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.

Through the Looking Glass VI -- chapter 4: BLACK BIRD

The first half of Chapter 4 (to the completion of Dee's recitation) manages a balance of true nonsense for nonsense's sake ("The Walrus and the Carpenter," for example, though I think there's yet some revelatory nuggets here anyway) and what I believe to be truly symbolic, either as intended by Carroll or as subconscious manifestation.

What are your thoughts regarding:

• the music from the tree, which starts when Alice and the Tweedles begin their brief dance and ends abruptly upon their finishing;
• Alice's narration of her story to her sister;
• "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

– There is evidence that Carroll intended no symbolism whatsoeverby this poem, and despite uncounted readers' attempts, and that it’s indeed complete nonsense, for Carroll left the choice of the second character to Tenniel, based upon the latter's preference in drawing, betwixt a carpenter, a butterfly, and a baronet.

– (from Roger Green, via Martin Gardner) The operetta Alice, by Savile Clarke extends the ending of the poem with an additional stanza, thus:

        The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

                The Walrus ceased to weep;

        They’d finished all the oysters;

                And they laid them down to sleep—

        And of their craft and cruelty

                The punishment to reap.

        —at which point the ghosts of two oysters return and dance upon the chests of the gluttons.  According to Gardner “Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oysters sympathizers among the spectators.”

The second half of the chapter is significantly darker, even if you are an oyster sympathizer.

1. Which is Alice more justified to "like": the Walrus, who felt sorry for the oysters; or the Carpenter, who ate fewer of them?
2. The Red King is Carroll.  Defend.
3. Dee and Dum are mirror opposites (enantiomorphs; examine Tenniel's illustration of Alice preparing the brothers for combat.  Except for the accoutrement, they are indeed mirror images of each other).  If one stood before a mirror, he would not see himself (so to speak), but his brother.  As we're dealing with reflections, what do you think of someone battling with his/her own reflection?
4. This chapter opens with a famous nursery rhyme, which turns out in the end of the chapter to be prophetic--i.e. the crow actually comes.  Does Carroll, perhaps passively, hope that his writing might be similarly prophetic?  Does he have any such hope?
5. Interesting bit of double symbolism with the crow: first, consider the quotation from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, below; second, the fact that in 585 B.C. the war between King Alyattes of Lydia and King Cyaxares of Medes ended--or was interrupted--by a total eclipse of the sun.  Tangentially, is there a connection between Alice's taking refuge under a tree and the somehow-avoidance of dark and death?

From Tortilla Flat:

        Where is Danny?  Lonely as smoke on a clear cold night, he drifts through Monterey in the evening.  To the post-office he goes, to the station, to the pool rooms on Alvarado Street, to the wharf where the black water mourns among the piles.  What is it, Danny?  What makes you feel this way?  Danny didn’t know.  There was an ache in his heart like the farewell to a dear woman; there was a vague sorrow in him like the despair of autumn.  He walked past the restaurants he used to smell with interest, and no appetite was aroused in him.  He walked by Madam Zuca’s great establishment, and exchanged no obscene jests with the girls in the windows.  Back to the wharf he went.  He leaned over the rail and looked into the deep, deep water.  Do you know, Danny, how the wine of your life is pouring into the fruit jars of the gods?  Do you see the procession of your days in the oily water among the piles?  He remained motionless, staring down.

        They were worried about him at Danny’s house, when it began to get dark.  The friends left the party and trotted down the hill into Monterey.  They asked, “Have you seen Danny?”

        “Yes, Danny walked by here an hour ago.  He walked slow.”

        Pilon and Pablo hunted together.  They traced their friend over the route he had followed, and at last they saw him, on the end of the dark pier.  He was lighted by a dim electric wharf light.  They hurried out to him.

        Pablo did not mention it then, but ever afterwards it was his custom, when Danny was mentioned, to describe what he saw as he and Pilon walked out on the wharf toward Danny.  “There he stood,” Pablo always said.  “I could just see him, leaning on the rail.  I looked at him, and then I saw something else.  At first it looked like a black cloud in the air over Danny’s head.  And then I saw it was a big black bird, as big as a man.  It hung in the air like a hawk over a rabbit hole.  I crossed myself and said two Hail Marys.  The bird was gone when we came to Danny.”

*

The Tweedles always frightened me more than anything else in the two books when I was a kid.

Jane Eyre XXIX -- chapter 28: LOST IN THE MOOR-LANDS

"The Raven Tree," by Chris Lord

1. Since the last Jane Eyre post, I am more convinced than ever that Jane is a bird.  Here, in the second paragraph of chapter 28, Jane stands at a crossroads examining her options.  She doesn't know where these paths may lead despite the signs' indications, because she doesn't know what may await her at any of the potential ends.  She is very much like the birds from Bewick's in chapter one: destitute, alone, and sedentary--at least temporarily--in points dark and dreary.
2. "We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."  Always?
3. "Long after the little birds had left their nests...."; "I was a human being and had a human being's wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them."
4. In addition to her now past life, Jane has left all her fiscal earnings behind.  Considering the manner of her departure, would she have accepted her salary had it  been proffered?
5. Interesting what one can become habituated to: compare (if you've read the latter) Jane, here in destitution, with the paisanos of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat.
6. "Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester, is still living: and then, to die of want and cold, is a fate to which nature can not submit passively. Oh, Providence! sustain me a little longer! Aid—direct me!"  What does she mean by this?
7. ignis fatuus: I believe this is, by Potter lore, a "hinkypunk," which is a will-o'-the-wisp by the rest of English folklore.  (If you haven't read The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Doyle, this would be a perfect time.  Imagine you're lost like Jane somewhere within this moor-land as described so much more effectively by Doyle.  What might a will-o'-the-wisp or hinkpunk do to your paired hope and despair?)

"All the Pretty Horses," McCarthy, and my [lack of] Confidence as a Writer

There are writers whom I admire, whom I emulate, and who inspire me to be better; then there are those writers--not many--who just make me depressed, simply because they are such unapproachable masters.  Among these authors, each of whom fit somewhere among this list, are Michael Chabon, who is likely the closest thing to which I aspire; Tolkein, whom I admire immensely and who awes me; Steinbeck, who seems to provide me with inspiration for all kinds of things, not just writing (or at least his characters and his words do); and then there's Cormac McCarthy. 

Of the author a critic from the New York Times Book Review writes, responding to All the Pretty Horses, that McCarthy "puts most other American writers to shame."  As I endeavor (in word count, pathetically) to accomplish my first NaNoWriMo goal, and having read the scathing review of the enterprise by Laura Miller of Salon.com (much of which I highly agree with), I wonder, for realzies, if I should even bother.  I've got a book STILL in the final reviewing stages at a publishing house (IT'S TAKING SO LONG; and how great can it be if they're STILL deliberating!), I've got two books underway, and I still love to write and will always do so anyway, but is it really worth bothering with or stressing over getting published?  Is it really a valuable use of my time and little-available emotions?

I don't know, but I am nothing if not an optimistic person.

I've read a lot of books.  I would even venture to claim that I have read thousands of books, many of which I've read more than once (yes, I am a re-reader, and I highly recommend that you become one as well, if you're not already).  That said, I have not read a lot of McCarthy.  Shame on me.  I know.  He has passively climbed, via the transmission of just over one hundred pages, to the tippy top of my list.  Bar none.  Well, unless Chabon comes out with a new one.

I read The Road.  I loved it.  I read it twice.  I taught it once.  Haven't read it?  READ IT!  It's fast, it's easy, it's tragic, it's flipping amazing (lexically speaking it's easy; emoitionally speaking, it will bowl you over like a glacier), it won the National Book Award, for crying out loud, and yet it is not as good as All the Pretty Horses, which I'm not even halfway through yet.

How does McCarthy write?  Unconventionally.  At first glace, even lazily.  I don't get it!  He writes like he doesn't give a crap about the English language, and yet he pracitcally DEFINES what the English language is in the U.S. of A. in the first place!  The man doesn't punctuate.  Period.  Except for the period, I mean.  He practically doesn't use adjectives or adverbs at all (and I use way too many, especially "especially" and "particularly" and "certainly" (yes, I'm self-aware, and even of my overuse of punctuation, which use I generally defend, but which, in McCarthy's shadow, embarrasses me)).  He is so supremely confident and so lazer-focused in his writing that he does just what he wants, exactly how he wants, and it works so well it's heart-breaking and crushing and spectacular, and all these only after you remember that you're reading a book in the first place.  He's like a black hole.  You don't see a black hole.  You know it's there because you see what it does to everything around it.  Cormac McCarthy writes a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, and he only tells you THIS MUCH (imagine my thumb and forefinger just barely not touching), yet you know three, four, five times more than anything he tells you about his characters, his setting, his plot, his intentions for guiding your thoughts and your heart.  He is the minimalist, imagist writer of prose that Hulme and Pound and Williams are of poetry.  I don't think I can give a higher compliment.

Within two pages, the man has made me laugh my guts out, while being simultaneously awed (not about the writing, though I was, but about the situation and characters) and then finding the briefest piece of equine-metaphor and philosophy the likes of which might be found in the finest Steinbeck passage, yet told so much more briefly and at least as profoundly.  (Maybe we'll eventually read this book here (if I have any guts left), and I'll pose the questions to you that it brought to me.)

Here's the crux of the issue once again: when I read these authors who just blow my brains right out the back of my head (think symbolically of Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket), I want to be just like them.  Imagine the hopelessly ambitious--and hopeless--eighth grade boy claiming he's going to be a professional basketball player when he grows up.  That's me with these guys.  Except I'm 33.  I read McCarthy and I want to go back and rewrite all ten thousand words of my NaNoWriMo attempt, because I think it will work better if I do it like McCarthy.  If I'm reading Steinbeck (which I'm doing right now, too, so imagine the bizarre combination and conflict of ambitions here!), I want to go back and insert philosophy and enrichen my characters with more words.  If I'm reading Chabon, I wonder why I can't arrange my words just right to make them spring off the page like Disney "Real-D," which HIS WORDS ACTUALLY--and, I swear, they PHYSICALLY--DO (I don't know how he does it; it undefinable; he, like, uses them just SO, that a single word is suddenly more than it ever was or could be out of your own fingers).  Each of these guys' styles are so THEM (not to mention someone like Saramago or Barthelme or any of my other five million literary idols), and I want to be just SO ME, just like they are so them.

Am I?  Does it matter?  Will anyone care if I am?  Well, not if I don't get published.  Not if I don't keep it up!

And yeah, yeah, I know, there's room for all kinds of writers and there are all kinds of audiences and there are countless chances, especially since I'm just going to keep doing it anyway, because I love it, right?

I'm not looking for consolation.  I'm not looking for compliments (unless you're a publisher and want to read my books!).  I want to be great.  I mean, GREAT.  I want to be a McCarthy, a Chabon, a Tolkein, or a Steinbeck.  I want someone to read something I write and be inspired.  Okay, so maybe I don't want to be McCarthy then, because he makes me want to shrivel up and die and stop telling students that I know what I'm doing or talking about when I say "this is how you should write."

So, I write.  I practice.  And I have four thousand words to slog through to catch up with my NaNoWriMo schedule, in a book that, so far, is exactly all the crap that NaNoWriMo professes it should be.  (And thank goodness, right?  Less pressure that way, right?)

I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that each of the guys listed didn't just explode onto the scene out of nowhere when they were twenty-one years old or whatever and somehow gain the staying power that holds them yet in the literary eye after all these years (well, okay, Chabon did).  Maybe there's hope yet for this somewhat and ever aging "young" man tapping away at a fairly worthless blog entry that practically no one will read.

So on to NaNoWriMo.

Tally-ho!