Is it about the medium?

There is an interesting discussion on art blogs in the November issue of Art in America. "Report from the Blogosphere" is a roundtable discussion of five bloggers across the country who blog about art. (Sorry, no online link). While these are blogs of professional art dealers and critics, I found several parallels in the discussion of art blogs to the vociferous and ongoing debate about book blogs and traditional print review and criticism. Like in the world of book blogs, there is, apparently, some concern and controversy over the role, potential influence and quality of artblogs.

One interesting quote from art critics Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof: "As populists, we see our blog as art activism. Writing the blog is a political act -- an end run around the print powers that be".

This can apply to blogs on any subject, but especially when reviewing or critiquing something of cultural value or significance, whether it is visual art, movies, music or books. I think this quote is spot-on: it is the populist nature of blogs that sometimes causes concern and fosters dismissive attitudes among some in the established media. There is a lot of junk on the Internet but the fact that not all of it is poor quality is what can concern the traditional media. It isn't that there are many bloggers out there spouting off about their own concerns, it that there are some bloggers -- some well-written and frequently read -- that may be putting forth ideas contrary to the mainstream or contrary to the economic interests of a publisher. Perhaps the headline should be Upstart Bloggers Cause Kneejerk Reactions, but the root cause of that reaction is a discomfort with a new populist means for disseminating information, for spreading ideas and commentary, for making recommendations and ultimately shaping opinion -- even if only in a very minor way to a limited audience.

By its nature, blogging is more casual. It can also be more immediate. Since in most cases it is just the blogger and her comments, there isn't someone to review or copy edit a piece and to prevent you from publishing something incredibly stupid. There aren't standards to specify length, or reading level or to enforce restrictions on certain subjects. So, in some respects, it is about the medium: a short blog post should not be compared either to a diary or to a newspaper or magazine article as it is neither. But, it isn't all about the medium. Sometimes it is the content that is the chief importance. To dismiss all book blogs because some do not provide critical reviews, is like saying that you won't read any magazines because you don't like the celebrity-focused, gossipy nature of People or the look of the glossy paper it is printed on. To think that because there is a multitude of readers willing to write about books means that they will cause the obsolescence of print reviewers is just as short-sighted.
What a discerning reader should easily differentiate is what the writer/blogger's goals are. Is it meant to be a review? a recommendation? a chatty conversation with friends? a finished piece of criticism? Blogs can be any of those. Only when it is framed by what it is intended to be, can you judge its quality and value.

I am interested in book bloggers responses to questions similar to those in the Art in America roundtable. If you are interested in participating in a similar discussion regarding blogging in general, and blogging about books in particular, please leave a comment. I'll compile a list of questions to email to those willing to respond, and then post the 'roundtable' discussion here in a few weeks.

On reading that Lessing has won the Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing is one of those writers of whom I always feel that I should have read more. I've only read one of her short stories and it instantly comes to mind when I hear her name.

Our Friend Judith is commonly anthologized. My first reading of it was in the text used for an Intro to Lit class I taught as a grad student. I had never read anything by Lessing at the time but I was not unfamiliar, if perplexed, with her reputation. In my undergraduate classes, she was praised by professors in Women's Studies classes, and merely mentioned by professors in Literature classes. "Oh yes, Lessing. Well, the feminists seem to like her a lot".

My first reading of the short story was, therefore, influenced by these comments. In retrospect, I'm not sure that I ever had a professor mention Lessing that had actually read her work. The syllabus was mandated; Our Friend Judith was for the unit discussing character and an unreliable narrator. It is a good story to teach these concepts.

Naive readers will state that the story is about nothing much, except for an old spinster who gets upset about a cat. When I was teaching this story (in the mid-80's), some students might state that the story is about a woman who is independent and her friends who are envious that she is. Some would have picked up on a 'feminist' twist to this story, perhaps because they had run to the library to read criticism in order to sound as if they knew what they were talking about. But few realized from the first reading that the story was more about the busybody narrator and her gossiping friend Betty than it was about Judith.

I reread this story the morning after reading that Lessing won the Nobel Prize. Twenty-odd years after reading it for the first time, I still like it and I am still admiring of the structure of this story. Maybe some day I'll read more of Lessing's work. Maybe it is similar to this brief story. Maybe then I'll understand if there is a reason --other than the blatant sexism of my 70's era Literature professors --for their comments.

Reading Like A Reader

Last year, soon after it was published, I started reading reviews and blog posts about Francine Prose's book, Reading Like A Writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them". It seemed that there was no middle-ground: either the review/blogger loved the book, or he hated it. I had seen the book in the store before I had read discussion of it on-line and I had been intrigued by the title. But, I felt like I didn't need someone to tell me how to read, so it was placed back on the shelf. Later, after reading so many items about this book, I did buy a copy because I wanted to read Prose for myself.

I read the first four chapters soon after I got the book. I put the book down after those four chapters and didn't pick it up again until I read Dorothy's post a few weeks ago about it. Litlove and Stephanie also wrote about it recently. Since I was on a spree to complete several in-process books over the holiday weekend, I picked this one up & started it where I left off.

There were marks and comments in the margins of the first few chapters -- obviously I had reacted to reading the text -- but I could not remember anything significant about the book. That should have told me something about this book. I began reading it determined to complete it, and did so. Now a week later, I struggle once again to remember something distinctive in this book.

Prose's book doesn't cover anything that someone with more than one or two introductory classes in literature shouldn't have already learned. This could be an additional text for a beginning creative writing class. She dissects texts to offer up examples of fine writing, starting with the basic unit -- words -- and working her way through sentences, paragraphs, narration, etc. Some of the works she cites inarguably are examples of fine writing. Some of them, for the avid reader, are not unfamiliar, and one can appreciate Prose's efforts to find such wonderful examples to support her points.

Yet, I don't think that I learned anything new from this book. Her book may be a guide to an aspiring writer, but I think that it would have to be one who hasn't yet studied much about writing.

Is it for readers? I don't think so. I think that people who are avid readers do not need an instructive text on how a writer might approach creating a literary work. Aspiring and beginning writers might benefit. In the early chapters Prose writes about how a close reading of a text is beneficial to the writer. In fact, she suggests that this could be a better approach than a writing workshop.

I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made. And though it's impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.

This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught. What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire. And so the book that follows represents an effort to recall my own education as a novelist and to help the passionate reader and would-be writer understand how a writer reads.

Prose writes about how it is reading that taught her to how to write, not writing classes. She says that the writing workshop is beneficial to learn to line-edit, but it is from reading that she learned how to write. I'm not sure why, in the initial chapters, she tries to advantage the reading of good writers over writing workshops. If such workshops teach one how to line edit, isn't that also what a close word-by-word reading would do by example? Can you do one without the exposure to the other? Is this really a dichotomy that should exist?

More importantly, does this really matter to the "passionate reader"? I'm not sure that there is one way to read a work. I think that even an unschooled reader, that is one who hasn't been introduced (is indoctrinated too strong a word?) to literary studies, can certainly enjoy a work of literature without needing to be able to dissect the manner in which the writer developed the character. One can read a short story by Chekov (Prose discusses his work extensively) and enjoy the pleasure of reading a story, perhaps connecting to it on an emotional level. On a different level, the same reader could reflect on how Chekov crafted his story, analyzing the way in which it was built, the seemingly effortless technique used to develop his characters. This leads to a different appreciation of the story and a deeper understanding of Chekov as a master craftsman of the short story, but does not necessarily reflect a closer -- or better -- reading of the text. This is just a different kind of reading of the text. Prose is right that would-be writers should study the examples of well-known authors and their works in this manner, but I don't think it is a necessary approach for "people who love books".

Then again, maybe I only think this because it took me nearly 20 years after earning my Masters to detox from the academic bs that had tainted my enjoyment of reading. Sure, I can discuss works using the terms of literary analysis and criticism -- and sometimes I do in this blog. But, sometimes, there is just a sheer joy in reading and it's okay to say "Wow! That book was great!" because that's all that needs to be said.

Batter a paradox

A few weeks ago, I came across a quote from John Donne, and had to look up the source. In doing so, I took the time to read through The Holy Sonnets, a collection of 17 sonnets Donne wrote in his later life, after the death of his beloved wife. Of these 17, I had previously only been familiar with two of them: Sonnet X, Death, be not proud and Sonnet XIV, Batter my heart, three-person'd God.

Holy Sonnet XIV is a poem that vexes me. And, yet, it is a poem that I love. It is fitting to have these contrary reactions to Holy Sonnet 14, given that the poem's beauty and truthfulness lies in understanding the paradoxes in Donne's sonnet.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The images of violence in this poem are overwhelming. The speaker asks his loving God to set aside his gentle, healing ways ("for you/As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;) replacing them with force. The speaker compares himself to a town in battle that will lose to the enemy; the speaker traitorously abandoning his threshold despite reason. (Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,/But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.) Lastly, Donne compares the speaker to an unfaithful bride, loving God, but betrothed to his enemy. (Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,) To be released from this agony, the speaker asks God to batter him, imprison him as his only salvation. And this is where the poem gets really tricky, or perhaps even icky: the speaker asks to be ravished -- the Elizabethan word meaning rape -- in order to be purified, to be defiled in order to be made chaste.

To my modern sensibilities, this conceit is wrong. A God of love and mercy should not be compared with acts of violence, especially rape, a violent act of power and control. To suggest it seems not just inappropriate, but sacrilegious. It is so contrary to what I hold as true, that it is jarring, shocking, even revolting.

And yet...maybe that is exactly Donne's point. By using such brutal and shocking metaphors he makes the point that the easier way is that of the world -- the earthly, and the carnal. In our imperfections we choose things of this world, rather than those of a heavenly one in the guise of freedom. I believe that the spiritual path is one to be found here, not only in some dreamy, cloud like conceit of a heavenly afterlife, but it is only found by abandoning the trappings of this world that likewise enslave us. The speaker in Donne's poem knows which master he should serve, but begs to be bullied into servitude to the more difficult path. As Bob Dylan once penned, (in what had to be one of his worst songwriting phases), "...It may be the devil or it may be the Lord/But you're gonna have to serve somebody".

And so, I love Donne's poem for the form, the meter, the lyrical way the words play in my head and on my ear, (go read the poem aloud, immersing yourself in its language) and even for its ultimate meaning, but the explicitly violent images distress me. My feelings a paradox, just like Donne's poem.

I prefer the prayer/poem of Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya (an 8th century woman from Basra, Persia) which presents the same paradox. While her images are not of battery, rape and sexual torture, they are no less frightning:

Oh God, If I worship Thee for fear of Hell,
Burn me in Hell.
If I worship Thee for in hopes of Paradise,
Exclude me from it.
But, if I worship Thee for Thy own sake,
Do not keep Thy Everlasting Beauty from me.

Spending a few hours with Mary Oliver's Winter Hours

Following a long nap -- a perfect past time on a snowy cold day -- I sat down to browse through a book I picked up a few months ago, Mary Oliver's Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems. Oliver writes in the forward that this collection, published in 1999, is of poems and essays that reveal herself, "to offer something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me". But, Oliver warns, it is not a work that is chronological or opens up secret matters of her life and heart. Rather, she writes, it is like "parts of conversation, or a long and slowly arriving letter...natural in expression".

One of the essays in the book is about Robert Frost. Other essays deal with Poe, Hopkins, and Whitman. In a brief essay, she writes convincingly about Frost as a poet who on the surface appears to be writing about how all is right, yet subtly reveals that all is not right. His works are lyrical and perfectly formed, Oliver states, but the meaning behind the form defines an ever-present discomfort with the world. Oliver writes:

So often is seems Frost is about to float away upon a lilting cadence, or barge away in some desperate rage, and then he reins himself in; there is the wondrous restraint, the words that are rich and resonant: dark and deep. And there is also that other restraint: the impending rhyme-match and the line length that must reach, not never overreach, its companions.... Whatever the painful and unresolved interior of the poem, the poet has kept his balance, and we can too. Balance, restraint, steadiness, a controlled and reasonable tongue, and an eye that never fails to see the beauty of things whatever else it sees -- these are victories. Whatever disappointments and woe Frost felt, he rocked him way through them and made the perfect cages of his poems to hold them.

This renders "the woods are lovely, dark and deep" in a different perspective, doesn't it?

In another essay, titled The Swan and preceding a poem with the same title, Oliver writes of her rules for acceptable poems:

Every poem I write...must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose.... I want every poem to "rest" in intensity. I want it to be rich with "pictures of the world". I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy....

I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader's part in an implicit author-reader pact.

Following this brief essay is the poem The Swan. Oliver writes that it has some of these qualities, but in fact it has all of them. To quote a few lines (unfortunately, I don't know how to reproduce the indentions as published):


Said Mrs Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company --
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,

and the gestures
with which you honor it.

I think that Oliver is absolutely correct on this requisite interaction of the reader with the text. And it isn't limited to poetry alone. She writes: "The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building...The point is not what the poet would make of the moment but what the reader would make of it." Oliver succeeds in meeting her standards for a poem with "The Swan". It indicates "a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy" and it also rests with intensity and causes the reader to think about the non-flat, non-linear miles in the arc of a life and to contemplate what are the gestures which honor that.

My experience with Oliver's poems has been limited. I'm not sure that I'd recommend this book as the starting point for someone with no exposure to Oliver, but it does provide a glimpse into Oliver as a writer without bogging down in memoir-esque trivial details, revealing too much about the writer that might persuade one to confuse the writer with the speaker in her poems. Nor does it overwhelm the reader with theory or explication that might send one fleeing rather than to the nearest volume of Oliver's poems to read more from this gifted poet. Mostly what I like about this book is that it provides insight into how a poet regards other poets' works as a reader as well as how the poet envisions readers of her own work.

Right and Wrong Readings of Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

When I saw a few months ago that Kate had selected Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants for the January discussion at A Curious Singularity, I was excited. This was a story I was familiar with and one that I would have something to write about. And then I read the story a few days ago and I realized that there is still more to understand about this story.

I knew before I read Hills Like White Elephants for the first time that it dealt with abortion. I first read it in a Women's Studies class in the late '70s, not in a literature class. I recall being a little confused -- how did they know it was about abortion? -- but I understood why it was a valuable text for discussion in the context of that class. It was not the type of discussion that was likely to have happened in any of the American lit classes in the the male-dominated, Western Canon-oriented English Department at Conservative Midwestern State College.

The next time I read Hills Like White Elephants was in the early '90s, again as part of the assigned reading for a class. This time, it was a literary theory class (this time at small urban public univ with non-traditional students), and Hills was assigned for the portion of the class where Reader Response theory was to be discussed. And what a discussion it was! The class was small -- 3 strong feminists, 1 ardent anti-abortion proponent, and 1 woman desperately trying to become pregnant. In retrospect, I realize what a great selection this story was for discussion of Reader Response theory; Hemingway's sparse text does not give up it's secrets easily to a careless reading. But, I'm sure the professor never imagined the impassioned discussion that this story provoked. The discussion did not focus on the abortion issue as you might guess. Rather, the discussion was intense because the infertile woman believed that the 'operation' the girl and the American discuss in the story referred to a procedure to unblock the fallopian tubes, one that would 'just ... let the air in' as the text states.

The class argued for 2 hours whether this was a valid reading; if the text means what the reader experiences is there such a thing as a 'wrong' reading? I firmly believed that it was wrong. Unequivocally. Obnoxiously, I planted my flag and stood my ground. That was not what the text supported. Or did I mean it was not what Hemingway meant? I could never believe that one could correctly read this story in this way. And what kind of parents would the girl and the American make anyway? They are sarcastic, bitter, manipulative people whose lives consist of looking at things and trying new drinks.

Fast forward to this week when I last read Hills Like White Elephants. This time reading the story, I couldn't help but read it without thinking of that woman's reading from 15 years ago. The language in the story is vague. Jig and the American talk as a couple might in public if they were avoiding the topic, or if they didn't want an eavesdropping outsider to know why they would be taking the train heading towards Madrid. But, the fertility angle still seems to me like an inaccurate reading. I then read some of the posts and comments on the Curious Singularity's site. Some had commented that they didn't understand what was going on and welcomed the information presented in the posts. As much as I don't like the 'here's the key to unlock the secret of the text' approach, I do understand how some readers might be confused and how having the context explained would allow them to re-read the story and consider it in a different light.

I re-read the story one more time, this time considering it strictly in terms of the dialogue. How would this play out if two people were speaking the lines as if it were a play? When reading the story in this manner, one can understand the passage of time. The action comprised in less than 2000 words didn't take place in 5 minutes. There are long periods of silence when Jig and the American drink their beers and later order the Anis del Toro, where they look at the landscape and try to say clever things about it, when they wonder about the train's arrival time, or if they will board the train when it pulls into the station. If one hears the stretches of silence, Jig's utterances can be seen as attempts at making conversation and at placating the man. It doesn't work and his attempts at persuading her regarding the abortion seem manipulative. He is domineering; she submissive, eager to please him, though she jabs and pokes him with her sarcastic verbal sparing.

Stark. Pared down. Long silences instead of narrative description. These things aid in creating the atmosphere of the story, present a backdrop, and develop a tension between the characters that not only fills in the blanks regarding the 'action', but also suggests the inevitable unhappiness between Jig and the American no matter what they decide regarding the abortion. No matter which direction the train they board is going, they have a ticket heading in the direction of more unhappiness.