Extreme Measures

This book is about Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.  He invented eugenics and statistics, amongst other things.  Martin Brookes wrote the book and it is well worth reading if only to see how much more dishonest we are now.  Galton was a racist and his idea of making the human race better- preventing criminals and idiots, amongst others from reproduciting- was horrifying.  H.G. Wells thought that criminals were some of the smartest people he knew.  He thought they were smarter than some judges.  Therefore, he disagreed with Galton.  Who knows who would make a good parent?  Galton didn't and he never became one himself.  Doesn't what you give your child after he is born mean as much as the genes you have given him?  Galton didn't think so.  It's one hundred and fifty years since Galton came up with eugenics.  As Brookes notes, a lot of people followed him, including thirty states in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s.  He was a proto-Nazi.  But I've been reading letters to the editor from people with Down syndrome children who say they get asked all the time why they didn't get the amneo that would tell them whether their child was going to have birth defects.  They say this with the child standing right there!  How much have we really changed?

Dick lit versus chick lit

Chick lit is a way to dismiss women readers, of course.  Dick lit is a way to laugh at men, who follow their penises everywhere, even into their intellectual endevours.  And what poor endevours those are, filled with laughable plot lines where the most-unlikely things happen with young women to the delight of the male readership.  Fantasy, said Freud, is a major part of every normal person's life.  Therefore, it's not surprising that literature should allow us to live in these places.  I've read one book that I would consider dick lit and that is a book by Ross MacDonald.  It was fantastic, but far too uninteresting.  I want my authors to get me closer to glory, which is all they wanted too.  If I can share in that glory, the fiction has succeeded.  I have delved more deeply into the human soul.  It's great books that put me in touch with the eternal.  I loved Ross MacDonald's book.  But I have to spend my time reading great literature.  I realize how pompous I sound; what I'm trying to sound is sincere.  I am happy about Prose's list because it doesn't just have the Russians, Irish, Canadians and Americans.  It has new writers too.

The end of reading

The New York Times says that people read these days to be social and to fit in with others who are reading the same books.  It also says that we are losing our ability to think deeply.  That we spend far too much time being interrupted by one kind of technology or another.  Either it is true that reading is an individual activity whose enthusiasm cannot be easily transferred to another or it is a communal activity that moves us more towards the hive mentality that one writer warned against of the Internet.  Does anyone have the patience to sit through an entire book?  A book takes hours!  We have only seconds!  Add to this the fact that, according to the same NYT article, people have no thirst for fictional constructions.  We want reality as much as possible.  Perhaps we are losing our imaginations.  When that happens- watch out!  Fascism will not be far off.

Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon"

Prose is right to say that you can learn to write by reading outside of your genre.  But it would seem more strange if someone was interested in writing non-fiction and therefore refused to read novels.  Or would it?  I've heard people- a person that Margaret Laurence might call a pioneer- say that they don't read novels because they're untrue and therefore distracting from the world as it is.  Of course, a novel is a lie that tells the truth.  West's writing is lively and it's no wonder that this book got on to the list.  I approached the book with reluctance, but was won over by the dedication which said: "to my friends in Yugoslavia who are now all dead or enslaved."  I like politics too and that doesn't hurt if you're going to read such a tome.  What are you reading?

Patricia Highsmith's bleak vision

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes is devastating.  I'm encouraged by these stories because they're blunt.  Without getting too exaggerated about it, my writing is like them and a lot of people have said great things about her book: that it's existential and that it's not about crime where people get killed, but about being caught outside in your underwear.  Her imagination is boundless.  It makes me uncomfortable to read stories that I would dismiss as written by a curmudgeon in print.  I'm better than I think.  What are you reading?

Oh! The Noise!

It's hard to read a book like L.P. Hartley's "The Go-Between."  There's far too much noise in my life.  Too much distraction from the quiet space within that all of us need in order to read such a devastating book.  Besides the fact that I'm on the subway.  And the damn station announcements, largely unnecessary, every two minutes.  The book is a coming-of-age story, as Kathleen Kirk says on her wonderful blog, Wait!  I have a blog?  It is a great book and I know why Francine Prose put it on her list of books.  It is another room that art has.  But it is not television.  There is nothing in it demanding to be paid attention too unless you can be very quiet inside.  I doubt I can be that quiet.  I'm off to read Patricia Highsmith's Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes now.  Prose mentions in passing that she spent a summer reading all of Highsmith's books, but she didn't put her on the list that she created.  I think Prose would admit that Highsmith too occupies one of the rooms of art.  What are you reading?

Sunday's the best day to read

A colleague said once that she couldn't read on a bus that was only going to be traveling for twenty minutes; she needed more time.  Our weekends are now as busy as our weekdays, but, if you get up early enough, you can have time for reading.  I am reading Turgenev's "First Love" before I sleep and it is luminous.  Unlike Alcott, it is filled with light.  I guess that's the thing about Prose's list: it includes all of life, children's books too.  Which I usually like.  Prose wrote a book for children that I like, for example.  What are you reading?

Globe and Mail confirms the futility of writing courses

Russel Smith pointed out that there are fewer books of fiction being read than ever before and at the same time there are more people wanting to write them.  Some of this is snobbery.  I've already quoted Atwood on this and it's a good quote, but there's a feeling amongst those who've been published that there is far too much democratization of art.  If they were forced to say it, they'd say that not everyone can be a literary artist.  I'm sure they're right.  In any case, what must be avoided and the good writing books point this out at the same time as they contradict themselves by offering advice is advice to writers that will impose rules. There are no rules in art, both Gardner and Prose agree.  Learn from the great works of literary art, especially those outside of one's genre.  What are you reading?

Little Women

I like Alcott's book a little better now.  There's no Ishmael and no Captain Ahab, but the characters want things.  They are adorable and they make me happy.  No quote of the day.  What are you reading?

Tuesday February 23, 2010

I'm reading Little Women on the subway.  At least it wasn't as bad as reading Flannery O'Connor and having a Black man sit down beside me only to look over at a page of N-words that he managed to misunderstand entirely.  He must have thought that I was actually saying the N-words on that page because he started screaming at me and calling me a racist.  But reading Little Women, especially the illustrated copy, is worse because it's for five year olds.  I mean I can't believe Prose recommended it.  I trust her and so I keep reading it, but it does feel like a book for girls or, at best, for women.  It reminded me of Brenda Ueland's book "If you want to write."  The writing that she quotes is like Louisa May Alcott's.  That's the writing that she praises.  Imagine a list that includes Samuel Beckett and Louisa May Alcott!  So I'm lost to even find anything that I might not know about writing that Alcott knows.  Quote of the day: "After various lesser mishaps, Meg was finished at last, and by the united exertions of the family Jo's hair was got up, and her dress on."  Don't get me wrong, I love children's books.

Gogol's Dead Souls

If there's any doubt that the greatest teachers of writing are dead, read Gogol and see how wrong you are.  Especially remarkable is this passage: "Happy is the writer who omits these dull and repulsive characters that disturb one by being so painfully real...The delicious mist of the incense he burns dims human eyes; the miracle of his flattery masks all the sorrows of life and depicts only the goodness of man...He is called a great universal poet, soaring high above all other geniuses of the world even as an eagle soars above other high flying creatures.  The mere sound of his name sounds a thrill through ardent young hearts; all eyes greet him with radiance and responsive tears...
      But a different lot and another fate awaits the writer who has dared to evoke all such things that are constantly before one's eyes...the shocking morass of trifles that has tied up our lives, and the essence of cold, crumbling, humdrum characters with whom our earthly way, now bitter, now dull, fairly swarms....Not for him will be the applause, no grateful tears will he see...not to him will a girl of sixteen come flying, her head all awhirl with heroic fervor.  Not for him will be that sweet enchantment when a poet hears nothing but the harmonies he has engendered himself; and finally, he will not escape the judgement of his time, the judgement of hypocritical and unfeeling contemporaries who will accuse the creatures his mind has bred of being base and worthless, will allow a contemptible nook for him in the gallery of those authors who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the morals of his own characters, and will deny him everything, heart, soul, and the divine flame of talent."

Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor

Reading diary pages 496 to 540.  She's very good.  But I've spent so much being politically correct that it's hard to read.  Prose says that art is a house with many rooms.  She hates the habit of colleges that insist on making students critics of the writers themselves and then able to dismiss their work.  In this recommend list, it is the work itself that is important.  She spends almost no time talking about how bad a man was and how that is obvious in his writing.  Von Kleist is on the list, and she does say that he killed his girl friend and then himself, but it didn't keep him off the list.  When we condemned writers because they were racist or sexist, we felt so superior to their art when we were in university.  We had no right.  Quote of the day: "A visionary light settled in her eyes.  She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.  Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.  There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs."  

Escapes by Joy Williams

I want to learn from all the books on this list. I had a feeling that I read it as a teenager or maybe only one story. I hate the book, but I remember, still, a year after I've read it, the story about a drunk woman told by her young daughter. Maybe the stories are simply too raw.

Some Hope: A Triology by Edward St. Aubyn

It's hard to say why I loved this book so much. I recommend it highly. It takes the reader right to hell, but I could never turn away. I didn't want to turn away. There's not a false note in it and there are monsters galore. This is where I most appreciated Prose's comments about the pressure that young writers are under (I refer not to St. Aubyn) to write characters who one can identify with from editors. That is the way to sell in writing Hollywood and, as publishing becomes more like Hollywood, the same pressure is put on novelists. What you can't help admitting about the vast majority of these books is that they are filled misfits, syncophants and sociopaths. I am interested in them. As Prose said, that's the only thing that's necessary.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Saturday, February 20th, 2010. I read pages 448 to 492. Perhaps my colleague is right and O'Connor is far too depressing, especially for February. Today's story was very dark. "The Lame Shall Enter First" is a devastating view of human beings at least the one in this story. I don't have the guts to be so powerful in my vision. I'm reminded of Margaret Atwood's comment about the democratization of writing classes. "Everyone," she wrote, "can dig a hole, but not everyone can be a gravedigger." In any case, I'm grateful and fortified by the courage it must have taken her to write the story. Quote of the day: "The question and the sight of Sheppard seemed to throw the boy into a fury. "To show up that big tin Jesus!" he hissed and kicked his leg out at Sheppard. "He thinks he's God. I'd rather be in the reformatory than in his house, I'd rather be in the pen! The Devil has him in his power. He don't know his left hand from his right, he don't have as much sense as his crazy kid!" He paused and then swept on to his fantastic conclusion. "He made suggestions to me!"

Alice Munro's "Selected Stories"

This is a great book. I'm not a fan- or wasn't- of Munro, but this collection changed my mind. It has to be read to be believed.

Swann's Way

There is no way to do justice to this translation. I've tried to read bad translations of Proust and they were dreck. This is writing that cannot be looked away from. It reminds me of Bowen's "The House in Paris." They are both lush books. Although Carver is more my thing, Proust is even more valuable.

Crime and Punishment

So this is where O'Connor got her inspiration. Or from Gogol. Who can say for sure? There's a long tradition of misfits in fiction, one I never noticed before. I love Dosteyevsky. I love his crazy exaggeration about spiritual matters. But sometimes I have no idea what he's talking about.

Drown

By Junot Diaz. Hard stories to read with, if it's not too cliche, a lot of heart. I'm happy I got to read this book because it makes me agree with Prose that the novel is alive and well. Diaz can write!

The Big Sleep

I love reading this book, but I don't think I got much out of it. Prose put it on the list because the writing is great, but it's not serious fiction. She's not a snob; her list is impossible because she's completely without snobbery. She doesn't look down on hard-shell detectives. She sees art here too. Chandler's strength is dialogue and that's one of my huge weaknesses. I could learn something on a second reading.