Here are mine :-)

A Classic

Portrait of a Lady. One of the great things about my Kindle is that there are so many free classics. This book, considered by some to be Henry James’ masterpiece, is definitely “slow hand lit.” James takes his time; the book’s pleasures are subtle ones meant to be lingered over, not swallowed in chunks. Definitely worth reading if you’re inclined to literary fare.

An Indie

As an indie author myself, I’m meeting other indies on a daily basis. There’s no way I could read all of the new books I’m finding out about as a result, but I am trying to at least sample and if something grabs me, read on. The Movie by Bosley Gravel is one that did. Said it before and will say it again, Bos is a writer to watch.

Where have you been all my life

This one sort of falls into the indie author category as well. Julie Harris is a midlister who has started bringing titles out as ebooks. I read An Absence of Angels and really enjoyed it. It’s historical fiction, great story telling, memorable characters.

And one print book

My dad lent me this one. Gregory Orr spent part of his childhood in Germantown, New York, where my father also grew up. The Blessing is his memoir. It opens on the day that Orr accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, but this is not a maudlin book. It’s a beautifully realized meditation on pain, grace, and art.

The Blessing is a memoir about a tragic family that opens on begins at the bottom: on the first day of deer hunting season in 1959, Orr accidentally shot and killed his little brother.

Today Orr is a poet, so no surprise: The Blessing is not only beautifully written, but also richly felt — Orr has lived a life examined and as dreadful as it has been, at times, he’s somehow found a way to bear it.

Highly recommend.

Read more Friday Finds here.

Bordewich quotes from the book that in the first year after its release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

sold 310,000 copies in the United States, triple the number of its nearest rivals.

It would eventually sell a million copies in Great Britain alone.

The book “opened the way for a widespread acceptance in the North of antislavery arguments that had long been ignored or dismissed.”

It helped pave the way for Lincoln’s efforts to “convert countless apathetic Yankees into men willing to fight for the emancipation of slaves.”

I read the book many many years ago, as a pre-teen — it was one of the novels I found as I worked my way through my hometown’s little library. Even then I recognized it was not only dated but propaganda; I recognized that the writing was in service of a Cause rather than an esthetic.

But what a cause, and what an accomplishment for a writer to almost single-handedly turn an entire country away from its acceptance of slavery . . .

kept Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” with the Bible in his cookpot hat. Arriving at a house on one of his walkabouts, he would greet the inhabitants: “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” The answer didn’t matter—he was already reaching for the cookpot. Chapman’s “religious intensity,” not his apple planting, was “the driving force of his life,” Mr. Means says.

 

Guess what else. The apples that grew from his trees weren’t the big luscious bake-into-a-pie sort you find in the supermarket today.

Nope. They were little sour things — that people grew to make hard cider.

LOL

Here’s how it would work.

A writer with a published e-novel would submit a review copy to me.

The writer would agree to review two other books. The review would have to be published on one of the three big ebook distribution sites: Amazon, B&N, or Smashwords.

As soon as the writer completes those two promised reviews,  his/her novel would go into a queue for review by two other writers in the club.

Everyone who joins would get two reviews for his/her book.

Here’s why I think this would a good tool for writers:

1. Nobody would know who reviewed his/her book. Benefit: club members would never feel hesitant to give an honest review, out of fear that someone might take offense and “reciprocate.”
2. I would do a preliminary screen of books before admitting writers. Benefit: no terribly amateurish, “ready for prime time” books would be added to the queue; club members wouldn’t have to read books (hopefully!) that absolutely deserve single stars.
3. I’d set some basic standards for the reviews. Benefit: the review of your book would reflect the thoughts of someone who had obviously taken the time to read it. It would not be a one-liner! ;-)

So what do you think?

Ideas? Suggestions? Please drop a note in the comments. Thanks!

Found I needed a dictionary beside me while I was reading, too — a kick in & of itself — not often I encounter a writer whose vocabulary is such a mismatch to mine.

Tatterdamalion — congeries — badinage — louche — farouche.

There were others but I misplaced the third index card I used to record them.

I plan to drop them in future posts though. I hear a vast vocabulary boosts SEO. ha ha ha ha ha

In the prologue to his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Ellis shares several anecdotes about people who, upon learning that he was writing the book, volunteered their input into how he should approach his subject.

If you’ve spent any time at all on political blogs, you’ll recognize some of the characters. One in particular jumped out at me. He forwarded to Ellis three (!!!) copies of a no-doubt-self-published book titled Revolution Song, which professes to offer a Jeffersonian-based alternative to communist ideology. It reminded me of the well-meaning folks who post misattributed Jefferson quotes on online forums; in a kind of a naive Internet primitivism, they hold the man up as a one-dimensional small-government/individual-freedom demigod. Despite the fact that he held slaves and advocated, rather cavalierly, periodic returns to bloody revolution (“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” How’s that for a pretty Jefferson quote?)

T. Jefferson was, in reality, a complex man, to put it lightly. His positions on issues were often muddy, the product of personality more than ideological purity, and sometimes downright contradictory. Ellis makes this all amply clear in the book.

And so Ellis has little patience, understandably, with people who try to appropriate Jefferson in service of overly simplistic political ideologies. He dismisses Revolution Song, for instance, as “propagandistic,” with a “hyperventilating tone . . . reminiscent of those full-page newspaper ads in which Asian gurus or self-proclaimed prophets lay out their twelve-step programs to avert the looming apocalypse.”

I should break here to note that Ellis is a wonderful and engaging writer. My copy of American Sphinx came to me courtesy of my dad (thanks, Dad!); he went on an Ellis jag a year or two ago, kindly passed the books along to me when he’d finished them, and I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read so far. They are truly lovely, and for the most part I trust Ellis’ perception of his subject matter. He’s steeped himself for decades in Revolutionary-era scholarship, and it shows; he moves deftly, brushstroke by brushstroke, detail to context back to detail again; you feel history wash over you as you read.

And yet. Wonderful as he is as a historian and a writer, Ellis strikes me as out of touch, in some respects, with contemporary political thought. He states bluntly, for example, that Jefferson’s ideology from a policy perspective has no relevance today. “After the New Deal,” he writes (tellingly, in a sentence that is uncharacteristically awkward)

no serious scholar any longer believed that the Jeffersonian belief in a minimalist federal government was relevant in an urban, industrialized American society.

Ah. I see. And the quote unquote libertarians out there who do believe in minimalist federal government don’t count, of course, because they, presumably, aren’t “serious scholars.”

Ellis has every right, of course, to place a high value on formal scholarship. It beats t.v. history any day of the week. But Ellis overreaches when he dismisses Jefferson’s relevance to current political affairs. You can see it here, in the paragraph just prior to the one from which I pulled the above sentence:

The main story line of American history . . . cast Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the lead roles of a dramatic contest between the forces of democracy (or liberalism) and the forces of aristocracy (or conservatism). While this formulation had the suspiciously melodramatic odor of a political soap opera, it also had the advantage of reducing the bedeviling complexities of American history to a comprehensible scheme: It was the people against the elites, the West against the East, agrarians against industrialists, Democrats against Republicans.

Ellis’ definition of “liberalism” and “conservatism” are 19th century definitions, not 21st century definitions.

Today, it’s the elites who advocate large government.

Our academics are overwhelmingly Democratic, for example, as are our journalists: two sectors which dominate mainstream intellectual thought and discourse — surely one measure of elite status.

Our politicians — elites by virtue of wielding political power — overwhelmingly support increasing government (the Republicans as well as the Democrats). They know how to butter their bread, after all: by delivering goodies, one at a time, to specific constituencies in exchange for blocs of votes. You can’t play that game and shrink government at the same time.

And business — elites via $$ — take advantage of increasingly centralized political power to align itself with it. They support the Dems, therefore, when the wind’s blowing that way: in 2008, 55 percent of political donations from businesses went to the Democratic party, for instance. So you can no longer argue that business sides with democracy over aristocracy. On the contrary. It supports the party that would see Caroline Kennedy appointed to a NY Senate seat, while one of its own, billionaire Paychex founder Thomas Golisano, managed but a measly 14 percent of the state vote when he last ran for governor.

These are the facts of today’s political landscape, and so while Ellis’ neat Democrat v. Republican line-up may have made sense 150 years ago, today those words mean something entirely different.

Those of us who do not believe that minimalist federal government is “irrelevant” are, in fact, politically marginalized. The GOP once paid lip service to reducing the size of government, but they are liars for the most part and nobody believes them any more. As the bailout debacle in Washington makes perfectly clear, both parties are perfectly happy expanding both the size and scope of government.

Jefferson, on the other hand, shrank it.

Of course, the task was immeasurably simpler when he assumed the Presidency in 1801. There were but 130 federal employees in Washington. Federal government revenues (raised “mostly from customs duties and the sale of public lands”) totaled only $9 million annually.

Yet in Jefferson’s eyes, the beast was already too large and too intrusive. He hated the national debt, and commissioned his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, to formulate a plan to retire it over a 16-year period. He took a dim view of taxes as well. He wrote that no American should never see a “tax-gatherer,” and in his first speech to Congress as President, in 1801, advocated abolishing ALL “internal taxes.”

Can you imagine? No taxes. An America with NO taxes.

So yeah, Jefferson deserves to be held up as an ideal by small government advocates. What politician today would dare to suggest such a thing?

American Sphinx was first published in 1998. Two years later, Ellis made news when it emerged that he’s a liar himself. He had claimed in a number of venues (including press interviews) that he’d served in Viet Nam as a paratrooper, and had been active in the civil rights and peach movement activist. The claims were fabrications. When asked to explain them, he told the AP that he’d done it because of his dysfunctional family and alcoholic father.

For me, this scandal doesn’t necessarily detract from the pleasure of reading Ellis’ books. But it does suggest a curious parallel between Ellis and his subject. Jefferson railed against the national debt, for instance, but was in his personal life a profligate spender who never lived within his means; he was consequently bankrupt at the time of his death. His words “all men are created equal” are so much a part of the American mind that people who can’t even name Obama’s vice presidental candidate could no doubt recite them. Yet Jefferson not only held slaves himself, he refused to tackle the problem of slavery as a politician, preferring to bequeath the issue to future generations — who consequently fed his tree of liberty with the blood of some 620,000 Americans between 1861 and 1865. Nice work, TJ.

Ellis ascribes Jefferson’s tendency to self-contradiction to his character, as suggested by the book’s subtitle. For instance, Ellis writes that Jefferson’s duplicity on slavery was “more self-deception than calculated hypocrisy.”

Then Ellis gets truly weird, writing it was “the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart.”

Come again?

One wonders of whom Ellis was really writing, when he penned that sentence. Himself, perhaps?

And so we look with fresh eyes at Ellis’ statements equating liberalism to “the people” and conservatism to “elites.” Ellis, himself an elite, dismisses the advocacy of minimalist government as “irrelevant;” in so doing, he sweeps aside the policy preferences of “the people,” if by “the people” you mean folks who are by definition not elites, because they don’t have connections in high places, they aren’t represented by Congressional caucuses or national get-out-the-vote organizations: small business owners, the middle class — people who don’t hold advanced degrees, who aren’t held in esteem by the press, who have no friends in Washington because they don’t have the money, pooled or individually, to buy them.

I’m an optimist by nature, so I won’t give up on the notion of minimalist government. But things do look pretty grim. We’re gathering momentum by the hour toward what Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan, writing on Friday’s WSJ op-end page, called “a tipping point for democratic capitalism:”

The last several months are a foreshadowing of a new era of government activism, rather than an unfortunate but necessary (and anomalous) emergency action. We will soon shift from a market-based economy to a political one in which the government picks winners and losers and extends its reach and power in unprecedented ways.

Mmmm. That’s exactly what is worrying us — we, “the people” — a.k.a. the adults in the room.

So. Joe. Loved the book. But advocacy of small government isn’t irrelevant. It’s just politically inconvenient. And elites like you who want to brush it aside are guilty of abetting those in power — those who hope Americans have forgotten their roots and will continue to trade their hard-won income for big government promises of everlasting existential peace.

He was a hypocrite, yes, but on the subject of the size of government, Jefferson’s public persona got it right.

Answer: yep, very closely. I’m sure this has all been written out before, so I won’t turn this post into an OMG!!! sophomorish comparative lit paper (at least not on that topic, heh) but suffice to say that about the only major differences were in the whole fake-my-death-in-a-doomed-ploy-to-be-reunited-with-my-lover device.

If you’re a lit nerd like me, it is kind of fun to enjoy the two side by side — to see how famous dialogue like “a rose by any other name” is handled in the musical. Try it, and do enjoy ;-)

Another thing struck me as I mulled the play, however.

This has probably been remarked before too but I’m going to work it out for myself anyway.

I published a post some time ago about how, in rereading Anna Karenina as a nominally-mature adult, I found it to be a different book than I once thought. It isn’t a starry-eyed celebration of doomed love — it’s a condemnation of weak character. Anna’s a deeply flawed individual, not a one-dimensional victim of social repression.

I had a similar reaction last night to Romeo & Juliet. The first tip-off was something I’d completely forgotten: that when we first meet Romeo, he’s a complete mess over another woman, fair Rosaline.

Huh?

The man has, apparently, been pining away for some time because Rosie doesn’t love him back — spending every night wandering around outdoors, weeping & sighing, and then shutting himself inside all day with the curtains drawn to make himself “an artificial night.”

Then, after spending an entire day insisting that he’ll never get over her, he meets Juliet — and within about a nanosecond is as smitten for her as he ever was for Rose.

I found that odd. What sort of true-hearted hero is this, Bill? Whose heart can veer so suddenly and violently (and unselfconsciously!) from one love to another?

Of course Shakespeare renders the love between Romeo and Juliet a beautiful thing. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Clearly he means to hold it up as a romantic ideal of sorts.

But there’s another critical layer to the story that I noticed after a bit: the consequences of the lovers’ extraordinary passion are every bit as destructive as the passionate “choler” that erupts whenever lesser members of the Montague and Capulet families run into each other in the street.

It seems to me Shakespeare creates an obvious parallel between the two. Romeo and Juliet never try to temper their passion with anything like common sense, let alone reason. They marry the day after they meet, for crying out loud — and in Act III Scene 3, after Romeo is banished from Verona by the prince for murdering Tybalt, it’s only the Friar’s scolding that stops Romeo from killing himself:

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art –
Thy tears are wom’nish, thy wild acts denote
Th’ unreasonable fury of a beat.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both,
Thou hast amaz’d me.

Get ahold of yourself, you ninny. The Prince has spared your life. You can bide your time and be reunited with Juliet by and by. It ain’t the end of the world.

Romeo calms down, but of course it’s only a prelude to yet another slew of rash acts that culminates with the final bloodbath.

It’s a marvelous thing, then, the way Shakespeare handles the first murder in the play. Do you remember it? There’s a street brawl, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio. But what’s interesting is that Tybalt does so by using Romeo’s body to hide from Mercutio the fatal thrust of his rapier.

Romeo he cries aloud,
‘Hold friends! Friends, part!; and swifter than his tongue
His agile arm beats down their fatal points
And ‘twixt them rushes; underneath show arm
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life
Of stout Mercutio . . .

This layer isn’t brought out in the same way in West Side Story. WWS is played, first of all, as a straight “star-crossed lovers” story — Tony has matured, he’s not hanging out on the streets any more, he’s got a job — but then he’s drawn back into the gangs’ fighting by his love for Maria, becoming a victim of the violent subculture he’d tried to leave behind.

And, in keeping with that trajectory, the circumstances of the first murder are subtly different: Tony holds Riff back from stabbing Bernardo, and Bernardo takes advantage of that to stab Riff.

It’s a subtle difference but a telling one. Tony is playing pacifist, physically restraining Riff. Romeo is also trying to break up a fight, but he functions as an unwitting screen behind from which comes the deadly thrust.

“Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks Romeo before he dies. “I was hurt under your arm.”

Romeo’s read of the situation was naive –just as was Tony’s — and on the level of pure plot, that’s why the story turns tragic.

But in the Shakespeare, Romeo’s arm cloaks Tybalt’s — they become in that moment the same arm. So it isn’t just the street brawlers who are in the words of the Prince (Reason and Justice) “enemies to peace” . . .

Incidentally, if your library lacks a collected works of Shakespeare, I highly recommend you look for the marvelous but sadly out-of-print edition, The Yale Shakespeare

The beauty of it: it’s broken into 40 slim volumes. Here’s my Romeo and Juliet.

It’s 4X7 inches — light enough to hold open with one hand.

I have no idea if it’s considered up-to-par today from a scholarly perspective (my edition was published in 1954; the original came out in 1917) but it’s annotated to help with the more archaic bits.

And from an ease-of-use standpoint, it’s pure genius. When publishers shove Shakespeare’s complete works into a single volume, you end up with a book that is hugely unwieldy (and with paper that is thin as tissue to try to keep the weight down). Who wants to lug a 20 pound doorstopper around when all you want to do is read R&J while you’re parked in the dentist’s waiting room?

The Yale Shakespeare is kind of pricey (link above to Amazon has a couple sellers offering the complete set for $75 as of right now) but it’s well worth it, in my opinion.

Would be nice to see a re-issue. Wonder if it could be done for under $75 . . .

Bayard’s droll conceit includes a description of the four categories into which he places books:

“LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten).

Tahourdin next recounts that Joyce’s Ulysses falls into the category LE.

[Bayard] claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

I suppose we should delight in his honesty.

I also wonder . . . hmmmm . . . what do his students think?

I’m afraid I can’t relate. Having attended a modest state college, I’m reasonable certain that my lit professors had actually taken the trouble to read the books to which they had the habit of making “frequent and unflinching references.” An alarming lack of pretension, I agree. But I forgive them.

Another thought also occurs to me. What does it say about a literary novel when People Who Read Serious Books can sum it up in a single sentence — sum it up as an idea — without even having to read it — and then discuss it, as that idea, amongst themselves?

Where are its roots?

Michael Blowhard wrote this, a couple of days ago, in a post about mystery writer Elizabeth George:

When you pull an artform out of the earth it grows from, even if you do so with the best or the loftiest of intentions, it’s likely to whither and then die.

I’m not sure we can accuse Joyce of yanking literature out of the earth — I think he was just marchin’ to the beat of his own drunken Irish drummer — but in the end he didn’t need to even if he’d wanted — he has the Bayards of the world to do it for him . . .

Technorati Tags: James Joyce, writing, books, literature

(besides working of course! my day job has been pumping writing assignments to me like an out-of-control gadget in an I Love Lucy bit)

is reading.

One book I’ve just about finished now is Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, and a couple nights ago got to the chapter covering the period where Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus. One of the themes Ackroyd explores is Shakespeare’s use of contemporary political events in his drama; in Coriolanus, there are parallels between the events of the play and the 1607 Midland uprising by English peasants against the landed gentry. Shakespeare displays an empathy with his characters; for instance, he portrays his rioting Roman citizens as motivated by imminent starvation. Nonetheless, notes Ackroyd, Shakespeare didn’t take a political position in the play. Instead, he “displaced and reordered” the events of his own day “in an immense act of creative endeavor.”

Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to ‘take sides’ when the characters are doing it for you.

To take this a step further, consider Norman Holmes Pearson and W.H. Auden’s introduction to Viking’s The Portable Romantic Poets, in which they write:

Consciousness cannot divide its données into the true and the false, the good and the evil; it can only measure them along a scale of intensity.

Exactly. And so we have in Shakespeare that he seeks the intensity of consciousness rather than, say, ethical illumination; this explains also why “art” in the service of some sort of Message is invariably off-putting, like a note struck not quite in tune; even though we may nod in approval our jaw has tightened slightly; we are burdened by such “art” rather than released.

As it happens, I’ve also just finished another book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, which the bookjacket promised to be “rollicking” and “a brilliant new comedy of manners.” The book, if you haven’t heard, is set against the backdrop of 9/11 and its aftermath; the plot is the bitter interplay between a man and wife who are divorcing. It was a 2006 National Book Award Finalist and got press when it was published for having incorporated 9/11, and for the opening hook: both protags believe for a short time that the other had perished that morning, and hate each other so much they both hope it to be true. And so you have the frisson of public horror mixed with private triumph, raising the possibility that the book will somehow conflate or even alchemize public and private worlds, public and private reactions. It’s a book, IOW, that suggests we will find some sort of Meaning, if only of the sardonic sort.

And so I read, hunting. Here’s a bit of what I found: a reference so passing as to almost seem inserted (as if the actual event occurred as Kalfus was drafting the book; it didn’t, it actually happened before 9/11, although in the book, whether by error or literary license, it’s said to have happened in 2002) to a suicide bombing of a pizzeria in Tel Aviv. Marshall is reminded of the bombing when he’s walking in Manhattan and is startled, post-stress-syndrome-traumatically, by the sound of a “heavy steel grille being slammed shut on the back of a truck parked in a loading zone;” he goes on to reflect:

This was a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness, and divorce. Sense was not made, this was jihad: the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made just.

So Marshall’s personal world is allegorically connected to international events. Nod, nod.

Earlier in the book Joyce, the wife, again in a scene that felt to me patched-in, is said to be “intently” following the invasion of Afghanistan — so much so that she memorizes the country’s geography, the better to follow the military campaign’s every move. She’s also “drawn to the Afghan people, for their beauty and primitive dignity, even if that dignity seemed contradicted by their brutality, untrustworthiness, and venality” and asks

Would American wealth and the expediencies of its foreign policy corrupt the Afghan people? Or were we being corrupted by their demands for cash, their infidelities, and their contempt for democratic ideals?

Meanwhile her life hadn’t changed. She was still not divorced and she had lost hope of ever being divorced; or, more precisely, her marriage was a contest governed by one of Zeno’s paradoxes, in which divorce was approached in half steps and never reached. After the long post-9/11 interregnum, Joyce and Marshall had resumed meeting with the lawyers, who themselves seemed wearied by their disputes despite the cornucopia of billable hours.

You can almost hear the study questions forming in the background. How does the Afghan invasion shed light on Joyce’s behavior toward her husband? Her attitude toward her divorce? How she views herself within her marriage?

And of course there’s also the possibility that we’re intended, as well, to find Kalfus himself peeking through, a kind of parallel world outside the book where he is wink wink nudge nudge “taking sides.” More study questions.

What we don’t find, however, is intensity. There’s the Jerry Springeresque viciousness of Marshall and Joyce’s mutual hatred, but that’s not intensity, that’s spectacle. Certainly neither Marshall nor Joyce “take sides” in contemporaneous political questions, unless moral ambivalence itself counts today as side-taking.

We’re left with mere Meaning.

It’s enough to make one wonder if that’s the most to which a literary writer, writing in America today, can dare aspire.

Technorati Tags: book review