Janet Fitch's White Oleander

I finally secured a copy of White Oleander. The Duchess and I had watched a screen copy of it in Ukraine, and I'd wanted to read the book ever since.

While only on chapter three, I'm enjoying it tremendously. It's a bit chockablock with imagery, with the metaphors heavy-handed at times. I think that's probably deliberate though, a function of the narrator's age. The mother's character is drawn with very bold lines; she's fascinating.

Once again, I'm loving an Oprah Book. Don't really care for her, but she picks good books.

"I rested my head on her leg. She smelled like violets. "We are the wands," she said. "We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental."

"The wands," I repeated. I wanted her to know I was listening. Our tarot suit, the wands. . .

"We received our coloring from Norsemen," she said. "Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are."

TS Eliot on the Art of Poetry

The Paris Review has a really lengthy and fantastic old interview with Eliot in which he discusses his work methods, the influence of Pound and French symbolism, his playwriting and lots of other topics. He says that Four Quartets was his greatest work. I'm not sure, but the Little Gidding section is probably my favorite thing he wrote outside Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.

Anyway, the poetic peeps here will like it.

New Books!

I scored at the library sale today. Dollar books, one of the great aspects of American life. . .

1. Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children. The Booker people call this the best book in 25 years.

2. Ha Jin: Waiting.
3. Milan Kundera: The Joke.
4. Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse.
5. Anais Nin: Winter of Artifice.
6. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms.
7. Jorn Donner: The Films of Ingmar Bergman.
8. Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth.
9. Sean Hannity: Deliver us from Evil.

10. John Brinnin: Modern Poets. 'Modern' here means 1963. It has a big mugshot of Ginsburg center-cover.

11. Howard Zinn: Terrorism and War. Just to keep up with what the traitorous wing of the Democratic Party is thinking.

12. William Hatcher: John Jasper, The Unmatched Black Philosopher and Preacher. This is by Sprinkle Publications, a great little publisher that reprints Southern Presbyterian classics.

Sex and the Slayer: A Gender-Centric Look at Buffy

The Duchess and I are both crazy-mad Buffy fans. It's probably the last show since Sledgehammer! was cancelled to really fascinate me. The character development, the storyline, the world itself. . . all good things. So it was cool when the Duchess brought home Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan.

It's written for Gender Studies classes, but while it interacts with the considerable body of academic Buffy-stuff out there, it's surprisingly jargon-free. I've read a few Postfeminist works, and that was enough to let me keep up.

Buffy is well suited for the subject, especially as Joss Whedon consciously plays with gender and sex in his work. It was something the Duchess and I noticed along the way -- the need to emasculate all the strong male characters in the show, the way in which Buffy flips between girl power and traditional femininity, and one can only imagine Freud's reaction to a girl penetrating male vampires with a wooden phallic object.

I enjoyed the book because it was a generally a work of analysis, rather than a harsh polemical screed. Here are a few sample lines:

"Good girls like Buffy and Willow are constantly engaged in constructing their postfeminist identities, incorporating both 'feminist' and 'feminine' aspects. The more static and restricted development of the bad girls traps them in their role as villains,and they are (at least superficially) complicit with heterosexual, patriarchal structures."

a Dorothy Parker ditty

Our second child is named Tennyson, so I had to laugh at this Dorothy Paker poem I found today:

"Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he's not like Tennyson.
I'd rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll."

New book by former KGB archivist

If you haven't read Vasili Mitrokhin's history of the KGB's war against the West, you're missing out. The Sword and the Shield is sourced directly from the decades of files Mitrokhin brought with him when he defected in 1992. Among the fun tidbits we learn is that the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is a decorated KGB agent -- code name Drozdov.

Mitrokhin's newest work is being published posthumously. The Mitrokhin Archive, Volume II: The KGB and the World focuses on KGB hijinks in the developing world. His co-author, Christopher Andrew, has a piece on the KGB in India in The Times.

Thinklings and the Decline of Poetry (it's not their fault, btw)

The Thinklings put up a post on Leithart and the Novel which touches on the way the novel has supplanted poetry in the modern world. I had a few thoughts:

I’m not sure I would just blame modernity for the decline of poetry. The 19th and early 20th were very much ‘Modern’ centuries, yet poetry remained extremely influential. If anything, poetry reached its apogee during the early Modern period. Tennyson, Poe, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Arnold, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rossetti, Swinburne, Blake and Byron would be just a few of the ‘unelected legislators of mankind’ from that time.

Even into the 20th you still have giants roming the earth — Frost, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Millay. . .

It seems to me that the sharp decline in poetry came about for three or so reasons (though this is totally just an opinion.)

One is the advent of easily recordable records and the radio. Until that time poetry was still a popular endeavor, and the drop off seems to coincide with these new technologies. I think lyric verse has been replaced by lyrics to an extent. That might be why Jewel’s wretched book of poems sold about a billion more copies than your average ‘real’ poet.

Next is the decline in form, which can be said of most artistic media outside of music, photography and film. Real people want form and perspecuity. When modern poets threw out these things, they lost even those in the public who like literature, which is always a minority anyway. This doesn’t explain why even classic poems are left unread today, wihch brings me to another thought.

Poetry is a mental discipline. It’s not only an acquired taste, but an acquired skill. Very few people are being equipped to enjoy poetry by the educational system. So they don’t, and they never read it.

Another reason I believe is the radicalization of the intelligentsia. Poets were often on the bohemian edge of society, but they were rarely antagonistic toward their own nation. And even then many were quite conservative — Coleride, Kipling, and Arnold spring to mind. Modern intellectuals, poets included, are generally in an adversarial role to the larger society. And society returns the contempt, to the extent they notice the poets at all. A great irony in life is that the actual contact that an intellectual has with the common man is inversely proportional to the degree to which he claims to speak for the Common Man.

Because of this radicalization and its consequent elitism, prestige isn’t found by reaching the hearts of millions, but rather the small numbers of like-minds who comprise the literary award committees. Poetry becomes a very onanistic endeavor.

There isn’t a great incentive to reach a wide audience, either. With the explosion of universities since WWII, a poet can get a cushy post in an English Department that guarantees an income. How many live off their poems these days?

Those who do want fame rarely seek it through just the quality of their work. They end up doing publicity stunts like snubbing a White House invitation and then holding a press conference as they did with Laura Bush. It’s no coincidence that practically the only poet who’s currently a household name, Maya Angelou, really came to the public eye because of her bosom relationship with the Clintons. Politics has seeped into everything, much to the detriment of art. . .

Anyway, a lot of this is off-the-cuff speculation. Feel free anyone to correct, extend or clarify my remarks. :-)

Addendum 1:
Oh! Along the lines about achieving fame for one’s actions more than the quality of the work. . .

One of the few groups of poets that still remain socially prominent are the Beats. Again, this is a group more notable for who they were than what they wrote. Reading the Beats (and talking about the Beats and carrying Beat poetry books around campus) isn’t so much about poetry as it is a social marker. Po-Mos are all about constructing identity, and a Ginsberg collection is a great building block for some. (Which is not to say that there weren’t a few worthy poems to come out of that set.)

Addendum 2:
Ack! Okay, last comment…

Music actually DID lose form. Hello, Jazz. It just didn’t lose popularity in the same way that abstraction marginalized painting or sculpture.

Addendum 3:
Now it’s getting ridiculous, I admit. But I also wanted to say, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, that maybe the mass popularity of Hip-Hop shows that there is still a place for verse in the popular consciousness IF it’s couched the right way. Sadly, the “right” way seems to incline less toward urns and ancient mariners and more toward Big Pimpin’ and bling bling, but still.

The Song of the Strange Ascetic

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have crowned Neaera's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.

(G. K. Chesterton - 1913)

"From Dawn to Decadence"

After four years of separation, I'm blissfully cohabitating with my book collection once more. And I've finally gotten around to reading Jacques Barzun's massive history of modernity -- From Dawn to Decadence. So far I'm only through the Reformation, and I'm not enchanted with the book. While a nice survey, there really weren't any big new insights in the material. There were some great tidbits, however, and I love the format of the work.

His coverage of the Protestants vs. Romanists issue seems more than a little tendentious. When you end up arguing that it was the Proddies fault that the Catholics persecuted Galileo, you know you have an axe of some kind to grind. Somehow, Servetus and Castellio both make the book, Counter-Reformational slaughters don't.

He's also quite weak when he strays from cultural history into theology and church history. For example, he states that the only thing connecting the Puritans and Calvin was a belief in self-restraint. Excepting the fact that the Puritans took the bulk of their entire worldview from Calvin, I guess a belief in self-restraint was the only connection.

And he makes assertions like this: "At the same time, a man of intelligence and honesty like Luther cannot be blind to the many contradictions in the divinely inspired text." And the basis for this is. . .?

The book was well-received among conservatives, so I'm still hoping for good things. But if he's weak in an area where I know things, it makes me hesitant to trust him on other topics.

Eulogizing Hunter S. Thompson

Other than perhaps PJ O'Rourke or David Horowitz, there's no eulogy of Hunter S. Thompson I'd rather read than Tom Wolfe. Opinionjournal has it online today.

"Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was.

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization."

Hunter S. Thompson caps career/self

I was too young to have read Thompson in his prime, but all the after-the-fact reading I've done of his work was great. The end he came to was incredibly sad, but not without a certain narrative logic that I think he appreciated.

Ironically, the most lasting impact of his life will probably be in having inspired the creation of Duke. In like 90+ years of writing the thing, it's the only time Doonesbury's comic strip has succeeded in being comic.

Reading Lolita in Iran

I'm totally enamored with Azar Nafisi's memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. It fuses so many great things -- especially personal recollections of post-Revolutionary Iran and a passion for human rights and dignity.

I'm only a third of the way through the book, but thus far she's been sentimental without being maudlin. A light brush is always a good thing with this type of work.

Jean Cocteau and Spaceballs

I reread Spaceballs: the Movie: the Book this weekend. Amazing. It's somewhat similar to the professoriate of the average American university -- simultaneously brilliant and stupid, with a strong tendency toward frivolity.

"'No, no. Light speed is too slow!" Lord Dark Helmet protested. 'We'll have to go to ludicrous speed!'

Sandurz was astonished at the suggestion. 'Ludicrous speed?" he said, leaning forward and gripping the handrail. 'We've never gone that fast before. I'm not sure the ship can take it.'

'What's the matter Colonel Sandurz? Are you chicken?'"

Not all my reading was so highbrow. I also finished Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. It ended with a lot of parallels to The Dreamers, but he had the courage to follow through in the end. Even in translation there are some lovely turns of phrase. Definitely worth a read.

However, it was something of ten pounds of book stuffed into a five pound novella -- in a traditional reading the book felt rushed, especially the conclusion.

When approached more like a Classical myth I think it would read better. The brother-sister relationship is straight out of a Greek play, and elements like the snowball and the poison are presented as concretely as stage props.

Vile Bodies

It always takes me half a novel to forgive Evelyn Waugh for not being P.G.Wodehouse. . . His writing has the whimsy of Wodehouse, but he didin't play with language in the same way. What he did do well was satire.

My favorite character in the book is the Aimee Semple McPherson-inspired Miss Ape. Aimee had her Angelus Temple, Miss Ape has her "angels" -- Faith, Creative Endeavor, and so on. Their lifestyle is almost as questionable as Aimee's herself.

A great moment is the filming of a "meticulously accurate" film about the First Great Awakening. Two famous evangelists are fighting over the Countess Selina.

"But did Whitfield and Wesley ever fight a duel?"

"Well it's not actually recorded, but it's known they quarrelled and there was only one way of resolving quarrels in those days."

New Books!

The Duchess and I hit the sales at the Globe bookstore today while in town. Woot.

For starters, we found a two dollar copy of Petronius's Satyricon . Petronius was Nero's 'Tutor in Refinement', so this should be anything but dull reading. I'm trying to catch up on a lot of the Romans I overlooked along the way -- last year was Catullus and Ovid.

I also found Jean Cocteau's 1929 novella Les Enfants Terribles . Happily, I like his writing a lot more than his singing. About halfway through the book, I'm seeing more and more parallels with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. In both you have overly close French siblings, suicidal tendencies, an elaborately constructed interior world, and an intrusive outsider. I'm curious to see if the parallels extend to the finale.

New books!

Today we witnessed the happy arrival of both an Amazon.com order and a belated Christmas package. I have enough new books to last me at least. . . a week. Maybe longer!

Some of the highlights:

Friedrich Nietzsche -- Beyond Good and Evil

Michel Foucault -- The Foucault Reader

Azar Nafisi -- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Mako Yoshikawa -- Once Removed

Geerhardus Vos -- The Kingdom and the Church

We also received back copies of Bon Appétit and Organic Style magazines.

It was a good day on the lifestyle front all around -- while downtown today we picked up tickets to Charles Gounod's opera Roméo et Juliette for Saturday night.

What's in my head these days. . .

Depressingly little, really. Primarily an insistent beeping from my central nervous system saying I need to eventually sleep eight hours like normal people.

Otherwise, I've been reading The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey. I was intrigued that a historical novel about an Australian bandit could win the Booker Prize. I'm not surprised any more. There's little need to suspend disbelief while reading it -- Carey did an amazing job making you feel as if you're reading the bushranger's own words.

I also finally picked up some Thomas Pynchon today, after years of meaning to read him. He almost lost out to Salman Rushdie, but I had to go for the sale price. Any novel that was written in 1998 and already spawned three scholarly book-length assessments has got to be interesting. Or turgid and French.

While at the bookstore, our friend Olena hooked us up -- she loaned us three albums of Squirrel Nut Zippers. Such joy is mine. You can get Madonna or Britney over here, but Neo-Swing isn't usually in the offing.

Baudelaire's The Fountain of Blood

I go through periodic enthusiasms for the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. There are many poets I love, but I always come back to the evil old Decadent. . .

I sometimes feel that my blood is flowing in waves,
like a fountain with its rhythmical sobs.
I can hear it clearly, flowing with a long, murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.

I have sought forgetful sleep in love;
but love is nothing but a mattress of needles,
made to give those cruel girls something to drink!

Death of the Author, or Bon Voyage, Derrida

I was caught up with events here, and left the passing of Jacques Derrida unremarked. Here's a passage that always makes me think of him:

"French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of the French imports is the notion that there is no author behind the text. Is anything more affected, aggressive and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe."

No disrespect for the dead intended. I can't help admiring the aggressiveness and even the turgidity of the French intellectual.

Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog

While not the fantasia that Master and Margarita was, I really enjoyed Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog. It's the closest I've seen the Russians (or Ukrainians, in this case) get to slapstick, and at the same time it makes some sly, cutting commentary on both Communism and human nature.

The short version is that a renowed surgeon experiments on a stray dog -- implanting him with a human pituitary and testicles. He metamorphizes into a short, hairy human. That's probably the most normal aspect of the book -- from then on it gets weird.

It's interesting that utopian Communism, with its naive belief in human perfectibility, took root first in Russia. Read Dostoyevsky or Bulgakov, and you see that the authors of that nation understood the darkness inside each of us. I love this exchange in Heart of a Dog:

"You're right. Just think of the way he goes for cats. He's a man with the heart of a dog."

"You're making a big mistake, doctor. . . The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!"

Reaganites always said that the seeds for the destruction of Communism were inherent in the system. They were close. The seeds were inherent in the heart of man. No perfect system can be built from such relentlessly imperfect building material.

The Only Good Meme is a Book Meme

I generally despise these sorts of gimmicky meme things. If I'm going to use mindless blog filler, it's going to be original mindless filler. But this one includes books. Okay, whatever. Here's the deal:

Copy the list, then remove from it the names of any authors not in your home library, replacing them with names of authors you have. Boldface the ones you’ve added.

Mine's from Comme un trou:

1. Marcel Proust
2. Salman Rushdie
3. James Ellroy
4. Vladimir Nabokov
5. Jane Austen
6. John Piper
7. Milan Kundera
8. Mikhail Lermontov
9. V.S. Naipul
10. William Shakespeare

(Like anyone's going to admit to not having anything from the Bard.)

Be sure to check out Comme un trou if you get a chance -- another Slavophilic book-loving blog.

what's on my mind

Books: I just finished Henry James's Daisy Miller and came away unsatisfied. I love James, but this was an empty Seinfeld of a novella. I'd rather give myself another migraine with The Ambassadors than read Daisy again.

On the other hand, I'm enjoying Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Though set in an unnamed Latin country, the plot seems clearly based on the Tupac Amaru hostage crisis in Peru (the president is ethnically Japanese, for example.) Since I was in Peru during the high point of the Communist insurgency, it adds interest. While I don't see how it picked up both the Orange and the Penn/Faulkner Awards, but it's still worth reading.

On the movie front: the Duchess and I loved Donnie Darko, though I'll never look at the Easter Bunny the same way again. Despite some rough edges, that was a gripping piece of movie with a good dialogue and cast. To me it had many elements in common with The Butterfly Effect, but with fun surreal touches and less brutality.

The same cannot be said for the horror that is Weekend at Bernie's II. Viewing this film is a brutal, masochistic act. I'd bought it to nurse a migraine, and ended up worsening things by gnashing my teeth. I was left with the resonating thought -- "someone made this movie on purpose."

Today's soundtrack:

- Cesaria Evora vida tem um so vida

- Django Reinhardt Limehouse Blues

- Dead Kennedys Viva Las Vegas!

July 16 -- the new Harry Potter

It took forever for Book 5 to hit Kiev. I'll be in the States at least part of the summer, so I'll be able to pick up the new Harry right away. Life is good. JK Rowling is a beautiful, Presbyterian genius.

some discernment about The Discerning Reader?

This won't concern most of you, but I wanted to invite the people who were discussing Rob Schlapfer's business practices up to the main page, rather than having them languish in the archives. I had never heard of Rob until shortly before I did the original post, but it has been an eye-opening experience to watch him respond to criticism. While I won't speak to his business acumen, I will say that Jefferson Davis had rhino skin in comparison to him.

Here's an example from his visit to Le Sabot: "I really don't give a damn about what you people think. All I know is that I have been working my A** off for 5 years doing this . . ."

Thomas Hobbes meets Dr. Ruth

Ecce Homo led me back to Paglia's Sexual Personae. Much of her substance comes from Nietzsche. More than that, she drew style from him -- like Nietzsche, her prose contains the inflection of both poet and prophet. This section stuck in my brain today:

"Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature, and other hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law. . .

In society, there are protections for the weak. . . When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves. . .

My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind. Romanticism always turns to decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster. It is the hammer and the anvil, crushing individuality. Perfect freedom would be to die by earth, air, water and fire. Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted."

new acquisitions for the Collection

The Duchess and I made out like Ukrainian oligarchs during yesterday's trip to the Stoned Baboon's book exchange. Turning in a few old videotapes and a selection of Wordsworth Classics, we got some great new stuff including:

Laurence Sterne's Letters
Modern Age's The Conservative Scholar in the 21st century
Mikhail Svetlov's selected poems
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto
Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog
and Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Women of China

The Duchess also picked up Jeannette Kupfermann The MsTaken Body, a "plea for the reinstatement of myth and symbol in a world where women have been alienated from themselves and reduced to the language of the body."

I've been rereading Paglia's Sexual Personae, so the two books have sparked some good convo today.

What's on my Mind these days. . .

The Duchess and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. Wow. The film suffers from a few longueurs, and shouldn't be seen by anyone on Suicide Watch. Those caveats aside, it's my fave postmodern film since Being John Malkovich. Which made sense, when I found out today that Charlie Kaufman had done both films. I think it blows away Adaptation. I just saw on his filmography that Kaufman is also lined up to do a joint project with Spike Jonez. Life is good.

Less good was Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles. I've been getting into Japanese Lit for a couple of years, but this one was a bit of a let-down. I think my impression suffered because I've been reading primarily Japanese Po-Mo stuff, and this was written in the early 20th. I should have been thinking more Steinbeck and less Murakami. Maybe the translation was flat, too. I'm going to read a couple more before passing judgement.

I hate Marcel Proust

I really wanted to like Sodom and Gomorrah, really I did. But the man’s work is a literary equivalent of West Texas – occasional areas of interest separated by vast tracts of tedium. His plodding plotting makes Henry James at his most constipated look like Speedy Gonzales.

On the other hand, I loved Emile Zola’s Nana. It follows the story of a Parisian courtesan during the time of the Second Empire. The prose is both intelligent AND readable. Proust could have learned a thing from his countryman. And the insight into late-19th Century France is educational. At a time when Evangelical revivalists were leading moralistic crusades throughout America, the French had already descended into Weimar levels of decadence, with prostitutes filling a role something like our modern pop stars. The cultural divide between the US and France didn’t start with George Bush.

Victor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine Gun is the first contemporary Russian novel I’ve found that’s worth mentioning with the dead masters. While I don’t exactly relate to the novel’s Buddhist themes, I admire the artful way Pelevin structured the book --multiple, illusory plotlines for the same character, all equally real and unreal, just as he views our existence. Throughout the novel he weaves in dry-witted commentary on Russia – both Revolutionary, and the Wild West mentality of the 90’s New Russians.

On the Bedside Table. . .

While it has a few objectionable elements, Sarah Waters' Fingersmith is the most enjoyable Victorian Gothic novel I've read that wasn't actually written during the period. She follows all the conventions of the genre -- plenty of orphans, dark secrets, hangings, colorful criminals, lost fortunes, and credulity-straining plot twists, but does it in a fresh way. It occupies a pleasant niche in between 'good' literature and brain-candy.

I also finished Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes while in Yalta. Frankly, it was a little disappointing. From the reviews I read, I was expecting a haunting adolescent tale of love and yearning, etc. Take my advice -- if you want a look at the intimate life of the provincial French, stick with Madame Bovary.

Today I picked up Sterne's Tristam Shandy. It was a huge influence on Jefferson and his contemporaries, so I've been wanting to check it out. Also started on Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. When it comes to 19th-Century postmodernly-prophetic syphilitic madmen, he ranks right up there in my Top Ten.

The de Sade of Amherst

I've been reading the letters of Emily Dickinson these days. Her poems have never held my interest, but after reading Paglia's depiction of her underlying philosophy, I decided to reinvestigate her. While I still don't see many points of connection between Emily and the Marquis, she is much more enjoyable as an epistoler than as a poet. Her letters are clever, pithy, and sentimental without bathos. Here's a short example:

"Dear Friend -- Your sweetness intimidates.

Had it been a mastiff that guarded Eden, we should have feared him less than we do the angel. I read your little letter. It had, like bliss, the minute length. It were dearer had you protracted it; but the sparrow must not propound his crumb.

We shall find the cube of the rainbow, Of that there is no doubt. But the arc of a lover's conjecture, Eludes the finding out.

Confidingly,
Emily

Admiring Henry James

Henry James has had nearly as many books turned into movies as Stephen King -- Wings of the Dove, Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, The Bostonians, The Europeans and others.

I'd be surprised, though, if he's all that widely read these days. Especially in his later period his prose became almost baroquely ornamental. The Ambassadors is probably the only book not written by a Dutch theologian that I've tossed against a wall in frustration.

But he's worth reading. A good jumping-off point would be his Gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw -- considered by many to be the best short fiction ever written by an American. One thing I appreciate about his work is that it remains relevant. I read The American during the lead-up to the Iraq War. A story of an honorable American having a bitter encounter with proud, cynical France, it was impossible not to see Chirac in the manipulation and false-dealing of the de Cintré family. Commentators portray the cultural division between Europe and America as something new. It was enlightening to see it so clearly delineated before the turn of the 20th Century.

Also check out The Bostonians. After having endured residency in the People's Republic of MA, I was fascinated to see how the character of the people was already formed a hundred years past. The story focuses on a quirky love-triangle -- an austere Boston feminist vying with a Southern conservative for the heart of her protégé. In fifty years, this observation will probably suit most of the grrrrls who formed our Uni's student senate:

"She belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements."

Ukraine -- the World's Biggest Village

I was reminded again last night that Ukraine is a village of 50 million people. It's uncanny how everyone knows one another. This first came to me on a ski slope in the Carpathians, when I shared the lift with a good friend of my colleague back in Kiev. This sort of thing has happened often since then. The Ukrainians I've mentioned this to have the same impression of their country. Last night I was at a birthday party for a friend, and we started talking contemporary Russian lit. I mentioned Andrei Kurkov as a favorite of mine, and the girl next to me laughed. "He's my krestniy otets!" -- her godfather.

What NPR Could Be. . .

I'm besotted with The Atlantic Monthly these days. While nothing will ever replace National Review in my pantheon of opinion journals, Atlantic is near the top. Every issue features long, thoughtful commentary on the things that make life interesting from a variety of political persuasions. It's what NPR could be if "public" meant something broader than "upper-middle class Northeastern liberal".

This month's issue contains Christopher Hitchens on Burke, for example. Now that Hitch is saying things like, "Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and turn into their opposites", does that mean his pilgrimage from Leftist to Neocon is complete?

Poetry-lovers should check out Cristina Nehring's beautiful piece on Sylvia Plath -- Domesticated Goddess. It's the most balanced biographical overview I've read of Plath, and explores the implications of her suicide -- did it "validate" her death poems?

You foreign affairs types need to read Rauch's piece on the "democracy caucus". I hadn't realized how far the idea had come. Imagine a voting bloc for democratic states in the UN. Better, imagine a democratic alternative to the dysfunctional UN. It's easy if you try. And even easier after reading this article.

In another addition to the "Great Minds Think Alike" file, the Duchess is also praising The Atlantic over at Tulip Girl.

Multiculturalism -- the blended Scotch of the Intellectual World

Chris from Progressive Protestant and I talked a bit about the Western Canon the other day. He mentioned that he favors the inclusion of some non-Western works. To an extent, I agree. Our future intellectuals should interact with other cultures. It's a wonderul preventative against stagnation.

However, that's the least of our concerns these days. While the multicultists want our students to learn the cultures of everyone from Singapore to Somalia, most come out of Uni with only the barest grasp of their own culture, let alone Mogadishu's.

Want to know the amazing irony? Conservatives are the true defenders of diversity. If their ideas held sway, a student would emerge from our universities steeped in the riches of the Western tradition. In other words, a unique voice would be added to the world's Great Conversation -- one distinct from, say, a Japanese or Arabic student. That's genuine diversity.

The self-proclaimed "diversity" advocates of the Left have a much grayer ideal -- graduates with a veneer of acculturation in multiple traditions.

That isn't diversity, it's the intellectual equivalent of blended Scotch. This is made by taking unique, flavorful single-malts, and then dumping them in a vat with neutral grain alcohol and mixing vigorously. You end up with an inoffensive blend that lacks the spirit of the original malts. In most cases, a mediocre uniformity -- a fair depiction of our approach to the Humanities these days.

A Second Look at the Victorians

Camille Paglia rekindled my interest in the Victorians last year, and I've been getting reacquainted with them -- H. Rider Haggard's novels of Africa, the Brontës, Austen, Christina Rossetti, Wilde, Tennyson, Carlyle and his Great Men, and a few others. I'm halfway through Penguin's wonderful survey of the period, The Victorians. I appreciate that it doesn't just appraise each author's work, but places it in historical, literary and intellectual context. I can't recommend it enough.

The two opening essays on the intellectual and spiritual clime of Victorianism are beautiful, and balance critical evaluation with genuine fondness for the period.

"In the end the most stimulating thing about the Victorian intellectual scene is this: a great debate, intelligent and passionate, was conducted by brave men who neither despised the public, nor pandered to its lowest instincts."

Would that our own thinkers could do the same. No group, with the exception of the Puritans, has had their image so caricatured as the Victorians. These two essays do a great job showing that they weren't simply a nation of pecksniffs and prudes. Sadly, the author is a Romanist. While restoring a balanced view of Victorians as a whole, he reverts to the same crude stereotypes of Evangelicals and Puritans that one expects from a high school Lit class. Isn't it fascinating how brilliant people can still have huge intellectual blindspots? In an otherwise wonderful piece are tucked away several paragraphs of Jack Chick-level polemicizing. A quick example:

"And there is no doubt that the traditional Protestant way of reading the Bible literally, and without regard to human authorship or historical circumstances, made this seem much more threatening than it was."

While the author seems to know quite a bit about the Oxford Movement and the like, he should have read at least one actual Protestant book before presuming to write about us. It would seem he's unfamiliar with the grammatical-historical method of Biblical interpretation, which is, of course, the normative method of Protestant hermeneutics. It very much takes into account historical context and authorship.

Tractarian Lit 101

It's been so long since I last read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter that I'd forgotten the great book's even greater flaw -- it's just TOO didactic. Plunked in the middle of an otherwise lovely novel are at least half a dozen 2-3 page sermonettes on Marxism, detailed enough that there could have been discussion questions at the end of the chapters. Lest anyone think I mean this in a John Birchesque "Eisenhower is a Communist" way, this is a paragraph from one of them:

"We must remember the words of Karl Marx and see the truth according to his teachings. . . We must remember that we all make the things of this earth of value because of our labor. These main truths from Karl Marx we must keep in our hearts always and not forget."

Reading this in 2004, it seems preposterous that there was once a time when this was almost standard thinking for American intellectuals. It seems so quaint. Marxism has been so thoroughly discredited by experience it was as if the words should simply have faded from the page by now.

Reading it, I also had the same slightly giddy feeling I get walking by the Lenin statue downtown. It's a wholesome sense of "We Won." As America faces a new threat to her way of life, it was good to remember that we beat the Fascists and the Reds. And we'll do the same to the bin Ladens of the world.

Presbies in Lit, Part Deux

I'm re-reading Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I would read every time I went through a Southern Lit phase while growing up. I'm so jealous that a 23-year-old could capture personalities so vividly, and with such simple strokes.

We quoted Rob Roy on Scottish Presbyterian worship the other day. Here's Portia, the main character's cook and nanny on Southern Presbies:

"Now, I not a big shouter. I belongs to the Presbyterian Church and us don't hold with all this rolling on the floor and talking in tongues. Us don't get sanctified ever week and wallow around together. In our church we sings and lets the preacher do the preaching. . . Now Highboy he were a Holiness boy before us were married. He loved to get the Spirit ever Sunday and shout and sanctify hisself. But after us was married I got him to join me, and although it kind of hard to keep him quiet sometime I think he doing right well."

Going from the holly-rollers to the Presbies myself, the passage made me grin. Though I don't personally have any trouble keeping quiet.

Two Brushes With The Old Kirk Today. . .

Another hat tip to The Duchess. She's finishing up Scott's Rob Roy, and pointed out this nice passage to me:

"The sound of so many voices united by the distance into one harmony, and freed from those harsh discordances which jar the ear when heard more near, combining with the murmuring brook, and the wind which sung among the old firs, affected me with a sense of sublimity. All nature, as invoked by the Psalmist whose verses they chanted, seemed united in offering that solemn praise in which trembling is mixed with joy as she addressed her Maker.

I had heard the service of high mass in France, celebrated with all the e'clat which the choicest music, the richest dresses, the most imposing ceremonies, could confer on it; yet it fell short in effect of the simplicity of the Presbyterian worship. The devotion in which every one took a share seemed so superior to that which was recited by musicians as a lesson which they had learned by rote, that it gave the Scottish worship all the advantage of reality over acting."

--Rob Roy, Sir Walter Scott

I was able to win one of my English students over a bit today with a bit of Presbyterian lore. Like a lot of Ukrainians, her family is mildly suspicious of Western Believers (many here lump us together as sektanti -- sect members.) She loves the fantasy genre. When I explained that the authors of both Narnia and Lord of the Rings were Believers, that made an impression.

But the crowning moment came when I mentioned that J.K. Rowling is a Presbyterian, which just happens to be the same church we're organizing here in the Poznyaki Region. Apparently, Harry Potter's not only good for luring youngsters into witchcraft. . . He works for Calvinists too!

Four Feathers and More Satanic Verses

Neither period pieces nor Heath Ledger movies could be called habits of mine, but I really enjoyed The Four Feathers. I was amazed that they took the old Victorian novel about the Empire's war in Sudan, and managed not to turn it into an anti-Imperialism tract. Once again, the film industry has managed to make a film about honor, courage and duty, and do it without sneering. This may become habit forming for them, with any luck. Feathers is well acted, the action scenes are believable and the landscapes are gorgeous. Check it out.

I'm re-reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and continuing to be dazzled by it. It's not the world's most accessible novel, but it's worth the effort. Rushdie flits the reader between ancient Arabia, modern India and London and the top of Mount Everest, and does it without the storyline ever seeming forced. In the process he brings in colonialism, cross-cultural issues, race-hustling, morality, theology and the founding of Islam, all with an off-kilter magical realism.

I'll do a fuller write up on it later, but I came across this paragraph I enjoyed:

"Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogenous, non-hybrid, 'pure', -- an utterly fantastic notion! -- cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let's rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is. -- That, in fact, we fall towards it naturally, that is, not against our natures. -- And that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road."

While he goes too far in portraying 3rd World immigrants to Britain as spotless victims of an uncaring country (the country which gave them refuge in the first place), some of his political observations are spot-on. I love his depiction of American cultural hegemony -- "Coca-Colonization."

More Ten Second Reviews

We finally got around to watching Bend it Like Beckham tonight, and I was so cheerfully surprised by it. I'd dreaded it, imagining an unholy mix of Billy Elliot and My Big Fat Greek Smarm-Fest with the added nausea of rah-rah Gel Power. Thankfully, nothing of the kind. It was instead just a clever, diverting little film.

Our non-fiction category has two entrants this week. First up is The History of the Blues, by Paul Oliver, probably the single best intro to the subject. Ilover is a Brit, and wrote the book during the heyday of Britain infatuation with the Blues. He begins with field hollers and medicine shows and takes the style up to Muddy Waters and B.B. King. It's technical enough to interest music majors, but his prose is lyrical enough for even people like me to get a feel for the music. To celebrate fnishing the book, I picked up a copy of John Lee Hooker's final recordings in the Metro station a couple days back.

I'm also working my way through John Keegan's Penguin Book of War. I became a fan of Keegan after reading his History of War. He's of the same school of military history as Victor Davis Hanson. Both emphasize the effects of culture upon armies and strategy, though Keegan is something of a dove and Hanson an arch-hawk. This new book is a compendium of great military writings, with first sources dating from Thucydides through an SAS man's recollections of Desert Storm.

Now that I've read Christopher Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously, I'll never conflate Sukarno and Suharto again. The historical novel focuses on the year leading to Indonesia's abortive Communist revolution, during which a half millin people lost their lives. The plot focuses on a tiny band of hated Western journalists trying to survive and report during a time of rabid nationalism. I don't want to make it out as an adventure story. It's most of all a very human novel, with a wonderful tenderness to it. Koch shows the ugly realities of Third-World life. he does it with sympathy, but without ever making saints of them. The same can be said for his Western characters, who are all terribly flawed but sympathetic. Central to the plot is Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf who shares more with Owen Meany than his stature.

10-Second Book Reviews

I was bitterly let down by Irving Welsh's novel Ecstasy. It's always a drag when you give someone credit for depth they simply don't have. Trainspotting was a very powerful novel (and a great film), and I loved his use of Scots vernacular. I'd hoped for similar strengths from Ecstasy, but it's so flat. Where Trainspotting shocked you, this one just makes you a bit queasy. I'll admit to tossing it halfway through, so perhaps there's some redeeming grace that I missed. But don't count on it.

Another that rated low on the whelm-o-meter was Ha Jin's In the Pond. My enjoyment was stifled by reading in translation, and also by what we could call worldview issues. The novel focuses on a young Communist artist's struggle against corrupt petty bureaucrats in contemporary China. I was so frustrated by the "harmonious" ending of the book. Call me reactionary, but I'll stick with our Western literary model of the lone, righteous man standing against the corrupt system and either winning or losing greatly.

On a happier note, Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt was a treat to read. I've kept to his weightier novels, like The Power and the Glory or A Burnt-Out Case. It was fun to see a lighter, more bantering side to his craft. The author's mad aunt reminds me of Holly Golightly, had Truman Capote let her age to about 75. Definitely worth picking up.

For some light BritLit, try out Liz Jensen's The Paper Eater. It focuses on a near-future consumerist dystopia called Atlantica, where people are no longer citizens, but "valued customers." Even good capitalists like myself cringe at the creeping advance of consumerism and materialism into every facet of life, and Jensen's parody is worth reading.

I'll cover non-fiction tomorrow, this is running long.

A Fugitive at the Atlantic!

I was happy to see The Atlantic Monthly has a piece on John Crowe Ransom, the great Southern Fugitive writers, along with his poem Here Lies a Lady. I didn't know he'd done a peculiar side-by-side Version A, Version B for his poems, having only read him in anthologies. There are also links to readings of the poem at the bottom.

While not a sympathizer of their Agrarian philosophy, I love the writing that came from the Fugitives, particularly Robert Penn Warren.

Vinnie Pukh Is Not A Russian Mobster

As the astute reader of Le Sabot might have noticed, our children's hamster is named Vinnie Pukh. This is the Soviet version of our own Winnie the Pooh (the Commies stole more than just our H-bomb plans. . .) Russian has no articles, so he's just Winnie Pooh. It has no W, so he's Vinnie. And their "h" is pronounced "kh", hence, Pukh. The Soviet version is charming in his own way, but much different than ours -- stout, dark brown, and with the gravelly voice of a 3-pack-a-day smoker.

Books, Glorious Books. . .

The Globe bookstore, my favorite English shop in town, is having a 60% off sale. Could life be better? Over the past couple of days the Duchess and I found:

Americans at War -- Stephen Ambrose

The Fourth Treasure -- Todd Shimoda

Neuromancer -- William Gibson

The Birth of a New Physics -- Bernard Cohen

History of Literature: The Victorians

Le Grand Meaulnes -- Alain-Fournier

Travels Wih My Aunt -- Graham Greene

This many books could last me for, well, for days.

The Wheel of Time -- A Warning Label

Warning- Robert Jordan, the author of this interminable 10-volume-plus fantasy series, has succumbed to world-builder disease. This is characterized by a desire to show you every possible facet of the world he's created, and a tendency to think this substitutes for plot development.

Much like cigarettes, if you haven't started Robert Jordan, then don't. The first six books are dynamite. The past four have placed fared poorly on my Master List of Interesting Diversions. They rate just below macrame, and slightly higher than watching Helen Thomas do the fan-dance. Not only that, but he's developed this weird thing with corporal punishment, and the instances of "inadvertent" (though innocent) nudity are becoming as frequent as one might find at an Art Frahm retrospective.

Christmas in January!

We just had two care packages of late Christmas presents arrive. . . Not only did I get a trés-fly Guinness rugby shirt from my sainted mother, but a much-needed book infusion for my library.

Among the new acquisitions:

1. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

2. Lizard, Banana Yoshimoto

3. Treason, Ann Coulter

4. Glory, Vladimir Nabokov

5. Life, Art and America, Theodore Dreiser

6. Heart of Winter, Robert Jordan

7. Commentary on John, John Calvin

These should last me a couple days.

Fave Books for 2003

Here's a look at some of the favorite books I read in 2003. . .

My favorite:

Classic Novel(s) -- War and Peace and Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy

Modern Novel -- Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami

Short Story -- Greenleaf, Flannery O'Connor

Poetry Collection -- Renascence and Other Poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay

Genre Fiction -- The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy

Essay -- Those Radical Chic Evenings, Tom Wolfe

Bible Reference Work -- The Gospel of John, D.A. Carson

Theological Work -- Christ of the Covenants, O. Palmer Robertson

Biography -- When Character Was King, Peggy Noonan

Modern History -- A Religious History of the American People, Sydney Ahlstrom

Ancient History -- On Sparta, Plutarch

Unified-Field Theory of Western Culture -- Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia

How-To Book -- Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara

Badly-Written Novel -- Across the River and Into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway

What were some of yours?

Where Have You Gone, Joe Conrad? (Apologies to S&G)

There's a certain protaganistic archetype that populates nearly every novel I've read this year. The lead character is inevitably male, passive, alienated and rootless. His personality is as washed-out as a 1970's photograph. There's generally a much stronger female supporting character, something like Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451, who says quizzical and wise things that prod the lead character from his inertia and basic lameness. The plot, while sometimes having peripheral actions that look like story movement, boils down to the lead character searching for some reason to justify or demonstrate his own existence.

While the writing itself is often beautiful artistry, it is so anemic, so monotonous, that after the 4th or 5th novel of the type you start to long for something meatier. Anything meatier. I wouldn't even insist on a Hemingwayesque safari hunter/boxer/bullfighter/Resistance partisan. Even another tired story centering around a family torn apart by some dark 'Secret' would be preferable to one more helping of this cold oatmeal.

Just one more, and I'm doing something rash. I'm not sure what -- maybe going back to only reading books written before 1948, or mailing a set of Alexander Dumas novels to Penguin and Vintage so they can remember what decisive male protags look like.

If Life Were Jeopardy. . .

I'm reading Douglas Coupland's novel, Microserfs. It's a clever look into life at Microsoft during the mid-90's heyday of Geek Chic. While enjoyable, it's a bit ephemeral. When you write books with titles like Generation X or Microserfs it's almost a form of literary planned obsolesence. Even now it looks less zeigeisty than quaint. But it's witty, and interesting in a time-capsulish sort of way. One of his better pieces of gimcrackery is listing the seven dream Jeopardy categories for each of his major characters. I thought I'd do the same:

If my life were Jeopardy, my dream categories would be:

1. Contemporary American Politics

2. Stout Beers

3. History and Theology of the Reformation

4. Anime

5. Non-Employable Bits of Trivia

6. 80's Television

7. Realist, Naturalist and Post-Modern Literature

What are yours?

***Cue Jeopardy theme music***

Dorothy Parker writes you, you wonderfully urbane,
witty boozehound, you.


Which Author's Fiction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I've loved Dorothy Parker for ages. Big Blonde is one of my favorite short stories, and her doggerel poems are dark and fun. Here are a few I like:

Resume

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

General Review of the Sex Situation

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

The Flaw in Paganism

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

Special thanks to Jared at Mysterium Tremendum!

Exegete Me Baby, One More Time. . .

A girl in our Student Fellowship came to me excitedly the other day with the news that Britney Spears is a born-again Christian. She wanted to know if I had any more info on the subject. I was pleased to hear of it, of course. What an opportunity! Considering how recalcitrant Evangelicalism has been about embracing pop morals and culture, having a Spokes-Not-a-Girl-Not-Yet-a-Woman like Britney could be just the shot in the arm we need! And think of the influence a faith such as hers could have on the millions of Evangelical girls whose parents allow them to buy her records. Why, an abstinence advocate like her could revolutionize the spiritual and sexual mores of a generation. . .

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see that Britney's agile mind was one step ahead of me. She's put together a relevant and hip Bible study for girls that encapsulates her Christian walk:

It's even ecumenical -- Madonna, a devout Catholic, wrote the forward as well as a chapter on sacred objects as fashion accessories.

Wodehoused Out?

If you love Bertie and Jeeves, but can't face one more plot revolving around a purloined pearl necklace, you might check out Evelyn Waugh. I just finished Decline and Fall, and loved it. It has many of the same elements as Wodehouse -- feckless British aristocrats, lighthearted crime capers, romantic mishaps and memorable characterization. Lacking is P.G.'s campy playfulness with the English language, but Waugh makes up for it with a darkly ironic wit.

Paglian Hessians

After fifteen years of good intentions, I've finally picked up Herman Hesse. At present I'm halfway through Narcissus and Goldmund. I'm glad I waited 'til after I'd absorbed Camille Paglia's thought, because so much of it is more meaningful when read in that context. Jung and Freud haunt the work, with constant explorations of the libido, sexuality-and-art and the mother-son relationship.

Something akin to Paglia's musings on the-artist-as-pagan-votive-to-Gaia runs through the book like a thread -- Goldmund seeking an elusive female image that blends his mother, Eve and the Madonna into an archetypical She. Goldmund's constant pursuit of women, and the diminishing and disappointment that follows, reminds me of the vagina dentata that Paglia writes of. Sexuality and nature in both Paglia and Hesse's writing aren't of contemporary Liberalism's safe, romanticized variety, but rather are wild, mysterious places of dark magic where love and cruelty co-exist and blend.

There's also a strong Apollonian/Dionysian dualism present. Narcissus is of the sun -- an ascetic, male essence living the life of the mind; Goldmund is of the moon -- feral, sensual and emotive.

Even the hermaphroditic ideal in art is present: "Any work of art that was truly sublime... had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality."

This passage captures several of these points:

"Women, the game of the sexes, came first on his list, and his frequent accesses of melancholy and disgust grew out of the knowledge that desire was a transitory, fleeting experience. The rapid, soaring, blissful burning of desire, it's brief longing flame, its rapid extinction -- this seemed to him to contain the kernel of all experience. . . The mother of life could be called love or desire; she could be called grave, death and decay. Eve was the mother. She was a source of bliss as well as of death, eternally she gave birth and eternally she killed; her love was filled with cruelty."

Paglia's Sexual Personae ends in the 19th Century with Emily Dickinson -- "Amherst's Madame de Sade." Does anyone know if she's written anything on Hesse himself?

Domo Arigato, Ms. Yoshimoto, Part Deux

I just finished Haruki Murakami's Dance, Dance, Dance. Fortuitously, my language tutor just read the Russian translation of the work, so we had one of our odder sessions so far. Generally speaking, psychic 13 year olds and Sheep Men aren't our standard topics.

With his flat description of setting, his protaganist's alienation, the magical realism, the constant pop-culture references, etc., anyone looking to taste-test postmodern literature can do worse than Murakami. I enjoyed him much more than Kundera, for instance. And the bouts of surreality are tucked inside a deceptively humdrum context in a way that reminds me most of David Lynch (a beautiful, misunderstood genius if ever there was one.)

His writing was also very reminiscent of Andrei Kurkov (or should I say it the other way.) Death and the Penguin had so many parallels, not only stylistically, but in plot elements like the child-ward, the character's isolation, organized crime and several others. This will likely be of interest only to my good friend and faithful reader, Liberal Media.

A Core Sample of the Russian Soul

I came across a Yevtushenko poem today that captures something of the Russian soul. It encapsulates the experience of so many men here -- the institute, the struggle to get ahead, the family stresses, the drinking, and the bleakness of growing old in a country where the word 'pension' is almost a sick joke. Not everything lent itself to direct translation, but I think I've kept it true to the original...

A Life in a Hundred Words

Lullabies, diapers, crying;
Word, step, runny nose, doctor;
Running, toys, mother;
Yard, swinging, kindergarten.

School, first, second, fifth;
Ball, stumble, cast, bed;
Fight, blood, broken nose;
Yard, friends, clique, attitude.

Institute, spring, bushes;
Summer, session, re-examinations;
Beer, vodka, gin and ice;
Coffee, session, diploma.

Romance, love, star;
Hands, lips, sleepless night;
Wedding, mother-in-law, father-in-law, snare;
Quarrel, friends, nightclub, cup.

House, work;
House, family;
Sunshine, summer;
Snow, winter.

Son, diapers, lullaby;
Stress, mistress, bedspread;
Business, money, plan, busyness,
Television series.

Dacha, cherries, cucumbers;
Graying, migraine, glasses.

Grandson, diapers, lullaby;
Stress, blood pressure, bedspread;
Heart, kidneys, bones, doctor;
Speeches, grave, good-byes, crying.

Domo Arigato, Ms. Yoshimoto

The subject of Japanese literature came up in the comments section. . . It isn't my strongest area, but I thought I'd list a few authors I've enjoyed, for the benefit of anyone whose experience with Japanese writing ended with Star Blazers.

Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favorites. Her novella Kitchen is a sweet, melancholy little work that's easy to find in the States. I was less impressed with NP both for subject matter and plotting, but still worth picking up.

Eiji Yoshikawa wrote a series of historical novels about the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. An interesting (and romanticized) look at feudal Japan. It's been called their Gone With the Wind. There's a 5-book translation available titled simply Musashi. It has warrior monks and samurai, what else could anyone hope for?

Miyamoto Musashi himself wrote The Book of Five Rings, which is the closest thing to an Art of War produced by the Japanese. This is also widely available in English.

Rumiko Takahashi is a prolific writer of various mangas. An interesting look into modern Japanese youth culture, and usually a pretty funny read.

Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji in the 11th Century. The insight into the characters is great, even if the plot doesn't exactly sweep along on heron wings. A tale of court life in feudal Japan, it's a must-read for anyone interested in world lit.

A question for my fellow travelers -- Has anyone read Haruki Murakami? I'm deliberating on whether to buy one of his books now that they've hit Kiev.

What's On My Mind These Days...

On the Bedside table:

The Idea of a Christian Society -- T.S. Eliot
The Master and Margarita -- Mikhail Bulgakov
The Black Dahlia -- James Ellroy
The Middle of the Journey -- Lionel Trilling
The Gospel According to John -- D.A. Carson

In the VCR:

Identity -- John Cusack, Ray Liotta
Paris When it Sizzles -- Audrey Hepburn

In the CD Changer:

The Fugees -- Greatest Hits
Beck -- Sea Changes
Glukoza -- Nevestka
Lynyrd Skynyrd -- Skynyrd's Innyrds

Current Chinese Proverb for Meditation:

Confusion say, 'man who live in glass house get dressed in basement.'

Finding Yourself in Print

It's interesting doing a websearch for oneself. I just discovered an article I'd submitted to EnterStageRight and promptly forgot. Apparently, they published it. It's a comparison of parallels and differences between the Cold War and the ongoing War on Terror. Some of it's a bit dated, but it's aged well. Check out The Elephant in the Mosque: Thoughts on the New Cold War
and then come back here and savage it...

The Duchess found herself featured in a new article about the Gary Ezzo controversy. For those unacquainted with the lifestyle gurus of the Christian ghetto, he's a moralistic parenting teacher who's been evicted from his last three churches and peddles medically dangerous advice for newborns. If the word "chucklehead" hadn't already been invented, Gary Ezzo's life and work would have necessitated the term. Check out Is the Babywise Method Right for You?

The Satanic Verses

I'm midway through Salman Rushdie's brilliant The Satanic Verses. I've avoided it for ages, because his short-story collection East, West so totally failed to meet my whelm threshold. But an Iranian friend loaned Verses to me last week, and that alone was intruiging enough to make me open it. I felt as if I were reading some sort of Soviet-era samizdat publication. This is a book, after all, that caused Rushdie to be placed under fatwah (a sentence of death) by the Iranian authorities. He's still in hiding after 14 years with a 2.8 million dollar bounty on his head.

The novel itself is incredibly ambitious. Take a cup of Bulgakov's imaginative (and imagined) religious history in Master and Margarita then mix in a bit of V.S. Naipul's musings on culture and Indian ethnicity. Dump in a heaping teaspoon of kafkaesque metamorphical surrealism and then lace the entire concoction with hallucinogenics. You'll strike somewhere near the mark.

Lord Bacon said that some books were to be tasted, and some to be fully ingested. This one should be dropped with blotter paper. But an engaging read all the same.

Rowling an Inkling?

I just put in an order for the new Harry Potter today; the first deliveries should reach Kiev in about a week. My navel is puckering and unpuckering in excitement at a frightening rate. This is possibly too much information for you.

Regardless, a healthy percentage of the Christians reading this have just deposited me in a bin marked either 'misguided' or 'worldly.'

Enough bytes have given their lives already to endless debates over the ostensibly pagan nature of Harry Potter and his alleged ability to turn nice kids into warlocks. I'll confine my remarks to something I wrote the other day on a blog I frequent:

If your child's grasp of Christianity is so tenuous that Harry Potter can turn him to the dark side, then you have failed in your covenant duties as a parent. Further, Hogwart's is little more than a fanciful adaptation of British public school life. I think a much greater threat than children turning to witchcraft is that they may develop a desire to wear knickerbockers and speak in fruity little English voices. Now THAT is something to fear.

Dave Kopel has written an interesting review of John Granger's book: The Hidden Key to Harry Potter. The premise of the work is that J.K. Rowling is heir to the tradition of the Inklings-- the Oxford dons (including Lewis and Tolkien) who wrote some of the only worthy fantasy in modern Christian literature. I'd have to read the book to be fully convinced, but it was an interesting alternative view.

Plus I learned that Rowling is a Presbyterian. Which demonstrates the truism that liturgical Christians are the only believers that write decent fiction.

Everyone's Favorite Guerrilla Feminist

To maintain my credentials as a Pop Culture Maven, I've been advised that I need to include more lesbian references in my blog (given the ubiquity of lesbian chic these days, I'm sure you understand.) After briefly considering a post on Tatu, the pseudo-sapphic Russian band that's sweeping Europe, I opted instead for Camille Paglia.

I've been rereading her breakthough work -- Sexual Personae. Walking in the Louvre among the ephebes, femme fatales, amazons and other archetypes which populate the book inspired me to pick it up again. It is a long, strange, tripped spin. Her unified field theory of Western art and culture is incredibly ambitious, and immersing yourself in it is to step temporarily into an alternate reality.

Much like Ayn Rand, many of her conclusions are cheering to conservatives and Christians. A cursory reading of her introduction would find many such people nodding their heads approvingly. But as with Rand, her worldview (atheistic paganism) is so utterly foreign to Christianity that these points of connection are limited. For example, where she sees nature's barbarism in operation in human interaction, Christianity sees mankind's Fall. Nevertheless, it's a wonderful read... a sweeping look through Western Civ from the Egyptians to Elvis that's written in an engaging and aggressive voice.

"Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau...

"This book takes the point of view of Sade, the most unread major writer in Western literature. Sade's work is a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau...

"For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would be to give free reign to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal, but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man's innate cruelty bursts forth."

I recommend Sexual Personae with one very large caveat. She takes a position in the book on a very sensitive subject (which I won't even mention on this blog, but think Catholic priest scandals and you'll be in the ballpark) that is completely abhorrent to any normal person, and which almost ruined the book for me.

The Last Life

I've just finished reading and begun digesting Claire Messud's novel The Last Life. It was surprising. Having lived down the road from Amherst, MA, I assumed any coming-of-age novel set among former French colonials would be a predictable potpourri of feminist cant and multicultural pieties.

It was surprisingly nuanced. Rather than a simplistic portrayal of all colonials as rapacious racists, they come across as genuine, flawed people. You get a sense of what it would be like to watch 150 years of ancestral sacrifice and dreams disappear, and to then be tossed into a country that views you as an embarassing anachronism. Augustine and Camus are Algeria's two most famous sons. A major thread of the book is their alternate views of the life and the land, and how they relate to Sagesse, the main character.

The story opens with an act of violence that cracks the orderly facade of Sagesse's household. As the family struggles to deal with the fallout, Sagesse is told stories by her feuding grandmother and mother--one a hagiographer, the other putting the darkest spin possible on the tales. Family vignettes can be a bit ponderous, and the narrative has a few longeurs. Overall though, it's an engaging read, and Messud accomplishes this without resorting to the usual lurid DARK SECRETS that most authors in the genre rely on.

And while Sagesse ultimately rejects the life she was born into, the author avoids the usual liberationist route in portraying this. Family, order, tradition and loyalty need to be balanced with freedom in Messud's world, but they aren't the enemies of self-fulfillment.

A timely aspect of the book was the comparison of American and European culture--the nearly boundless capacity we have for self-definition verses the class and race-consciousness of Sagesse's world. This is something we'll explore in an upcoming entry on Henry James' The American.

Shameless Self-Promotion

If you have a moment, pop over to Razormouth-- RC Sproul Jr., John Whitehead and Joel Miller's webzine. They were kind enough to publish an article of mine on Baudelaire and humanity's falleness. It might sound like a dry topic, but the old goat had his finger on the black pulse of human depravity. If Generations X and Y still read poetry, this man would be their poet laureate.

Vive la France et les pommes de terre frites...

I've been rereading Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees. Not his best-written novel, but I came across this gem inside:

"Liberté, Venalité, et Stupidité. The great clarté of French military thinking... Three schools of thought. One; I hit you in the nose. Two; I hide behind this thing which does not cover my left flank. Three; I hide my head in the sand like an ostrich, confident of the greatness of France as a military power and then take off."