Books and the presidential candidates

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed John McCain about the Middle East, and one of his questions was about favorite Jewish writers. (Goldberg interviewed Obama previously, who mentioned how much he liked Philip Roth.)

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing. ...

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

The mention of Victor Frankl brought back a ton of memories for me, and McCain is absolutely right that it's an incredibly moving and thought-provoking book. Frankl was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, and Man's Search for Meaning was the book he wrote afterward based on his observations there. I still remember his articulation of "the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's own attitude in any given set of cirumstances, to choose one's own way."
I also vividly remember where and when I read this book -- when I was 13 years old and a Catholic school girl. Certainly this is a testament to Frankl's skills as a communicator (and definitely NOT to any extraordinary perception on my part) that his book resonates with people of different ages, social standings and circumstances.
Here's the summary of "Man's Search for Meaning" from Google Books:

Man's Search for Meaning tells the chilling and inspirational story of eminent psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps for three years during the Second World War. Immersed in great suffering and loss, Frankl began to wonder why some of his fellow prisoners were able not only to survive the horrifying conditions, but to grow in the process. Frankl's conclusion - that the most basic human motivation is the will to meaning - became the basis of his groundbreaking psychological theory, logotherapy. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl outlines the principles of logotherapy, and offers ways to help each one of us focus on finding the purpose in our lives.

Spoon River Anthology and spoonriveranthology.net

The most commented post on this blog is "Why Spoonreader?", one of my first posts that I wrote way back on Sept. 14, 2004 when I was just getting started. Recently, a student posted a question there about marriage and Spoon River Anthology. Here's our exchange:

Anonymous said...
I have to write a paper for my english class including 15 epitaphs and 20 outside sources on a spoon river theme. some possible themes are corruption, death as the great equalizer and so on. I had thought about doing something with fakenesss of marriage or along those lines, any thoughts or help?
May 13, 2008 10:40 AM

Angie said...
20 outside sources?! That sounds like a lot. I hope this is a college class.
I think marriage would be a great topic. Though I would call my paper something like "Master's Kaleidoscope of Marriage," that way you can talk about some of the poems that say good things about marriage, too. Here are some of the poems you should look at: Amanda Barker, Mrs. Pantier, Benjamin Pantier, Julia Miller, Mrs. Williams, Margaret Fuller Slack, Willard Fluke, Amos Sibley, Mrs. Sibley, Tom Merritt, Mrs. Merritt, Roscoe Purkapile, Mrs. Purkapile, Elsa Wertman. For a more positive outlook on marriage, try Lois Spears, Lucinda Matlock and William & Emily. That's just off the top of my head, there are other poems, too, I'm sure.
As for your critical sources, I can really only recommend one: the introduction to Spoon River Anthology: Annotated Edition, edited by John E. Hallwas. Please email me a copy of your paper when your done, I'd love to read it.
May 13, 2008 11:00 AM

Anonymous said...
haha yes it is a college class, the paper will surely be huge. And thats good that you cited John Hallwas because I did add him in my list of sources. I think im going to relate the theme to corruption of marriage and human nature as a sort of subtopic, thanks for the epitaph listing! It helps a lot.
May 14, 2008 2:16 PM

To dig up all those names, I used a very cool web site, www.spoonriveranthology.net The poems here are hyperlinked so you can easily see which poems talk about each other. There's also some neat analysis of words used in the different poems. You can also comment on the poems, and the comments include the gamut of responses you would expect. Because "Spoon River Anthology" is a town of people talking about each other, it's similar to a network, and the hyperlinks really draw out that aspect of it. I like the site a lot.

Poems I love, Part 2

Lately I've found it hard to concentrate on any one book. There are a bunch of half-started books littering my home, almost all of them nonfiction. Certainly this is a byproduct of stress. The newspaper industry in which my spouse and I make our livings is in severe recession and transformation. The future is unpredictable. Also I find aspects of this modern life worrisome, everyone so busy and filled with the need to acquire.
When I feel anxious about what's happening, this Wordsworth poem comes to mind:

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I love everything about this sonnet, except perhaps the last two lines. I don't think neo-paganism will solve my problems, or Wordsworth's. And old Triton blowing his wreathed horn is a hokey image. If I were a wealthy philanthropist, I would sponsor a contest to re-write the last two lines.

Poems I love, Part 1

One of my favorite poems is "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens. This came up lately because my mother got two cats, and she was trying to decide what to name them. Now of course I set about trying to think of literary names. (I once knew a cat named Percy, named after Louisiana author Walker Percy, and I thought that was so cool.) These cats are Siberian cats, so I thought, why not name them after the greats of Russian literature? So I suggested Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and Leopold (Tolstoy). Well, this suggestion did not go very far for a variety of reasons, including that one of the cats is female.
Another pertinent fact about the cats is that the breeder lives in Tennessee. So I suggested Wallace and Anna. Wallace after Wallace Stevens and Anna after Tolstoy's famous heroine Anna Karenina.
Why Wallace?, mother asked. Because of "Anecdote of the Jar," I replied.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

What does that poem mean?, mother asked. Well, it's hard to say what a poem really means, but I think it's about architecture, roughly speaking. We build things, and those things change the way we see the natural world. And the natural world changes the way we see the built environment. In other words, the natural world and the built world influence and change each other, so we should take care of what we build.
On another level, I just love the delicious language of this poem: "Like nothing else in Tennnessee". "The jar was round upon the ground". "It took dominion everywhere".
Well, mother didn't like that suggestion either. In retrospect, I should have made one last Tennessee-related suggestion: She really should have named them Stanley and Stella, from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play by Tennessee Williams.
But she ended up naming them Angel and Mimi, after her two children. Yep, so now I have my very own familiar ("a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person").
The photo above is me with Mimi.