12 posts tagged “books”
Jane Yolen
One of my favorite short stories as a child was "Words of Power" from The Faerie Flag by Jane Yolen. I don't know exactly how old I was, but it was right at the time I had claimed words for myself, too old to be read to, old enough to have free run of the library, checking out everything and anything that looked interesting.
And I read many other Yolen books over the years, some of which have stuck with me, though never in the same way, and many of which have been lost in the recesses of the great lost library in my brain. (Indeed, part of the point of these reviews is to keep more books out of that great back storage room, as there are things on my have-read list from _last year_ that I know look back on and say "what on earth was that about?")
So I picked up her little book on writing with much confidence that there was _something_ for me in it, just as I had often found something in many of her 250-odd books that had come before it.
And once again, like the Faerie Flag book that started the journey nearly twenty years ago, it was almost as though Yolen had tapped into my soul and created this book just for my reading. Even her final interlude "A Wish from the Winter Queen", felt like it was for me, just me, specifically, and that I would punch anyone in the face who told me that such a thing was unlikely given that the illustrious writer and I have never met.
Of course, having the discerning mind of an adult, that great puzzle-solving intellect that ruins the suspension of disbelief, there were moments that rang less true, times when I thought "this is _not quite_ the book I needed. She has _not quite_ got me right, in this book she created just for me."
I think of the following from the chapter "mind over matter":
In the classic texts on writing-- which I have to admit I studied avidly, trying to find a way into this chapter-- four main points of view are discussed: Omniscient, First Person, Limited Omniscient, and Objective.
Now it's been years since I have given any serious thought to defining point of view. So here are some ideas about these four points of view, cribbed liberally from others.
Yolen is at her best when she is writing about what she cares about, about that which is important to her to pass along. And while her take on these important fundimentals is, as usual, beautiful, it lacks the soul of some other passages when she's more invested in the information she's transfering. That the book felt it needed to cover these basics was, I think, it's weak moment. Like the watermelon slice on the cover, there was so much to savor from Yolen's *joy* in writing, that these basic facts became much more like seeds-- fun to spit, but much less edible.
An Elemental Thing
Eliot Weinberger
I'm going to pimp out the amazon link for this one because (a) it's an excellent book and (b) New Directions is a wonderful little publishing house that doesn't take it's books out of print and has some wonderful gems in its collection.
The book itself I picked up randomly (actually, it was free swag. But the cover was rocking. I like sea things, if you haven't noticed.) and it's beautiful. From the inside cover:
Eliot Weinberger has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narrative where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable.
And there is something deeply poetic about the whole thing, my favorite of the essays being "The Rhinoceros," a five segment account of this family of mammals, starting with both the original and translation of an 1834 Hawaiian newspaper article. Reading the original is worth it for the sound alone, and the comparison from that, with all of the lovely vowels, to the dry factual article translation itself, is just beautiful. And then segment two, a richly visual account of the history of rhinoceros brought to Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, provides the perfect counterpoint.
I threw out my back right before writing my final paper on gothic picture books. The pictures of my workspace on the floor ended up being somewhat amusing... I share them with you here:
There's something about the fact that I was working on a pop-up book at the time that made it especially entertaining. And I love the page of "Are You My Mother" that I was on at the time.
Just in case y'all thought that I was taking the easy way out by studying children's lit.
(Because who can say no to an evening of picture books on a rainy November evening?
...I mean ...this is for purely intellectual study... you understand...)
So, for my long lit paper this term, I'm writing about the vague catagory of "gothic picture books". What do the children whose favorite Muppets are Oscar for his attitude, and The Count for his style like to read? What texts prepare children for Scary Stories to tell in the Dark, and a Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Spiderwick series? And what can be said about them?
That's the project, and I'm still open to new book suggestions.
However, there's nothing like work you should be doing to make you dig into work that can wait, and I've got so much writing hanging over my head, a blog post reviewing my recent forrays into the books for spawn seemed just the way to relax on a Friday evening. So without further ado:
Fortunately, by Remy Charlip:
Remy Charlip is without argument my favorite picture book writer from childhood. I DEVOURED Arm in Arm as a child... quite literally destroyed it, and then took the covers that had fallen off and put them up on my wall like movie posters.
A couple of years ago, my mother spent weeks before Christmas, finding my sister and I new used copies, with the orignal cover illustrations. It was pretty magical.
Anyway, I had always bypassed Fortunately as being simplistic. It's narratively cohesive, if only in the sense that each page is a new Deus Ex Machina for the character to deal with or adjust to. But after
Brian Selznick credited it for being part of the Hugo Cabret invention, I just had to pick up a copy. The back and forth nature of the page, the way turning a page creates movement, and time, really is something to love. Reading it silently to yourself really doesn't do the trick, and the more you think about the "what happens", the more you wonder about why a book like this could possibly work. But reading it aloud, the surprise at every new page, even if you understand the structure and know the next page will be a bad (or good) event, is something just magical.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg is such a classic, I don't know why I didn't own a copy before. I'd glanced through it before, and heard them talk about it on NPR, but tonight was the first time I really sat down with a copy. I'm currently reflected on the narrative arc of a piece which is supposedly about different stories... there's still a strongly noticable development where the pictures in the begining... the sleeping child, the thing under the rug, are points that imply a beginning of a tale, while things like the catipillars spelling goodbye, a picture that comes near the end, serve as a warning that this tale, like the "story" the picture is "taken from" is coming to a close.
So, I heard a rumor that Steampunk hit Newsweek for Halloween. Ah, Newsweek, when will you stop being a month behind on my life? I've been who you've watched to decide what cool culture is ever since that summer I was obsessed with Ryōri no tetsujin.
Anyway, how could I not pick up this little gem? It has basically nothing to do with my paper, but dude, it's got a Dream Vacuum Machine in the title, and he's wearing a top hat. I do wish, however, it had been an idealized vacuum machine, as opposed to a machine for vacuuming dreams, but perhaps that is neither here nor there. It's a fun little time; I especially enjoyed when Sneem becomes depressed, and hides in his room under an umbrella to prevent being hit by any sunlight sneaking in through the window. I mean, that's how I spend every weekend, so I could really relate.
Boris and Bella, by Carolyn Crimi
The boyfriend saw me reading this, and asked if I was reading the picture biography of Tim Burton. Grimly's illustrations are really the stuff I was looking for when I was a child myself. And while I cringe at Crimi's writing, that the two of them become a couple because they're "just the right size", I am as much of a sucker as Bella for Boris any time I see him with a shrunken head or skull teacup. (And really, I'd be right there next to her with the neon green dreads if I didn't have a day job. Those are the win!)
Speaking of which, and I'm scared to even mention this in a summary of otherwise children's books, I picked up Sarita Vendetta's particularly gory version of Strewwelpeter (for academic reasons only, you understand) the other day. I haven't read all of it, although I've flipped through her illustrations, and am familiar with the stories. Her illustration for "Jimmy Sliderlegs" stops me every time, but I do have to say I was a little disappointed with her illustration for my favorite story, "The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup". Judging from the scale of the arm reaching in from the side as if to feed him, it seems as if she was almost going for a somewhat fetus-esque image, but I feel like this could have been further developed. I found myself flipping back to look at the 1915 Winston printed version, with the boy that turns into an almost cave-painted looking stick figure.
I'm getting tired, and this is getting rediculously long, but I just can't help talking about this little gem. Gothic, stick-legged boy, and the little pet lizard that follows him like a puppy-- and not the slightest mention of Halloween anywhere to be found-- this is the picture book that is year-round gothic fun.
And oh! the melodrama! How delicious!
Then his stomach began to ache;
it growled and turned and spun.
"This is it," Mucumber thought.
"The dying has begun."And so upstairs he ran,
with teardrops in his eyes.
"I guess I'll lied down on the bed,
and then I'll wait to die."
All I have to say about this is that it's a beautiful example of prolepsis and dramatic irony, and that anyone who claims that children can't comprehend advanced forms of humor is sadly ignorant themselves. We know that there will be No Cat at the end. And sure enough, throughout the text, the actions of the cat and the witch build to that inevitable end. And yet...
Well. I was still totally satisfied. And amused.
Last one, promise. This book gets a bad rap from a lot of parents. And maybe the girl sitting in an armchair where what initially looks like a rug is actually a running horde of rats is a bit grotesque. But the fact that I bought this book for it's purported "gothic" nature is a sign that some people are far too obsessed with the fluff and the bunnies. Not all imaginations are pure or simple. This is a far cry from confronting the darkness, and is the pefect example of the crowbar of separation between the gothic and the surreal. Even if Yvonne is waiting with an axe.
School classes start on Tuesday.
I have read 54 books so far this year.
I hope to make it 57 or 58 before classes start, depending.
Two updates for the price of one! Now with a free soda!
(I should just do these more often, and then not feel
like I have a backlog of things worth commenting on.
But boy, do I have a backlog of things worth commenting on.)
One of my friends, and I can't remember if it was here, or somewhere else on the interwebs, or by federal post (being one of those rare individuals who sends handwritten letters, I occationally have the good fortune to recieve them as well... try it, you might like it.) told me that I was too smart for poetry and that, hence, I would probably be good at it. I like to be a good fiction writer and pretend to not like poetry. I do try to maintain my dry fiction-writer sensibility. And yet I keep getting suckered back in.
This spring semester, which is two months over, and yet I'm still not sure to have recovered from, I became resuckered. Poetry of the rambling words on top of words, meaning perhaps found in the density of it, or maybe just the sound of it, is the sort of thing that I tend to fancy... exactly the opposite of what typical New Yorker fare tends towards. So... Best American? I have my reservations.
The 2006 is deeply rooted in narrative arc. Poems that go somewhere. Out of the 75 of Billy Collins' top choice, I found 12 that spoke to me, and only three of particular note. Poems that forced me into a slow pace, pondering plodding alliterations of metaphors mesasoaic I read through once, read the author's note on the poem, and moved on. But Daniel Gutstein's prose poem, Monsieur Pierre est mort about a pet rock which meets a grusome end is a little fantabulous, and Julie Larios' Double Abecedarian: Please Give Me had the wonderful sound and word usage I adore, the sort of randomness forced through order of the sort Oulipeans rejoice in. Meanwhile, James Tate's was the only one with the kind of engaging pacing that I enjoy, and I liked the surrealism of the ending, although, being the good fictionista I am, I felt like perhaps he hadn't earned it in the setup.
***
And now for something completely different:
Barbara Lehman's The Red Book has no words. And I'd always been of the mindset (sort of like my imagined fiction-writer stance on poetry) that I just wasn't the picture book sort of girl. What did I know about picture books? I was writing word books before I could write words, creating line after line of scribles in a blank book with teddy bears holding heart balloons on the cover. I couldn't make them yet, but I loved the way words traveled across a line, the wonderful horizontality of it all. But I've been suckered there, too. (More on that in a life update section, as opposed to the book update section. Hopefully I'll get around to a life update section. We'll see about that.)
But, inherent prejudices aside, what I like about Lehman's book, what I really really like about it, is that it's a complicated idea. A little fantasy, a little surrealism, and a large dose of metafiction. Not bad for a book with no words that I thought was going to be about color. The climax of the story we see through the pictures of some pictures in a book. Talk about layers. That's the kind of depth that I favor at all levels, and I'm glad to have added this one to my collection. I take it all back guys. Picture books are better than I thought. My mistake. Call me fooled.
I hope to do a full picture book round-up and review sometime soon.
I've added a few more to my collection, and I've barred a few from ever
being spoken about in my presence. Sometime I'll get around to talking
about which are which. For now, I just wanted to say this is one of the
awesome ones.
One of these days, I will learn the ballance of research before embarking on a text versus knowledge aquired after the text. The best, of course, is the classroom method of digesting a piece at a time, with imput from an outside source who actually understands and can give feedback on each step of the process. Unfortunately, finding someone to walk you section by section through the book in person can be difficult... it's a big book, and it takes a certain kind of stalwartness to have the stamina to stand in front a classroom and present an intellectual opinion on long sections that are without a doubt both pornographic and obscene.
Baring the classroom experience, my approach has always been just to blast my way through, no holds barred, and hope that in the end, I remember enough of what I've absorbed that any additional texts I consult after the fact will help me add this monstrosity up to something that makes sense. It's a technique that works, but it's not pretty. I got my first glimpses of making connections in the text at around page 415, or so. Before that, it was all just words. A lot of words. And after the first 400-odd pages? I was still confused, but at least by then I was following along.
One of these days, though, I will learn. Perhaps someone will clue me in to something like Allen Ruch's Introduction to Gravity's Rainbow before I undertake my next solo literary quest. It manages to both illuminate things to keep in mind while examining the text, and to point out references which will help the first time reader, without giving "spoilers" (of course, given the "plot" of the text, spoilers is perhaps not the wording that best fits the kind of information a reader would want to avoid to enjoy a first experience.) Maybe next time I'll learn to look before I leap. Sometimes there's a sign-post.
As to my crazy, uneducated absorption of the text itself: my favorite moments were perhaps the most tangental, there is a child with a lost lemming, for example, who I discovered myself adoring to pieces. The lifestory of a lightbulb near the end of the text was both hillarious, and his lifestory very interesting when compared to what was becoming of the activists of the '60s during the early '70s when the text was written. (Incidentally, I came into the living room in the middle of this, and was dancing to some beetles covers the boys out there were listening to, and was told I was "very '70s tonight". To which my response was "I'm always very '70s, with a little '68, and a bit of '93 for good measure". The '80s, allas, allude me completely.) Out of the 400 or so characters, I often found my interests did not line up with the narrative, I would have much rather have stayed with the Annubis when Slothrop falls overboard, but I would have much rather have stayed with Slothrop in section 4, and had a clearer understanding there, than to take off in some of the other directions that Pynchon does. Of course, these are comments as a critic, what I wish the text was, rather than as a scholar, finding the logic of what is. The merits of each (approach) could be argued.
I have read 18 books thus far this year.
Still, Millay, as always, is precious. My favorite quote (although I have a sinking feeling in the back of my mind that its appeal is more pertinent to my mental state and internal events in my life to any inherent appeal in the text), from an early letter:
There's something about her I just can't wrap my head around. I don't know that anyone ever could. Perhaps it's my issue of style, that I can't believe Milford did. On the other hand, she's pretty much the resident expert of women writers of that time. But what does that mean, when those around Millay, friends and family, so often seemed to react to her with that same feeling of fascination and confusion that I feel?But it makes no difference who you are. You are perfectly charming, and I am crazy about you. There! Such a relief to be able at last to confess it, without indiscretion; or if not without indiscretion-- all confessions are indiscreet-- at least to confess it. --This is not a crush; don't be alarmed; I never have them. It is purely an intellectual enthusiasm.
And also, just to share, my favorite Millay poem:
The Penitent
I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I,
"And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I've been!"
Alas for pious planning - -
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep --
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!
So I got up in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, "One thing there's no getting by --
I've been a wicked girl," said I:
"But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!"
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Apparently, this is Beckett's "Trillogy", always with the understanding that Beckett hated it being referred to as a trillogy. I wonder if perhaps people call it that on purpose, revenge for his sending it out into the world. But I could easily say I see Beckett's point. To call them a trillogy, and refer to them as having a common story is to say "these books all have in common that they have no story. They're unifying feature is that they are completely unlike anything else ever written."
Malloy spends his life in a ditch. And he sucks on stones. He has one bad leg and another one that's going bad, crutches, and sometimes a bicycle. In class we discussed Descartes, subtracting everything down to essence, and the similarities between that and Beckett, but the refusal to then restart, to engage in the "I think, therefore I am" rebuilding that made the former famous. I brought up the point that while that Stoic sense of ataraxia is comfortable for Malloy the character, Beckett then clearly prefers the much more uneasy aporia of panicked uncertainity, as halfway through the book he then switches to another character, a Moran, who is an agent in search of Malloy and who similarly completely devolves (de-evolves?) into limblessness and ditches. No stone sucking, in the second half, however.
A side-note of all of this greek philosophy, however: In discussing all of this with my coworkers, I had forgotten the word aporia. Explaining the concept while at work, I then recalled the word on the train ride home, and sent the text "Aporia?" to my coworker, who found it the most hilarious out-of-context text he'd ever gotten on his phone. That's one more nerd point to my trophy wall. Indeed.
Malone Dies is easily the most accessable to the writer's mind. Another dying legless man (the other thing the "trillogy" has in common) tells stories about an overintelligent child who seems to arrive simultaneously from two different sets of parents and whose name changes halfway through the story. The beginning of it speaks for itself:
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or May. For the year is still youn, a thousand little signs tell me so. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist's Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption. But I do not think so, I do not think I am wrong in saying that these rejoicings will take place in my absence, this year. I have that feeling, I have had it now for some days, and I credit it. But in what does it differ from those that have abused me ever since I was born? No, that is the kind of bait I do not rise to any more, my need for prettiness is gone. I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things. Something must have changed. I will not weigh upon the balance any more, one way or the other. I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. but I am less given to them now, since coming here. Of course I still have my little fits of impatience, from time to time, I must be on my guard against them, for the next fort-night or three weeks. Without exaggeration to be sure, quietly crying and laughing, without working myself up into a state. Yes, I shall be natural at last, I shall suffer more, then less, without drawing any conclusions, I shall pay less heed to myself, I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm.
And then, getting back to Beckett, there's The Unnamable. At one point there's a head and a torso named Mahood in a jar. Who may or may not be the narrator, Who tries to convince the narrator that it's him, one of those many wispering voices, including Malone, comma, dying. Mahood has flies, and a collar around his neck so he can't stick his head too far into the jar, and he, or the narrator, would feel like he, they, it, existed if only two passing strangers would make mention of him. Ah! if only...
I think my epitaph for Beckett would be "Beckett, he had good aphorisms". Which, given the Wikipedia definition of epitaph is just circular enough to have made him happy. At any rate, for not feeling to have understood a bit of the text, it is a sorry state my book's bottom corners are in, as I continue my habit of turning in pages which I find to have witty lines or phrases. Some of which I feel may haunt me for sometime to come.
