Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Column in the LA Times by David Ulin. Title: The Lost Art of Reading.

The predicament: Ulin was a voracious reader but today finds that he’s having trouble reading books.

These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

Question.

Is he reading the wrong books?

I find that I have trouble when I try a book because I think I’m supposed to read it. Example: piece of literary fiction that’s been lauded by people whose tolerance for literary affectation is greater than mine. Got stacks of that sort of book in my unread pile.

OTOH I couldn’t put down Helprin’s Freddy & Fredericka when I read it a few weeks ago: the engagement was effortless, it was swimming downstream. And he’s definitely a writer’s writer, so it’s not like I gravitate toward pot boilers.

With some quarter of a million print titles published annually in the US now, books themselves have become their own fragmented cacophony. We need to be selective. We need to know when to give up on a book and move on.

Second question: might there be something else at work besides the encroachment of the new media bogeyman?

Unrest is unrest. A feeling that there’s something out there that you’re missing might be a clue that there is something out there that you’re missing — something that might have nothing to do with books and reading.

I’m reminded of the folk tale about the in fool is searching for his key under a street light. The punchline is that he didn’t lose the key near the light; he lost it somewhere else.

Sometimes we have to look for things in places that aren’t so easy or obvious . . .

Interesting piece, in the New Yorker, about Rose, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I read and re-read all the Little House in the Prairie books as a kid — the love story that culminates the series is one of the sweetest ever written — and still recall the little jolt I felt when I got a little older and realized they are autobiographical.

Click & read for a glimpse at the untold bits of the story . . .

I need to update my sidebar. I’ve finished 2 more Waugh novels. Handful of Dust first. Freaked me out because I’d read Scoop and HoD is no comedy. It’s a flippin horror novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just hated seeing the only decent character in the book come to such an unthinkable end. (Nice to have the background from his grandson’s memoir under my belt before reading btw — pretty obvious that Evelyn was processing the breakup of his first marriage, not to mention the rather monstrous way his father treated him.)

Next: Decline & Fall. Comic novel. Loved it.

Conclusion after HoD & D&F: the man was a masterful craftsman. The books are absolutely flawless IMO. The structure, pacing, character development, the weight he gives various aspects of the narrative — I didn’t notice a single wrong note. Haven’t been that impressed by a piece of fiction in a looong time. And all the more impressive considering D&F was his first novel.

Another not-original-observation — Evelyn considered becoming a cabinetmaker originally, and the books have a very constructed feel to them. You do feel like you’re experiencing something 3-dimensional, with drawers that you open and find something important inside, and depth & weight, and just the right touch of artful decoration here & there. Like the glimpse of an inside joke or a throwaway line about a minor character that makes the hair on your neck stand up, it’s so well done.

Reading Vile Bodies now. Enjoying it. Still in the first half. His first wife left him while he was writing it; I understand you can tell, the book changes midway through, where he stopped writing and then later picked it up again . . .

So I finished reading Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age by D.J. Taylor (part of an Evelyn Waugh thing I’ve taken on — g*d I’m such a lit nerd! lol). Some similarities between that generation & the trailing edge boomers — those of us who were too young to serve in Viet Nam (like the English kids who were too young to serve in WWI) but hit our late teens/early 20s in the direct shadow of those who did.

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

How I wish this were required reading for everybody in this country: Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, compares recent government “policy” to the near-parody programs Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged:

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why people can’t grasp how badly our politicians are running the government right now.

It’s just COMMON SENSE.

I know that there are good, thoughtful people out there who hope the Democrats can rescue this country from the mess we’re in. But government isn’t the answer. You can’t force people, through legislation, to not be stupid and greedy. They’re going to be stupid and greedy no matter what, and when you pass a law to restrict one behavior, they’ll just express their greed & stupidity some other way.

This is an existential issue, folks. You can’t legislate what goes on in peoples’ souls.

Meanwhile, that growing pile of increasingly byzantine laws encumbers EVERYONE. You end up with lunacy. You end up with things like a tax code that’s so complicated people can’t fill out their income tax forms without professional help. As one example of many.

That’s why the minimalist approach of our Constitution is such a beautiful thing.

Probably the best article I’ve read so far on what was going on, in the last few years, on Wall Street is this one: a piece in Conde Nast Portfolio by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker.) The article does a great job of describing just what greed & stupidity looked like among the guys who engineered our current fiscal disaster.

But we don’t make it better by putting our politicians in charge — because they are every bit as greedy, and if anything more stupid, than the Wall Streeters.

They don’t have our best interest at heart — and we don’t have the resources to keep them honest. We just don’t. We’re looking after our homes, and our families, and our jobs.

There’s only one way out. We have to take our medicine and put our economy back on sound fiscal footing again. Even if it means we go through a period of economic upheaval, and uncertainty, and even hardship for a few years. We can handle it. We can come together at a community level and take care of each other.

That’s the only way out of this mess.

Common sense.

Having watched West Side Story a few weeks ago, I came down with a severe relapse of the Shakespeare bug and so last night sat down and re-read Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to see how closely the movie followed the play.

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 . . .

Let the American quality, the dream
Of a land where men shall work their destiny
Deeply as they will, give you the power
To realize with proud and reverent heart
The strange identity of man as man
And fling it up against the dark of time
Where it may loom forever as the bright
Image of godhead in the simple man
That now has risen from this American earth
And shall but with the bitter end of things
Go back again into the humble earth . . .

– Paul Engle, America Remembers

Via a comment on Ann Althouse’s blog, I skipped over today to this review in the London Times of an essay titled Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus (“How to discuss books that one hasn’t read”), which was written by one Pierre Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. And also (writes the reviewer, Adrian Tahourdin) a “practising psychoanalyst.” How beautifully French.

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

At some point in fifth grade, I noticed the blackboard in Mrs. Marshman’s math class was blurry. I mentioned it to my parents, and within a few weeks had been fitted with my first pair of glasses.

I didn’t submit to the experience wholeheartedly, by any means. Most troubling was the sense that I was now damaged in some way. Poor eyesight is a mild disability for sure, generally more a nuisance than a crippler. Still, the finality of it weighed on me. It also complicated things. My eyeglass lenses were constantly in need of cleaning, the frames would get knocked about and no longer fit, and then, of course, came puberty, and to my other insecurities came the added burden of a reputation for braini-slash-nerdiness — of which my glasses were an obvious sign.

The body is always in a state of flux, of course, and once pointed in the direction of poor vision dutifully explores that trajectory; the silver lining was that as my eyesight worsened I swapped the hornrims for gold wire rims, and later contact lenses. Not quite so homely.

But I still hated them.

Then, in the late 1980s, I learned about William Bates, an early 20th Century physician who had made the astonishing claim that poor eyesight is learned — and can be unlearned.

I read his book, tossed my contacts aside, and began muddling about the world without my visual crutch.

I was encouraged at first. With my eyes freed to function more naturally, my vision improved quite a bit right away; my right eye (the “weaker” of the two) went from 20/180 to 20/80 or so.

But 20/20 vision eluded me. I could induce it for short periods — I’ve passed vision tests, twice, for my driver’s license — but much of the time my world was still blurry. I didn’t put my glasses back on. But sometimes I wondered if the received wisdom wasn’t correct, after all. It seemed that perhaps poor eyesight is inescapable, a curse bestowed by our genes or the modern necessity of being tethered to close-up work, reading, computers.

Now I know differently.

The clues I needed were in another book, Relearning to See, by Thomas Quackenbush. I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my discovery, but the upshot is that I needed to relax and stop trying to see. By trying to see, I was distorting either the shape or the alignment of my eyeballs. When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, the world around clears.

This isn’t a purely physical change. On the contrary, Candace Pert is right on when she says the body is the subconscious mind. Granted, straining to see has a measurable effect on the physical body (this image

is one Quackenbush reprinted from Bates’ Perfect Sight Without Glasses; the woman had perfect vision at the time the leftmost photo was taken. In the middle photo she has myopia — see how her eyes look different? And on the right, she’s furrowing her brow as she tries to see) — but it is first and foremost a condition of being. Put another way: my vision began to blur when I was a child not because my eyes were failing but because as I transitioned from early childhood into social awareness — when I began valuing how others viewed me — a kind of habitual anxiety that defined my relationship to myself hardened into fact. Little wonder the world around me went dim.

When I relax, breath, and stop trying to see, I feel something that affects more than my eyes. It’s like sinking back into a comfortable chair, a state of being in which I am letting go instead of struggling. The clarity of my vision is ancillary: a function of a different vantage point rather than a different way to hold the muscles of my eyes.

Quackenbush touches on this as well in his book, writing:

The individual with blurred vision is interfering with the normal, relaxed way of using the mind and body.

Plenty has been said about the way we modern folk are so stressed; how we react to non-physical stimuli with the same fight/flight response our forebears depended upon to escape saber toothed tigers. But how many of us realize that this response literally distorts our experience? It’s a perversion of our ability to think abstractly: we wrap ourselves in a kind of continual low-grade nightmare, little realizing that our anxiety defines what we can touch and know.

“Cultivate a habit of relaxation.” It’s the first New Year’s resolution on my list, because I’ve begun to understand that everything else flows from it . . .

Technorati Tags: eyesight, myopia, natural vision

“HarperCollins announced the firing, ‘effective immediately,’ in a two-sentence news release that was issued about 7 p.m. Eastern time.”

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