Has it Changed My Life? Quite Possibly.

So, Calvino's Invisible Cities is our next book.  Period.  I just finished reading it, which reading, as I've said before, was slow and savory, and I'm trying to decide: am I the same person, now that I've finished it, I was before?  Just the fact that the book's brought me to this question is saying a great deal.  Of course, to place it upon the pedestal aside the very few other truly life-changing books, I must compare it to them.  This also raises an interesting question: what is it that makes a book life-changing for its reader?  It's not a particularly difficult question, just interesting.  The answer, I think is simple: it must be a combination of [1] the book's quality (though generally to a lesser degree) and [2] the circumstances of time and place of the reader's life.  As it is, Invisible Cities is of a higher quality than some of the books way up there.  For example, as wonderful as Life of Pi is, it has its [few] limitations, one of which is word craft.  Don't get me wrong.  Martel is an excellent craftsman of the sentence, but Calvino is of the master-smithing status of Borges, Chabon, and McCarthy.  Other books include the obvious tomes of The Divine Comedy and East of Eden/Grapes of Wrath, as well as the Alice books, Ender's Game, Wonder Boys, and Blindness.  Each of these books arrived in my life at key moments, did their business, such as it was, and took up permanent residence upon my bookshelves--literal and metaphysical.  Does Invisible Cities, an essentially perfect book (yeah, really--and not perfect like Joyce, but perfect like, well, Joyce if he had a freaking heart or if Steinbeck could write briefly yet as powerfully), warrant place among the others?

Nearly all of the best books I've read, save All the Pretty Horses, which just bloody tortured me, broke me, heart and spirit, and highlighted in thirty-foot capital, fluorescent letters, "YOU CAN'T WRITE!" inspire me.  You see, I want to be a writer.  Rather, I want to be a successful writer.  I want to be a writer whose stuff people want to read!  The best books nearly always inspire me to write.  They tickle the muses who come and circle me and whisper in my ears and give my fingers and cerebral frontal lobe the itch and make me want to CREATE.  Yeah.  Well, Invisible Cities has done that--and in frickin' spades, man.  The last time I felt the bug this strongly (at least via a book) was when I finished Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North (or however you want to translate it) and subsequently began my own hyohakusha and used the genre and text as model for my creative writing students' end-of-year project.  (My hyohakusha ultimately failed (I'm an inadequate poet), though many of my students wrote and created brilliantly, beautifully.)

Basho was a three years ago.  Since reading it, I've returned to it again and again.  I've studied its poetry and form and in four or five translations.  I've traced his path on maps.  I've referred to and used him as model in poetry and a book of my own.  Has it changed my life?  I dare say it has.  Maybe it just takes time for a book to climb the long stair to the top once it's arrived at--been permitted access to--the base.  If this is the case (and you can't tell right away if it's happened), I expect Basho will soon arrive at the top right along with Steinbeck et al and Calvino will have likely just recently begun the ascent.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Regardless, this book amazed and amazes me.  I am eager to read it again.

KIM XIV -- chapter 8: Meantime a Place by the Fire

1. Churel: The overlapping of folkloric creatures / ghosts / monster / characters across cultures is fascinating.  The churel reminds me of La Llorona and the diviners from L'Inferno.  Of course, folklore derives itself from the human needs of its inventors and propagators, and no matter the culture, little differs among the peoples of world.  Right?  Anyway:  Inasmuch as the churel is a woman who died in childbirth, is there any symbolic connection that you can, well, divine, from/to the text?
2. Seeing the substantial role that Mahbub Ali yet plays, I haven't given up on the notion that perhaps he is the Red Bull after all, and that the Red Bull on the Green Field of Kimball's father's old regiment is ancillary, at least for Kim's coming-of-age.  Interesting, however, and especially from our current perspective from within the story where Kim is yet to commit to any one particular way of life, that not only is the beard dyed (within the context of the story) but also that (meta-story) the Red Bull regiment is an invention of Kipling's.  Thoughts?
3. "They were unfriends of mine."
4. "Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger."  Akin to (off the top of my head, though a common enough theme) Ender's Game and its Buggers versus Humans: "If the other fellow can't tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn't trying to kill you."   This, of course, is a perfectly apt theme (potentially, anyway -- though, of course, we'll see...) for Kim as there are so many cultures and the issue of communication between them is at point, else Kim would certainly not be Friend to all the World.
5. And so, building from the previous: "Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law—or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart."
6. Forgetting the final section, evaluate this chapter [1] as compared to those we've read so far and [2] as a story--a short story--unto itself, isolated from the rest of the book.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana IV -- chapter 3: FLOWERS and MORE FOG

from Benali's edition of Dante's Commedia

So often, chapter titles lend a childish, or, well, a less than sophisticated, sense to a book, not that there's anything wrong with that.  Many of my favorite books, YA or children's, rank right up there with my all-time favorites.  Of "grown-up" books, however, I can only think of a few that manage to use chapter titles especially well: Tortilla Flat, Ender's Game, and, of course, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  In my impatience and eagerness to get to the meat of the next chapter, I often forget to look at the chapter number or, if it's there, the title.  We are now on chapter 3 of Mysterious Flame and only now have I finally looked up at the chapter title.  I flipped back over the first two, and they're great!

1. What is your impression of Yambo's opinion of himself, especially now that he's seen evidence of his past as a businessman and with (though perhaps he's only invented it, as Gratarolo suggests) Sibilla?
2. (I will generally leave issues of Italian grammar aside, like, for instance, the differences between tu and lei and their correlates in French, unless you'd like me to load up each post with bits of Italian minutiae; otherwise, if you have a question about anything like this, please ask.)
3. This chapter makes me really wish I could afford ancient treasure tomes like these!  I am guilty of buying books just because they're pretty, because they feel nice.  I love a library for its smell.  Would I say no to a Nook were it offered me?  Of course not!  But pages and ink and sweat and love packed between stretched, gilt leather covers....  But that's just me.  Is it such a business of passion for Yambo?
4. "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."  As Yambo has forgotten his past and lost the experiences of love with it, from where will new love build or grow or spring [insert your poetry here]?  In a child, love begins as dependence and trust, and therefore is extended--and only ever around the girth of its own selfishness--to parents, guardians, caregivers.
5. "Are there drugs for remembering?" // "Maybe Sibilla..."  What is the emotion he's experiencing toward this girl?
6. So here's the line that provides the chapter's title: "And someone will pluck your flower, mouth of the wellspring, someone who won't even know, a fisher of spongers with take this rare pearl."  The context, of course, provides its own interpretation of jealousy and lust, but there's another use of plucking flowers, or deflowering, which also applies to the source of Yambo's fear--and mixed sense of conquest--for his maybe-relationship with Sibilla.  Also, often, a wellspring is a ready source of ample fog when conditions are right.
7. Issue of translation and plurals: Umberto Eco carefully supervises the translation of each of his works.  He most certainly was aware of the translator's pluralization of palazzo to palazzos, though the "correct" carry-over pluralization would be palazzi.
8. At the time the Lira went out for the Euro, 1000 lira was worth about 65 cents (very approximately) --just to give you an idea.
9. Another brilliant analogy: Yambo compares his loss of past to the loss of the third dimension, leaving everything flat--without depth.
10. Eco ascribes certain fog quotations to certain characters as their favorites.  Is this meant to indicate character traits or the like, or was the determination arbitrary?
11. Ah, that last sentence!

Finally, what do you think of the nickname, Yambo?  I don't have an Italian copy of Mysterious Flame, so I don't know if the original uses the Y or the more appropriate Ia (Italian generally skips y/upsilon), like J, K, X, and W (except for carryovers from English or French or whatever else), which are phonetically useless.  It doesn't make much sense to examine it in English, which shows itself mildly as "I am," and all it's Old Testament weight, though I can't totally disregard it.  As it is, "Io," is Italian's first-person singular pronoun.  Closer to its spelling, however, is the Italian of the poetry term, "iamb," "giambo" in Italian ("iambo," "iambe," and "jambo" in others of the Romance languages), which, in English, is a trochee, but in Italian, as "giambo" is actually three syllables, contains in its first two an iamb.  I don't know.  Names are usually important, but I can't find anything more than this.  Thoughts?

Wednesday's for Kids VII -- A CHALLENGE IN SELFISHNESS

read ahead for the challenge

***

IF YOU'VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, 

IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE;

if you have, well, maybe it will and maybe it won't.

***

Kids are selfish.  (Not a bad thing.)

All of us have at least some kid in us--some more than others.  (A good thing.)

This Wednesday--today--and more so than other Wednesdays, this post of "Wednesday's for Kids" is not intended exclusively for kids (inasmuch as kids are defined as people who are not grownups, though the distinction, here at least, is utterly pointless) but intended to motivate you to tap into your inner kid and be, via just one particular activity, selfish for one day.  (WARNING: this may be preternaturally difficult for the unnaturally selfless.)

Backing up a bit, and in the name of contrast, pretty much all of the reading on "Mr. Center's Wall" is slow.  Really slow--like less than a chapter-a-day slow.  If you've tuned into my Dubliners feature for instance, well, that's about five or six pages about every week-and-a-half.  So, slow.  And there's very specific advantages to going so slow.  It's like using a microscope.

But what about fast?  And not so much an increase of words-per-minute, but pages-per-day.

Stay with me:

So there are benefits to reading slow.  Duh.  To get what I want to get out of a story from Dubliners, I've got to read those same five or six pages (they're really short stories) five or six times--practically a scanning electron microscope.  But what if I read the whole book--and that's only something like 150 pages--in one day?

Have you ever read a book in one day?  In one sitting?

The most memorable reading experience I've ever had came when I was about ten years old.  My family came into a new edition of Alice in Wonderland.  I knew of the book.  I'd seen a couple different Alice movies.  But I'd never read the book.  The illustrations intrigued me.  The advertised weirdness interested me.  I set myself up on the couch and started reading.  It was Thanksgiving break.  Snowy outside.  Smelled nice and foody inside.  And I only left the couch to eat.  I was there for something like ten hours.  Everybody else doing puzzles, watching football, playing computer games.  Me reading.  And reading.  And reading.  It was amazing.  And not because I was ten and demonstrated a ten-hour attention span; amazing because I was interested, into it, excited--it was cool!

Since then, there have been a number of other books I've read in one sitting: Call it Courage, Ender's Game, and The Hobbit, to name a few of the other most-memorable.  However, and while all excellent, they are not necessarily the best books I've ever read.  But the experience of ditching, at least temporarily the microscope for the macroscope is fascinating.  The experiences--slow versus fast--are entirely different.

So HERE'S THE CHALLENGE:

1. Pick a day for utter and complete selfishness and mark the calendar (don't have a calendar? make a poster with the date, the book title, and your signature and hang it on your wall; take a picture and email it to me);
2. erase all obligations, cancel all appointments, turn off all phones, touch not your computer (not even with your wee little eyeballs);
3. pick a book you haven't read (making sure it's one you got on good authority and will not slowly poison you through the skin of your hands over the half-a-day (+) you'll be holding on to it);
4. do all grocery shopping and food prep and caffeine procuring IN ADVANCE (plan well);
5. read;
6. report back here.

Actually, REPORT HERE NOW, if you don't mind.  Two things you may include (1 for those who will do it; 2 for those who won't): 1, what book will you be reading and when will you read it; 2, what book would you read if you were willing (and/or able) to take the challenge?

*

Already done it?  What'd you read?