I'm almost to the end of The Magic Mountain. Somewhere I must have missed a day of reading because I'm fifty pages behind my little schedule I made to get the book read by the end of the 2010. I can get that done tonight and be back on track, though.
I love the new year. There is always something refreshing about starting over. Even though it's a man-made construction (time) and, furthermore, thoroughly Western, and even though I've never quite understood why we chose the middle of winter to be the beginning of the new year, I'm always gung-ho for resolutions.
You know about my resolutions this year - two books a week and two pages written each day. I'm very optimistic. The first two books of the new year are extremely long, so I'm kind of hoping, if I can get them read on time, they will be like a trial by fire that will make the rest of the year a breeze as far as pacing myself. I can't wait to get to the Writers at Work series from The Paris Review. A friend of mine gave me the third in the series a few years ago and the interviews in it are just brilliant. There are nine in the series, so I'll be reading the other eight. One of them has interviews with Vladimir Nabokov AND Jorge Luis Borges. Holy shit.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Philosophy Is the Talk on the Cereal Box
Awesome lyrics from Paul Simon's wife.
What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.
At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).
Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.
Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.
What I've learned from reading The Magic Mountain is that I don't get most philosophical debate. My little mind can't wrap itself around abstract ideas when they are presented in paragraphs that go on for pages and never give any concrete examples.
At one point, the main character, Hans Castorp, has what is clearly a dream from the very onset of the scene (though I think we're supposed to think it's really happening for a time) and through the images and events of the dream I came to an understanding of how Hans Castorp felt about two other characters who were always arguing their beliefs in front of Hans Castorp (he is always referred to by his full name in the book). Two witches are ripping apart a blond-haired baby and eating him alive? I immediately understood this image (Hans Castorp is blond).
Following this scene, however, is about two - three pages of narrated explanation of how Hans Castorp feels. Maybe this is necessary for readers who can't make connections between images like I can. That's fine and I'm glad Thomas Mann was thinking of them. But what it turns into for me is a daydreaming session where I wander off into my own thoughts while simultaneously reading words that go nowhere for me.
Here's the kicker - if I didn't have the dream sequence I wouldn't know how Hans Castorp feels about the two men arguing around him. I would just be skimming a paragraph that goes over my head because it's too abstract and too grand for me to pay attention. Maybe Mann is a genius for including both so he leaves no reader behind.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
C Grades
The widest category of all. I would conjecture seventy-or-so percent of all books fall into a 'C' category. And you know, it's not even really about mediocrity. I mean, it is, on one level, but it's also about 'c'ompare and 'c'ontrast.
'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.
'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.
And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."
One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.
When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.
I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.
'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.
'C'omparing one book to another is something one of my former professors hated. I guess he's right if you take the point of view of yet another professor (though I dropped the second's class after one appalling day) that no two authors can tell the same story unless they plagiarize. During college, I read for professor #1's class One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. It is very, very difficult not to 'c'ompare these two novels. They both deal with generations of a particular family in South America, and both are magical realism. The bad thing is, Garcia Marquez's book is a pioneer of the genre. Allende's book, while good at times itself, doesn't revolutionize the genre and, furthermore, didn't really wow me otherwise, either. Allende of course would cite Garcia Marquez as one of her influences, and sometimes it's hard to shake the ghost of that influence. I give Allende credit for telling the story only she could tell - but in the wake of Solitude it's just not that special.
'C'ontrasting, to me, is the heart of literary criticism. How does one book contrast to another? How, to follow the idea of professor #2, did each author bring his own aesthetic to his particular telling of the old story? According to Stephen King, there are something like nineteen archetypes for stories, and I believe there are others who would argue that down to about six. Maybe those archetypes correspond to the six major emotions: disgust (or hate), happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise (boy, four of those are terrible emotions and surprise is a coin toss - so we have a one-in-six chance of experiencing happiness in this world?). Anyway, how can a new novel make a reader respond with one of these emotions in a new way? This is how new novels 'c'ontrast to other novels.
And the unfortunate thing about Allende, for me, is that she didn't make me respond to these emotions in a new way. You know, thinking it through, I think the most important emotion may be surprise. I want to be surprised at how a book makes me feel. I think when I give a book a grade of 'C', it's because it failed to surprise me in any way, good or bad. Failing books surprise me in a bad way, by either confusing or insulting me. Passing books surprise me in a good way, by focusing on the subject in a way I wouldn't have previously thought to do so. 'C' or 'low-pass' books just make me go, "Oh, yeah, I guess."
One book that surprised me in a good way is Lauren Slater's Lying. It's a memoir. But guess what she does? She lies. The important part, though, is that she admits that for a long, long time, she believed everything she recounts to have been the truth and was shocked to learn it was all false. Because of my own obsession with false memories, I found this book to be a refreshing take on how we perceive the world, what 'the truth' means, and what makes us who we are. Abe Akira's short story Peaches does something similar, although many fiction anthologies include his story because the narrator isn't sure how to sort the truth from the fiction.
When I was in grad school, I had to take a memoir class and it ended up being incredibly enlightening. On one of the first days, our professor stood at the chalkboard and had us come up with categories memoirs often go in, i.e. stories of illness, stories of childhood trauma, stories of divorce, etc. What we discovered was there are very few original stories, even in real life. And even though each person's story, as tired as the subject matter is, should be riveting because it's so personal, it just plain isn't always that interesting.
I have a hard time giving 'C' grades to any story about the Holocaust. I know I should, but it just seems like such a monumental amount of anger, fear, and sadness it's hard to not be surprised at every turn. I'm also afraid of reinforcing what my students said about the events of the Holocaust not being all that bad. But, isn't every story of anger, fear, and sadness monumental? I don't know, but I'm able give 'C' grades out like 'c'andy as long as it's not about the Holocaust.
'C' is for 'C'ommonplace. How fast did I read it? How much did I remember? Why wasn't I more engaged? Who would I recommend this book to? If the answers are fast, because nothing was new, no one and everyone, then I know it's a 'C' book. It's a shrug-of-the-shoulders. It's a see-for-yourself. It's an I-could-do-better. I guess they're as good as any other way to pass the time.
Monday, December 6, 2010
2+
Last night I timed myself reading The Magic Mountain. I had no distractions and I read as fast as I could with total comprehension. It took me twenty-five minutes to read ten pages. The book is seven hundred pages long but each page is two pages in one, the print is so small and so densely packed. It's like reading fourteen hundred pages instead. At this rate, it will take me roughly thirty hours of straight reading to get through this book. That's four+ hours a day to get through it in a week. Not undoable, but tough nonetheless.
Don't yell at me if I can't get through it quickly. My goal with it is to read two other books this week while reading at least a chapter of Mountain each day. I've already read Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I've always been curious about this book but guess what? It was really, really boring. Which may have been why I was able to fly right through it. C-. Again.
I don't know what the other book will be yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I make a decision. Meanwhile, I also distract myself here and there with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which is brilliant, but also not a book easily consumed.
Don't yell at me if I can't get through it quickly. My goal with it is to read two other books this week while reading at least a chapter of Mountain each day. I've already read Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I've always been curious about this book but guess what? It was really, really boring. Which may have been why I was able to fly right through it. C-. Again.
I don't know what the other book will be yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I make a decision. Meanwhile, I also distract myself here and there with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, which is brilliant, but also not a book easily consumed.
Friday, December 3, 2010
No, No, I'm Sticking with It
I'm NOT abandoning my multiple-books-a-week goal. My problem is procrastination and distraction. I CAN get through Mountain if I stop puttering around reading a page here and there. I'm making excuses - the big one being that I have to be on eggshells because I KNOW that every five minutes someone is going to want to ask something of me and I never have any real, true privacy.
My mother was very angry this morning when I tried to talk to her about it. This is just a silly example, but today I was watching a program and in the final five important, revealing minutes of the program two people called. Neither call was for me. Since then, we've received probably twenty phone calls, none of them for me. I tried to explain to my mother how frustrating it is to have to run to the phone every five minutes and she said, "How are they supposed to know they're interrupting you?" That's not the point. The point is there are so many people who live here that if there were three phone calls every day for each of us there would be eighteen phone calls every day. And, there are more than three phone calls for each of them, I'll tell you.
If I lived alone, I wouldn't have to answer the phone for the three friends who call within an hour for my older nephew. I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my sister who calls twice in ten minutes because of yet another school crisis with her child (wherein she blames everyone but the child). I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my mother when my brother calls, over and over and over again, to ask if my mother is home yet from the grocery store.
How can I concentrate? I really just want to curl up under the covers and sleep. I want to lock the door and pretend they aren't yelling up the stairs for me. I want to be able to take the few hours before I go to work to make breakfast, take a bath, and read a book. I just want to be able to READ a book. Who can read being constantly interrupted?
My brothers and sisters don't think it's fair that I don't have the responsibilities they have (i.e. children). But I made decisions to keep from having these responsibilities. It's amazing how jealous they are of me. At this point in my life I am seriously considering the life of a hermit. I am budgeting out my money and preparing for a day when my credit cards are paid off (March) and I can beginning dreaming of a studio apartment away from here. I know they'll still call me, every day, but it won't be everyone else in their lives calling me as well. I just want to be alone. I can't wait to be alone.
Just now they called up to me. I couldn't even get through writing this freaking blog entry.
My mother was very angry this morning when I tried to talk to her about it. This is just a silly example, but today I was watching a program and in the final five important, revealing minutes of the program two people called. Neither call was for me. Since then, we've received probably twenty phone calls, none of them for me. I tried to explain to my mother how frustrating it is to have to run to the phone every five minutes and she said, "How are they supposed to know they're interrupting you?" That's not the point. The point is there are so many people who live here that if there were three phone calls every day for each of us there would be eighteen phone calls every day. And, there are more than three phone calls for each of them, I'll tell you.
If I lived alone, I wouldn't have to answer the phone for the three friends who call within an hour for my older nephew. I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my sister who calls twice in ten minutes because of yet another school crisis with her child (wherein she blames everyone but the child). I wouldn't have to answer the phone for my mother when my brother calls, over and over and over again, to ask if my mother is home yet from the grocery store.
How can I concentrate? I really just want to curl up under the covers and sleep. I want to lock the door and pretend they aren't yelling up the stairs for me. I want to be able to take the few hours before I go to work to make breakfast, take a bath, and read a book. I just want to be able to READ a book. Who can read being constantly interrupted?
My brothers and sisters don't think it's fair that I don't have the responsibilities they have (i.e. children). But I made decisions to keep from having these responsibilities. It's amazing how jealous they are of me. At this point in my life I am seriously considering the life of a hermit. I am budgeting out my money and preparing for a day when my credit cards are paid off (March) and I can beginning dreaming of a studio apartment away from here. I know they'll still call me, every day, but it won't be everyone else in their lives calling me as well. I just want to be alone. I can't wait to be alone.
Just now they called up to me. I couldn't even get through writing this freaking blog entry.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Pinocchio
Because The Magic Mountain is not an easy read, I'm going to read some other books while pacing myself with it. Yo, the multiple-books-a-week goal might have to be revamped in order of structure because I've come to the realization that I don't read quickly unless I'm extremely engaged. Which doesn't mean I'm not engaged with Mountain, but it's just not an easy read.
So, the first book I read simultaneously was Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Like Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, this book is repetitive and frustrating. It is NOT the Disneyfied version, I'll tell you. Pinocchio is an idiot, and one who can't learn his lesson no matter how many times he gets punished for his wicked ways. This bothers me immensely. I thought Quixote was basically the same story over and over and over until I just wanted to scream. Pinocchio is similar. C-.
I'm not sure how I'll work out two books a week, or if that will even still be the goal, with the new slower reading, but somehow, I need to change my approach.
So, the first book I read simultaneously was Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. Like Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, this book is repetitive and frustrating. It is NOT the Disneyfied version, I'll tell you. Pinocchio is an idiot, and one who can't learn his lesson no matter how many times he gets punished for his wicked ways. This bothers me immensely. I thought Quixote was basically the same story over and over and over until I just wanted to scream. Pinocchio is similar. C-.
I'm not sure how I'll work out two books a week, or if that will even still be the goal, with the new slower reading, but somehow, I need to change my approach.
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