Book Watch

I don't know where to begin with Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel A Rebours (Against Nature, or Against the Grain). One place is with Huysmans himself, who was a bizarre and fascinating figure. Oscar Wilde called the book "poisonous" and Arthur Symons called it "diseased." It is at once beautiful, repellent, bizarre, attractive, and disgusting. The novel has only one character, Des Esseintes, and nothing much of a plot. The narrator, disgusted by humanity in general, retreats in to what can only be described as monastic hedonism. While Des Esseintes professes nihilism and extols the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the specter of Catholicism and God haunt the novel's every page. Large portions of the book are discussions of minor artists, philosophers, and some of the worst medieval Latin authors. 

Often the novel feels like a sort of perverse experiment, other times a little Kafkaesque. I am reading it for a course on Aestheticism and Decadence, and it indeed seems to utterly embody both. The novel is fascinating, sometimes tedious, and always utterly strange. It address theoretical concerns of content and form and ultimately challenges our conceptions of pleasure and the intellect. I certainly recommend this book to all, but it is a must read for anyone interested in Modernism and the fin-de-siecle avant garde.

Book News

The Vladimir Nabokov lost manuscript controversy continues, in this amusing and insightful piece. 

I'm torn on the burn it or save it issue (what do you think?), but I'd like to believe Nabokov orchestrated this whole thing, intentionally leaving the literary world in ethical agony - I  think it fits his sense of humor.

Essays

I have a lot of translating to do, so I though I'd do a round-up of my favorite essays, on many topics, floating around on the web:

-Dreams from Obama

The best essay yet on a politician I enthusiastically support.

"Shelby Steele ridicules institutions obsessed with diversity, but they, like Obama, are right to be inspired by the civil rights movement. The youth vote that gave him such a margin of victory in South Carolina, and kept his campaign going on Super Tuesday, missed the Sixties. Here is their chance."

-A Close Shave

An amusing and fascinating look at the major role of barbers in the Opera, beginning with Tim Burton's latest film Sweeney Todd, which I highly recommend!

"As Sweeney Todd croons to his razor, "My friend, my faithful friend," more in love with its sharp blade than with Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, you may find yourself wondering what it is about opera and its ubiquitous vengeful barbers. "

-The Moral Instinct

Steven Pinker writes about reconciling morality and neurology

"Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like.'"

-James Joyce

A dense, but fascinating examination of Joyce's major works

"The alternatives that Joyce suspends, the nihilistic and creative potentialities that now confront us, keep us in an ambivalent state of mind. He himself kept the balance by moving from a negative position to a positive accomplishment. But, because his self-portrait was so explicit, and his masterworks were so elaborate, this development has not clearly been understood. "

-Desert Storm

James Wood writes this beautiful, beautiful essay on a new translation of the Psalms - it's just wonderful.

"The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in which a desert people gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them, the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God is conjured into words he seems to disappear..."

-Movable Types

Another Wood piece, expect more, on the new translation of War and Peace. Again, just lovely.

"Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, 'If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.'"

Opera

Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to see the Philadelphia premier of the new opera Cyrano by David DiChiera and Bernard Uzan. Although I have been fortunate to have already seen quite a few operas - at the Met, in Toronto, Philadelphia, and Washington DC (not a bad bunch) - this was the first "modern" opera I had ever seen. I went in excited, but perhaps a tad skeptical. If I was going to go see a Modern opera, I had been thinking along the lines of Einstein on the Beach, or even (yikes!) Wozzeck. It was hard to imagine Cyrano's pithy wit set in atonal chords, but I have seen weirder.

All in all, I did enjoy the opera. The music was lovely and surprisingly tuneful. I was disappointed that it ended up being quite conventional, but it certainly complimented the overall feel of the opera's traditional, in-period setting. While the set was impressive, but also conventional, there were moments of staging that were quite inventive and interesting. I especially enjoyed the production's attention to the story's rich, self-conscious engagement with literature, art, and expression. The opening scene was strikingly metatheatrical. Placing a stage on the stage, the chorus spend most of the first scene with their back to the audience, attention turned toward the metaperformance and their role as audience on the stage. This was a very effective way of sneaking Cyrano in behind the staged audience, but up front, in center of the opera's audience. The marriage scene was beautifully staged and when the curtain opened on the battle field scene, there were audible sounds of amazement from the audience - the staging was beautiful and haunting. Overall, acting and singing was quite solid. The leads, Marian Pop and Evelyn Pollock, were great - Pop as Cyrano was especially excellent.

I had forgotten how interesting Cyrano's story is - it's smarter and more provocative than its watered-down, historical romance label suggests. It must be one of the most famous studies of ugliness in Western literature, and a deep mediation on questions of aesthetic value. Cyrano's sorrow stems not simply from his ugliness, but equally from his personal love and devotion to beauty - artistic, linguistic, personal, and moral. While the story has cliched elements - beauty is on the inside, kids - Cyrano's pitiful underestimation of that cliche is poignantly juxtaposed against his own unfailing belief in the power of beauty, however it is defined - in narrative perhaps?, as an essential foundation of life and love.

Blogging

In a nod to the old "Book and Blog" project, here are a few links on litblogging:

- From NPR, another book analyzing blogs, but it does mention one of my favorite blogs, In The Middle, featured on my links bar.
"Isn't an old-school paper book about blogs sort of self-defeating? Sarah Boxer, editor of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, thinks not."

- An insightful look at the nature of blogging from poet Reginald Shepherd:
"To an extent that I could never have anticipated, having a blog resembles Wallace Stevens’ description of writing a long poem: all kinds of favors fall from it."

The Book is Dead... Again

I'm tired of the doomsday pronouncements that reading is coming to an end as we know it.

Let's make this insightful piece by Timothy Egan the last word - at least on this blog.

Book Watch

"And the attribute of all true art, the highest and the lowest, is this – that it says more than it says, and takes you away from itself. It is a little door that opens into an infinite hall where you may find what you please."

Today I would like to talk about The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner. Set in colonial Boer South Africa, this magnificent novel presents a small, extraordinarily isolated farm as a microcosmic set for questions concerning race, feminism, religion, colonialism, and the nature of creativity itself. It is historically significant for introducing the “New Woman” - brilliant, independent, yet clauterphobically constrained. Olive Schreiner herself was an early feminist, socialist, and activist who grew up in a troubled missionary family in South Africa. The narrative descriptions in the book are breathtaking, and the book’s subtle consciousness of the beauty and meaning of narrative clinched the deal for me. I highly recommend this book to all. It is an immensely readable, beautifully written, and influential novel.

The Sidebar

Additions to the sidebar:

My Reads
Here I'll be putting up the covers of books that I am currently reading. Once I'm finished one of them - I'm a full-time student so that may take awhile - I'll post my thoughts. I'll also include posts once in a while about books I'm reading for my course work.

LibraryThing Widget
LibraryThing is wonderful. It's a way to organize and keep track of all your books. I have many and it is a great tool. This widget allows you to search my library. But, before you come begging to borrow something, I also keep books on my librarything that I want to own and/or read. Feel free to search "wishlist"and surprise me. (Yes, I know the widget is weirdly truncated, but I don't understand these things. If you do, let me know).

Hello Again

As you can see, this blog had undergone quite a few changes. After not posting for quite a few weeks, I decided to alter the blog's overall theme.

This blog was started as part of a research project on the relationship between litblogging and print book reviewing. Now, this blog will be a more general space for thoughts and links on the arts and criticism. Until further notice, my address remains bookandblog.blogspot.com, but that may change.

One last point, despite the blog's new, horrifically post-modern and egotistical title, I hope this blog will be neither. We'll see; blogs tend to be inherently a little bit of both.