On bookslut today, I found a list from the American Book Review that seemed to me to be of a piece, interest wise, with the most recent thoughts posted by this outfit, vis a vis privileged chunks of text. Some of them are interested in their ideas about what a last line really is (the BANRR is more strict about sentences); their numbers one and four, for example, come from weirdly punctuated texts, and to throw the whole sentence up would be pdf-straining. The other chunk of special text, in addition to these prides of place, is the title, and today I want to talk about those three things working in conjunction, mostly because I still haven't picked out the book that will be this outfit's next selection. Hopefully, that will change by the end of the post.
Today I finished reading Madame Bovary by celebrated grump and mustache enthusiast Gustave Flaubert. The first sentence is as follows:
"We were in class when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.”
The last sentence is as follows:
"He has just been given the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur."
The title, of course, is Madame Bovary. According to something I read a long time ago and don't remember, at one point Flaubert was once asked who provided the inspiration for his titular heroine, and bellowed back "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" And in addition to channeling her creator and naming her text, Emma indeed is the reason for the book: she and her dalliances provide the plotting through which Flaubert channels the scathing things he has to say about bourgeois philistines, especially the pathetic Charles (the new boy from the first sentence) and the worthless pharmacist Homais (the "he" from the final sentence). For such a dominant personality, though, it seems, to my currently-occupied-with-textual-privilege eye, curious that those framing sentences have nothing to do with the titular Madame. (It's also interesting, though I'm not sure why, that the "we" making observations in the first sentence and chapter drops out and never appears again; its as though the novel is a insanely psychologically acute "Where Are Your Classmates?" from the Tostes Yearbook.)
Compare this treatment to that of another Emma. Ms. Woodhouse is introduced like this:
"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."
So here we know we are getting a book that wants to know: what is Emma Woodhouse like? Presumably she will be interesting enough that she will care (though Jane Austen thought no one would like her), and hopefully, for plot's sake, at least something will distress or vex her. But the big difference that I am angling at between this two novels, and using my hokey first-and-last-sentences-as-thematic-indices tool for since this is a blog and not a paper, is that one is focused on a review of a system and one the review of a person. Since I work at Borders, and have a family which is large and largely uninterested in what they call "books you have to think about", I spend a lot of my time wondering what kind of generic difference that makes for: what makes the sort of book that I would like and that my boss would instruct me to leave off of a display, since no one would buy it? Or, what kind of book would I love that my mother would refuse to put before her book club? This structural exercise has opened a set that seems potentially potent, the systems review vs. individual idea. I will sit down with some Sophie Kinsella, a book which my family and Borders customers seem to love (and about which, I swear, I have no opinion yet whatever) and see where she falls between these Emma poles.
Up next: I am not yet done with Grendel, so may you all. So I will probably write another post on him in the next day or two (plus I thought up of a line about him that is too, too good not to post).
Also -- did you know that if you stay up til midnight, you can read what feels like the next day's op-eds? And that Monday is a Krugman day? Kickass.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Democracy
So here's what I've been reading, in the doldrums surrounding our next official pick: Blake Emerson's tremendous (and recommended) Radical Negative blog, ESPN.com. Madame Bovary, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. The things most germane to our nominal concerns are the two latter, and the most strongly recommended are the two former (especially Blake's). But for the second two, which I've been studiously devoting myself to on breaks in my strenuous sched at Borders: what's going on with Mme B.? Why do so many novel-historians think it's so important? And what's going on with the BANRR2007? What are the new and hip reading these days?
The first thing I'd like to recommend about one of these is the BANRR's newly acquired habit of pointing out the Best American First Sentences of Novels. This practice is absolutely irreplaceable. And the best part is, you can do it yourself. Go to Borders or wherever, and just write down like ten or twenty first sentences of novels, picked at random. Throw in a short story or a biography if you want, just make sure that it's the first thing the author wanted you to see. And look at them. This is a specially privileged piece of text that you'll be privileging yourself to, right up there with writing down instances of a book's title in its text (which is harder to find and, frankly, as a generic exercise, less rewarding). Think about it -- this is the equivalent of inviting yourself to the ESPYs, or some other party for the privileged. Look at the text that is most special! This is almost as good as inviting yourself to a party for the OTHER most privileged text, the text that gets the honorable job of closing out a novel or story, but minus all the resonant jobs given to them. I seriously recommend this activity, especially if you are put in a bookstore and tasked with the job of "making the place look good" in the final three hours of the night that the store is open.
Anyway, that is enough fun to have for one day. I have Thursday off, so e-mail me your favorite first sentences discovered this way and I will do likewise. Or else, I will post my favorites in the absence of e-mails, or else I will just blog about Madame Bovary. Up to you guys. Democracy in blogs?
YES WE CAN!
The first thing I'd like to recommend about one of these is the BANRR's newly acquired habit of pointing out the Best American First Sentences of Novels. This practice is absolutely irreplaceable. And the best part is, you can do it yourself. Go to Borders or wherever, and just write down like ten or twenty first sentences of novels, picked at random. Throw in a short story or a biography if you want, just make sure that it's the first thing the author wanted you to see. And look at them. This is a specially privileged piece of text that you'll be privileging yourself to, right up there with writing down instances of a book's title in its text (which is harder to find and, frankly, as a generic exercise, less rewarding). Think about it -- this is the equivalent of inviting yourself to the ESPYs, or some other party for the privileged. Look at the text that is most special! This is almost as good as inviting yourself to a party for the OTHER most privileged text, the text that gets the honorable job of closing out a novel or story, but minus all the resonant jobs given to them. I seriously recommend this activity, especially if you are put in a bookstore and tasked with the job of "making the place look good" in the final three hours of the night that the store is open.
Anyway, that is enough fun to have for one day. I have Thursday off, so e-mail me your favorite first sentences discovered this way and I will do likewise. Or else, I will post my favorites in the absence of e-mails, or else I will just blog about Madame Bovary. Up to you guys. Democracy in blogs?
YES WE CAN!
Friday, March 21, 2008
Misty Monster Hop
Here, and at long g.d. last, is the Book Report on Grendel, from me rather than Grendel’s poor patron, but unbowed nevertheless. Where does Grendel fit in on the storied number line of book club book appropriateness? It is hard to say. What Grendel is is a barrage of observation, gleaned in various ways, about selves. But the bookishness of those selves, and the seriousness with which we are advised to take the book-like quality of any self, is chimerical throughout the book. It seems to think different things at different times, or even be different times. Which, well and good if you are a novel narrated for a monster. Not for nothing is their purview called cryptozoology.
I often get on the subject of things that came first and command our respect as such. The whole lame tideover bit that constituted the last entry on this engine was such a getting on of a subject, and conveyed what I normally think about these things: with apologies to Robert Johnson, I’d rather take the new and exciting. However, usually when I am at bars and talking about Chaucer (so like eighty percent of the times I am at bars) I will start admiring Chaucer and Shakespeare and other early heroes for their visionary empathetic abilities. Here’s Sir Philip Sidney, on Chaucer: “I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.” It is a good kind of marvel, that: it is ennobling to imagine mist-surrounded early empathetic pioneers. The problem is that there are a lot more people like William Langland, whose Piers Plowman doesn’t have the same kind of dry-ice cache as the Canterbury Tales, than there are people like the singular Chaucer. So how do you solve a problem like this? One way, is massive, monstrous, pomo anachronism; and so here we have Grendel, rent from his proper, Beowulf-poet-thuddingly dull ways of thinking, and given to talk like he went to Yale in the seventies. That dragon, I guess, is Paul de Man.
How would this book have worked if it wasn’t called Grendel, if it didn’t have Beowulf propping it up? Everyone’s fond of those misty figures, even if they aren’t familiar, and there’s not a lot to Grendel in the source material, so Gardner has plenty of latitude. The parts of the novel that work best in relation to Beowulf are the ones that echo with irony – we know well before our narrator what fate awaits him at the hands of that Geat he never gets around to naming. And his analysis of the power of fiction is very shrewd – Grendel is most interesting when he talks about the Shaper, who had “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the Danes] who knew the truth, remembered it his way – and so did I” (Gardner, 43). One avenue that seemed, at first, to be one that may have been interestingly explored, would’ve been an awareness, or even a suggestion, on Grendel’s part that he was no less invented than the harmonious reign of Scyld. However, the more I think of it, that would’ve been to absolutely kick down the pole that held up the tent, and I am glad that Gardner held off. In fact, the huge importance given the Shaper seems to suggest that he may have at one time thought of such a gesture, but that the rich character of his invented, sorrowful Grendel – sad, sardonic, scourging – refused to sabotage himself.
Up next: I haven’t decided. I am vacillating between our Shadow Correspondent’s suggestion (Proust was a Neuroscientist, which I really want to read but kind of want to read Swann’s Way first) and one of my own personal current intrigue, Author Author by David Lodge (starring a fictionalized Henry James). That, or I’m going to inaugurate a new series where I only read books that have been recommended to me, and then try to judge the character of the recommender by their pick. Stay tuned!
I often get on the subject of things that came first and command our respect as such. The whole lame tideover bit that constituted the last entry on this engine was such a getting on of a subject, and conveyed what I normally think about these things: with apologies to Robert Johnson, I’d rather take the new and exciting. However, usually when I am at bars and talking about Chaucer (so like eighty percent of the times I am at bars) I will start admiring Chaucer and Shakespeare and other early heroes for their visionary empathetic abilities. Here’s Sir Philip Sidney, on Chaucer: “I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.” It is a good kind of marvel, that: it is ennobling to imagine mist-surrounded early empathetic pioneers. The problem is that there are a lot more people like William Langland, whose Piers Plowman doesn’t have the same kind of dry-ice cache as the Canterbury Tales, than there are people like the singular Chaucer. So how do you solve a problem like this? One way, is massive, monstrous, pomo anachronism; and so here we have Grendel, rent from his proper, Beowulf-poet-thuddingly dull ways of thinking, and given to talk like he went to Yale in the seventies. That dragon, I guess, is Paul de Man.
How would this book have worked if it wasn’t called Grendel, if it didn’t have Beowulf propping it up? Everyone’s fond of those misty figures, even if they aren’t familiar, and there’s not a lot to Grendel in the source material, so Gardner has plenty of latitude. The parts of the novel that work best in relation to Beowulf are the ones that echo with irony – we know well before our narrator what fate awaits him at the hands of that Geat he never gets around to naming. And his analysis of the power of fiction is very shrewd – Grendel is most interesting when he talks about the Shaper, who had “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the Danes] who knew the truth, remembered it his way – and so did I” (Gardner, 43). One avenue that seemed, at first, to be one that may have been interestingly explored, would’ve been an awareness, or even a suggestion, on Grendel’s part that he was no less invented than the harmonious reign of Scyld. However, the more I think of it, that would’ve been to absolutely kick down the pole that held up the tent, and I am glad that Gardner held off. In fact, the huge importance given the Shaper seems to suggest that he may have at one time thought of such a gesture, but that the rich character of his invented, sorrowful Grendel – sad, sardonic, scourging – refused to sabotage himself.
Up next: I haven’t decided. I am vacillating between our Shadow Correspondent’s suggestion (Proust was a Neuroscientist, which I really want to read but kind of want to read Swann’s Way first) and one of my own personal current intrigue, Author Author by David Lodge (starring a fictionalized Henry James). That, or I’m going to inaugurate a new series where I only read books that have been recommended to me, and then try to judge the character of the recommender by their pick. Stay tuned!
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