Why it is OK brain cells die--from Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine

I hope you enjoyed that passage as much as I did on my commute this morning. The third of Nicholson Baker's books I've read, this one traces a man's trip up an escalator in 134 pages. I'm only at Chapter 3, but nothing has happened yet. Rather it's a discursive exploration of consciousness that's I hope lives up to The Anthologist.

And next time you're hungover, just say to yourself, "No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato to North America." (See point b)

The Anthologist, a Plummy Read

I can't remember the last time I wrote about a novel, but then again I can't remember that last time I picked up such a good novel. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker is a simple story told in a great voice that is incredibly appealing.

Told from the point of view of Paul Chowder, a sometime poet writing an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry, the story unfolds into one of intimate, blind self-destruction. Paul narrates his lawnmowing, his girlfriend leaving him, cleaning up the office, and about the difficulty of writing the introduction. He is overwhelmed by the task and can't write the introduction. Even when his girlfriend leaves him because of it, he can't write the introduction. Yet in the process the reader hears him narrate about English poetry: about rhyme schemes and past poets and why it all matters. This becomes maddening because it's the very stuff of an introduction.

It's both about the history of poetry and the creative process; It has a great narrative voice; Of course I loved it in the first five pages. I love poetry, and this might be as close as fiction as meta-poetry comes. The author (lucky me!) has a backlist, so I think I know what I'll be reading after Lolita. Next time you're searching about for a good read, check it out.

Books That Make You Dumb

A chart rating intelligence by reading preference based on actual, scientific evidence. Or at least a correlation between university SAT scores and favorite books listed on Facebook. Virgil Griffith has put together fun data sets for both books and music. Click on the image for a bigger, easier to read version.

Note: Deciding to read to Lolita after looking at this chart has not been proven to make you more intelligent. Sorry.

Proust and Time

Swann's Way is the first volume of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), and I found it easy to dip into the lives of the boy Marcel and the dilettante Charles Swann for my first foray into Proust.

Where is the first volume going? Somewhere along the life of a little boy and a Mr. Swann, but apparently that will be wherever life takes them and not where plot demands. To enjoy this novel one must allow a companionable closeness with the protagonist, and if you do, you'll find yourself as torn up as he is over the refusal of a mother or lover, and as overjoyed to see his beloved. How closely you can identify with a character when you know the minutest details of his thoughts!

Describing the charm of Proust's writing is difficult because his virtues are old-fashioned and rare. He doesn't skimp words. He is circuitous and his relates much more than is necessary for any plot; his writing is the opposite of what we are taught. His flow lacks the modernity of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, and yet has an expansive, naturally drifting quality that revolves around an intense personal consciousness. Unlike Joyce, reading Proust is the most easy, natural thing to dip into, but he requires patience. The longer read, the better sense you gain of the cumulative meanings that lend poignancy to his writing.

"the memory of a particular image is but the regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years"

Proust might be writing fiction, but it reminds me of Fernando Pessoa's autobiographical The Book of Disquiet. À la recherche du temps perdu is to a great point autobiographical (I think that is what allows him to write it so well.) Proust names the protagonist Marcel, his own name, and his title suggests that he is trying to write his life back. What a lovely thing, to be able to write a fictional account of one's own life. How much closer one might get to the heart of the matter, as Proust does.

Book Review: A Quiet Adjustment

A cursory glance at the jacket copy makes clear why I picked this book up: it's a fictional account of Lord Byron's wife, and thus Byron. Byron's work is delightful, he was a fascinating person, and I'm a tad enamoured. I love Byron no less after this imaginative and vivid account of his cruel humor and selfish megalomania, not to mention his more depraved side, but I don't recommend anybody actually read A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (Fathers and Daughters, Imposture).

Is Byron's character pure imagination on Markovits' part? Hardly. He embellishes the facts but not the characters of the ill matched pair of Annabella Millbanke and Lord Byron. Prudish, self-righteous, and dignified Anabella had no idea what she was getting into when she ended up marrying tempestuous, willful, and perverse Lord Byron. Their marriage seems like an accident on both their parts, as Annabella felt little love and Byron less. Byron's antics from shattering bottles on the ceiling during her confinement to carrying on an affair with his sister in front of her eyes are horrid. Markovits tackles Annabella's inept reaction to his behavior that put off divorce for too long, and then refused to name the most terrible ground for divorce. (What that unnamed reason was remains a mystery, rumored to be incest or sodomy.)

Would I recommend this novel to those who couldn't give 2 figs about Byron? Absolutely not; it's dull. The monotony of A Quiet Adjustment, with its accomplished character development and good sense of setting, stems from the plot and not the author. Of course, I happened to know the ending, but the more basic failure is that its plot follows that of the real Annabella's life. Life does not often form the arc of suspense and conclusion that a satisfactory plot requires.

Unless you happen to be Lord Byron, and then you continue to live, love and write the rollicking Don Juan until your death fighting for Greek Independence. Byron makes a much better story than a person, and no doubt Annabella was a better person than she makes as a story. Markovits choose an angle for his story that is more of a straight line, which is shame because as a writer he seems capable of more.

Bottom line: read Byron instead.

Book Club: Extreme Decisions

The Good: I'm starting a book club! It's called, creatively enough, Contemporary Fiction Club (CFC to those in the know). At least for now anyhow...

The Bad: I'm floundering in impossible choices. A good book club is a lot of pressure!

What books should my fledgling book club read? My co-founder and I think focusing on contemporary fiction would be fun. But then, I've picked up some poor fiction choices lately. The book should obviously be well-written and discussion-worthy. Hopefully it will lure people of all kinds into thinking CFC is the best book club ever. I feel like this is an impossible decision, and important because I want everyone to come back. Any thoughts?

And then there's the additional worry of how to handle the meetings. Should I have questions? Let people just talk?

All suggestions welcome. Also please note, despite the above pathetic ramblings, I'm actually hosting a lovely brilliant book club full of intelligent and fascinating discussion, so it would be the highlight of your literary life to come to our first meeting--Feb 2!

Connections: VanGogh and Nietzche; Too Much in the Sun

Both died mad at the end of the 20th Century, and their incipient fame and death in their prime only suggested how much more of which they were capable. But the similarities between philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) and painter Van Gogh (1853-1890) are more than the biographic (e.g. syphilis) or zeitgeist-related. I imagines the same anguished ethos formed the works of both, but I could be imagining things. Their style, however, is palpably similar in different mediums. According to Nietzsche, all philosophers had to be artists in order to completely express their thoughts.

Reaper. 1889.

Deceptively joyous, their works make one feel as if the creator has stared at the sun too long without seeing the fingerprint of god on it. They take radical ways to express a view of the world that is intense and yet accessible on the surface. Influential as they have been, they remain isolated iconoclasts in their paeans.

Their works are accessible only in their apparent joyousness. Van Gogh is repeated on shirts and posters because people find his work pleasant. Nietzsche becomes the easy catch phrase for the undergrad searching for a strident, carefree tone. This view confuses the bright veneer of a conclusion with the strenuous wrestling that went into its making. Within Nietzsche words lies the horror that is in the root of the oldest fairy tales, and Van Gogh paints as one who must paint the flatness of life in the purest pigments and thickest layers because the world enters his consciousness with the cunning of the light that finds the hungover man and makes him wince. Such heightened feeling is not always pleasant, even when it has been transformed into the aesthetic object.

"There are endless corn fields under dull skies, and I've not shied away from portraying this sadness and utter loneliness..."- Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Cypresses

Painted around Saint-Remy in early June 1889

Merely the madness of artists on view? Perhaps, in that these men used their art to express a worldview that Conrado de Quiros, a writer for the Phillipean Enquirer, puts it well by saying, “That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it."

It is a mistake to view these two artists as unrelated raving lunatics. I would venture rather that they are raving artists depict the intensity of life head on and struggle in their valuation thereof. If their similarities do not depict the same temperament exactly, they do the same view of a world as one to reckoned with, in all its glory. A glory that became overwhelming.

Swashbuckling Swill and a Song

A swashbuckling adventure story with a limp and noodly protagonist whose unintentional irony and understatement form the greatest (and yet not so great) part of the tale.

All the Tea in China proceeds with action over character development, but even the action is envenerating. Little drives the plot forward except the feeling our dear protagonist has gotten himself into quite a muddle. And so he muddles forward. To lack suspense as it does, it needs to be more humorous (the 17^th century dialogue was forced rather than funny).

That said, you could give it to the 13-year-old boy of your Christmas list, assuming he's already had the pleasure of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (which I remember being quite scary) and is permitted a few X-rated scenes.

This novel, besides being mildly historical, is hardly a typical choice of mine. The inside flap tricked me; it gave the the author Kyril Bonfiglioli kudos as a "groundbreaking satarist" in this "maritime romp." So for that reason, and because the title reminded me of a song by The Magnetic Fields, I picked it up.

Clearly if I know the expression "all the tea in China," I should also know "don't judge a book by its cover" by now. For your listening pleasure, here is the better of the two, still with an ironic twinge but with a bit more heart:

Greater women in Kate Christensen’s The Great Man

Terrible title, but I picked it up because there was a paint brush on the cover. I didn't know about Kate Christensen's other novels or that this one had won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Instead of the light trash I imagined, I'm in the midst of the lives of some intriguing women as they sort themselves out as the great (dead) man's biographers stir up their static lives. On knowing this, the title becomes amusing, especially because the book is about the not-so-great, great man's many women.

The dead artist, Oscar Feldman, binds his wife Abigail, his sister Maxine, and his mistress Teddy together, and not always in ways they enjoy. These very different and complex women are complex and passionate. Oh, they happen to be old. That's by no means a focus of the story, but I find it interesting to see old women as active characters. The fact the Oscar was a selfish womanizer who got everything he wanted makes their stories a bit more poignant.


The male biographers who come to interview these women think of Oscar as a great painter, a great man. As the women see it, Oscar was a good painter rather than a great man, and a closely guarded secret bears them out. The Great Man theory, according to Wikipedia, is a theory that aims to explain history by the impact of "Great men", or heroes; that is, highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or Machiavellianism, used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. Examples would be Stalin or Napoleon, my image left, or Oscar Feldman. Except the novel snips away at the Great Man theory with curt comment after snide remark. A purely feminist approach to this novel would be limiting, but it is satisfying to see the women come into their own in the wake of Oscar's death. It certainly beats cats and knitting.

Christensen captures the competitiveness of the art world and its strikingly different personalities with tongue-in-cheek humor. The character Maxine provides a stringent perspective on all art (besides her own), like

the dinner party where she criticizes the artist across the table and her dealer in a sweep of faux pauxs. Oscar's paintings get ripped apart women by women to the starry-eyed biographers dismay. A question of authenticity arises about some important paintings, and the art world buzz is so strong the book hums a bit in the reader's hands.

Vibrant women and art transforms this book on the great man into a delightful dialogue that would be a home Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Chicago, who created the art installtion of a triangular table with 39 places for iconic women, stated that its purpose was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record." Appropriately enough, The Great Man is the story of women writing themselves into history.

I'm 2/3rds of the way through, which is the perfect time to review a book: I can't give away the ending, but I know quite well what I think. The characters are delightful, and the plot well-constructed. I got more swept up in it than I expected, despite having reservations about the writing itself. Obviously it's well-written enough to convey characters that are sweeping me along, yet the language itself is predictable and non-distinct. Don't let my nit-picks or this sketchy plot outline dissuade you though; Christensen is onto something quite delightful.

Of Russians: Returning to Babel's Verve

My Russian kick (first Chekhov, then Vladimir Sorokin) has led me back to Isaac Babel, and the rogue is finally starting to get interesting. As I mentioned in a previous post, I ambitiously took out Babel's collected short stories from the library, then found one story might have been enough for me. On a second perusal, I find his lively verve thrilling and terseness masterful.

Babel's folksy tales are rollicking in a way Sorokin's The Queue was not. (To The Queue's credit, it ended with a hilarious dialogue of sex sounds.) Babel writes the Jewish experience in Odessa in the 1920s and 30s, so he isn't dealing with Communism as Sorokin is. Yet he critiques society in a way that suggests he must poke fun at life because he must somehow bear the status quo. These Russians attempt humor through criticism, or criticism through humor, but I'm not sure to what effect, as I haven't laughed out loud as of yet.

I flipped through Babel's collection again, hopping from Odessa stories to Red Calvary stories to autobiographical stories. There's always a joke on someone by the end, and with a modicum of detail he suggest a world of characterizations. His people don't always have great depth, but they fit in their role in society that grows increasingly complex as we read his cycles of stories. His portrait is one of Russia rather than an individual. Humble lives are transformed into red-blooded exercises in existence. What I'm trying to say is, Babel is a great storyteller.

Babel, photographed upon his arrest

Babel's life is a story unto itself: he survived the 1905 pogrom that killed his grandfather. He became a journalist and fiction writer, only after fighting in wars and studying finance for lack of other options. He become silent under Stalin's tightening control. Accused of being an aesthete, Babel would pay for his artistic licence (see Wikipedia article here):

After the suspicious death of Gorky in 1936, Babel noted: "Now they will come for me." ...In May 1939 he was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated under torture at the Lubyanka....After a forced confession, Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.

Reportedly, while Babel confessed under torture, "once he realised he was doomed, he recanted" but "it made no difference." His last recorded words were,

"I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work."

Soho Poetry Reading and its After-effects

Standing on a stool with papers in hand, the young poet declaims visions. The crowded back room of the Soho bar softly stirs fruit around sangria glasses, as he heaps polysyllabic words on their ears. The warmth and the crowd dull the senses a bit.

This was my night last nigh; a quick bike ride in the suddenly descended chill, and then crammed into a small barrel of a room to be shot at by local wordsmiths.

I didn't catch much. With all three of the readings I heard, the imagery obscured the train of thought, as if they ambitiously wished to express everything, rather than one thing. 'Poetry reading' sounds stuffy. On the contrary, it was familiar and relaxed, even if the deluge of verbal images stirred the heart without reaching the intellect. The energy of the live performance was a treat that somehow left me tracing the words of other poets around the inside of my head.

Is this the best way to experience poetry? Poetry takes one another life when it is read aloud and its musical quality predominates. Yet one--or I, at least--can't understand it as well as I can by sitting in silence with a poem and reading it again and again.

Yet I was reminded of a favorite poet of mine, who I've not read in many months, Edna St. Vincent Millay. The tone of her structured, explosive sonnets number her among my favorites (if I could do such a thing as pick favorites). Please allow me to present, for your reading pleasure, Ms. Millays' sonnet XLI in Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree (1923), and allow me to fantasize she is reading it aloud at a Greenwich village speakeasy:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Maddening Queues of Soviet Russia

Imagine you've been waiting in line to buy a pair of shoes. Imagine you've waited all day and all night with hundreds of people. Can you imagine how dull that is?

This is the subject of the book I'm reading, The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin. If you went to school in the U.S., you probably came across the book 1984 by George Orwell. Well, I'm halfway through a Russian novel written in 1983 the follows much the same line of poking fun at the communist system. The Queue was the debut of this popular contemporary Russian author, and in it he tackles form with an absolute appropriateness to the subject that exploits every angle, or rather the straightness, of the line.

How does the subject of waiting in line influence the structure? Brilliantly, that's how. The narrative is actually nameless dialogue of innumerable people in line, making conversations and noises as they stand there. One comes to recognize certain voices, like a little boy and his mother and a young man hitting on a girl named Lena. Even so, it feels like overhearing the hum of the crowd, as people complain about the sun or their feet in short, colloquial snippets. The chain of dialogue moves as the line moves. For example, a segment of the line twists itself to a courtyard with benches where they nap. After settling in, the reader finds page after blank page while they sleep. The text on the pages even looks like a line.

Yet as the reader finds, this farcical line in the Soviet Union is anything but straight. The humor of the book comes from the deadpan depiction of people moving backwards instead of forwards in the queue. Humor, immediately recognizable as it is, is difficult to pin down. The Queue rests on a recognition that waiting in line in a perhaps futile attempt to purchase anything, of the difficulties of merely waiting to do so, such as the Georgians cutting in front and pushing the whole crowd back, is not reasonable, and is incongruous with the society that Communism purported to establish. The absence of the author's voice keeps the novel from taking on a didactic or even very dark aspect. The Queue is a comedy, but a rather dull one, as waiting in line has little to recommend itself.

Despite the cleverness of the structure, it's also difficult to become involved in fiction without engaging characters. The struggle of the line seems the struggle of faceless individuals, but not of people despite hearing their voices speak throughout. It's also because the characters do not act--they wait and wait in line. Following orders is not the inspiring stuff of novels, though it is perhaps truer to life. Only halfway through, and here I am critiquing the novel. This is less unfair that you might think. A disappointment of the novel is the extended stasis of the plot, and leaves me thinking the line will continue forever, without them ever buying the shoes of rumored American-make and brown leather.

Ah, Russians on the joys of communism..The novel really is interesting in itself, but believe me when I say it fully explores its chosen topic. No one, no where need ever write about queue in Soviet Russia ever again. Sorokin has filled that niche.

Milan Kundera: Can betrayl of another amount to betrayl of self?

A recent Economist story has made me very sad, indeed. It did not involve the economy, but Czech author Milan Kundera (b. 4/1/29) who moved to France to escape the censorship of the Communist government. Kundera's most popular book has been The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which deals with of identity and love and betrayal, also touches on his recurrent theme of lives clouded by totalitarianism. Ironically or logically enough, now similar charges are being brought against Kundera in his youth. Per the Economist:

"The story of Miroslav Dvoracek, a Czech spy for the West, would fit well into a Kundera novel. Caught by the secret police in 1950 while on an undercover mission to Prague, he was tortured and then served 14 years in a labour camp. He was lucky not to be executed. He has spent nearly six decades believing that a childhood friend called Iva Militka betrayed him; he had unwisely contacted her during his clandestine trip. Similarly, she has always blamed herself for talking too freely about her visitor to student friends. Now a police record found by Adam Hradilek, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in Prague, suggests that it was one of those friends, the young Mr Kundera, who was the informer."

Could this the face of a backstabber?

Kundera refutes the suggestion. While I might cheer to hear muck about a politician or the latest scandal of some pop star, this news really disappoints me. I find it quite likely that Kundera did betray Dvoracek. He was already in a bit of trouble with the political machine, and yet was allowed to continue his studies. Many in that time faced and made similar choices to the one he is purported to have made. If he did betray him, one could infer that he spent most of his life writing out the guilt from it. Perhaps that's why he is a recluse now.

Kundera writes poignant characters with a keen sensitivity to time and identity that I haven't found in other contemporary authors. I idolize his writing. But what if he had to make this choice to write the way he does? I think his writing is wonderful and valuable, while noting it sticks to much the same subjects, like a singer whose songs all sound alike. So what if this incident provided him with limited themes, a sort of stumbling block that he can't move past mentally?

What if this betrayal of his youth, betrayed his ability to write better and deeper novels?

Fit the LAST

Something drastic has occured: I've suspended delivery of Confessions of an Opium Eater. I always finish books I start, even if it's terrible. But I could suffer no longer, and went to DailyLit (a service that emails installments of a selection of books) and suspended it. You know what--I feel great. Light as a feather. Free.

Why do I feel a compulsion to finish? It's gives a sense of completeness to my negative judgement, but why else? If it's really terrible, why woudl I care about the end? It's as if I had a duty to finish anything I pick up. If only that extended past my reading habits! It is much easier to quit a DailyLit subscription--they cater to a variety of tastes if you want to fit some literature in your workaday lives.

However, this is not quite Fit the Last. I'm still reading the Hunting of the Snark, which never ceases to bring a smile to my face. The beaver and butcher (or is it the bellman?) have become friends, and the company has discussed means of catching the Snark. Mostly the traditional ones, such as hunt it with a thimble and care and such stuff. Recently, the barrister had a dream, attempting to prove that lace-making would not help to find the Snark. The Snark took over the courtroom.

I would totally buy a Snark suffed animal. I wonder what it would look like. Would it make me vanish? No, that's the Bojum. Now that's a nasty beast.

Nobel Prize for Literature: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Who?

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for works characterized by "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and focused on the environment, especially the desert....The decision was in line with the Swedish Academy's recent picks of European authors"

I am a failure. The Swedish Academy did not select me for this year's Nobel. To insult my pride on top of this injury---I did not know who Le Clezio was.

I am now entering crisis mode. Was Enghdal right to critique American literature as too insular? I don't think my literature is in dialogue with Le Clezio. Maybe I could get his phone number and we could start one...

Here he is now:

"Ello?"

"Hello. Is this Mr. Le Clezio?"

"Oiu. Et vouoo are you?

"I'm an American calling. The Nobel has finally shamed me into dialogue with you. What global themes does your work embrace? Whose dick did you suck in Stockholm?--I mean, what book of yours should I read first?"

"I em not eenterested."

"But Mr. Le Cle--"

BANG

There was no need to slam the phone with such force. Damn frogs never had any manners. I'm going to call Roth and Updike to commiserate. Seriously though, why does the Academy pick typically obscure, European writers?

Salome (A Wilde History)

In anticipation of tonight's opera at the Met, I am going to tell you a secret about me: I am in love with a dead gay man. It's true; Oscar Wilde has been the man in my life long before I had a man. He wrote a biblical tragedy of all things, this decadent fop. Then Strauss turned his Salome into an opera, and that is what I am going to see tonight.

1) A Play by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde wrote Salome in 1891 in French, and an English translation came out in 1894. (Translated by Wilde, not his no good lover Bosie despite the fact the Wilde still gave him credit in the Dedication.) The play tells in one act the Biblical story of Salome, stepdaughter of Herod, who, to her stepfather's dismay but to the delight of her mother Herodias, requests the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. Rehearsals for the play's debut in London began, only to be banned. The play eventually premiered in Paris in 1896, but by then Wilde was in prison.

2) Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley

An outrageously talented artist, Aubrey Beardsely had already been greatly influential prior to his death at age 26. In 1891, at age 18, he met Wilde, who was in the process of writing Salome. Wilde asked Beardsley to illustrate the English version. He was a prefect choice for both the play and for Wilde.

Beardsley "developed a perverse and playfully theatrical style partly inspired by Greek vase painting. The venomous elegance of his drawings has an ornamental rhythm akin to the abstract decorations of Islamic palaces. For Salome, Beardsley ironically appropriated the decadent theme of the evil, emasculating woman." (From Michael Gibson, Symbolism)
Wilde, on Beardsley's muse: as having "moods of terrible laughter"

3) An Opera by Strauss

Those in the know (and I am not referring to myself), argue that Strauss's Salome is the first "modern" opera and his first major operatic success. Richard Strauss composed it in 1904, and wrote the libretto as well, in German. The opera's music is supposed to be gripping–-relating the themes of perversion, evil, and cruelty.

In Production:

The New York Times had a favorable review of the Met’s production and especially of the singer in the role of Salome. The closer it is to Wilde’s original version, and to Beardsley’s striking vision, the happier I will be.

My esteemed father would like to add that, in his opinion, nobody over 50 years of age or 250 pounds should attempt the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Fit the Second: Styles and Times

Some authors are in step with their time; others seem to write worlds outside of it. One way is not inherently better than the other. However, in Carrol one greatly enjoys his departure from Victorianism in his childs poem. While I keep reading de Quincey, I am not enjoying the way he exercises the style of his era, using it as an excuse to tell the most dull details of his childhood as a wordy confession of--nothing!

Carrol's musical nosense is so much more than Sussical. It's really brilliant, topsy-turvy--fun--but with harmonious internal order that extends to the logically played-out rules of his world, even if the world he depicts is going snark hunting. In some ways, his language is very caught up in the Victorian culture of his day, but his subjects and the made up vocabulary he uses to match it are outside of what we typically think of as Victorian. The stories he tells are children's stories, and his work can be seen as a method of escape. Despite the trappings of Victorianism, it's hatboxes and tea ceremonys and mannerly insistence on order, Carrol uses fiction as an escape valve, with the joy of a child throwing his mother's clothes on the floor and writing on the walls in red lipstick.

Thomas de Quincy can go shove it. I slogged through another installment, and like Sysphis have slight concerns I might have to repeat the effort tommorow all for naught. This long-winded autobiography should not be entitled "Confessions of an Opium Eater"--he does not confess. I wish he would. I am distinctly uninterseted in his excellent command of Greek and his views on the manners of bishops. However, if one wants insight into the typical style of Regency England, it's quite appropriate. It's all Jane Austen avoided in her social satire--de Quincy would have been a tiresome bore who fancied himself quite the revolutionary. In some way, his novel inspires me. I'm going to come up with a very sensational title, then write a weather report. Maybe posterity will keep getting tricked in to reading me.

Book Review: The Septembers of Shiraz-Nobel Enough?

Sometimes books come to you in different ways: an intriguing cover, a recommendation, even a mix up at the library. This novel, written by debuting author Dalia Sofer, has come to me twice now. I proofed pages of it when I first moved to New York City as an intern with Ms. Sofer's literary agent. Then my current boss, who works in finance, recommended I read it. The book had been published! And on the shelves of Borders, O sweet measure of success these days. So I finally paid attention this weekend, reading The Septembers of Shiraz like a zealot.

This story of a family living in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution conveys a vivid historical reality, but only as a backdrop to the changing relationship and lives of Isaac, his wife, and children. Isaac, being a prosperous Jewish jeweler, attracts the unwelcome attention of the Muslim revolutionaries. The novel opens on his arrest--seized and taken to prison on suspicion of being a Zionist spy. Isaac endures prison and torture until, with a well-placed Koran verse and his life savings, he buys his freedom. He returns to his home and long-estranged wife, who he had come to love in a most basic and humble way.

One of the joys of this book is how it tells the story of this long-married couple who have ceased to know each other and who need each other. Their ability to come together after great loss, as they escape into Turkey and freedom with their daughter, says much for the resilience of the human spirit. Sofer has a real gift for the nuances of how people relate to those closest to them, and the interaction of the family she creates in The Septembers of Shiraz feels as real and nuanced as one's own.

But to follow my mental chain of thought away from the story itself, The Septembers of Shiraz strikes me decidedly as an American author delving into a different national character. Sofer left Iran at the age of 10. She is Iranian and also American. So I wonder what Enghdal, the permanent Secretary on the Nobel Prize for Literature, would think? Enghdal said recently that U.S. writers are:

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

I'm not proposing that Sofer has in any way earned a Nobel prize with this lovely novel, which does not approach greatness. But I am suggesting the American heritage is so diverse that it seems ridiculous to call it insular. I'm not sure what world dialogue is going on in European literature that is so enlightened, but doubtless that is because I am American. (Although by American, I mean to say I am both an American and a Swedish citizen.) However, I don't wish to argue that excellent American authors are engaging in international dialogue in a way that merits a Nobel. I would argue that great writing, wise and brilliant and innovatice and beautiful, earns itself recognition for just those qualities. Whether the work is simultaneosly eccentric and insular is on no great importance, as so long as our common humanity is clear enough. That seems to be something that Sofer, Iranian or American, has done beautifully here; the same is said easily enough about John Updike or Philip Roth as well.

Cum Laude: New York arts scene

To state the obvious, New York City has an art scene that just doesn't compare to Little Town, Bumblefuck, USA, or Petite Village, Bumblefuck, Anywhere. Prior to a play I saw at the Roundabout Theatre Wednesday, I was invited to a lovely radio interview where the director spoke about the play and the process of putting it on. On going to see the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in its new building at Columbus Circle on Thursday night, I stumbled upon "Gallery Night with the Artists," and very informally heard 3 (rather young) artists as they discussed their work on view currently. In addition, at the former I was given free food and wine (the way to my heart) and the latter, free admission to the museum. What could be better?

Live action contemporary arts programs like these enlivens the easy misconception that culture is artifiacts, things long done. Art that isn't merely for museums and words that don't merely live in books makes me so aware of culture as an ebb and flow of ideas and people and means of expression. Not to mention, art seems to have a proper set of values, always including free wine and food. Must have been all those childhoods of being starving artists. For a long time, one of my favorite fall activities has been gallery hopping on Thursday nights in Chelsea. (Again, we touch on themes of free art and wine.)

Note: The MAD is quite fun, and as its name suggests, you won't find orderly rows of chairs inside. The exhibitions were designed with a great deal of creativity and a touch of whimsy. Try to find the little details in the windows of the stairwell. It's rare to find a museum of that calibre in which the Artist's Talk involves 3 young women in their 30s. But then, perhaps that says as much about the female-dominated field of crafts. What male going to come along to break the glass ceiling of this matriarchal form? I suppose, a bit uninspiringly, the prize would have to go to Dale Chihuly.

So applause to the MAD and the Roundabout Theatre, and hooray for living in a city with a thriving arts scene.

Fit the First

Confession of an Opium Admirer:

After sleeping in on this grey morning, I read more of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which so far has been platitudes and childhood autobiography instead of those sordid details I craved. I thought of the tasks and chores before me this morning and afternoon, and how much chillier it outside, and the trouble of getting dressed, and--I confess-- opium eating sounds delightful. Opium sounds like the sport of bedside philosophers, princes of thought, and the coffee I have in my hand the bitter encouragement given to worker ants.

Poor lost snark hunters, with no opium to comfort them

After all, there's a reason that I am reading the Confessions concurrent to Lewis Carrol's The Hunting of the Snark. Either the Confessions need to pan out more, or I need to secure some opium.