July 9th: James Joyce A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished re-reading: "The Metamorphosis"/"Die Verwandlung" by Franz Kafka
now reading: Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Kafka, Styron, and Joyce...someone might call these guys "writer's writers," if that weren't such a weird way to talk about creative people. (Not that it stops the critics. "She's a real songwriter's songwriter," you sometimes hear. We understand what it means, but it still seems like a phrase to use when you can think of no other words to describe the artist -- truly no other words, so you just use "artist" again.)

Today's Story: "Clay"
Author: James Joyce
My Rating: B

Reading this story, "Clay," puts me in mind of the eternal question I ask myself as a writer (well, one of them): do I want any and all readers to understand my work? Do I care if they don't get it? Does it matter if I refer to things that are clear and obvious now, or known to many people, but that in the future will be confusing, or baffle some folk?

In short, do I want to be one of those annoying pieces in the Norton Anthology where the footnotes take up more of the pages than the actual text? No, I do not. But will I be?  ???  Over time, the things which we find so familiar will be altered beyond recognition. And even now, I know some people have a hard time keeping up with my allusions, although I don't say that in a literary snobby way, just an "I-talk-a-lot-and-throw-in-a-lot-of-random-Clue-and-Designing-Women-references" way.

Then again, even a one-footnote story puts forth this eternal question, because were it not for the footnote in this particular case, and despite the story's title, I wouldn't have known that Maria had stuck her hand into the clay, nor known that choosing the clay is ominous. Is this an Irish thing? A 1915 thing? I have no idea. Never heard of it. Never heard of the Hallowe'en game they're playing, in fact. So maybe I'm just unimpressed because I'm confused, but James gets a deduction and the grade is a B. Not fair? (Who ever said I was a fair grader? It's my freakin' blog, after all.) Well, I hardly think that anyone coming to the defense of James Joyce's writing is going to try, "You're just ignorant; he doesn't make any obscure allusions" for the thrust of their argument.

Oh, James Joyce. Good writer, that boy. Are his short stories deceptively simple? Are his deft turns of phrase like Forster's, with more than meets the elegance-beholding eye? Is he as wise as Tolstoy about the human condition? (OK, no on that one, sorry.) Is he the Dante of his generation? The Da Vinci? The Bono?

In AP English my senior year of high school, we were all set to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We knew this was coming, because as I previously mentioned in my Kafka entry, my sister and several of my classmates' older siblings were two years ahead of us and the English department pretty much kept the biggies of the curriculum the same, at least not altering them in just a couple of years. Now, it wasn't to be our first time around the James Joyce block cul-de-sac, as we had studied "Araby" the year before, but anyway, the novel loomed. And then our teacher, who had taken over AP English that year from our sisters' teacher who departed in the wake of a messy life/divorce incident, discovered that we had not yet read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She was incredulous. At first she thought one student was saying he alone hadn't read it, like, he had blown it off sophomore year or whatever. No, we explained, to this teacher who had in previous years taught the "average" and remedial English classes and wasn't familiar with us, the accelerated/Advanced Placement crowd who'd gone through our four years of high school together, we didn't read that in sophomore year American Lit. None of us read it. We read The Scarlet Letter  and Moby Dick that year and assorted other things, but no Huckleberry Finn. She immediately scrapped Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and hauled out her set of Huckleberry Finn  classroom copies, which we AP seniors surely eyed with disdain, as they were normally handled by, you know, sophomores. And not even advanced  sophomores. Do I now look back on her decision approvingly? Do I agree with her that any self-respecting English student must study Huckleberry Finn in American Lit?  Yeah, sure. But we hated the very idea of being senior AP English students reading the same book as the average sophomores. What a delicious whirlwind of meta-pretentious thought, no? Joyce should be proud.

Before you can become an artist, you must rid yourself of all the baggage of your "influences." But what games did you play on All Hallows' Eve, James Joyce, that now haunt Maria and me? What twists of fate await us, blindfolded, when we try to reach for our destiny? And when the hell will I ever get around to reading Ulysses?

Trouble With the Karamazovs

now finished: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reading the same book for a month? Wishing I had more time to devote to it? Folding down pages and lamenting my lack of ability to read in the original language? Ahhh, must be time for another Big Russian Novel.

This one was destined to be anti-climactic. I've been meaning to read The Brothers Karamazov for SO long. I kept trying to persuade my Los Angeles book group peeps to read it (L.A.! That's so many cities ago!...although I need to go back there, by the way) when we had our The Books We Should Have Read in High School book group. That being said, they were probably right about not reading it at that time; I guarantee we would not have had a 100% successful finish rate. And, I no longer think of this as a Book We Should Have Read in High School whatsoever. College, maybe, though. In fact, college definitely. It's that kind of book. I probably would have loved it in college. I didn't really love it right now. I thought it was long-winded.

Now, recall that you are reading someone who absolutely loves her some long Russian novels. (And short Russian novels, but aren't there fewer of those?) Who read Anna Karenina (the whole thing! really!) in high school. Who considers reading War and Peace one of the top five greatest life experiences. Who has often pondered how Russia, much like the American South, does it -- how those two places crank out so freakin' much good literature, although they never make readers actually want to live there or anything.  Long is great. Long-winded is quite another thing. I'm not entirely sure that Dostoevsky edited this book at all.

It turns out that The Brothers Karamazov should be even longer; he was planning to write a three-part saga, but he died. This was his final novel. I kind of see him as this old man (even though he was only sixty-ish) with a life's great work behind him so everyone just lets him write and create and do whatever he wants in his art, without trying to stop/edit/finesse him to make it better. Kind of like Clint Eastwood does now. We don't really demand anything of Clint anymore; we just take what he gives us and continue to praise his genius. I think Dostoevsky was kind of rambly in the Brothers but no one cared. Why not? Just let it all wash over you. (No word on whether he kept an empty chair around to stimulate discussion.)

So, there are a few great things about the book. One, he has this crazy ridiculous insight into the human mind. So you can actually get through the book on that alone, marveling at the way these flawed characters are depicted and delighting in some of his pithy summaries of thought processes that are a bit like Kerouac's in the way they make you think, "Wow, he finally said what my brain has been trying to say for twenty years."

But then you kind of want the plot to go somewhere instead of reading five mystical pages about what place love and Christ and death have in our jacked-up world...

Eventually the plot goes places, of course. I frankly think the book got really good around page 500. (I am aware that this is FAR too much to ask of, oh, most readers.) And despite the fact that SO few people read this blog and even fewer are planning to ever read The Brothers Karamazov, I just can't offer up spoilers, which means I can't talk about huge, gigantic, major, point-of-it-all happenings like "whodunnit" and why.

I can say that Alyosha was annoying at first, but then I really got to like him, once I kind of understood him. Dmitri seems like a big jerk, but once you tap into his confusion you start to understand him a little better, too. Ivan is presented as all dark and dismal and atheist but I kind of liked him more in the first place than I did the others.

Another great thing about this book is that there are definitely great quotes. Like:

"...you, I, all of us are in a state of aberration, and there are ever so many examples of it: a man sits singing a song, suddenly something annoys him, he takes a pistol and shoots the first person he comes across, and no one blames him for it."   --p. 528, ISBN: 1-59308-045-X

He wrote that line in 1879, kids!

Speaking of the edition I read, I would really like it if the Barnes and Noble Classics edition hadn't told me a major plot point on the back cover. I mean, I guess everyone is just kind of expected to know what the book is about, but I am still of the belief that anything that happens after three hundred pages should not be on the back cover, period.

Basically, this book is really different from Crime and Punishment and Notes From Underground, my two previous Dostoevsky endeavors, both of which I loved. This book is more winding, more overtly philosophical about Big Questions (is there a god? what is family? what is love? death? society? justice? and so on), more pointless in some ways (Ilusha and Kolya Krassotkin....why? just, why?), and definitely more long-winded. Which, I already mentioned that.

However, I will say one thing: this book would be really hard to fake. The experience of it is quite different from its fame and all you hear about it in the world. I think one could fake The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick or Hamlet a lot more easily. The Brothers Karamazov is really famous, but what do we know about its details in the world? It's about a family. With brothers. It's big and Russian. It's full of ideas and peasants and society. 'Cause it's Russian. With brothers. This, my friends, barely scratches the surface. As much as I think Moby Dick is utterly wasted on high school and college students and has so much more to say to adults who are disillusioned with life in the workplace, I still think the famous ideas about The Whale match the book itself, more or less. Not so with this book. So that's my advice to you: if you are one of the millions who has not read this book, don't try to fake it to impress that potential date at the bar who adores it. You will be called out faster than you can say Smerdyakov.

"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab

now re-re-re-reading: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

You may recall that one of my new favorite hobbies is reading the 1-star and 5-star reviews on Goodreads. The non-extreme reviews on there just aren't as interesting. But the 1-star reviews of crap like Twilight or The Almost Moon? Endless entertainment! Yesterday, I checked in with some of the love and hate for The Whale, and I observed the following:

1. The five-star people need an editor. Seriously. Their reviews are, on the whole, looooooong. Just because the book you loved is long and rambly, your Goodreads review does not have to be. Trust me on this.

2. The one-star reviews for the most part were flawed! Seriously. I found a few where there was just a straight up difference of opinion, and I totally accept that. But many of them stated things that weren't quite right! For example, one person's review says: "you only read (and I'm not exagerating) like 50 pages of actual story, and the rest is biological documentation," but that is not true. The "biological documentation" of the whales comes and goes (and I think most of it is hilarious - but that's another point entirely), but that person is totally exaggerating, even though she cannot spell exaggerating.

I am now on page 538 of Moby and I am so delighted by Melville, and so sad I can't meet him and tell him he's awesome and hang out with him. Let me give you a real example of what Melville does, lest you be dissuaded by inaccurate reviews on Goodreads. In Chapter 17, "The Ramadan," when Melville-as-Ishmael waxes philosophical about religion? He says that rather than arguing with Queequeg one should let him be, because "Heaven have mercy on us all -- Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." So that's a digression that's too boring and philosophical for you, oh 1-star reviewer? Really?

Yeah, and all these digressions about whaling? That's another popular complaint - a lot of people even say they read the book "but skimmed through some of the whaling parts," which, ewww. Then you did not, my friend, read the book. But here's an example of a "whaling part," from chapter 94, in which Ishmael talks about the blubber-room, where the spade man stands barefoot on a sheet of blubber chopping it into portable pieces:

"This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistant's, would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men." - p. 458

Dude, Herman is funny! Moby Dick is a whimsical, profound work of genius. It occurs to me that in all my questioning of myself as to the genre of the Cuba book I have written/sort-of-almost finished, I should have long ago realized it's kind of like Moby Dick. All personal-voyage-quest-fiction-yet-fact-invented-character-narrator and stuff. I can only wish that my book will end up half as awesome. Wait, who am I kidding, an eighth as awesome. A hundredth.

You get my drift.

Read Moby Dick, people!

I also recommend it to people who liked Infinite Jest. I suspect a lot of Infinite Jest readers have already read Moby Dick -- I mean, you don't get to be an Infinite Jest reader by just succumbing to the endless 40% off crap the big retailers shove down your throat all the time -- but you know, for those others like me who maybe blew off Moby Dick once or twice three times in high school and college English (major) classes but still grew up to be real-live readers and thus ended up reading Infinite Jest first. Infinite Jesters will think nothing of the length of Moby so they won't be overwhelmed, plus they clearly are a lot who appreciate a digression or two. And they will be delighted to see how very Herman-like our boy DFW is. Was. Is?

Bonus, for law school-like peoples: there was a whole bit about a fast-fish or a loose-fish and to whom either belongs. It was totally all first-day-of-Property-ish when a fox, a duck, and a whale walk into a classroom...

It's going to be over soon. I can't believe I'm going to finish soon! It really has me in the mood to read more fabulous classic novels instead of going back to presidential bios.

Looming Questions

now reading: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

There's a lot going on with Moby Dick. Well, duh. But let's start with identities, shall we? The most famous three-word beginning ever, "Call me Ishmael," is both straightforward and deceptive. Call whom Ishmael? Call me Ishmael because that's your name, or call you Ishmael to assign a name to a construct of identity that will morph into an omniscient narrator while simultaneously rendering the account of a voyage through one man's reason even as he whimsically observes others' quests? Yeah, and that's just the first line. Oh, Melville.

I mean, our good buddy Herman (can I call you Herman? It's not as if anyone else does, ever. Maybe there's a reason for that? Maybe you wish you were named Ishmael?) also constructs other identities for himself/the narrator, like the "late consumptive usher to a grammar school" and the "sub-sub-librarian" who provide the Etymology and Extracts that actually come before that famous "first" line. Those are worth reading, by the way. Herman's sense of humor comes through, plus you learn about languages and get more ideas of things to add to your ever-growing list of literature to read. Or wait, maybe that's just me.

So anyway, Manhattan? I had totally forgotten about the book starting in the "insular city of the Manhattoes" with everyone gazing to the water. The last time I perused these pages I had not yet lived Manhattoes-adjacent. How can one not love taking the plunge into this novel, with our wandering narrator who's like, "Man, you know, every once in a while I just got to GO to the sea! I'm off!" Love this man. Also how he doesn't actually want too much responsibility in his job.

"For my part I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not." -p. 5

By the way, I am reading the Penguin Classics ISBN: 014-039084-7 but even if you don't own the book at all it is available online. (Although, shame on you if you have stopped buying real books and only read digital. Shame, shame.)

And, just a refresher for those who didn't get the memo, why am I reading Moby Dick? Well, you see I have "read" Moby Dick before. I have "read" it three times in fact, once in high school (hi, Ms. Freeland!), and twice in English major classes in college. And I blew it off all three times. I SUCK. So in a concerted effort to suck less, I decided to re-read/read it, and had pretty much settled on it being my Big, Classic Book of 2010. Then this past New Year's Eve, for whatever reason, someone said something I now can't recall about the whale hating Ahab. I immediately started debating this with Brian, and then via text message to several others: that's not quite right, is it? I mean, the whale doesn't hate Ahab. Right? It's Ahab who's a crazy f***er. The whale just wants to go about being his bad-ass whale self. I decided then and there to get on the Moby Dick stick ASAP, which worked out to be mid-March. And despite some minor blogging delays, here we go!

Join us!