Haiku-ption Contest #4

By now, you know the drill. My entry is below. Yours are in the comments. Winner will be determined by the voting public. Make them count!

Penetrating gaze

Five knobs and two antennae

Our bow-tied future



Links to the Past

You might have come across a mind-boggling trivium that began getting renewed attention around the web late last week: President John Tyler- a man who was born 222 years ago (we’re talking the 1700s), the man who became only the 10^th president of the United States, and who died over 150 years ago- still has two living grandchildren!

This kind of thing absolutely floors me. Kottke.org posted some other similar examples here: An eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination who appeared on a 1956 gameshow, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had the honor of shaking hands with both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy in his lifetime. These present-day threads to the long-forgotten past absolutely blow my mind.

But I’ve noticed that this same thing, played out in fiction, can be equally compelling: a mysterious or long-forgotten backstory whose ties to the present are assumed to have been lost or severed ages ago, is suddenly discovered to have some tangible thread, some real, yet unexpected connection to the story that we are reading. It could just be the history major in me, but I think it makes for a fascinating, edge-of-your-seat reading experience. I don’t even know what to call this literary device- it’s not in any list I’ve seen. A backstory epiphany? A hidden thread? A long-lost MacGuffin? I have no clue what to call it, but I know it when I see it.

In H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines Alan Quartermain runs into a man named Evans who tells him about a distant mountain range and a tale he’d heard from an old witch doctoress about a magnificent, ancient diamond mine that is said to exist there. Evans is gored by an animal shortly thereafter and Quartermain soon puts the whole exchange out of mind and continues his rough and tumble life as an elephant hunter for the next twenty years.

At some point his work takes him to a piece of country where one can see the mountains in question across 130 miles of ruthless desert, though the forgotten legend is the furthest thing from his mind. He falls ill and happens to meet an old “Portugee” with whom he trades a few innocent words. As the old man takes his leave he nonchalantly says “Good-bye, senor, if we ever meet again I shall be the richest man in the world,” and he strikes out across the desert. Quartermain doesn’t put two and two together until a week later, when that same old man comes crawling back across the desert, feverish, starved, and close to death. Before he kicks the bucket, he leaves Quartermain with a crude, old map, drawn with blood on ancient linen, which had been passed down from an ancestor who had himself died trying to reach the mine three hundred years prior.

These are not really spoilers, by the way.  All of this happens within the first few pages of the book. But let’s look at what Haggard has done here: He planted the seed of mystery, he teases us with the possibility that there might be some truth lurking behind the legend, and when that tangible link to the past ends up in Quartermain’s hands, the legend of King Solomon’s Mines and the promise of untold riches become living, breathing entities in the story. What can you do but read on, right?

Another example is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Having traveled to search for gold that is rumored to be hidden near the old family farm, the main character “Milkman” stops at the decaying mansion that was home to the family who killed his ancestors and took control of their land. By chance, he meets an impossibly old ex-slave who reveals some surprising family history and points him to a town called Shalimar. It’s there that an ancient family legend interweaves with the book’s theme of magical flight. I won’t spoil this one for you, but the result is intense and beautiful and unexpected. The African folklore of Milkman’s ancestors is brought to life right before your eyes. Absolutely love that book.

But the threads don’t have to stretch over hundreds of years to pack a punch. Just look at Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. In running away from her abusive father, Lily Owens seizes on a mysterious picture of a black Virgin Mary that she finds among her deceased mother’s things. Scratched on the back is the name of a remote South Carolina town. Once she makes her way there, she and her African American nanny move in with three beekeeping sisters who sell their honey under the Black Madonna brand. She realizes her mother’s picture was just one of their honey labels, and thinks she’s solved the mystery of the Black Madonna and what it means. But her own family history and her relationship with her dead mother is tied up that place in ways she doesn’t yet understand. More backstory epiphanies, and threads to the past bring the story to a very satisfying close.

David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, my favorite non-fiction read from last year, plays on the same themes. I could go on and on. It’s the same thing that makes movies like Indiana Jones or the DaVinci Code compelling...

I’d like to read more books like this. Are there any others I should check out that bring the long-lost past to life? Let me know in the comments.



Keeping up with the Joneses

Did you know that the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses" has its origins in the unrestrained mansion-building project of an extremely wealthy New York family?

Yeah, me neither.

A daughter of this storied family, Edith Newbold Jones, is pictured above. But you might know her better by her married name: Edith Wharton.

From the Pen of Joseph Conrad

One more post on Conrad before we let him have a nap. Yesterday we served up a meaty review. Today we dish out a dessert of light, fluffy prose. Enjoy.

"The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank."

"They streamed aboard over three gangways. They streamed in, urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmer or a look back; and when clear of confining rails, spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship- like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim."

"His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy, as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw."

"There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of color like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching in dusty laced boots...

-Joseph Conrad, in Lord Jim

Review: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

We’ve wondered before whether Conrad really deserved to place four novels on any Top 100 novels list. He’s one of the greats, to be sure. But four out of a hundred? If you scratched your head along with us, you might be asking yourself ‘why read Lord Jim?’ Well, I answer that question with a few of my own: When was the last time you read the word “inexpugnable” in a novel? When was the last time you saw someone use “abject” seven times in one paragraph (none of which described a failure)? When was the last time someone lobbed an alliterative locution like this line: “daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe?”

Never, that’s when. Only Conrad, bless his heart.

Lord Jim is a fascinating tale with its roots in actual events- but then, that deserves a blog post of its own some day. Very briefly, Jim is the first mate of a ship called the Patna, which is filled to the brim with pilgrims bound for Mecca. The ship's hull is ripped open by some floating debris, and the only thing keeping it from sinking like an anvil is a precarious, rusty  bulkhead which is barely holding steady in the lower levels. Only the ship's crew knows the situation, and when a squall threatens them in the open sea, they are overcome with fear of drowning.

In a lot of ways, this is a book about things that don't happen. Despite his sense of duty Jim does not stay with the Patna; the Patna does not, in fact, sink in the storm, but is later rescued to the crew's great shame; And unlike the rest of the officers, Jim does not clear out and escape the wrath of the courts, but rather takes all the blame on himself.

I won’t rehash the rest of the plot, which takes place in the remote Indonesian jungle, but I will  talk a little bit about the story's structure, because it gives the book an interesting effect. We never see Jim’s story play out first-hand, but we get it in bits and pieces, after the fact, and from numerous different people. Rather than concentrate on the linear series of events, the reader is forced to analyze as he goes, and to put the story, and Jim’s mental state, together on the fly.

Conrad uses a frame story, told by his alter-ego Captain Marlowe, the narrator of several of Conrad’s other books. Within that surface story we see Jim’s testimony in court, his conversations and confessions to Marlow, reports of conversations or interactions that others had with Jim, later relayed to Marlow, and even some letters that help fill in the missing pieces. This seemingly scattershot approach turns Lord Jim from a straight-up adventure story into a complex psychological examination. You get other characters’ value judgments along the way, and you’re forced to ask yourself, “Sheesh. What would I do in Jim’s situation?”

I think that’s why the book has secured itself a position of such lasting literary importance. Besides doling out heaping scoops of adventure and the mystique of exotic ports and life on the high seas, it's a book that really makes you think. Don’t deprive yourself of the pleasure of reading it.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is not great, per se, but it is unique. Very unique. And to be fair, I have not read the novel, but I have seen this first line cited for years and years. Here it is:

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel 'If On A Winter's Night a Traveler.'"

This first line is from "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler," by Italo Calvino. Obvious, right? So, it's definitely unique, but to me it also smacks of how a 9th grader would commence his / her own novel. It's too easy, too convenient, it seems to me. In fact, one could argue that it shows a blatant disregard for literature. A novel in the second person? Give me a break!

Or is it genius?

I can't tell.

From the Pen of Thomas Mann



A couple days ago I tried to root out some of the psychological underpinnings of Thomas Mann’s stories and explain why they had such a tendency to “stick.” I fear the result may have been a little gloomy. So today I’ll try to flesh him out a little better than I did last time around.

So what is it you’re going to see if you pick up something by Mr. Mann? For starters, lots of blue veins under pale complexions. Apparently nothing was quite so sexy to Mann as the pallor of translucent skin. But if you can get by your urge to throw his characters in the nearest tanning bed, you’ll love some of his descriptions. Here’s one that tickled my funny bone:

“A young man whose appearance smacked of ill-pay and vegetarianism.”

His language is relatively formal, but it’s delivered in a conversational manner- lots of authorial asides like “the following incident actually happened,” and “what happened next was so disgusting that I don’t dare explain it in detail.” It’s a style that puts you at east, despite the flowery expression.

You’ll see him use music as a stand-in for love and sensuality, and he delivers some of the best writing on artistic creation and writing that I’ve ever come across. Any aspiring writer ought to pick him up for that reason alone.

Last of all, here are a few great lines to give you a taste of his style.

“They disagreed superbly, their eyes narrowing into flashing slits. They pounced on a word, a single word he had used. They tore it to shreds, rejected it and dug up a different word, a dead certain one, which whizzed, struck, and quivered in the bullseye.”

“The winter sun was only a meager glow, milky and matte behind layers of clouds… and sometimes a kind of soft hail fell; not ice, not snow.”

“With a moronic gape, a cigarette in his trembling fingers, he stood there lurching laboriously, keeping his balance, pulled forward and backward by his intoxication.”

Democracy comes to the Haiku-ption Contest

I'm itchin' for a new Haiku-ption Contest, but we never closed the loop on Contests 2 and 3. So I look to you, esteemed readers. Why don't you all pick the last winners for us?

poll by twiigs.com

The Mark of a Mann

It’s been a couple months since I tackled Death in Venice & Other Tales  by German author Thomas Mann. The collection was my very first introduction to Mann, and definitely won’t be my last.

Now, two months is enough time to make an honest-to-goodness review of the book a daunting task for my memory- but it’s also enough time to realize that this is a book that keeps coming back to me whether I mention it here or not. I’m tempted to use that well-worn reviewer’s cliché and call his stories ‘haunting.’

See, Mann has a real gift for creating pathetic, pitiable characters who are called upon by their author to respond to all sorts of inhumane cruelty and unrequited love. Whether sickly, deformed, corpulent or whatever, they all share the distinction of being irredeemable outcasts.

There’s “Little Herr Friedemann” who drowns himself in an ironic nod to Narcissus, by dunking his grotesque form in a reflecting pool. There’s the obese cuckold in “Little Lizzy” whose terrible shame only becomes obvious to him as he is forced to literally played it out on stage in a red silk baby dress. There’s the deeply wounded “Tobias Mindernickel” who takes out his worldly frustrations on his pet dog, eventually stabbing him to death. I could go on and on.

I’m not smart enough to namedrop philosophers, but Wikipedia tells me Mann is heavily influenced by Nietsche’s views on decay and the fundamental connection between sickness and torment and creativity. (Many of Mann’s characters are also artists or writers).  Following this thematic thread from one story to the next, the reader gets the impression that, by the time we’ve come to the end, it is Mann that we have come to know- and not any of his pitiful characters.

Here’s an excerpt from his story “The Harsh Hour,” (which is essentially a story about writer’s block,) that gives us some insight into Thomas Mann’s own creative struggles:

“Talent itself, was it not pain? And when that thing there, that wretched work made him suffer, was that not as it should be? And almost a good sign? It had never gushed, and if it did so, that would truly arouse his disgust. It gushed only for dabblers and bunglers, for the quaint and the easily satisfied that did not live under the discipline of talent. For talent, ladies and gentlemen down there far away in the orchestra, talent is not facile, not frivolous. It’s not mere ability. At its root, it is a need, a critical knowing about the ideal, a dissatisfaction that cannot create or increase its powers without torment. And for the greatest, the most dissatisfied, their talent is their sharpest scourge.”

Another line from “Death in Venice” reveals the importance he places on solitude and isolation as an artist:

“Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the perverse, the assymetrical, the absurd, the forbidden.”

Of course, this last line also betrays the author’s closet homosexuality and foreshadows the forbidden lust that will keep his main character in a decaying city, at the mercy of a secret epidemic that will eventually take his life.

So maybe Nietsche was right. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that the pain and humiliation and anguish of Mann’s characters are a reflection of his own secret torment. But maybe that’s why it works so well. Give the Mann a whirl.

 

Literary Death Match: Brave New World vs. Nineteen Eighty-Four

Welcome to Literary Death Match where two books engage in a fight to the death for the title of Best Book in a category arbitrarily decided by us. Up for grabs today is the title of “Best Book set in a Dystopian Future London.” And our contestants are Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Google will tell you this isn’t the first time these two have squared off together, but it’s certainly bound to be the bloodiest. Without further ado, let’s send it over to Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who will be calling the match from Shelf Actualization Stadium.