Category Archives: Literature

Humanities, Letters, Literature

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

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Beltane                                                                  Early Growth Moon

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?  NYT article you can find here.

I’ve read great literature off and on my whole life, starting probably with War and Peace as a sophomore or so in high school.  I’ve also read a lot of not great, but not bad either literature and have even written some myself.  And, yes, I’ve read some distinctly bad literature, but not on purpose.

A formative experience in my reading life occurred in my sophomore year of college when I took a required English literature class.  Before taking the class I had given serious thought to majoring in English.  Then I had whatever his name was for a professor.  He told me what the books I read in his class meant.  He also claimed, proudly, to read Time Magazine from cover to cover each week as a form of discipline.  (That would have been discipline for me, too.  Punishment.)

Whether he represented English literature professors or not I don’t know, and I suspect now that he probably didn’t, but at the time I decided I could do the work of an English major without putting up with anymore of that kind of instruction.  I would read.  And I did and I have.

(Greuter Seven liberal arts  1605)

[That’s how I ended up in Anthropology and Philosophy for a double major.  Though I did have almost enough credits for a geography minor and a theater minor.  The theater credits were almost all in the history of theater, which I found fascinating.  The geography business came about because I was interested in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser exent then, China.]

Has reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Singer, Hesse, Austen, Mann, Kafka and all those others made me a better person?  Hell, I don’t know.  In the article quoted above I think the writer refers to an argument about liberal arts in general; that is, that studying the liberal arts makes one more able to think critically in a complex world and, therefore, to act with a higher level of moral sensitivity.

That the liberal arts and reading great literature teaches critical thinking is, I think, established.  They do this by the comparative method, familiar to students of anthropology and philosophy and literature and theology.  How does it work?  In the words of blue book essay tests since time immemorial, you compare and contrast.  By comparing this culture to that one, or this writer to that one, or this book to that one, or this period of philosophy to that one or this theological perspective to that one, a sensitivity to the variations in argumentation, in problem solving, in abstract analysis becomes second nature.

This sensitivity to the variations does not, I think, breed a more moral person, but it does produce a more humble one, a person who, if they’ve paid attention, knows that this solution or that one is not necessarily true or right, but, rather is most likely one among many.  This humility does not cancel out conviction or commitment, rather it positions both in the larger reality of human difference.

So, in the end, I don’t believe the case for reading great literature is to be made in its efficacy or lack of it in creating moral sensitivity, but rather in great literature’s broadening of our horizon and in the concomitant deflation of our sense of moral righteousness, perhaps, oddly, the very opposite of creating a more moral person.

 

Garden, Literature, Weather +Climate

Root and Branch

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Water and heat.  Sun and soil.  Roots, stalks and leaves.  There you have it.  And we’ve got it this week.  Rain, rain, rain.  Then some heat.  Seeds germinating, bursting up, ready to transubstantiate.  All for the great cycle of life, churning, moving, flowing, surging.  I can feel it, smell it at this time of year.  And I love it.

Just finished Dan Brown’s Inferno.  If you read the NYT review, you will discover that Dan has a mundane talent for words.  And that’s true.  The reviews I read didn’t add, but they should, that he throws in potted art history and architectural criticism, not to mention some odd rant on transhumanism.  Yet, did you notice, I finished it.  Why?  Well, reading like a writer, this guy knows how to plot.  He can make you wonder what’s coming next.

He pulls off one big twist in this novel and it’s a dandy, but it feels very contrived even though he sucked me in completely with it.  That’s sort of the thing he’s got going, you can see the holes in his works, where I wondered were the editors who could have easily fixed much of this, but you pass them by to find out what happens next.  That’s story telling and it’s the true game which every writer plays.

(Lucifer, trapped in the 9th circle. Canto 34, lines 20–21  Gustave Dore)

Hey, listen!  Have I got something to tell you.  Clumsy sentences, wooden metaphors, filler pages, yes, they matter, but in the end not as much if you keep me interested.

coda next morning:  I will buy and read your book if you can entertain me.  Whether I remember it or learn from it and, most important, whether I will return to it, however, depends on those skills Dan Brown seems to shunt aside as unnecessary.  No, I won’t be re-reading any of his work.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Like Attending My Own Funeral

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Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.

 

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

At It

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Spring                                                             Bloodroot Moon

Still reading through Missing, making notes, trying to integrate beta reader observations and questions.  It’s slower right now because I’m also trying to integrate lessons about description and pacing from Robert Jordan’s amazing The Eye of the World.

The general plan for revision III has begun to take shape.  Some shifting of certain narrative threads to book II or to a book of their own, expanding the ending, putting the climax in earlier, making descriptions beefier, more lush and adding narrative in sections where what I wrote was, as Judy observed, outline like.

How long will it take?  I have no idea.  As soon as I can finish it, but just how long that is, I don’t know.  Why?  Partly the removal of certain narrative lines will create disruption as well as clarification.  Partly because the climax I have doesn’t satisfy me and I’m not clear what it should be.  Partly because adding descriptive material is a whole manuscript task and a personal style changer, too, since I tend to be spare.  There will be a learning curve.

Closing in on the last few verses of the Jason and Medea early story.  When I’m done with it, before Friday, and have checked and revised my work, also before Friday, I’m ready to go to Book I and begin the work I first decided I wanted to do back in 2008 or 2009.  That’s exciting.

It’s exciting for more than the obvious reason; that is, that I can now do it.  It’s exciting in addition because it will feed a new work, one I will not start until all three of the Tailte novels are finished; but, a work I hope will utilize all I’m learning about writing and about mythology and Latin and Ovid and Rome.  Working title:  Changes.

 

Art and Culture, Literature, Writing

The Dark Edge of Fiction

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Spring                                                                               Bloodroot Moon

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”  A. Einstein

In one part of my life I chomp down on facts, ideas, connections, linkages.  Known and knowable things.  Stuffing them in, sometimes sideways, cramming them into the remaining nooks and crannies, or, rather growing dendrites and increasing those neuronal connections.  The Connectome.  My Connectome.

But.  When I write, instead of pouncing on the learning.  Trying to take it out for a spin in, say, an essay or a short non-fiction book.  I don’t.  My fiction comes from the darkness, from the circumference surrounding the knowledge, the place where the knowledge cannot go and would be of little help.

Fiction has its coherence with reality in spite of the definition, say on a continuum from realism to fantasy.  Even in fantasy, even one based on a world not this one, the characters are recognizable, they have to be, otherwise the fiction would not be communication but gibberish.

So, yes, there is that leash, but it’s a long one.  Often in fantasy long enough to lie useless on the sidewalk next to an orange lawn under an azure sun.  Oh, if you wanted, you could pick it up and follow it back to a Dairy Queen and ocean-going shipping, but why would you want to?  I mean, the action is at the other end of the leash.  That’s where I’d want to go.

And that’s the edge of fiction that lies alongside, shares a border with, the darkness.  Out there the leash no longer matters.  Except as a reminder that we’re all in this together somehow.  Somehow.

 

Asia, Cinema and Television, Literature, Politics

Politics

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Kate and I continue to watch House of Cards on Netflix.  We’re on episode 11 of 13.  I’ve enjoyed it though the cringe factor of reducing opponents to relapse and the casual, I use you-you use me attitudes speak of a world in which humans have only instrumental value, rather than intrinsic.

Still, when the stakes are high, the tactics get messy; I have no doubt of that; but, the world of political intrigue that resorts to the more extreme tactics represented in  House of Cards has not been part of my political experience.  Of course, I’ve never really left state level politics, so my range is narrow.

Civil Servant’s Notebook, the novel I mentioned a couple of posts ago, has very similar content, though in a Chinese metropolitan context.  I promised when I mentioned it excerpts, but they’ll have to wait.

The world view presented in many of the characters is bleak, a sort of aimless grasping propelling many of these bright, capable people.  There is also a strange dance between the hardest of hard core realism, e.g. life is absurd and a keen yearning for the pure political actor, impossible to corrupt and acting with the best interests of the people always in mind.  At various points the characters come off as actors in a dark political thriller, only later seeking love and friendship, even spiritual salvation.  It is, I believe, an important book.

Asia, GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Just Stuff

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Imbolc                                                                                 New (Valentine) Moon

The images, each moved from their numbered folders into new folders named for the organizational scheme that moved me at the moment, have a new home.  I’ve checked the prior machine for missing images, found a few and they’ll get added in tomorrow, but in essence the big image reorganization, self-inflicted, is over.

(Valkyrie (1908) by Stephan Sinding located in Churchill Park, Copenhagen, Denmark)

On March 1st I’m going to hit Missing with my third revision.  I’m hoping this one puts me close to finished that I can begin shopping it to agents.  I think it will, but until it’s done, I won’t know.  Research for Loki’s Children goes well, too. I’m almost done with all the Eddas, then I’ll go back over them again, looking at my notes and underlining, taking pieces here and there that I’ll use.

With the image reorganization I’ve felt a bit off my game this last week, but I’m back now.  Time to step up again.

Each day, though, I have (for the most part) finished a sentence of Jason and Medea.  That doesn’t sound like a very ambitious rate, but by the time a sentence is done, which can be between 2 and 14 lines long, I’m ready to put away the Lewis and Short, the Wheeler and the Anderson, close Perseus and go upstairs.  It’s a pace that, for now, allows me to work at an intense level, get work done steadily and yet allows enough time to do a quality job.

Been reading Civil Servant’s Notebook by Wang Xiaofang.  Author of 13 novels, all about Chinese bureaucracy, this is his first translated into English.  Published by Penguin.  Of all the material I’ve read on China of late this one seems to have the most insight into contemporary China.  Wang gives a satirical perspective on life inside municipal government, but he also strips the veins of a culture deep with history and short on ethical guidance.  I’ve read elsewhere of a moral aimlessness that inflicts contemporary China, but I was never able to put my finger on it until reading Civil Servant’s Notebook.  I don’t have it down here with me now, but tomorrow I’ll quote a few lines from it to show you what I mean.

Literature

Caution: Rant about the teaching of literature

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Winter                                                                 Cold Moon

“[A]ll methods of literary interpretation — Marxist, feminist, structuralist, and so on — depend upon the making of a distinction between surface and depth, between what is seen in the text and some underlying meaning.

— Peter Barry, “Postmodernism,” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

As a sophomore I took a required introductory literature class.  I’d always read a lot, having completed many of the classics before my freshman year of college; so, I wanted to see how a college level look at literature worked.  To orient us to time and place I should note that this is the fall of 1966, the place, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  Since my freshman year had been at the all male Wabash College, Ball State with its thousands of students (Wabash had 800) and coeds (remember that quaint yesterday term?) was a new experience for me.

I don’t remember the professors name, but I can see him, a short balding man with a non-descript face, a bit fleshy.  A suit wearer.  Cheap suits.  Do you see where this is going?  He said he disciplined himself by reading Time cover-to-cover each week.

The particular books we read I don’t recall now.  What I do recall is this professor telling me what the books meant.  Huh?  I always thought that was a contract between writer and reader.  A matter of creator and a mind willing to encounter the creator’s work in a receptive way.  As to what things meant.  Well.

This was a time, gentle reader, a time before theory, a time in the ancient days of yore when books were books and a time when readers did not receive texts; we just read them. Of, course there were various schools of literary interpretation, but they had little impact on the average reader.  And even if a careful application of prevailing theory revealed ideas about a text, that was all they were.  Just ideas.

Not holy writ.  But this guy, this professor and his Time magazine reading discipline claimed to know what the author meant.  And, worse, what I should understand from having read a text.  This violated my joy in reading so much that I abandoned, in that class, ever taking another college class in literature; based on the premise that I would continue to read and continue to interpret books as they impacted me, not as some poor schlub in a cheap suit said I should.

Of course, I over reacted.  Goes without saying.  But, I kept reading.  I kept learning things, important things, from books.  I don’t regret the decision.  At all.

So, I continue to read today, blithely ignoring what others say works mean, and taking my own sustenance from them.  Wrestled out with what tools I’ve cobbled together from years of enjoying the written word.

Would I have learned a lot in English classrooms?  Sure, I would have.  Not every professor could have his head stuck so determinedly in the sand as this guy.  It’s just not possible, is it?

OK.  Just wanted to get that off my chest.  Thanks for listening.

 

Literature

The American Geist

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Winter                                                                       Cold Moon

A long time ago, high school, maybe junior high, I decided that the way to get to know a people or a place was to read their literature.  Of course, reading their literature and being in the place for some time is optimal.

When I moved to Minnesota, for example, I read Sinclair Lewis and Ole Rolvaag and F.S. Scott Fitzgerald and Vilhelm Moberg.  Gave me a good grounding in the ethos, the thought world behind Minnesota.  Now, were I to do it today I might add Keillor, Erdrich, some of the many mystery writers, but you get the idea.

Here’s the point of this.  How much earlier American literature have you read?  I mean, how well do you know us through the minds of our first novelists and story tellers.  Say, Washington Irving.  Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Melville.  or,  Edgar Allen Poe.  If you have read them, are you like me and that reading is far in the past?  I’m going to start re-reading these guys over the next months.  Getting back in touch with our thought world.

 

Art and Culture, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Challenge a God

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Samhain                                                                  Thanksgiving Moon

My course on Mythology finishes week 8 Sunday with a quiz on material about Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ The Bacchae.  Over Thanksgiving week we have another 250 word essay due, the final writing assignment.  I’ve chosen to answer this question:  “In tragedies, the worlds of the divine and the human often come into direct contact, but in different ways in each tragedy. Choose one tragedy and analyze how it imagines the relationship between humans and the divine.”  Just weeks 9 and 10 to go.

(Caravaggio, 1595, Uffizi)

Don’t know how many of the 50,000 world wide students have stuck it out, but this is a wonderful way to refresh and deepen knowledge about Roman and Greek mythology.  It has also increased my analytical skills for use in approaching any myth, which includes, of course, the Metamorphoses.

In the Bacchae Sophocles approaches the story of the doubter Pentheus, king of Thebes, from the perspective of Dionysus, a god challenged.  The same incident occurs in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses and I translated it.  My main goal in all this work in the Latin is to embed the stories and the characters firmly in my mind.

While reading The Bacchae, a sudden burst of insight.  Here’s the insight:  The focus of this myth is how a god demonstrates his/her divinity when challenged.  The story of the golden calf in Genesis is a similar story.  So is the story of Adam and Eve.  Even Job.

This is, if you consider it, an ur-story since at some point every god or goddess had to establish their bona fides to persons who would worship them and so people would worship them.  We tend to come at religious life after this delicate and not at all obvious in its outcome encounter has already happened.  In the Bacchae and the story of Pentheus in Ovid Pentheus gets the ultimate penalty for challenging Bacchus.  He dies, his kingdom perishes and his people go into exile. Powerful demonstration of divinity on the part of Dionysus.