Writing into the Morning

January 15, 2020

It is early January. Does life feel flat, or is it filled with fresh promise, like a juicy filled donut? It really depends on the beholder. I am in the process of reconciling myself to the fact that Big Uni is not calling me back to offer an interview to the Big Scholarship. Sigh. But my proposal was so good! I really think it was. We are back to “I believe in me”, which is a good thing, and I only feel stronger, somehow. Taking 2 weeks to compile that application package and write RIDICULOUSLY POSITIVE things about one’s self has only galvanized me. I will write those articles and books someday, because they need to be written. I need to write them. That’s not the question.

It is wonderful, how it all progressed, this sense of self: when I started my PhD I didn’t think I would really see it through. It was something to do because the job market was so bad. For the next two years, I doubted myself terribly. Then I spoke at a conference, flinging my ideas out there, and it went ok. The whole point anyway, is not to be universally loved but to discuss topics, that’s scholarship. But it felt amazing. And then, I still had setbacks, doubts, impostor syndrome. Perhaps I have just stayed doing it long enough. Over the course of 2019, my fourth year plugging away at my topic (while working) I began to…not relax, because I am often a bundle of nerves, but to accept this: this is my path, whether it works or not. This is my job even if I have to do it alongside another job (although another full-time job would be quite hard to manage). But it must be done. I feel I was born to do these topics. And I’ve grown into this precept so much it seems to be true. Only time will tell, and anything can happen in life, but like the early Canadian pioneer lady who landed on PEI after a rough sea voyage, and refused to continue further inland, Here I Stay.

I do have the idea that “cream will rise”–once you actually start publishing good stuff they cannot ignore you—and they cannot stop you publishing good stuff, if it really is good. But if cream never does rise in my case, and there have been plenty of forgotten thinkers and artists appreciated only after their deaths, I will at least have challenged myself to the end of my abilities, in the process extending them, and reaching, reaching.

So, in December and a bit of January, I read Schadenfreude: A Love Story by Rebecca Schuman. I will not bother to type out the subtitle here. It’s about a woman who tries to be an academic for about 15 years, and then gives it up and has a baby, a blog post of hers goes viral, and then she lands a book deal (those were the days!) so everything is fine.

It IS very much a memoir, and there is a lot about academia in it, which is why I wanted to read it, but there is also a LOT about it about the loves and hookups she has had, filtered through the lens of time of a very specific ocular strength: the one that makes you look a lot cooler than you were. Usually this is because you forgot the embarrassing parts of life (thank god brains edit), although Schuman does make a lot of fun of herself for being weird or uncool, these usually help (though too much self-deprecation never does), but I am sorry to say this, even though I sort of enjoyed reading the book, I found the narrator equal parts annoying and refreshingly honest.

I do apologize, because she is a real person, its just, somehow, the tone of the book. And she says motherf***ing about 200 times. I’m no prude, but it was just like, I GET IT. You’re not meant to be an academic. Because you are so rad and cool and loud and not a prude! She even reports at one point, that she was told after an interview that she “had a personality” which was considered a negative, and the reason she didn’t get the job. I get it. You are cool. But, I digress. I was just listening to a brilliant youtube video of Leena Norms last night where she said “don’t make your thing about hating on other people’s art.” That is good advice. So I am not going to keep describing in what ways this author ticked me off. In the end she decided it was healthiest to stop trying for academic jobs when nothing was happening after 2 years, and it was ruining her relationship (ok, that’s fair) but then it’s just a bit grating that she is able to fall onto the support of a loving husband, produce a child (she did it! she is a Woman and worthy!) and maybe there are a lot of other people for whom it is not wrapped up so neatly. I do think, however, that the author does a good job of never implying to us that it was ‘always supposed to work out this way, ‘ she’s quite honest that it is just what happened.

I’m torn between wanting to say “but she just gave up!” and the fact that really, it is everyone’s right to give up. But in my marrow I can’t avoid saying “she must not have wanted it badly enough” which is a terrible thing to say, and unfair . By the end of the he job search, the author was quite honest about the fact she wanted the affirmation of getting a job. She said (I’m paraphrasing) that “by the end of several years of turning of her PhD into a book and travelling all over for interviews, she wasn’t sure what she wanted any more. She wanted to be told that she was good enough for a job by getting it,” but the point of this path beyond getting the job had become more murky. I can understand.

I personally have never been about landing the job, and that may account for some of the struggles I have had. I know jobs are necessary (how will those student loans pay themselves?) but I am just concentrating on the PhD, and seeing what comes of it, not what it leads to. In my tiny niche subject, jobs are quite rare, and sometimes I think: why would it be me? But I also don’t think that it couldn’t be me. In terms of the really plum roles, you just have to catch one. And you never know.

Schuman captures perfectly something that I hope is never part of my own life, the struggle to think of something to write about from a new angle, suitably buzz-worthy angle, with lots of jargon in the title. That definitely does exist in academia, as it becomes ever more like a factory, in many places academics must produce a particular quota of papers and books within a particular time frame, just in order to keep their jobs. Not that academics need to live totally unrestricted, but when we try and quantify scholarship in terms of page count, we are going to get worse quality works in the long run.

This book was good. Definitely worth the read, and well-paced, for the story it told. I take issue with the fact that somehow her “great love of Kafka” is wound up in her highschool crush—-that does kind of make women look like idiots—and the highschool chapters were a bit hard to get through for me. That is going way back—too far back for my taste. Also—and this is just personal, there were like 3 times the author praised herself for her physical beauty—it seemed a bit…pointless…and Schuman writes with what some might call an outrageous zest for life—which I felt was rather “look how much craaaazy sh*t I did, I was so cool and carefree”—and that’s a choice, personally I would draw a veil over those parts of the past for my sake and that of others. In general I hope to forget stupid stuff, not drudge it up again.

But of course that desire is antithetical to memoir….and memoir must also be an art form. Because there is no way that she could remember that when she left the Prague railway station in 1996 that there was a loud American in a cordoroy skirt telling the train service personnel off. Not after all the things you do in life can your remember an ugly skirt from 25 years ago. And therefore, a lot of this stuff has to be invented. Not the larger events, but the details, which are what made the book come alive. This isn’t really a criticism, it’s more me realizing what is going on here. I have a few comments, for one thing, the author did land several teaching jobs and a fellowship, whereas some people who finish PhDs never actually use them; I think she was already pretty successful. Also, she often implies she was “poor” but…her parents were both professors (not super well paid, but more so than many other jobs) and at one time she is living in New York city with no discernible job… she’s “volunteering” staging a Broadway play….anyway. Unless my kindle-app skipped, she covered the period of her Master’s in about 2 pages. But the Germany parts were ok. She was too hard on her first host family but she admits she was an awful guest for them. I did feel for her in various exchanges she had with Germans, especially on the way to fluency.

I did not come away from this book with a profound interest in German literature as I had hoped (it seems nothing can impart that to me, except for maybe actually trying to read it) but the ways in which snippets from literature were worked in to this book were very interesting, and I liked the practice of captioning the chapters with various German words, of the type that seem to contain a world in a word. All the romantic relationships could have been cut in my eyes, or summarized, except for the last one (what a prude I’ve become! But nothing IS less interesting than other people’s relationships!) because it shows how TWO people pursuing academic careers interact. Apparently the men have infinite patience and achieve early success (i.e., they land a job) and pay all the bills (this is also the way I currently have it so I REALLY need to get off my judgy-train).

Obviously I have had a lot of conflicting feelings while reading this book, as it describes a clever woman giving up and letting a man save her…when I am currently being supported and will never reach my goals without this period of support…that’s dissonance for you. Pursuing your dreams can be peinlich.

(embarassing)

The Cleah Winnah

January 11, 2020

There is something to be said about the effects of restriction plus time, in that it helps you think more and more clearly about what you want. This is true in so many small cases in my life…in restricting myself to trying a PhD, and only that, for several years I did in fact, hit upon the time period I would like to make my life’s work, in having put on weight so that few things fit and even fewer look good, I have gotten very clear on what I like and don’t like garment-wise, and having very little money (as a result of the PhD) I can buy so little that I must be very, very clear on what is absolutely necessary. And it is a good way to be.

In Germany, I can’t get many of the English books I want, so I need to really THINK about what is worth reading, for my education or my enjoyment, keep lists, and buy rarely and incredibly selectively. For the most part, once I have established a list, I need to see it through. Because my options are not infinite. I need to keep writing until I finish the PhD, I need to wear my winter boots until they have holes in them. Both of these ‘processes of patience’ grow me, I think. Things are getting clearer.

Anyway, before I was even a couple chapters into this book, it wasn’t grabbing me in the way I expected, and I wanted to put it down. But having so few options made me pick it up again and try again, and I am so, so glad I did. But the mid-point I was ‘rationing’ the book, letting myself read it as a treat when all the work was done, and I didn’t want it to end. It just got better and better and better. It was hilarious.

Isn’t it also funny, that earlier in the year, I didn’t have much good to say about many books? I was only tolerating some of them. So did I change? Has everything just lightened up for me? (In the final year of the PhD? Somehow I don’t think so). Or, did I randomly hit upon 4 really great books to end my year with? Well, I don’t think it was random, it was a result of having stuck to the plan, the overall plan of reading 12 books a year, and altering this plan in minor ways, because, over the course of the year, I did learn more about what I like. This whole process was very interesting. It means, don’t wait until you have the perfect list, or perfect plan, just start. Things can be changed, moved around. But certainly, we get better at doing things by doing them.

I loved Cold Comfort Farm. I hope you read it. Someday, for cozy fun, in the future, I will read more Stella Gibbons, especially the other two Cold Comfort Farm books, Christmas at CC and Conference at CC, which are much less well known, and perhaps not in print any more. When I started to read this book it was because I’d liked the cover with the cow on it when I had worked in a bookshop in 2008, and I knew it was supposed to be funny. I didn’t know that it had taken the (English) world by storm in about 1933. Some people didn’t appreciate that it parodied super-dramatic rural dramas—and those people take things too seriously!

I Read a Play

January 4, 2020

Book Choice for October: The Persians, Aeschylus

Happy New Year! Yes, we are a few days into the New Year now, and I am just doing a bit of catch-up on my blog, tying up loose ends. I finished reading The Persians today, it took about an hour and a half to read all together, so it was rather short, although I do think it was complete. The ending made sense, but it didn’t really seem to tell an entire story. The play depicts how the Persian Queen, Atossa (the widow of the Persian king Darius) learns of her son Xerxes’ defeat at the hands of the Greeks at the sea-battle of Plataea. And then something cool happens, and then it ends. That’s it.

This play is something which probably requires a lot of context, and I didn’t read the Commentary yet, but I will. The gist of the historical situation of this play is that the Greeks were justifiably proud of their second repelling of a much larger force than their own (which probably was true), in 480 BC. The first attack on mainland Greece took place 10 years before, at Marathon, and also ended in disgrace for the Persians. After the second defeat Aeshchylus wrote this play, although Persians had likely been depicted in Greek dramas previously, but none of these other plays survive.

It’s very interesting, because obviously this play is meant to make Athenians feel justly proud of their achievements, and their democracy, and rip on the Persians’ autocracy and for not being able to beat them, despite being the great power of the world at the time. (The Persians make use of Egyptian soldiers and Babylonian troops, so this is after the time that Persia controlled both those territories as well). As a counterpoint: once in a Greek History class a professor told us laughingly something that seemed shocking at the time, as we were all there as devotees of “Classical civilization”: “Can you imagine how it was from the point of view of the Persians? They owned the world, all its goods and all its people. And they come to some place on the very edge of everything, with tiny towns and no written culture and in their minds, these people are so incredibly unimportant. What the Greeks remember as the glorious wars that formed their nation and identity, likely appeared to the Persians as meaningless scuffles with unwashed barbarians that it was unnecessary even to record.”

I’m paraphrasing, as it was more than 15 years ago, but suffice it to say, it was rather shocking to realize that in the lead-up to their own glorious “Classical” period, the Greeks really were, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.

But, now. Now their records are what Western civilization very often has chosen to model itself on. When there were so many other enormous and older civilizations around, that few people today know much about. The Persians after all, were only inheriting territories conquered by the incredibly mighty and organized Assyrian empire. (Yes, those Bible guys).

The fact that the past as we know it, is almost totally an accident of preservation, is just boggling, especially in the case of those other Bible guys: the Biblical patriarchs who, although they set (some of) the trends that were followed by Western civilization for the next 2,000 plus years, in their heyday they were quite an isolated, fringe group of pastoralists, on the edge of much bigger happenings, outside of the much more advanced civilizations of their time. For some reason, Western history seems to have been put on its trajectory not by the losers, but by the nonentities (of their times).

It’s just interesting.

What is also interesting in this play comes during its final act: King Darius, Xerxes’ father, lately dead, is necromantically raised up to earth again for a chat. It’s very intriguing, and Aeschylus paints Darius as civilized and wise. Also, with all that is said in the play about Persia lamenting its dead, and the vivid refrains about wives mourning their husbands and families grieving their sons, this play is very sympathetic to those who lost loved ones, for a propaganda piece, if that is what it was meant to be. It’s possible that Aeschylus was diving deep into the emotions that make us all human, regardless of native culture…I need to study what has been written about this play more.

The Persians is just a very, very cool document to have, and I am sure that it has itself been influential, I would be that many of our perceptions about an East-West Europe/Asia divide were spawned by people thinking about this play. I definitely want to know more about this time period, and Archaic Greek literature in general after reading this. I am sure it’s just the tip of the iceberg of a whole history of thought.

I Read a Poem

December 29, 2019

So, I read a poem. I read The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot, knowing nothing about it, I was totally ignorant of how it tied into the First World War if you can believe, I thought it was just going to be about the emptiness of modernity. I quite liked it, it painted intimate, highly-coloured images, although I didn’t really care about the short chapter on the sailor and the final chapter about well, walking through very dry lands.

I gave each section lots of time to sink in and I read them each a few times. I did a bit of background reading about the “Georgian” poets of the 1900s and teens, who still mainly praised the beauty of nature and individual responses to that. I read one academic’s blog which had a section explaining the potential sources for and meanings of each section of The Wasteland, and found that pretty useful, but in the end, we don’t know “exactly” what is going on in The Wasteland, we have interpretations.

Through this blog I was suggested three poems to read alongside of The Wasteland, to contextualize it. Well, two were outright suggested in the academic’s article and linked directly, the third was only mentioned (but we will get to that). So, getting a bit of a taste for something I appear to have been missing my whole life, I read Rupert Brook’s 1912 poem “Grantchester” and found it MARVELOUS. Apparently Georgian poetry, and RHYMES are for me, and I think I will attempt to commit this one to memory. The rhymes are sufficiently jingly enough, I believe, and it praises Cambridge, which is alright I guess. This poem was being offered as the “pre-War” selection, and yes, it preserves the vanished sunshine of those mythic afternoons, of which we have by now heard so much about, absolutely everyone everywhere was having a fantastic time before 1914…but still, I like this poem a lot.

The War poem that was suggested, also as a modern-style poem was “Antwerp” written by Ford Madox Ford and published in 1914. There was despair and the gloom of war here, the waste, the overturning of those old, pretend glorious-battle ideals. One knows that this sort of disillusion happened, and some poets record the carnage, poetically, but it’s wonderful, in a sombre way, for me to read this eyewitness account from so close to the time. Already by 1914 pathos was being admitted as a war-experience, and it would get so much worse. At home I have a book of poetry from the First World War, this made me think I would explore it more. We only ever learned (year after year after year) ‘In Flanders Fields’ which I still have by heart, and its basically the only thing I do.

The most surprising thing, was that when I searched out the third-mentioned poem, which I could only get as a pdf someone had scanned (and it is true, apparently only 175 copies were ever printed) was that it was truly great. The Wasteland is also great, this is not a ranking competition, but what was certainly underplayed on this blog was HOW modern Hope Merrillees’ Paris: A Poem was, published 1919, in both form and typeography. In content it is very similar to The Wasteland which appeared three years later, Paris involves multitudes of Classical allusions, but who or what is speaking is more vague than in The Wasteland, facts and fancies just seem to emanate out of the city of Paris itself. T.S. Eliot’s poem is more people-focused, and in this way, not quite as ‘high-art’ I think, he has to have speakers telling us what to think. You don’t know what is happening in either poem, and they both do make you feel, but I think I prefer Merrilees. I want to read it again. The Wasteland is certainly worth a re-read (except the boring last section, blergh) but there are very few things that strike me exactly right, so much that I would want to read them again.

What is also interesting in this story is the sexism, or I should rather say, the “accidents of history.” It’s true, Merrilees poem didn’t seem to ‘catch-on’ when it was first published, maybe it was even a bit too early. And it has never been reprinted, it seems, outside of scholarly editions of her works, of which now about 5 exist. Apparently there is even an acronym I saw used in just the first few lines of a TLS column I cannot get ahold of, FFM, for “forgotten female modernist.” So maybe there have been a bevy of ladies who just fell into the cracks in The Wasteland.

But, it IS worth nothing that Merrilees’ work was published three years before Eliot’s, by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and T.S. Lewis was an acquaintance/friend of hers and also, apparently of Merrilees. I think it is almost a certainty that he read her poem, and the fact that she first mentions April’s unkindness as a month, twice in her poem…it seems…that with some work on the subject it could be established that The Wasteland borrows from Paris: a Poem, mainly with the method of referencing the classical world (I know that is done a lot, but the way in which it is done in both poems seems to a casual reader, quite similar). What T.S. Eliot did not borrow was her interesting typeography (I love it myself) which would have been a bit of a giveaway. Eliot separates his poem into sections headed by Roman numerals just like Ford Madox Ford’s Antwerp (which may be why it was suggested as something that should be read alongside The Wasteland). Ford does not go crazy in his word-imagery though, it is still very “understandable” what is happening in his poem.

I’m just going to end with something that rankled. Now (since about 1990) it is beginning to be realized that there was (at least one) poem which very much presaged The Wasteland. But this certainly hasn’t affected what is taught to us normals. I have only ever heard of T.S. Eliot, and how you should read his modern work which changed everything. Oh, I have also heard of Ezra Pound, and that he did quite a decent amount of pruning to The Wasteland (and also, about his awful politics). And what is worse, is that the academic blog I read also tries to explain Paris: A Poem away, as a coincidence, writing (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find it again) “it almost seems as if the post-world War I world required such responses.”

I know, I know, it seems tiny. But this is the difference between men’s and women’s contributions. The same blog says The Wasteland is “timeless” and “landmark”, while admitting it has several precedents, but that nevertheless T.S. Eliot “took modernism to new heights.” Not that there has to be a direct comparison, and The Wasteland is also great, but it actually doesn’t go farther than Paris: A Poem, because that poem also plays with the layout of words on a page, which I think makes it categorically “more modern.” And it is fine, to laud a great man, I’m sure that tendency is not going to go away soon. Fine. But it is the totally unconscious down-playing of Merrilees’ poem’s rights of originality and precedence, by implying, oh so casually, only when speaking of her work, that sometimes the Zeitgeist just makes works like this appear. Just births them magically into existence.

No. No. It’s not an accident, when a woman hits upon genius and originality. It is genius. Punkt.

Do read them though. Read all four. This is a new sensation for me, to be able to encourage you to read something I did, but I am ever so glad I read these poems! And I would not be adverse to reading more of any of these authors in the future.

The Year Wanes

December 13, 2019

I’m having a very mid-November feeling, despite the fact that we are officially on the 12th day of Christmas—if indeed the days started at 12 and counted down until Christmas Eve on the 24th? Is that how it worked? Ah for lost days, lost times and lost ways.But before I go down a nostalgia whirlpool (I can vividly remember writing “The year wanes” in a diary of mine on a gloomy November of highschool or university….probably the year was 2003)…oh for THOSE time and those days…

It’s very odd that the past doesn’t just evaporate when it goes. It can be clearly brought back for seconds-long visions, like my arm reaching over to slap my radio alarm clock—god what happened to that trusty thing—so faithful—everyday at 7am on my blue dresser with the sky lightening and the room frigid. (Well, actually, the moment I recall is from a sunny warm day, must have been a summer morning, when for a second I realized I am living and my brain recorded it permanently…)

Like I said…before we drop through the wormhole…

Oh no, I promise this isn’t drafted (I’d never!) but this leads too well into what I wanted you mention to you, on this blog ostensibly about books but more about my feelings, is that after polishing off The Idiot I read Alice in Wonderland (and Alice Through The Looking Glass, as they were bound together) and I didn’t like either at all.

Now I should say, that since I got back from Canada I was suffering a lot, in my head, from homesickness mainly at first, then that faded out, leaving generalized Very Low Mood for the past few weeks, so much so that when I was reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a very depressing book, on the sly, I felt like YES I need this misery-train read right now, but I would ALSO step back and be like “dear Jesus thank you that I’m not in such a bad place as THIS girl” the narrator, god her life was awful. So that book slightly put things into perspective for me. And secondly, I’ve been feeling so anxious overall that I ACTUALLY caved and did what everyone tells you to do, but is “the most under-used treatment” —and I did some exercise (gasp, horror)!

And I’m so out of shape that it’s HARD for me, and it’s only saving grace is that I’m following along to 80s and 90s workout videos on youtube and they are GREAT and kind of hilarious and seem to somehow preserve a totally different, possibly more naive, and more optimistic time.

Yes, when all else fails, at the very last ditch (before therapy) there is exercise….

But where was I? Oh yes. Tumbling. Alice. Yes. I really tried to put away my low mood and read something which I always have meant to, something that people find light and exciting. And I didn’t like it. I can see that it might have been light and exciting for 1890—and oh yes, Alice was a real pert little thing—but I really had to make myself get through it.

This did lead to a conversaton with my boyfriend about how he has something good to say about almost every book ever–and I never do (I did think to myself—IS this depression? Inability to enjoy things?) but I don’t think so. I know what I like (the Anne of Green Gables series, the greatest literary achievement the world has ever known), but Alice just made me tired. I mean, Alice walks around tired herself most of the time, and frustrated at all the nonsense. So yeah, August’s Classic down, disappointment all around…

I really did try by the way, I watched a documentary about Lewis Carroll on youtube, which of course, having the context that he probably was a pedophile only mad it worse, and I watched the Disney cartoon too, searching for the magic. It must not be my kind of magic, though it has delighted generations of readers.

Lest you run away thinking that I myself am tired of my self-imposed 12 Books a Year, or that I have over-extended myself (I have), I have had some thoughts about that. Alice was August’s book, and it took a lot of the effort I had left. I thought about giving up–it’s no fun if you are just making yourself read things you are not enjoying, and I had a big think about the rest of the books I’d like to read for the last 4 months of the year.

I’m now very sure about 3 of them. I want to read, as I’d planned from the start (because I am a very funny girl) The Waste Land for September (with whatever explanatory notes I can grab for free off the internet) because September is back-to-school month in Canada (the joke is that I’m still in school wasting my life—ooh it doesn’t look so good when written out like that, it’s supposed to be read WRY) and although I wanted to read any truly spooky story in October, with the dead leaves swirling, October vanished in the run up to my sister’s wedding (perfectly reasonable), but October is the only time I would read scary stuff, because it’s atmospheric, obviously.

And since that #atmosphere is over, I’m reading The Persians by Aeschylus, because I always wanted to read that and something tells me I am for once hitting the nail, it’s going to be brilliant and I’m going to love it. So that’s good, but so far I’m only in the Introduction to Edith Hall’s edition–still, I was Loving It while I perused it in the waiting room before my visa renewal.

As I had planned, I got ahold of a copy of Cold Comfort Farm for November–it has stood out in my mind for years as the absolute best thing to curl up in as blanket with and snicker to. But surprise, that is not happening, I have only slightly raised my eyebrows once and drawn my mouth down into a firm, but impressed line at another point. (The second one was funny, but so far, every sentence is dripping with a malignering sarcasm, it seems so heavy-handed. I can imagine it is a parody of Thomas Hardy’s novels, full of rural people with raging passions (or similar, I haven’t read him). But I’m a bit miffed–the back said it would be screamingly funny! Perhaps it will pick up.

So, I have 17 days til the end of the year, and 3 short works to read, and a humongous PhD to write—I’m not worried. I have just decided to not proclaim what my last book to read will be, the December book, except to say that it will certainly not be De Rerum Natura-–honestly, what kind of person was I in March? I don’t know her now.

But I’ll tell you two things—I did a big used-book buy on Amazon (wasn’t it big when those euros were slapped into Canadian, eh?!) and I bought quite a lot of the titles that I have been diligently keeping track of in my phone as things I’d like to read next year. So I’m already cheating on my next year’s list, and December, with each other, and I’m not going to write about that situation until the dust settles.

The second thing is (oooh I like how I’m perking up with talking about reading plans, and just a tiny second pisco). As human nature WOULD have it, I realized in the tub that the only thing I want to read Right Now is something I forgot to buy, and that is Schadenfreude, a Memoir. THAT is what I need right now. I’m really struggling with German, I want to be fluent without having to practice with other humans, or read in German (this plan is going as well as it sounds) and my suckiness with the language is increasing my fish-out-of-water-ness daily. This fish struggles with the persistent feeling that the water rubs her the wrong way a lot of the time—this fish is squandering the best opportunity for learning German she will ever have—ugh this fish is so privileged—-And it finally hit me, when I made my brain very quiet, that Schadenfreude is about a person who LOVES German literature (and perhaps also the culture). It’s about an English native speaker who loved German so much she pursued it to a PhD—this book will likely be peppered with love for German that I can absorb and be influenced by, as I’m far too apt to be in most situations!!! I must get it, as an ebook if I must, now now now!!

Originally I was just hing to read because it’s the story of a thwarted academic (from the blurb I have the idea that post-PhD, academia does not love her back) but this approach–how and WHY to love German is much better. Show me why I should care—please don’t start with Goethe, but if you work him in later….I’m listening.

So yes. This has been “The Waning Year,” called a “Reading Wrap-Up/Reading Vlog on youtube when accompanied by pictures. Thank you for attending Slow Scholarship, where we SHOULD endeavor to read in order to contextualize our life, but more often end up inserting literature INTO our lives, with negligible to minor impact on our outlooks. But I bought a new bookcase today, to house the pile of books that have lived on the floor for three months, and I feel hopeful. I must be getting somewhere.

The Idiot (No, not that one)

November 20, 2019

Book Choice for June 2019, by Elif Batuman

Look at me, wheeeee, third post in a month, I’m really going for it! That said, I do have a lot to catch up on. Finally bringing Night and Day to an end meant that I could return to a book that I left off at the halfway point, in the end of September. See, I’m reading all the time. Just never consistently, and often several things at one time. Well, without this 12 Books a Year thing, I’m not sure I would be reading at all. It’s good to push yourself.

So no, this isn’t the Dostoyevsky book. Just imagine my boyfriend’s delighted face when he thought that it was! But it wasn’t. Still, it was very close (I believe) to having won the Pulitzer prize, which I am dimly aware of as being “very important,”and I heard about it from Booktube. I’m really glad, in general, about this choice. It is a book about language. It’s kind of about love, obsessions, those intense relationships that go nowhere, but it’s really about words and their meanings. There are about 5,000 anecdotes regarding misconceptions over what words mean crammed into this book, and some are laugh-out-loud funny, but I realized near the end, that in the second section, set in Hungary, new characters were barely described at all; we learn everything about them through their oddly pointed (to our ears) usages of English.

That’s neither good nor bad, and it is very much how the first-person narrator looks at the world. She just kind of rubs along, being alive, listening to what people say. In this way, I felt we were different, I used to care a LOT about what people said, and I believed that I could quote people exactly, especially when their words hit the ear in an unusual way, but I am not so much like that now. Either I have heard all the possible sentences which have ever been created (at the ripe age of 34) or I became myself more productive than receptive. I think about my own thoughts more now. I understand (shades of Night and Day!) how so many of our utterances are just—not worth remembering. The person who said a thing, probably actually didn’t mean it that way (as our mothers tell us when we are four). But seriously, how often do you iron out your word order and consciously pick your tone before you speak in your first language? The main character is always looking for how people betray their inner truths with their verbal emissions—and I don’t believe in that anymore, anymore than I would look to a drunk person for truth. But maybe this novel is intensely good in this way: it portrays how youth thinks.

Hmm. When I sat down to write up my thoughts on this book, finished last night, I thought I would have little to say, even though I liked it, even though I might buy a paper copy (I kindle-apped this one too) and read it again, and keep it—being a big believer in the fact that you don’t know a book until you read it twice, and a bigger believer in only keeping the BEST books— but I am not quite sure. Yes, this book is a book very much about language, and could be kept in my little collection of linguistic and philological oddities (I’m getting closer and closer to my true niche of weirdness!) but I’m not sure if the love story is worth going through again.

I mean, it’s very TRUE, despite dating to that 2 year time span in like 1998 when it was exciting to receive emails, although it’s difficult to believe that ever happened (I remember that time! Sigh.) The Idiot is about hanging out and wasting time with someone you think is way above you (the type whose aloofness is the only thing that makes them interesting) and never bringing it into the physical, despite all their chatting about literature.

Everyone has a first love story in them, so passionate and desperate, that would not, being recorded on paper, actually be able to move other people. You have to experience these things yourself, by yourself. You will read this book, enjoying all the cleverness (Harvard! multi-lingualism!) hugely, and then you will remember that there was also a “love story” in there too, and go “Aww, she was so young.” * It makes sense that she acted The Idiot.

Hopefully something like this can’t happen to you twice, although I do know that it can. And your heart can break in all sorts of ways–it doesn’t need to be over a person. It can be over your unwillingness to move beyond your fears. It can break from socio-economic inequality or the shocking tragedies that happen in life. Love isn’t all there is to write about, but this is an incredibly well-told story of First Love in the late nineties.

After I finished this book, I just kept reading on my kindle app, something that I had bought before, by chance another new book also set in the late nineties, which appropriately provided me with a quotation that almost literally stabbed my heart—(it’s true! It’s true! As the blade flashed!)

“Education is directly proportional to anxiety”

This is from “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” probably not a book I will review on here, if I ever were to finish it. This quote however, pretty much sums up my existence, and could have been cut from “The Idiot”–although The Idiot’s narrator is very self-contained and calm, with a superhuman ability to not need to discuss her love uncertainties with her friends (because this is fiction). But Education is Directly Proportional to Anxiety should have been used to caption an image, or as the watermark of the paper. It’s a hard-hitting sentence, for sure.

*Am I the only one feeling forty million years old right now? This feeling has been growing on me for the past three weeks or so.

Night and Day

November 18, 2019

Book Choice for April 2019, by Virginia Woolf

This book review was 8 months in the making, because that’s how long it took me to read these dense 385 pages, while putting it down for weeks at a time. By now you might assume that is my normal way of reading, but really it is related to the crammed-emotionality of this particular book. Reading cam be hard, as I will get into later in this discussion. This discussion will be told in 2 parts, with the first part written after I read the actual text and the second part after I went back and read the introduction, looking for signposts.

Before page 200, I didn’t care about any character in this book, and I mean, at all. Shortly after page 200, Mary Dachet goes home for the weekend and I started to actually give a crap. It may be that the first 200 pages very much are engaged with setting up the world, a mostly unconscious rich person’s London. About 100 pages after I started to care at all about what the characters said to each other—interestingly, in a very “realistic” way it doesn’t matter what the characters  actually said to each other, because as in life, their utterances were hopelessly mundane and didn’t match up at all with the motives behind them, which the reader was privy to, for the most part.

At about page 300, I began to dimly realize that the characters actually were in love with each other, before that it was told, but I was not convinced. In a way, this book expresses very much the garbled intellectualizing the brain dies when it tries to think about its feelings, this is done very often, characters following their trains of thought…Which I think it’s very brave and high-level writing, but that doesn’t mean it is compelling. And still– you would have to be the most romantic reader enamoured of romantic fiction to care about the consequences of these people’s love for each other. It’s not that it doesn’t work—for all I know it might be the first stream of consciousness novel ever—and I do think it must have been QUITE a different novel , perhaps radical, in 1919— it’s just, hard going.

You will read 12 pages with supreme effort, and then set it down for a week or so, if you go faster you’re a better Mensch than me. The last 80 pages I managed to accomplish in about 5 days, this was mainly possible because I did not want to DNF it, I did not want to choose a new book for April, also it’s part of my “Read all of Virginia Woolf Project” which I have imposed on myself for no clear reason, other than the fact I am a woman (makes sense?) And I was somewhat motivated by this 12 books a year project overall. With this done, I can finally move forward. I started this book on a grey spring day when we lived in our old apartment. Perhaps I use books to mark time. I thought—as this book was coming to a close—maybe I really like this! Maybe I will find that this book is great—(I do think it is “great” as an accomplishment) and that I will want to read it again someday. As no one really learned anything though, that they weren’t capable of before the story started, I am not inclined to read it again, however. It will go on the shelf beside The Voyage Out, V. Woolf’s first novel, waiting until my reading of her other works makes these first two more clear…

Now I’m moving on to read the Introduction, which in my Wordsworth Copy is by “Dorinda Guest PhD.” It showed me my own predilection for non-fiction reading (which I haven’t given into at all this year—I do attempt to read hard NF everyday after all)–but there were times during this book I wished I could just read the damn introduction and figure out what I was supposed to be learning here. So now I will read what dear Dorinda says, and hope it gives me a frame, a map, a path…

It didn’t really. Apparently Wordsworth introductions are to “guide, not interpret” for the reader. There are certain things it brought out to me, such as the “self-conciousness” of Mary Dachet, who is trying to create a profession for herself, of working for increased women’s rights, when that was never a vocation before and certainly isn’t paid…I know this “self-consciousness” well myself. There is very subtle exploration in this book on what it would be to do work that represented us, that we “loved” or believed in, and especially as this is discussed for the women, Katharine and Mary, (men’s work is of course a solid, accepted thing that requires no justification), which is very interesting. The Introducton points out that Katharine’s profession was “living at home”–which of course sounds rather stupid, but which entailed a myriad of stupid activities and supporting roles and an entire way of being (that obscures most women’s personalities, if they were even allowed to have them) and was actually a full-time job.

Finally, the Introduction reminded me that the saving grace of this book is really the figure of Katharine’s mother—she was the only comedy I saw in the book (aside from the awkwardness of humans speaking to each other, or maybe the patheticness of Katharine’s suitor Rodney, though I thought he was more of a tragedy myself), and she was fantastic. Perpetually enthused about something, absolutely ludicrous in her cries after “Poetry! Poetry!” and her ridiculous quotations. It’s not often that a female character would get such a role, not having to be instructive or ideal, just a kind of exuberant person who has to be worked around—a nutty professor, but a woman. That’s very rare. Women always have to be perfect, and serve a POINT. Or they aren’t there.

All in all, Night and Day, you mystify me. I know you are getting at something, with all the energy of a placid stream rubbing a pebble smooth. It was not fiery enough for me, all the feelings were hidden under successive overcoats of Englishness—but I know you were important. But I don’t think you were romantic and most of the time I was incredibly bored.

I’ve heard various accounts of Jacob’s Room, from booktubers (although I cannot remember exactly who). Someone really enjoyed it’s artistry, and another felt she had suffered too long, for no reward. Well, that’s next year’s April to look forward too!

A Clergyman’s Daughter

November 4, 2019

Book Choice for July 2019, by Orson Welles

At some point during the last six months I rather made up my mind that I was only going to read “weird” books for this blog, and by that I meant that I was going to search out fairly uncommon books, forgotten classics in the main. Or books by famous authors that are NOT the works ever associated with these great names now. This perversity lead me to read, at the tail end of July, A Clergyman’s Daughter, the first novel published by a certain Orson Welles.
Let me set the scene for you: I am back home from the conference, with a sense of an ending. The weather is fair and cool. We are in the process of moving out of our flat, all our stuff, as well as my boyfriend, are already gone to the new place, because he had to start his new job. I’m confused about what next to do in my PhD project, and staring down the barrel of weeks of working just for the institute and not for myself.

I had some clothes hanging in the wardrobe and a few books, and silence, in which to consider the mainly empty room which I moved into when I came to Germany and started a new life. What a different person that was, running from her pain. In other ways, I am the same. I laud her courage though, I’m so glad she changed her life, the scared angry thing. Now she has everything she has ever wanted—and the most obliging work.
At the time I read this book, I didn’t know how much longer I would be in that room, with my lingering past self and still air. The time had to be gotten through somehow. I opened a book that I also had gotten at the Oxfam charity shop on the Cowley Road the last time I was in town. I had tried dipping into it twice before, and was only on page 11 when I sat down that quiet Sunday–the flat was hardly ever empty or quiet–in my old chair we got from the street, like nearly everything we own, and began to read. I’m sure I got up for tea and water and to go to the bathroom, but I did nothing else and I read the book straight through. It’s not long, but when does that happen in life? I told my friend that I sat and read a book straight through and she was like “No!” But Readers, it’s true. And a leisured moment worth recording.
A Clergyman’s Daughter is the story of a girl whose work and untiring dedication is taken for granted, who has a bit of a mental-breakdown episode and runs away from home. I remember feeling intense worry from the creepiness of a male character in the story, but damn was he charming and grew on me, although he REALLY shouldn’t have. I was struck by how well Orson Welles wrote a female character–I am VERY picky on this subject as we are usually cast as dolls to be moved around for reasons entirely unconnected to our hazy, undefined inner beings. He did well. I liked this girl and I felt for her. I cared what happened to her and believe she was a person, although the book seems deceptively simple, it actually is quite literary, if literary means that she made a decision at the end which I STILL wonder about. Because it’s not made clear, or wrapped up with a moral, as you would rather expect from the type of plot it is or the way it is written.
All in all, I was glad to have read it, but it may have contributed to curing me from the desire to find forgotten things just to make a point of it.  I mean, Orson Welles wrote about twenty novels I think, before hitting it out of the park with Animal Farm (I still can’t remember if I read it in High School or just had the choice to read and think I have read it because it’s such a part of our Zeitgeist now);  but the fact remains that I’m not exactly running to chase his other works down.
I’m glad I’m cured of needing to read things that are never read now—sometimes there’s a reason, although not necessarily, in the case if this book. Now I am again free to better connect with what my taste actually is. Still, I’m glad I read this because of the experience of utter absorption I had in my old room that day, and because, let’s face it, I’m not doing great on my book-a-month plan. I remain stalled in April in my Mandatory Virginia Woolf book, and I am throwing Villette (June) in the trash where it belongs. I needed a win.

What is interesting to me mainly about this book is the setting, the “shabby-genteel” in-between world of the clergy, which by the beginning of the 20th centre was on the course of dying a slow death. And yet it wasn’t always so, of course! This year I tried to read the Warden, in order to climb into the Barsetshire Chronicles, but I found it to be impossibly boring, deathly even on audibook, and so I have settled on watching the miniseries made out of all seven books, available on youtube thank goodness. A Warden, was a type of churchman who raked in 800 pounds (in the 1870s) a year for basically doing what he liked, perhaps giving one sermon a week (it isn’t clear to me if the Warden of the novel was actually obliged to preach) and for saying a few kind words to old men living in a rest-home, whenever he met them. I checked and 800 pounds in 1880 when the book was published would be over 100,000  euros a year now. Sounds great.

This cause me to remember Bill Bryson’s description in his book At Home of the strange flowering of the Anglican priestly class in England, which led to a large number of well-educated men who didn’t have to work, (or hardly at all, think about the expectations Edward in Mansfield Park entertains, in all seriousness he vows to take his future ministerial duties seriously, he vows always to preach his own sermons). These were hardly onerous posts. It’s not surprising the public got tired of this, as skepticism grew. But in their heyday, Clergymen were freed to write, invent things, raise large families or think about their dinner all day–whatever they felt like. It’s a weird situation, and the church was obsfucatingly complex, with a hierarchy of curates, wardens, elders, almoners, etc (I don’t really know, I’m just saying words) and now, in whst is probanly a good thing, or just a sign of the times, this system has mostly rotted away.

But you meet the branches and twigs of this system scattered through literature, the such as the titular Daughter of this book (set in about 1920), and the children of a clergymen in Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day (set in about 1915); all of these are offshoots of quasi-upper middle class clerical families with rambling old houses that their dads’ got for free, and a difficult to define social status which required the boys to go through Oxford or Cambridge and often allowed the girls of such families an education. I suppose all traces of this shabby-genteel world, which was fading from about the time of The Warden through the 1920s-30s died during the Second World War. I don’t want to know about the system itself necessarily, but I would like to see if there are any books about the best outcomes of this obsolete caste, the books, and inventions—I reserve judgement on The Diary of a Country Parson, that tale of gluttony— as to whether it will embody the best side effects of the system, or evidence of its worst waste. Curious.

Wolf Hall Bandwagon

October 7, 2019

Book choice for May 2019, by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall is a great and engrossing work of historical fiction. I ate it up in at few days and it was such a relief to sink into a wonderful page-turner (which also felt a weensy bit highbrow). It was lovely how it happened too: after a very patchy summer reading wise, riddled with unfinished boring books or no time to read at all, and after a productive but emotionally chaotic conference visit (when I got back I realized I hadn’t taken ONE picture of Paris, which pretty much sums up my academic life), and then our subsequent (and I mean the DAY AFTER I got back) move—-and AFTER the end of our hellish sprint as an Institute to submit the first volume of our Dictionary to the press—–after a few wild nights of staying at work til 4am—-I wandered dazedly to the only bookstore with some English books in town (the English shelf is now 2 shelves, to German’s detriment)—and I found a petite paperback copy of Wolf Hall. Thank god, I sighed.

And I was right! As so many before me had hinted. It was wonderful to be in our new apartment, surrounded by boxes and chaos, ignoring it all with something I wanted to read. Immediately after I finished it I bought the sequel on the kindle app so I could read it on my phone—I had no hope of finding a hardcopy of the sequel in a German bookstore. (And somehow this lack it choice makes my life and concentration better, in general).

I didn’t enjoy the second book as much as the first, but it absolutely wasn’t an effort to read. It concentrates on Thomas Cromwell (I really need to find out if his family tree sprouted the later Oliver Cromwell!) rather than the frankly more interesting personage of Anne Boleyn, which is of course a less-explored angle, but as the second book of the Wolf Hall trilogy is concerned with her downfall, the choice to restrict Anne to a few scenes…well, it wasn’t the story I knew well.

One thing that does stick in my memory is Cromwell’s impression of Anne in a pink and grey silk dress to the effect of “it should have been pretty and youthful but all I could think of was spilled intestines” which is bitingly lovely.

Hillary Mantel did seem to be a bit in love with Cromwell in the second book, which wasn’t a plus, in the way that she went to great lengths and used euphemistic and unrealistic means to exonerate him from having used torture to produce confessions from prisoners, which I am quite certain he did. These things were routine, but Mantel apparently didn’t want them in her hero.

There is also, in the second book a twice or thrice-repeated “impression” from the first book, which certainly was spooky and evocative the first time it was mentioned, but dulled swiftly with repetition.

All in all, I enjoyed both these novels (the second is called Bring up the Bodies or whatnot) the first intensively (I have since heard Jennifer from the Insert Literary Pun Here youtube channel say that Wolf Hall was the book that made her want to be a book reviewer, in order to be able to explain how it worked so well—which shows how late I am to this bandwagon, as she read it years ago and now IS a professional reviewer) and I will definitely read the third, to finish off Mr. Cromwell (probably literally).

A breath of fresh air, in a reading year into which I have perhaps already crammed too many classics. To forget oneself—is divine.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being

October 1, 2019

Ever since I wrote my last post, I’ve been mulling something over on the back-burner of my mind. I just can’t…bear to…be so negative. This blog is not turning out how I wanted it to. In my last post, which I thought was my cleverest, and best, I just railed about a system that is not changing. It’s going to be capitalism from here on out, until the world ends because we ended it. And somehow, that gives me comfort at this point. So much of this life is out of my control, I just have to witness how things go down. I think the attempts at making government work for the larger majority of people were righteous and heroic. The ones that were stamped out, as it was in Chile, I think need to be remembered and the victims of the coup need to be remembered. They tried for a better world, and external conditions (the powerful capitalist structures that are) forbade it, and internally, the dissatisfaction of individuals for whatever reason, also broke it.

In the last few weeks, or maybe the last year, since I converted to Marxism and understood what had happened to me, I have been so dissatisfied. As one is when they look at a world and dream of one better, that exists, and has a high likelihood of only existing, in one’s own mind (and the minds of a select few others). Probably early Christian missionaries who saw the unlikelihood of vast continents converting felt this way (but in the end, the continents did! With some horrific loss of culture…) And there have been many for social change on the large scale…just making this happen in the face of the EXACT opposite wave of thinking is such an exhausting thought. This week we were in a bookstore here which had a table of books about the DDR, maybe 50 titles, and I read them all and realized that NONE of them were ACTUALLY about the DDR, unless it was about “escaping” it, and then I read the sign above the table “Germany Celebrates Reunification.” I’m not sure how history will remember the DDR, but right now, it is clear there is only one way to think about it. Thank God that’s over.

It may be that we are living in the most exciting times in history. Just today I thought that it was the best time to be alive, that thought jogs through my mind sometimes. I want to be more grateful. I don’t want to be depressed, about a hypothetical better world, when I am enjoying the most independence and a wonderful relationship and excellent working conditions and the most beautiful apartment of my life! Life is good!!!!!

Life is good for me, today.

And I want to go up and up. And I *think* life is 90% how you think about it. And right now, here, is good. I’m not going to think of hypotheticals, I’m going to stop being so sour. There is almost nothing I can affect, but my immediate surroundings. Sorry. It seems that is a bad way to think but how often do large-impact decisions (no, not arguing at a dinner party) come into it. Yes, I’ll vote once or twice a year —-I’m not going to surrender my one kick at the can. But…I am going to chill it on the Socialism talk on this blog (I think). It just makes me upset, that we are half choosing this capitalism everyday, half having it and its propaganda forced upon us. But wishing for more equality and doing nothing to achieve it, daily, is also such an uncomfortable way to live. So I’m being open about my capitulation.

Frankly, I am tired of complaining. This blog is my escapist happy place, where I just try new things and develop myself (that last part sounds incredible capitalist cult-of-the-individual-esque). But it is what it is. I am going to accentuate the positive. I am going to find wonder again.