The Classics

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Robert Fagles, a wonderful scholar and translator - one of my favorites - of the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid and other works. He is especially near and dear to my heart since he was a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton focusing on English and the Classics. He was also an adviser to Rebecca Bushnell, a phenomenal professor here at Penn. Eerily, I was visiting the Comparative Literature department at Princeton the day he passed away.

Here is an excellent interview with Princeton Classicist Denis Feeney on Fagles and the art of translation.

Art

Everyone should look at these beautiful lithographs by Marc Chagall of the Odyssey and the Old Testament - his whimsical, etherial style seems wonderfully appropriate to these little sketches of Homer's epic, and really brings out the domestic, personal angle of that work. (Via Maud Newton)

Book Watch

I've been writing my thesis in recent weeks so apologies for the long hiatus. I'm back with the long-promised look at Oscar Wilde's famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

It's a fabulous novel and a great introduction to the enigmatic Mr. Wilde and his unique style. Any new reader will especially be struck by his use of aphorisms, which are all deeply thought provoking, linguistically clever, and delightfully irreverent. The story of Dorian Gray itself is a fascinating study of duality, sensuality, sin, and the nature of creativity. Criticism of Dorian Gray tends to fall into two camps: the moralist reading, whereby the ending of the novel offers a kind of censure to a life that is utterly aestheticized. The other camp rejects this view, in favor of a less didactic reading of the text. I'm rather inclined to fall somewhere in the middle. Overall, this novel is easy to read but not necessarily easy to understand. I recommend it to everyone.

I'm applying to PhD's in Comparative Literature next semester and indeed, my mind seems drawn to it. As I was reading Dorian Gray, I began to think about more contemporary studies of similar themes. What have I concluded? The movie Fight Club. It's by no means a water tight comparison, but I think there are some interesting convergences: the theme of duplicity, in Dorian as painting, in Fight Club, schizophrenia; rebellion against conventionality, so excellently symbolized in Fight Club by IKEA furniture; and the quest for sensation above all things - in Dorian Gray this sensation is firmly rooted in the aesthetic and is suggestively (homo)sexual, in Fight Club this has been replaced with violence, an ultimate attempt to experience pain, agony, physical suffering. Fight Club is so interesting because it offers this kind of reverse hedonism, very Freudian death-drive.

Art View

Some thoughts on the new Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which I recently saw with my friend Billy.

Frida Kahlo has never been my favorite artist, but I have always felt a certain power in her paintings, an undeniable brilliance, perhaps a bit too obvious for my tastes. However, I was very interested in seeing this exhibit to learn more about both her life and her work.

The exhibition itself will not disappoint. It is well laid out, chronologically, and contains a phenomenal line up of her greatest and most famous paintings. It is long, but not overwhelming. The audio guide was informative, but a little bit too basic. I quite enjoyed the exhibitions' overall emphasis on how Kahlo's life and work mirrored each other, and they were not afraid to intermingle artistic criticism with fascinating biography about Kahlo's dramatic, and rather , tragic life. Such an approach seems fitting for an artist who was almost obsessed with her artistic persona and whose most famous work are her haunting self-portraits. I found the collection of photographs in the beginning of the exhibition a fascinating look at the real Kahlo and her tumultuous marriage to the great Diego Rivera. Some of the photographs, showing Kahlo, Rivera, and men like Leon Trotsky were fascinating snap shots of 20th century intellectual history.

I certainly felt that I left with a greater appreciation of Kahlo's legacy and importance.

Book Watch II

Here is Oscar Wilde's, or rather Dorian Gray's, account of Huysmans' A Rebours (see below) in Wilde's phenomenal novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which will be the subject of my next Book Watch post.

"It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows."

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.

What is a litblog? Part II

I was happy to see the comments to my last post, which are very helpful for my preparation. I'd like to respond and propose a tweaked, and hopefully improved, definition soon.

"Main-stream literary culture" is problematic. What I am trying to suggest is that litblogging is not strictly "academic." For example, there are very few posts which would discuss extremely esoteric topics in literary theory, the way many academic articles do. Instead, they tend to focus on a more current literary culture - a New York Times Book Review kind of culture, which yes, I do believe pre-dates the blog in non-academic journalism... 

But at the same time, blogging has an element of counter-culture that I need to account for. Any thoughts? I'll keep thinking. 

Someone suggested that the ability to comment is very important, so I'll be adding that in. 

What is a litblog?

A website where commentary and/or news on current developments in main stream literary culture are posted and displayed in reverse chronological order. 

What do you think?

A few more books...

As the research goes on...

Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture by Geert Lovink

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America by Gail Pool

Links

Sorry I've been MIA - the beginning of school has been rather stressful. But fear not, more to come I assure you!

For now, enjoy these links:

Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging

Article on Jessa Crispin of Bookslut, one of my favorite litblogs, discussing many of the topics on this blog.

Blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, with a refutation of the recent NEA report on reading.

The Book (Review) and the Blog

A James Wolcott article on book reviewing. His position on litblogs I mostly disagree with. 

He begins...

In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs--or at least, it shouldn't.

And ends...

The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals. 

I actually do believe that linking may be one of the most important features of litblogging, but that doesn't by any means make litblogging obsolete. Ironically, I only found Wolcott's article through a litblog link, and I'm sure he wouldn't object that I'm passing it on here. 

Books

If you are interested in the relationship between blogging and political news, this book is of interest:

The Rise of the Blogosphere by Aaron Barlow