No time for blogging

I haven't blogged lately because I've been spending my time reading! Since my last blog, I've read Dracula and Wuthering Heights, along with several secondary sources on each, particularly as I prepared for my presentation on Dracula. I've learned a lot about female editors in the 19th century, and a larger project is starting to take shape. Liz Polcha has even convinced me that perhaps Turn of the Screw belongs in my project with its genderless narrator and female transcriber. Anyway, I'll have to think more about that.

I've loved, btw, reading these two Gothic novels. The discussions in class have been great--I especially like when people wonder why I like Wuthering Heights so much. It gives me a chance to express passion for literature that I don't often get to express in stuffy academic writing. I can't wait to finish the trifecta by reading Frankenstein.

Anyway, I start Blake this weekend and plan to read both America and Milton. Blake is so underrated and misunderstood, but in many ways he is the father of modern poetry, especially postmodern, psychedelic writing. Allen Ginsberg said he begin writing poetry because William Blake visited him in a vision. How much more inspirational can you be than that??

Skipping

By the way, I fell behind so skipped Bunting's Brigflatts and MacDiarmid's Drunk Man. I have read both before, and since nobody else is reading them, I don't see the point. I've moved on to Dracula, which seems to be much more popular as does Wuthering Heights. Most of the class is reading both.

I must admit that I feel bad not having covered any true "high Modernist" work like or Drunk Man or Dubliners or Virginia Woolf or whatever. But I do encourage all of you to read in this time period and/or take a class at TU on Modernism. It's one of the strengths of our English department.

Waiting for Dracula

I haven't posted in a while--mainly because I've been getting ready for the art opening--but I have been reading. I finished Waiting for Godot and have started Dracula. Beckett is one of my favorite writers, but I hadn't read this play until now, believe it or not. And I'm so glad I put it on my list. Now I know why it's so popular and influential. So many issues and themes are at stake simultaneously in the play that it could be fertile ground not just for several essays/projects for this class but for an entire scholarly career!

Tottering Satan

Over the weekend I finally finished Satantic Verses. As I said in class, I have nothing against this novel and think it deserves all the plaudits and controversy that it has gotten. I simply could not get into the story that much and think that it ultimately does not accomplish its goal of blending the mystical with the realistic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for mystery and otherness in literature--heck, I have made a living writing about things that are beyond our grasp--but I just think that the myths of Judeo-Islamo-Christianity (in other words, The Bible) are incompatible with the realistic forms and expectations of modern readers like me. What's the point of having Saladin grow horns if they just disappear without any consequences? Does it really matter--and can it not be unavoidably interpreted as an insult--if Gibreel's divine visions are diagnosed as schizophrenia? I guess I'm saying that "magical realism" bugs me.

I suppose I identified with Mirza Saeed the most--the rational husband who followed his wife and their village to the Arabian sea being promised it would part for them--but I hated the fact that Rushdie kills him in the end with a vision of Ayesha taking his soul to heaven (or wherever). Just seems like a cop out to me because, honestly, many of the problems in the world are caused by people who take sacred texts literally and not as what I believe they are, inspirational stories to guide our lives. When it is all said and done, I'm not sure what value I got out of this novel in terms of inspiration or guidance.

I am, however, getting inspired by Tom Raworth's Tottering State. This books offers a glimpse into the life-long risk taking of a poet who is at extreme odds with the poetic tradition of his native England. Over the course of the book, you can see his styles, forms, and preferences change and develop. None of them, however, could properly be called "English poetry." In fact, it seems as if Raworth is bound and determined to write the opposite of English poetry, as defined by the mainstream that holds up the likes of WH Auden and Geoffrey Hill as heroes. Raworth eschews being "deep" and "expressive" and instead offers us quirky details and gemlike objects to ponder or dismiss as we will. He invites us to make meaning out of his work rather than stuffily shoving it down our throats by labeling it "proper English verse" and all that. Because of his experimentation and risk-taking, I think he is one of the best poets in the UK today.

Neverending verses

I've only 100 pages left in Satanic Verses. Will this never end? I got more interested in it when all of the stupid magical realism stuff stopped--I mean, really, Chamcha becoming a satyr with horns?? Anyway, I'll be done this week.

I've also started Raworth's Tottering States, the title a reference to at least two meanings--drunkenness and the imminent fall of a national empire--which one is most like reading this book??

Other

Continuing my reading in the anthology Other from which I gave the class an excerpt on Vista with poems from Bob Cobbing, Eric Mottram, and Denise Riley. I've decided that Riley is a good bridge between more mainstream poetry like Stevie Smith and Phillip Larkin and the more experimental stuff from Mottram and Cobbing, as well as what we'll read soon from Tom Raworth.

I've also been reading ahead in Bressler and other resource texts to finish my didactic on Modernity/Modernism/Postmodernism, which I'll deliver today.

Despite all of this other reading, I've been able to keep up with Rushdie. Again, the Alyseha section has my interest because of it's fairytale/mythic structure, interesting characters, and surreal images. Have you noticed the characters names are repeating in Gibreel's dreams? Very cool. But what do you think is the significance of such a repetition? Naming is something I'd definitely like to discuss in class when we finally get to the book.

Getting into it

I'm now 200 pages into Satanic Verses--and should be further along but I forgot my book when I went to the lake this weekend--and I'm finally with the flow of the novel. The Ellowen Deeowen section did it for me, I think, with its magical realism (or Kafkaesque surrealism, really) and clear exposition of conflict (that between Gibreel and his dream, Gibreel and Rosa, and Chamcha and just about everybody). I guess I also like the exploration of love that took place in that section. One of my favorite lines ever from a novel: "The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one."

British Poetry Since 1970

Taking a break from Satanic Verses to read excerpts from Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, an anthology edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain (a critic and poet who is British but lives in Vancouver and one of my favorite literary critics). Although I only gave you the selections of Bob Cobbing, Eric Mottram (another one of my favorite lit critics), and Denise Riley, I really a little more broadly in the anthology and would be willing to loan it to anyone who is interested in reading more. The introduction, for example, is not only a good survey of poetry from this period, it discusses some of the major issues and challenges dealt with by these writers all in the context of the larger tradition of British Literature that we've been discussing. I recommend it.

First, I must say that these poets write the kind of poetry that I love to write, read, and study. Some might call them "experimental," "innovative," or "radical," but I just call it my style. I myself have done somethings with language-as-object like Cobbing, trying to make a sculpture on the page. I'll try to remember to bring some to class. I also share the same influences and tradition that the poets in this volume claim, which is mostly of American extraction coming after modernists like Pound, HD, Williams, Zukofsky, and Stein. The reason why this volume is titled "Other" is because the poets after these modernists, in America but especially in Britain, have been ignored because they do not fit into the conventional idea of "good" poetry. In fact, they challenge such notions as the poet having a "message" that the reader must passively decipher and consume. Instead, they ask the reader to participate in the production of meaning in the poem by bring her own experiences, biases, and imagination to bear on the poem. The "meaning" arises out of this collaboration. They also challenge the notion of the poem as perfect and complete with an ending that makes one go "hmmm" or "awwww." Instead, they rely on fragments, incompleteness, half-words, what is unsayable or unsaid, and they make us aware of language as a medium rather than simply using it as a means to an end.

Anyway, I'll talk more about this in class because I think it's important for everyone to know that an entire underground tradition of British poetry exists beyond Phillip Larkin, Ted Hughes Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heany, Dylan Thomas, and the usual suspects that you will find in the Norton anthology. Try reading the work of Brian Coffey, JH Prynne, Wendy Mulford, Grace Nichols, Fiona Templeton, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, or any of the other poets in the table of contents or mentioned on page xviii of the introduction.

Mahound

I'm in the Mahound section of Satanic Verses, and I have to say that I'm really enjoying it. The girth of this section seems to be a dream of Gibreel's (perhaps the dream he is trying so desperately to avoid in the airplane?) about the resistance of monotheists, Mahound and his disciples, against the Grandee and his minions in a pantheistic, hedonistic Middle Eastern Las Vegas. I like the Thousand and One Nights fairytale quality of the story. It's interesting.

Rushdie and my overview of Brit Lit

Yes, I have been reading, even though I haven't posted in awhile. I've been too busy reading to stop to post! Over the weekend, I did a lot of background reading in order to solidify my overview of the period of British literature from 1789 to the present. It's quite a bit of ground to cover, I don't mind saying. If you want to fill in the rather broad strokes I made in class, I suggest reading the preface and introductions to the three volumes of the Norton anthology.

As for Satanic Verses, I'm through the first part of the book. Finally! It's taken me awhile to get into the book (try 2 years!), but now I think I'm finally hooked in the flow of it. I think my major motivation problem has been the lack of plot and the focus on character development in the first 4 chapters of the novel. Not that I don't like character, it's just that I need conflict to make me interested in narrative (I don't have that problem with poetry, by the way). The book has finally gotten around to explaining how the airplane blows up, but now I'm wondering where it's going to go from here. How is Rushdie going to sustain the plot for another 400-odd pages?

My favorite parts of the books so far are 1) the discussion of art by the narrator and characters and 2) the anxiety Chamcha has over being Indian. This issue of national/ethnic/natal identity is central not just to postcolonial literature but all postmodern lit. I must say, however, that this issue of "Indianness" seemed fresher 20 years ago than it does now. Now, it seems that everyone is from somewhere else and that exile is the norm, not the exception. The exception, perhaps, lies in America, where everyone seems to feel that they belong and that their identity is based merely on being from somewhere else but calling oneself "American." But I digress to America, and I want to stay in Britain.

That reminds me of a question that occurred to me yesterday: Why do you think Amis chooses to set the beginning of Time's Arrow in America and not England (or even Argentina where many Nazi war-criminals emigrated)?

Any thoughts?

PS: Time

Another potential problem with Amis's novel and its irony is that it's potentially very conservative. By showing the horror of the Holocaust backwards, isn't he saying that America really is so much better because we try to help people. Not that there is no truth to that, but it seems to simplistically deny the destruction that the US has also inflicted on the world (ie, the narrator barely mentions the atomic bomb!)

Time, Trains, and Satan

I finished Time's Arrow yesterday. Although I got more acclimated to the reverse chronology (I didn't feel like I had to replay conversations I was having in real life backwards anymore), I have to say that the way the book handles the Holocaust, the climax of the book, met my expectations. Odilo is right about one thing--reversing the flow of history is the only way to make sense of the Shoah. Saying that what the Nazis were doing was "creating life" by pulling a new race out of the ovens places in stark relief the true horror an magnitude of the atrocity in a way that regular narrative could not. By saying Auschwitz was one place of true goodness, we see through the irony the vast distance to the opposite interpretation. Telling the story in reverse is not the same as denying the Holocaust--as the president of Iran has recently done--which derives from anti-Semitism--Odilo says after all that he loves the Jews and heals them--but reveals the ways in which human beings justify their actions morally. In fact, we see in the wake of reverse time how much violence and hatred (even anti-Semitism) still exists in the world, even when we think of ourselves as moral do-gooders. The novel is as much about the how as about the what of good and evil.


Anyway, one thing that bothered me about that section of the book was the way the narrator and Odilo become one. Why did Amis do this? I think it was a cop-out. He didn't want to have to account for the narrator's realization that Odilo was still in denial. Perhaps this question is what Amis is asking us to consider. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Watched Trainspotting. It's still as disturbing as it was 10 years ago. Now that's timeless literature...

Started Satanic Verses (again). I think I'm now getting into the characters and the story. I think it will go faster and faster. Bu why did I pick a 560 page book??

The backwards of logic

Have you ever noticed how blogs work a bit like Time's Arrow? The posts are listed with most recent first, daring you to read backward, and most of us do.

I'm 100 pages into the book, and I must say that it's really messing with my mind. After I've been reading for awhile, reality seems confused. I have to pause a second when someone is talking to me to try to reconstruct the conversation in the "right" direction to make sure it makes sense. That of course is what the book makes you do. I've never had a book affect me so viscerally before in that way. I hope it's over soon.

Aside from the affect, I keep wondering one thing: What is this book trying to say??

Time's Arrow

I'm about 40 pages into the novel now, and its world is starting to become more familiar. The reverse chronology takes some getting used to, and I have to think about some of the events that are occurring by trying to reverse them in my mind. I really like how this makes me think about the "real" events (if they were going forward) and allows me to question their conventional "goodness" or "badness."

I have my doubts about the logic of the text--the attempted "realism" of the book (esp from the view of the narrator, who may not be entirely trustworthy) doesn't always work--like the fact that everyone would be talking backwards, which is mentioned a few times, but that the author isn't always consistent about. I understand this is for our convenience, putting conversations backwards by sentences is already difficult enough to follow. Can you imagine if all the words were backwards? It'd be very hard to read, but I think truer to the potential of the form Amis has chosen (invented?).

I also wonder what the relationship between Tod and the narrator is--though I guess this will probably be explained--I picture the evil vestigial twin head of the Mike's Hard Lemonade commercials--as the narrator is some sort of invisible parasite.

That's all for now. I hope to really kick into gear and have the book done by the end of the week.

Commencement

This posting marks the beginning of my reading log for my course at the University of Tulsa, ENGL 2523: Major British Writers II. I hope to keep updates and notes on my readings for the course here throughout the semester, time allowing. I've already read or begun reading several of the books for the course--Trainspotting (though we are only watching the film in class), Time's Arrow, and Satanic Verses. I'll cover those in order in subsequent posts. For now, welcome.