Thursday, August 28, 2014
On "Taking" by Alix Ohlin (6:14 minutes) ****
Ohlin turns a childhood game into a metaphor for a much more serious and disturbing life event. The childhood game involves taking an object from a room and seeing if the sister knows what the object is. The narrator is not so good at the game, but some things can be taken that affect one forever thereafter. Listen to the story here at the Drum.
On "Ghosts" by Paul Auster ***
The second book of Auster's New York Trilogy, this one is more of a philosophical journey than anything else, something to be enjoyed on an intellectual level but not much else. It explores similar themes as the first book in the trilogy, but fails to quite live up to the first. Had I read it first, perhaps my opinion would be slightly different, but somehow I doubt it.
In Ghosts every major character is named after a color. Blue is a detective who has been hired by White to follow Black. Brown is his idol, and it is to Brown that Blue appeals, only to find the advice disappointing, if not completely absent.
Black, Blue finds, does little more than write. Following him is boring. Blue sits and observes and writes about Black, who sits and writes and observes also. Blue becomes paranoid as the story goes on, wondering if perhaps White and Black are in cahoots. Has White actually hired Black and Blue? Blue begins to make stuff up about Black, in part because it's more interesting, but also to see what kind of reaction he'll get from White. Will White know? Do White and Black speak to one another?
As time goes on, Blue finds himself less and less interested in writing about Black and, indeed, writing at all. The writer is a detective of sorts, but that work is less than exciting at times.
In Ghosts every major character is named after a color. Blue is a detective who has been hired by White to follow Black. Brown is his idol, and it is to Brown that Blue appeals, only to find the advice disappointing, if not completely absent.
Black, Blue finds, does little more than write. Following him is boring. Blue sits and observes and writes about Black, who sits and writes and observes also. Blue becomes paranoid as the story goes on, wondering if perhaps White and Black are in cahoots. Has White actually hired Black and Blue? Blue begins to make stuff up about Black, in part because it's more interesting, but also to see what kind of reaction he'll get from White. Will White know? Do White and Black speak to one another?
As time goes on, Blue finds himself less and less interested in writing about Black and, indeed, writing at all. The writer is a detective of sorts, but that work is less than exciting at times.
Saturday, August 23, 2014
On "A Story from the Sand Dunes" by Hans Christian Andersen (13,455 words) ***
One tragedy after another comes in this story by Andersen, which largely avoids the elements of fairy tale. It regards a young child of nobility whose ship is torn apart before he can remember and who ends up growing up in a small fishing village, adopted by parents who lost their child in another tragedy. The boy is God's miraculous replacement (never mind that all the other shipgoers died). The boy grows to be a man and makes good friends with one particular other young male in the village. They fall for the same girl. The boy saves up to buy a house, and the gal agrees to marry the boy because she knows she'll be better off with him, even though she actually loves the boy's friend. The boy chooses to hand over his house to his friend, as well as the girl, and leaves the village to travel the world. Only . . . there's a murder, and the boy ends up in prison. And then later, he ends up in another town, where he meets a lovely woman, who again is taken away from him by the sea. In addition, his mind is taken too. And so this dreadfully depressing story comes to an end . . . almost. Andersen was apparently very religious, and the hope of eternal life often ends up playing a role in his stories, and it's no exception with this tale. Read the full story here.
On "City of Glass" by Paul Auster *****
This is possibly the best novel I've read this year, certainly the best in a long time. The first of a trilogy, I look forward to the next two parts of it. Auster's book was written in the mid-1980s. It's hard for me to believe that it is about thirty years old and that it took that long for me to get to. Novels like this were works written in the 1950s back in the mid-1980s, and they were classics of a sort. It's hard to believe this would now be essentially a classic, in that sense, tested by time.
The novel is about a writer--a writer on many different levels. Daniel Quinn is a the main character. He writes detective novels under the name William Wilson (the name of a baseball player for the Mets, and the name, I believe, of a character in a Poe story about a man with multiple identities). Wilson in turn writes about the detective Max Work (maximum work of literature?). Quinn receives an anonymous call. The caller is asking for Paul Auster, a private detective.
After a couple of calls, Quinn decides to pose as Auster. The woman on the line is looking for help protecting a man Peter Stillman from his father of the same name. The father experimented on Stillman at a young age, similar to experiments keeping young children in a room without language to see what would happen. The abuse did no good for the son, and the father, who was imprisoned for his evil doings, is fresh out of jail. The son needs protection.
Quinn's job is to offer said protection. He embarks on following Stillman Sr. around. Stillman has a double, and Quinn has to choose which one is real. Stillman walks his days away in patterns that suggest letters that suggest words. What does it all mean?
Quinn eventually finds the real Paul Auster, who is a writer, not a detective. The two sort of collude for a bit, but not well and not for long. And Quinn in turn finds his musings growing progressively shorter and more meaningless, as Stillman's whereabouts get harder to trace.
Language is a major theme of this book, as is identity. Even the body seems a major element of it--nudity is stressed quite a bit early on. It's as if the body is all that is real, as if language is a slippery attempt to define the meaning of who we are, to give those bodies identity.
The novel is about a writer--a writer on many different levels. Daniel Quinn is a the main character. He writes detective novels under the name William Wilson (the name of a baseball player for the Mets, and the name, I believe, of a character in a Poe story about a man with multiple identities). Wilson in turn writes about the detective Max Work (maximum work of literature?). Quinn receives an anonymous call. The caller is asking for Paul Auster, a private detective.
After a couple of calls, Quinn decides to pose as Auster. The woman on the line is looking for help protecting a man Peter Stillman from his father of the same name. The father experimented on Stillman at a young age, similar to experiments keeping young children in a room without language to see what would happen. The abuse did no good for the son, and the father, who was imprisoned for his evil doings, is fresh out of jail. The son needs protection.
Quinn's job is to offer said protection. He embarks on following Stillman Sr. around. Stillman has a double, and Quinn has to choose which one is real. Stillman walks his days away in patterns that suggest letters that suggest words. What does it all mean?
Quinn eventually finds the real Paul Auster, who is a writer, not a detective. The two sort of collude for a bit, but not well and not for long. And Quinn in turn finds his musings growing progressively shorter and more meaningless, as Stillman's whereabouts get harder to trace.
Language is a major theme of this book, as is identity. Even the body seems a major element of it--nudity is stressed quite a bit early on. It's as if the body is all that is real, as if language is a slippery attempt to define the meaning of who we are, to give those bodies identity.
Monday, August 18, 2014
On "Mirabeau, the Truant" by Andrew Brininstool (4687 words) ****
Mirabeau is a peeping tom. He is also a boy on the cusp of being a teenager, a boy with a father suffering from depression, a boy with certain problems adjusting to the world around him--or understanding it. His best friend is Tug, a home-schooled fatty who is also a bully. The world around them is coming apart--the sky is literally falling, remnants of the space shuttle. But in the midst of this, there are small moments of beauty that make life worth living. Read the story here at Better.
On "The Elephants Teach" by D. G. Myers ***
In The Elephants Teach D. G. Myers traces the origin of the teaching of creative writing in the university, and in the process he tells the history of the teaching of English in the university. For the last several years, I've felt as if my studying English was ill advised; I'd have done something more useful had I studied, for example, one of the sciences. But young, I was idealistic and decided to study something I love: writing and reading. Nowadays, I tend to think I could have done such without a degree; I could have studied some other field and had something to write about. The problem . . . When I look back on it, I realize that I never enjoyed studying the sciences, and so I'd have likely consigned myself to misery trying to do so. And in total, my life hasn't worked out badly; I just often wish I felt more like I had a "real" skill.
Myers's book merely confirmed a lot of what I've come to feel--that English degrees, and especially writing degrees, are essentially self-reproducing. English students study English to teach other students to teach English. And creative writers study writing to teach others how to teach others how to write.
Myers starts his work off with a discussion of philology, which predated the modern English program. Philologists studied language the way a linguist does, focusing mostly on grammar and on etymology. Where did this word come from and how should one use it? Writers, as with today, could rarely make a living writing, so they often had other professions, and only rarely did one choose philology--or the teaching of a foreign language.
It was in the late 1800s that English departments began to take shape. Philology fell from favor as the idea of composition took hold. Composition--teaching others to write--started out to be, according to Myers, actually much more like creative writing. The idea was to be creative--and teachers often didn't care what one composed be it an essay, a story, or a poem. Many classes were forged around the idea of daily compositions--journals. Part of the impetus for teaching writing, however, was also for people to learn an appreciation for reading--not so much to become a professional writer.
But as composition became more popular and was added as a requirement to many school's prerequisites, so too did composition come under fire, just as it does today. What exactly should composition teach? Creativity? Critical thinking? Rhetorical argument? Literary appreciation? Business-oriented writing for specific disciplines? As composition moved more closely into the line of rhetoric, creativity began again to be placed on the back burner.
Writers, however, began to enter the academy more and more as a means to support themselves. (Myers examines the founding of various writing colonies, which is also a rather fascinating discussion.) And that's when New Criticism came to the fore. The idea was that writers would read texts closely, examine them, see how the text worked internally, rather than looking to its linguistics or its historical origins. Criticism was, thus, a part of teaching writers to write and readers to read. (The elephants teach refers to the idea that a zoologist study not just the animal from the outside but that the zoologist actually become the animal--he or she lives the life of the elephant to understand how it is constructed. So it is that a writer lives the writing life, reads like a writer, to understand how a piece of writing is forged.)
But eventually criticism and creative writing split off. And thus we now how several segmentations in an English department--linguists, rhetoricians, critics, and creative writers. Though the process started in the 1920s, much of the influx of writers to the academy happened after World War II, with the advent of the GI bill and the upswing in the number of degrees being granted. These people needed something to do, and the federal government was happy to pump more money into the system. Creative writing was a cheap program for a university to start (most such universities were not a state's flagship institution but an outlier, looking for a program to include among its specialties). And so it is. An excess of English professors and of money led to more creative writing programs being established, which led more such programs and more and more.
Myers's book merely confirmed a lot of what I've come to feel--that English degrees, and especially writing degrees, are essentially self-reproducing. English students study English to teach other students to teach English. And creative writers study writing to teach others how to teach others how to write.
Myers starts his work off with a discussion of philology, which predated the modern English program. Philologists studied language the way a linguist does, focusing mostly on grammar and on etymology. Where did this word come from and how should one use it? Writers, as with today, could rarely make a living writing, so they often had other professions, and only rarely did one choose philology--or the teaching of a foreign language.
It was in the late 1800s that English departments began to take shape. Philology fell from favor as the idea of composition took hold. Composition--teaching others to write--started out to be, according to Myers, actually much more like creative writing. The idea was to be creative--and teachers often didn't care what one composed be it an essay, a story, or a poem. Many classes were forged around the idea of daily compositions--journals. Part of the impetus for teaching writing, however, was also for people to learn an appreciation for reading--not so much to become a professional writer.
But as composition became more popular and was added as a requirement to many school's prerequisites, so too did composition come under fire, just as it does today. What exactly should composition teach? Creativity? Critical thinking? Rhetorical argument? Literary appreciation? Business-oriented writing for specific disciplines? As composition moved more closely into the line of rhetoric, creativity began again to be placed on the back burner.
Writers, however, began to enter the academy more and more as a means to support themselves. (Myers examines the founding of various writing colonies, which is also a rather fascinating discussion.) And that's when New Criticism came to the fore. The idea was that writers would read texts closely, examine them, see how the text worked internally, rather than looking to its linguistics or its historical origins. Criticism was, thus, a part of teaching writers to write and readers to read. (The elephants teach refers to the idea that a zoologist study not just the animal from the outside but that the zoologist actually become the animal--he or she lives the life of the elephant to understand how it is constructed. So it is that a writer lives the writing life, reads like a writer, to understand how a piece of writing is forged.)
But eventually criticism and creative writing split off. And thus we now how several segmentations in an English department--linguists, rhetoricians, critics, and creative writers. Though the process started in the 1920s, much of the influx of writers to the academy happened after World War II, with the advent of the GI bill and the upswing in the number of degrees being granted. These people needed something to do, and the federal government was happy to pump more money into the system. Creative writing was a cheap program for a university to start (most such universities were not a state's flagship institution but an outlier, looking for a program to include among its specialties). And so it is. An excess of English professors and of money led to more creative writing programs being established, which led more such programs and more and more.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
On "Month to Month" by Sean Gibbon (2647 words) ***
Not so much a tale as a collection of voices, desperate ones. The narrator is a former drinker trying to stay sober--a biker. Archie is too--and a painter. Tyler--a former contractor. All of them had potential. All of them are older and seemingly going nowhere, settled, except perhaps Archie. He's still working at it, and maybe that's what makes for an artist. Read the story here at Agni.
Friday, August 8, 2014
On "Clod Hans" by Hans Christian Anderson (about 1300 words) ***
I've read that many of Anderson's tales are fairly political. Unfortunately, not knowing the context of his writing very well, most of this is lost to me (and to most of today's readers). In some cases, however, the points are pretty over the top and thus hard to miss. "Clod Hans" is one of the more entertaining (and humorous) stories in that vein. It's a tale of three brothers who compete to marry a princess, two smart, and one incredibly stupid. Guess which one wins? And this is how we get our leaders! Read the tale here.
On “Marriage, a History” by Stephanie Coontz ****
Coontz discusses the history of marriage from prehistoric times to the present. I was expecting her to denote that marriage moved from being an affair based on familial decisions, extended families, and convenience rather than true love to one based on a “love” system, and that is exactly what Coontz establishes. However, in that story, Coontz sees an institution that has never been wholly stable and a change in marriage in our modern day that would inevitably lead to its currently changing definition.
The introduction recounts how Coontz came to her topic and was surprised by the history she found--more surprised than she expected to be, though she'd known that the 1950s ideal was a temporal thing. In that introduction Coontz covers various types of marriage as they have existed through history, including agreed-on relations between the same sex, polygamous and polyganous marriages, and even one society that has no marriage concept at all. Marriage, as Coontz brings out, has been throughout history a way of organizing human society. The society without a marriage system was very interesting to read of. Children are raised by this entire African community.
Marriage among the rich and powerful was generally a way to increase one's power and riches. And even among those who were not so well off usually used marriage as a way to aid the community as a whole. Many a marriage was created to gain land, whether it be to merge two countries or two fields.
Much of this changed once the Church entered the picture. As the Church extended its power, familial concerns with regard to treaties were no longer as important as getting the approval of the Church for various things--like marriage itself, or divorce. Interestingly the Church's stance toward divorce and remarriage was not always what it is today. However, as the stance toward divorce became stronger, it became more important for kings to have Church approval to rid themselves of unwanted wives using the Church's ability to declare such marriages annulled. That was needed, not for love, but to ensure heirs--women who could bear sons.
Once the Reformation, happened, that ushered in a time when the Church no longer had say in when and whom people married. It also ushered in the Age of Reason in due time, and with that the foundation for marriage based in love, since society less and less devolved around extended familial relations.
Marrying for love thus started its beginnings in the Renaissance and found full form in the Victorian era. But that era saw husbands as protectors for a frail and frigid but moral sex; women hated sex, but men too needed to avoid it as much as possible. (This was different from the previous era/generation, when women were seen as temptresses, to prone to sexual desire and pulling men away from things that really matter.) As the twentieth century came into being, women came to be seen as more sexual, and men lost the protective aura.
Women increasingly entered the workforce and married older--through World War II. Then the 1950s came, and men came home, taking the women's jobs and taking advantage of GI bill to further their education. In this time, marriage moved to a younger age, divorce actually decreased, and the nuclear family came to be the norm, with men as the breadwinners. This “long decade” lasted only fifteen years, and then marriage continued to develop on its way.
For the issue with love as the basis of marriage means that when love is no longer there or you happen to love someone untraditional, then the extension, by reason, of what should constitute acceptable marriage is no longer based on community standards but on individual desire. And that is why divorce became more common, and why now gay marriage is finding its place into our culture. It also means that other changes to marriage are likely to come.
The introduction recounts how Coontz came to her topic and was surprised by the history she found--more surprised than she expected to be, though she'd known that the 1950s ideal was a temporal thing. In that introduction Coontz covers various types of marriage as they have existed through history, including agreed-on relations between the same sex, polygamous and polyganous marriages, and even one society that has no marriage concept at all. Marriage, as Coontz brings out, has been throughout history a way of organizing human society. The society without a marriage system was very interesting to read of. Children are raised by this entire African community.
Marriage among the rich and powerful was generally a way to increase one's power and riches. And even among those who were not so well off usually used marriage as a way to aid the community as a whole. Many a marriage was created to gain land, whether it be to merge two countries or two fields.
Much of this changed once the Church entered the picture. As the Church extended its power, familial concerns with regard to treaties were no longer as important as getting the approval of the Church for various things--like marriage itself, or divorce. Interestingly the Church's stance toward divorce and remarriage was not always what it is today. However, as the stance toward divorce became stronger, it became more important for kings to have Church approval to rid themselves of unwanted wives using the Church's ability to declare such marriages annulled. That was needed, not for love, but to ensure heirs--women who could bear sons.
Once the Reformation, happened, that ushered in a time when the Church no longer had say in when and whom people married. It also ushered in the Age of Reason in due time, and with that the foundation for marriage based in love, since society less and less devolved around extended familial relations.
Marrying for love thus started its beginnings in the Renaissance and found full form in the Victorian era. But that era saw husbands as protectors for a frail and frigid but moral sex; women hated sex, but men too needed to avoid it as much as possible. (This was different from the previous era/generation, when women were seen as temptresses, to prone to sexual desire and pulling men away from things that really matter.) As the twentieth century came into being, women came to be seen as more sexual, and men lost the protective aura.
Women increasingly entered the workforce and married older--through World War II. Then the 1950s came, and men came home, taking the women's jobs and taking advantage of GI bill to further their education. In this time, marriage moved to a younger age, divorce actually decreased, and the nuclear family came to be the norm, with men as the breadwinners. This “long decade” lasted only fifteen years, and then marriage continued to develop on its way.
For the issue with love as the basis of marriage means that when love is no longer there or you happen to love someone untraditional, then the extension, by reason, of what should constitute acceptable marriage is no longer based on community standards but on individual desire. And that is why divorce became more common, and why now gay marriage is finding its place into our culture. It also means that other changes to marriage are likely to come.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
On "Ib and Little Christina" by Hans Christian Andersen (4436 words) ***
Anderson must have suffered from some kind of lost childhood love, because this theme seems to present itself in story after story of his. Here's one of the better ones. Ib and Christina are young friends. The fortuneteller provides to them a hint of their future, but it proves to be deceptively accurate. Christina grows up, moves away, and marries up. Ib struggles on as a poor man. But fortunes turn quickly, and all is not what it seems. Somehow, I'm to believe that Ib should be satisfied with a replica of Christina. Read the story here.
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