Onward

now finished: March by Geraldine Brooks 

up next: something written by a woman because I am reading only books written by women in 2022 

Well, damn me if there isn't trouble and forgiveness all around, and within, us. 

That is my takeaway from my gal Geraldine's book here. Including that this mirrors my very reading of it. At first (say, 70 to 80 pages in), I was put off, uncomfortable, thoroughly not into her taking this silent side character and imagining him whole, totally disturbed by Mr. March's objectifying of women, of Black women, of people enslaved. I went so far as to not like the book at first. My, how the pages changed me. Because, you will see when you read it, Brooks has done something quite intense in depicting our awfulness without shying away from it, while also solidly reinforcing my very favorite themes: 

1. Is redemption possible? 

2. Life is a mess, an absolute total mess.  

3. You will absolutely fck things up. You will. And you must go on, keep stumbling forward, and try to do better the next day. 

(This is the part where I once again cite my favorite MILD SPOILER line from the fantastic film In Bruges SPOILER: "Well, save the next little boy!" I mean, sometimes it's all we can do.) 

I am very specifically not going to spoiler March at all, and I hope that you will read it. If you have already read it, feel free to talk to me privately, or talk without spoilers in the comments here, because I would love to know your thoughts. 

I am simply going to say that I changed in the course of reading this book from being so powerfully uncomfortable with it existing to realizing the talent and raw power of what Geraldine Brooks has done. And do I now want to read every damn word she has ever written? I do. Do I now regret shelving her and stacking her and mindlessly touching her books over the years without getting around to reading them? I do. 

It was inevitable that I would read this one sooner rather than later because hello, Pulitzer. But now I want them all. And I also love reading about her, and ahout how she wrote this book, and about her Bronson Alcott research, and her Australian, worldy, and UnitedStatesian-ness, and her marriage with Tony Horwitz, and how he brought her in some literal and figurative ways to see so much Civil War history. 

This book is vivid, and hard to bear.   (Do I really need to say it? LIKE LIFE.) 

And the insight she has about war with her foreign correspondent experience is next level, combined as it is with her artistic and emotional genius. 

Little Women has always, always been about so much more than it might initially seem, and I do think many people realize that, which is good. Despite my resistance to taking it, that something-more aspect, and all the layers of Louisa May Alcott and Concord, are part of why this book March works, too. 

Stunned, I immediately wanted upon closing this book to go walk around some Civil War battleground and feel the ghosts. And guess what, turns out that living in Georgia as I randomly do now, I can do just that. But it gets better: where I am in Decatur, in DeKalb County, I just learned, the majority of residents voted in January 1861 to NOT secede, unlike neighboring Atlanta/Fulton County. And during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate troops attacked General MacPherson's Union troops near the Decatur Courthouse (walking distance from my house), driving them back down the North Decatur Road (my intersection). 

I mean... as Amy (Ray, Indigo Girls) sings, "...before I realized / everywhere I stand..." 

Amy Ray being from Decatur and having taken those names Jonas and Ezekiel from tombstones she saw one day in a slave cemetery... 

My godz but we are all so fortunate to get to live and learn and feel pain and grow and read and write about it. 

Interpersonal relationships (as other Indigo Girl Emily Saliers would say) are so hard. 

Geraldine Brooks has scarred me. She's wondrous. 

Christ Nailed

now finished: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
now reading: My Life by Bill Clinton
up next: The Wife by Alafair Burke

I've just finished reading Wise Blood, and I am here to say -- what a weird little book. Of course, for Flannery O'Connor that's a pretty tame comment. We emerge from so much of her writing with comments more along the lines of "Damn, that was dark!" or maybe "That was so fucked up!" so, you know, "weird" is no big, really. Then again, please don't get me wrong - there is twisted shit a-plenty in this novel, and I don't believe I'm spoilering you as a Flannery O'Connor reader by saying please don't expect a happy ending. But somehow this one, despite its showcase of the usual gothic depravity that is humanity, didn't leave me reeling as some of her others have.

And that, I think, is because I was so amused and delighted by her central character's invented not-religion, the Church Without Christ. Early-ish in the novel, Haze, who in Wise Blood is what passes for our protagonist, declares, "I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything" (p. 72 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631) and I perked right up. It reminds me of one of my favorite Pretty Woman lines I'm forever quoting at people: "I can do anything I want; I'm not lost."

A bit later, this man -- who, like everyone else in the novel, is pretty much a lost wreck -- begins "preaching" his Church Without Christ. Basically in response to someone on the street one day who mentions the Church of Christ, Haze invents his Church Without Christ and says, "I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redepmption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar." (p. 101 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Good stuff, right? I mean - this book is hilarious. Even though it's also Flannery-dark-and-twisted. Now, O'Connor herself was Catholic, right? To the end? I've finished this book but am still unsure of exactly what she is trying to say about religion herein. Or about people. Or wisdom or blood. The plot, such as it is, mostly involves a few characters running into and from one another in a weird little small town as they try to figure out something, anything about their weird little days, and there's all kinds of grotesque imagery, animals-in-cages symbolism, notions of freedom, automobiles, whorehouses...a real nice range of human fuckery. But it's peppered throughout with Haze's "sermons" and it's therefore kind of fun.

There is also a great (terrible) argument with an even-more-pathetic-and-stupid-than-Haze (if that's possible) (and it is) character, named Onnie Jay, who tells Haze, "It don't make any difference how many Christs you add to the name if you don't add none to the meaning, friend." See what she does there? This clown actually thinks Haze is trying to preach Christ because, I'm telling you, he's reeeeallllly dumb, but O'Connor manages that jab at religious hypocrisy nicely. Onnie Jay goes on to say, "You ought to listen to me because I'm not just an amateur. I'm an artist-type. If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet. You got good idears but what you need is an artist-type to work with you." (p. 157 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Ha ha ha ha ha. That last sentence there in those exact words might be the very advice I'd give to, well, the whole world, if I were a consultant to the world. (And really, am I not, though, a consultant to the world? Just a decidedly unpaid one.)

Now in this book Flannery has touched me with not just the darkness, the worst zoo ever, an exploited gorilla, the religion, and this little artist-type bit, but she outdoes herself with one more passage that became my favorite with how nicely it sums up my religious worldview, like, really and truly.

I'll get to that in a second, but let me remind you that this is not to say I 100% agree with Haze. His nihilist Church Without Christ (it still makes me smile every time I type it) is actually antithetical to me in some ways, such as when he delivers this sermon: "I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth...No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!"  I dig his blasting of religion and all there is to unpack in O'Connor's literature, but I definitely DON'T believe in "no truth." There absolutely are absolute truths. I just think they're not being taught by religions, on the whole.

However, he moves from this directly into some of what I DO think, starting with his very next sentence:

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. 

"Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backward into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was a Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

"Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?" he cried. "Show me where because I don't see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?"   (pp. 165-166 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

That, my friends, is some excellent preaching. In the past, when I have tried my ablest to get people to explain to me how Christianity works, perhaps I should have just hurled that question at them, demanding to be shown where in your time and body Jesus has redeemed you. Show me, people. Show me damn where.

And just for some icing on this cake of Wise Blood, there's a (fucked up, obviously) character who swears, and boy does he swear excellently. He has introduced me to two new excellent swears, in fact: "Jesus on the cross!" and "Christ nailed."  I shall endeavor to incorporate them into my vocabulary at the earliest opportunity.

The Reivers

Well, if one is going to return to one's literary supplement blog after far too long away, The Reivers is certainly a good choice with which to do it.

Y'all, Faulkner is one of those writers that we've all heard of and many have even dabbled in (by literature teacher force) or come to have ideas about. But how many among ye have actually read a bunch of his stuff? Lots of people get turned off early, like in high school. I did, but not by slogging through As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury -- no, I was horrified by the experience I had reading a mere (as if anything is "mere" with Faulkner) short story, "Barn Burning." I hated it. I hated it in an intense, passionate, irrational way. I can't really remember now, decades later, why I hated it so, so, so very much, but I loathed it. I'm pretty sure I hated the characters and I know I hated the outcome. So I did what any self-respecting, literature-loving 16-year-old would do: I took a stapler, sat down with my AP English textbook, and stapled shut the pages containing that story, starting with the page before and ending with the page after, a series of staples advancing like a row of ants around the edges of the pages, so as to prevent myself from ever  accidentally letting the book fall open to that horrid story and making me see it ever again.

I then spent my next several years -- in which I was, mind you, an English major with an emphasis in American literature-- complaining about Faulkner and telling anyone who would listen how much I hated his writing (and occasionally throwing in the "Barn Burning" stapling story for good measure). Of course, I had also read "A Rose For Emily" in high school and didn't hate it nearly as much, but I conveniently overlooked that.

Fast forward a decade or so from high school, and by my mid-to-late 20s I had become obsessed with the Pulitzer prizes and decided to embark on my project of reading all the Pulitzer-winning fiction. This came with a realization that I would be reading not one but two novels by Faulkner, although I didn't do those right away, of course. (In fact, I'm still in the midst of that project, because I mix projects together and read other stuff in between, instead of just blazing through one project at a time, which is very not-Charles-Emerson-Winchester-the-III-like of me.)  Not to mention Faulkner's appearances on other lists of greats with which I concern myself, such as the Modern Library's Top 100 and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. But before I got to any of that, during the summer of 2014, a summer in which Brian and I had many a day at his family's Lake Michigan vacation home (that I am Southwesternly unable to refer to as a "c*ttage" as they all do), I spent some time reading The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Yes, all of them. One of them was by Faulkner.  "That Evening Sun Go Down" (published in slightly different form sometimes as "That Evening Sun") was a good story. A really good, well-written story. And there I was, a thirtysomething, forced to sit on a porch one summer, in the midst of being back from Asia and kind of sort of settling down in the U.S. again, in a day-of-Americana-reckoning, realizing that my high school self really might have not had that good of a reason to hate "Barn Burning," ya know? Not that I can particularly remember that much about it...

Well, now here we are, with me having finally rectified this major gap in my literary life, having finally got around to reading a full Faulkner novel, and it is The Reivers. Yes, this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by our boy William Faulkner. His other Pulitzer winner? A Fable. What't that you say? You've never heard of these novels of his? You figured he must have won the Pulitzer for As I Lay Dying, or The Sound and the Fury? Or at least Absalom, Absalom!  Fun fact: No novels with exclamation points in the title have won the Pulitzer, although Swamplandia!  was a finalist for the year 2012, when no award was given. Well, Faulkner may have won the Nobel Prize after writing those famous novels (those of you who've been with me a while will undoubtedly recall that you don't win the Nobel for a book; you win it for a body of work), but his Pulitzers came later, for A Fable and then for his last book, The Reivers.

And yes, I had to look up what on Earth a "reiver" is. Turns out it's an old word for "robber" used in the Scottish borderlands -- at least that's what I read -- and brought to the U.S. by people from there. An interesting choice of Faulkner's definitely, for the title.

I hate describing/spoilering plots, but the "robbery" in this book is more of a free-wheeling escapist weekend journey that ends up being a coming of age experience. It's definitely not about, like, career burglars or street thugs, but rather people who get swept up in an opportunity and plunge themselves into a feverish few days of learning and growing, from mistakes and other things that come along.

What this book does incredibly well is take you into long, winding sentences without letting you get so lost that you can't find your way out of the paragraph; it also gives the reader a vivid sense of place and the characters inhabiting the places rendered.

What it did for me, more importantly, is get me fired up to read more Faulkner novels. He has a beautiful command of sentence structure (long and involved though that structure may be), life journeys, introspection disguised as regular-ol'-folks-livin'-life, and the striking interpersonal turmoil of life. He makes you want to crawl inside the book and hang out with these people, even though no part of you would rationally want to, say, have Everbe's job, or Boon's...or necessarily live in rural early twentieth century Mississippi...

What I also loved about The Reivers: his social commentary, particularly about the way cars and the automobile society we've embraced have erased some very real things. Nature, for one thing, in the form of wild, untouched spaces; those are basically gone. Also, some part of our human selves has been forever altered. The car/train/horse/walking layers of symbolism that pile upon themselves in this story could take years of literary analysis to fully sort out.

One thing I must point out, though: I've seen multiple reviews/commentaries where people describe the book as "funny" or "one of his funniest novels" or "a comic masterpiece," Um, hello? Do these people also work for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association slating Golden Globe nominees into categories? To me, The Reivers was anything but a comedy. It was a coming-of-age tale and a slice of life. Sure, there was wit -- there were clever and sly bits slipped in all sorts of places in this book. It was real and endearing. A "comic masterpiece" though? Did we get what Faulkner was showing here at all?

If you've read The Reivers, what do you think -- comic masterpiece or no?

July 31st: William Faulkner A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Missing Justice by Alafair Burke

Wheeee!  Made it to the 31st of July, my Month of Short Stories. And for the last day? That sweet southern nemesis o' mine.

Today's Story: "That Evening Sun Go Down"
Author: William Faulkner
My Rating: A

A-minus? A? Did I round up to try to make up for being so mean to William Faulkner over the years?

I did not enjoy reading William Faulkner when I was a teenager. In high school, I famously hated his "Barn Burning" so much that I stapled it together in my AP English text so that my book would never accidentally fall open to those pages. "A Rose for Emily" didn't quite rub me the wrong way, but "Barn Burning" just eclipsed everything about him for me. Why did I hate it so much? Who knows? I can barely even remember it now, but I generally loved English class, and I hated that story. All through my English major college years, I continued to badmouth Faulkner at every opportunity and I studiously avoided reading his novels, even The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, which I now feel like everyone but me has read. I haven't even read his two (two!) Pulitzer winners yet. But I will. Once I decided to read all the Pulitzer-winning fiction and sample every Nobel author, I knew I was doubly doomed and would have to dip back into the Mississippi maestro's writing. Someday.

Anyway. It's not like I thought I'd get through a month of short stories without some Faulkner. How could I possibly dream that The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike of all people, wouldn't present me with some Faulkner? And so today, the last day of July, the end of my short-story-a-day project, here we are, with "That Evening Sun Go Down." At least that's what this book calls it. Apparently it's also known as "That Evening Sun." Does it really matter, since the sun is not around much in this story? Darkness is everywhere.

And for those keeping score: we're up to 1931 now, and still authors are freely using the n-word. To be fair to my southern man here, he also uses "Negro", while "n*****" is basically used in dialogue, spoken by white and black people, and it's absolutely part of the point of the story, with Nancy saying she is "just a n--" as she has been taken advantage of by white men and basically violently and horribly dealt with by all the men, white and black, although our narrator's father does try to help, to a certain extent. But Nancy knows her doom is coming.

Sharp dialogue? Vividly rendered setting? Action that incorporates flashbacks while propelling the story forward? Realism? Spooky commentary on humanity? It's all here. How do you not give Faulkner an 'A'?

What, seriously, did I hate so much about "Barn Burning"? Should I go back and read it to find out, or will it put me off of him all over again, when I really need to be checking his novels off of my life things to read list?

Anyway, we now wrap up July, and my Month of Short Stories and Their Authors has come to an end.
Later, we shall have a post-month reflection and examine the results!

July 24th: Jean Toomer A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Zola and His Time by Matthew Josephson

and 10 años con Mafalda by Quino

now listening:
To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

This was a rough one. 

Today's Story: "Blood-Burning Moon"

Author: Jean Toomer

My Rating: C+

Where to begin? It gets the + instead of just a 'C' for being about such a haunting subject, and describing it realistically and painfully, and making you disgusted that you live in this world that behaves that way, and so on. But it really is a C story, in a few different ways. 

Now, author Jean Toomer is an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and this work has literary merit and all that. But you know what? The writing is just straight up not that good. We are in eager-creative-writing-student territory here. Example: The second paragraph of the story begins, "Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folk's kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in the fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees." 

About the only thing interesting there is "winds," plural, not "the wind." The rest of it is as if the creative writing teacher said to put a character in nature and describe the scene. It's like an imagery exercise, with a nice frat-boy touch. It's also far from the only sentence in the story like this. The title, after all, is "Blood-Burning Moon" and we get lots and lots of talk about the moon, the full moon, the full moon which is an omen, the full moon which is an omen hanging in the sky above the plantation, sorry, former plantation. For god's sake, there is treachery and evil about! Does it have to be so dully written? 

Jean Toomer, the author, whose work I don't think I've ever read before today, apparently "passed for white" sometimes during his life and married a white woman. This background informs (perhaps) "Blood-Burning Moon," in which Louisa likes/is liked by both the white Bob Stone and the black Tom Burwell. Come to find out, Bob Stone is an asshole and has a temper, and Tom Burwell has brute force strength and a slightly more righteous temper.  Think this is going to end well? 

OK, so it's fine, average, whatever, doesn't really do it for me, wish it did more. Here's a serious thing to consider: the use of Black English vernacular in dialogue. Necessary? Improves the story? Lessens the story? Should be written (only?) by African-American authors? Makes the characters more/less sympathetic? Creates the mood? Affects the theme? etc. So many questions. (By the way, this story, published in 1923, frequently uses the "n-word." You have been warned.) Here's a question I do want answered, though: What's up with "gwine"? 

This isn't the first time I've come across "gwine" or "agwine" -- it always has bugged me. I just don't hear it right, I guess. Example from this story: "What y'think he's agwine t'do t' Bob Stone?" 

Everything else I can "hear" as I'm reading it:  "Yassur he sho' is..." and "An' here I is, but that ain't ahelpin' none..." and "Cut him jes like I cut..."  I hear those words, because I've actually heard such speech. I have never in all the regions in which I've lived and traveled heard someone pronounce the word "gwine" or "agwine" in talking about what they will do. Who says this? Where is it pronounced this way? What have I missed? 

Also, Toomer writes the voices of all these southern characters, not just the black characters. For example, white Tom Stone says, "Fight like a man Tom Burwell an' I'll lick y'." Does that mean that Toomer is or is not making literary use of Black English vernacular? Discuss. 

I'll be over here falling asleep while you students work on your compositions about this story. 

(But "agwine"? Seriously?? I just don't get it.)