A prequel called Five Years on a Rock came out in 1994. Unlike Anzia Yezierksa's overwrought drama, All I Asking for unfolds organically and offers a fascinating portrayal of daily life on a Hawaiian sugar plantation in the 1930s. Makes for a great companion to I Hotel.

The 78-Square Foot Studio

2011-08-10T21:56:00.003-04:00

In Manhattan, naturally.

I love this! Americans have way too much crap in houses that are way too big and car-dependent. My own studio is a little over 300 square feet and is just right.

Via Apartment Therapy

"My posting to China has taught me what greatness and what misery a soldier can know:"

2011-08-08T18:41:00.004-04:00

. . . on orders he moves from one place to the next without knowing where he is going or why. A pawn among many others. He lives and dies anonymously in the name of a greater victory. The game of go is changing me into a senior officer who uses his men coldly and with calculation: the stones make their steady progress, many condemned to die for the sake of a wider strategy.

Shan Sa (1972-) was born in Beijing. She moved to Paris in 1990 and studied art for two years under the painter Balthus. Her debut novel Les quatre vies du saule won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 1998, which was followed by the 2001 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for La Joueuse de Go (The Girl Who Played Go). Sa is also a painter who has exhibited in Paris, New York, and Shanghai.

The Girl Who Played Go (translated from French by Adriana Hunter) is a star-crossed love story set in occupied Manchuria in the late 1930s. Its voices alternate between two nameless protagonists born worlds apart but destined to collide in a cruel gesture of fate. The first is a Chinese schoolgirl from a worldly but faded aristocratic family. Nearing her sixteenth birthday, her typical teenaged pastimes take a dangerous edge as her newfound sexuality pulls her into a love triangle with two resistance fighters. The second is a Japanese soldier in his early twenties whose relentless focus on honor and national glory is turning him into a war criminal. In an effort to flush out underground "terrorist" cells, the soldier's Captain has ordered him to pose as a Chinese civilian and infiltrate the go square, which the Captain believes is "just a camouflage: it's there on that square, as they pretend to play their war game, that our enemies are putting together their twisted strategies." Both narrators are skilled at this ancient contest of will and intellect and commence a long, drawn-out game that has them seeing one another with greater frequency, even as the situation around them steadily worsens.

Sa is one of those rare authors able to speak volumes with deft, sparse prose. Every word is chosen carefully with none wasted on extraneous exposition or flowery description. Her unflinching portrayal of war cuts like a razor. Most writers would have turned this scenario into a treacly (and not to mention offensive) BRING ME TOOO LIIIIIIIFE story of a Darth Vader type who "still has good in him" and the Love of a Virtuous Woman. Sa brings us instead a pair of complex and often unsympathetic characters whose relationship is never anything grander than two strangers making hesitant contact. Indeed, the love story is actually secondary to the war itself in fitting with the game of go as a metaphor for the insignificance of the individual in life-and-death struggles for conquest and freedom. Sa sacrifices none of her realism to starry-eyed fantasy and the ending is inevitable from the beginning.

The Girl Who Played Go is a powerful work. Though not marketed as YA, older teens will relate to the girl's adolescent struggle for self-realization, which, along with the Marxist idealism of the Chinese resistance, foreshadows the upheavals of Maoism and its attacks on tradition. In fact, she is one of the strongest and most memorable female protagonists I have come across in some time. Her male counterpart is no cardboard cutout either. His chapters reveal a growing dissonance between his patriotic values and the brutalities regularly committed by his comrades. The Girl Who Played Go is a study in contrasts: the dehumanization of war revealed through a highly intimate look into the hearts and minds of two individuals. Highly recommended.

Trigger warning for a graphic torture scene.

Note on the translation: This is the second French novel translated by Adriana Hunter I have read and once again, her work is flawless. The first was Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea, another dark story that will haunt its reader afterward. I will definitely keep my eye out for more Hunter translations in the future.

Mini Porch Makeover

2011-08-03T07:51:00.002-04:00

I live in an ugly house on a beautiful Edwardian street. As a mere studio tenant, there is little I can do about a paint color that can only be described as a "puce-yellow" that covers even the intricately carved architectural panels and extends to the wrought iron railing. The landscaping consists of "giant generic bush."

But as you can see, the house does have a tiny front porch with an interesting wedge-shaped alcove. Back in June I noticed that a local thrift store selling a glass-topped outdoor table and was suddenly inspired. So I bought it along with a vintage hand-stitched tablecloth. I am usually not one for fake flowers, but this vase and small bouquet matched the tablecloth and seemed to complete the look.

At the time, the porch was adorned solely with three pitiful red plastic chairs that had been out there all winter. These sufficed for a few days before the same thrift store acquired a pair of old wrought iron chairs! I sanded and then spray-painted them a bright cherry red and was thus able to retire two of the ugly plastic ones to the basement. The finishing touches were an Italian pot full of bamboo sticks I bought from a Mid-Century Modern antique store and a hanging flower basket.

Total cost was around $50. I believe I saved the most money buying all secondhand, which is generally how I prefer to get "new" stuff. Buying used/vintage is basically a form of recycling and is much better for the environment than buying a brand-new item when hundreds of versions are already floating around in places like Craigslist and garage sales. I have also found that the little setup replicates that book-friendly relaxing vibe I get at independent coffeehouses, of which there are many within walking distance. I now have a nice reading place that doesn't demand a $3 latte for use.

There is also this little side garden that was begun by my apartment's previous tenant, who planted some mint, daisies, and these little yellow flowers and added a stone dog statue. I added another yellow flower plant I got through my workplace's annual "free plant exchange" and bought the big iron flower from a local store that sells original American handicrafts. This photo was taken back in June. The garden has since grown enormously and is blooming all over the place. Although I still sincerely wish the landlords would at least paint the trimming already, I am very pleased with what I was to do on a limited budget to increase my home's curb appeal. I may not own the property but I do live in it.

This post was prompted by Emily's sharing of her new "reading + knitting space."

Top 10 Trends I'd Like to See More/Less Of

2011-08-02T19:52:00.001-04:00

More

5. Steampunk

I think there's already plenty out there and I just need to read it. Love love LOVE steampunk fashion.

4. Standalones

There are so many series out there already and most of us really don't have the time.

3. Indie Bookstores

Do yourself and your local economy a favor!

2. Cthulhu Mythos

OF COURSE. Steampunk Cthulhu, now there's a story!

1. International Literature

Because America doesn't read nearly enough.

Less

5. eBooks

Meh.

4. "Chick Lit"

Insulting the intelligence of women everywhere.

3. Twilight

Please go away and take your diehard fangirls with you.

2. "Celebrity" Novels

How the hell does a piece of tripe allegedly written by Snooki end up as a New York Times bestseller? ENOUGH!

1. Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance

Look, I love me some True Blood but this is getting ridiculous! Most of the stuff is clichéd and cheesy as hell.

"the world's hidden symmetry"

2011-07-31T19:50:00.003-04:00

Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

Orhan Pamuk (1952-) is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2010 Norman Mailer Lifetime Achievement Award in the United States. With over seven million books sold in fifty languages, he is Turkey's bestselling writer. In 2005 Pamuk was jailed for taking publicly about Armenian Genocide and the mass killing of Kurds, prompting an international outcry and doubts about Turkey's future in the European Union. A statement supporting Pamuk was signed by José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Three years later the lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, who had brought the charges, was arrested along with several other ultra-nationalists for plotting a series of assassinations. It is believed that Pamuk was among their intended targets.

The tumultuous and fractured nature of Turkish society forms the basis of Pamuk's 2002 novel Kar, (translated by Maureen Freely), the Turkish word for "snow" that is played with throughout the story. We open with the poet Ka's return from exile in Germany to Kars, an impoverished city in eastern Anatolia. He has been assigned by a socialist paper called Republican to report on the recent rash of suicides of "born-again" Muslim girls forbidden to wear their headscarves in schools and other institutions. Though considered a backwater today, Kars is rich in Ottoman, Kurdish, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Greek history. In the deep winter snow it is a bleak, run-down place that still boasts magnificent buildings recalling its glory days as a trading hub and cultural nexus. Now masses of unemployed men congregate around television in dingy teahouses and tensions run high. Periodic outbursts of violence are not uncommon. Ka's arrival also coincides with a massive blizzard that cuts Kars off from the rest of the world and creates an environment akin to a pressure cooker. It is a Turkish microcosm, complete with its own mini-coup.

Ka's inquiry opens a veritable Pandora's Box involving not only political Islam, but also radical Islam, Kurdish rebellion, Marxism, secularism, and the clash between traditional and Western values. Despite his past as a leftist student, Ka has no current ideological attachments, which allows him to function as a mediator of sorts between the city's various factions. Meanwhile, he longs for the hand of fair İpek, an old friend who runs a hotel with her father, a retired leftist named Turgut Bey, and her sister, Kadife, the leader of the so-called "head-scarf girls" whose lover Blue is wanted by the state as an alleged terrorist leader. To top it off, a disgraced actor named Sunay has seized power in the name of secularism and nationalism and instituted a brutal crackdown on Islamic and Kurdish activity. He is the closest thing to a villain in this deeply complex tale, as the previously warring political groups temporarily unite in opposition to the military repression. The rich tapestry of beliefs, loyalties, friendships, and love affairs inspires a burst of creativity in Ka, who seems detached from the events surrounding him even as he is drawn further in. A poet longing above all for his own happiness, Ka embodies the difficult relationship between Western notions of art and individualism and his homeland's demand that he take a side. A revered sheik bluntly rejects his desire for a private relationship with a God best revealed in the beauty of falling snow.

We soon learn that the narrator is in fact Ka's novelist friend Orhan, who is himself acting as an investigative reporter some four years later following Ka's murder in Frankfort. Snow is Orhan's reconstruction based on his interviews with the various characters and the notes Ka left behind. This further reinforces Pamuk's exploration of the interaction between fiction and reality and the unfolding of a Creator's hidden pattern. (Note the character Orhan sharing a name with his author.) Sunay uses political theater both to jumpstart his coup (all too late did the audience realize the soldiers were real and the guns loaded) and, later on, as a propaganda tool starring Kadife, who has promised to bare her head onstage in exchange for Blue's release. One of Ka's notebooks reveals a diagram based on the six-sided snowflake - made up of the triple axes of Reason, Imagination, and Memory - the hidden symmetry of the world on which he has positioned all the poems written in Kars. In the center is "I, Ka." Each person is as unique as the snowflake, Ka believes, flourishing for a brief time before fading away.

The rich layers of Snow make for a vivid introduction to contemporary Turkish politics and pressing social issues. I am bothered, however, by what appears to be Orhan Pamuk's appropriation of women's experiences to make a point about Islam v. secularism. I could not find any information on the Web about Turkish Muslim women committing suicide over the headscarf controversy. What I found instead was that the suicide epidemic, which is occurring in Batman not Kars, is a new form of honor killing, often for reasons as trivial and innocent as light flirtation or wanting to see a movie. In anticipation of joining the European Union, Turkey has tightened the penalties for this egregious human rights abuse, which has prompted families to urge their "dishonored" daughters to kill themselves rather than risk losing two children. One method is to lock the girl in a room with rat poison, a gun, or a noose until the deed is done. So maybe there's something I'm missing here, which is entirely possible, but it looks like Pamuk took considerable poetic license, which is pretty disrespectful to the victims. If anyone out there knows more about this topic, please don't hesitate to enlighten me.

There are also problems with pacing. Snow is a character-driven story and as such runs the risk of getting bogged down with naval-gazing. Unfortunately, the trap is unavoided and, as I noted yesterday, the result is an overlong novel (426 pages) that seriously drags. Still, I am glad to have read it but can't say I plan on picking up more Pamuk in the future. To be fair, though, it was a New York Time Book Review Best Book of the Year and counts John Updike and Margaret Atwood among its admirers.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow was my reading selection for the month of July. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here. Other participants this month include:

Emily @ Evening All Afternoon
JoV @ Bibliojunkie
Richard @ Caravana de Recuerdos
Sara @ Wordy Evidence of the Fact

Snow Update

2011-07-30T07:10:00.002-04:00

Well, as some of you have mentioned, this book goes veeerrrry slooooowly. I'm about thirty pages from the end so I should have my post out today. *drags feet*

Top 10 8 Books That Tackle Tough Issues

2011-07-26T18:31:00.000-04:00

8. Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

A character-driven examination of race, class, and power on an impoverished Caribbean island in the late 1960s. Subtle but eye-opening.

7. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Despite my dislike of Herland, this is one disturbing look at the effects of well-minded paternalism mixed with post-partum depression. Still a great feminist text that resonates today.

6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Problematic (to put it mildly) by today's standards but still a chilling examination of the impact of imperialism on the imperializers. And then you go on Wikipedia and learn that the Congo Free State was even worse than what Conrad described.

5. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood

The reality of what independence has meant for Kenya. A heavy-handed but powerful attack on the new ruling elite left in place by the European colonists to continue the exploitation.

4. Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

It's about a WWI vet whose arms, legs, and face have been blown off. It's, like, maybe kind of anti-war. Just a little. </sarcasm>

3. Mathias Énard, Zone

A brutal stream-of-conscious narrative about the perpetual warzone that is the Mediterranean.

2. Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go

One of my recent reads, this coming-of-age story, set in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation, explores the effects of war on young people, whether they're civilians or invading soldiers. Beautifully written and tragic, I really need to get a post out on this one.

1. Roberto Bolaño, 2666

A hard look at the ongoing rapes and murders of hundreds and hundreds of women in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, and the society that enables such crimes.

More on Machen and Women

2011-07-24T11:29:00.005-04:00

From Arthur Machen's short story "The White People," written sometime in the 1890s:

"But shouldn't we experience a certain horror - a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang - in the mere presence of an evil man?"

"We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason."

Women are like children and animals and lack proper civilization. Riiiiight. Again, this type of shit is why I'm actually glad Lovecraft had so few female characters.

"What kind of haunted house is this that you live in, Erik?"

2011-07-20T20:35:00.002-04:00

. . . She thought of the neighbors, could see the stairwell in her mind's eye. That stark, unpleasant light when she emerged from the lift. When she came home tonight she'd had a momentary urge to creep up to Mrs. Malmer's door and listen. The memory almost made her smile. Was it something to do with her pregnancy? Anonymous phone calls. Mrs. Malmer's midnight masses. She was smiling now.

Åke Edwardson (1953-) of Gothenberg, Sweden has won three awards from the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers. The ten novels of his Chief Inspector Erik Winter series have been translated into twenty languages.

Despite my current celebration of the joys and freedom of summer, and not to mention my disdain for New York's harsh winters, I nevertheless found myself with a very wintery book. Sun and Shadow (Sol och skugga, translated by Laurie Thompson) was published in 1999 and is set in September through January of that same year. Anyone old enough will remember the excitement for the approaching millennium tinged with fear of a Y2K disaster. Although the latter is never mentioned, a sense of disquiet underlies the city of Göteborg (Gothenburg) that is further heightened by a horrifying double murder. A couple has been found dead in their apartment, their heads removed and switched, with the proverbial message in blood on the wall. Enter the appropriately-named Erik Winter, the youngest police chief in Sweden, currently dealing with his father's death and girlfriend Angela's pregnancy.

Sun and Shadow is distinctively northern in mood: cool and stark. Walking the line between contemporary and historical fiction, it has the feel of another era when the world stood waiting with both dread and anticipation. The murders and the ominous events surrounding them play off one another as a series of doubles: the Scandinavian cold and Spanish heat, Winter's hopefulness and another's despondence, family happiness and family dysfunction, birth and death. While daily life goes on, Göteborg has its seamy side as well: alcoholism, swingers, and expressions of violence in morbid fashion shoots and that characteristic Scandinavian metal, which by the way I love. The killer apparently has a fetish some obscure band described as "[sounding] like something from another world" with a drummer "having an epileptic fit" and a cement mixer thrown in. For maximum Scandinavian scary-beautiful, I'm thinking early Tristania.

Those wondering how a peaceful land like Scandinavia ever produced such music may also wonder at the explosion of Scandinavian crime/detective fiction (thanks in no small part to Stieg Larsson). Critics have pointed to the perceived failure of the welfare state and immigration as popular inspiration, evoking wealthy, progressive countries floating atop turbulent undercurrents. Despite its cast of middle-class native Swedes, Sun and Shadow reveals these tensions as well and may be considered a good example of its genre. A good snowy day book, but a literary one.

Fun Times in the Summertime

2011-07-18T21:21:00.009-04:00

Us Western and Upstate New Yorkers like to moan about the winter, and rightfully so. But this brief period of warm summer days makes it all worthwhile.

I have been so busy!

I love urban living. Love it. You will NEVER get me back into the suburbs, where all the McMansions look the same and everyone shops at Big Box Stores and you have to drive everywhere. Or to the countryside, which in my experience has been synonymous with isolation. Here I have three farmer's markets (one of which was voted the Best Large Farmer's Market in the country twice), many wonderful boutiques, parks, coffeehouses galore, and a variety of events and festivals all within walking/biking distance. The houses here, including the ones divided into apartments (like mine), are all beautiful examples of early twentieth-century architecture with great emphasis on curb appeal. Nothing like a simple stroll through a lovely neighborhood topped with a stop for cappuccino at a funky cafe.

The pictures above (which are not mine) are from our annual GLBTQI Pride Parade. With the passage of same-sex marriage in New York State, this year's celebration was particularly special. If you have never been to a Pride Parade, go. The atmosphere is like Christmas: everyone partying with strangers and good will all around. It was right on my street and attracted the most diverse crowd of people I have ever seen anywhere. All ages, races, gender orientations, and sexualities just hanging out, drinking, blasting music, and cheering as the floats went by. Next day was the Pride Picnic in the park by the river. First held in 1972, the picnic has become a local institution attracting some 3,000 people over a six-hour period. There were vendors, tasty food, and a dance pavilion. I was actually there as a volunteer for a two-hour clean-up shift. I was supposed to change the bags that were getting full but took it upon myself to remove the recyclables from the trash and place them in the proper receptacles. (I care about the environment that much.) But still, it was a great time and the hot, sunny weather was absolutely perfect. I already can't wait for next year.

The only people not having a good time that weekend were the fire-and-brimstone protestors who positioned themselves mid-route at the parade and waved their silly little signs. They looked so lonesome and pathetic that most people just laughed. I wonder if it's ever occurred to them that they're just part of the attraction. ("Ooooh look! Christian whackos like we see on TV!") Parade veterans call it the "holy gauntlet."

Once that volunteering was finished I rode my bike along the river path and over the bridge and arrived at the co-op where some friends of mine live. They were about to leave for yet another festival, this one put on by the local independent coffeehouse chain. This is a smaller event held in the parking lot of their flagship location featuring artisans and live bands. From there we went to an authentic English pub for a birthday. Over the course of that weekend I ate 1 pint of ice cream, a funnel cake the size of a dinner plate, a large saucer of crème brûlé, a 16-oz. can of Mike's Harder Lemonade, and two rum & Cokes. But I walk and ride my bike everywhere so it's okay. Much apologies for the silence but it is so hard to sit inside and type when there are so many places to go and things to do. But I do get to read outside.

The season holds yet more festivals and joyfulness ahead, and not to mention general fun times. Oh how my winters will evermore be filled with the longing for happier days ahead.

Update: And Shakespeare in the Park! How could I have forgotten to mention that amazing performance of Othello, featuring a most Palpatine-esque Iago?

Arthur Machen, Monstrous Matrons, and Other Eldritch Things Man Was Not Meant to Know

2011-06-29T20:18:00.007-04:00

"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late; we had better go in."

"Yes, I married, Villiers. I met a girl, a girl of the most wonderful and most strange beauty, at the house of some people whom I knew. . . My friends had come to know her at Florence; she told them she was an orphan, the child of an English father and an Italian mother, and she charmed them as she charmed me. The first time I saw her was at an evening party. I was standing by the door talking to a friend, when suddenly above the hum and babble of conversation I heard a voice which seemed to thrill to my heart. She was singing an Italian song. I was introduced to her that evening, and in three months I married Helen. Villiers, that woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul."

"Everyone who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have spoken to a man who saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn't tell why."

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was born in Wales to a poor vicar. He left for London to seek his literary fortune but found mixed success, although a surprise inheritance sustained him comfortably for a time. He took up acting and associated briefly with the Aleister Crowley circle, though mostly out of curiosity. After a brief period of popularity in the 1920s, Machen's fortunes faded, but on the event of his eightieth birthday a literary appeal was made to formally recognize him as a distinguished man of letters. Signers included T.S. Eliot, Bernard Shaw, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, and John Masefield. Its success gave Machen's final years a long-sought security.*

Much more so than Robert W. Chambers, Machen was an enormous influence on H.P. Lovecraft. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft praised "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder" (from the episodic novel The Three Imposters) as "perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver" and used them as the basis for his own stories "Cool Air" and "The Colour Out of Space." Machen's most famous work, the 1894 novella The Great God Pan, inspired Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," which shares many significant plot points and even gives its predecessor a shout-out. ("Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal!") More recently The Great God Pan has been said by Stephen King to be "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language" that cost him several sleepless nights and deeply influenced his 2008 novella N.

As part of my Year of Lovecraft I purchased a copy of the anthology The Three Imposters and Other Stories:Vol. 1 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu fiction line. It contains The Great God Pan, "The Inmost Light," "The Shining Pyramid," and The Three Imposters; or, The Transmutations. According to editor S.T. Joshi (a leading Lovecraft scholar and editor of the Chambers collection as well), Machen was a "religious mystic, [for whom] the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects - the spiritual life and its corollary, art - where it had no place." In his 1902 treatise Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature Machen criticizes "such writers as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackery for work that is too much under the control of the conscious reason and not sufficiently open to the wonder, mystery, and 'ecstasy' of life." Machen can perhaps be called a Dark Romantic for whom nature was a chaotic, untrammeled force of creation and destruction, of joy and madness.

Machen's concept of nature is basically horror's original Eldritch Abomination, a special type of Cosmic Horror made famous by such Lovecraftian entities as Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. In fact, the latter is best known for its role in "The Dunwich Horror," in which the godlike entity impregnates a human woman and brings forth a monstrous half-human hybrid. The key trait of the Eldritch Abomination is that it is above and beyond our comprehension - even to see one is enough to shatter the human mind. They are rarely actively evil; rather, the havoc they wreak is indirect, akin to a human accidentally crushing some bugs while performing a mundane task. Encounters with an Eldritch Abomination are often the result of meddling in things Humanity Was Not Meant To Know, such as Dr. Raymond's experiment on Mary in The Great God Pan which would enable her to "see Pan." Originally the Greek God of Nature, Machen's Pan is the true formless form of the universe.

"We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form."

Her single glimpse of Pan drives Mary insane and, as with Lovecraft's Lavinia Whateley later on, somehow results in a pregnancy. While Wilbur Whateley was a repulsive man with tentacles, Machen's Helen Vaughan is a beautiful but sinister woman who seduces prominent men and drives them to suicide. The misogyny is blazingingly obvious: Helen, under her alias "Mrs. Beaumont," is a single, independent woman with no authoritative male attachments - no husband, father, or brother. Machen may have been racy for his time, but his portrayal of liberated female sexuality only reinforces the Victorian status quo. As Harry Markov puts it in his review of the Cthulhurotica anthology:

Sex is strength for women in “Cthulhurotica.” Their sensuality is a tool. What Everett doesn’t explain, however, is why the women in the Lovecraftian universe are ready to transition from the ‘uninitiated’ – sexually and in the sense of knowing the world – to ‘initiated’ – accepting the layers hidden within our world and coming back stronger from meeting the horrors. Well, historically speaking women were demonized because of their sexuality. Lilith supposedly slept with demons and Succubi are sex-starved demons that drain men of their life force after sex. Sirens lured men to their death with an irresistible song. Circe tried to seduce Odysseus to his death. Witches were rumored to copulate with Satan himself. In the long run, myths and legends – told by men – stigmatized women’s sexuality as sin and demonized them to a point where it’s ingrained in our subconscious collective mind. It’s why women in the Lovecraftian universe can transition and accept, whereas men fail to and become insane.

The "monstrous female," Markov argues, achieves dominance through sexual destruction. In this respect, Machen's vision of the Pan mythos seems to draw heavily on that of Bacchus/Dionysus, whose wild female followers, the maenads, tore powerful men like Pentheus to shreds with their bare hands. Women in Classical myth, I remember my professor telling us, are always associated with hysteria and madness, even in ostensibly positive portrayals such as Sophocles's Antigone, in which the titular heroine is irrationally fixated on properly burying her dead brother in defiance of all danger and dire consequence. Dido in The Aeneid is another good example. And these associations are hardly a dead trope: the second season of True Blood featured a maenad named Maryann Forrester who fed off primal emotions and was said to have been known in ancient times as Lilith, Isis, and Gaia, a Greek goddess of earth. Here once again we have a connection between a "monstrous female" and destruction, raw nature, and crazed emotional states. Maryann driving all of Bon Temps to ecstatic madness further positions her as a literal threat to civilization.**

If women are intrinsically linked to an eldritch vision of nature, then men represent restraint and civility. The characters opposing Helen Vaughan and trying to stop her (by killing her) are all male. The other Machen stories included in the anthology center on English gentlemen stumbling into various occult mysteries, ranging from arcane rituals to a particularly nightmarish version of the Fair Folk. There is a vivid contrast between "the darkness of the thicket, the dance on the mountain-top, the scenes by lonely shores, in green vineyards, by rocks and desert places" and the urbane London flat, where a man of letters and a scientist converse about cryptic encounters with the strange people of the streets. For all their emerging awareness of the dark corners of the earth, however, Machen's heroes - such as Dyson, the recurring amateur detective - maintain their cultivated aristocracy. No one even Goes Mad from the Revelation, as usually happens in Lovecraft, although they may be shaken.

Which is not to say that only women in Machen are villainous. Dr. Lipsius in The Three Imposters is a truly diabolical figure that may remind modern readers of Senator Palpatine. But even then, his victim was seduced intellectually (as opposed to sexually or emotionally) by promises of ultimate knowledge. Where women are victims, this simply transforms them into infernal gateways. Both Mary and Mrs. Cradock ("The Novel of the Black Seal") bring forth monstrous children of rape. Mrs. Black from "The Inmost Light" obediently submits to the experimentation of yet another mad doctor, this one her husband, and is turned into something no longer human which must be destroyed. A possible exception to both villainy and victimization could be Miss Lally ("Black Seal"), who is rationally skeptical of Professor Gregg's obsession with the Fair Folk. But given the twist ending of The Three Imposters that dramatically alters our perception of the preceding stories, both her example and that of Mrs. Cradock are probably nullified.

Despite my complaints, though, I really did enjoy Arthur Machen, even more so than H.P. Lovecraft! Compared to Machen's subtlety and elegance, Lovecraft comes across as little more than the pulp writer he was. The big issue I have here is one most marginalized bodies (i.e. women, people of color, the GLBTQ community) face when reading fiction: that of how to enjoy literature, especially older literature, when you're likely to encounter stereotypes and prejudicial beliefs. I agree with one gay blogger who argues that it's usually better to be erased than to see yourself portrayed in an offensive manner. Given the sheer amount of FAIL Lovecraft displayed towards minority groups, I'm actually glad female characters are practically nonexistent in his works. It comes down to how many bumps you're willing to tolerate, I suppose. Along with Chambers, Machen could use more love, though not without a critical eye.

The Great God Pan can be read here. For "The Dunwich Horror," click here.

* Yes, I wrote the TV Tropes page for Arthur Machen and supplied most of the tropes. I did the same for "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." LOL I am such a dork.
** And on the Wild Mass Guessing page for True Blood, I even argued that Maryann Forrester was Helen Vaughan. TV Tropes will ruin your life.

"Lovecraft. . ."

2011-06-13T19:38:00.005-04:00

. . . it's bizarre that the guy had the word 'love' in his name, yet he was never a specialist on the subject . . . a failed marriage, a hermit's life . . . It's said that his best friends were his cats . . . strange. . . ("Found in a Trunk from Extremadura")

The Innsmouth Free Press is a Canadian micro-publisher of dark/supernatural fiction and horror, with a focus (as their name implies) on the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. They also have a wonderful website that includes a fictional Innsmouth newspaper online edition, articles and reviews, and a free triannual literary magazine. Historical Lovecraft, released in May, is their second book following the novel Fraterfamilias in 2010.

The submissions page for this short story anthology called for "Historical fiction with a Lovecraftian twist" (up to 1937, the year of Lovecraft's death) with an emphasis on multiculturalism. That last part especially caught my interest. His ideas may have been original, but Lovecraft was mired in deep racism that was excessive even by the standards of his own day. Most notably, the various cults and cosmic horrors they worship are associated with marginalized communities such as immigrants, the poor, the disabled and mentally ill, and racial and ethnic minorities. The deformed mutants and "blasphemous fish-frogs" of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" represent the dangers of miscegenation and the foreign pollution of Anglo-America, with a final revelation that recalls the infamous "one-drop rule." The sanity-shattering monstrousness of an Eldrtich Abominations comes from its sheer alienness rather than any special ability. At its core, Lovecraftian horror is about fear of the unknown and unfamiliar (and not to mention sex and seafood).

Historical Lovecraft, on the other hand, takes the Lovecraft out of New England and sets him down in Africa, Europe, China, Indonesia, Latin America, and the Middle East, where a Byzantine bishop, a Javanese medicine man, Laotian guides, Stalinist officials, and a Moche priestess face terrors from the stars above and from the earth and waters below. It's like that moment of recognition between the Polynesian medicine man and the Yankee sailors in Pierre Comtois's "The Old Ones' Signs" from Tales Out of Innsmouth: "He says he knew we would come around to see him sooner or later. That any normal man, even sickly looking white men, would be repulsed by what had happened to his own people and be compelled to seek out their own kind. . . We white men always think ourselves the superior of other races, and now we can see just how closely related we really are to them." It is no longer a threat of foreign freaks and their arcane gods threatening Massachusetts but a diverse array of humans dealing with powerful beings and dark forces in a variety of culturally-prescribed manners. Though not quite a deconstruction - scary things are still pretty scary - Historical Lovecraft explores how people from different backgrounds might deal with the reality of Cosmic Horror.

Despite the global setting, the stories together reveal a general procession from a "primitive" acceptance of the fantastic to the modern outlook that interprets the supernatural as unnatural violations of scientific law. The "Ancient History" and "Middle Ages" sections tend to place Cthulhu & Co. in the context of established practices and beliefs. Y.W. Purnomosidhi's "Pralaya: The Disaster" is unusual in that nothing Lovecraftian actually happens, but the primeval force of the Mount Merapi volcano is subtly likened to a sleeping monster (such as Cthulhu) that brings destruction upon its awakening. This pagan idea of nature as something alive and active in its own right is ironically revisited in Orrin Gray's "Black Hill," set in the oil fields of the American Midwest in the early 1900s. Possibly the most modern piece is Bradley H. Sinor's "The Second Theft of Alhazred's Manuscript," which follows Sherlock Holmes and Watson on the trail of a missing edition of the Necronomicon. Holmes's faith in science and logic simply does not allow room for old-fashioned superstition and other such nonsense. Even the extraordinary events of the case are blamed on a "hallucinogenic of some sort pumped into the room via the gas outlets."

Although most of the stories were unique and entertaining in their own ways, the crown jewel of the collection isn't until the very end. "Found in a Trunk from Extremadura" by Meddy Ligner (a French translation!) is a circular, non-linear narrative that it begins and ends with that trademark Lovecraftian madness. (It is also the only Mythos work I've ever read besides Lovecraft is Missing that includes the Master himself as a character without being hokey about it.) Also of note is Sarah Hans's "Shadows of the Darkest Jade," which inverts the old "Mighty Whitey vs. Savage Cultists" trope by putting a pair of Tibetan Buddhist monks in the role of civilized outsiders who stumble upon something too horrible to describe. Really the only story I disliked was "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins" by Molly Tanzer, which seemed intent on outdoing itself in shock value. Along with the "antiquated" prose it was more eye-rolling than anything else.

Historical Lovecraft is the first book from the Innsmouth Free Press that I've read and I was not disappointed. They are a great publisher with a commitment to increasing the visibility of women and people of color in speculative fiction and I salute them for it. Even if you don't get to one of their books, the website is still well worth a visit. Right now they are seeking submissions for another anthology called Future Lovecraft that sounds very exciting. Candle in the Window, a collection of Gothic tales, comes out in September.

Everyone already has a Cthulhu plushie! Buy cool Innsmouth stuff!

"Maybe bull running's a bit like boxing, . . ."

2011-06-08T19:35:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow Pamplona
By Jan van Mersbergen
Translated from Dutch by Laura Watkinson
189 pages
Peirene Press
June 6, 2011

But with a whole load of people against a bunch of mad bulls instead of just two men.

Jan van Mersbergen (1971-) is the author of five novels, beginning with De grasbijter in 2001. Number 4 was 2007's Morgen zjin we in Pamplona (Tomorrow Pamplona). In meantime he also writes for sports magazines and became editor of the literary magazine De Revisor in 2010.

Tomorrow Pamplona tells the story of Danny, a rising star in the boxing world until the violent end of a love affair forced him to flee. With no plan in mind, he hitches a ride with an insurance salesman named Robert, who is embarking on his annual excursion to the Pamplona bull run. To Robert, the rush and excitement represent a break from the routine of work and family. With a disaster behind him and nowhere to go, Danny agrees to face the bulls himself.

What stands out right away to the American reader is Robert and Danny's road trip from the Netherlands to Spain. The cross-country odyssey has long been a popular theme in our literature, from westward expansion in the nineteenth century to Jack Kerouac's On the Road and more recent works like Katia Noyes's Crashing America. At times, Tomorrow Pamplona feels familiar. There are run-down rest stops, little diners, and chance encounters with interesting individuals who leave their mark yet are never met again. But European nations are the size of American states, and their journey, though not a long one, takes Danny and Robert across international borders. There's a psychological dimension present you just don't get when you travel far but remain in the United States. Robert is leaving the country. Danny is fleeing it.

Flight, juxtaposed against fight, is the driving force behind Tomorrow Pamplona. The twin metaphors of boxing and bullfighting build off one another as recreational activities founded on those opposing instincts, the primordial responses to fear and danger. As van Mersbergen himself observes, "In a bull-run the thrill comes from escape. In a boxing match you look the opponent in the eye." There are moments of motion - the escape that jumpstarts the story, the car on the road, the bulls - and pauses in between, like the overnight stay at a park in France, characterized by its quiet nocturnal mood, and Danny's memories of his time with Ragna. There are also the images of the chickens idling besides their overturned truck and the passivity of the doomed cows in a trailer bound for a slaughterhouse, both of which throw into doubt the oft-heard judgment that facing adversary is preferable to escape. The choice between two options is not always black and white.

Van Mersbergen further reinforces his motif with solid, direct prose that has won him comparisons to Hemingway. While such praise is often overstated (see To Hell with Cronjé) I believe the reference is particularly apt in this case given the masculine narrative with its taciturn but wounded hero and inclusion of the Pamplona bull run. Still, Tomorrow Pamplona is hardly a repeat of The Sun Also Rises. The influence is subdued and even played with in a scene where a Spanish cafe owner laments American writers turning the fiesta into a global tourist trap. Tomorrow Pamplona stands quite on its own as a terse, taut exploration of the psychology of reaction. It's also a great gift idea for that guy who's hard to shop for.

Review Copy

"The modern waste land,"

2011-05-29T21:04:00.012-04:00

. . . as Eliot describes it, is a place where thought and naked desire have taken the place of feeling and comprehension, which have almost completely atrophied. This situation, as we have already seen, is difficult to grasp precisely because to 'grasp' it is to already have lost it, to have become like the characters in all of Eliot's early poems who can only think, not feel, who know too much but understand nothing. (107)

Gabriel Josipovici is an author, literary critic, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and Weidenfield Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford. His novel Moo Pak was The Wolves' selection for the month of July 2010.

Josipovici's 2009 non-fiction work, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, at times reiterates what has been said about Modernism already: namely, that it is art produced in reaction to a disillusionment with old forms arising from a disillusionment with the natural order of things. This creative weariness is said to have originated with the Industrial Revolution and crystallized with the discoveries of Darwin and Einstein which effectively demolished the old humanocentric universe. As H.P. Lovecraft memorably said, the consolidation of this new knowledge "will one day open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." He was also famously overwrought and possessed of a fantastic imagination, but his perception of a vast universe beyond human comprehension was shared by many in the early twentieth century.

I did a post awhile back comparing Lovecraft's cosmic outlook to that of Dante, having been impressed by the exquisite orderliness of The Divine Comedy compared to what I was used to in more recent literature. (With the exception of fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings which are also strictly fictional.) Dante's Christian/neo-Classical vision was a comforting one in which divine justice prevailed and eternal reward or punishment was bestowed upon all those deserving. It was in reading Paradiso that I began to feel a sense of loss or nostalgia that such a worldview was no longer possible except as rigid adherence to archaic dogma. To Josipovici, this is precisely the paradox at the heart of Modernism: both the longing for what is lost and the freedom that said loss enables.

Dante, working in an age when an ordered universe was taken for granted, could build his poem out of a hundred cantos precisely (three canticles of thirty-three cantos plus a prologue) and place his sinners and saints in carefully guarded positions in both Heaven and Hell, while drawing on a rich tradition to bring home to the reader how each of us can be saved and what steps need to be taken. By 1840 all that has long gone. All [Søren] Kierkegaard can do is to try and explore in every way imaginable the troubled heart and soul of the nineteenth-century man, one who has been given his freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life. (43)

Another example from music would be Haydn and Beethoven. The former was able to churn out hundreds of compositions since he was working within an established tradition that required obedience to prescribed forms. Beethoven, by contrast, started from scratch each time and for that reason produced only a few symphonies.

Although Kierkegaard and Beethoven are denizens of the nineteenth century, Josipovici differs from other critics by locating of the origins of Modernist thought much further back than is conventional. Certainly its manifestations were most prominent between about 1850 and 1950, Josipovici observes, but to limit Modernism to a single era is to risk turning it into just another movement or period in intellectual history. Modernism is a state of being: "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore something that will, from now on, always be with us" (11). The accepted story is that the rise of Protestantism and Humanism in the sixteenth century liberated Western civilization from the superstition and authority of the Middle Ages, thus paving the way for the Scientific Revolution and eventually the Industrial Revolution and the Modernism that developed as reaction to it. Josipovici argues instead that Protestantism and the Renaissance were symptoms of a shifting cultural landscape to which Martin Luther merely provided a focal point. He discusses a pair of engravings by Albrecht Dürer called Melencolia I and St. Jerome in his Study, both completed in 1514. The former seems to already depict that "disenchantment with the world" so closely identified with Modernism, especially as contrasted to the latter, which evokes a sense of peace and order, of the saint at one with God.

This cosmic/artistic assurance is one of Josipovici's primary themes, appearing as a characteristic of "old-fashioned" art, regardless of the era in which it was actually produced. In fact, Josipovici attributes it to many living writers, composers, and painters whose art is, well, artificial: self-contained and dead. The very foundation of Modernism is art's interrogation of its own purpose in the absence of an established tradition. The "dreariness of 'the marquis went out at five'" is scorned by writers who "hunger for that 'relentless contact"' and a "form of fiction which transcends the anecdotal" (166). Josipovici relies mostly on case studies here, such as that of Cézanne, who was an enormous influence on ensuing generations of avant-garde painters.
According to art critic Maurice Merleau-Ponty, landscape painting before Cézanne consisted of flat representation that effectively steamrolled multiple visual impressions into a unified whole.

Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectable decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passes without hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistance to this supremely easy movement. (93)

Josipovici links this to the use of the passé simple (or récit) in the traditional novel which implies, according to critic Roland Barthes, a hidden storyteller or chronicler and places the verb "in a casual chain, [that] participates in a group of actions which are of a piece and forward driven, it functions as the algebraic sign of an intention" (80). Such novels are neatly packaged, episodic, and bear no resemblance to real world's spontaneity and uncertainty.

To reduce our visual impressions to a singular view "kills their trembling life," says Merleau-Ponty (94). It was Cézanne who first realized that nature does not conform to the guidelines laid out in "how to paint" manuals and sought to portray on canvas how the mountain actually was and not how he, the painter, simply saw it. There is no such thing as background or foreground; these are narrative forms imposed upon nature to render it coherent to the human eye, just as the Right Hegelians used to whittle history down to a convenient tale to assert the historical inevitability of existing institutions (to give another instance of an artificial construct made to represent reality). While the struggle against the dead hand of contingency may be a futile one, Cézanne, according to Merleau-Ponty, was a successful genius whose landscapes depict an "emerging order" when the myriad "perspectival distortions" are viewed globally (95). As far as literature goes in this vein, Josipovici sees T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the momentary vision of an Everyman reflecting on his life in opposition to the ongoing enterprise of art itself: "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" goes the refrain. He rolls the bottoms of his flannel trousers and walks upon the beach, hearing the mermaids singing to each other but not to him, leaving Prufrock in the tenuous position of knowing what will give his life meaning but finding it just out of reach. The endcap "each to each," Josipovici observes, is circular and "turns in on itself" (126). The poem seems to disintegrate with the closing verses, reminding us that it only exists as long as we read it.

While again, Modernism may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, Josipovici argues convincingly that it is not. Nor is it necessarily the future of art that has rendered all conventional forms obsolete. As in Moo Pak, Josipovici takes aim at the current state of literary affairs by decrying Oprah-esque sob stories, Big Important Tomes about Bosnia and Rwanda, and the emptiness of contemporary British literature as a bunch of prep boys showing off their shock value. A particular offender is Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, written in 1941 during the invasion of France, and then forgotten at the bottom of a suitcase after Némirovsky, a Russian Jew who had converted to Catholicism, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. The novel's backstory is very interesting and tragic and all, Josipovici admits, but that hardly makes it a Great Book thanks to the "clichés of the middlebrow novel [used] without embarrassment, quickly filling in the background and sketching in her chosen representative family with the minimum of fuss, then cutting to the cat so as to convey the sense of ordinary life going on regardless of the great events that are unfolding" (168). The second passage he quotes demonstrates his point much better, as the "cadenced phrases," tidy description, and blatant symbolism jar badly with the chaos of battle. Josipovici contrasts Némirovsky to a WWI novel by Claude Simon, but I thought the stream-of-conscious ramblings of Mathias Énard's Zone would be another great illustration of his point.

Still, as with Moo Pak, I cannot help but to feel that there is silencing at work here – that Josipovici is telling survivors to go Modernist or shut up. It's quite contradictory that he feels Modernist literature to be closer to life yet is willing to dismiss authors with actual life experience that needs to be heard. And while I prefer more experimental literature myself and am especially partial to Modernist writers, I think it is a mistake to dismiss the traditional novel as somehow out of touch. Zone features a novel-in-a-novel told using conventional forms (passé simple, omniscient third person narration) that would be quite powerful and illuminating on its own. In fact, Énard's narrator identifies with it quite strongly, and there seems to be a strong case here for a diversity of voices and the legitimacy of traditional formats. By his own admission in the beginning, much of what Josipovici says here is subjective and a difference of opinion is encouraged. While I find his conclusions on the contemporary state of Modernism problematic, What Ever Happened to Modernism? is overall an enjoyable read that is scholarly yet never academic. Its case for Modernism's longer reach is a compelling one and quite accessible to a broad audience.

Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? was The Wolves' reading selection for May. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

I'm still here.

2011-05-29T17:16:00.003-04:00

I went to the mountains with my family on Friday and will return on Monday. Not only have I been busy with Memorial Weekend but my Internet connection is very sketchy. Am working on my Josipovici post using Word and will hopefully have it up later today.

Update: I have most of it done, actually, I'm just having difficulty writing my conclusion. I always have this problem.

Top 10 8 Books I Have Lied About

2011-05-24T18:35:00.001-04:00

It's been awhile since I've done one of these. This week's topic is books you deny having read, guilty pleasures you keep secret, books you pretend you've read, and other literary activities about which you have not been forthright. In no particular order:

8. Fan fiction

Believe it or not, some of it is damn good.

7. Star Trek books

I've never really hid this per se but I don't advertise it either.

6. V.C. Andrews

Let's make this clear: I DO NOT READ THESE BOOKS ANYMORE. That was a high school anomaly! And they wasn't even the original ones that she actually wrote - it was that formulaic crap churned out by ghost writer Andrew Neiderman. I cringe whenever I think about it.

5. Sweet Valley High series

I WAS ELEVEN OKAY???

4. Jean Baudrillard

French postmodern philosopher, theorist, cultural critic. I've talked about his ideas several times on this blog but I've never actually read him. I confess: all my information about Simulacra and Simulacron comes from Wikipedia.

3. Bentley Little, The Return

I bought this book in high school while on vacation. It was awful. Absolutely horrible. And yet - I occasionally come back to it. In retrospect, it was actually my first introduction to Lovecraftian horror, and I think what intrigued me about The Return is everything I've come to love about the Cthulhu Mythos: madness, ancient horrors, depraved cults worshiping godlike monsters, the vast unknowingness of the universe. So yeah, it's a cheap, silly ripoff, but one of an author I'm quite fond of.

2. Yaoi

I read, like, five mangas. And then I realized how stupid and problematic it was.

1. The Vagina Monologues

This one I feel guilty about. Even as a feminist, I have to admit I'm uncomfortable with it. Not because of the subject matter or the word "vagina" itself but because it sounds like Eva Ensler is just doing what misogynists have always done: reducing women to a sexual body part. I got into an argument about this in college and actually lied about reading it. I ended up bluffing my way through. Feel free to hate me.

"The key of joy is disobedience."

2011-05-19T19:48:00.003-04:00

"Eternitas" by Satyrian

Black horizons drape the autumn skies
The moon is rising, the night bird flies
We came from beyond the woods of ancient trees
New lively mortal
Passion bleeds

Gates of time arise in the night
From the cave of mystery and delight
Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light and dark
Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light turn dark

Until night's black velvet burns to crimson
Sister of the earth, thy moon's arisen
With love and knowledge drove our innocence
The key of joy is disobedience

Gates of time arise in the night
From the cave of mystery and delight
Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light and dark
Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light turn dark

We came from beyond the threshold of the infinite
New lively mortal, the warmth of passion bleeds

Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light and dark
Eternitas. . .
Owl of the nightfall fleets the sky
Eternitas. . .
Eternal gates of light turn dark
Eternitas. . .
Eternitas. . .
Eternitas. . .
Eternitas. . .

Bookshelves in the Bathroom?

2011-05-13T18:45:00.005-04:00

Apartment Therapy has an interesting theme going on. First it was "The Bathroom as a Room" then "Totally Gorgeous Toilets" and, most recently "Art in the Bathroom," among others. But this got my attention!

"Bookshelves in the Bathroom". Hmmm, you know, I love this photo. So very dreamy and serene. But realistically, I feel the same way as I did about that distressed walls inspiration post. They're lovely pictures and all and I would certainly put one in a frame on my wall, but they're just not liveable (unless said walls are in an old village in France or Italy). As far as the books go, the humidity will destroy them and the bookcase itself will probably just be out of place, like one of those "circle the items that don't belong here" picture games.

This looks like they didn't have enough room in elsewhere in the house. And then there's the manners issue. Seeing a stack of reading material in the bathroom is way TMI. Ugh.

An entire magazine rack? Really?

Great decor is marred.

I suppose this is more tasteful but . . . yeah, still not feelin' it. Look, if you want to have a big old bookshelf filled with antique leather volumes to go with the crumbling wall in the vintage bathroom of your medieval Tuscan villa . . . do take a picture and send it to me.

"It was hot and humid, the darkness sultry."

2011-05-10T20:46:00.007-04:00

. . . It was hard to keep my eyelids open. I wished I could sleep. I wasn't awake enough to fall asleep. And I wasn't really asleep enough to pull myself awake. Trapped in that space between drowsiness and sleep. Somebody once told me that in situations like this, the only option is to adapt. Otherwise, it becomes unbearable. The first step in adapting is to practice forgetfulness. Oblivion.

Rashid al-Daif was born in 1945 in Zhgarta, a region in northern Lebanon populated largely by Maronite Christians. Like many leftist, secular Christians, he spent the civil war in West Beirut, an area known as the "targeted zone" between political and religious loyalties. The experience left him disillusioned with Marxist analytical thought, which felt dry and hollow in the face of history's onslaught. I needed "confession, screaming, and holding pain up in the face of recklessness," he recalled, and subsequently "went back to literature." For only the language of literature, al-Daif found, is as volatile as reality itself. (From the introduction by translator Nirvana Tanoukhi.)

First published in 1986, the original Arabic title of Passage to Dusk is Fus'hah mustahdafah bayna al-nu'as walnawn, which transliterates into "a targeted, or intentional, zone or space, in between drowsiness and sleep." True to its al-Daif's creative philosophy, the story is unstable and constantly shifting. The narrator has returned home after a shell blew his arm off and landed him in the hospital. The building superintendent tells him that his cousin arrived several days ago with his pregnant, widowed sister-in-law and her young son, and that he has lodged them in the narrator's empty apartment. They're still there and he hopes he doesn't mind. But anything beyond that is a waking dream. The narrator spends most of the time in bed, where the feverish heat merges with his PTSD visions in a fugue of unending violence and sexual energy. His voice is muted but his words describe a world dominated by the forces of passion - for faith, party, people - that sweep everyone and everything along in all their tragic senselessness. Beirut is suspended, caught in a zone where the only thing that moves is the cycle of destruction.

At only 100 pages, Passage to Dusk is condensed to what feels like the dream of a single night. Bombs, bloodshed, falling buildings, and sectional warfare have been a universal story throughout the twentieth century, but al-Daif's surrealism is an unusual interpretation. Haunting and evocative, Passage to Dusk is best read in a single sitting to best drive home its visceral impact.

New Books from Around the World

2011-05-09T19:46:00.003-04:00

My TBR list for the next month or two. See, I go to this great secondhand bookstore right up the street from me intending to buy gifts for some upcoming birthdays, and instead I find all these great international titles and end up shopping for myself! (The first one, however, is the upcoming Peirene Press release, so that's a review copy.)

Moody Scandinavian thrillers and Asian coming-of-age seem to be the big themes.

Netherlands (2007)

A story about anger, aggression and the desire for intimacy by a rising star of modern Dutch literature.

A professional boxer and a family man meet by chance on a journey to the Pamplona Bull Run. The boxer is fleeing an unhappy love. The father hopes to escape his dull routine. Both know that, eventually, they will have to return to the place each calls “home”.

Egypt (1943)
Written in the 1940s, this novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz deals with the plight of impoverished classes in an old quarter of Cairo. The lives and situations depicted create an atmosphere of sadness and tragic realism. Indeed, few of the characters are happy or successful. Protagonist Hamida, an orphan raised by a foster mother, is drawn into prostitution. Kirsha, the owner of a cafe in the alley, is a drug addict and a lustful homosexual. Zaita makes a living by disfiguring people so that they can become successful beggars. Transcending time and place, the social issues treated here are relevant to many Arab countries today. With this satisfying tale, Mahfouz, often called the Charles Dickens of Arabic literature, achieves a high level of excellence as a novelist and storyteller. Highly recommended.

Germany (2000)
Nobel laureate Grass's deft new collection of stories thoroughly and intimately marks the passing of the 20th century. Comprising 100 monologues, each named after a year of the century and spoken by characters who represent a broad spectrum of German society, the work becomes the literary equivalent of a choral symphony. The stories include the reminiscences of ex-Nazis about their activities in 1934; a dead woman's perspective on Germany after the crumble of the Berlin Wall (1999); a delirious letter by the turn-of-the-century poet Else Lasker-Schüler (found by the story's narrator in a used book), in which she imagines herself to be 20 years younger than she is (1901); and the author's descriptions of his beleaguered personal life (1987). Several entries establish some continuity from year to year, while other segments clash brilliantly with each other. The volume progresses less like a narrative than like an argument, each year's oral history advancing the thesis that history and personal identity are inextricably linked. . . Grass (The Tin Drum) concludes with the memories of a 103-year-old woman who has been brought back to life by her novelist son for the purposes of his fiction. As she says: "I'm also looking forward to the year 2000. We'll see what comes of it... "

Sweden (1999)
Eric Winter, at 40, is Sweden's youngest chief inspector, but his brow is already starting to furrow in the manner of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander. In this American debut of what promises to be a superior procedural series, a plethora of seemingly insoluble problems contribute to Winter's sense of growing discontent: his father is dying in Spain; his pregnant girlfriend is moving into his apartment; and a bloody double murder suggests a serial killer. As in the Wallander series, the focus here lands not only on the hero but also on his entire team, as Edwardson details the slow grind of the investigative process. The action, beginning in fall 1999 and extending into spring 2000, effectively uses the Y2K panic to heighten the sense of troubled waters approaching that grips Winter and those around him. The comparison to Mankell is obvious, but in many ways, this series harkens further back, to Sjowall and Wahloo's early Martin Beck novels, in which another youngish Swedish inspector was beginning to realize that sometimes a crime's solution solves nothing.

Denmark (1992)
A stunning literary thriller in the tradition of Gorky Park and the novels of John Le Carré.

Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen is the daughter of a Danish doctor and an Inuit woman from Greenland. Raised in Greenland, she lives in Copenhagen and, as befits her ancestry, is an expert on snow. When one of her few friends, an Inuit boy, dies under mysterious circumstances, she refuses to believe it was an accident.

She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her involved. But Smilla persists, and as snow-covered Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation leads her from a fanatically religious accountant, to a tough-talking pathologist, to the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth. Finally, she boards a ship with an international cast of villains - and a large stash of cocaine - bound for a mysterious mission on an inhospitable island off Greenland.

China/France (2001)

As the Japanese military invades 1930s Manchuria, a young girl approaches her own sexual coming of age. Drawn into a complex triangle with two boys, she distracts herself from the onslaught of adulthood by playing the game of go with strangers in a public square - and yet the force of desire, like the occupation, proves inevitable. Unbeknownst to the girl who plays go, her most worthy and frequent opponent is a Japanese soldier in disguise. Captivated by her beauty as much as by her bold, unpredictable approach to the strategy game, the soldier finds his loyalties challenged. Is there room on the path to war for that most revolutionary of acts: falling in love?

Japan (1988)
In this translation of a best-selling novel first published in Japan in 1987, the young narrator, Mikage, moves into the apartment of a friend whose mother is murdered early in the tale. What seems like a coming-of-age melodrama quickly evolves into a deeply moving tale filled with unique characters and themes. Along the way, readers get a taste of contemporary Japan, with its mesh of popular American food and culture. Mikage addresses the role of death, loneliness, and personal as well as sexual identity through a set of striking circumstances and personal remembrances. "Moonlight Shadows," a novella included here, is a more haunting tale of loss and acceptance. In her simple and captive style, Yoshimoto confirms that art is perhaps the best ambassador among nations.

All reviews are from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

"I walked over to the radio and pressed the button that said Phonograph."

2011-05-04T20:19:00.013-04:00

The Guinea Pigs
By Ludvík Vaculík
Translated from Czech by Kača Poláčková
179 pages
Open Letter Press
May 17, 2011

. . . I turned off the speaker and locked the pickup arm. Then I went back to the table where Ruprecht was waiting. I carried him over to the phonograph and wondered what speed I should choose for him. First I tried thirty-three rpm. He huddled down on the turntable and made jerky movements with his head, but otherwise he didn't show any distinct attitude towards what was going on. In his voluntary helplessness, he was incapable of moving closer to the center of the revolving turntable, so that he might keep his nose from bumping against the rim of the phonograph. I was beginning to get made at him. I stopped the motor and changed the speed to seventy-six. But that was senseless; at that speed Ruprecht was swept off the turntable and he fell behind the pickup.

Ludvík Vaculík (1926-) is a Czech writer know internationally for his novels The Axe and The Guinea Pigs, as well as a volume of essays called A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator. A progressive member of Czechoslovakia's Communist party, he was ousted for his manifesto Two Thousand Words that had galvanized the Czech people during the Prague Spring of 1968 and alarmed the Soviet Union. For decades Vaculík faced constant persecution and his writings were censored. From 1971 to 1989 he ran a samizdat publishing house called Padlock Editions that printed and distributed over 400 banned books.

1973's Morcata (The Guinea Pigs, translated by Kača Poláčková) concerns the misadventures of one Vašek. Vašek lives in Prague and has a wife named Eva and two sons. Every day Vašek goes to work at the State Bank where he and most of the other employees routinely try to steal money, only to have it confiscated by the guards when they leave. But the confiscated money never returns to the bank's reserves. This is very odd. His elderly colleague "Mr. Maelstrom" believes the bank intends to suddenly flood the monetary supply and drive Czechoslavakia into a depression. Meanwhile, Vašek's family has acquired several guinea pigs, starting with an albino female named Albínka, followed by a male named Ruprecht, the short-lived Red, and Red the Second. Vašek is very fond of his new pets. The narrative is framed as his hidden manuscript, addressed to an imaginary audience of children, chronicling the weirdness and mystery that daily envelopes him.

Many of the books I've read from Eastern Europe during the Cold War era have a clear Kafka influence, as articulated by Milan Kundera in The Wall in My Head anthology. The expanded role of the state under communism meant greater intrusion into citizens' lives in the form of an opaque and incomprehensible maze of bureaucracy. In the face of such an omnipresent system, the individual is caught up, pulled in various directions, and sometimes ground up in the gears. Not surprisingly, Vašek has gone a bit nuts. He cares for the guinea pigs, he really does. He never explains why exactly he tries to drown Ruprecht in the bathtub or traps him in the window until he nearly freezes or tempts a cat with Red the Second. He does say he wants to hold them in his hands but that only adds yet more incongruity. From the guinea pigs' perspective (and not to mention the reader's), Vašek and his motives are as enigmatic as those of the bank are to Vašek.

The Guinea Pigs is not ostensibly a political novel. It is one man's account of his daily life, dissonantly cheerful and peppered with dark humor. It is a novel of irony: Vašek lacks any self-awareness whatsoever and doesn't consciously recognize how he, his family, and the guinea pigs are linked as the playthings of unknown forces. The power of the story is in the juxtaposition of menace and absurdity that captures the mood of an oppressive society without resorting to documentary-style portrayals of arrests, censorship, and suchlike. It is reminiscent of Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring in that respect, as an indirect protest. Ludvík Vaculík brings us a unique and creative take on life behind the Wall that is either amusing or disturbing or both.

Review Copy

Sweet Sleeping Cthulhu

2011-05-03T18:20:00.005-04:00

I log onto Facebook and find that this redneck I knew in high school had posted the following message a total of forty-four times over a half-hour period:

oh noes! teh negros haz viktory! mah hed asplodes!

Seriously, how desperate can you be?

To give you more context - several months ago he posted a comment full of n-bombs about how if it's okay for black people to be racist against white people, then we can be racist against them too! Apparently he was angry over an interview with some NFL player and decided a dumbass jock represented every black person in the country.

"This austere skepticism is not so much balanced as complicated by a giddy submission to the mystical."

2011-05-01T11:06:00.003-04:00

. . . A true, perfect history of mankind lies elsewhere, inaccessible to man as long as he is led along by his corrupt eyes, touch, hearing, taste, and sense of smell, but perceptible perhaps to the undisturbed motion of the soul. ("Tenebrian Chronicles")

- Not so outré as all that. Didn't Plato say as much? And what of sensible John Locke? Surely it is naïve to believe that the senses are reliable interpreters of all reality. The senses don't see gravity, or electricity or intelligence, and yet we believe these things exist. ("The Parlour Game")

Paul Glennon is a Canadian author who works in the software industry. He is currently writing a trilogy for children called Bookweirder about a young boy who enters the world of books and has to piece plots back together.

According to Glennon's Afterward, the idea for The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames grew from his thoughts about the "geometry of short story collections." In most cases, he observed, the stories follow a continuity similar to that of the novel, progressing through a series of developments until a resolution in the final story. Instead of this "cyclical" geometry, Glennon wanted to produce a unified collection where each story could nevertheless stand on its own and linear order was irrelevant. He also looked to the Oulipo principles that guided another one of our reads, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, and set A Frame for Frames within certain constraints based on the geometry of the twelve-sided dodecahedron. Each of the twelve stories represents one of the dodecahedron's faces, which are pentagonal. These five sides in turn stand for the relationships between the stories: each one must refer to or be referred to by each of the five stories adjacent to it. And so the book's shifting perspectives and all-out Mind Screw were born.

A Frame for Frames is difficult to describe without spoilers. Common themes include an ancient Vatican conspiracy to hide the New World, messages in bottles, the Arctic, the production of fiction by machines or artificial intelligence, the philosophical notion of transcendent paragons (or "types"), and variations on the tale of Scheherazade. Several genres are present in addition to the standard short story, including fantasy, memoir, the children's story, the magazine article, academic paper, adventure fiction, and what seems to be the opening chapter to a novel. Regardless of the order in which you read, the collection as a whole unfolds like endlessly deconstructing origami. The stories both contradict and reinforce one another in a disorienting flux that leaves reality itself in doubt with the faint image of the underlying dodecahedron as the only point of stability. In the self-contained universe of the The Dodecahedron, it is the symbol of ultimate reality - that spiritual truth glimpsed at by monks in the prolonged Arctic night or a casual conversation about said monks at a modern cocktail party. But wait - are the Tenebrian manuscripts just a hoax???

The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames is a constant surprise and one of the most marvelous books we've ever read. The stories themselves are individually gripping in their own ways and the concepts they introduce are delicious food for thought. I would like to thank Sarah for choosing this one and look forward to the responses of the other Wolves.

Paul Glennon's The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames was The Wolves' reading selection for April. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

No Man's Land

2011-04-28T22:58:00.014-04:00

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a writer, sociologist, and utopian feminist. After supporting herself as an illustrator for several years, she married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. She suffered severe postpartum depression following the birth of their daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson, in 1885, only to be dismissed as just another hysterical woman. The "treatment" she received became the basis of her famous short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte and Charles separated in 1888 and legally divorced in 1894, although their relationship remained amicable. She remarried her cousin Houghton Gilman in 1900. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932, Perkins, a longtime advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, committed suicide three years later.

Throughout her career, Charlotte Gilman was active in socialism and other reform movements, making her living as a speaker and lecturer among similar-minded activists. Fame as an author came with the publication of In This Our World, her first volume of poetry, in 1893. She also wrote many essays and short stories. The 1915 novella Herland is her longest work.

Three young, adventurous American men are exploring the South American jungle when they hear rumors of a hidden, all-female civilization. Intrigued, they investigate further and are promptly captured and sedated. Upon awakening, Terry (über-masculine womanizer), Jeff (chivalrous Southern gentleman), and narrator Van (sociologist with a scientific mind) find themselves in the care of a group of matrons entrusted with their education. As the months go by and they learn the language, they discover that the men of "Herland" were wiped out some two thousand years ago by a combination of war and natural disaster. The women reproduce by parthenogenesis, each becoming pregnant automatically at age twenty-five and bearing five children each unless they direct their energies to other tasks. Still, whatever they do comes from a feeling of divine, universal motherhood on which their entire society is built. They are, without fail, entirely selfless, nurturing, and practical and focused not on their individual selves but on the world they are building for their daughters.

In terms of its structure, Herland takes a predictable route as primarily utopian exposition. The main female characters spend most of their time explaining how their world works to the ignorant outsiders who also stand for the reader, much like Dr. Leete to Julian West in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887. As with Bellamy's future Boston, there is little description of Herland beyond that it is very clean and lovely and orderly. Terry exhibits no character development whatsoever and exists solely as a foil to the empowered women of Herland. You can see his Moral Event Horizon coming from practically the first page. Jeff does little besides occupy the other end of the spectrum, falling for Herland without a look back. Van is the straight man who balances skepticism with an open mind and desire to learn. The inevitable romantic subplot waits patiently for the last act, once we've gotten Gilman's fantasyland well established.

See, the problem with utopian fiction is its inherent narcissism. At the basis of every perfect world is the simple fact that it is perfect because everyone follows the author's ideas. Perfection is fulfillment, consummation, transcendence, completeness, the Platonic ideal beyond the grasp of physical reality. The very word "utopia," coined by Thomas More who was in fact writing a satire, means "no land." It is the secular version of the postmillennial Kingdom of God, the end of history and the final state of things. The future United States of Bellamy's Looking Backward actually came about following a mass conversion experience and America's subsequent rebirth as the ultimate society. (This also happened to humanity in Star Trek following first contact with an alien race.) Which they did by implementing every single one of Bellamy's theories, of course, which places him in the ancient role of messiah. Or even God, if you want to get metafictional, since he is the literal creator of this world.

Herland, as another utopia, faces similar drawbacks as a reflection of its maker. Gilman may have been a radical in her day but feminism has since been criticized as historically concerned only with the plight of white, middle-class, able-bodied, straight women (of which I am one, BTW) - a generally comfortable bunch who seek to be equal to white men pursuant to their racial privilege. Thus, feminism, the argument goes, has been a homogeneous movement that has erased the voices of women who do not fit a narrow mold. It has been, like Gilman's Herland, cut off and isolated from the majority of the world, seeing Western conceptions of gender as the only relevant form of oppression.

From start to finish, Herland reveals everything wrong with early feminism. It is racist, heterosexist, and ableist. The country is in South America, yet the women are explicitly described as white and indeed Aryan, with their perfect, advanced civilization in stark contrast to the primitive brown savages inhabiting the forests below. Gilman, through narrator Van, also lumps hospitals in with vice, crime, and poverty as the evils of our civilization. Disability and illness have long been vanquished in Herland. This may seem positive at first, but this is basically saying that disability is some kind of offense. Many people who are deaf or on the autistic spectrum (such as myself) will tell you that they are quite happy with who they are and would not wish to change. Really, what is "disability"? Who defines what it means to be able-bodied or neurotypical? I'm doing just fine - do I and others like me need to be purged in order for society to progress?

We also learn that the "sex instinct" has atrophied after two thousand years of no men and any woman who exhibits an "atavistic" sexual nature is denied motherhood. That female sexuality exists only in relation to the male, and vice versa, is obviously homophobic but there are darker implications here as well. Women who do not fit a certain mold are forbidden to have children. Women who do have children happily allow theirs to be raised by professional specialists. This is the era's Progressivism talking, with its emphasis on a rational approach to everyday life that effectively steamrolled traditional ways of childrearing, particularly those rooted in other cultures which tended to be marginalized in the American social hierarchy. As womanist blogger Renee Martin puts it,

It was White women who sought independence that organized the tenement movement. They came up with the idea of scientific domestic labour, and used their standards to attack poor immigrant women. Their racial biases can clearly be seen in the reports that they wrote. Families that had yet to be categorized as White, such as Italians and the Irish were constantly found to be substandard, even though these women were raising their children in a manner that was culturally appropriate for their countries of origin.

(She's written about this topic quite a bit.) At the vanguard of the Progressive movement were white, middle-class, native-born Americans who had grown disillusioned with their Victorian way of life and sought to improve things and "uplift the weak" according to their own standards. As a college junior I remember reading a report from a female volunteer at a local settlement house who quite arrogantly turned up her nose at the dirty Polish mothers who could not properly care for their children. And this is to say nothing of the Native American children taken from their mothers and sent to boarding schools under the care of white women or the forced sterilization of women of color and disabled women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is so focused on gender oppression she can't recognize where she does have privilege.

With this we return to that question of homogeneity and the denial of other voices. Only in the most conformist culture would the restriction of dissenters' and outcasts' reproductive choices go without question.* It would take a completely uniform society to accept that other people can raise your children better than you can. To maintain such acquiescence requires isolation, which makes these issues even more troubling because it implies literal brainwashing. When presented with the opportunity to open themselves to the rest of the world, the women of Herland reject it despite their alleged curiosity and love of learning. Outside is messiness, a myriad complications and threats to the "exquisite order" of Herland. Even to hear of opinions and ideas foreign to their own - such as abortion or the Judeo-Christian Hell - causes near-violent reactions. And all this in juxtaposition to Van's constant rhapsodizing about the perfection of Herland which altogether evokes a sense of megalomania on Gilman's part. If only we could follow my ideas and get rid of everyone else and cut ourselves off from everyone else still remaining WILL WE CREATE OUR OWN HEAVEN YAY!

Herland is an archaic book. There is nothing in it that will appeal to anyone in the social justice movements today. Even from a literary perspective it is unremarkable. Herland's remaining value is as an artifact of American intellectual and reformist history. If monsters are physical manifestations of our fears and anxieties (vampires for sex, zombies for consumerism, Deep Ones for miscegenation), then utopian societies are their inverse, as imaginary worlds from which those things causing us fear and anxiety have been excised. Problem is, perspectives change and what was a threat or impediment yesterday is an accepted part of our lives today. It's time to move on.

* Update: I just realized I didn't phrase that very well. For a long time in the real world, the dominant culture has accepted these restrictions when it comes to marginalized women (arguably still does). But those women certainly did protest it, it's just that no one listened to them. What I'm saying here is that in Herland a woman in this position is completely alone. There is no recognizeable group of women targeted - it's on an individual basis in judgment of that woman's deviance from the accepted norm. Does that make sense?

BOOKSHELF PORN

2011-04-21T18:47:00.006-04:00

A site for people who really, really like bookshelves. Via Unclutterer, of all places.

Four Things Meme

2011-04-20T21:22:00.003-04:00

I love memes. So when I saw this over at Fizzy Thoughts, I decided to give it a try.

Four jobs I've had in my life:
1. Cashier
2. Office Assistant
3. Legal Secretary
4. Archives Assistant (library)

Four books I would recommend/read over and over:
1. Anything by H.P. Lovecraft
2. T.S. Eliot
3. The Other City
4. 2666

Four places I've lived:
1. California (born there)
2. Pennsylvania
3. Upstate New York
4. Slightly downstate New York

Four places I've been:
1. Florida
2. New Mexico
3. Canada
4. Mexico

Four of my favorite drinks:
1. Coffee
2. Water
3. Organic skim milk
4. Coffee

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Pasta
2. Seafood
3. "Dirt" (crushed Oreos, chocolate pudding, gummy worms)
4. Organic

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Southern Italy (Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri)
2. Southern Greece
3. Paris
4. A funky indie coffee shop

Four things that are very special in my life:
1. Reading
2. Music (European metal!)
3. Independence
4. The sheer number of funky indie coffee shops within reasonable distance of my apartment.

Four bloggers I hope would do this meme:
Whoever feels like it.

"The story is made of twists, detours and many hesitations."

2011-04-20T18:06:00.005-04:00

A Little Party Dress
By Christian Bobin
Translated from French by Alison Anderson
77 pages
Autumn Hill Books
December 1, 2009

. . . The story is like a piece of cloth folded in eight. As you read it you unfold it, it becomes bigger and bigger, ever more luminous to your eyes. A silk of pure sky. ("The Frailty of Angels")

Christian Bobin was born in Saône-et-Loire in 1951. In 1993 he was awarded the Prix des Deux Magots for his novel Le Très-Bas (The Secret Life of Francis of Assisi in English). His favorite form, however, is the fragment - a little picture representing a moment in time.

1994's Une petite robe de fête (A Little Party Dress, translated by Alison Anderson) is a collection of lyrical essays, a mode that combines the reflective essay with the prose poem. Each one is a brief rumination, like the snippet of a dream or pause in the midst of daily life, with a focus on childhood and the transcendental power of literature. Bobin's introduction establishes a link between the two with reading as the boundary between innocence and knowledge.

The three recurring tropes are the imaginative child, the transported reader, and the dull non-reading adult. The relationship between them is an uneasy, paradoxical one. Learning to read represents "a little piece of god departing, a first fracture in paradise," yet also keeps alive that spirit of boundless creativity. In the end, human growth is inevitable and accompanied by responsibility and conformity.

She leaves the white horse with regret. Each time it's the eternal question, the dark riddle: why can't I stay there? Since I'm happy there. Since when I'm close to the white horse I'm closest to myself. Why do I have to progress, to continue, when then are there all these hours that take me away from myself and from everything that matters. You don't know how to respond. You can't respond, because like her you've already met your own life in play - and nowhere else. ("Look at me, look at me")

The reading adult is the compromise between the two, standing apart from, say, a crowd of businessmen, the "same man, in dozens of copies. . . You look at them fearfully, the way as a child you used to look at dried-up old people with their somber voices" ("Promised Land"). Loss is another central motif, stemming from that original loss in the early days of school. To adults, this is often the loss of love, explored in the title piece as a redemptive but transient echo of childhood.

A Little Party Dress ultimately fulfills its own themes as the perfect book to come back to again. No essay is more than ten pages, wonderfully suited for those quiet moments in time when the philosophical mood sets in. Recommended.

Review Copy

"How can this be?"

2011-04-18T18:47:00.002-04:00

The Moon Over the Mountain
By Atsushi Nakajima
Translated from Japanese by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner
165 pages
Autumn Hill Books
March 1, 2011

People seemed to concede that evil might prosper for a time, but in the end there would be just retribution. Of course that might occur, but would that not merely confirm the truth that human beings were doomed? . . . What was the reason for this sad state of affairs? . . . "What is this Heaven people talk about? Doesn't Heaven see what's going on? And if Heaven decides men's fates like this, how am I supposed to keep from rebelling against it? Does Heaven fail to distinguish between the good and the bad, just as it ignores the distinction between men and beasts? Is everything - even righteousness and wickedness - relative, with man alone the measure of all things?" ("The Disciple")

He may have died in obscurity, but today Atsushi Nakajima (1909-1942) is both a cult figure and a canonized literary great. He is standard reading in high schools and colleges, and there is even a festival held annually in his honor. More recently, a young actor named Nomura Mansai produced a dramatic performance of several Nakajima stories in the classical Kyôgen style, which developed in the medieval era as comic shorts inserted between serious dramas. The stories themselves, however, are not Japanese but Chinese in setting and inspiration. Nakajima is regarded as a master of a sub-genre popular in Japan for generations: that of the fictional work set in ancient China.

The relationship of Chinese culture to Japan is analogous to Graeco-Roman influence in the West, down to the Japanese adaptation of Chinese characters, which has intriguing parallels to use of the Latin alphabet in modern European languages. For centuries the educated Japanese man would be expected to know such Chinese classics as the texts of Confucius, The Historical Record (Shiji) by Sima Qian (145-86 BCE), The Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Daoist works of Laozi and Zhuangzi. In finding inspiration from Chinese history, mythology, folklore, and philosophy, Atsushi Nakajima was part of a tradition stretching back millennia. Writers in this particular area are afforded great respect in Japan, yet Nakajima's stories have never until now appeared in English.

Released by Autumn Hill Books in March, The Moon Over the Mountain (translated by Paul McCarthy and Nobuko Ochner) consists of the following:

"The Moon Over the Mountain"
"The Master"
"The Bull Man"
"Forebodings"
"The Disciple"
"The Rebirth of Wujing"
"Waxing and Waning"
"Li Ling"
"On Admiration: Notes by Monk Wujing"

Though comparable to the contemporary development of existentialism in the West, Nakajima's works tend to take a holistic stance and place the protagonist in the context of a vast universe ruled by fate.

This is usually manifested by society, in the actions of other people. In "Li Ling," the war between Han China and the Huns becomes a study in the unpredictability of high politics, which operates not unlike Kafka's concept of bureaucracy. Brave and noble men such as the general Li Ling and the Court Historian Sima Qian are unjustly ensnared and chewed out by the caprices of a despotic emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. "Forebodings" is downright sexist, as a reserved woman named Xiaji becomes a pawn in various power struggles merely by existing. She is a passive character, a complete non-being in fact, yet is somehow to blame for the downfall of several prominent men. Kuai Kui, Duke of Wei, is unusual in that he is both the protagonist of "Waxing and Waning" and the puppetmaster of people's fates himself. The story follows the twists and turns of his exile, return, and rise to dominance, throughout which he also punishes loyal subjects and becomes a tyrant. In doing so, however, he only learns that for all his might, he is still nothing more than a cog in the vast political machine, which has very much a life of its own.

Injustice and corruption arise from excess, which is defined as the overwhelming focus on one aspect of one's being to the neglect of others. It is a deformity of character that grows monstrous. The titular story tells of an aspiring poet whose egotism and obsession with his craft, to the detriment of his family's welfare, transformed him into a man-eating tiger whose humanity is increasingly submerged. In "The Rebirth of Wujing," there are literal monsters at the bottom of the River of Flowing Sand who are "gluttons; therefore, their mouths and stomachs were inordinately large. Others were lascivious, and so their genitalia had developed obscenely. There were others who prided themselves on intellectual purity, to the point that, aside from their heads, their bodies had atrophied." Figurative monsters appear in the more realistic tales. Among the aristocracy, violent power struggles are the norm. Men caught up in the fore are castrated or executed by being tied to two chariots and pulled apart, often for unjust or trivial reasons, in an ongoing cycle of death that even the wisdom of Confucius cannot penetrate. The catastrophic events of "Li Ling" eventually force both the reader and title character to wonder at the definition of "barbarian": "At times he would suddenly feel himself to be a mere speck between earth and sky, and wonder why in heaven's name there were such distinctions as Han and Hun." A poignant question considering the tumultuous era in which Nakajima was writing and the actions perpetuated by cultures proclaiming themselves the superior.

Atsushi Nakajima died of an asthma attack as World War II raged, having arisen from a previous bloodbath whose scale forced a reconsideration of the individual and their place in society. In Japan as elsewhere, literature at this time was censored and writers were pressured to extol the virtues of the Japanese government. Nakajima's soul-searching found refuge in a distant time and place, his years of classical study forming the basis of delicately-crafted tales of art, learning, loneliness, cruelty, honor, metamorphosis, and the perpetual quest to find one's place in the universe. The translators' Afterword states that the original Japanese is a "classical, erudite style" that can make for difficult reading, but their English rendition is clear, unadorned, and accessible across cultures. Nakajima's themes are not uniquely Chinese or Japanese but universal, and The Moon Over the Mountain comes recommended.

I do have to say a word about Nakajima's portrayal of women. The only two female characters in the whole book are Xiaji in "Forebodings" and Old Madam Perch in "The Rebirth of Wujing," whose entire philosophy of life consists of fucking her male harem to death. Other women are mentioned only briefly in connection with "licentiousness" or "immoral relations." As such, Nakajima's ancient China is a world of men. They may be evil men or corrupt men, but they are nevertheless permitted a broad range of roles and personalities denied to women. For all his skill elsewhere, Atsushi Nakajima was quite the misogynist.

Review Copy

More Anne

2011-04-16T10:17:00.006-04:00

Unclutterer has a new post answering the question of how a tchotchke-free home can be inviting. Here's what Anne had to say:

. . . And now when I travel I purposely avoid buying decorative objects just for the sake of it. Alternatively (as I used to do) you could buy the very cheap, but modern and stylish, made-in-China ornaments that are readily available these days and just throw them away when necessary (such as when moving home). I find that objects only feel like clutter when they are difficult/expensive/too valuable to throw away (and to hell with the green you-must-recycle-everything preachers!).

To which I replied:

Oh dear. Are you the same Anne who a few days ago was just proclaiming that anyone who enjoys owning physical books is a hoarder unworthy of this hallowed website? Soooo . . . it sounds like those empty shelves of yours, after you destroyed your books, are being used to house cheap, disposable crap made in Third World countries with questionable labor practices. To hell with social justice and the environment!
Really, you say the darndest things.

If you have a perfectly good item you no longer want, sell it or give it away. In the meantime, you'll have to find a place in which to store it. Which then makes it . . . clutter.

YOU BLAZING BOOK-HATING IDIOT

2011-04-13T23:30:00.000-04:00

While browsing the Unclutterer blog I came across the post "Keeping book clutter off the bookshelf." No, the post itself was not the problem. I am always paring down my book collection and donating books I either did not care for or do not plan on reading again. The writer had some great advice, particularly regarding "look-how-cool-I-am books." You know you have some. (Although I disagreed with her about the reference books - you can probably find all that online.)

You know that Internet adage to "never read the comments"? Yeah. According to a genius named Anne:

Scan your books – it’s easy (especially with paperbacks). Just slice off the spine with a knife and metal ruler, which takes about two minutes, then feed through your ScanSnap and OCR. They are as clear and easy to read on the iPad as any downloaded ebook, you can take your book collection anywhere, free up all that shelf space, and keep your books backed up offsite. File size is around 20 to 30 mb per book, which in this day and age is hardly a drain on storage space. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I can’t help thinking anyone who prefers a shelf full of books over this can’t be a true unclutterer.

*dies*

Take a second to read that again. JESUS CHRIST, LADY.

I work in a archives/rare books department. We have shelf after shelf after shelf of reel-to-reel films, videocassettes, U-Matics, cassette tapes, LP's, you name it. Obsolete recording technology. Some of it we don't even have the equipment to play. We have to pay money to send them to a company that upgrades old formats to DVD, which is itself going rapidly out of style. Now consider that nearly all of our output today is electronic. It's been said that everything we produce is going to disappear because it has no physical existence that can be preserved in the real world. Not some nebulous datasphere but in reality. We have letters written two hundred years ago but what's going to become of texts, emails, and digital media files? Even if some forward-thinking individual did save a lot to their hard drive, will our future devices be able to access it? What if the files become corrupted or deleted? Did you create backups? Then back to the previous question: will we be able to access those backups? (Maybe you repeatedly transferred your data to new formats, but did you do that for the backups too?) I recently accessioned a collection of poetry manuscripts and correspondence from a local woman who lived a century ago. I can read her words (insofar as I can decipher Victorian scrawl) but I can't listen to a concert recorded in 1975.

I'm not opposed to digitalization. I got rid of most of my CD's and now buy all my music from Napster for my MP3 player. I went on vacation recently and the airline misplaced my bag. My laptop power cord was in there. (I know, I know, bad idea.) While I was waiting two days to get my bag back, the laptop finally died and took my MP3 player with it because it can only be recharged through a USB port. The only reason I had music at all was because I was able to dig out a Discman I had been planning to get rid of, thinking I could just play my remaining CD's on Windows Media Player. Now imagine if that MP3 player had been a Nook or Kindle. Also consider that my (obsolete) Discman could have been busted from being in the back of the closet all this time or, as often happens, I may not have had the batteries for it.

Imagine if some horrible disaster happens. Anything from Japan to Katrina to full-scale all-out apocalypse. Where are you going to recharge that Kindle, huh? What historian is going to be able to recover your digital media files and explore our culture's art, literature, knowledge, and ideas? Oh, that's right, they couldn't because the information on your Nook technically doesn't exist.

And I haven't even gotten to the part where she's DESTROYING A BOOK.

Anne, you just don't know when to stop, do you.

@Heather. Sorry if I seemed harsh but I do think my opinion is equally valid: So in your view my books are better off yellowing, gathering dust, too heavy to travel with, and prone to physical damage than beautifully preserved forever and readable on a gorgeous piece of technology? True book lovers should adore the fact that we are entering the age of the ebook. I’ve never understood this books-are-sacred, I-love-the-smell-of-old-library-books mumbo jumbo. I think some people are just not cut out to be unclutterers (nothing wrong with that but maybe this website isn’t for you) and book hoarders definitely aren’t.

Sweet sleeping Cthulhu. (I just got an 878-page Lovecraft edition, by the way. FUCK YOU ANNE.) Since Anne clearly has problems with reading comprehension, perhaps it is she who does not belong on Unclutterer. They have said repeatedly that their philosophy is not about asceticism or anti-consumerism. "Instead it’s about streamlining your space and your possessions so that you can be more efficient at work and enjoy a more relaxing and serene environment at home." Uncluttering is about carefully evaluating your purchases and cutting down on distractions by discarding things you don't need, don't use, or don't care for. I realize some people feel that they don't need physical books, and that's cool. Like I said, I buy all my music digitally. But I don't pretend it's the only way to enjoy music. Many of us value our libraries and love their presence as tangible collections of human creativity. My organized, streamlined books are not clutter. To me, my CD's where but my books are not. Seriously. . . It's 11:30 at night and I have to get up at 5:30 tomorrow. Anne's idiocy pretty much speaks for itself and I really don't feel like spending any more time on this.

Oh Lordy, look folks she's at it again:

@Anna N. As long as you keep multiple backups of your files, they will be forever. And trust me, PDF files will be readable forever. I would bet a lot of money on that.
And could I just add: If you can afford to buy the book, please don’t borrow it from the library. You’re hurting the author by denying them the full revenue for their work, and you’re stopping a truly poor person from having access to the book while you borrow it. If you’re worried about clutter, get the ebook. In Japan buying second-hand or borrowing when you have the money to buy is considered bad form, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

You hear that? Libraries are for poor people. Don't use them.

I hate this woman.

". . . my shells have disappeared into a labyrinth, an underground maze. . ."

2011-04-10T11:09:00.002-04:00

The Book of Happenstance
By Ingrid Winterbach
Translated from Afrikaans by Dick and Ingrid Winterbach
254 pages
Open Letter Press
June 14, 2011

They have become dispersed, entangled in a densely woven network, intertwined and enmeshed with the fate of Constable Modisane in Musina, with Jayckie and Patrick Steinmeier, with Sparrow and Fish and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and with the home-industry shop in Ladybrand - where they are subjected daily to multiple metamorphoses.

Ingrid Winterbach is a South African artist and award-winning novelist. Her previous book, To Hell with Cronjé, was released in English by Open Letter Press last year.

Helena Verbloem is a fiftysomething lexicographer and disillusioned writer. She is staying in Durban for the year to assist in the assembly of a dictionary of Afrikaans words that have fallen from use. Her boss is Theo Verwey, a married man with whom she is in love. Working at the Museum of Natural History also introduces her to experts who humor her interests in evolution and the origin of life. Meanwhile, the bulk of her prized shell collection has been burglarized from her apartment and she is getting strange calls from a Freek van As, who wishes to continue a conversation they apparently had about Plato some thirty years ago. She has no idea who he is.

The present events in Helena's life all have their roots in the dictionary project, which prompted her move to Durban where she met various people and her shells were stolen. Everything grows from there to their own undetermined conclusions. As with To Hell with Cronjé, the vastness of geological time is a strong undercurrent to the characters' various doings, although instead of a war, we have the day-to-day concerns of Helena Verbloem, who wonders at her place in the grand scheme of things. The network of occurrences over the course of a single year parallels the sequence of coincidences that result in such miracles as human consciousness, the mathematical beauty of the shell, and the ongoing development of language as it sheds words and grows new ones. At its very core, The Book of Happenstance is a novel about the phenomenon of life itself.

Unfortunately, I found myself with the same dilemma that Silence in October introduced: that of the limits of art in movement. Both books focus exclusively on well-to-do individuals with an intellectual bent that places their first-person narration in the context of bigger topics. The problem is how to sustain the reader's interest in a story about ordinary contemporary people (in cultures similar to your own). Helena's scientific outlook at least more grants her more awareness of her own triviality than Grøndahl's self-indulgent art historian. Despite the quirkiness of her voice and the contemplative themes, The Book of Happenstance drags itself out and may be a chore to finish. To Hell with Cronjé is a much better choice.

Review Copy

Little

2011-03-31T21:48:00.000-04:00

Yes, do. Try and calm yourself, and make your mind easy again, my frightened little singing-bird. Be at rest, and feel secure; I have broad wings to shelter you under. How warm and cosy our home is, Nora. Here is shelter for you; here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk's claws; I will bring peace to your poor beating heart.

Henrik Ibsen, Norweigan playwright, was friends with a couple named Laura and Victor Kieler. Laura had written a sequel to Ibsen's 1866 work Brand called Brand's Daughters: A Picture of Life, and she made Ibsen's acquaintance shortly afterward. Over the next five years they visited on and off. In 1876, however, Victor became ill with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended convalescence in a warm climate. Unbeknownst to her husband, Laura financed the trip through a loan on which she forged a signature. Victor was furious when he found out, demanding a divorce and taking the children with him. The emotional strain landed Laura in a public asylum, although she returned to her family after a month. Ibsen, who had declined to help Laura, was left feeling guilty about his role in the affair and the result was his landmark feminist play, A Doll House.

A dramatic backstory to be sure, but the play itself was kind of a let-down.

The problem with reading plays is that they're meant to be performed, not read. My disappointment with A Doll's House likely stems from this fact. Realist in style, it consists entirely of everyday dialogue with (to me) little aesthetic value. Still, it had its moments. Torvald's character is particularly interesting - as part of my job in a library Rare Books Department I cataloged a collection of poetry and correspondence from a local woman who lived in Ibsen's day. Her husband's letters address her exactly the same way Torvald speaks to Ibsen's heroine Nora. Anyway, turns out, according to third-party sources I discovered elsewhere, he had abandoned his first wife and child in another city to marry her without finalizing his divorce first! It's knowledge of real-life history like this that can add another dimension to your reading. Don't trust men who call you things like "my little squirrel" or really "my little" anything because that's belittlement and it means they don't take you seriously as an adult human being.

Also, the beginning of Act II, when Nora asks her children's nurse "how could you have the heart to put your own child out among strangers?" The response is that "I was obliged to, if I wanted to be little Nora's nurse." What Ibsen intended as commentary on social class is also, from an American perspective, commentary on racism as well. It's hard not to picture the nurse as a mammy - the black woman who raises the white folks' children instead of her own. Even without the added layer of racism, the exchange is loaded with implications of the word mother and what it signifies to different women. The Victorian "Angel of the House" was very much a bourgeois ideal that upheld the middle-class white woman as the arbiter of all things motherly at the expense of poor women and, in the United States, women of color as well. It's only a small part of the overall work but one that stood out to me.

But I'm afraid I don't have much else to say about this one. Henrick Ibsen is not Tennessee Williams. As a reading experience, A Doll House just fell flat for me. Oh well, better luck next month

A Doll House can be read online here.

Top 10 Authors Who Deserve More Recognition

2011-03-29T07:27:00.007-04:00

I read a lot of translated fiction, which is sadly underrepresented in the American market. With a couple of exceptions, most of this list is foreign authors who need more love in this monolingual country.

10. Ara 13 (American)

"To argue inside any theistic construct is likely a futile effort, and perhaps unnecessary. Ayn Rand is right in declaring existence axiomatic. We must acknowledge existence as revealed by our senses to construct proofs. . . We can academically challenge the credence of reality – claim we are in a dream state and will wake instead of dying – but in the end, we likely come down from our scholastic theorizing and eat and not play in traffic. We assume reality in order to function in this existence; that is what sensible means, after all – as verified by the senses. Hence to act contrary to a common acknowledgement or common sense is nonsense."

9. Suzane Adam (Israel)

I feel almost like an archaeologist, chipping away at a widening pit, descending into it, into another room, a maze. I don't understand anything. I didn't know any of it, violating the oath of years of silence. In my family we always screamed the truth in each other's faces. This did not make me any happier, though at least we knew each other's sore points; her family is partitioned, everyone nursing his own pain.

8. Ingrid Winterbach (South Africa)

"Any icy northerly wind blew for days on end. . . The sky was dull and overcast. The wind whistled and gusted. It was March - almost exactly a year ago. Winter was on its way. The tent was so low that one could stand up straight only in the middle. The grass was nearly flattened by the wind. In the distance the veld was greyish yellow and a muted blue where it met the heavy clouds on the horizon. If our circumstances had been different, one might have called it a scene of picturesque beauty. But I was too down-hearted, and the rain too unceasing - a fine, misty, mournful rain. Every day I yearned intensely for the end of the day, for at least night brought oblivion."

7. Mathias Énard (France)

. . . I thought about Harmen Gerbens the Dutchman and about his apartment, about the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria who came through Spain in 1967, about all those movements in the Zone, ebb, flow, exiles chasing other exiles, according to the victories and defeats, the power of weapons and the outline of frontiers, a bloody dance, an eternal interminable vendetta, always, whether they're Republicans in Spain fascists in France Palestinians in Israel they all dream of the fate of Aeneas the Trojan son of Aphrodite, the conquered with their destroyed cities want to destroy other cities in turn, rewrite their history, change it into victory, in other places, later on, . . .

(All 500 pages are one big sentence!)

6. Mercè Rodoreda (Spain/Catalan)

She told me she knew many things: far away the river was flowing; the dead were asleep; trees that held a dead person likewise died a bit; cement inside a dead person took a long time to dry. She said we knew many things about the light, about everything that transpires as it goes round, returning to us – neither too fast nor too slowly, like our shadows on the sundial hours. The same, always the same, no beginning, no ending, never tiring.

5. Robert W. Chambers (American)

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

4. Esther Tusquets (Spain)

Grrrr. . . No quote! (I read the book for my publishing internship in college and don't own it.) But trust me: if you love Woolf, you'll love Tusquets.

3. Jáchym Topol (Czech Republic)

…my loved one was a bee and a butterfly and knew how to cut with her claws and her tongue, and I tried too … we learned from each other what was good for the other, and that made both of us stronger … running, and the earth turned beneath us, running by graves and leaping across them, avoiding the bones and glassy stares and empty eyesockets … of wolf skulls … and steering clear of traps and snares, we had experience … with falling stakes and poisoned meat … we made it without harm through the red pack's territory … and met the last of the white wolves, they were wracked with disease … and the big black wolves chased us, but we escaped … we, the gray wolves of the Carpathians, had an age-old war with them, they were surprised we fled, their jaws snapping shut on empty air, they had a hunch it was their turn next, the helicopters were on the way … we ran side by side, our bodies touching … running over the earth as it turned, with the wind whistling in our ears like a lament for every dead pack … and the clicking of our claws made the earth's motion accelerate … we ran over the earth, a mass grave, running away …

(One of my all-time favorite passages anywhere. Imagine what the original Czech must have sounded like!)

2. Michal Ajvaz (Czech Republic)

"Until just a few years ago the scientific community, with the rare exception, was of the view that the great battle in the depths of bedroom could not be regarded as a historic event. It was maintained that the records in the reference books were not reliable and were the result of the historicization of certain rituals connected with underground celebrations of expulsions of dragons from savings banks. It was also pointed out that there was no reference to the battle in the famed Lion's Chronicle, which was found, as you all know, on a rainy night in a plastic wrapper on a seat in an unlit compartment, just as the train stopped on the track and the compartment was just beneath the lighted window of an Art Nouveau villa at Všenory, the light of which was reflected in the wet leaves of the darkened garden. It is truly astonishing that the scholars who were hypercritical about the source material should not have found it odd that the chronicle was found precisely outside a villa in whose window could be seen dimly lit on the wall part of a picture on which could be discerned the figure of fauns dancing in a meadow. It would seem that one of the historians noticed that the small object painted in the grass below the birch tree bore a striking resemblance to the scrubbing brush used in the spa-temple, where, one evening, the priest said into the clouds of steam rolling over the baths: 'In the buffet of a distant town, on a blackboard with the names and prices of the meals, is written in chalk the last message of the Lord of the Outskirts - a warning that the blackened interiors of vases exhale into our spaces. This breath, declares the Lord of the Outskirts, corrodes the old constellations. Nor must you forget the impatient and nimble pincers of machines lurking behind the long walls in the streets of Smíchov. . .'"

1. Macedonio Fernández (Argentina)

Humans, breathers, those innumerable incessantly stirring the world's air, relentlessly ordering it into your chests, elevating your eternally open mouths to an eternal heaven, beings of the heartbeat and the voice that either brightens or breaks, which perhaps every day demands alternately an end or an eternity, there's beauty to give us all understanding of the Mystery, and to stop all pain. But where is it? Is it in Art, in Conduct, in Understanding, in Passion? In Cervantes, or Beethoven, or Wagner, or in some great delirium: in adoring intonation, dazzled by Walt Whitman's Man?

Update

2011-03-27T19:02:00.004-04:00

With apologies to The Wolves, I'm giving up on Conversation in the Cathedral. I got about sixty pages in before I before I couldn't take it anymore - not knowing who was who, all the random nicknames, the jumps back and forth in time and all over the place, the lack of anything resembling plot. . . Yes, I know this is supposed to be a masterpiece of world literature, but to me, this book is just a mess.

So right now I'm reading Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance, which I got as an ARC from Open Letter Press. I also need to read Henrick Ibsen's A Doll House for A Year in Feminist Classics and get my review done of Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker. All this should keep me busy for awhile.

Also, I found yet another great coffee place:

Aaaaand. . .

Lovecraft and European symphonic metal! My two favorites!

"Call of Dagon" by Therion

Nikamowin

2011-03-24T19:39:00.000-04:00

Kevin Lee Burton is a member of the Swamp Cree tribe from God's Lake Narrows in Manitoba, Canada who grew up speaking his ancestral language. Moving to Toronto was a disorienting experience and he would often repeat Cree words to himself so that he did not forget them. Nikamowin, Cree for "song," is a beatbox-style exploration of the connections between land and language.

Also recommended is Helen Haig-Brown's ?E?Anx/The Cave, about a man who comes across a cave that turns out to be a portal to the Tsilhqot'in spirit world. The Cave was made for an international collaboration of indigenous peoples, in which each was assigned a genre outside their usual repertoire. Haig-Brown was given science fiction, an area often noted for its emphasis on exploration, expansion, and the conquest of alien planets. Not wishing to reuse colonialist tropes from the majority culture, Haig-Brown turned inward to depict a world within our own. Unfortunately, I could not find this one online, but do check it out if you ever get the chance.

"As we drove through Trás-os-Montes, . . ."

2011-03-24T08:02:00.003-04:00

". . . I thought once more how quickly the years had gone since the winter she moved into my apartment and broke my solitude. The years were like a train in the night that moves at such speed that the lighted windows flow together and you see nothing. I thought about how much of our time had been taken up with doing the same things every day, as the months passed and the children grew and we talked about all that had happened."

Copenhagen's Jens Christian Grøndahl is one of Europe's most popular contemporary authors. His novel Lucca was awarded the prestigious Golden Laurels Prize in 1999. Tavshed i Oktober (Silence in October, translated from Danish by Anne Born) was his 2001 American debut.

An art historian wakes up one morning to find Astrid, his wife of eighteen years, with a coat on and a suitcase in her hand. She turns and leaves without saying a word. Melancholy and meditative by nature, the narrator looks back on his life and ponders his relationships with his children, parents, friends, and old lovers. His memories form a series of stories, meandering back and forth in time as he tries to attend to his book on the New York School of painting. But his past haunts him, especially when his research takes him back to the city where he made his greatest mistake.

Silence in October is a quiet book. Grøndahl's poetic voice recalls the stark reverence of the art gallery and the subdued tones of the morning mist. Even the busiest of settings are muted and padded by the narrator's ruminations, further reinforcing the sense of him as an isolated individual despite his preoccupation with how other people have molded him. In Manhattan, for example, he "[stands] in the strangely cross-illuminated shadow at the bottom of the streets' deep shafts, confused and weightless with fatigue in the restless, unceasing stream of cars and faces, the same stream as always." Later in his hotel room, you can picture easily the fading urban evening through the window and the impersonal solitude of a room designed for transient strangers. In fact, the work of Edward Hopper comes to mind, a connection made by the narrator himself.

Silence in October is also a visual book. A recurring image is that of time flying by in a repetition of routine cycles which Astrid's abrupt departure brought to a halt. There is a tension between motion and stillness, between life and the frozen artifice of the painting or snapshot that allows for a depth of contemplation precluded by perpetual movement. "I cannot include everything," the narrator muses. "I have to select from among the images I have, I have to decide on a sequence, and thus my story will be quite different from the one she could tell, even though they are supposedly about the same subject." In that way the novel calls attention to itself as art and invites a postmodern examination of the boundaries between narrative and perception.

But.

What Hopper's paintings evoke was not meant to be extended this far.

To put it simply, this is not 296 pages of material. Literature, after all, is art in movement. Whereas the painter produces a singular object, the author must continue to engage the reader by building upon their original premise. For all the prose reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, a middle-aged man just constantly pondering his relationships is a poor match for this particular art form. Silence in October should have been a novella, not a full-length novel. The thoughtful art critic becomes a self-indulgent bourgeois intellectual whose problems seem to stem from his life being too comfortable. But where Grøndahl fails in form he succeeds in expression. Silence in October is beautiful book while the appeal of its art lasts and still quite worth the time, even if it's eventually abandoned.

Top 10 Bookish Pet Peeves

2011-03-22T20:14:00.001-04:00

With some help from TV Tropes, the site that will ruin your life.

10. Grammatical Errors and Commonly Misused Words

You're a professional writer, for cryin' out loud! "Bemused" and "amused" are not synonyms!

9. Fallen Creator

Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Laurel K. Hamilton. . . Look guys, maybe it's time for a break. I think we all know you can do better than this.

8. Author Tract

Happens a lot with socialist novels like Johnny Got His Gun, The Grapes of Wrath, and Petals of Blood. I liked those books, though, despite the preachin.' I guess it depends on how much you agree or disagree with the oh-so-subtle message.

7. All Just A Dream

Does anyone still do this? Oh, right: Glenn Beck.

6. Climactic Motive Rant

The big whodunit cliché, the villainous version of The Summation. You know the drill. The hero's been interpreting clues, following leads, eliminating suspects, putting pieces together, and so forth. Then OMG! REVELATION! They did it? Why, we did not see this coming! Well, now that we're at their mercy, what better time for the Bad Guy, since they finally have the spotlight, to gloat gloriously and explain how and why they did it! Luckily for the hero, some unexpected turn of events usually occurs just as the villain's winding down and leads to their downfall.

This one has been especially on my mind lately, due to a particularly egregious example in a recent book I read that ruined the whole damn thing.

5. True Art Is Incomprehensible

I encounter this a lot. Jakov Lind's Ergo = WTF? And I'm still waiting for someone to properly explain William S. Burroughs.

4. Did Not Do the Research

Dan Brown is full of it.

3. Stalking Is Love

Goes with "control is protectiveness" and "creepy is moody." Often excused because the "love" interest is a monster or supernatural of some sort, usually a vampire. We're supposed to accept this as dangerous but not dangerous dangerous because he, like, totally loves her and would never hurt her, oh noes. Can we please stop romanticizing abusive behavior?

2. Mary Sue

GAGH! Twilight's Bella Swan and The Rose Garden's Lucy King are two good examples.

1. The Taming of the Grue

Defined as "Villain Decay on a species level." Basically, a monster that started out as terrifying Always Chaotic Evil gets toned down to the point where they're either harmless, Misunderstood Nice Guys, or constantly angst-ridden about being a monster. The Fair Folk, for example, became Tinkerbell. Vampires are especially notorious for this: we went from Dracula to the sparkly Cullens. Thank God for Hellsing!

Alas, they have come for the Deep Ones. IS NOTHING SACRED.

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

Update

2011-03-21T22:10:00.004-04:00

My checked bag went to Tulsa!

Finally two days later I get it back. Meanwhile, my laptop died and took my MP3 player with it. The computer power cord was located in said bag that went to Tulsa. And I can't recharge my Sandisk without it because it has to plug into a USB port. So I had no Internet and no music until 7:00 this evening, when I found a ride and hauled myself down to the local airport, where I knew said bag was now located. United Airlines was just incapable of delivering it.

Conversations in the Cathedral was also in said bag. I could've spent the last two days reading it! But on the upside, I got a $50 gift certificate towards my next airline tickets. Hopefully I can also get the $25 baggage check fee refunded too.

Oh well, other than that, I loved my trip and promise to get back to regular blogging right away. I've finished two books. One was well-written but way too long. The other was awesome until about three-quarters of the way through, when the plot exploded into an epic hot mess. Will be writing all about it!

More on Fledgling

2011-03-19T16:03:00.005-04:00

I read Octavia Butler's Fledgling about a year ago and expressed my distaste at its positive depiction of pedophilia. Although Shori is actually 53 years old, she has the body of a ten-year-old girl and is still considered a child by her culture. HELL NO. Also, the writing was blah.

Womanist Musings, one of my favorite social justice blogs, recently published a post, co-authored by blogmaster Renee and frequent contributor Sparky, that I agree with 100%. Not only do they take Butler to task on the pedophilia issue, they also point out that the Ina's aphrodesiac-like venom is extremely rape-ish and discuss some the book's racial problems as well. I recommend this piece very strongly. Like Sparky and Renee, I simply cannot believe so many people rave about Fledgling while blatantly ignoring the freaking child sex, among other things.

Read their post here.

Greetings from Albuquerque

2011-03-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

As you may have noticed, my blogging has been nonexistent as of late. That's because I'm on vacation! I've been in Albuquerque since Saturday visiting family.

My opinion of the place has really changed - the first two times I went, I hated it. It was a brown, run-down wasteland. But then I got to visit all the boutiques and historical sites and see all the art and architecture and I love it! Central Avenue and Nob Hill are full of great places such as Peacecraft, AstroZombie, Stilo, Buffalo Exchange, and Masks Y Mas, where you can find the most unique and funky things imaginable. Even just walking the streets is a visual treat. The people here just live and breathe art. Even the highways and overpasses make use of color, landscaping, and sculpture.

Then you head to Old Town and find authentic Navajo and Pueblo pottery, weaving, jewelry, and crafts. I didn't realize how different the culture here is. New Mexico is very Hispanic and Native American and at times seems indistinguishable from old Mexico. When you've lived out East all your life you never think about American regional differences but I really felt like I was in another country. A modern suburb that's all adobe? Awesome. I wish New York had this much Native American influence.

So anyway, as you've probably guessed, I spent way too much money. Here's what I bought in Albuquerque:

Brazil Nut Tree pod candle (Peacecraft)
Painted bottlecap magnet (Stilo)
Small ceramic bowl (Hanselman Pottery)
Carved wood and painted coyote from Oaxaca (Old Town)
Ironwood carved coyote (Old Town)
Coyote magnet: "Sometimes you just have to howl." (Old Town)
Secondhand leather boots (Buffalo Exchange)
Secondhand Teva sneakers (Buffalo Exchange)
Secondhand homemade blue dress (Buffalo Exchange)

And then today I had to go to Sante Fe, which is like Old Town only bigger! I also bought:

Coyote sand-painted magnet
Coyote figure made of Navajo clay
Small woven square from Mexico

I love coyotes.

Tomorrow is my last full day and I think I'd like to spend it hiking. In the meantime, I have a full reading schedule with several books lined up. (Notice to Emily: Our Horses in Egypt actually did come but it went to my parents' house and they were saving it until I got there, right before I left for NM. I will start it as soon as I finish Silence in October.) Will return to regular blogging next week.

Top 10 Dynamic Duos

2011-03-08T19:32:00.004-05:00

A few have more than two, but overall, these are my favorite awesome character combos. They kick ass, have various adventures, or just plain go great together.

10. Reitz and Ben, To Hell with Cronjé

Not really "dynamic" per se, but definitely a powerful portrayal of friendship.

9. Harry and Hermine, Steppenwolf

These two were just crazy together.

8. Fournier, Weil, and Pananster, The Officers' Ward

Each would have fallen to pieces if it wasn't for the others.

7. Anne and Diana, Anne of Green Gables

A childhood classic I'm sure many have included.

6. Alucard, Integra, and Seras, Hellsing

Epic kickass manga starring vampires that don't fucking sparkle.

5. Christopher Snow, Bobby Halloway, Doogie, and Roosevelt Frost, Seize the Night

Tragically, this was one of the last good books Dean Koontz wrote before becoming the "Thomas Kinkade of horror."

4. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, The Millennium Trilogy

Even just Salander on her own is a force of nature. Together they're unstoppable.

3. Dante and Virgil, The Divine Comedy

I'm sure you saw that one coming.

2. Sam and Frodo, Lord of the Rings

Obviously.

1. Dr. Armitage, Professor Warren Rice, and Dr. Francis Morgan, "The Dunwich Horror"

Three scholarly gentlemen who took out an Eldritch Abomination. Professors should be this cool in real life.

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

Sat and gazed into the eternal process of birth and decay . . .

2011-03-06T01:13:00.005-05:00

Next World Novella
By Matthias Politycki
Translated from German by Anthea Bell
138 pages
Peirene Press
February 2011

. . . or whatever it was all fundamentally about, linking one thing with another, that one with yet another, flowing over and into it, mingling and dispersing and in the end leaving only a continuous grey expanse

Matthias Politycki (1955-) is considered one of Germany's most successful contemporary authors. He has published twenty novels and poetry collections that have sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into several languages. Jenseits-novelle (Next World Novella) came out in 2009.

Hinrich Schepp is a renown authority on ancient Chinese. He has been married for the past thirty years to Doro, a fellow Chinese scholar who gave up a promising career to be a wife and mother. With the children gone, they have a content but tranquil marriage, or so Hinrich thinks. He wakes up one day to the sickly sweet scent of decay and finds Doro dead of a stroke at her desk. A series of notes on a forgotten manuscript of Hinrich's reveals that not all was what it seemed.

Hinrich had had surgery several years previous to correct his vision. Since then, a new world had opened up to him of bars and social gatherings. He was never unfaithful to Doro, who remained home as he spent his evenings hanging with students or enjoying a flirtation with Dana, a Polish waitress at La Pfiff. Ironically, however, Hinrich is afflicted with another form of blindness: the inability to recognize Doro's increasing unhappiness as the wife who sacrificed and is rewarded by being left behind. He is also ignorant of the friendship formed between her and Dana in which his pathetic old-man foolishness was a recurring topic. The narrative starts to take an odd circular motion as people and events turn out to be linked in more ways than one. Hinrich's brief, aborted manuscript for a novel called Marek the Drunkard is an almost exact retelling of events at La Pfiff despite having been written before said events took place. Hinrich knows Dana who also knew Doro.

Throughout it all there is the recurring image of the dark lake you must cross after death. It appears to be a subdued place - "there are no colours, no smells, not a breath of wind, not a sound" - and so still as to be unreal. In the early days of their relationship, Doro had shown Hinrich a painting that she believed to be a portrayal of this lake of her nightmares. "Anyone could see, she said, that the painting was intended to be surreal; it skillfully kept its real subject hidden; the island was nothing but a reflection, an illusion that the painter had added as a kind of consolation." Dream, reality, and reflection blend into one another, as symbolized by the mystical body of water whose unreachable far shores promise renewal and whose immovability conceals the struggles of a swimmer. The short length of Next World Novella only reinforces its dreamlike atmosphere.

Although the thoughts and ideas raised by Politycki on life, death, relationships, and interconnectedness are poignant and beautifully unfolded, I still found myself not quite satisfied with the Next World Novella overall. I hate to say that it was because I could not identify with an older male protagonist and his marriage and mid-life crises - Hermann Hesse once described his Steppenwolf as being primarily concerned with the anxieties of middle age and I enjoyed that one immensely. But that seems to have been my issue, which is admittedly a very shallow one. So I'm left in the unusual position of appreciating yet not quite liking a novel yet still able to recommend it. In conclusion, I will say that Next World Novella will doubtlessly appeal to other readers and even if it does not, Mattias Politycki raises many thought-provoking subjects and invites a post-read meditation.

Trailer

Review Copy

One generation passeth away. . .

2011-02-28T19:11:00.001-05:00

"This bourgeois class is nothing but an array of complexes. It would take an expert psychoanalyst to cure all of its ills, an analyst as powerful as history itself."

The above quote would be more appropriate for Palace of Desire, the middle volume of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy which we've been reading since December. Talk about Drama! Final book Sugar Street, however, takes a different tone. Covering the al-Jawad family from late 1930s through 1944, the primary theme is age, its attending anxieties, and the passage of time.

Sugar Street's subdued mood contrasts sharply with the overwrought goings-on of Palace of Desire and the day-in-the-life narration of Palace Walk that was interrupted periodically by bursts of civil disorder as Egypt agitated for independence. Now there is a settled weariness in most of the grown children (Khadija, Yasin, Kamal), while Aisha has sunk into a permanent depression following the loss of her husband and two sons to cholera. Nearing the end of their lives, parents Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Amina are steadily falling into ill health, while World War II and Egypt's tumultuous politics are ever-present in conversation and falling bombs. Meanwhile, the new generation is on the rise, overshadowing even Kamal, who is only twenty-eight at the beginning and already suffering intellectual disillusionment.

Stylish Ridwan, son of Yasin the indiscriminate womanizer, is gay and suspiciously well-connected to various high-ranking members of the Wafd Party. Sixteen-year-old Nai'ma (daughter of Aisha) dies in childbirth early on, shortly after marrying double first cousin (!) Abd al-Muni'm (son of Khadija), the pious and idealistic Muslim Brethren member. His brother and political counterpart, Ahmad, becomes a leftist journalist who defies tradition with his working-class wife and comrade, Sawsan. Even more radical is his acceptance of her as an intellectual equal - exactly the opposite of how his older male relatives, including Kamal, have always viewed women. ("Our class is perverse," Ahmad thinks at one point. "We're unable to see women from more than one perspective.") Although Ahmad seems the most forward-thinking of the two, Abd al-Muni'm is hardly the proto-Taliban a modern reader would envision. Much to Ahmad's annoyance, the Muslim Brethren has appropriated socialism's rhetoric of earthly uplift and transcendental revolution. Needless to say, both movements make the Egyptian government very, very nervous.

There is also Yasin's daughter Karima, but she occupies a secondary role only, perhaps in keeping with the staunch (and hypocritical) conservatism of her older relatives.

At nearly two hundred pages shorter than the previous volumes, the darker storylines of Sugar Street have a tighter impact. Played out against a backdrop of international and domestic crises, the heady lives of the grandchildren and the passing of the older generations compose the most vivid portrait of a time and place Mahfouz has yet given us. All three books of The Cairo Trilogy end with catastrophes: Fahmy's death, the deaths of Aisha's husband and two sons, and the arrests of both Ahmad and Abd al-Muni'm. ~~(And I've just received word that Joe has stolen Yasin's body!)~~ But now there is no follow-up, in perfect keeping with the uncertainty of this later age. Despite an imperfect translation and an over-reliance on exposition, Naguib Mahfouz has given us a fascinating window into recent Egyptian history, as seen through the eyes of a single family. For an indirect sequel, I recommend Miramar, which takes place in the 1960s.

The Cairo Trilogy read-along was hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos. Our schedule was:

December 26-27, 2010: Palace Walk
January 30-31, 2011: Palace of Desire
February 27-28, 2011: Sugar Street

Gender, Subjection, and Hegemony OH MY

2011-02-24T19:28:00.006-05:00

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher in the fields of social theory, political theory, and political economy. The eldest son of James Mill, John Mill was an extremely precocious child with an intellectually rigorous upbringing. As an adult, he was a longtime pen-pale of August Comte, founder of positivism and sociology, and a member of Parliament for City and Westminster. In 1866 he became the first MP to call for women's suffrage.

Wife Harriet Taylor Mill (1807-1858) was also notable for her work in women's rights. John Mill was the first man to treat her as an intellectual equal, and they maintained a friendship for twenty-one years before marrying. Although they exchanged numerous essays, Harriet's surviving body of work is very small and she is remembered largely for her influence on her husband. This is especially evident in The Subjection of Women, published eleven years after her death.

The more I read The Subjection of Women, the more it seemed that Mill had anticipated the field of Gender History, particularly Joan Scott's seminal essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." Scott opens up with a discussion on the then-recent distinctions made between gender and sex in order to "[denote] a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as 'sex' or 'sexual difference.'" "Gender" also refers to normative femininity in the holistic, social sense, as an attribute defined by its opposition to normative masculinity. In short, Scott argues that you cannot understand history without taking into account the presence of women. Gender is both "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes" and "a primary way of signifying relationships of power." Even male-dominated areas are informed by gender as an abstract category and the basis of various cultural tropes and symbols.

Both Joan Scott and John Stuart Mill are interested in the relationship between gender and political history. Mill's analysis in The Subjection of Women begins with the Enlightenment precept that humanity is ever-progressing toward a state of greater liberty and rationalism. People are ultimately the products of their society, Mill argues, and most societies are founded on force, be it of master over slave, lord over serf, monarch over subjects, and so forth. At the time of his writing (1869), England, he felt, was the most advanced nation on Earth with the "the law of the strongest" having been supplanted by the individualistic rule of law, which recognizes all (male) citizens as equals. The subordination of women, another universal institution, is one of the last remaining vestiges of that old primitive order, which is hardly surprising even in "developed" countries, as human sentiments tend toward the past. "Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals," Mill asserts. "They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right." At one time most males and all females were slaves, yet the gradual evolution of Europe saw men emancipated into free agents in charge of their own destinies, while women's condition has been ameliorated to a milder form of dependence. Mill goes on,

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the effect of mere usurpation, while on the contrary it is natural. But was there every any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect . . . than Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and it rested on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of med over women is usually based, namely, that there are different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; . . . But why need I go back to Aristotle? Did not the slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal interests? . . . Again, the theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was framed on the model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. (Chapter 1)

Marriage is particularly problematic. Until recently, women could be forcefully "sold" by their fathers to another master, the husband, whose authority they would remain under as long as he lived. Even under current English law, the two are "one person," inferring that whatever is hers is his but not the other way around, except insofar as he is responsible for her actions just as a farmer is responsible for his cattle. And, just like the worst of the American slaveholders, an especially base husband has the right to physically, emotionally, and sexually mistreat his subordinate. "Not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said of political despotism," Mill argues. Whether the issue is slavery, political tyranny, or familial tyranny, "we are always expected to judge of [it] from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other - superior wisdom ordering all things for the greater good of the dependents, and surrounded by their smiles and benediction." The only way to guarantee equal protection and the preservation of individual rights is for the law to account for the worst possible abuse. For every benevolent dictator there is a monster drunk on power.

But, some may ask, why do women not protest then? In fact, it seems to me that they are quite content with their lot.

The ideas Mill articulates in response to such criticisms have since been established by Marxist historians as the theory of hegemony, which refers to the process by which a dominant group maintains its superior position with the consent of the dominated. Although the Marxists spoke of social class, the concept of hegemony is also highly useful in the discussion of gender, as demonstrated, retroactively, by The Subjection of Women:

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear, - either fear of themselves or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. (Chapter 1)

Mill's thoughts on gender are far, far ahead of his time, although today's definition of the word did not exist then. He argues very strongly that what is commonly perceived as women's character is almost entirely the result of social conditioning in favor of marriage, motherhood, and servitude as the greatest and only goals in life. "It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; . . . in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters." He agrees with Mary Wollstonecraft that arguments against women's capabilities based on experience and observation are null and void: if you think women cannot do something, it is because society does not permit them to do it, and furthermore, if you believe women have a certain traits, it is because society has molded them. In a nutshell: biology does not and should not equal destiny.

It is here that I believe Mill slips up. His position allows little room for individual female agency and can even be turned around in favor of patriarchy. It may naturally follow that, if women are collectively warped, then they must not be in their right minds and are therefore suspect. Still, his strident advocacy for women's emancipation is startling, coming as it does from a male Victorian. Are talented men in such abundance, he demands, that the fields of business and politics cannot be opened up to women? How can we justify excluding a capable woman from birth when we give complete freedom to the stupidest of men? But overall, I believe the greatest strength of The Subjection of Women is that Mill places women's oppression and liberation in the context of a global, historical movement from tyranny to freedom and boldly lays out the contradictions inherent in Liberté, égalité, fraternité when only certain groups are allowed to benefit. Not only does he make strong cases for women's rights on both moral and practical grounds, he is also laying a framework for future historians, sociologists, philosophers, and activists to move the feminist cause forward. Does society really progress or was that just an Enlightenment dream? While I'm not sure we can assign human values to the force that is history, given how much has improved since John Stuart Mill's time, I have to believe we are headed in the right direction.

A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . .

What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

Top 10 9 Book-to-Movie Adaptations

2011-02-22T13:19:00.008-05:00

I don't watch many movies so this list was hard to come up with. I just couldn't think of one more.

9. Ghost in the Shell

I haven't actually seen this one yet but I've heard great things about it. The manga it's based on is incredible.

8. Girl, Interrupted

Angelina Jolie was AMAZING!

7. Brokeback Mountain

A major milestone in LGBT film.

6. Schindler's List

Literally one of the greatest movies of all time.

5. The Shining

OMG SCARY!

4. The Gangs of New York

Not many people know this, but The Gangs of New York was originally a 1928 nonfiction book by Herbert Asbury.

3. True Blood

Okay, it's a TV show not a movie, but I love it and it's way better than the books. I tried to read the first one, Dead Before Dark, but found the writing so mediocre I couldn't even finish it.

2. Interview with the Vampire

Says Anne Rice herself on Amazon.com:

The film took me back even further, into the soul that had exposed itself inthe writing. Darkness. No grace. No salvation. The film got it. It got "the glamor of evil" and that darkness, that hopelessness, that despair. It is -- and I say this now as a film buff -- a great film. Forget me. Forget the book. It's a piece of sublime work in which genius "happened" as it can in film when great directors like Neil Jordan, and great actors, and great professional on all levels are giving it everything that they can -- when they have but one goal and that is to be true to something in which the author was true to himself or herself. It worked. It's magic. And now ten years later people are discovering it. They are sharing that sublime vision. I'm thankful; I'm happy; I'm proud to have been part of it. I'm grateful. And I hope David Geffen knows. I hope he knows how the world values that film. He did that. I hope he's proud.

1. Lord of the Rings

Enough said.

Book-to-movie adaptations I would like to see (in no particular order):

Precious
Orlando (That's a movie?!)
Rebecca
Trainspotting
City of Bones (Upcoming adaptation of the first book of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series.)
Blade Runner (Loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Dagon (Based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," my favorite of his stories.)
At the Mountains of Madness (Upcoming Lovecraft adaptation directed by Guillermo del Toro!)

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!