New Worlds = New Bookshelf

My poor students are in the throes of midterm exams. I try not to tell them how wonderful it is when they’re done–that you can keep on learning without any threats hanging over you.  You can learn solely because you want to.

Which brings me to my current announcement.

It has come to my attention that I will be buying a new bookshelf.  I will admit I had an inkling this would happen, what with how I currently have a pile of books on one chair, a pile on the floor next to my Da Vinci sketch, and a pile on my little Egyptian table.  But it’s now “for realsies,” as my st00ds would say.

My second manuscript requires research into a new time period.  I blame William Somerset Maugham.  Because if it wasn’t for Ted Morgan’s BRILLIANT biography of Maugham, I’d not have known how PERFECT said period would be for my book.

Research = books.  Books = Delight Bookshelves

Egad!

(and I see in the photo below I need to get rid of a lot of price tags. but what can you do–some of them if you rip them off, they leave icky sticky residue… Alas! Alack! The trials and tribulations continue! ;-p)

Books and their Guardian

Victory, thy name is Cloud!

So I just finished, for the first time ever, reading a book in Russian. Garri Potter i Uznik Azkabana. Five hundred and seven pages.

Oh. My. Gawd.

It took me a week, what in English would take two days. (Excuse me in advance if this blog is littered with idiomatically clumsy sentences—reading this much Russian has had a noticeable effect on my spoken English too.)

I haven’t read an English language book all week—a long time for me. Russian print is swirling around in my head; I can’t walk down the street without finding myself absent-mindedly repeating some word or another—sometimes without knowing for sure if it’s a real word or one I’ve just made up. It’s incredible and …*sigh*

The funny thing is that the achievement is made more amazing not only by the idioms and expressions and words I seem to have effortlessly picked up and integrated (erratically) into my speech—and Lord knows there’s bunches of words that bounced OFF my head too—but rather by this one tiny, almost ridiculous realization which has swooped me into euphoria.  Namely:

I know two words for cloud.

!!!

I know, it seems useless. After all, I am no meteorologist. I am no weather reporter. I am no sky-gazer.

But two words! This is victory indeed! Because it provides—flexibility. *sighs happily* Flexibility is power, I have decided. I can choose among words…or in this case, between words. I can be the master of my own nuances!

I am on cloud two, I tell you!

It occurs to me I also know now two words for werewolf. I typically discuss neither clouds nor werewolves at length, but I sense integration of both into my daily conversation for at least a while.

Russian: “Hello, Ruth. How are you?”
Ruth: “I am well. Is that a cloud (1)? I am a werewolf (1)”
Russian: “Uh, are you pointing at the pavement?”
Ruth: “Clouds (2) are different in America. Are you also a werewolf (2)?

Good times. Ah, and I now have five words for interrupt. Several ways to describe smirks, bitter smiles, glinting eyes, exploding with fury, exchanging glances, examining things… Precautions. Invisibility Cloaks. Wiping one’s tears/sweat. Aiming one’s wand… Yes, several ways of aiming weapons, assuming all weapons are wielded similarly to wands…

Life, fellow English speakers, is GRAND!    But now I must bid you adieu, for I have two clouds to gaze at.

War and Peace, a tale of class warfare

I had a Russian teacher once who didn’t much like me.  In her defense, I did not attend class with particular regularity.  In my defense, this was because she had committed two terrible indiscretions, the second being worse than the first:  she had a class favorite, and it wasn’t me.

Instead of witnessing such wrong-headedness, I took to lolling about in the park with my friends.  But come the final exam, I made sure to attend.  I am nothing if not a model of propriety.

It was an oral exam, and it was worth the bulk of our grade. 

“Ruth,” she said, “as you may have heard, we read War and Peace in class.”  I had not heard this.  To have heard this would have required me to associate with my classmates.

Instead of answering, I genteelly scraped my jaw off the floor and rearranged my features into a stretched, sub-par variation of “oh, did you not notice me in class?”

All this time she was looking at me from the top of her eyes, and I was steadily smiling back.  Maybe overly widely.  Never show fear, shock or complete consternation to the enemy.

“Ruth,” she said, “please tell me about Prince Andrei and Natasha.”

I nodded.  Like many a Russophile, after all, I HAD read the damn book, or at least the Peace part of it.  But in English, my friends.  Not in Russian.  Not after but three months of the language!  I could not FATHOM how the class had done it.  But fake it, I would. 

And so, with a polite cough, I passionately brought Tolstoy down a notch, to my simpleton’s grasp of Russian.

Once upon a time, there was a Frenchman called Napoleon.  Napoleon did not like Russia.  No!  Napoleon told himself, Russia must—suffer!  Russia—bad!  (This is Napoleon, not I.  I like Russia.  But Napoleon—No!)

Napoleon with many Frenchmen came to Russia, and then Napoleon—with pistols!  Bad!  Very bad!  Many pistols!  More than before!  The Russian people—sad!  War!  Many men come in to war!

Prince Andrei also.  But Prince Andrei loves Natasha!  Natasha additionally loves Prince Andrei’s!  They have met each other to dance in a nice place.  She is beautiful.  He is—there!  They dance!  And they love each other.

Then Prince Andrei asks Natasha to—live with him forever!  Natasha agrees!  Prince Andrei is in the war!  It is bad!  Natasha is at home.  France is bad!  Napoleon!  War!  Pistols!

Suddenly, Prince Andrei is—A gun!  No!  Pain!  In his body!  Prince Andrei—it is very sad!  Prince Andrei’s soul!—leaves him!  Forever!

It is very sad.  There, that is the anecdote of Prince Andrei and Natasha in War and Peace.  Thank you.

She looks at me.  I’m sweating and congratulating myself on my genius.  It is incidentally the first time I truly realize how flexible one becomes with a new language when one doesn’t have a full vocabulary.  And that one should always know the verb for dying.

“Ruth,” she says, in English now, “we only read one scene.  When they met, at the ball.  Not the whole book.” 

“Ah,” I say, growing hotter.

“What am I going to do with you?”

Ah, this is great.  I hadn’t realized I would get a vote here.  I am very good at advice.  I lean forward.  “If I were you, I would either fail me or give me an A+.”  I nod.  “I would lean toward the A+.”

She dismisses me.  I don’t get a chance to explain why I would give myself the A+.

My grade comes in two weeks later.  She’s had the audacity to give me a B+.  I fume.  I would have preferred a stronger statement, one way or another.  But I guess this is what she did, nick the pleasure from a high grade, showing ultimately the point is knowledge but also respect.

Years later we met again and I can say I was still not her class favorite.  And once again hers became the only Russian class I ever skipped.

Stone Cold

My new thing is stonemasons.  I read a great book a while back by a master stonemason (Thomas Maude), and ever since then, I can’t get enough.  From stonemasonry to architecture to sculpture, I’m swimming in delicious books, hooked onto the glimpses of that other world, that other our world, lurking beneath the surfaces of our everyday lives.  Literally.

One thing that’s fascinating me is the way in which we fixate on inanimate things in order to prove our strength.  Remember the Taliban in Afghanistan?  The Soviets did the same thing in Kaliningrad—only instead of blowing up statues in effigy, they decapitated them.

Apparently this was all the fashion in the Paris of the Reign of Terror (1793-94).  When Louis XVI was decapitated, it wasn’t quite enough of a statement—the funerary statue of Carolingian King Lothair (954-86) was decapitated too. 

Throughout Paris, images of kings were torn down and destroyed.  Decapitated-destroyed.  Statues of unknown provenance, if possibly regal statement, were also thusly tossed down.  If stone could think, it would scratch its head.  Which would of course be lying on the ground several feet away from its body.

The Notre Dame, when its medieval sculptures were forced from their pedestals along the walls, offered the discerning anti-royal citizen quite the heaping mass of rubble.  According to records, the very doors of this grand cathedral were obstructed and obscured by defiled stonework, featuring the illustriously decapitated statues of French royalty—be they holy or secular.  For three years they sat there in disarray, gathering the dirt and detritus of abandonment.

A contemporary painter suggested they put the rocks together to form a huge sculpture, but France had enough problems at the moment without directing all their horses and wagons to the site, and of course trains had yet to be invented.  So to minimize costs, they offered the misshapen rocks as quarry for sale.  Genius.  And so it was that these historical statues, saints mistaken for kings, were transported to various reaches of that great land.

Almost two centuries later, in 1977, the French were living their normal lives, sans revolutions and butchered statues or royalty.  Very novel.  And what should happen when some dear French dudes start excavating at 20 rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin to build a prison?  You guessed it.

Wait, you didn’t.  I shall have to furnish the answer myself.  No worries, dear reader.  I came prepared.

What should they find–but a mass grave.  A mass grave of statue heads, all buried facedown.  Twenty-one heads, buried together and cushioned by plaster.  No records exist to tell us today who buried these heads.

So now we have not only the fact that we sculpt ourselves from stone and venerate it.  We also destroy these images to show our power.  And we also bury them, again in veneration.  We bury them, or of course we walk slowly around resurrected statues like Venus de Milo, and marvel at its beauty, at its survival, and at its makers.

Stone…not so cold, after all.

On Gimmicks: just poorly disguised weaknesses or insulting cons and crutches?

I’ve been thinking about gimmicks recently.  Such an ugly word, “gimmick.”  It sounds sticky, gummy and like a cheap con.  Well, to me it does.

So what brings this on?  The book I read on Saturday.  I read it till past midnight because I wanted to know not so much what would happen next, but how it would end, period.  But although I read the entire book, and in one day, the reason I rushed through it was that I didn’t want to waste any more of my time reading it—it’s one thing to have done with it that same day, and another thing entirely to waste a second day on it.  I could have leisurely read it all weekend, but it didn’t provide that sort of pleasure.

So what makes a book gimmicky rather than simply “thusly structured or told?”  I guess it’s my sense that I can see the author’s crutches and on top of that weakness (of laziness), he’s also trying to con me or seduce me with cheap thrills.  How insulting.

Here’s examples from that particular book:

1. Sex that feels like a cheap ploy used because “sex sells.”  By contrast, the protagonist of Shadow of the Wind is a passionate teenager, and his sexual experiences are intrinsically bound to the story and it works.  In Fingersmith the sex is also a great part of the story.  It’s not simply writerly wanking, if you get my drift.  The protagonist of this story, by contrast, feels absolutely fake and a stand-in for the author, and the sex feels like stand-in sex for the author, too.  (Linked to gimmick #3, clearly.)
2. A protagonist’s unlikely brilliant ability to get out of any fight the winner.  Can we save that for TV?  (This is genre-related, but this book was not a ninja-tale.)
3. A sense I have, I can’t tell you why, that there’s some gratuitous self-revelation and self-love in a POV character who is meant in some way to reflect the author positively (example: as sexy, sharp, savvy, say-it-how-it-is and important)
4. Too many useful coincidences, not just stretching but making a joke of a reader’s suspension of belief.  In this book, every chief character is connected in some way to the NYPD, the mob and legal counsel.  (Including the film student working for minimum wage in a bookshop.)  Give me a break.

Maybe, though, if the writing was better (to me, as it’s a New York Times bestseller, something that’s utterly diminished my opinion of that particular accolade), I wouldn’t feel irritated and insulted by those crutches.  But was so obviously plastic.  It felt like a smarmy politician’s pick-up line.   

To feel clean again, I followed that book by reading another one entirely on Sunday.  This one I finished also after midnight, but because it was good and I wanted that closure of staying with the characters, in their mood, until the end.  This one’s also a bestseller, and once again I don’t understand how—but in this case that’s because I feel that it’s way too dense to be that popular.  Proof again that if a society VIP like the New York Times says “this is hot,” anything can sell, whether it’s trash or delicious but an acquired taste.

Anyway, this book did not have any obvious crutches to me.  It also was told through two POV characters, and two rather unusual ones, at that.  At first I felt the one character was too pat—a super intelligent 13 year old girl—but, hey, I accept it.  Because she’s also limited by her age’s didacticism, which is realistic to me, and surrounded by the concerns of her surroundings. 

The first book is The Book of Air and Shadows.  The second is The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

What about you guys—do you resent “gimmicks” or do you consider them simply poorly disguised story skeletons or something else?  And when you read gimmicky books, do you find yourself returning to your own work to eradicate anything smelling like gimmickiness in it, too?  Or do you want to convince me that I’m being petty?

I, for one, feel as if I’d hired someone to build me the Sistine Chapel, and they’d brought me to a plaster-and-chewing-gum-conjoined structure and expected praise.  Is that what I paid for?  Is that what he considers a Sistine Chapel?  No, it’s an insult and it’s an act of self-hoodwinking as well.  Or maybe just an indication of the author’s cheaper taste. 

  Ahem.  And now I’m going to get off my high horse and go to work.

Paper Art

So I have reached the conclusion: sometimes it’s okay to cut a book up.  But basically only if you’re Su Blackwell.  When she does it, fiction comes to life in a most magical, delicate way.  (And the image she brings to life is made of the very pages describing it in the book.  So cool!)

Not sure if you agree?  Check these out and get back to me. 

The Old House 2007, by Su Blackwell

The Girl in the Wood, by Su Blackwell

The Girl in the Wood (detail), by Su Blackwell

Alice: Through the Looking Glass 2007, by Su Blackwell

Alice: A Mad Tea Party 2006, by Su Blackwell

While You Were Sleeping II, by Su Blackwell (I think)

     

The Apple is an Orange: Update on The Appointment

I’m the first to admit it.  I have my moments.  Oblivious moments.

Like when the protagonist of Fight Club makes his big reveal, at the very end.  You know the moment, when the whole audience gasps and a few shrewd folks nod self-importantly.  Yeah, I neither gasped nor nodded.  You see, dear reader, I thought the character was deluding himself.  Or to be more precise, I thought he was talking rubbish.  I heard him out and waited for truth, for the denouement.  When the credits rolled immediately thereafter, I was gobsmacked.  What had just happened??

What had happened, gentle reader, is that I was an idiot.

However, there are times when it’s not just me being a moron.  Yes, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.  Which leads me to my update on the book I was so excited about last week: The Appointment. 

Turns out, the blurb is misleading.  Utterly misleading.  Which was effed up.

Now, if I’m handed a mug of steaming beverage and told it’s tea, when it’s in fact coffee, regardless of whether I prefer coffee or tea, my first reaction upon tasting it is: this is wrong.  Something’s very wrong.

The Appointment was well-written and interesting.  But that blurb is rudely misleading.  At a certain point one stops savoring each moment for itself, and instead begins waiting for what the blurb suggests is a turning point—the turning point.  The story.  Which is a disservice to any book, interesting or not.

It’s one thing not to judge a book by its graphic cover.  But one does hope the blurb is honest.  If you do read the book, for your own sake and the author’s, imagine you haven’t read the last line of the blurb, about the street with the fearful thing that terrifies the heroine more than her appointment.  It’s a misstatement and it ruins the read by setting up your expectations for something that is not the story at all.

Annoyance.  Meh.  And now to write a happier post.  But I didn’t want to basically mis-blurb the book myself by not warning you…

Oy. Another Good Book…

So, about a month back I bolted into Barnes and Noble for two books.  “Just the two,” I reminded myself, hand against the door.  Then something went wrong. 

Perhaps you’re not surprised. 

I stood before the cashier, willing my heart to stop thumping.  “Please don’t tell me the cost.  Don’t.  Just take the card.” 

I slipped it to her and looked away, but she gave a gentle cough and announced the total.  When I arrived home I put the two first books—the guilty books—in exile on the dining room table, upright, so they could see what they’d done as I shelved the others.

What had happened at the store—plunge at the abyss—happened when I stood before one table of books near the cashier and somehow decided that as I’d gone mad on the third floor, collecting seven unwieldy books rather than two, why not succumb completely and utterly for one last book on the first floor.  In a flurry that could not have lasted more than two seconds—two!—I thumped not one but three more books on my pile (boom, boom, smash) and dashed away, eyes almost closed to ensure nothing else desperate occurred.  Oy.

Three days ago I stumbled upon one of my thumpee books.  A slim one, she was shelved discreetly between two larger volumes.  I frowned in unrecognition and flipped her over to read the blurb.  Oooh.  I put her down again; I’m not in the market for a book set in totalitarian Europe right now.  But the words lingered in my mind…at work, on the street, back home. 

Finally last night I returned to my shelf and looked the book square in the face, as one must in these situations.

“You’re not what I’m looking for right now,” I told the book.

She smirked.

I cleared my throat and picked the book up.  “See, it says your author is the winner of a Nobel Prize.  I can’t stand half the winners.”

Still the book held her silence.

I flipped her over again and sighed.  “Don’t get your hopes up now.  I’m just taking a quick peek.  A little dip.  Not reading you, per se.”

I fluffed the couch cushions and unwillingly opened her covers.  Boom—not two minutes later I’m simultaneously captured by the story, the character, the mood and also scrambling blindly for a pen, dog-earing pages and somewhere in the remotest part of my mind thinking, “gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, she’s so good….”

It’s Herta Muller’s The Appointment.   I’m 68 pages in (–it’s a short book, some 214 pages).  Here’s the wicked blurb:

“I’ve been summoned.  Thursday, ten sharp.”  Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime.  Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy.  “Marry me,” the notes say, with her name and address.  As she rides the tram to her interrogation, she thinks over the events and people of her life under terror.  In her distraction she misses her stop and finds herself alone on an unfamiliar street.  And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale in comparison.

And her bio:  Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Muller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s secret police.  She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.  She won the IMPAC Award for her novel The Land of Green Plums, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

Sigh.  Accursed woman, she is rocking… 

The Appointment

I’m just sayin’….

I remember when my good buddy and former Peace Corps sitemate asked me if I knew the Russian for “it goes without saying.”

I looked at him for one long moment.  “Are you sure this is a phrase you need?”

“Yeah,” he answered seriously.  “I say it a lot.”

I admitted I had no idea what the Russian form of this idiom is—if indeed they’ve bothered to have their own version for a basically ridiculous expression—but that I thought he could get by perfectly well by simply omitting the phrase.

Instead of saying, for instance: “It goes without saying that when the sun shines we call it daytime,” he could simply say a) “When the sun shines we call it daytime,” or better yet, b) nothing at all.  Perhaps squint at the sun happily in silence or summat.

My friend felt my answer was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, and squinted at the sun silently, ruminating perhaps on what else went without saying.

Then again, there also things that require saying.  That require spelling out.  In fact, two years on, I wonder if perhaps I prefer, indeed, to be told what goes without saying over not being told what requires saying.  But what sparks this, you ask, wondering if I will say…

Funny you should ask.

Flash forward to this weekend.  While the snow falls gently outside, I sat reading Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Romanticism.”  I plugged through the book and even found interesting passages. 

Why “even?”  Am I implying the book’s boring or ill-crafted?  No.  But it’s been a long time since I bumped into a book like this.  An “academic” book of “scholarship.”  A book of literary criticism which doesn’t deign to translate the original texts it quotes at length into English.

Which would be fine if, say, the book was entitled “Die Redekunst der Romantik” and intended for German speakers.  Or “La Rhétorique de Romantisme” for French speakers.  Oui, then it would be fine.  Danke, I would say.  (Apologies for, uh, you know, language mistakes.)

You get my point.  Its title is in English, the author clearly prefers to write in English, and English-speakers are reading it.  So why is Holderlin cited only in German?  Why must I glaze past entire paragraphs of French only to find neither footnote nor in-text translation of the foreign material?  Is the literature cited not abundantly important—as in, say, the point of the entire book—such that the author doesn’t deign to translate it for his readers?

Now, when I was in college, I came across this often.  Back then I would curse my ignorance, my feeble mind and derelict priorities, and imagine I was missing the kernel of wisdom that could somehow make me a sufficiently knowledgeable person. 

No longer.  Now I mirror the scholar-author; I raise my own brow in disdain.  The author wants to appear smart, does he?  Or he wants to protect his teaching from the masses; why else would he raise a barrier like that, or rather, seeing it up, feign lowering it (after all he is writing an entire book supposedly elucidating the matter)?  Yes, yes, I know: he’s not writing for the masses. 

Meh.

Must literary criticism remain the domain of the select few who can puff themselves up with allusions and jargon, and feel important in the blank and frustrated gaze of the apes outside their pristine self-erected gates?  How banal.  I try to hush my ire, telling myself this book is from another time, when knowledge was considered the pleasure, office, vestige and flourish of a select few. 

And because I’m stubborn and know there’s what worth knowing in there, I trampled onward. 

Can I curse myself that at age 33, I still don’t know French and German?  I guess so, but the little dingdong hasn’t yet quoted a Russian (were there no Romantic Russians?) and I could quite read that just fine–I’ve traveled the world speaking a variety of languages; I will not blink in the face of French and German and imagine myself an ignoramus because the author treats me as such.  Nay, I will not blink! 

*blink*  Did I just call the author–  Oh.  Not that the author is a little dingdong, of course.  (Did I really say that?)

*imagines a world in which an irate reader calls me a little dingdong*

*realizes this implies I have a reader*

*smiles in bliss*

Anyhows, that journey’s over with now and I’ve gleaned what I could, not knowing any of the Romance languages.  I’ll have you know I tried; I read some poems and passages aloud in the hopes that spoken, the foreign words would conspire with me to share some of their meaning.  I may have made up interpretations wildly off-base.  Or written even better poetry. 

Or maybe not.  Maybe not at all.  Thanks for that ego tripper, de Man, my would-be teacher.

It goes without saying that…  Ah wait, let’s at least have integrity: I shall not say what goes without saying.  Let the phrase keep its honor and truth.  To be robbed of it in the speaking is just painfully wrong, and the more so in the writing.

What about you–any peeves to share? 

In Armenian Turkey--in a long-crumbling church in Ani

I’ve been remiss…

I don’t know how it happened, my not blogging this week.  I fell into a flurry of books these past few days.  Since Tuesday I’ve read a book each day.  I don’t remember a thing before Tuesday… 

It all started with the BRILLIANT T.S. Elliot.

1.  Murder in the Cathedral – T.S. Elliot
2.  The Name of this Book is Secret – Pseudonymous Bosch
3.  The Monster Loves Its Labyrinth – Charles Simic (poetry)
4.  The Waste Land and Other Poems – T.S. Elliot (poetry)
5.  Magyk – Angie Sage
6.  Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

And then some side-reading into Memory’s Library by Jennifer Summit (brilliant), Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles (brilliant), The Cistercians by Stephen Tobin, and Rilke’s collected poetry.

My mind, my eyes…are fried.

I promise to put aside these books for at least tonight, and to reemerge with bloggarificness. 

I do have one new fact to share: 

Ever wondered how many new books the Library of Congress adds to its shelves each year?  7,000.
Crikey. 

I hope you’re all well!!!