Hello from Princeton

Hello from Princeton, home of boxing legend Robert Cohn. I actually finished yesterday on the bus (it's a nice bus book) and will post my thoughts on the novel when I get home (something for us all to look forward to). I have to say that while the book was quite different from everything else I've lately been reading, I really really liked it for a few reasons. Namely, I think he truly succeeded in making every aspect of the novel put the "lost" in Lost Generation. Hemingway gives us such a comprehensive portrayal of directionlessness, and I think the key to really appreciating the novel is to see it as a great snapshot of the period to which it's attributed. Beyond that, I think that some of his ideas speak (as Caryl Emerson is quoted saying on the back of an Anna Karenina translation) "from within it's own time, but for all times." This is clear from the quote from which the title is taken, the idea of a continuing cycle and progression of time that pushes humanity forward even when they have nowhere to go. Hemingway's narration style is interesting in its portrayal of time and chains of events, mostly because the subjectivity of Jake's perspective is assumed, and thus his bland, literal recounting of events and mundane actions tells us something in itself of how time keeps pushing the days forward even though they don't seem to go in any direction. Think about how Brett reads Romero's palms and the way it looks out onto the future. This is especially noteworthy given that the novel is so caught up in the past (the Great War) even though it rarely makes explicit reference to it.

Those are my thoughts for now. I will look over my notes and put something more cohesive together later on. I was kind of tight last night. I used the book as a coaster for beer... I thought that Hemingway would have liked that.

And It Rises Again

This novel, to be frank, annoyed the crap out of me. This is probably to Hemingway's credit rather than otherwise; I simply couldn't get a handle on what was going on in the novel, either on or beneath the surface. By the conclusion of the book I felt I still had not answered any of the questions I had started to ask at the beginning of the novel: what is wrong with Jake? does Brett really love him? will they make a go of it despite everything? what makes Brett tick? Hemingway doesn't give the reader any easy answers. I mean, it seems pretty clear that Jake is impotent, and I suppose most readers don't want more details than that - but for everything else, you know.

Dana, you mentioned the blunt language as a balance or counter to the studied glamour of the dialogue. I read them both as distractions, as distancing mechanisms that keep the reader from getting to close to the emotional and intellectual center of the novel. Bill's flippant wisecracks about Irony and Pity seem to hint at some deeper point about contemporary literature, but the sheer glossy ridiculousness of their conversation distracts from a deeper investigation of his meaning. Likewise, Jake's terse, plain narrative rarely goes into real detail but merely covers as much action as possible. "I unpacked my bags and stacked my books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry." This kind of thing goes on and on, and rarely do the particulars of the actions become important. The descriptions are not colorful enough for us to be entranced by the language or to envision the scene sharply; I can't imagine even being interested in such a letter from a dear friend. Meanwhile, under the surface, there is a little bubble of tension in his occasional glancing references to Brett, in his volatile feelings toward Cohn, and in his oddly passive narration. I continually wanted to get closer, to really know what was brewing beneath the surface, but I felt elbowed away by the too neat prose and the too pat dialogues.


I'd follow with an update, but I like to keep this blog free of real world clutter. *cough* DANA.


Just kidding! Tell us more! Police! Scary! I love you!

小问题

Which Henry James novel were we going to read?  Portrait of a Lady or Turn of the Screw?   I've finally typed out my official list.

The Sun Also Rises

So I meant to blog about a week ago, and then I got sick, and then I was just sort of listless. While at first this whole southern hemisphere winter thing was kind of interesting, it's rapidly losing it's charm. I keep messing up dates - I've managed to convince myself that it's December, not June - I guess my brain is just having some sort of temporal glitch?

I actually finished The Sun Also Rises last week, and I finished the Kundera book I was reading - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting- late last night (I went under the covers with a torch). Anyway, the Hemingway was a good stylistic contrast to the Woolf, and I actually enjoyed it much more than I anticipated (I’ve never read Hemingway, and I always had this distant idea that I wouldn’t like his writing style).

The thing about the novel that struck me the most was the superficial, slightly unbelievable, glamour of the characters’ conversations. As a reader, I got the same incredulous (partially envious) feeling I got watching Juno, that such quick wit was kind of impossible. I don’t know if “wit” is the right word for the dialogue of The Sun Also Rises, but their banter (especially with Brett), is too mocking, too fast, with the “Irony and Pity” Bill talks about about 2/3 through the book. It could be symptomatic of their need to distance themselves from saying anything genuine, of the estrangement of the lost generation and/or Americans in Europe (or is that too obvious?)

I think the novel offers a counter to the falseness/gaudy shine of their conversation, though, mainly in the chapter endings. Though this is not necessarily true for every chapter, I found that the ending of every chapter was very bare, very simple, almost banal. Jake will say things like, “I went upstairs to bed.” Or “It felt good to be warm and in bed” or, “A waiter came with a cloth and picked up the glasses and mopped the table.” The straightforward simplicity of the endings seems to be the novel’s way of coping with the exaggerated playfulness of the dialogue.

But now I’m wondering if the endings, because they are often about Jake going to sleep, also serve to emphasize the episodic nature of the book, and the way “the sun also rises”, la dee da da da.

Is it nastily appropriate that Robert Cohn went to Princeton?

Also, can we also start using the word “tight” for “drunk”?

How are you guys doing? I was happy to see that "Summering" has commenced, Claire, and that it is complete with photos! I'm still poking around Australia, I got to see the city a lot more this weekend It's really eclectic in style, it's the "artiest" city I've ever been in. I rode a tram, took photos of graffiti, looked at aboriginal art, went to their vietnamese district, saw the play of Amadeus, walked by the river, and oh! i almost got kicked off the train for having my feet on the chair. Three train officers came and sat down next to me and told me that it was a $168 fine for having my feet on the chair. They were being disguistingly rude and patronizing (they didn't think I could speak English). I got all insolent and "gave them attitude" (that's the only way they could manage to describe sarcasm), and they threatened to take me off the train and make me talk to the cops. I almost lost my temper at that point. The COPS? I mean, seriously. But I didn't want to pay $168, so, I sucked it up and they let me off for being a tourist. Thank you, America.

Excuse my vent... tell me how you guys are doing, I always want to know, I get a little crazy over here, hanging out with people from work 24/7. miss you guys!

"What's shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart.

Can there be beauty in Sodom?  Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that's just where beauty lies - did you know that secret?  The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious.  Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart."

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I have nothing relevant to add to this blog, but its walls had been stagnant for too long.  I hope you guys are doing well.  Summer's almost 1/3 complete...

Also, how far are you both in the Hemingway?  I'm just curious... I've barely made a dent.

Ah, I felt like I could just fly!

Regarding the Lily Briscoe/Elizabeth Dalloway similarity, I can only take some stabs in the dark.  First off, it should be established that Virginia Woolf periodically got called out for being racist, antisemitic, and a snob... so, in pointing out the Chinese eyes on each of these characters, I think that one of her chief aims was to establish that neither Elizabeth nor Lily was conventionally pretty.  This fact, to an author whose adult relatives and acquaintances while growing up were themselves products of the Victorian era, would likely shape her perception of girls whose looks prevented them from being hot commodities.  It was assumed from the beginning that Lily would never marry; Woolf goes so far as to call her (ironically) "an old maid holding a paintbrush" or something (I looked and couldn't find the exact quote, but it was very powerfully delivered to show how stark and undeserving Lily's external identity was, after we had just gotten to know her thoughts so deeply).  At least in To the Lighthouse, Woolf is composing a detailed meditation on 'beauty,' broadly construed.  Thus, in making Lily less-than beautiful, she is allowing for a level of complexity that could not exist under the name of 'beauty', a complexity that makes emotions less convenient and familiar.  Indeed, much of the novel concerns Lily's battle with her own perceptions and emotions--to understand them and recreate them in art.  Recall when Woolf writes: 

"But beauty was not everything,  Beauty had this penalty--it came too readily, came too completely.  It stilled life--froze it.  One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw forever after.  It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty."

Another interesting connection between Lily and Elizabeth was their love for older women.  While Lily has a sort of aesthetic and spiritual fixation with Mrs. Ramsay, Elizabeth falls in love, as it were, with Doris Kilman (which Clarissa strongly resented).  I'm actually finding this to be sort of common; in Anna Karenina, Kitty similarly 'falls in love' with Anna when they first meet in Moscow, and Tolstoy says something about how Kitty felt for Anna a type of romance that young girls often feel for older, married women.  Kitty similarly feels this way for Varenka, establishing a relationship that's actually quite similar to that between Elizabeth and Miss Kilman.  Tolstoy was a big influence on Woolf's writing, but I don't quite know what to make of these relationships though.  We should read some Freud... I'm sure that would clear all of this up for us.

As for what Claire was saying, about the novel seeming "hyperreal" in a lot of ways, I think that's a really interesting fact that sort of relates Woolf to yet another realist who was a great influence  on her (and for whom our blog is named).  When you think about this idea of the "roar which lies on the other side of silence" and hearing "the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat," that's basically what Woolf is creating for us.  After all, what else did Septimus die from other than this hypersensitivity to every force that surrounded him?   Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Modernism:

"Modernism, while it was still "progressive" increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening."

Indeed, Woolf isn't 'adding' to our conception of reality like Eliot or Tolstoy tried to do; rather, she's trying to overthrow it completely and show us something new.  Wasn't it Ezra pound who said "Make it new" as a description of modernism?  I think so, but yes, it *is* hyperreal and that's why we love it.

So... what are we reading next?  Claire and I talked about this and did not find resolution.  Also, are we still doing the poetry thing?  I wouldn't mind discussing the Frank O'Hara poem ("The Day Lady Died") with all of you, because I'm not that comfortable with just my own thoughts on it.  I actually looked at a collection of his poems in Barnes & Noble today, and I actually came to find his style really interesting once I read a few more poems.

Other than that, I have said all I can say.  Hope you guys are having a good week...

Faced with the dodo's conundrum

I had a pretty similar feeling towards Mrs. Dalloway, I found it incredibly difficult to focus on a specific aspect of the text. I think the intensity, as well as the beauty, almost shimmer, of Woolf’s prose is disorienting (though I suppose that it is partially the intent of the whole stream of consciousness thing.) I can only offer some half-baked observations...

I was pretty fascinated with the use of details in Mrs. Dalloway. I found that the moment, that instance of stillness/suspension, sometimes was defined by details. For example, when Clarissa stands in her house (after hearing the aeroplane, oh the aeroplane), and thinks about this “exquisite moment”—she catalogues what everyone in the house is doing, and every detail seems to sharpen the moment, give it contour. It feels as if the moment allows for inspection of the details of the scene, the memory, whatever.

Other times, though, I thought that the moment was more defined by an object (often a loved, desired object). Details become an adornment, or background for the object—the fixation is with the object, not a dispersed fixation with details. When Clarissa thinks back on Sally Seton, once again, Woolf gives a list of details, but then writes, “All this was only a background for Sally.” The objects are often vague and sort of detail-less, as with the random, unknown woman Peter Walsh follows on the street, and the car of “greatness” and aeroplane in the first walks of the novel. The car only has that implied, unspecified greatness (I also was interested by the sort of equality it establishes over the people on the streets of London, maybe a comment on the Empire…in general, though, I was less interested with the arrival and interruptions of people and things associated with the British empire) and the aeroplane is even more vague, with its indistinguishable smoke letters (reader paranoia).

I didn’t get very far with this train of thought, though, because it was too hard for me to maintain a consistent thesis throughout the novel. I guess I focused my thoughts more on my favourite parts—the morning walks in the beginning of the novel, particularly Clarissa’s (I loved the way her thoughts moved in the way that it does when one window shops, that glancing sort of fleeting/absent-minded thinking), and the weird imagistic rise and fall of Woolf’s prose. Thoughts seemed to radiate out from Clarissa and radiate towards Septimus, accompanied by, maybe facilitated by? the car and the aeroplane in the sky.

I also loved the part later in the novel where Peter Walsh sits outside the hotel as evening comes out. Did you guys have a favourite part? John, this is dorky, but, I think when you go to London, you should take Mrs. Dalloway’s walk (or that of Peter, Septimus, Richard, or Elizabeth)… OR we should all go to London and take Mrs. Dalloway’s walk. Too agonizingly nerdy? Probably.

I also was wondering, though I guess this question is more to John (unless you decide to read To the Lighthouse, Claire) if you had any thoughts about Elizabeth Dalloway and Lily Briscoe. Woolf describes both characters as “oriental”, “Elizabeth, with her oriental bearing, her inscrutable mystery…”, “but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental…” which I found oddly resonant with Lily Briscoe’s description. I also wondered if Woolf adopted a similar attitude to both Elizabeth and Lily (she seems less condemnatory of them?)

hope you both are doing well!

Mrs. Dalloway

So I finished Mrs. Dalloway. It seemed almost too full of themes and allusions and influences; it made it harder to pick individual ones out of the crowd. After a first reading, I was just a bit overwhelmed.

To be general, then, what I found most noticeable about the book was the sheer intensity. The at first confusing focus on each detail of the passing day made the narrative seem hyperreal, as though I were living the day more deeply and vividly than any day I've actually lived. Woolf writes about details I never even notice, and the result felt a lot like insanity; I had to put the book down every now and then just to calm down. Oddly, the section I found the least emotionally charged was the suicide of Septimus. His observations, his conversations all seemed overwhelming, but his dramatic death passed by in my mind like a vague blip. Mrs. Dalloway's most trivial thoughts and decisions - the flowers, her jealousy about her daughter - seemed more real than my own.

I'm going to glance over the book again while reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez? I'll check later). Let me know how you all are doing. We can't lose touch this early in the summer.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN!

I'm going to go write you a birthday post on Facebook, because I'm lame and forgot, and THEN, as a birthday present, I'm going to post on Mrs. Dalloway! Soon.

Many happy returns!

australia!

I finally got access to internet! Hurrah! I made it to Australia in one piece, and I have already seen a kangaroo (clearly I have seen all of Australia, and can now come home. Actually, out in the country, kangaroos are evidently roadkill problems. They also like to hop up near houses and peer in?) Unfortunately, I don't know if I will have access to the internet for very long, I am getting shuffled around different houses for these first few days (meaning I have to be on my best behavior constantly-so much that my cheeks felt slightly sore tonight from straining to keep an interested, genuine, sweet smile on my face. This is quite the stretch for me, right?) I think I'm going to enjoy Australia, I'm in Melbourne right now, and there are a lot of various neighborhoods to go wandering around in (Melbourne takes a lot of refugees). I even went by a lovely little arty looking district with youths with long hair, smoking the (dreaded) cigarettes, pouring their legs into skinny jeans, a regular hipster haven. They, however, have Australian accents (!), which is pretty interesting. I am keeping one of those dorky traveler journals where I keep a running record of Australian words, interspersed with the latest quote from Mrs. Dalloway that I happen to be enamored with. nappy" = diaper while "serviette" = napkin. Trailer parks are called "caravan parks". (there will be a quiz on this later when I return)

ENOUGH ABOUT ME. I am in danger of making this blog my journal entry, I will spare you. How are you guys? I kind of wish you guys were here, alas, alack. How is home, for both of you? In a more literary vein (it was vaguely mortifying when I got picked up from the aiport and had to explain that I had a duffel bag of about a dozen books. I got very flustered and there was a lot of gesticulating and nervous sputtering of things like, "english major", "book club with friends", "I like to read". No, I am not carrying the western canon with me down to Australia...) I kind of chose poems for us to read. I thought it would be sort of nice if there was some sort of theme for each of the sets of poems- maybe the theme could be a single author, or topic, or form. I have a feeling this might deteriorate into "the theme this week is poems i like", you guys are under no obligation to pick a theme.

The tentative, melodramatic, sort of coherent theme for the poems I chose is the idea of watching a performance. I thought all of the poems explored that very unique sensation of one watching another while also hearing them...

Frank O'Hara "The Day Lady Died"
John Keats "Ode to a Nightingale"
D.H. Lawrence "Piano"
Billy Collins "Nightclub"
Li-young Lee "I Ask My Mother to Sing"

and I randomly opened up my book...
PLAY THAT NORTON ANTHOLOGY SHUFFLE: "Queen-Anne's Lace" by William Carlos Williams.

The poems are mostly more contemporary, and they're pretty mainstream, so they should be online. I can send them to you guys if you can't find them. ok, I write such longer posts than all of you. I think I'm just feeling anxiety that I'm not going to be able to use the Internet much. I hope you guys are doing well, tell me how you're doing.

cheers from australia!

Mrs. Dalloway

I finally just finished Mrs. Dalloway. I'm going to ponder it and then write something deep. Dana, are you all settled by now? Have you started reading yet?