Above the Star-Apple Kingdom

Poem: "the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls", by e. e. cummings

2010-01-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

More things should rattle like fragments of angry candy. And, like a Cambridge lady living in a furnished soul, I, too believe in Longfellow.

Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

2010-01-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I read this book, but it was one of the first ones that I read while I was sort of discovering what I liked about real, good literature. I was going to write about Myra Breckinridge, which I read yesterday on the plane, but I'm really unsure what to say about it, so I think I'm going to let it stew in my mind for another day before attempting to say intelligent things about it.

I'm going to start by making a sort of facile observation that, of all the litearture I've read, Japanese seems to be overall the most positive about nationalism and their county in general. Perhaps someone would care to disagree?

Snow Country, which is probably the best known work by Kawabata, has actually been published in two forms. The one that I read is a novel which is just shy of 200 pages, but Kawabata also published it in "palm of the hand" form, which reduced it to only a few pages. Although the palm-of-the-hand version necessarily loses all of the detail of the novel, the basic structure, movement, and sorrowful beauty is retained, which shows a remarkable control and simplicity that's quite impressive.

The novel revolves around three visits by a ballet critic, named Shimamura, to a geisha, named Komako, in a resort town in the north of Japan. In the first visit, Komako is still fairly immature, leading them to gain sort of friendship as Shimamura tries to protect her and forgives her mistakes. But by the second visit, Komako is a woman and an experienced geisha, leading Shimamura to desire her in a more sexual way than is technically premissive in the geisha-client relationship. And by the third visit, they're having an affair, although Shimamura also gets it for Yoko, who works as a maid at Shimamura's hotel. But their affair is doomed to failure; it literally almost never worked out for geishas, and by putting one of them at the center of his novel, Kawabata is sending us the signal that the ending is going to be sad. And it is, although I won't ruin it beyond that.

In some respects, this traces the development of the emotional maturity of the characters, which is also paralleled in their career development. Komako moes from being an inexperiened girl to a woman capable of supporting an angry love affair with Shimamura, just as she moves from being an unseasoned geisha into a graceful expert (although she learns the shamisen from the radio, which isn't exactly the tradition.) And when the novel ends, she's prepared to move on with her life without bitterness and without Shimamura.

Shimamura, in contrast, has no emotional development or career development; he's frozen in time, which forms the basis for the failure of the relationships in the novel, and also for its tragedy. Shimamura, as quizbowl will tell you, actually doesn't know anything about ballet, his nominal field of expertise - in fact, he's never actually seen one and experienced its beauty in person, . And he's focused on something western, which is never a good trait in a character in a Japanese novel (see: Some Prefer Nettles.) So Shimamura is really quite a failure in his career, doing nothing useful, sitting idly by and leeching off the pres without really contributing any expertise. And the equivalence between his professional development and his emotional maturity is absolute.

Neither of the two major are really complexly realized. The equivalence between emotional and professional maturity is pretty even. But there's a certain beauty in this simplicity, and one can charitably assume that to be Kawabata's goal in writing the novel. Rather than presenting a complex psychological portrait of two characters in their relationship, we get a series of three episodes which illustrate a larger story of loss and beauty between two lovers. I don't think anyone can claim that the novel is really that interesting psychologically But it is beautiful, if simple, and I think that lends credence to the frequent observation that Kawabata was really trying to write a novel-length haiku.

Those observations made, here's a brilliant haiku by Richard Wright, who's way better known for his novels than his extensive poetic writings:

In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white.

And as always, if you want to buy a copy of the book mentioned in this post, you can go here.

Poem: "since feeling is first", e.e. cummings

2010-01-13T06:19:00.000-08:00

Well, counting is apparently beyond me (or I was just really tired), but I actually get to post three more e.e. cummings poems before his time is up and I switch to someone else (Wallace Stevens, ladies and gentlemen!) Here's a less famous, but much more representative poem, by e.e. cummings; it's beloved by myself and several of my friends.

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

—the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Look at the reference to Spring: that's a really characterisitc cummings move. And this is one of his classic, touching love poems. If you haven't liked the cummings thus far, this is what most of his poetry is actually like.

Poem: "pity this busy monster manunkind" by e e cummings

2010-01-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victum(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go.

I love the last idea of this one: "listen: there's a hell/of a good universe next door; let's go." The idea of being able to pack it up and go next door when things aren't going well is entrancing. And "hypermagical ultraomnipotence" is just a fantastic phrase.

This is e.e. cummings in a different, more cosmic mood than we've seen him. There's only one more day of e e cummings left to go, and that will have to be a love poem, simply because that comprises so much of his work.

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

2010-01-12T17:37:00.000-08:00

Guys, I'm sorry I didn't post last night; I had an extremely late night/early morning, and not missing flights takes precedence over posting quasi-book reviews.

I very recently read Disgrace, by South African writer J.M. Coetzee., on the recommendation of a friend of mine. J.M. Coetzee is a unique sort of good writer. The landscape of South Africa is definitely very present in his work; certainly, there's probably a point to be made here about the external reflecting the internal. But that's not where I'm going with this post. Instead, for this blog post, I'm going to be thinking about dimensions of power.

David Lurie, Romanticist and romantic, is sort of in the habit of asserting his power. He seduces a young student in one of his classes, luring her (although she's certainly not entirely unwilling, one never gets the impression that she's particularly excited) into a relationship that she ultimately repudiates by striking back; she brings him up on ethics charges, getting him tossed out of the university. This is pretty standard stuff; the politics of their relationship is a give-and-take that ultimately goes poorly for the original taker.

But Lurie doesn't go gently; he refuses to pander to the ethics committee, standing on the principle that no one but he can possibly know whether or not he regrets his assertion of power and masculinity. And that's not an idle characterization: the novel makes it pretty clear that Lurie's real motivation isn't so much a desire for sex with the young lady, but intsead, a desire to prove himself virile and masculine even in the declining years.

Things go south from there. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter,Lucy, a fiercely independent woman and a lesbian to boot. And out of the confines of his quite modern university, the politics of power are really in plain view. At the climax of the novel, Lurie and his daughter's house is attacked and the poor young woman is raped, which is standardly read as an assertion of power. And it soon becomes clear that the act was at the instigation of her hired help, a black man named Petrus in the post-apartheid era. Petrus' motivations are simple: he wants to take over hte land on which Lucy lives and make it his own, and if that's not possible, he'll settle for having it basically under his control, perhaps by marrying her. These machinations of power are also pretty standard. But they're garish and extreme to us, and to Lurie, who's accustomed to the workings of the more civilized, but no less savage, parts of South Africa.

In some ways, that was really the impact of Disgrace to me. It's far from a one-dimensional novel; I've not even mentioned the Byron storyline, which is quite interesting in and of itself. But when I read Disgrace, I saw parallel worlds coexisting inside one country the savage acts of rape and ritual land-conquer-marriage, and the machinations of the university and the politics of a love affair. That's the South Africa about which J.M. Coetzee writes, and it is a terrifying, beautiful place.

I'd also be amiss if I didn't mention that David Lurie teaches Wordsworth's Prelude, which is a (brilliant) poem I learned about from survey professor extraordinaire Julia Saville, a brilliant lady who did her doctoral work under Coetzee himself. I'm deeply indebted to her for a fantastic introduction to the delights of British literature (which I'm not writing about for a while due to quiz bowl). Thanks, Professor Saville!

And as always, guys, if you want a sweet copy of Disgrace, go here! But I actually have two, so if you're geographically close to me, you can borrow one.

Man, that wasn't about e.e. cummings at all, was it?

Poem: "buffalo bill's defunct" by e.e. cummings

2010-01-11T18:25:00.000-08:00

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
   who used to
   ride a watersmooth-silver
   stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
   Jesus
he was a handsome man
   and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

I haven't really done anything to buck the "not actually representative e.e. cummings poetry" trend, have I?

Poem: "nobody loses all the time" by e e cummings/cooking/a question or two

2010-01-10T08:50:00.000-08:00

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added

my Uncle Sol's farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and

i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my uncle
Sol

and started a worm farm)

Here's another e.e. cummings poem! I fear that I'm giving the people in my audience who don't know a whole lot about e.e. cummings a bad idea of what most of his poetry is like; maybe I can rectify that by writing about him tomorrow in lieu of a book review.

In other news, we're making some awesome sauerbraten for my grandfather's 77th birthday tonight. It has to brine for two days and be turned twice each of those days, so that may give an idea of what's involved here.

If I wrote about about some stuff from philosophy, would you enjoy reading that? Or should I stick to book reviews?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

2010-01-10T08:24:00.000-08:00

If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. One of you yesterday said you were waiting for me to write about something I didn't like. I think that would be a refreshing change of pace, too. Today is not the day, but perhaps tomorrow we can talk about Madame Bovary.

Oh, I saw The Blind Side last night with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and her fiance. Sandra Bullock still doesn't suck at acting, in-movie football games are still kind of boring, and I'm still a way too affected by feel-good stories for my sense of postmodern irony's comfort. Hurrah for the status quo! But one surprise was the noticeable acting talent of Tim McGraw. I'm sure not going to write about football, but if you want to read some stuff about the playoffs, you can go to Andy Watkins' blog. He writes about that kind of thing.

Today's post is about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel by Michael Chabon. The Kavalier of the title is a Jew escaping from Prague (leaving his poor family behind) directly before the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis; Clay is his streetwise cousin from New York. The novel interweaves questions of Jewish identity, sexual identity, and the duties of nationalism against the rather quirky, but oddly appropriate, history of American super-hero comic books.

Here I'm going to take a side note to repeat an observation I'm hearing a lot lately, which is that superheroes really seem to be an American phenomenon, especially pitted against the backdrop of Europe. Sherlock Holmes is probably about as close as Britain gets to a native superhero, and he sure isn't leaping any tall buildings in a single bound.

The novel is really too long to succinctly summarize, I'm afraid. It's quite fast-paced, however, and includes one of my favorite aspects, which is an immersive experience in a time and place that I'll never experience. The New York of Joe, Sammy, Rosa, and Tracy (who bears the appellation "Bacon"; an amusing image of the forbidden for a Jew's homosexual lover.) is a vibrant, growing place, even in the midst of the crippling depression. Times are tough, but American optimism still rules the day.

One of the more interesting elements of Kavalier and Clay is its recurring imagery of escapism. The two heroes of the novel draw a character called The Escapist, who in an early cover of his comic book run is depicted punching Hitler in the jaw after escaping from being chained into impossible bonds. Kavalier is a trained performing escape artist and escapes from oppression under the Nazis. Later, after seeing Citizen Kane, Kavalier escapes from the limitations of the medium that he works in to create new panel arrangements that explode the genre. Paradoxically, Clay escapes into the confines of heteronormative marriage after a gay party that he's attending is raided by the government. And across the country, both in the world of the novel and in the real world, thousands escape from mundanity and dullness into the bright, paneled world of comic books and Michael Chabon novels.

Chabon's style is pretty good, although there's nothing I'd really call distinctive about it. But his real strength is in his characterization. The characters at the center of the book are well-realized, and even the one-off characters are people you want to know, and some of the peripheral characters are delights. The dry wit of Sheldon Anapol is a particular highlight. And they've all got just a touch of the spectacular about them, a little nod to the comic books that the novel draws upon.

This book was one of the more interesting ones I've read recently, and is one of a small handful that I've re-read. Especially if you want an insightful look into the history of comic books (the hearings about the Code are particularly interesting!), I'd highly suggest a read.

And, as always, if you want to buy a sweet copy, your friends at Amazon can help you with that here.

Quicksand, by Nella Larsen

2010-01-09T14:10:00.000-08:00

First off, a shout-out to internet personality Tyler King, who taught me to edit the html of the posts with the poems in them so they stopped doing an annoying thing where words would break at the edge of the posts. Thanks, Tyler!

This post is about a book called Quicksand, which was written by your friend and mine Nella Larsen. Nella Larsen had a rather interesting life; she only wrote a couple of books, and after that a rather dubious plagiarism charge by someone whose name no one quite remembers brought a quick end to a quite promising literary career. It's perhaps for that reason no one much studied Nella Larsen. But her two books, Quicksand and Passing, seem to be popping up all over the place on college syllabi lately; one might say she's become sort of fashionable to teach. Last summer my American Lit instructor succumbed to the tyranny of trend, and so we read Quicksand.

All that really makes it sound like I don't think she's a good writer, and that she's getting taught only because of fashion; au contraire, I think the woman was fantastic, and I'm glad the wind blew the right way that time. Quicksand was wonderful.

The story itself is about a woman named Helga Crane, who is half white and half black; not so unusual in itself, but Helga is an aesthete. She wants pretty things, she wants luxury, and she wants freedom from convention; those drives really propel her, and they make her a fantastically unconventional character. Helga couldn't really give a damn about the struggle for civil rights, or improving her race. She seems to feel like she should care about them, and she wonders why she doesn't, but in the end, she just doesn't care. She gives up a job teaching at a prestigious school for black children for unemployment in Chicago because she feels that the atmosphere is stifling.

So what this does is gives us access to the psychology of a character who struggles with questions of race and identity, but rather than externalizing them into a struggle to change the world, wholly internalizes them. And while that's a refreshing change of pace, things really don't go so well for Miss Crane. She ends of rejecting a couple of marriage proposals and moving to Denmark (both Helga and the esteemed Miss Larsen had Danish ancestry), where her near-black skin makes her a societal curiosity and a pawn for the social advancement of her Danish relatives.

So all this internalizing and agonizing over questions of race leaves her deliriously wandering the streets of New York after a brief period of feeling like she belonged in Harlem. Helga's paradoxical search for a community in which she fits while desiring to hold herself back is the drive of the environment of the novel, as opposed to her internal drives. And then she marries a southern preacher, and all of it turns out to be pointless; she has too many children and (probably) dies while being chained to a man and a community that she hates with people who hate her.

One of the triumphs of literature in general and the novel in particular, especially in the hands of extremely skilled writers, is its ability to give its audience a look at a foreign psychology. Quicksand does that in a refreshing way that radically inverts some conventions, which, while important and moving, can seem rather trite through overexposure. I highly enjoyed it.

PS: If you'd like to read Quicksand, and if you haven't I think you should, you can buy a sweet copy of it here.

Poem: "anyone lived in a pretty how town," by e.e. cummings

2010-01-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

Something more substantive later, my dear readers, I hope. But at least the "poem every day" project hasn't yet collapsed. In the meantime, I'm off to the store to pick up things for my grandfather's birthday cake, but I think I feel a meditation on art coming on.

Poem: "i sing of olaf glad and big"

2010-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand; 
but--though an host of overjoyed 
noncoms(first knocking on the head 
him)do through icy waters roll 
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed 
anent this muddy toiletbowl, 
while kindred intellects evoke 
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag 
upon what God unto him gave) 
responds,without getting annoyed 
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers 
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) 
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion  
voices and boots were much the worse, 
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease 
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified  
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

Before this blog, I had a couple of abortive attempts at posting a poem a day. I'm not sure that that's going to work out this time, so no promises. But here is a first attempt, a poem by a great favorite of mine, e.e. cummings. "I sing of olaf glad and big" is a poem about the detrimental affects of the military on a young man, but also about that same young man's defiance in the face of what we can all only assume is sodomy with a hot poker. I hope to post six more e.e. cummings poems this week!

go go gadget virtual bookshelf/ "Trifles", by Susan Glaspell

2010-01-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this outside in beautiful Bradenton, Florida, which is very near Sarasota. It's about 60 degrees outside, which I'm told is cold for the season. I remain skeptical.

I have a Shelfari. Shelfari is a website that allows you to sort of have a record on a screen in front of you of books you've read, as well as sharing your opinions of them with other people. Luckily, I have a blog for that second thing, but it's sort of nice to be able to take a look back and remember the impressions of things that I had as I read them.

This is a link to my Shefari:

http://www.shelfari.com/o1517943055

Many of my "book review"-esque posts will come from things that are listed on that site, so if you want to hear about any specific book listed there, you can comment and let me know.

I was paging through said virtual bookshelf today, looking for something cool to write about, and I hit on Trifles, which is a rather short one-act play by a lady named Susan Glaspell. Mrs. Glaspell was an influential founding member of the Provincetown Players, an at-first amateur literary/dramtatic company which spawned a couple of names that will no doubt be familiar to the quizbowlers/English majors/lofty educated types among you: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O'Neill both had their literary careers "launched" by the Provincetown Players, according to Wikipedia. They also did plays by already established but high quality authors, like Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, author of the incomparable drama of the Paris lesbian scene Nightwood. (Can you open Wikipedia for yourself if you're curious about who they are? I think you can.)

So anyway, Trifles itself is a one-act play. The plot of it is relatively simple. A woman, driven mad by her terribly restricting marriage, kills her husband, but no one can figure out who's done it, or why. The sheriff, a man from the town, and their respective wives show up on the scene of the crime to figure out what happened. To make a short, symbol-heavy story even shorter, the two women are able to figure out how and why the wife killed her husband, and the men are puzzled but agree to leave the mystery unsolved, complacent in their knowledge that the women have no idea what's going on.

But the play is actually a little more interesting than just a "haha, those men! Always ignoring women, what fools!" screed against patriarchy. The two women, having figured out the mystery, willfully choose to leave it alone, because they know that the murderess will be executed; however, they feel that the husband, admittedly a rather wretched specimen, deserved what he got. Their evidence for this assertion is a dead canary.

This opens us up to what the play is actually about, in my reading: the tension between masculinity and femininity, expressed here in terms of justice. Whereas a partriarchal society might adhere to the old saw "justice is blind," the women, rebelling, choose to take into account the circumstances and, effectively, decide that the woman already served her term.

Now, I think the play is a little simplistic in the way that it tackles this problem, but I think the larger question of whether or not justice must be blind to be fair is an interesting one, especially in the context of the now-legal profiling of Middle Eastern airline passengers. And that's the thought with which I'll leave this entry.

PS: Please leave your opinions! Comments rock.

PPS: You can buy a sweet copy of Trifles here:
http://www.amazon.com/Trifles-Susan-Glaspell/dp/0981967310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262981596&sr=8-1

Or you can read it online, courtesy the University of Virginia, here:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=GlaTrif&tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed

EDIT:

As Donald points out in the comments (everyone should leave comments!), Susan Glaspell also wrote a short story version of Trifles called "A Jury of Her Peers." You can read that here:
http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html

It's the first post of every blog

2010-01-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

But it's a very important one. Here's what this blog is going to be about:

Me. I'm a senior in English and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I plan to go to law school after graduation. Then, I plan to be a lawyer.
Literature. I read a lot of books that I think would mostly be considered quality, and I usually have thoughts on them.
Stuff in the social sciences, critical theory, that sort of things.
Maybe the occasional post about stuff in the fine arts so I can get some cool pictures on here. That's a cool picture, up there. It's the "profane love" from Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.
TV, movies, music, perhaps some political things

I've had a couple of abortive attempts at trying to post a poem every day; I'm not quite sure why that failed. I may try doing that again, in addition to everything else.