James Joyce reference

Last week in The New Yorker was a very charming, very sad personal history, Making Toast (subscription required; Dec. 15th issue). It's about a grandfather whose daughter dies, and he helps raise the grandchildren. (There's that death thing again, sorry.) But it also has a James Joyce reference that makes me laugh every time I read it. Here's author Roger Rosenblatt writing about his grandson.

One evening, he points to the shelf to his left and says, "Book." He indicates "The Letters of James Joyce," edited by Stuart Gilbert. It seems an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy, but I take down the book and prop it up before us.

"Dear Bubbies," I begin. "I went to the beach today and played in the sand. I also built a castle. I hope you will come play with me soon. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies seems content, so I "read" another: "Dear Bubbies, Went to the playground today. Tried the slide. It was a little scary. I like the swings better. I can go very high, just like you. Love, James Joyce."

Bubbies turns the pages. I occasionally amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce's life and personality: "Dear Bubbies, I hate the Catholic Church, and am leaving Ireland forever. Love, James Joyce."

Wordy Shipmates review

Sorry for all the death and morbidity on this blog lately! I guess that's the literary world for you. A friend told me recently that sex and death are the only appropriate topics for great literature (I think she was quoting someone, not sure who). I'll try to scrounge up some sex then ...
Meanwhile, here's a book review I wrote about the Puritans.

A new-to-me Robert Frost poem

My online Yale course on modern poetry continues. Over the weekend, I listened to the two lectures on Robert Frost and learned about a poem of his I wasn't at all familiar with. It is very different from the more familiar "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall." The poem is called "Home Burial," and it's mostly dialogue between a husband and wife who have buried a child. Although really they're having a fight. It's emotional and intense. Some of it just gives me the chills.

It's a long poem, and I won't copy it all here, but you can read it online via this link.

I'll just note that the spacing of the words on the page is important to reading it, and the above link is better than most others on the Internet. But it does differ a little bit from my copy of the poem in the Norton Anthology. (Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 Fifth Edition in my case -- old! -- not the new Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry that's on my Amazon wish list.) Point being if you have a Norton you might want to read "Home Burial" out of the Norton.

Alright, so our Yale teacher Langdon Hammer has this to say about "Home Burial":

The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself from trying to hold on to the dead child, and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past, which is also, frankly, a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force, to escape his will, I think. His will, his force – these are his ways, his resources for responding to death. ...

Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work, the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world, a safe world, into being. There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world but the material conditions of our circumstances. Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers, you see the poet himself, wanting to know; and wanting to know means pressing towards some revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things, a search for some kind of presence behind the way things are.

The Yale online people are so wonderful, they have posted the transcript of Hammer's lecture online so you can read it all for yourself if you like. I myself prefer to listen to the lectures on my iPod because Langdon Hammer has this wonderfully sonorous voice and his manner is the perfect combination of learned and diffident. Next up: World War I and Imagism.

Twilight and the act of reading

I was tempted to read the Twilight novel series, but I resisted with all my might. There were many things that may have tempted me: It's about vampires, and I love vampires. (Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is a longtime favorite.) I like to keep my finger on the pulse of the hottest YA. (That's Young Adult fiction for you non-library types.) And it had a strong, Austen-like young heroine.

But no, I said, no. There are four novels and they're all long, potentially sucking me in for a total of 2000+ pages. I just feel like my reading time is very precious and I have to guard it for the best stuff, and 2,000 pages crosses some mental barrier for me.

Then comes Caitlin Flanagan with a fabulous essay on the series in The Atlantic (which is great magazine seemingly at the top of its game right now). Flanagan apparently loved the Twilight series with its tale of Bella, a high school student, who falls in love with a classmate and finds out he's a vampire. Flanagan writes:

The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof. ...

Then Flanagan medidates on the act of reading itself:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I think this is a really astute observation, and if it's a little bit of an overly broad generalization, it's only by a little bit. I particularly think her description of reading -- "to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others" -- holds true for adults as well. Though it reading as an emotional escape is something I'm always on guard against. I don't want to be some zombie escaping reality through books. I then wonder if I should be out traveling the world and having extreme experiences instead of reading. But then I argue with myself -- I have only a moderate fondness for travel, I love the home comforts, and reading is not only about entering the emotional lives of others. Reading is also (at least for me) about entering into language itself in an abstact, metaphysical way that I would personally describe as sacramental.
Now that's getting far afield of Flanagan's essay, but it's the kind of interesting thoughts her essay evokes. If any of this interests you at all, the whole essay is really worth reading. (But I still don't think I'm going to read 2,000+ pages of Twilight.)