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."