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| 0812974018
| 9780812974010
| 0812974018
| 3.97
| 42,670
| Apr 11, 2006
| Feb 27, 2007
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it was amazing
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"The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making," says thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, and isn't that the truth? Black Swan Green is "The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making," says thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, and isn't that the truth? Black Swan Green is the third David Mitchell book I've read since the new year. And before that I barely would have been able to have come up with the man's name if you had asked. And I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about such things. But as I have moved along from Cloud Atlas to The Bone Clocks to now Black Swan Green, my appreciation for the author has continued to grow and grow and grow until I find myself in awe of his ability to write so movingly and so convincingly in so many different directions, and all of them uncovering what it really means to be human, whether it's two centuries ago in the South Seas, a thousand years from now in a post-apocalyptic Earth, or the year 1982 in the small town of Black Swan Green in Worcestershire, which is where our narrator Jason Taylor lives as he tries to navigate the difficulties of school, family, bullies, and girls, all the stupid shit that we all had to navigate back then, and some of which maybe we're still trying to figure out. The back of my book calls it "Great Britain's Catcher in the Rye," but that's not exactly right. Jason Taylor is far more connected to his family and community than Holden Caulfield. The two novels cover some common ground, but there's something more transcendent about Jason's coming of age experience in Black Swan Green. Because as heartbreaking and cruel as life can be when you're thirteen, there's also something here in Jason Taylor's world of Black Swan Green that's more beautiful and uplifting than anything Holden Caulfield can find in his. Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine is a better comparison...or maybe even Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, although Mitchell's novel is better than both. At one point near the end of the book, Jason finds himself relegated to a school storeroom where he sees a pile of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird sitting on a shelf, and it's Harper Lee's novel that's closer in spirit to Black Swan Green than The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, Black Swan Green might be the best book I have read in quite a few years, and it is highly recommended to everyone. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 07, 2020
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Mar 2020
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Feb 11, 2016
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Paperback
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| 4.40
| 340,665
| Jul 14, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
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it was ok
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I know this is an important book, and I know it's a powerful book, and I know it's a book that people should read. I've already recommended it to some I know this is an important book, and I know it's a powerful book, and I know it's a book that people should read. I've already recommended it to some folks I know, and I'm about to hand off my copy to a buddy of mine whose son is involved in social activism and Black Lives Matter and what's going on just 30 miles east of me in Chicago right now as I type this up. And, as much as I can understand as a middle-aged pretty much white guy, I do understand what Coates is saying here in this book. The thing that thrusts itself between the world and Coates is an abhorrent thing. It's an ugly thing. It's a hateful thing, and I don't recognize the country I live in right now. So I get what Coates is writing about here in this book, in this letter to his son. But I don't really like this book. I don't like how it's written. I don't like what it says. And yeah, I don't like the way Coates sees his country because I don't like what he sees, either. But most of all I don't like the message he has for his son in this book about this country because it's a message predicated on fear, which is a word that appears on just about every page of the book. And sure, there's a lot to fear in America right now if you're a black man, especially if you're a black male teenager. But I don't know if Coates' message of fear is all that helpful for his son. It's not the message I would have for my son, and yeah I get it; I already acknowledged my white middle-aged man-ness, so maybe my perspective isn't all that important here in a review of this book. But Coates invokes Malcolm X numerous times in the book, and Coates' message to his son sure isn't the message that Malcolm had for the world, not the Malcolm of before or after the hajj. And I know the author doesn't have anything to do with what's written on the book's cover, but Coates sure doesn't offer his readers a "transcendent vision for a way forward," as the dust jacket of Between the World and Me promises. Hell, you'd get a better "vision for a way forward" from watching Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight, which is something I also did last week, and which, much like Coates' book, is also in response to the ugly racist mess that America finds itself still mired in these days and which sadly we won't be finding our way out of any time soon. So, yeah, it's an important book that you probably should read. But as I said, I didn't like it all that much, and you probably won't either. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 24, 2015
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Dec 29, 2015
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Dec 24, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1401238947
| 9781401238940
| 1401238947
| 3.70
| 2,281
| Jul 16, 2013
| Jul 16, 2013
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liked it
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Greedy corporate interests driven by unprincipled individuals take a treasured literary work of art beloved by millions which has helped change the wa
Greedy corporate interests driven by unprincipled individuals take a treasured literary work of art beloved by millions which has helped change the way we view the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century and revamp it against the original intent of the author into a sequel which is actually a prequel… No, I’m not talking about Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman--I’ve spilled more than my share of electronic ink all over GoodReads this summer griping about that unfortunate cash grab at the expense of the elderly, infirm author—no, I’m referring to the four-volume set of graphic novels published a couple of years ago by DC called (in a mildly humorous convergence of rather strange frequencies) Before Watchmen, which on the cover the publishers quite helpfully remind us is a “Prequel to Watchmen, the best-selling graphic novel of all time.” But no, it’s not really a “prequel,” as we all know, because it was written almost thirty years after Alan Moore’s masterpiece in graphic novels Watchmen helped change the way we view superheroes and read that genre. And we know, if we are fans of that genre, that Alan Moore was defintely not on board with this reboot of his characters and retooling of his ideas. And at the time he was quite vociferous about expressing his angry opinions to anyone that was willing to speak with him. At the time, I wasn’t interested in rushing out and getting the revamp of Watchmen, not necessarily out of any loyalty to Moore, although I thoroughly understand his anger and I sympathize with him as well as with other comic book writers and artists who have been mistreated by the industry, but because it just didn’t matter that much to me to see what the Comedian was up to before he got tossed out the window. But I was at the library yesterday and the four-volume set just seemed to jump off the shelves at me, and in light of the recent sad events with Go Set a Watchman, I decided I’d take a look at this other misadventure in greed and see what I thought. And after reading one volume (Before Watchmen: Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan)I’ve decided it’s okay, albeit unnecessary. I just wish Go Set a Watchman were as good. Because it’s awful and unnecessary. The Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan volume really doesn’t offer much to the fan of Watchmen. There’s a great deal of clever weaving in and out of the original narrative with plenty of backstory provided. We see some awkward buddy dynamics between Rorschach and Nite Owl; we see a young Daniel Dreiberg and a young Jon Osterman; we see the early scheming of Adrian Veidt; and ultimately Dr. Manhattan has a great deal of fun with quantum mechanics. But we’ve seen all this before and Moore does a better job at it all with fewer brush strokes in the original version. We don’t need all the details and reworking of this familiar territory; it just seems like overkill to me. (Maybe one of the more interesting and fresher parts of the Nite Owl/Dr. Manhattan book is the surprise, shorter Moloch story packaged at the end of the volume, but again we probably could have inferred all of this about Moloch’s awful childhood from what Moore already gave us.) And “overkill” is definitely the word I’d use for the frequent gratuitous violence against women in this prequel and all the titties all over the place. I’m a big boy and I guess I can handle it all, but it’s more, much more, than Moore (and Gibbons) ever felt the need for, and while it doesn’t necessarily harm the original (which I think may ultimately be the case for Go Set a Watchman impacting the legacy of Mockingbird), there’s really no need to ever read these prequels. Famously, Alan Moore told the New York Times back in 2012, “As far as I know, there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick.” That may sound like arrogance or sour grapes or a combination of the two. But he's right about Moby Dick, and he's right about about the comparison he's making of where Watchman falls in the pantheon of graphic novels. It's just too bad that we can't say the same thing about To Kill a Mockingbird now. Here’s a link to that New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/boo... Here’s a link to another article from Slate that does a pretty good job putting Alan Moore’s anger into context for readers who don’t get why this is an issue that matters: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/cu... And here’s a link to my review of Go Set a Watchman, just in case you’re interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 30, 2015
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Jul 31, 2015
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Hardcover
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| B000FC2ROU
| 4.13
| 491,772
| Sep 2002
| 2005
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really liked it
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I bought this Murakami novel in Jhamsikhel and took it trekking with me to the Annapurna Base Camp this week, and what a great, crazy choice of a book
I bought this Murakami novel in Jhamsikhel and took it trekking with me to the Annapurna Base Camp this week, and what a great, crazy choice of a book it was for the trek, as it deals with labyrinthine journeys, both internal and external, the abyss, darkness, and the pathways we must choose, navigating between choice and destiny. It’s also a book about libraries, talking cats, and Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker, but I guess you’ll just have to read it yourself to find out how. The book was a bit hefty for the trip, but it was worth it, and my daughter carried the heavier bag anyway. She felt a little sorry for me and I think she spent half the trek worried I would keel over from a heart attack. But I’m still standing... She also said the book didn’t make much sense, and while there were a few loose ends, I suppose, it made a helluva lot more sense than John Irving’s fat mess of a novel Avenue of Mysteries, which she carried along for the trek and claimed to like more than Kafka on the Shore. The two books share some common ground, however, besides their heft. Both easily traverse the elastic boundary between the real and fantastic; both deal with loss, sadness and memory; both examine the conflict between the rational and the irrational; and both explore journeys taken to come to terms with pain from the past. And while I’m a dog guy, and Avenue of Mysteries is chock full of dogs while Kafka on the Shore only has one evil dog, along with all those talking cats, I’m sticking with Murakami here, and that’s not the altitude speaking. My daughter may be in far better shape than me to go trekking in the Himalayas, but while Kafka on the Shore may meander a bit, it comes together with a fairly satisfying resolution about returning to the world and choosing to live in it, and it offers the reader a lot more than Irving’s latest. And now for a word about Mr. Nakata... Murakami’s creation of Nakata alone makes this novel worth the read, and for me Nakata was the highlight of the entire book by far overshadowing the bland main character, Kafka Tamura. Nakata joins a short list of comically but movingly rendered archetypal wise fools, including Lennie Smalls, Samwise Gamgee, Eliot Rosewater, Chance the Gardner, and Groot...maybe even Lear’s fool and Blevins from All the Pretty Horses. Eel with rice is his favorite food, and Mr. Nakata may be a part-time cat finder who lives on a sub city from the Governor, but he quickly becomes the moral center of this wide-ranging magically realistic novel, and the quest he goes on with Hoshino for the Entrance Stone keeps the story going whenever it begins to drag, as it sometimes does, during the book’s main plot line describing Kafka Tamura’s own journey of discovery. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 26, 2018
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Jul 21, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 0062409859
| 9780062409850
| 0062409859
| 3.31
| 279,165
| Jul 14, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
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it was ok
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My grandmother lived well into her 90s in her old house out in the countryside on a lane named for the family she married into…no, this isn’t going to
My grandmother lived well into her 90s in her old house out in the countryside on a lane named for the family she married into…no, this isn’t going to be some folksy Maycomb County narrative…my grandmother’s people weren’t Southerners. She lived in Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. But when she was in her 80s, some thief broke in one day and tied her up and robbed her. It always makes me angry to think about it: her tied up in the livingroom while some tweaker is rifling through her life’s belongings. She was a tough old lady, and she never had any money anyway (something someone with any sense could have told from the house she lived in), but that’s all beside the point. Because the point here is when I think about old ladies being victimized and robbed, I think about Scout Finch turning to her father on the porch that night and telling Atticus, “Well, it’d be sorta like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?” And when I think about what’s happened to poor Harper Lee now in her late 80s, in these final years of her life, after all the good she and that book of hers has done for the world without asking for much from any of us in return, I think that’s a whole lot like shooting a mockingbird, and I think it’s something shameful and sad. Of course I’m talking about the unfortunate cash grab that was yesterday’s release of Go Set a Watchman, but I’m also talking about the way Lee has been abused recently regarding the copyright of To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as the infringement on Lee’s privacy that the Chicago Tribune’s Marja Mills published last year, The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee. I gave that book four stars (here’s my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), but not because it was well written or because I approved of how Mills wormed her way into the lives of the Lee sisters. I gave it four stars sheerly for its appeal on the prurient level because I was fascinated that Mills had opened the door to a life that I was curious about, the life of the reclusive woman who has written one of the most important novels in the U.S. in the second half of the Twentieth Century. I read Mills’ book in a couple of sittings, both fascinated and disapproving at the same time, and saddened that Mills failed to know the novel well enough, or its author, to understand that Harper Lee would have never approved of her book if she hadn’t been such a vulnerable old lady, and that, by publishing The Mockingbird Next Door, Mills was doing to her reclusive neighbor exactly what Scout did not want to do to her own neighbor, drag him with his shy ways into the limelight. Even Heck Tate was smart enough to call it a sin, but Mills didn’t seem to get it and perhaps I was complicit in it myself by reading and encouraging others to read the book. However, all that pales in comparison to the sin that is the publication of Go Set a Watchman because that’s not just a sin against the aged author who has not participated in any meaningful way in the decision to publish this old manuscript and call it a novel; it’s a sin against the reader, a sin against the characters of Lee’s great novel, a sin against good practices in the publishing industry, and a sin against the culture of the United States that has in no small part been formed in response to the reading of this important novel. Ironically, perhaps hypocritically, and despite these harsh words, I rather enjoyed reading To Set a Watchman and polished it off in less than 24 hours, a rare feat for my old eyes. At times I read with genuine pleasure, and on one level, at least for about half the novel, it seems to work, even if it is so obviously a first draft and a work in progress that never should have seen publication. That pleasure grew troubled as the novel progressed, but I found much to like in the memories of Jean Louise Finch, a twenty-six-year-old version of Scout who lives now in New York City, and who is returning by train to Maycomb for her annual visit. As the countryside through the train window grows more recognizable to her, the reader finds himself in a strangely familiar geography as well. The train stops in Maycomb Junction, there are references to Old Sarum, Abbotsville and Finch’s Landing; we get the history of Maycomb County, and names like Mrs. Merriweather, Cousin Joshua, Uncle Jimmy, and Judge Taylor begin popping into the narrative making the reader feel at home. And there are stories here, both funny and sad, that fit nicely into our understanding of the world of Jem and Scout and Dill: we see them in an extended make-believe Tom Swift sequence at one point, and at another, inspired by the revival going on in town, Jem baptizes a naked Scout in Aunt Rachel’s goldfish pond, just as the visiting preacher is coming to the Finch house for dinner. Reading these stories are priceless to a fan of Mockingbird. But there are changes as well, most obvious of which are the twenty years separating the world of Mockingbird from this story written a couple of years earlier but taking place two decades later. (And the timeline shared by the two books is off, especially if the Supreme Court decision that has everyone up in arms is Brown v. Board of Education [1954]. That court case is never mentioned by name, so if it’s not Brown, then please forgive, but it sure sounds like Brown.) For starters the man who meets Scout at Maycomb Junction and kisses her on the mouth isn’t Atticus. Scout is grown, and as unlikely as it seems, she has a beau, of sorts, Hank Clinton, one of Jem’s best friends who boarded across the street from the Finches although he does not appear in Mockingbird. Aunt Alexandra has moved back to Maycomb to live with Atticus, who at the age of 72 suffers from bad rheumatoid arthritis, as has Uncle Jack, who apparently has had enough of life in the big city of Nashville. Jack has his own house, but he’s frequently over and both brothers call their sister “Zandra,” something the stuffy Alexandra of Mockingbird would never accept. But these are minor changes. It’s not too hard to believe that Scout could have a love interest twenty years later, despite her early tomboy years. Uncle Jack could potentially move back to the Maycomb it seems he has fled as a younger man (although his fat, elderly cat Rose Aylmer should be long dead by now). Even Aunt Alexandra could grow softer and kinder over the years. After all, change is inevitable, which is one of the messages of the novel and something that Scout/Jean Louise struggles with. The property at Finch’s Landing has been gradually sold off and now even the old house itself has been purchased and turned into a men’s hunting club or something seedy like that. Jem is dead. Calpurnia has left the Finches, and there’s bad blood there. Atticus has moved to another house, and Scout’s childhood home has been replaced by an ice cream stand (run by one of the Cunninghams, in one of the stranger moments of the book). And again, these kinds of changes are inevitable and are acceptable in a follow-up to a beloved novel, even Jem’s death, which won’t come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with Harper Lee’s family story. What’s not acceptable, to either Scout or me, is what has happened to Atticus over the twenty years, a change I was prepared for after having the twist ruined the day before on MSNBC and other news programs, so it didn’t hit me as hard as it did Scout when she discovers her father has been reading racist pamphlets and then follows him to the courthouse to find to her shock and dismay that he is attending a citizens’ council meeting addressed by a virulent racist. Later Hank tells her that Atticus was a member of the Klan as a younger man. And near the end of the book when Scout angrily confronts Atticus for his moral hypocrisy, he dismisses her concerns and argues against the nascent civil rights movement, against the carpet bagging NAACP, asking Scout quite bluntly, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” The Atticus of Go Set a Watchman mouths a lot of hollow words about being a Jeffersonian Democrat, but neither his daughter nor I am buying it. And yet, on one level I might even be able to buy it. Atticus is in great pain, physically and emotionally. Pain has a way of changing people. Over the years since Mockingbird he has seen many changes occurring around him and he’s trying to hang on to a past that he understands. In a long and rather strange conversation with Scout, Uncle Jack equates Atticus and his reticence to accept change to the fight of the Southern people “to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.” When Scout says, “That’s been over for a—nearly a hundred years, sir,” her uncle replies, “Has it really?” And in a sadly remarkable way, today we can understand what Uncle Jack is saying perhaps better than his own niece: “The South’s in its last agonizing birth pain. It’s bringing forth something new and I’m not sure I like it, but I won’t be here to see it.” Uncle Jack would no doubt read with interest the recent events in South Carolina. But the reason why I can’t buy the change in Atticus, is that Uncle Jack isn’t really talking about Atticus to his niece at all. He’s not talking about Atticus because Atticus isn’t Atticus; Uncle Jack isn’t Uncle Jack; Scout isn’t Scout. This isn’t a sequel to Mockingbird. It isn’t anything except a dry run at some characters in a manuscript that over time turned into something else, and thankfully so. Reading Go Set a Watchman, anyone with a brain and a basic understanding of Lee’s novel can see so clearly that it’s a first draft of Mockingbird and not a separate work. And as a first draft, it’s only rightful place is in that safety deposit box where it belonged and later in a collection of Lee’s papers at the University of Alabama. If Go Set a Watchman ever deserved to see publication, then it is as a curiosity, as a necessary and needed step in the genesis of To Kill a Mockingbird. In a world filled with fewer venal publishers, agents and lawyers, Go Set a Watchman could have and should have been packaged and published as a first draft, a first draft for scholars and students, even for casual fans of Mockingbird who are interested in how the novel came to be. And this should have happened after the death of the author, preferably many years later. If Harper Lee had wanted this novel to be published during her lifetime, she would have done so long ago. She would have worked on it and created a continuity between the characters and the world of Watchman and that of Mockingbird. She would have made this older, racist Atticus the Atticus of Mockingbird, and there would be a sense of how this Atticus had changed over the 20 years. But Harper Lee didn’t do this. Or more correctly, she did. Because this Atticus, the Atticus of Watchman, should never exist in book form because over time he became the Atticus of Mockingbird. Living in New York, working with her editor Tay Hohoff and agent Maurice Crain, Lee transformed her understanding of Atticus and changed her approach to his story. She never wanted the Atticus of Watchman to be introduced to the public. And while reading, it’s quite clear that Watchman is just a first draft. Entire paragraphs in Watchman appear in To Kill a Mockingbird, and for a seasoned reader of Mockingbird, reading Go Set a Watchman is like playing a game of find the Mockingbird hidden inside its precursor. There’s no Ewells, no Dolphus Raymond, no Tom Robinson, but all the themes have been established, and there are recognizable phrasings and words that jump off the page at the reader. And if you read Watchman closely, you can hear those gentle guiding voices of Crain and Hohoff speaking to a young Harper Lee…tone that down, play that up, don’t preach so much here, that’s a great line, tell us more about that family…and ultimately, the best advice of all, “This isn’t working. You’ve created some brilliant characters and a fascinating world in Maycomb County, but the best parts of your manuscript are when Jean Louise is telling us about her childhood. Rewrite your draft as a childhood story.” Tell us more about her big brother Jem, and what about this curious Dill character? Write about them growing up. Show us why Scout thinks her father is so special…how about moving this story from the present into a recollection by your adult Scout of her childhood? And that’s what she did, and that’s the book that To Kill a Mockingbird became, and the world is a better place for it. One could argue that, as Go Set a Watchman is about change and how things refuse to stay the same, someone like me seems to be at cross purposes arguing that it never should have been published. Apparently I’m like the Atticus of Watchman, clinging to what I know, a fabled past, unable to accept the changes presented in this new book. But that’s my point. It’s not a new book, and that’s the problem. It’s an old book and a weak one that fortunately changed and grew into the better book we know. And this process also speaks to a better time when an editor and an agent were essential to the development of a young writer, and an agent and an editor could say no and help turn a good idea into a great book. Sadly, Lee’s agents and editors now are not these kinds of people because to put Go Set a Watchman out there as a work unto itself, a “landmark new novel,” as the dust jacket of my edition claims, and to market it a sequel to Mockingbird is wrong; it’s a transparent money grab by greedy, unprincipled people preying on an elderly, infirm Harper Lee who finds herself alone in the world after the death of her sister Alice last year. And that’s a terrible sin. Here's a sad story from 2013 about Harper Lee's loss of copyright,“To Steal a Mockingbird,” from Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/201... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 14, 2015
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Jul 15, 2015
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Jul 14, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0060753277
| 9780060753276
| 0060753277
| 3.23
| 147
| 2005
| Sep 01, 2005
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did not like it
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Having reread William Shakespeare’s The Tempest last week, I thought I’d have a go at Grace Tiffany’s Ariel, a little book that’s been sitting on my s
Having reread William Shakespeare’s The Tempest last week, I thought I’d have a go at Grace Tiffany’s Ariel, a little book that’s been sitting on my shelf for the past couple of years. The Tempest is fascinating and has inspired numerous retellings over the past 400 years, from W.H. Auden’s heady poem, “The Sea and the Mirror,” to the cheesy sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet to the contemporary production of the play as envisioned by magician Teller (he's the quiet one) and director Aaron Posner with acrobatics by Pilobolus and music by Tom Waits. However, I shouldn’t have wasted my time with Tiffany’s thin novel, which is poorly written and mostly a bunch of nonsense. And by time I’m done here, I will have ruined its idiotic twists and the big reveals at the end of the book, so there’s no point in you reading it either. You have been warned. Tiffany’s re-imagining of Shakespeare’s play seems to have been written for teens, although why the author chose to do this, I can’t imagine, especially since her bio depicts her as a professor of English lit at Western Michigan University with an emphasis on the Renaissance. Because even if Shakespeare’s original has at its core a relationship between a grumpy father and his precocious fifteen-year-old daughter, a daughter who now thinks her old dad isn’t all that cool anymore and falls for the first good looking guy she meets, the play’s rich language and even richer thematic concerns put it far beyond anything that could be adequately or satisfactorily explored in a dumbed-down version packaged for teen readers by a HarperCollins YA/children’s publishing line. Come to think of it, perhaps Miranda and Prospero’s story could be satisfactorily adapted as YA fare, if the right author and the right publisher went about it in the right way. There’s the absent mother, the attempted rape, the controlling father who learns he needs to let his growing daughter find her own way in the world. There’s the exotic setting, lots of drinking, violence, and conflicts of class and race; there’s witchcraft and sorcery…in fact, there’s just about everything that could be successfully exploited by an author seeking to bank on Shakespeare’s genius and scale down his rich tale into a YA money grab. But that’s not the book that Tiffany has written. She forgoes all of that and instead tries to write something that maybe she thinks is a thoughtful re-examination of some of Shakespeare’s themes, but I dunno. Frankly, I don’t understand Tiffany’s motivations or intentions for writing her book. The epigraph from Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” lured me into Ariel expecting a novel, even if it were written for teens, that explored the rich internal world of the imagination and the creative impulse of the artist, as well as the potential for self-destruction inherent in that very impulse, ideas that Shakespeare explores in The Tempest through Prospero and Ariel, long before Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Percy Shelley, or for that matter Dylan Thomas or Charles Bukowski or Neil Gaiman, ever wrote about similar ideas. And Tiffany’s first few sentences seem to carry out the promise of the epigraph: “The first thing you should know about Ariel is that she’s a liar. Dreams lie, and she is both dream and the maker of dreams. Her work is not to tell the truth but to play: to sing, dance, and spin thrilling pictures in the air.” But that’s about as good as it gets in Tiffany’s book. Even her next sentence rings false: “She likes bold colors; subtle hues and shades do not interest her. She paints with a broad brush…” And that’s just nonsense. That, perhaps, is what bad YA writing does, and it’s what this awful retelling of The Tempest may do, but it’s not what Shakespeare does, or what Ariel or Prospero do in his play, and it’s not what good writing or art does either. When I read the Auden epigraph and the first few lines of Tiffany’s book, I thought, “Okay, I get it. Art and the imagination are great deceivers. They’re dangerous. Sure, I've heard that idea before…” After all, the imagination is a powerful force, and the creative impulse can be both a creator and a destroyer. Picasso tells us that art is the lie that tells the truth, or at least he said something close to that. And Shakespeare knew the same thing, centuries before Picasso. But that’s not what Tiffany is doing in her book. In fact, I can’t really tell you what Tiffany intended to do here, but her version of The Tempest and her spin on Ariel, art, and the creative force of the imagination, is just a lie. It doesn’t tell the truth at all. It doesn’t do anything except deceive, and it certainly doesn’t add any beauty to the world. Strangely, in her story of Ariel, Tiffany seems to be saying that art and the imagination are absolutely useless, a shockingly bad message from a professor of English literature writing a book for teens and pre-teens that purports itself to be a retelling of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Critics don’t all share the same view of Ariel’s role in Shakespeare’s play, but most would agree that Ariel is an elemental “spirit” associated with the air and water of the island, in stark contrast to the “monster” that is Caliban, connected to the isle’s earth and rocks. Ariel has been subjugated by Prospero, a magician of vast power cast away on the island with his three-year-old daughter after being exiled from his position of duke of Milan. Prospero uses Ariel as an agent of his imagination to do his bidding over the 12 years that father and daughter have been on the island, especially to carry out his plan to avenge himself on those who have wronged him and restore himself to his dukedom in Milan. Ariel is a gentle spirit, a gracious one and eager to please, who is both thankful to Prospero for having freed him from the imprisonment in the tree by the witch Sycorax, but also anxious to be granted his own freedom by Prospero so he can return to the elements, a freedom that Prospero has promised him once his plans for dealing with his enemies have been achieved. This, without getting into the specific details, is Ariel’s role in the play, and most readers and critics recognize the essential nature of Ariel as a servant to the powerful Prospero who, not only being a wizard, is Shakespeare’s stand-in for the artist, even for the playwright himself. But not Grace Tiffany. In her preposterous spin on Shakespeare’s story, Ariel is a dangerous, hateful female spirit who has somehow been born from the dying thoughts of a Jewish sailor blown all the way across the Atlantic from the coast of Malta after a storm separated him from his master’s ship. His name was Jasper (seriously, Jasper?), and his master was the apostle Paul. Jasper (?) washes up on the shores of an island in the Bermuda Triangle. Like Athena, I guess, but a whole lot meaner, Ariel pops out of Jasper’s head and lives alone on the island for hundreds of years as Jasper’s bones bleach in the sun. She’s not Wisdom, though. And in keeping with Shakespeare, or at least in keeping with some of the interpretations of Shakespeare’s character, she seems to be the embodiment of the Imagination. In her isolation, Ariel gives birth to three minions, Intellect, Madness, and Fantasy, and the four of them enjoy themselves on the island, although they seem to be trapped in the Triangle itself. But if that all seems strange—how, for example, does the Imagination exist absent the artist? and doesn’t Mind (“Nous” in Tiffany’s words) give rise to Imagination, not the other way around?—don’t fret yourself worrying about the particulars because as the story develops things get more and more ridiculous. Ariel longs to leave the Triangle, not for the sake of freedom, which would fit in nicely with Shakespeare’s ideas, but because she is curious about the people who live beyond the wall of the Triangle on the other side of the island. She hears their drums and for some reason has a strong impulse to conquer the rest of this island and subdue the peoples she imagines must be making this racket. After several hundred years stuck in the Triangle, Ariel sees a young pregnant woman washed onto the shores of her island, Sycorax, a Saxon who has been kidnapped by Vikings and working on their ship. She gives birth to a dark-skinned baby (Caliban) whose father was apparently an African traveling with these Vikings. Ariel doesn’t help with the birthing process (although she gives birth to her three minions, Ariel doesn’t know nuthin' about birthin' no babies), and Sycorax somehow curses Ariel to be imprisoned in a tree. How? I dunno. Don’t worry about it. You won’t make sense of any of the book. Ariel hates Sycorax and her handsome boy Caliban (I know…) who suffers a twisted leg from Ariel not helping with the birth. And then from her tree prison, Ariel somehow convinces Caliban to poison his mother, and several years later an old man and his three-year-old daughter wash up on the island and the storyline of The Tempest follows. Or not…because here are just a few of the details in Tiffany’s story: •Prospero is a farmer, not a Duke, and he’s a bad farmer, as well as a bad poet. •Prospero wasn’t exiled. Apparently he did something dumb, like take his daughter and a bunch of books and get in a boat to go to some Greek poetry conference and then got blown all the way across the Atlantic. •Upon arrival on the island, Ariel makes Prospero believe himself to be a duke wronged by his brother. His terrible desire for vengeance is all the creation of Ariel, for Prospero doesn’t really want vengeance; he has nothing to take vengeance against. His brother Antonio is well-intentioned and loves him. Sure, he’s better with money than Prospero, who always has his head in a book, but Antonio has kept Prospero’s farm going for him in his 12-year absence, and taken care of Prospero’s grieving wife, Althea. •Alonso is Antonio’s partner in their farming concern. He doesn’t hate Prospero, either. It’s all so very nice, and would have been if not for that scheming menace, Ariel. Not only does Ariel fill Prospero’s head with delusions and a desire to harm the people who love him, but she also desires to harm the noble Caliban and poisons Prospero’s mind against him. Ultimately, her great plan after Prospero avenges himself against Antonio and Alonso and does away with Caliban is to get Prospero to take her beyond the wall so that she can dominate the rest of the island and conquer whoever is playing those goshdarn drums. In Grace’s retelling, Ariel is a sadistic maniac seeking to spread misery and destruction, and Prospero is a rather foolish incompetent. All he can really do is read books, which is really a big waste of time, although his brother does concede near the end of the story, “Work is good, but stories have their place.” Gee thanks, Miss Tiffany! At the end, several centuries after Prospero has abandoned Ariel on the island, someone does show up who is perfect for the seed of evil that Ariel wants to spread. And look who it is: My, my, it’s Christopher Columbus, arriving on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria! Let’s see, a dying Jewish sailor/Christian missionary gives rise to an idea that is embraced by a Genoese explorer and his expanding civilization that leads to the genocide of the New World’s indigenous peoples, as well as the institution of slavery in the Americas…ha! If Grace Tiffany had anything going on in this book that even remotely made sense, I’d say that’s almost genius. Except it’s not. It's just poorly written tomfoolery masquerading as a bad YA book. And it's got nothing to do with The Tempest. Here’s the one bit of the story that really works for me: Remember Claribel, Alonso’s daughter that he marries to the King of Tunis? Well, in Tiffany’s book she’s Claribel the cow, who took top honors at the Lisbon fair and they sold off to some African buyer…now that’s funny stuff! As for the rest of it? I say we follow Prospero’s lead here and, “deeper than did any plummet sound,” we drown Grace Tiffany’s book. Here's a slightly better YA book trying to rework The Tempest: Dennis Covington's Lizard And here's a much better treatment of The Tempest by a much better author, Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2015
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Jul 04, 2015
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Jul 05, 2015
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Hardcover
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| B00O9IH3TK
| 2.93
| 2,713
| Nov 04, 2014
| Nov 18, 2014
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it was ok
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Full disclosure: I'm from Iowa City, and if you know anything about Iowa City then you know where this is going...from 1977 to '81 or '82, I saw just
Full disclosure: I'm from Iowa City, and if you know anything about Iowa City then you know where this is going...from 1977 to '81 or '82, I saw just about every Hawkeye wrestling home meet at the Fieldhouse. And I watched just about every away meet I could with Iowa Public Television's coverage. As a kid, my club wrestled out of the Hawkeye wrestling room in the evening after Gable and his guys were done, and I saw all them up close and then some. I was probably at the Fieldhouse five days or more a week in the late '70s and early '80s, wrestling, working out on the Universal machines, running stairs, playing racquetball, just soaking it all in. The Fieldhouse, Dan Gable and Iowa wrestling had a tremendous impact on my young mind. And that's the era of the Schultz brothers, as well. So I'm from Iowa City, and Mark Schultz wrestled for Oklahoma. And so I never liked him. In '81 he beat my hero Mike Deanna in the NCAA finals. In '82 he moved up a weight to beat Ed Banach in the finals, an even bigger hero of mine, keeping him from becoming the first four-time NCAA champ. And in '83 he beat Duane Goldman in the finals; that didn't matter so much because I was never a tremendous fan of Goldman's, but you get my point. I've never liked Mark Schultz. I had a grudging respect for him that grew out of his tendency to beat my favorite wrestlers, but I didn't like him. He was a chump, even if he was a great wrestler. And I like him even less now after reading his book, which is ostensibly about the murder of his brother Dave at the hands of crackpot millionaire wrestling devotee and Foxcatcher sponsor John Dupont (as recently depicted by Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum to a worldwide audience in the Foxcatcher film), but which could probably be more accurately described as a list of grievances Mark Schultz has against the world. And it's a pretty long list. Mark Schultz is mad. He's mad at John Dupont, and rightfully so. But he's mad at everyone. He's mad at his childhood. He's mad at USA Wrestling. He's mad at assorted coaches who didn't treat him the way he felt he should have been treated. He's mad at the wrestlers who kept wrestling on Dupont's money after the murder. He's mad at the invisible asterisk after his '84 Olympic gold medal because the Soviets and Eastern Europeans boycotted Los Angeles. He's even mad at his big brother Dave for being a better wrestler and a better human being than he is. And so Mark Schultz is mad. And the book reads that way, which is too bad because at this point Mark Schultz should be over a lot of it and he should have shown some personal growth. But he hasn't, and you'll see that all too clearly if you read his book. Should you read his book? I dunno. Read it if you're a college wrestling fan or an international wrestling fan. Read it if you saw the movie and you want another perspective on the Schultz brothers and Dave Schultz's murder. After all, the movie Foxcatcher plays fast and loose with the details, and if you watch the movie you'll have the wrong time frame for the events of the murder. But Mark Schultz filters those same events through his angry, aggrieved consciousness, so I don't know that you'll get a better or more accurate view of it all from his book. But you will see how angry and aggrieved he still is after almost twenty years. So maybe you noticed I don't like Mark Schultz. He's got a chip on his shoulder. He's a staller. And he quit in the middle of the '88 Olympics, and two out of those three things nobody at Iowa would ever do. But Dave Schultz? I liked Dave Schultz. Everybody liked Dave Schultz. He wasn't a chump like his brother. And his death in '96 was a terrible loss to the wrestling world and the world at large. So maybe you should read the book for Dave Schultz, even if his brother Mark spends too much time in it grinding his personal axes and not enough time paying tribute to his older brother. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 06, 2015
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May 26, 2015
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May 06, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 1594205191
| 9781594205194
| 1594205191
| 3.45
| 7,866
| Jul 15, 2014
| Jul 15, 2014
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really liked it
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This is a marvel of a book and a must-read for any fan of To Kill a Mockingbird. Written by Marja Mills, a former features writer for the Chicago Trib
This is a marvel of a book and a must-read for any fan of To Kill a Mockingbird. Written by Marja Mills, a former features writer for the Chicago Tribune, the book grows out of a marvel of a story that Mills wrote for the Trib back in 2002 when mayor Richie Daley chose To Kill a Mockingbird as the first book for the kick-off of his One Book, One Chicago reading program in the fall of 2001. When I opened the Trib that morning and saw the full-page spread with Harper Lee’s photo, I was shocked and amazed that she had cooperated with the story and given the city of Chicago her blessing of sorts by allowing herself to be photographed for the story. Here’s a link to that article: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/20... And Mills’ book goes back to flesh out how she wrote that story, how she won the trust and confidence of older sister Alice Lee and family friend Thomas Butts not only to gain access to Harper Lee, but to be welcomed into her circle of friends and eventually spend a great deal of time with her masquerading as a sort of family friend. By now you’ve probably heard the story, as improbable as it seems. The journalist knocks on the door and Alice Lee answers and invites her in. That first conversation leads to a meeting with Thomas Butts, and then a meeting with Harper Lee at the Monroeville Best Western, which over time grows into a relationship with the Lee sisters that lasts for years, with the journalist eventually moving in next door to the Lees and spending over a year living in Monroeville, AL, regularly interviewing Alice Lee and spending a great deal of time with Harper, engaging with her and Alice in some fascinating intimate moments. And those moments are indeed fascinating: •Mills rents Netflix for Harper Lee and they watch Wallace and Grommit. And Harper Lee likes Fargo, too! •They cheer for the Crimson Tide on Saturdays. •They do their laundry together at the Monroeville laundromat. •Mills goes fishing with Alice and Harper at a family friend's fish pond, using hotdogs for bait. •She feeds the ducks with Harper and Alice, a regular outing for the two elderly sisters. •She goes to exercise classes with Harper Lee and a bunch of fading southern belles in velour sweat suits. •She rides out Hurricane Dennis with Harper and Alice in a bank in downtown Monroeville. •She watches Superbowl 38 with the Lee sisters, although Mills is out of the room when Justin Timberlake rips off Janet Jackson’s top during the halftime show. So if you’re a fan of the novel and curious about its reclusive author, this is the kind of book you probably have been waiting for with its insights into some of the most private moments of one of our most private authors. And yet, as I was reading and enjoying this book, I was also thinking about the ethics of it all because Marja Mills isn’t Harper Lee’s friend at all; she’s a writer for the Trib. And although Alice and Thomas Butts have signed onto the whole thing, it seems that Harper Lee is never quite along for the ride on the idea of a book. It’s clear, even in Mills’ slanted presentation of it all, that Harper Lee is never on board, and that becomes clear at several points in The Mockingbird Next Door. And so when Mills and Harper Lee are at the local diner or getting coffee at McDonalds or feeding the ducks or doing their laundry, part of me felt a bit anxious for Harper Lee because, as much as I want to know as much as I can about the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, she’s being deceived by Mills, and it’s not very nice. And that deception goes on for five years or more. So, as much as I liked reading Mills’ book and enjoyed pulling back the curtain to spy on these special moments with Harper Lee, part of me is tempted to give The Mockingbird Next Door one star for Mills' dishonesty. Mills crosses a line here that maybe most journalists cross, but just because I yearn to know the details of Harper Lee's life, doesn't mean I have the right to know these things. In contrast, the director of the recent documentary Hey Boo never crosses this line. In that fine documentary, Thomas Butts and Alice Finch are interviewed at great length. But nowhere is Harper Lee coopted for a project she is not on board with. But in The Mockingbird Next Door, the reader is given privileged glimpses into the private life of a private woman who had no desire to share those moments with me and the rest of the world. Mills might have done me and the rest of the world a favor, but she’s done a terrible disservice to Harper Lee, and that’s a sin, if I can quote Atticus here. I had a couple of old maid great aunts, two old sisters who were funny and eccentric and wacky as all get out. They lived their odd lives to ripe old ages doing their odd things and having a great time at it. Neither of them was famous, so no one outside of the family would have ever been interested in talking to them or writing a book about them. But I can’t help but think how easy it would be and how unethical to worm one's way into the lives of two elderly “maiden ladies,” to use the language Harper Lee uses herself to talk about Sarah and Frances Barber, two minor characters who make an appearance near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. Miss Tutti and Frutti, as the neighborhood kids call them, are figures of fun in Maycomb, two old deaf ladies who have the only cellar in Maycomb. And one Halloween night, the kids in town prank the old ladies by putting their furniture in their cellar. It’s cruel and unnecessary, one more example of the title playing out in Harper Lee’s brilliant novel. The lesson is clear: it’s cruel and plain wrong to pull a prank on a couple of deaf old ladies. It’s like killing a mockingbird… So how sickeningly ironic that Mills would title her book The Mockingbird Next Door without much thought to how Harper Lee would respond to its publication. She’s right, though; Harper Lee is a mockingbird and, just like Atticus tells Jem and Scout, it’s a sin to hurt her. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” Miss Maudie tells Scout. And that’s why it’s a sin to kill them. Marja Mills might have known this if she knew the book a little better. But she doesn’t. [Here are two good examples—she mentions chinaberry trees with their poisonous fruit, that’s not in the book: the Radley pecans are poisonous, according to neighborhood lore. And she writes that Reverend Sykes does the lining at First Purchase—but that’s not right either: it’s Zeebo, Calpurnia’s son.] So it’s no surprise to me that Mills hasn't learned the lesson of the mockingbird, either. Mills could have waited. Alice and Harper Lee will be dead soon enough, five years, ten years…Then everything would be fair game, and no one would be hurt. But Mills had to get her precious book out before then. The irony is so thick it’s almost choking. Near the end of the novel, Heck Tate tells Atticus, “To my way of thinking…taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that’s a sin. It’s a sin and I’m not about to have it on my head.” Heck is talking to Atticus about Boo Radley, of course, the mockingbird next door. But he could just as easily be saying these words to Marja Mills about Nelle Harper Lee. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 14, 2014
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Oct 14, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0785168508
| 9780785168508
| 0785168508
| 3.91
| 1,694
| Jul 25, 2013
| Jan 01, 2013
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really liked it
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So maybe you saw ol’ Purple Puss in last week’s rollicking premiere of The Guardians of the Galaxy, and maybe you wondered what’s up with that guy, an
So maybe you saw ol’ Purple Puss in last week’s rollicking premiere of The Guardians of the Galaxy, and maybe you wondered what’s up with that guy, and why is he so darn evil anyway? And if that’s the case, then this graphic novel compilation The Avengers versus Thanos is where you can get some answers. A bit of a misnomer, the collection isn’t really about the Avengers versus Thanos, although he does have two epic encounters with them in these pages, and fortunately Earth survives both. Instead, the compilation traces the Mad Titan’s early appearances in the Marvel universe through the end of 1977 . I assume this graphic novel collection was titled The Avengers versus Thanos to capitalize on Thanos’ first cameo at the end of the Avengers' first movie when he shocked true believers with his surprise appearance during the credits. But I don’t care how much you like the Avengers, and I realize they’ve saved the Earth many a time, with the exception of Moon Dragon, maybe Mantis, and probably Thor, they really aren’t up to the task of battling Thanos, and if Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock hadn’t been around to help, Earth’s mightiest heroes wouldn’t have fared so well either time. If you aren’t familiar with him, Thanos is a little like John Keats, that English Romantic poet who professed to be “half in love with easeful death,” except that Thanos is full barking madly in love with Death and his own poetry takes the form of mass murder, genocide, and the wholesale destruction of galaxies, or even the universe, if he can just get Death to look his way every now and then. Death’s so fickle, though, and poor Thanos has to constantly up his game to get her to pay him that attention he so desperately craves. And Thanos’ career is also a bit like Robert DeNiro’s, both making rare and powerful appearances in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When you went to a DeNiro film back then, you knew you were in for something special. But by the ‘90s, you started seeing him all over the place, and now he’s just stretched way too thin…and so too with Thanos in the Marvel universe. His selective presence once upon a time signaled big things, but now when you go to the bookstore and see the row of graphic novels there starring the Mad Titan, then you know something’s wrong. How many times can the universe be in danger of utter annihilation before readers begin to get bored? Sorry, the shine’s off the pumpkin when DeNiro appears in Little Fockers and Analyze That, and the Thanos brand name has likewise gotten stretched a little thin at this point. The creation of Jim Starlin (whose head will one day be carved into the Mount Rushmore of comic book legends right next to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), Thanos makes his first appearance in the early ‘70s in the pages of Iron Man, a treat for me here since I had never seen that comic before, and then he goes on to pop in and out of Captain Marvel and Warlock, two cosmic titles that make more sense for this demi-god with a hard-on for intergalactic destruction. Included here are Thanos and Gamora teaming up with Adam Warlock and Pip the Troll to fight the Magus in Warlock issues 9-11, one of my favorite storylines from my youth. And a big surprise in the compilation (at least for me) is to see some Thanos story crossovers into Daredevil in the mid-‘70s, a development I was unaware of, although it is the weakest writing in the entire book. Pitting cosmic elements against Daredevil and Black Widow is a little like teaming DeNiro up with Ben Stiller and Billy Crystal (or maybe even worse is adding Spider-Man into the mix, which is what happens in the final story and somehow even makes it to the cover of the collection). Even though Steve Gerber writes these three Daredevil stories, they’re weak and add little to the overall storyline, beyond introducing the character of Moon Dragon. And speaking of Moon Dragon, doesn’t Peter Quill’s dying mother look a lot like her in the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy? I can’t help but wonder if that’s intentional. True, many cancer patients bear a resemblance to Moon Dragon, but remember how his mother told Peter that his unknown father first appeared to her like an angel? Well, here’s what Moon Dragon says in Daredevil 105 after the deaths of her mother and father: “I was the lone survivor—a mere child, utterly helpless… until I looked up from the mud and saw before me what I assumed at the time must be an angel! And he was reaching out to aid me!” This alien is Emlot from Titan, and he takes the young girl there to be first raised by Mentor before she is later put in the Shao-Lom monastery. Hmmm…are the scriptwriters of Guardians of the Galaxy playing with the storyline here, making Peter Quill the son of Moon Dragon and Mentor (or Moon Dragon and Eros, the brother of Thanos)? I suppose we’ll find out in the second film, true believers. And I imagine we’ll be seeing much more of Thanos in later Marvel movies as the plot threads of the infinity gem storyline are pulled together into what can only become a film version of The Infinity Gauntlet. Now that’s some Thanos I’m looking forward to. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 04, 2014
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Aug 07, 2014
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Aug 04, 2014
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Paperback
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| 3.81
| 58,416
| Feb 07, 1912
| Jun 23, 2008
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really liked it
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Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars marks a milestone in my career as a reader. Like Scout Finch, I cannot remember not being able to read, so I’
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars marks a milestone in my career as a reader. Like Scout Finch, I cannot remember not being able to read, so I’ve got a lifetime of reading under my belt, but for the first time now, with A Princess of Mars, I have read a book in an electronic format. It seems rather late for me, doesn’t it? What with Nooks and Kindles and iPads and the Internet being around for so long already, but I just haven’t warmed up to the idea of reading books electronically. I read newspapers online: I browse the headlines, read poetry and lit crit—I’m no Luddite and like most folks these days I spend way more time than I should online—but I have a fondness for books and a reticence to give up the tactile experience of reading. And not just the tactile experience, either. I like the smell of books, especially the smell of old books, that musty smell that I equate with used bookstores and the old library I went to as a child in Iowa City and especially with the adult paperback carousel there that I discovered once I had finished with the Wizard of Oz books and the Hardy Boys and even the Nancy Drews, and moved out of the children’s room looking for something more. I was a voracious reader as a kid, and so long before I probably should have, I migrated to the adult side of the library where the wire carousel of well-thumbed paperbacks caught my attention. There, the novels’ covers showed well-muscled men with chiseled jaws fighting bad guys and beasts, blowing up things and shooting big guns. And there were usually scantily clad women on those covers as well, sometimes barbarian princesses in skimpy chain mail, sometimes European bikini-clad beauties on a beach in the Riviera or wearing a revealing gown in a Monte Carlo casino. So I was hooked. And thus I entered a new phase in my reading and checked out as many of these books as I could, at least the ones I thought my mother would not object to, causing me to leave the ones with the nearly naked ladies on the rack. From the fantasy of Oz and the action and adventure of the Hardy Boys, I quickly accelerated my reading fare to those pulp novels detailing the adventures of Doc Savage, the Avenger, Mack Bolan, and Nick Carter. And here I also found and read the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or at least his Tarzan titles because I feared his Mars books featured way too many alien beauties in undress on the covers to get past the eye of my mother. So there’s something curiously appropriate here that my first electronic book is Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. It’s almost like I’m back to that rack of paperbacks as an 11-year-old, making up for lost time and unread volumes, and what better way to initiate myself into this brave new world of electronic novels than to start with one of the great early sci-fi fantasy books of all time… Burroughs has his own influences, obviously Verne and Wells from the other side of the ocean, and James Fenimore Cooper here closer to home, and of course the cowboy dime novels of the late 1800s, but reading A Princess of Mars, I’m struck by how in 1912 what a ground-breaking storyline this must have been and how much a debt today’s American popular culture owes to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his John Carter. Carter is a uniquely American hero, the descendant of Natty Bumppo, and the forefather of just about every action/adventure hero who has come after him. I was just on Wikipedia, and the Robert E. Howard entry there calls Howard the father of the sword and sorcery genre. But without Burroughs’ influence, Howard would never have created Conan the Barbarian; without John Carter there’s no Superman and precious few other superheroes from the DC or Marvel line-up; without Burroughs, we wouldn’t have sci-fi as we know it today, from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to James Cameron’s Avatar. We surely wouldn’t have Christopher Pike and James T. Kirk and those sexy green babes from Orion. And there’s something in John Carter that might even remind the reader of big-screen action figures like John McClane or John Connor or even Neo, even though he isn't named John. John Carter arrives on Mars (“Barsoom” in the local tongue) through quite mysterious circumstances. He is a gentleman of Virginia, a veteran of the Civil War who travels to the west in the post-war migration to make his mark. The beginning of the story finds him in Arizona territory, prospecting. There are Indians and ambushes, and it’s almost like Burroughs here intentionally creates a transition between those early cowboy pulp novels and his new outer space adventure. Those Indians chase Carter into a cave and when he emerges he discovers he’s no longer in Arizona. Through his superhuman strength (the thinner atmosphere and lesser gravity on Mars allows him to leap 50 feet at a time and knock out a fifteen-foot Martian with one blow), John Carter overcomes many an obstacle to win the girl, save the day and become a prince of Mars before finding himself just as mysteriously back on Earth by the end of the novel. So the story itself is pretty much what you might expect it to be. But as with any good science fiction or fantasy, A Princess of Mars is more than just a simple pulp novel, and it’s as much about life on Earth as it is about Mars, and at the core of this novel is a message about the necessity of tolerance and diversity in a world filled with division and violence. In that way, A Princess of Mars shares common ground with many a sci-fi tale, for example, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the most recent sci-fi/fantasy offering that comes to mind. Just like those original Planet of the Apes movies (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes make the theme most apparent), this newest reboot offers a message of hope if people (and apes) can work together. And so too on Barsoom, where the green men live brutal, savage lives constantly warring on each other and on the neighboring red Martians, John Carter arrives bringing with him to the red planet a new hope for living together through tolerance and mutual understanding. When John Carter finds himself suddenly transported to Mars, he first encounters the Tharkian tribe of the green Martians. These fifteen-foot-tall creatures with four arms and long tusks practice eugenics and euthanasia, and few if any live to their natural lifespan of a thousand years. Their cruel code of honor creates a harsh society where it is kill or be killed, and the Tharks only smile or laugh when they see their enemies suffering. However, through his increased strength and his experience at war, John Carter is able to fight his way to a position of respect among the Tharks and encourage a new set of ideals among them. John Carter allies himself with the green man Tars Tarkas and teaches him the value of friendship. He is able to bring the green men together to fight for a common cause and for the first time creates an alliance between the green men and the red Martians of Helium. John Carter even shows kind mastery to his dog and horse (or his calot and thoat, that is), making them much more effective creatures as companions and mounts and through his example teaches the green men the virtue of kindness to animals. (Wait a minute, Edgar Rice Burroughs, you wacky guy…John Carter? JC? Bringing a message of hope and light to the darkness…hmmm? I dunno, but maybe!) And like any great writer of sci-fi, Burroughs is familiar with the scientific theories of this time, and he builds on them with a prescience that is curious to read today. In 1912, he is talking about the gravity and atmosphere of Mars and imagining flying machines with the capacity of waging war. Here through the warring green men of Barsoom, Burroughs seems to be pointing to the gathering storm in Europe that in a couple of years is about to unleash the worst violence in the history of mankind. The red Barsoomians, less martial than their green counterparts, have unlocked the secrets of light; the ninth ray is the key to the creation of their artificial atmosphere, and the eighth gives them propulsion enabling flight. Radium is the source of their energy on Mars and powers their technology as well as their weapons of the non-stabby kind. None of it makes any real sense today, but it’s fascinating to think about Burroughs reading up on the discoveries of the Curies or the theories of Einstein and working them into his stories. And so now here I am 100 years later with my own advanced technology, reading about John Carter and Dejah Thoris on my iPad. Truth be told, I’d rather be reading his adventures on Barsoom in some ancient paperback from a carousel in my public library. I’d rather have the touch and the heft of the book in my hands and the smell of wisdom from old bookstores emanating from the musty pages of the novel, but time keeps on slipping away from me, and in fact this fall I will be required to teach my freshmen using iPads in the classroom. No more books in the freshmen curriculum, if you can believe that. So today it’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, but in a month or so it’ll be Homer and Shakespeare and Steinbeck and more. I’ve got some serious catching up to do! ...more |
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Jul 21, 2014
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| 9783421051783
| 342105178X
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it was ok
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This book came to mind today as I was browsing a discussion thread titled, "Do you have to like the narrator to enjoy the book?" Quentin, the decidedl
This book came to mind today as I was browsing a discussion thread titled, "Do you have to like the narrator to enjoy the book?" Quentin, the decidedly unlikeable narrator of Oates' 1995 novel Zombie, kidnaps young men, holds them captive in his house, and then applies an icepick to their brains in his quest to create the perfect zombie love slave. He isn't particularly adept with the pick. Young men die horribly, and there is a great deal of ugly, violent rape and worse. Quentin also seems to love baby chicks. And then he does something terrible with them. The chicks notwithstanding, I didn't much like Quentin, nor did I enjoy the book. But that's not to imply the answer to the question posed in the discussion thread is "yes." I don't much like Anse Bundren, Victor Frankenstein or Humbert Humbert, either, and their books are some of my all-time favorites. No, this is just an ugly, awful novel, but it's supposed to be, so that's not really a valid criticism on my part. Plenty of other readers enjoyed it; I just wasn't one of them. Here's a funny/sad story. Back in 1995, the librarian at the high school where I teach purchased this book and put it on the "new" shelf. I'm not sure what she thought she was buying. It was pretty clear at the time that Oates was writing a first person point-of-view novel from the perspective of a sadistic serial killer based on Jeffery Dahmer. I checked it out the first day, read it in about a week and then returned it. But after that, the book was never reshelved, and then its entry vanished altogether from the electronic card catalog. Sigh... ...more |
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Here’s my first read of the summer, and I ripped through it like a fat kid on a tube of Pringles. Surprised by my rapid progress, my daughter (a high
Here’s my first read of the summer, and I ripped through it like a fat kid on a tube of Pringles. Surprised by my rapid progress, my daughter (a high schooler well-versed in the world of YA who had read The Fault in Our Stars shortly after it came out in 2012) asked me how I was enjoying the book. “Not as much as my students, unfortunately,” I said. To which she rather astutely replied, “That’s because you aren’t a 14-year-old girl.” And she’s right. I’m not. And I’m old enough and I’ve read enough to understand that, like a tube of Pringles, The Fault in Our Stars isn’t much more than empty carbs and calories. But it’s still tasty, nonetheless, and that’s why it’s captured our collective attention, and especially the attentions of America’s 14-year-old girls who know how to read. Don’t get me wrong, fangirls and boys, I enjoyed the book, just like I enjoy wolfing down anything with a lot of fat and salt and oil. And I appreciate John Green. I’ve been familiar with his name since Looking for Alaska came out and people in the know (including my daughter) started praising him as a very good YA author. I’ve even spent some time watching his spastic presence on Youtube. He’s knowledgeable and funny, and he’s doing the world a great service by getting teens to read while making himself a boatload of money. And I respect that, especially the part about getting teens to read. And I enjoyed the book, I’ll stress again, even though I went in prepared to dislike it and despite its first chapter, which is pretty weak. (C’mon Penguin! You don’t have editors with the backbone to tell John Green when he’s really sucking?) But quickly enough the book righted itself and drew me into the story, and pretty soon I was involved in Hazel Grace and Augustus and their journey to Amsterdam. So here’s what I like about the book: first, at its most mundane level it’s got a slick, moving storyline that engages the reader, even a cynical old bastard like me. And that storyline readily appeals to the teenage reader and to adults as well, because they’re gobbling it up at their Thursday evening book clubs and washing it down, no doubt, with crappy white wine. (But listen, soccer moms of America, just read it and be done with it. Save your book club choice for something with a little more meat on it, why don’t you?) And at its core The Fault in Our Stars is a book that wants to be smart, and it’s trying to be smart; so right away it’s got that over The Hunger Games or Divergent or all the catty, consumerist bullshit books being marketed to girls (Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl books come to mind as the most egregious). Here Green wants to appeal to his readers’ brains as well as their hearts. And it works again, as long as we’re talking about teens. I think Fault in Our Stars will get them to think, and that’s another plus for the novel. After all, it’s a book that features and revolves around another book, An Imperial Affliction, the novel that Hazel loves so much and gets Augustus to love and which puts them on their flight to Amstedam to meet the author, Peter Van Houten. And I like the way John Green drops in a wide range of other works into this book about a book: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Howl” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Anne Frank, and William Shakespeare and Archibald MacLeish, among others. So, here’s a book that’s got teens reading and maybe just maybe they’ll come across these references to other authors and works, pique their interest and look them up on the Web. Or at least that’s my hope. And as long as I’m on the subject of the novel’s “intertextuality,” my favorite part of the novel involves Hazel and Augustus’s ill-fated visit to Peter Van Houten in Amsterdam. I can't help but think that Hazel and Augustus's quest to seek out the author grows out of Holden Caulfield's lines early in Catcher in the Rye when he tells us, "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” That’s certainly Hazel’s response to An Imperial Affliction. Early in the book, Hazel even calls Van Houten (“an author who did not know I existed”) her “third best friend,” only after her parents. Rarely do things go well when the worlds of reader and author collide (think more Butters’ awkward encounter with George R. R. Martin than Ray Kinsella taking J.D. Salinger out to a ballgame to ease his pain). Needless to say, after the interview Van Houten is no longer on Hazel’s top three friends list, but their conversation does raise some interesting ideas about the relationship between readers and writers and the expectations that readers often bring to text. And finally, I really like how The Fault in Our Stars is the only book I’ve ever read that uses the term “assclown.” Sometimes it’s the little things, too… And yet, despite all that, I would have a hard time recommending this book to an adult reader with mature reading tastes. It’s a good, maybe even a great YA novel for teen readers, but it lacks the complexity and depth of better writing. Here’s John Green himself in his “How and Why We Read: Crash Course English Literature #1”: “Writing or at least good writing is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people and that’s true if you’re reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction…So when Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter or Salinger uses a red hunting cap they aren’t doing this so that your English teachers can have something to torture you with; they’re doing this…so that their story can have a bigger and better life in your mind.” And that’s the problem; Hazel and Augustus don’t really have “bigger and better” lives in my mind as I read the novel, and as good as their story itself is, they lack the complexities that real human beings possess, especially human beings facing the trauma of terminal illness. For starters, Hazel and Augustus don’t sound like flesh and blood teenagers, and that’s most apparent in that rocky first chapter. Here’s Augustus in the opening scene’s support group when asked how he feels: “’Oh, I’m grand…I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.” On the next page when asked what he fears, Augustus responds, “I fear oblivion…I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.” And then Hazel Grace feels the need to expostulate: “’There will come a time,’ I said, ‘when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that or species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this’—I gestured encompassingly—‘will have been for naught. Maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I enocourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.’” Yeah, that’s all pretty awful. And “encompassingly”? But more importantly, Hazel and Augustus don’t really think or feel like flesh and blood teens, either. Compare them to Theo Decker from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and they come out pretty flat. Here’s the best example, especially in comparison with Theo who has been traumatized in his own way and desperately, constantly looks backward for what he has lost in his life. When Augustus sees Hazel at that support group meeting and stares at her so persistently, we later learn it is because of her striking resemblance to the dead teenage girl he knew from the cancer ward at the hospital a year and a half earlier when he lost his leg to osteosarcoma. But that striking resemblance remains just a curious coincidence in Green’s novel, and none of the creepy or otherwise psychological depths of his attraction to Hazel are ever acknowledged or examined. Robert Smith of the Cure (who coincidentally also resembles a dead teenage girl) sings, “Tell me who doesn’t love/ What can never come back?” But the obvious ramifications of that resemblance and the way it drives Augustus's increasingly intense feelings for Hazel are never explored as their relationship develops. Green is telling a nice story here; he just doesn’t have the time or the desire to plumb the full complexities of human experience. And there are those little things, too. Like Augustus who so confidently asserts that they are not “literally” in the heart of Jesus, but then talks about the “metaphor” of putting the cigarette between his lips but not lighting it. Psst…it’s not a “metaphor,” Augustus, and it’s a pretty stupid idea whatever you want to call it, Mr. Green. And the title? It’s catchy and all that, but it makes little sense in terms of the story. Despite what Peter Van Houten claims (and despite him being an “assclown,” he does say some pretty insightful things in the novel), there’s nothing Shakespearian about their unfortunate circumstances. It’s sad, but it’s not a “tragedy,” and based on everything else Van Houten says in the book, I don’t see where he would ever come up with such a lame response. Van Houten doesn’t seem to understand Sonnet 55, and no, Shakespeare didn’t get it wrong when Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” First of all, Augustus and Hazel have cancer and that’s in them, not their stars, but more importantly, there’s no reason to title the book thusly and have Van Houten say, “there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars,” when the book is about we behave in response to the so-called “fault in our stars.” And Green ends the novel invoking personal choice in the face of adversity. So by the end of the novel, the whole clever title just feels wrong to me. In fact, all the titles and authors Green works into the novel (with the exception of Anne Frank) seem fairly gratuitous. I’m not sure Wallace Stevens or T.S. Eliot or Allen Ginsberg offer much insight into the story itself. I’m glad they’re all there. But it’s not much more than literary window dressing. Again, don’t get me wrong. I like this book, but it’s solidly YA. Perhaps Green could have turned the novel into something more literary, something more psychologically accurate and more true to human nature, but then it would have become a very different book and it would not be the novel that teens by the truckload are lining up to read right now. And despite the novel’s faults, I would much rather have the teens of America reading about Hazel Grace with her nasal cannula and oxygen tank than the ridiculous exploits of Katniss Everdeen or Tris Prior. ...more |
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Jun 13, 2014
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Jun 13, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1609805917
| 9781609805913
| 1609805917
| 3.87
| 9,932
| Apr 10, 2013
| Apr 08, 2014
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it was amazing
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George Shultz, some old jackass from the Reagan State Department, spoke at my graduation. I remember nothing about the speech. All I can tell you abou
George Shultz, some old jackass from the Reagan State Department, spoke at my graduation. I remember nothing about the speech. All I can tell you about George Shultz today is that supposedly he had a tiger tattooed on his wrinkly white derrière from back in his Marine Corps days. So it goes. Had Kurt Vonnegut spoken at my graduation, that would have been nice. It would have been Uncle Alex level nice, even pitcher of lemonade nice, and I'd probably still be able to remember a few of the good words spoken to us by the author before we left childhood behind and headed off into that big, cold world of adult responsibility with our expensive education under our collective belts. In case you missed it back when this book was posthumously published about ten years ago, If This Isn't Nice, What Is? is a small collection of some of the speeches Vonnegut gave during his lifetime, the majority of them commencement addresses, although there are a couple of other gems in here, a speech to the Indiana Civil Liberties Union and another he gave in Chicago upon receiving the Carl Sandburg Award. It's all great, although a tad repetitive in places, and there are several laugh out loud moments because Vonnegut is wicked funny, even when he's just speechifying. Sure, if we rated this book objectively, it probably doesn't deserve those five stars when you compare it against some of the great novels by the author, but at this point in this sorry world in which we live, anything by Kurt Vonnegut is going to get five stars from me. And speak of the devil, there he is on the back of the book looking quite dapper for an old guy, and a lot less rumpled than in most pics of the author, especially in the last book cover photo I remember from my copy of Jailbird, when he's sitting on the edge of a bed having a cigarette as he stares out a window, a dish full of smoked-out stubs on the table next to him. [image] And P.S., don't go looking here for that commencement address about wearing sunscreen. Vonnegut had nothing to do with that speech, dummies, despite what you may have heard. The "Wear sunscreen" address was actually a column by Mary Schmich, one of my favorite writers at the Chicago Tribune and a very nice woman herself. ...more |
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Dec 14, 2021
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Dec 16, 2021
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May 05, 2014
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| 3.67
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| Jan 01, 1945
| 1945
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really liked it
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Judging from the slim number of ratings here at GoodReads, Paul Engle doesn’t get read much anymore. And his name probably doesn’t come up in conversa
Judging from the slim number of ratings here at GoodReads, Paul Engle doesn’t get read much anymore. And his name probably doesn’t come up in conversation much either (even in Iowa City, home to the Writers’ Workshop), and that’s too bad because Engle deserves in his own small way to be mentioned along with names like Maxwell Perkins or Malcolm Cowley or William Shawn as a force behind the scenes guiding the development of Twentieth Century American fiction. His three decades at the helm of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop brought an impressive stable of talent to the University of Iowa to write and teach there, and the effects of what he helped create in Iowa City resonate throughout the body of American fiction and poetry from the second half of the Twentieth Century until today. But despite all that, Engle’s own writing doesn’t hold up that well for most of today’s readers, and even early in his career in the ‘30s his optimism and declamatory style was already out of fashion, easy to deride as foolishly open-hearted and naïve. As a poet, he descends from Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, and he wears his roots from the heartland on his sleeve. Even Kurt Vonnegut, one of Engle’s draws to Iowa City, scorned him as a “hayseed clown” in a moment of unkindness published in 2012’s Letters. And Engle no doubt appeared that way to Vonnegut—he was an athletic, friendly man, big and robust, a product of Cedar Rapids—but he spent his life writing among writers, oversaw the Workshop during arguably its most talented years, and he created the International Writers’ Workshop which brought scores of international talent to the community of writers in Iowa City as well. I met Engle once, during my mailman days. I brought a special delivery letter to his house on the bluff above Dubuque Street overlooking the river. He answered the door, signed for the letter and was friendly, still quite dynamic for a man in his late 70s or early 80s. He was a part of the framework of the Iowa City I grew up in, the rich, artistic tableaux that made it (and still makes it today) just about one of the best places (and the most literary) in all the world. So here’s what I did on Sunday: back visiting Iowa City with my daughter, we got up that morning and walked along the river from the Iowa House, took the walkway up from the river by the old University High School building and then walked east along Fairchild through the north end neighborhood where Vonnegut lived in the late ‘60s. Our walk took us to Oakland Cemetery to look at the Black Angel and all the dead people I know there. And there tucked away on the south end of the cemetery is Paul Engle’s stone, and wonder of wonders his stone is gazing down the hill at Donald Justice, just three or four rows away. It’s like Iowa City has its own little Poet’s Corner right there in Oakland Cemetery. So then my daughter and I walked back on Bloomington where I was surprised to find the Haunted Bookshop has moved into the house where Murphy-Brookfield Books was for so many years. And we browsed the shelves, and I found this attractive, signed copy of Engle’s American Child, his sonnet sequence of 64 poems written to his daughter. I took it back to the Iowa House and read it. Engle’s sonnets touch on many of the elements that sonnet writers have explored since Petrarch: time and beauty and love and eternity, enormous, unwieldy concepts that the fourteen-line form of the sonnet allows the writer the chance to exert some control over, to make sense of in an orderly limited manner. And Engle has a masterly control of the sonnet form, and his poems echo many an early sonnet by Shakespeare and Spenser, but maybe even more so those by William Wordsworth because there is something entirely Romantic with a capital “R” about these poems, a recognition and a celebration of the simple and sadly transient beauty of childhood set against the beauties of the natural world. “Lucky the living child born in a land / Bordered by rivers of enormous flow,” the sequence begins with the first sonnet, “Missouri talking through its throat of sand, / Mississippi wide with ice and snow.” There is an intimate connection to the land here, the rich, black farmland of the Midwest, and at times Engle sounds much like Wordsworth, albeit not of the Lake District but of Iowa, which he sings and celebrates unabashedly though his daughter’s experience growing up in that fertile land: “She lives between those rivers as between / Her birth and death, and is in these bold days / A water-watched and river-radiant child” (I). Later in Sonnet X Engle writes, “She moves above the wide fields shiningly, / Loving the living earth where her feet run, / Making that whole land meaningful and wise.” Wordsworth called youth “nature’s priest,” and in these sonnets it seems Engle would agree. Wordsworth wrote, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” and to his own young daughter he wrote, “Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, / And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, / God being with thee when we know it not.” And Engle seems to be channeling Wordsworth at many points throughout his sonnet sequence: For all her life is the enormous now, No time is in it, and no yesterday Torments tomorrow asking why or how. The intense instant is complete and right. Forever is a place as far away As the dark forest or tomorrow night. (XVII) Engle’s sonnets are filled with an achingly powerful love for his young daughter whom he sees growing and changing, playing and running, slowly puzzling out the mysteries of the world around her: “She knows the natural earth of thing, but all / The human world is dreadfully ahead” (VIII). Gradually, the child awakens into the understandings of time and loss and death. But Engle celebrates the innocence of his daughter before the “shades of the prison house” begin to close upon her: Growing old does not mean growing wise But losing what was accurate and wild, The savage sense of river, sound and sun. Deafened by ears and blinded with our eyes, We will forget the elemental child Is made of earth, air, water, fire in one. (XII) Engle’s sequence shows that gradual forgetting of the “elemental child,” as sickness and loss and goodbyes take a gradual toll on her innocence. There is the concern of the father for a sick child, an attempt to help her understand loss and the everyday troubles of broken dolls and Halloween and dying pets. But in the background is an even greater concern of a father for a daughter growing up in the ‘40s, the fascism in Europe, the “hysteria of hands and voice.” Engle brackets these sonnets of childhood and innocence with grimmer ones alluding to the dictatorships in Europe and the consoling himself that his daughter will not grow up with those fears in her life. For me and my connections to Iowa City, this is a wonderful volume of poetry by a man whose significance in guiding the direction of American literature is unmistakable. And American Child becomes even more important to me in that I found it on a beautiful Sunday morning on a walk with my own daughter. Engle writes lines I would record for her here: She is a miracle like daily light, As warm, as moving as that luminous air. Let her eyes never lose the daily sight Of the sun’s great golden hand on face and hair. (XXXI) Clearly, this sonnet sequence won’t appeal to everyone. I know that as a younger man I would have sneered at the sentimental writing here. There is, undoubtedly, a touch of what Vonnegut called the “hayseed” in these open-hearted poems from a father to his daughter, and despite the connections I have made to other writers, no one will mistake these sonnets for those of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. There is something entirely “Iowan” about these poems, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. ...more |
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Mar 30, 2014
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Mar 30, 2014
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Mar 30, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0811874559
| 9780811874557
| 0811874559
| 4.14
| 31,949
| Jun 30, 2010
| Jun 16, 2010
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it was amazing
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I know, I know...only one measly star to classics like A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar, and A Separate Peace, and just three stars to The Waste Land?
I know, I know...only one measly star to classics like A Farewell to Arms, The Bell Jar, and A Separate Peace, and just three stars to The Waste Land? And now this?!? Don't try and shame me. I feel bad enough about it already. Some times I think I'd like to live forever... [image] But just look at this sad dinosaur...all his friends are dead. And no one even calls him a "Brontosaurus" anymore. And what about this old guy? [image] Maybe he reminds you of the old poet of Sonnet 30 who laments "precious friends hid in death's dateless night"? [image] And now maybe the ancient man of the Pardoner's Tale? [image] Hamlet sure felt like this guy. [image] And then he felt like this guy. [image] Oops, look who wins again! Sigh... ...more |
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Feb 14, 2014
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Feb 14, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0394562690
| 9780394562698
| 0394562690
| 3.69
| 933
| Jan 01, 1939
| Aug 12, 1987
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it was ok
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Here's something I bet you never saw on Mulberry Street... Dr. Seuss's tale of the seven naked Godiva sisters and their quest for horse truth is a curi Here's something I bet you never saw on Mulberry Street... Dr. Seuss's tale of the seven naked Godiva sisters and their quest for horse truth is a curiosity and worth seeking out if you're a fan like I am, but, alas, it's not particularly funny or clever or even all that interesting, truth be told. Written in uncharacteristically stiff prose, the story just clunks along, but in places you can hear Seuss's future anapestic tetrameter just itching to bust out: "This gig she rigged up she called "Wagon Anterior." But that promising line collapses into the awful: "Never, from a horse's point of view, had a vehicle been constructed with less consideration. The whole crazy business was backside to." Yeah, and I don't know what that "to" is doing there. Here, in 1939, Seuss is just starting to get a feel for the rhythms of language that he masters over the next 20 years. Maybe the most humorous part of the whole book for me is seeing my childhood hero draw nekkid ladies (especially the very large Teenie Godiva), although the good doctor (certainly not a gynecologist) has a real reticence in addressing anatomical accuracy. Some precious vandal went and helpfully added nipples to Hedwig Godiva on an early page of my copy of the book. I had to look carefully before I figured out it wasn't the work of the doctor himself there. Big G, little g, what begins with "G"? Giaquinta giving the Godiva girls two stars on a cold winter's day! ...more |
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Jan 05, 2013
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Jan 06, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1476727651
| 9781476727653
| 1476727651
| 4.13
| 270,928
| Sep 24, 2013
| Sep 24, 2013
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liked it
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Once again Stephen King has this week’s number-one bestseller on the New York Times hardcover fiction list, and that’s great for his publisher, I supp
Once again Stephen King has this week’s number-one bestseller on the New York Times hardcover fiction list, and that’s great for his publisher, I suppose. After all, didn’t he have the number-one best seller last year around this time? And didn’t my fellow GoodReaders vote last year’s Mr. Mercedes the top mystery and thriller novel of the year? But here I am this same week just finishing up King’s Doctor Sleep, three books behind you might say, although, in fact, I’m more like 25 books behind and destined never to catch up because, unlike his publisher, I don’t share the same enthusiasm for King’s assembly-line literary production. And as I sit here thinking about my review, it strikes me that I’d be a more content GoodReader if GRR Martin would write just a little bit faster and Stephen King would slow it way down. This is heresy, I know, and I’m imagining, after I post this, legions of King fans lined outside my house tonight with their torches and pitchforks shouting for blood, pistols at dawn at fifty paces, or whatever would give them satisfaction. But I’m right, and more of them would agree if they’d just step back and think harder about what they’re reading instead of just ravenously sucking on the ever-flowing teat Stephen King offers them. For a time I kept up. Every Christmas there in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s I could expect that King’s latest would be sitting under the tree waiting for me. But then there was a bad patch … Christine … Cujo … even King’s staunchest fans would have to acknowledge how weak those years were, and after a while it became exhausting to keep up, and there were far better ways to spend my time once I went off to college. Somewhere back there in the mid ‘80s I gave up even trying to keep up. I’ve dipped into his some of his offerings over the past two and a half decades since then (the best? Maybe The Green Mile? the worst? Well, there are plenty of choices, but maybe Gerald’s Game?), but I’ve lost the interest I once had in reading his life’s work. And I write all this as a fan of King’s. I saw him in about 1980 give a talk in a small room, maybe he was touring in support of The Dead Zone or Firestarter, maybe he was just coming through town, I dunno. But I was captivated by the man, although this was a heavier, bearded version of the author that no one seems to remember anymore today and of whom you can barely find an image anymore, even on the Internet. But bearded or no, back then he had written some of the creepiest short stories and scariest novels that I’d ever read. And for my money The Shining was the best of them. And to make it even better, Kubrick shortly turned the novel into just about the scariest movie that I had ever seen, which sadly is a film King has never liked. (And he takes time yet again to put down Kubrick's movie version in the author’s note at the end of Doctor Sleep. Well, here's my note to Mr. King: No, Kubrick’s film is not as good as your novel, and yes, Stanley made all kinds of naughty changes to it, and yes, there’s a TV mini-series that is truer to your intentions, but it’s not better than the movie, and listen, in all respect, I’ve never read Ken Kesey complaining about Milos Forman’s version of Cuckoo’s Nest, so after thirty-plus years, Mr. King, can’t you stop your belly aching and just enjoy it for what it is???) But despite the author's distaste for the film, it frightened me to death, and I liked it as much as the novel. So, you can imagine how enthused I was when I heard that King had a sequel to The Shining in the works. And on some levels the novel is great, especially in the beginning as it opens with Danny Torrance after the events of The Shining. There’s a quick look at a young Danny Torrance trying to deal with the emotional (and supernatural) fallout from the events at the Overlook and Dick Hollerann making an appearance to help him cope with it. And then there’s Danny later as a young adult trying to put the past behind him less successfully with drugs and alcohol, drifting from town to town, flop house to flop house, one crappy job to another, leaving a trail of destruction in his path as he tries to flee both the effects of his stay at The Overlook and his childhood with father Jack Torrance. Dick Hallorann teaches Danny a way to deal with the supernatural residue from that winter at the Overlook, but the psychological and emotional damage inflicted by his father on Danny is harder to evade. Too often, Danny finds himself causing the same sort of damage that his father inflicted on Danny and his mother. There’s something in this early part of the novel that works and is true to King’s earlier novel. But once the exposition is through and the real story line of Doctor Sleep gets going, the novel begins to fade for me. There are the typical King story elements, the small northeastern town, the second or third or last chance at redemption, the young child in need, and although it’s a storyline you’ve seen before, it draws you in and begins to take a pleasant shape. Daniel Torrance finds work in a hospice in a small New Hampshire town and finds help at the local Alcoholics Anonymous. But then it just doesn’t take off the way I hoped it would. It doesn’t fizzle out and die, and there’s probably enough here for the King fan to sink his teeth into, but it’s not what I was waiting for, and it could have been so much better. And I have to think that some of that is due to the lickety-split way that King writes. Sure, he’s had thirty-plus years to think about Danny Torrance and the other characters, but the actual writing of the book (if we’re to trust the dates he provides us with at the end) took him 14 months, and the result is plot lines that don’t go anywhere, characters lacking development, tired stereotypes needing more depth, and an anti-climactic showdown at the Roof o’ the World which brings him back to the Rocky Mountains and the very spot where the Overlook Hotel burned down nearly 30 years earlier, but which really doesn’t do justice to those thirty years at all and leaves the reader wanting a lot more. Part of the reason why The Shining works so much better than Doctor Sleep has to do with the success at how well King intertwines the supernatural evil of the Overlook Hotel with the more mundane but no less terrifying evil that is located within Jack Torrance, the anger that grows out of his failures as a father and husband, as well as a teacher and writer, and his pathetic inability to cope without destroying himself and his family through his alcoholism-fueled rage. Here in Doctor Sleep the issue of addiction and alcoholism is revisited, but less successfully because the evil is far more obviously external in this novel. And this is where King needed more time and thought to figure out how to revisit the evils introduced in The Shining. Because in Doctor Sleep it’s embodied in the True Knot, a clan of vampire sorts who feed on misery and human suffering, crisscrossing the country in their caravan of Winnebagos and other types of campers and recreational vehicles. (In his author’s note, King also gives credit to one of his staff for keeping him up to date on the best and most current RV information.) And as much as I like the idea of evil Winnebago people in their “ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN!” t-shirts and stretch pants, embodying a specific aspect of American culture, and moving from one natural disaster to another, feeding on scenes of mass murder and other human despair, and feasting on the death and suffering they encounter there, I tire of it rather quickly as well. For one, the last thing any of us need in our pop culture diet is another clan of vampires, even if the True Knot technically aren’t vampires and don’t want to suck your blood in any sort of way that Bela Lugosi or Edward Cullen would recognize. Nonetheless, I’ve probably had enough vampires, thank you very much, blood sucking, sparkly or otherwise. But King doesn’t really exploit this (joke? symbol? allegory?) of the American experience as well as he could, something that again should have been developed with more time and thought put into writing the novel. King is clearly attuned to the possibilities here; he makes specific references to the changing of the presidents over the decades and there are enough specific connections to pop culture and American capitalism to shake a really big stick at, but it’s sketchy and King should have developed it better and make the evil of the True Knot something even more integral to the American experience. There is one particularly interesting scene that King specifically should have developed better where the members of the True Knot are drawn toward the East Coast in 2001 and set up their wheeled community across the Hudson from Manhattan so they can participate in the effects of 9/11. That was an invigorating day for them, and King could have played that scene out even more so to its logical conclusions and the suffering and disaster that spilled out of that day for years to follow. (Hey, is Big Dick Cheney a member of the True Knot? That would explain a lot.) After all, the history of the True Knot parallels the American experience. It's a community that has been active for centuries, first moving across the water from Europe on sailing ships, then crossing the continent first in covered wagons, feeding on the misery and destruction that is the conquest of the New World, before becoming the mobile RV community of the novel. This concept of an ancient community of life-stealing monsters isn’t original with King, and he even tosses in a Twilight reference for yucks, but connecting this traveling clan of vampires to the seemingly mundane oldsters of the RV community in the U.S. feels like an original twist to me, and it works to a point, even if it does feel a tad corny. But again King should have spent more time on the concept, although maybe after his earlier connection to “American Vampire,” he didn’t want to milk the parallels to the American experience too obviously. And True Knot? True Blood? Maybe King thinks it's a tip of the hat, but to me it's just derivative and makes me wish he had canceled the vampire thing altogether in this novel. After all, The Shining didn't need no stinkin' vampires or whatever you want to call them. In fact, these True Knot vampires don’t feed on blood at all; instead, they feast on the life essence of their victims, something they call “steam,” and apparently it is released in a more potent form if their victim dies more excruciatingly. And thus the massacres and disasters they flock to. And there’s nothing the members of the True Knot enjoy better than feasting on a victim possessed of what Dick Hollarann taught young Danny is called the “shining,” and thus the paths of Daniel Torrance and his young protégé, Abra, are fated to cross paths with the True Knot RV caravan. It could have been, and it should have been, so much better. First of all, I wanted more Tony. I guess I can let that go. But what a lost opportunity… More importantly King doesn’t pull everything together very satisfactorily at the end, and the climax of the novel occurs in rather slapdash fashion. Danny needs to better come to terms with the pain of the past, the evil of the Overlook and even more so the even greater evil presented by his father Jack. King brings Danny back to the very spot of The Shining, but he doesn't do it justice here. If the final battle with the True Knot on the very spot where the Overlook burned down feels anti-climactic, then King's final treatment of the even more palpable evil presence of Danny’s father is even less satisfying. King dispenses with Jack Torrance in a tossed off mere couple of sentences that he really should have spent more time on. However, and perhaps in response to my own complaints about King not crafting the novel hard enough, one of the most interesting aspects of Doctor Sleep is its treatment of the power of Alcoholics Anonymous in the life of a recovering alcoholic. Stephen King isn’t the first to equate the need of the vampire (or whatever you want to call the members of the True Knot) with addiction, but that’s what he is doing here with their insatiable need for “steam” paralleling Daniel Torrance’s struggle with alcoholism. Maybe it’s a little preachy, a little over done, but in the same way that The Shining is a novel about alcoholism and its destructive effects of the family, Doctor Sleep is about the healing effects of Alcoholics Anonymous on the life of the damaged individual, from its twin epigraphs from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous to the final pages of the book when Dan Torrance speaks to his niece about the terrible problems with alcoholism running through their family tree. Interestingly, King creates subtle parallels and correspondences between the two groups in the novel, the travelers of the True Knot with their terrible need and the recovering members of AA who make up Dan Torrance’s support system. King establishes these parallels between AA and the True Knot early on, but they didn’t strike me until more than halfway through the book. Both groups are secretive societies with mentors guiding newer members; they both hold their own sorts of rituals at their meetings set off from the eyes of the larger public. Both groups have their own medallions and trophies, their hierarchies, their specialized language, their own mantras. I didn’t see what King was doing here until I hit the point where Abra tells Dan that the members of the True Knot have “funny names, like pirate names”: Barry the Chink, Rose the Hat, Jimmy Numbers, Silent Sarey, Snakebite Andi, Steamhead Steve, et al, and I started to think about how King paralleled that to the names of the people at the AA meetings: Doc, Fat Bob D., Yolanda V., JD, Danno, Big Casey. Here's where King shows his skills as a writer, and these parallels provide probably the most clever and interesting aspect of Doctor Sleep. It’s the kind of subtlety and thought that I would have liked to have seen throughout the entire book. But instead, the novel as a whole is flat; it suffers from loose ends, and for as skilled a person Stephen King is at cranking out words, too often those words sound exactly the same in the mouths of nearly all his characters. The voices of the members of the True Knot are indistinguishable from each other, as well as from the voices of the human characters; everyone, including young Danny, adult Daniel, young Abra, old Billy Freeman and, to an extent, even Dick Hallorann, sounds exactly alike, all flattened out in a slightly folksy manner. This is rushed writing, and it isn’t good writing. And I’d like to think with a little more time and effort, a little more attention paid to the words he puts on the page, Stephen King could have made Doctor Sleep more like its predecessor. For those legions of Stephen King fans out there, the novel will please. But for the more selective reader, fussy folks like me, it will leave you craving something more, something better. Maybe I’m a little too much like the True Knot myself, hungering for a better quality of steam than what King is able or willing to produce right now. But I just wish he had slowed things down and taken some time to let those ideas of his grow and then polished them into something more worthy of a sequel to The Shining. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 09, 2015
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Jun 16, 2015
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Sep 24, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 0747524823
| 9780747524823
| 0747524823
| 3.44
| 2,670
| 1996
| Mar 14, 1996
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it was amazing
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I pulled into Iowa City yesterday afternoon, not planning to be in Iowa at all when I had woken up that morning. But while I was mowing my front yard,
I pulled into Iowa City yesterday afternoon, not planning to be in Iowa at all when I had woken up that morning. But while I was mowing my front yard, my son came up to me and said his ride back to college had fallen through; there was something about a texted dispute with the girl driving him about how much gas money he would owe her, and he told me that he had told her to stick it... I suggested to him that he needed to work on his interpersonal communication skills, especially with women, but secretly I was not displeased because I was hoping to get back to Iowa City, even if it was in such an unexpected manner and for only a quick visit. So what does one do in Iowa City on an unexpected Saturday afternoon? Well, after a walk through the pedestrian mall and a gander at the vagrants, I headed over to a used book store, Murphy-Brookfield Books on Gilbert Street, and took a look, a rare pleasure for a guy like me who grew up in Iowa City with its used book shops (as well as Prairie Lights, one of the better bookstores in the world) and who finds himself sadly living now in a part of the world with barely any bookstores at all, and none of them used. And I enjoyed myself tremendously, browsing the tall shelves crammed with second hand books. I even enjoyed the cat there, and I'm not much of a cat person. And when I left, I had a couple of books in hand, one of which was an attractive copy of the British Bloomsbury edition of John Irving's memoir, The Imaginary Girlfriend, which I started reading later that evening and then finished in the middle of the night when the paper thin walls of the crappy Days Inn where I was staying failed to keep out the noise of the Coralville Strip and the voices from my neighbors' television. So what? you might ask, and I'd reply that sometimes a book's rating might be more than just in response to the words on the page; the rating could be based on an entire sequence of events, a process of sorts involving an infinite number of factors like a surprise visit to Iowa City and a cat in a bookstore and a photo on the book cover of a young John Irving in his wrestling gear, captain of the Exeter Academy wrestling team, staring into the camera without any sense of where his life would be taking him over the next fifty-some years. And so the five stars is partly based on all that, and it's based of course on my fondness for John Irving, who you'll see over to the right in my profile, listed as one of my favorite authors, and it's also based on how much of the book takes place in Iowa City (just about my most favorite place in the world) and how much of it focuses on wrestling and writing. And if you don't understand the relationship between Iowa City and wrestling and writing, then you probably don't get the attraction here because, more than anything, that is what this book is all about, Irving's lifelong relationship with wrestling and writing and about how those two pursuits have informed his life. When Irving first came to Iowa City as a student in the Writers Workshop, Dave McCuskey was coach of the Hawkeye wrestling team. Irving had wrestled for Pitt and not done particularly well there, but unlike most former wrestlers he wasn't content to just let that part of his life slide. Irving visited McCuskey's wrestling room on the top floor of the Fieldhouse and wrestled with the team now and then. Later, when Irving returned to Iowa City in the mid-70s as an instructor in the Workshop, he wrestled in the room with Kurdelmeier's squad and then with Dan Gable's team. In fact, there's a hilarious photo at the end of the book of Dan Gable throwing Irving to his back with a wicked foot sweep. And he kept wrestling, and reffing wrestling and coaching wrestling all the way through the first part of his writing career. One of the last chapters in the book is called "My Last Weigh-in," about the final tournament he wrestled after publication of The World According to Garp. And he also devotes a great deal of time talking about his two older sons' wrestling careers, and all of this adds up to the point where many of the reviewers of the book here on GoodReads have complained about "too much wrestling" in the pages of this memoir. Maybe these folks haven't been reading their Irving very closely, and maybe they just haven't read much about Irving up till now, but beyond Garp and Iowa Bob and all the other wrestling references in his novels, John Irving really loves wrestling. Maybe they just didn't know that about him. But if you aren't in it for the wrestling, and if you don't understand the way wrestling has helped create the man John Irving is today, then you don't want to read this book, and you certainly wouldn't give it five stars. Speaking of wrestling and Iowa City, in what might be considered a tremendous coincidence (a word that Irving uses several times in The Imaginary Girlfriend--and what sprawling nineteenth-century novel does not make use of the coincidence, and where would Irving [the closest writer we have to Charles Dickens today] be without ample use of the coincidence in his novels?), yesterday afternoon as I was walking in downtown Iowa City I passed Dan Gable right in front of the old Post Office by the little drive-in bank where my mother would often do her banking and where as a small boy I was constantly amazed by the little door that would pop out from the side of the wall when you pulled in for your transaction. There was Dan Gable and his wife and a group of what I could only imagine were his grandchildren on their way to some event in downtown Iowa City. Gable's old now and his hips are bad, but he's still the greatest wrestler in the world, and he's still a tremendous part of the fabric of Iowa City. As a lad I spent a lot of time in the Fieldhouse watching his teams wrestle, and I spent a lot of time in his wrestling room watching his practices before my wrestling club would use the room. Who knows, but maybe Irving was even there. Gable was relentless, and he would often stay after his practices were done, drilling alone in the room on the dummies, working on technique. Back then, even though he was long finished as a competitive wrestler on the mat, he could still beat everyone in that room, and watching him was a joy, so seeing him on the street yesterday was its own special kind of joy, as well. So that's all part of why this book gets five stars from me, even though I'm one of the few reviewers to give it five stars. And there's a lot more, but I'm sure you're tired of reading this. And I could easily understand why someone else without a keen interest in Iowa City or wrestling or the Writers Workshop might give it a one-star review. After all, the book is a bit of a toss-off, written while Irving was recuperating from shoulder surgery. It's rambling and discursive, while at the same time maddeningly brief and undeveloped (it's less than 150 small pages). Irving tosses out names without much background, and the reader is left wanting to know a whole lot more about the author than what he gives here. No doubt there is a larger, more developed autobiography coming one day from Irving, and no doubt there will be biographers both sleazy and academic who will unfold more of the mysteries of John Irving's life, but this small book isn't going to give a lot of insight to the fan who is looking for profound revelations into the life of the artist. As for me, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Here's something, though: on the "By the same author" page, the list of works ends with A Son of the Circus. And this might be another reason why I have taken so well to this small book published in 1996--it seems to me that despite the slapdash quality of the book, it's written at the peak of Irving's career, or at least at that part of his career that matters most to me as a reader. After A Son of the Circus, my appreciation of Irving's works begins to dwindle...maybe it's after Owen Meany. Even A Widow for a Year, which a lot of Irving fans seem to enjoy, fails to captivate me as well as those first seven or eight books, and what has followed Widow really hasn't impressed me too much. (I admit I haven't read the most recent book, but I'll get there soon enough.) Here's what Kurt Vonnegut told John Irving all these many years ago back in Iowa City: "You may be surprised...I think capitalism is going to treat you very well." And it has, oh yes it has. Just maybe, though, it's treated him too well, and what's left now in the second half of Irving's career is only a shadow of what he put into those first books. But The Imaginary Girlfriend has little to do with that second part of Irving's life. This is the Irving of Exeter Academy and the Writers Workshop, of New Hampshire and Iowa City, and it's the Irving who sits on my Favorite Authors list. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 17, 2013
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Aug 18, 2013
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Aug 17, 2013
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Hardcover
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| unknown
| 3.54
| 1,130
| 1750
| 2012
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liked it
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Unless you've studied Rousseau in college (and I didn't), you probably aren't prepared for what he has to say in his "Discourse on the Sciences and Ar
Unless you've studied Rousseau in college (and I didn't), you probably aren't prepared for what he has to say in his "Discourse on the Sciences and Arts." To put it mildly, good old Jean-Jacques probably wouldn't be a fan of GoodReads, and he definitely would look askance at the tremendous amount of time I've wasted this summer reading, thinking about my reading, and posting my thoughts on GoodReads. For a man thinking and writing at the height of the Enlightenment, Rousseau has little positive to say about either of these activities. I, on the other hand, not much interested in the ideology or morality expressed in religion, have labored for much of my life under the delusion that reading makes me a more thoughtful, more sensitive, more compassionate and ultimately a better person, enlightening my consciousness and freeing me from ignorance and bigotry, and by extension serving to make the world a better place as a whole. And I would expect that most of my friends on GoodReads would voice similar opinions. In general, the fine folks I've met on GoodReads find in literature a powerful force for expanding virtue and extending kindness and helping make our society a more just and equal place to live (well, if you discount all the mommy-porn out there...and, yeah, the creepy monster sex books, too, I guess). But here's what Rousseau has to say: The mind has its needs, just as the body does. The latter are the foundations of society; from the former emerge the pleasures of society. While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them. Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any. Ouch! So, according to Rousseau, for all the reading I've been doing this summer, I'm no better off than if I had stayed in bed all day. For Rousseau, all this so-called "enlightenment" is nothing more than a degradation in virtue as we strive to leave ignorance behind: There you see how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us. The thick veil with which she had covered all her operations seemed to provide a sufficient warning to us that we were not destined for vain researches. But have we known how to profit from any of her lessons? Have we neglected any with impunity? Peoples, know once and for all that nature wished to protect you from knowledge, just as a mother snatches away a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child, that all the secrets which she keeps hidden from you are so many evils she is defending you against, and that the difficulty you experience in educating yourselves is not the least of her benefits. Rousseau probably would equally disapprove of the amount of time I have wasted in bookstores (back when they existed in this fair land of ours) and libraries: When the Goths ravaged Greece, all the libraries were rescued from the flames only by the opinion spread by one of them that they should let their enemies have properties so suitable for turning them away from military exercise and for keeping them amused with sedentary and idle occupations. And remarkably, in his discourse he even comes out against the printing press: Considering the dreadful disorders which printing has already caused in Europe and judging the future by the progress which evil makes day by day, we can readily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to ban this terrible art from their states as they took to introduce it there. Rousseau looks back fondly to a time before mommy-porn and monsterotica: People had not yet invented the art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind. But thanks to typographic characters and the way we use them, the dangerous reveries of Hobbes and Spinoza will remain for ever. Go, you celebrated writings, which the ignorance and rustic nature of our fathers would have been incapable of, go down to our descendants with those even more dangerous writings which exude the corruption of morals in our century, and together carry into the centuries to come a faithful history of the progress and the advantages of our sciences and our arts. If they read you, you will not leave them in any perplexity about the question we are dealing with today. And unless they are more foolish than we are, they will lift their hands to heaven and will say in the bitterness of their hearts, "Almighty God, You who hold the minds of men in your hands, deliver us from the enlightenment and the fatal arts of our fathers, and give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods which can make our happiness and which are precious in Your sight." Whew...maybe you'd be tempted to think this is all quite ironic in a post-modern kind of funny way, but that's just because, like me, you're a happy slave luxuriating in your arrogant dissolution. Ah well, it makes me wonder how Rousseau managed to remain friends with Diderot (he of the Encyclopedia, which by definition is a mutant hybrid of the arts and sciences put into play by the terrible printing press for the purpose of systematically expanding knowledge), and what Rousseau would have to say about the hour I just wasted writing this review... ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Aug 08, 2013
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ebook
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| 9781841957173
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| 3.72
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| Oct 05, 2005
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liked it
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Margaret Atwood revisits familiar territory as she reworks the story of Odysseus's homecoming through the perspective of his wife Penelope, who here,
Margaret Atwood revisits familiar territory as she reworks the story of Odysseus's homecoming through the perspective of his wife Penelope, who here, courtesy of Atwood, is not merely the long-suffering portrait of wifely patience and perfection but who over his twenty-year absence has grown into a clever, cynical woman every bit the equal of her smarty-pants epic hero of a husband. It's "familiar territory" not only because so many other writers and artists and singers over the years have revisited the world of The Odyssey for their inspiration in their re-tellings and re-imaginings (Dorothy Parker, of all people, has a "Penelope" poem that is often anthologized, and is it just my imagination or do Mumford and Sons spend a lot of time singing about Odysseus and Penelope?), but Atwood herself has delved into the story of Odysseus more than once in her career, reworking Circe and the Sirens and even the Cyclops as ways of discussing ideas of gender and power in her poetry. In The Penelopiad, Penelope, dead for thousands of years, speaks to us in the present from the fields of asphodel, a flower she has grown mighty tired of over the millenia. She's aware of what a shifty liar her husband is, and she's also grown tired of how her persona as the perfect wife in Homer's "official version" has been wielded as a cudgel over the years to be used against so many other women: "And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn't they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners." This Penelope has her own story to tell, and if it's taken her this long to tell it, well that's because she's had to work herself up to it. She's not that fond of story telling, a "low art" she rather humorously calls it near the beginning of her tale, and an art her slippery husband is famous for. But, as she notes, she's famous herself for her patience, so waiting several thousand years to tell the story is not a problem for her, and she's ready now. But Penelope is not the only tale teller in The Penelopiad. Even more interesting is the Chorus that Atwood creates for her, a Chorus composed of the twelve disloyal maidservants forced by Odysseus to clean the great hall after he and Telemachus slaughter the suitors there, the maids who then he takes outside and hangs in a row with their feet dangling in the air. The twelve maids speak mostly in verse throughout The Penelopiad, offering some funny and some pointed commentary about how they have been treated, not only by Odysseus but also by history according to this same "official version" that Penelope is addressing. They start with a jump rope rhyme: we are the maids the ones you killed the ones you failed we danced in air our bare feet twitched it was not fair with every goddess, queen, and bitch from there to here you scratched your itch we did much less than what you did you judged us bad you had the spear you had the word at your command and from there go on to tell an idyll, sing a sea shanty (rhyming "saltiest seaman" with "where we would all like to be, man" and "Odysseus, that epical he-man"!), deliver an anthropological discourse on the overthrow of the matrilineal moon-cult by "usurping patriarchal father-god-worshipping barbarians," and even put Odysseus on trial in a sort of courtroom teledrama. But despite being found guilty Odysseus is rescued in yet another deus ex machina moment, something the judge never had to deal with on Law and Order. The maids are even better story tellers than Penelope, but their story has never been told before. (I read a review on GoodReads where someone said they skipped the maids' sections, which would be a horrible thing to do when reading The Penelopiad.) If you go back to the jump-rope song, Odysseus, as they said, not only has the spear, but he has the "word" at his command. What Atwood did thirty years earlier in "Siren Song" and what she does here again is to give that word to someone else besides Odysseus, someone who up till now has never had a chance to tell that story. (One brief note of explanation: I gave The Penelopiad three stars; it could just as easily been a five, but I just read it on the heels of two other Atwood novels I gave four stars to, and it's a lesser work, although it's a very different kind of book. But there are a lot of one-star ratings for The Penelopiad in GoodReads by people who don't seem to understand what they are reading. This is a re-imagining; it isn't Homer and it's not supposed to be. If you know Homer, and you don't have a stick up your butt, you'll find it wicked funny at times. And if you've enjoyed books like John Gardner's Grendel or John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, you will love The Penelopiad.) ...more |
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1
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Jul 2013
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Jul 02, 2013
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Jul 01, 2013
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Hardcover
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Petergiaquinta
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Dec 29, 2015
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Jun 26, 2018
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Oct 14, 2014
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Aug 07, 2014
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it was amazing
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it was amazing
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it was ok
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it was amazing
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Jul 02, 2013
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Jul 01, 2013
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