"Why write? Life is a cage of empty words."

The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990, by Miriam Elia and Ezra Elia, was waiting for me under the Christmas tree.

Friday, September 26th

He says his name is Wolf, although he is not a wolf.

He is a hamster.

I tried to goad him into debate on the nature of our captivity, on the emptiness of life and our irrational will to live.

He burped, laughed and defecated in the food tray.

He is either mad or profoundly stupid.

I am crushed.

He sleeps again. Perhaps I shall do the same.

It is my only option.

Edward was a hamster who smoked, went on hunger strikes, questioned his existence. Edward loved and Edward lost. These are his scratchings, translated from the original Hamster.

This little hardcover book, illustrated with black and white sketches, full of hamster musings, was a lovely way to spend an hour and round out my year of Kierkegaard.



Read an excerpt.

Article: New York Post.
Quiz: Who said it? Edward the Hamster or some other existentialist philosopher?

Why do you want to write? It must be so upsetting!

"Leontii Sergeyevich" remarked Ivan Vasilievich, "has brought me a play."

"Whose play?" asked the old woman, gazing at me sorrowfully.

"Leontii Sergeyevich has written the play himself."

"What for?" asked Nastasya Ivanovna anxiously.

"What do you mean — what for?... H'm... h'm..."

"Aren't there enough plays already?" asked Nastasya Ivanovna in a tone of kindly reproach. "There are such lovely plays and so many of them! If you were to start playing them you couldn't get through them all in twenty years. Why do you want to write? It must be so upsetting!"

She was so convincing that I could find nothing to reply, but Ivan Vasilievich drummed his fingers and said:

"Leontii Leontievich has written a modern play!"

This disturbed the old lady and she said: "We don't want to attack the government!"

"Why should anyone want to?" I said in her support.

"Don't you like The Fruits of Enlightenment?" asked Nastasya Ivanovna shyly and anxiously. "Such a nice play... and there's a part in it for dear Ludmilla..." She sighted and got up. "Please give my respects to your father."

"Sergei Sergeyevich's father is dead," put in Ivan Vasilievich.

"God rest his soul," said the old lady politely. "I don't suppose he knew you were writing a play, did he?"

Black Snow, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is a very funny novel. Bulgakov never finished it, and it was not published for more than thirty years after his death.

It starts off as a book about the creative process, and veers off into the surreal (weird). There's a failed suicide attempt (funny) and a Mephistophelean editor (funny!), and before long it's a nightmare of financial dealings, with characters, offices, and assets disappearing over night (funny, in a dark way). Most of the novel, however, has the pacing and tenor of a 1930s screwball comedy, befitting the theatrical farce that it is.

For example, the theatre itself is opulent, the foyer hung with portraits in gilded frames, including depictions of Sarah Bernhardt, Molière, Shakespeare, various actors and other theatrical personages, and the Emperor Nero (hilarious!).

"By order of Ivan Vasilievich," said Bombardov, keeping a straight face. "Nero was a singer and an artiste."

The business of the theatre is chaotic and has a logic all its own. Bulgakov captures the mystique with an almost filmic precision:

The three telephones rang incessantly and sometimes the little office was deafened by all three ringing at once. None of this disturbed Philipp in the least. With his right hand he picked up the receiver of the right-hand telephone, clamped it between his shoulder and his cheek, with his left hand he picked up the other receiver and pressed it to his left ear. Freeing his right hand he used it to take one of the notes being handed to him and began talking to three people at once — into the left-hand telephone, the right-hand and then the visitor again. Right-hand telephone, visitor, left, left, right, right. Dropping both receivers back on to their rests at once and thus freeing both hands, he took two of the scraps of paper. Refusing one of them, he picked up the receiver from the yellow telephone, listened for a moment and said: "Ring up tomorrow at three o'clock." He hung up and said to the petitioner: "Nothing doing."

In time I began to understand what they wanted from Philipp Philippovich. They wanted tickets.

Black Snow is based on Bulgakov's own experiences with writing for the Moscow Art Theatre. Bulgakov mercilessly satirizes the theatre milieu and its famous director, Konstantin Stanislavski (he of the eponymous acting method). It is much less political than I might have expected, but it does deal with censorship of a kind — how a playwright's work ceases to be his own.

Despite feeling uneven, like three or four different novels rolled into one though they might have wandered off in different directions, Black Snow is a highly entertaining insider's view of the workings of the theatre.

O'er the hills of snow

Christmas Freilachs, by the Angstones.

Pretty much my favourite Christmas medley ever, capturing the chaotic spirit of the season.

I bought this cassette single back in... I dunno, some 20 years ago or so. And in 20 years of Internet, I haven't found an easy way to share it, but finally I found a link.

It never fails to put a smile on my face. Hope you're smiling too.

Telling the story is hard

"I am writing the story," she says. "The story of you, and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone. I am writing about how we put Snowman-the-Jimmy and Adam One into the ground and Oates too, so that Oryx can change them into the form of a tree. And that is a happy thing, isn't it?"

"Yes. It is a happy thing. What is wrong with your eyes, Oh Toby? Are you crying?" says Blackbeard. He touches her eyebrow.

"I'm just a little tired," says Toby. "And my eyes are tired as well. Writing makes them tired."

"I will purr on you," says Blackbeard.

Among the Crakers, the small children do not purr. Blackbeard is growing quickly — they do grow faster, these children — but is he big enough to purr? Apparently so: already his hands are on her forehead, and the mini-motor sound of Craker purring is filling the air. She's never been purred on before: it's very soothing, she has to admit.

"There," says Blackbeard. "Telling the story is hard, and writing the story must be more hard. Oh Toby, when you are too tired to do it, next time I will write the story. I will be your helper."

"Thank you," says toby. "That is kind."

Blackbeard smiles like daybreak.

MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood, is a most satisfying conclusion to the near-future postapocalyptic scenario laid out in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. But I think you do really need to read the first two books to fully understand the dynamics of this one.

This volume gives Zeb's backstory, and through him, the story of Adam One.

MaddAddam is funny, mostly in its depiction of the Crakers, the naïve genetically engineered humans, as they are beginning to undergo evolution, at least of a social and cultural sort as they learn from the surviving "natural" humans and develop a mythology of their own. And it seems that the future of humanity depends on their interbreeding.

The characters are wonderful — genuine and sympathetic if not always likeable. While the first two volumes set the stage of this new world, its creatures, environments, and issues all reasonably extrapolated from science that is being performed today, this volume, in my view, now that the world-building is done, is simply about a group of (somewhat misfit) survivors trying to get along and cope with a (very) tough situation. The first two might be considered cautionary; this book, remarkably, is unabashedly hopeful.

It made me smile like daybreak.

It's really delightful

...if unusual

My ambiguous self

One of the most beautiful books I read this year was Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan, an Egyptian scholar who specializes in Arabic and Islamic studies. It won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009 and has been condemned by the Coptic Orthodox church.

In a wonderful review, "In Case of Doubt, Choose Doubt," Andreas Pflitsch says that this historical novel is a plea against religiously motivated violence.

Set in the 5th century AD, these are the memoirs of Hypa, a Coptic monk who journeyed from Upper Egypt to Alexandria and then Syria.

It's not a period in history that I know much about, but several aspects of it are fascinating. It covers a culture in transition between pantheism and Christianity. It shows the significance of the life and death of woman mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria.

And it features Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, condemned by the Council of Ephesus for his belief that Christ's human and divine natures could not be reconciled. (Lucky for me I read this novel while studying Kierkegaard, who didn't care so much about reconciling them, so I had ample opportunity to consider the absurdity of faith.)

Hypa meanwhile is consumed with the problem of reconciling, or accepting, his own human and divine natures, that is, satisfying both physical and spiritual yearnings. Azazeel, the devil, is the voice inside him, a daimon, who does not lead him to temptation so much as reflect it back to his conscience.

I sat up, filled with a fear the source of which I did not know. I asked myself: should I go to church now, to feel a little peace of mind? The night prayers must have started. Being in a group would relieve the anxiety, since nothing is more conducive to fear than being alone. Or should I go to Martha's cottage nearby and mend what was broken in our relationship, then sleep on the floor under her bed? Does Martha sleep in the bed where we made love two days ago? Or does she lie on the floor like me? I don't know much about her. I've never seen her from the inside. In fact I've never seen anything from the inside. I always skirt around the surface of things and never go deep. In fact I think I'm afraid of looking deep inside myself, yet I know the truth about my ambiguous self. Everything about me is ambiguous — my baptism, my being a monk, my faith, my poems, my medical knowledge, my love for Martha. I am one ambiguity after another, and ambiguity is the opposite of faith, just as Satan is the opposite of God.

Azazeel is by turns adventurous, sensuous, thrilling, and mysterious; it is laden with historical detail and religious intrigue. It shows great insight and sensitivity to matters of spirituality and faith (or lack thereof, as I have none), and lends itself to slow and contemplative reading.

Reviews
The Bookbag
The Guardian
Winston's Dad

There is also a sampling of international response to the novel on the book's website.

War was where it belonged — in the hands of the individual

Based on Robert Sheckley's short story "Seventh Victim."


(via)

See also Movies and Books Like The Hunger Games (full text of the story is posted there).

I would not have gone crazy about Beethoven so unexpectedly

I went crazy for Beethoven quite unexpectedly.

Witold Gombrowicz on Beethoven:

Quartets! Sixteen quartets! It is one thing to dip occasionally into one of them, in passing, and another to step into the building, to immerse oneself, to wander from hall to hall, wander in the galleries, take in the vaults, examine the architecture, uncover the inscriptions and frescoes ... with a finger to one's lips. Form! Form! It is not him I look for, the building is not full of him, but his form, which I get to know in the course of this gradual self-composition of adventures, changes, acquisitions — similar to creatures human and nonhuman from ancient fairy tales. […]

Certainly, if not for that elegant sound of four stringed instruments, if not for that polyphonic quartet refinement, thanks to which all music that passes between these four instruments undergoes an inordinately subtle transformation, I would not have gone crazy about Beethoven so unexpectedly.

I went crazy for Beethoven quite unexpectedly. Overrated sellout, I used think; as a teenager, I snubbed the establishment. But then I listened, I was made to listen. And it's the aural sculpture of the quartets that sent me reeling into the unknown depths of my own self. To this day I cannot get enough of the quartets.

It was about the same time I discovered Gombrowicz's Diary.

The MOOC experience

I've completed my first massive open online course (MOOC). It was weird at the start, but it didn't take long to get my bearings.

Here's how it worked.

I enrolled in Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony, and the Crisis of Modernity. So did 23,000 other people.

Every week new course material was released: 3 or 4 videos, each on average about 20 minutes long; a list of required reading (PDFs were supplied); a discussion question; a quiz.

So over the last 2 months, I have watched several hours of professional documentary-quality video, and read a couple hundred pages of Kierkegaard, with some Plato and Hegel thrown in.

The quality of the video lectures really surprised me; this was not merely a recording of some fuddy-duddy lecturing in front of a classroom. This professor was a great speaker; he was filmed in various locations around Copenhagen. There were also several interviews with other Kierkegaard scholars. Each video ended with a quiz question, which was not graded but was meant simply to reinforce your understanding of the video material.

The weekly quiz consisted of 10 multiple-choice questions. These did count toward the final grade. They weren't hard, but they weren't easy. I learned early to take my time and refer to my notes, which meant taking better notes during the lectures. Before you submit each quiz, you must check the box indicating that you will abide by the honor code, which states something to the effect of your work being your own (but there's nothing to preclude me from using my notes).

In the first days, the discussion forum exploded with 23,000 people sharing their enthusiasm and trying to get to know each other. That was a bit overwhelming. But I eventually learned to identify which discussions I wanted to follow and know that I couldn't stay on top of them all in any meaningful way even if I devoted all my waking hours to the task. I learned to tune out the white noise.

The course information indicated that the material would require 3-5 hours a week. I'd say it's a bit more. And that estimate doesn't include the potential timesink of the forums.

Some people complained about the deadline for the final essay. I was amazed, and disappointed, that the deadline was adjusted to accommodate the whiners. The schedule had been made clear at the outset of the course, and I expected everyone to stick to it; in fact, pushing back the deadlines by a week very nearly jeopardized my ability to complete the final stage (peer review) because I had organized my life around the original dates. It worked out though, but this shouldn't happen. An extra week for the final essay should've been built in from the start — working on an essay while keeping up with the regular weekly assignments is tough.

It's difficult to grade the humanities in the best of circumstances, and a MOOC is not the best of circumstances. The grade breakdown for this course was 70% from quiz scores (best 7 of 8) and 30% from an averaging of your peers' assessments of your essay. My feeling is that the quizzes were too easy to be given that weight. Essay marks, however, are hard to control — less quantifiable, more open to dispute.

Is it a perfect setup? No. But can you teach the humanities via MOOCs? Absolutely.

According to this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the survey they conducted, the median for MOOC registrations is about 33,000 students (so my Kierkegaard course is a bit on the low side).

• The rate of completion in MOOCs is believed to be around 10 percent.
• For students who so much as submit the first assignment, the completion rate leaps to 45 percent.
• And it goes up again if students pay for the course.

So I'm proud to have finished.

And I've already registered for more.

A net made of money

The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, is one of the funniest novels I've read in some time, but also, as you might intuit from the fabulous title, one with great depth. (What a great title!)



Matt, out of work reporter and about to lose his house, goes out one night to the convenience store to pick up some milk (like, nine dollars a gallon!) for the kids, for their cereal for breakfast, and ends up giving a lift to a couple guys and smoking dope with them, and before the high wears off he's decided that dealing drugs is a sound option, a sensible path out of his fiscal troubles.

Informed of Matt's recent life decision, a friend tells him, "I'll say this about your new life, Matt. You're the only person I know who has anything to talk about right now other than budget deficits and layoffs and the death of newspapers."

Which is ironic, because Matt is all about the money, hyper aware of the cost of milk at the convenience store, and his course of action is a direct result of layoffs and the death of newspapers. It's all he rambles on about in his head. Selling drugs seems like a way out. At three hundred an ounce and a fifty percent profit if he's selling to his peers (nostalgia types, who wouldn't know where else to go), he need just roll his savings over three, four times to forestall the foreclosure on his house.

This may be the great Great Recession novel.

We're broke, Lisa and me — something important cracked in us. And I have no idea how to fix it, any more than I know how to keep from losing our house, or for that matter, how to build a tree fort. All I know is that I have a check in my pocket for less than ten thousand dollars, a check that represents the last threads of the money we always assumed would serve as our safety net, and that might be the stupidest thing we did — not starting a poetry-business website or buying shit on eBay or taking the six-month stay of financial execution, not emailing old boyfriends or getting high at a convenience store — no, the truly stupid mistake was believing that when we fell, a net made of money could catch us.

Matt has so many lapses in judgement, but he believes so strongly that he's actually thinking clearly and logically that I nearly believe it too. Because, this is the big financial mess we're all in, you buy a nice house and a big TV, lease a car and you want to send your kids to a nice school; it feels like anyone could make a mistake or two (or ten), like Matt, and how do you get yourself out of it?

I don't bring up her insistence on remodeling and her online shopping binge and she doesn't stare across the dinner table and say, with all due respect, Matt: financial fucking poetry? And on and on we go, not talking — all the way to the incriminating cheating and weed-dealing mess we're in now.

We're not husband and wife right now; we are unindicted coconspirators.

(Cuz there's that time when Matt gave up his day job to commit himself to a website that gave stock tips in free verse.)

We recently met with the rep for our daughter's education savings plan, and she told us what great shape we're in, which took me by surprise, because we don't plan well, we don't even consider our options much because from where we sit there aren't that many options anyway and they're mostly the same, we just muddle along and I think we're lucky. It's not that we're stupid with money and lucky about it, we just don't give it much thought at all, and I think we could be proactively smarter about it. But it turns out we're doing better than I thought, and maybe we have made some smart choices, like not buying a bigger house than we could afford. Maybe I just take fiscal conservatism and being sensible with money for granted. Which, if you think about it, is pretty lucky.

Matt gets in trouble, but he gets through it. Not exactly a happy ending, but a financially sensible one, which, I guess, is a happier ending than a lot of Americans get.

Reviews
LA Times
The New Dork Review of Books
New York Times

All best, Margaret Atwood

What a remarkable lady!

Last night I saw Margaret Atwood at the Rialto. One can't always be sure what one is going to get when an author makes an appearance; expectations aren't always properly set*, and so much depends on the author's personality, the venue, the crowd's energy. Chances were good this would be good. But Atwood was brilliant. I think she must always be brilliant. (I have seen her before, and she's always been brilliant.)

*I made the trek last week to see Chris Hadfield, but was disappointed to find it was a signing only — no reading, no musical number, no magic tricks I mean science experiments, just some dumb astronaut signing your book, I mean oh my gawd I shook an astronaut's hand and his handshake is so firm and he signed my book! But you see my point, I hope.

She started off singing, a hymn from The Year of the Flood. She is by no means an extraordinary singer, but she sings just fine, loud and proud. She actually sang! And cracked that some people really do tell her to keep her day job.

And she read, from MaddAddam, the recently released third book in the speculative trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake. I only started reading the book a few days ago, and in a happy coincidence, she read the section that I had just arrived at (she read pages 106 to 109).

And then she talked. With the very personable Sheila Heti (whose work I have not read, but I intend to someday). That's them in the picture above. (Really.) They chatted (well, mostly Peggy chatted, while Sheila prompted) about the power of storytelling, and what parts of the brain light up when engaging in narrative, indicating that it's a basic thing in humans, along with language, music, rhythm, not like algebra or reading for that matter.

Also edible body products (when the apocalypse comes, go to the spa), cats (everyone knows that one of the most useful things to do for a migraine is to put a purring cat on your head; science has yet to figure out how to keep it there), the future (and extrapolating toward it), Menippean satire (but the world is moving so fast, satire has to push farther to keep up), the Amazon drones (if she'd included that technology back in the day of Oryx and Crake, it would've been considered beyond belief), Archie comics, Northrop Frye, origin stories and the tendency to mythologize (which comic books and science fiction are particularly great at). And other stuff.

Oh, right, and a bit about the book: how God's Gardeners mix scripture, nature, and science with imperfect results; the nature of the Crakers (in their society there would never be a book by Sheila Heti called Women in Clothes); why Jimmy is reluctant to share his story — he cannot envisage a reader — contrasted with Toby, who can, which is hopeful.

She entertained questions from the audience: She advised against hallucinogens as a writing aid, affirmed that social media is good for literacy (citing Smarter Than You Think), commented on Rob Ford (Toronto is paying for its great sin of puffed-uppedness), and scoffed at the idea of writing exercises (you mean like summer camp? let's pretend to be a triangle).

Also she said some smart things about the control (or lack thereof) the author has over the reader. You never know who your readers are going to be. A reader doesn't want to see Austen pulling the puppet strings; the reader would much rather sit and listen to Mr. Darcy. As for authors connecting with their audiences, well, isn't that what the book is for?

And she signed my book! (Which I must hurry up and finish reading this week.)

Check out Margaret Atwood's website; it will lead you to new and interesting places. Also, know that there's a MaddAddam app, the game Intestinal Parasites (which I'm downloading this very minute).

Briefly it will seem as if you're free

light

Think of bars that cease to exist
the closer you get to them. Before you feel
their coldness, then their obstinacy, briefly it will seem
as if you're free. Think of a keyhole, of the eye
of a peephole that sees everything, or even more.
And think of your own eyelid, of your own soul
lurking just behind the pupil.

— Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Tadeusz Dąbrowski's Black Square, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is published in a bilingual edition (Polish-English) by Zephyr Press. My copy's inscribed to me by the poet (thanks to my sister, who, at my encouragement, attended a reading of his a couple months ago).

I had a tough time choosing a poem to cite here, so I give you this one because I can do so in its entirety. (Although, I must admit, when I first read this poem, I pictured some drunk someone, maybe me, stumbling along to the next bar, and thinking how tragic that the destination would be always removed and then must be reconsidered, infinitely. In Polish, however, the meaning of "bars," in the iron jailing sense, is quite clear.)

I find these poems beautiful, the sound of them, in English or Polish, and certain phrases transport me, particularly the love poems ("I carried you unintentionally in my arms from a go-/go club straight into my bed and thoroughly/ rubbed you into the bedclothes [...]" — emphasis mine, because, oh).

And I also find myself in smiling agreement ("This is the first line. This line means nothing./ And this is the second line, in which you are no longer you,/ i.e., you're not the person from the first line,/ and now you're not even who you were/ in the second and third, and fourth and on top of that/ the fifth. This poem is life, [...]") but then disagreeing quite passionately, which happens when the poem turns to God (and this one does).

I have loved some poetry, and I have hated some other poetry. Most poetry leaves me indifferent. But this may be my first love-hate relationship with a poet.

Mired deep in the relentless, endless mud of Russia

Why do so many Russian writers need to make their protagonist a victim or pain-bearer? Why this fixation with self-flagellation? With guilt?

My theory — based on absolutely no research whatsoever — starts with mud. Thick, sucking, up-to-your-knees mud. Centuries of it. Add millions of serfs all labouring away, mired deep in the relentless, endless mud of Russia. Lives worn away by the yoke of oppressive landowners. Throw into the mix long, dark, dismally cold winter. Pile on the gloomy weight of the church. Voilà! The only hope of survival is to admit your guilt and accept punishment for the unknown sin that landed you in this miserable existence. A resigned acknowledgement of your own responsibility. A spiritual masochism.

— from Terry Gilliam's introduction to Black Snow, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

What is this world?

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a buy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.

— from The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter.

This is Matt. He's forty-six, sleep-deprived, and somewhat stoned, having recently made the sound life decision to — seeing as he was recently laid off, they're foreclosing on his house next week, and he suspects his wife is cheating — become a drug dealer. Only that's not really working out either. Matt's world is unravelling, and now his mind is too.

Living poetically

We saw the circus last weekend.

Cirkopolis
C'est la quête identitaire d'un travailleur solitaire.
C'est l'obsession de retrouver son âme d'enfant.
C'est le parcours initiatique d'un clown
qui par sa poésie va changer son environnement.



A little purer than the now seemingly garish and bombastic Cirque du Soleil.

One great thing

There are lots of great things about Helena, but when the Nivea commercial came on while we were watching TV, I had to ask her, what did she think was one great thing about herself.

"I like to talk," she said without hesitation.

"No, wait. I like to think. Yeah. A lot. I really like to think."

(I love her to bits!)

Happy birthday, kid!

A Doris Lessing notebook

The Lessing Woman:

Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way as people once talked about the Hemingway Man. The Lessing Woman is a formidable female. She hasn't been to a university but she has read everything and remembers it. Her ideals are high and unsullied. She works (or has worked) at lost political causes. Although she loathes marriage, she gamely raises children and endures domestic woes. She cooks well, keeps a spotless house (except when depressed) and does excellent writing, research or secretarial work. She is any man's moral and intellectual superior, and she rarely hesitates to tell him so.

I was being domestic this morning, cleaning. For some reason I opened a drawer I almost never open. In it are some old work contracts, an address book, and, for some reason, two books that I keep separate from all the other hundreds of books in the house: Kwiaty Polskie, a volume of poetry by Julian Tuwim, in Polish; and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I took out the Notebook and fondled it; I like the feel of my edition, I like the look of all its not quite gold-hued lines. Not an hour later, in a meeting with the rep for my daughter's education fund, my phone alerted me that Doris Lessing had died.

My first Lessing book was The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five, in a course on dystopian fiction, when I was 18. I've been reading Lessing regularly ever since.

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, Prelude. Music, Philip Glass; libretto, Doris Lessing.

Lectures
Nobel lecture
Monique Beudert Memorial Lecture

Obituaries
Margaret Atwood, The Guardian: "She was political in the most basic sense."
Lorna Sage, The Guardian: "Commitment was one of the things from which she weaned herself away."
Lisa Allardice, The Guardian: "Lessing seemed to have an almost uncanny genius for pre-empting problems or social change."
Maev Kennedy, The Guardian: "Few writers have as broad a range of subject and sympathy."
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent: "Crucially, she also shook the dust of successive movements, styles and ideologies from her ever-restless feet: communism; feminism; psychoanalysis; social realism."
Charlie Jane Anders, io9: "Lessing was a master of combining characters with rich inner lives with a general hint of strangeness in the world around them."
Helen T. Verongos, The New York Times: "She divorced herself from all 'isms'."
Vicki Barker, NPR: "She was a campaigner against racism, a lover, an ardent communist, and a serial rescuer of cats."
Gaby Wood, The Telegraph: "How many women can be said to have been thought of as an Angry Young Man?"
Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post: "Cantankerous, irascible, outspoken, she thrived on controversy and outrage."

Excerpts
The Cleft
"Dialogue"
"How I Finally Lost My Heart"
On Cats
"Our Friend Judith"

Commentary
The Fifth Child
The Golden Notebook
The Good Terrorist
The Grandmothers
Mara and Dann
Memoirs of a Survivor
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

A quick review of this blog shows that I've managed to mention Doris Lessing while writing about Jim Crace, Jeanette Winterson, Keith Scribner, Lionel Shriver, Allen Kurzweil, China Miéville, Penelope Mortimer. She is a baseline. (And of there writers, I think only Miéville is in the same league as her, of the same ilk.)

Thank you, Doris Lessing, for introducing me to Patrick Hamilton, George Gissing, Anna Kavan. And for planting the idea that Charles Dickens would be good in bed (Tolstoy, not so much).

I do not believe that one can be changed by a book (or by a person) unless there is already something present, latent or in embryo, ready to be changed. Books have influenced me all my life. I could say as an autodidact — a condition that has advantages and disadvantages — that books have made me what I am. But it is hard to say of this book or that one: it changed me. How about War and Peace? Fathers and Sons? The Idiot? The Scarlet and the Black? Remembrance of Things Past? But now they all seem dazzling stages in a long voyage of discovery, which continues.

So I cannot say that Doris Lessing changed me, but she helped me recognize that I was ready to be changed, on several occasions.

The Zola project

I am enthralled by The Paradise. This television series pushes all the right buttons for me, though I can't identify them all. Music is one positive factor, and the beautiful people are another. For some reason I find the department store setting fascinating. Exquisite production value, fine acting, etc., but why I should be so enamored of this program while others leave me cold (ahem, Downton Abbey) is due to some ineffable je ne sais quoi.

(I'm watching on PBS Masterpiece Theater and we're nearing the end of season 1, but I've just discovered that most of the series is available on YouTube. I expect I'll be binging on season 2 before Christmas.)

The Paradise is based on Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, the eleventh novel in his 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series. The television program has transposed the story from Paris to somewhere in northeast England. Of course, this leaves me wondering how much else has been changed. And what better way to find out than to read the source material for myself?

Meanwhile, my other half has been reading up on L'Assommoir, another novel in that series, after we were speculating about the origin of the name of a local bar that goes by that appellation. And he's become somewhat obsessed with Zola's concept.

The Rougon-Macquart cycle follows the life of a family during the Second French Empire. It includes a couple of Zola's best known works: Nana (which I in fact read, about 25 years ago) and Germinal, and lo they are interconnected.

In Différences entre Balzac et moi, Zola noted:

In one word, his work wants to be the mirror of the contemporary society. My work, mine, will be something else entirely. The scope will be narrower. I don't want to describe the contemporary society, but a single family, showing how the race is modified by the environment. (...) My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist.

The challenge then, for me and my other: to read the whole Rougon-Macquart cycle. Also, to read it in French. (This may take years.)

I will be following Zola's own recommended reading order with the following exception: I will pick up Au Bonheur des Dames first. The fact that I have some familiarity now with the story should help ease me into the language. Plus, I want all my pressing questions answered.

What is a poet?

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris's bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant's ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, "Sing again soon" — in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming. And the reviewers step up and say, "That is right; so it must be according to the rules of esthetics." Now of course a reviewer resembles a poet to a hair, except that he does not have the anguish in his heart, or the music on his lips. Therefore, I would rather be a swineherd out on Amager and be understood by swine than be a poet and be misunderstood by people.

— from "Diapsalmata," in Either/Or, by Søren Kierkegaard.

This is a very strange and disjointed text, mostly dwelling on Kierkegaard's (self-termed) "depression." He sounds overly dramatic, and very much like those German Romantics he rails against.

I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own, anything. Most people complain that the world is so prosaic that things do not go in life as in the novel, where opportunity is always so favorable. I complain that in life it is not as in the novel, where one has hardhearted fathers and nisses and trolls to battle, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such adversaries together compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious-of-life nocturnal forms with which I battle and to which I myself give life and existence.

How self-indulgent.

I was completely unprepared for this. It seems that after having defended his thesis (The Concept of Irony), Kierkegaard threw all notions of structure and form to the wind, one big middle finger to the Man, his traditions and institutions. This strikes me as a little at odds with his being a Christian theologian, but what do I know. (Maybe we'll cover this issue later in the course.) To Kierkegaard's credit, he practiced what he preached, practiced irony and found his own subjective truth.

It's pages upon pages of aphorisms concerning death, cereal, erotic love, Mozart, boredom, salmon, Sunday afternoons. It begs to be parodied. And it's wildly beautiful.

This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed — amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

No genuinely human life is possible without irony

In our age there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship, but what doubt is to science, irony is to personal life. Just as scientists maintain that there is no true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency. Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it but loved by those who do. Anyone who does not understand irony at all, who has no ear for its whispering, lacks eo ipso [precisely thereby] what could be called the absolute beginning of personal life; he lacks what momentarily is indispensable for personal life; he lacks the bath of regeneration and rejuvenation, irony's baptism of purification that rescues the soul from having its life in finitude even though it is living energetically and robustly in it. He does not know the refreshment and strengthening that come with undressing when the air gets too hot and heavy and diving into the sea of irony, not in order to stay there, of course, but in order to come out healthy, happy, and buoyant and to dress again.

Therefore, if at times someone is heard talking with great superiority about irony in the infinite striving in which it runs wild, one may certainly agree with him, but insofar as he does not perceive the infinity that moves in irony, he stands not above but below irony. So it is always wherever we disregard the dialectic of life.

— from The Concept of Irony, by Søren Kierkegaard.

(Which is weirdly both unscholarly yet pretentious.)