Big in Japan

I've always had a fondness for this phrase "Big in Japan," which sort of encapsulates how the Japanese seem to care more about U.S./U.K. pop cultural figures -- and even more so jazz music and jazz musicians -- than their home audiences.  Maybe it is the quirkier one-hit wonders that really become celebrated in Japan while remaining near unknowns at home.  This is more obvious in pop music than in jazz, where the Japanese seem to shower love and affection on all jazz musicians, well-known and obscure.  I don't really know what drives this obsession with Western music and movies.  Maybe it really is as simple as in such a space-constrained place as Tokyo, it is easier to be consumerist over music and to a slightly lesser extent movies and books than cars or model trains or what have you.  While it isn't quite as surprising as it was in the 80s and 90s, major film stars would go off to Japan and film commercials and do things that would cause them to lose too much "cred" at home.  (Now they do the same for the Chinese market, but there is less shame attached and sometimes their agents even pimp out these weird US/China hybrid things.)  And of course, lesser known (and perhaps washed-up) movie and TV stars may have enough of a fanbase in Japan that they are called in to make said commercials.  (This was essentially the premise that kicked off Lost in Translation.)

Anyway, perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that with all the love that Japan has given U.S. pop culture, there wasn't some recognition of it (and no, I am not just talking about The Vapors' Turning Japanese).

There is a defunct U.K. punk band called Big in Japan.  At least three novels with that title.  And at least 4 songs.  Here are my top 3, listed by artist who performed them:

Alphaville (an early (1984) song about the phenomenon)
Alphaville live (2011) (now that they are a middle-aged band I do wonder if they are more appreciative of being appreciated in Japan)
Tom Waits (it takes 30 seconds for sound to kick in -- maybe to trick you into blasting the volume)
     This doesn't appear to be an official video (though it does use the CD version of the track).
     This video isn't authorized either and is a bit NSFW (though it may be worth watching for some clips from Godzilla).
Martin Solveig & Idoling (this seems to capture Japanese pop culture the best, though I do wonder if it is a dated portrait (from the 90s perhaps))

While it would be kind of cool to write a short story about an artist who is still big in Japan, I'm just not that sure I have that much to add.

Where I can add a bit is that I made my own trip to Japan in 2006 for a conference in Kyoto.  I was pretty sure then that it would be my own trip, so I added a side trip to Tokyo.  Kyoto was a bit odd, with the very old shrines with a modernist city on top (but a city that was more of a 80s or 90s version of a city).  I was amazed at seeing vending machines for everything on the sidewalks. Tokyo was ultra-modern in comparison and had far fewer obvious shrines.  The crowds were fairly overwhelming, at least in the main shopping districts.  I had a great time getting obscure jazz releases at the records shops.  I'll add in a handful of my better photos, starting with Kyoto.

Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion)

Sadly, I don't really have any good photos of a typical Kyoto sidewalk, just this photo of a store with various "medicinal" remedies.

On to Tokyo, where I spent a day and a half in a strange timeless rush (never did quite get over the jetlag even by the end of the trip).

At night:

It was quite a journey, and I'm glad I went.  I certainly got a kick out of being the one running around with a camera (despite not taking nearly enough photos!).  The one thing I struggled with, particularly outside the conference centre, was just how difficult it was to make myself understood.  This simply hadn't been that difficult in any part of Western or Central Europe.  I knew this was going to be a bit of an issue (and also knew I didn't have time to take a primer in Japanese) but it was still pretty alienating.  This post is already quite long, so I will spill over into the next one where I discuss the implications for "The Poet" in Japan.

Minor poets revived

Is "minor poets" an oxymoron?  Actually, that's not right.  Instead, I should ask isn't it redundant.  How many poets are actually known outside their circle of family and friends?  It's quite possible that (in the U.S.) the last poet with any kind of widespread recognition was Allen Ginsberg, though Alice Walker might qualify through her connection with Oprah Winfrey and that crowd and Adrienne Rich was well known among feminists.  It's hard for me to even tell how obscure or well-known a literary figure is.  Even though I may run across this or that poet, I am hardly representative of the general public.  Also I don't talk about literature with anyone outside a (very) small group of contacts who still are immersed in literature to see if they have heard of this or that particular figure (i.e. this doesn't come up very much around the proverbial water cooler). I generally imagine most poets are fairly obscure but some are still more obscure than others.  (I have to say while it really is mostly about other things, including a trek to see a secret nuclear waste deposit site, I love the title of the novel Making Love to the Minor Poets of Chicago by James Conrad.  I picked up a copy recently to go through it again, then donated it to the library, though sadly it doesn't look like it was added to their collection.)  I will also say it is hard to make it even as a minor poet.  Getting a book published, knowing that it will not crack the 500 mark in sales...  I only did the self-publishing route, so can't even qualify as a minor poet (formerly of Chicago).

Anyway, I did manage to find R.P. Blackmur's book of poems at the library.  I'm sure this is a case where it is only available (and published in the first place) because he was such a well-known critic at the time.  I liked the poems from his first book the best.  They reminded me of some of T.S. Eliot's minor efforts.  I don't think one can objectively say that Blackmur was objectively that much worse than other Modernist poets, but he didn't spend that much time on it and he certainly didn't set out to carve out a career as a poet.

Well, it certainly a mug's game worrying too much about literary reputations and what makes it and what doesn't.  I do think that many of the NYRB Classics are quite good (and will probably be writing later about J.F. Powers who has had all of his work reprinted in this line) but some are just "eh?"  I just read a piece in Slate about Hoban's Turtle Diary being reprinted and I can't quite see the appeal.  But maybe I'll feel differently in a few more years.

As far as poets go, I think being able to pull together (and publish!) a Selected or better yet Collected Poems means that you had either sufficient readership or stature in this rarefied world and that your legacy will last to a certain extent.  It is those poets with only a few chapbooks here and there that only a curious grad student will stumble over in the library.  And maybe not even this in the future.  More and more books are just going the e-book route, and while that may mean a longer life in the long tail it also may mean it is harder to just stumble across them.

Anyway, I have still been gathering up a few poems here and there for my transportation anthology (which I have not conceded is a dead end as of yet). Starting from Katha Pollitt's Antarctic Traveller, I was led to her later collection The Mind-Body Problem (in general, Pollitt seems to spend too little time on poetry to ever qualify as a serious poet) but then to Thomas Rabbitt's The Booth Interstate and then on to Exile.  Exile is actually quite a gem of a book, which I had never heard of, despite it winning an award (from the International Poetry Forum).  Rabbitt went in a very different direction with his "Booth poems" -- kind of rural pastoral/gothic.  And while this was productive for him and appealed to a certain readership, I much preferred Exile.  Rabbitt actually does have a selected poems (American Wake) but it isn't really my thing, since it focuses mostly on the post-Exile work.

Karl Shapiro actually has two selected poems (one of which I only learned about in the library) and Harvey Shapiro one (The Sights Along the Harbor).  I actually quite like Sights, especially the later poems where he has a few poems about traveling.  I was surprised about a year ago to find that Alan Dugan had a much more comprehensive collected poems out (Poems Seven) and I have been enjoying dipping into that. I'm a tiny bit torn over the Shapiro, as I have the more recent Selected.  However, I compared this to the earlier one (The Wild Card) and stopped counting at 50 (poems in The Wild Card not in the newer one).  That's basically an entire chapbook, and I could probably justify having both collections -- at least temporarily.

Constance Urdang was perhaps the biggest find from the last library trip.  I had never heard of her before.  I can't quite recall the link.  Maybe through another chapbook listing the entire Pitt (Pittsburgh) Poetry Series.  But you know what's really strange -- I just went to the U of Pittsburgh Press website, and they have completely scrubbed her from it.  You would never know Urdang had 3 books on their imprint.  Crazy!  At the same time, these books seem to have migrated to another publisher as e-books.  I did not like her first collection at all, but thereafter liked a few poems from each collection -- and even found a few related to transportation!  I liked her middle collection (Only the World from 1983) the best, but will see if I can borrow these from the library (2 are sort of readily available and the others would have to go through ILL) to give myself a bit more time to digest them.

I'm not expecting that she get the full Gluck treatment, but I don't see any reason why she doesn't have a selected poems out.  Her work seems quite in line with Jane Kenyon's (maybe a bit more wide-ranging).  Kenyon had a well-received selected poems (Otherwise) and about five years ago got the full Collected treatment.  Granted Donald Hall is a powerful force to push her legacy.  Curiously, Urdang was also married to a poet (Donald Finkel), who was a much more marginal literary figure than Hall.  Both of them (Kenyon & Urdang) died far too young.  It does strikes me that Urdang is due for a revival (or perhaps a good article comparing her to Kenyon -- not that I think I have the time to take such a piece on).  I'll have a better sense of what works from among her books after I read her again more carefully a bit later (mid-September sounds about right).

In the meantime, it seems apropos to close with "A Hot Night in July" from Urdang's collection The Lone Woman and Others (1980):

How slowly the leaves
Shuffle against one another
With a sound like paper being crushed
In a heavy fist
And the night presses down
Like dusty black felt
And the moon hangs there
Like an enormous paper lantern
With a single candle burning inside
That we once watched drifting higher
And higher over the terraced roofs
Before it burst into flames
And scattered ashes like flakes of dirty snow.

All the Books on the Shelves - pt3 (Fiction E-J)

Based on very preliminary analysis, it seems that the fiction, poetry and drama (on the shelves) will come out to roughly 850 distinct works.  If the current read/unread ratio holds, then I will have read (and/or viewed in the case of plays) 300 of them.  So that's the current over/under for anyone keeping track.

In addition, there are roughly 350 non-fiction books (sociology/anthropology/urban studies/history/philosophy) and somewhere between 200-250 art monographs on the shelves.  And this is after slimming down the collection!  I actually gave away two bookcases before moving from Chicago.  Back then, there were still massive overflows of books.  I believe if I still had those two bookcases I would be able to get nearly all of the boxed up books onto shelves, so there has been real progress.  Ideally, I would get rid of all books not on bookcases to force myself to thin out the collection even more (like not buying bigger pants when the current pants start getting tight), but I'll probably compromise and acquire one more bookcase after the next move.

Anyway, E-J takes us almost to the end of the middle bookcase.

T.S. Eliot R Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950
Ralph Ellison R Invisible Man
Karen Enns R That Other Beauty
John Fante The Bandini Quartet (Wait Until Spring, Bandini; The Road to Los Angeles; Ask the Dust and Dreams From Bunker Hill)
John Fante West of Rome
William Faulkner R Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner R As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner R The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner R Light in August
William Faulkner The Unvanquished
William Faulkner If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms)
William Faulkner R Go Down, Moses
William Faulkner The Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion)
William Faulkner R The Reivers
Kenneth Fearing R New and Selected Poems
Frederick Feirstein Manhattan Carnival
Ferlinghetti R A Coney Island of the Mind
Ferlinghetti R A Far Rockaway of the Heart
Ferlinghetti R Endless Life
Timothy Findley Stones
Timothy Findley R Famous Last Words
Timothy Findley The Piano Man’s Daughter
Timothy Findley Pilgrim
Timothy Findley R Headhunter
Timothy Findley R Not Wanted on the Voyage
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Basil & Josephine Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Pat Hobby Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald Novels and Stories 1920–22 (including This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned and R Tales of the Jazz Age)
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Leon Forrest Divine Days
Leon Forrest Meteor In the Madhouse
Robert Frost Collected Poems, Prose and Plays
Carlos Fuentes R Christopher Unborn
Alice Fulton R Palladium
Alice Fulton R Powers of Congress
William Gaddis The Recognitions
William Gaddis Agape Agape
Damon Galgut The Imposter
Mavis Gallant The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant Varieties of Exile
Mavis Gallant Home Truths
Gadda R That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
Federico Garcia Lorca Collected Poems
Federico Garcia Lorca R Poet in New York
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Strange Pilgrims
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R In Evil Hour
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R The Autumn of the Patriarch
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R Love In the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Of Love and Other Demons
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R Leaf Storm
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R Chronicle of A Death Foretold
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R No One Writes To the Colonel
    (this was a pretty cool box set of Garcia Marquez novels I picked up in the UK, though I think the novellas could have been combined to make room for The General In His Labyrinth)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R Collected Stories
Gabriel Garcia Marquez R The General In His Labyrinth
Gaskell Wives and Daughters
Gaskell R North and South
Amitav Ghosh The Glass Palace
Reginald Gibbons R Slow Trains Overhead
Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems 1947-1980
Albert Goldbarth The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poem 1972-2007
Nadine Gordimer Something Out There
Nadine Gordimer My Son’s Story
Alasdair Gray Lanark: A Life In Four Books
Alasdair Gray Poor Things
Alasdair Gray Ten Tales, Tall and True
Henry Green Loving, Living, Party Going
Henry Green Nothing, Doting, Blindness
Henry Green Caught, Back, Concluding
Graham Greene R Travels With My Aunt
Vasily Grossman Life and Fate
George & Weldon Grossmith R Diary of a Nobody
Thom Gunn R The Man With Night Sweats
Jim Gustafson R Virtue and Annihilation
Mohammed Hanif A Case of the Exploding Mangoes
Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy R Far from the Madding Crowd
Jim Harrison R Selected & New Poems
Jim Harrison R The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
Nathaniel Hawthorne R The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of Seven Gables
Robert Hayden R Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney R District and Circle
Hemingway Complete Short Stories
Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
O. Henry R The Gift of the Magi and Other Short Stories
Lolita Hernandez R Snake Crossing
Victor Hernandez Cruz R Snaps
Victor Hernandez Cruz R Rhythm, Content and Flavor
Robert Hershon R How to Ride On the Woodlawn Express
Jack Hodgins The Invention of the World
Jack Hodgins Distance
E.T.A. Hoffmann The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr
James Hogg R The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner
Homer The Iliad (Lattimore trans.)
Homer The Odyssey (Lattimore trans.)
Fanny Howe r Selected Poems
William Dean Howells A Hazard of New Fortunes
Langston Hughes Collected Poems
Zora N. Hurston R Their Eyes Were Watching God
David Ignatow R Selected Poems
Randall Jarrell R Selected Poems
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala In Search of Love and Beauty
Charles Johnson R Oxherding Tale
James Weldon Johnson R God's Trombones
June Jordan R Things That I Do in the Dark
James Joyce R Dubliners
James Joyce R Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce R Ulysses
James Joyce Finnegan's Wake

Again, a bit of ambiguity how to count some of these works, but I shall score it as 50/121 or 40%.  Not too shabby.

Novels and Stories 1920–1922

This Side of Paradise • Flappers and Philosophers • The Beautiful and Damned • Tales of the Jazz Age

- See more at: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=147#sthash.cXK6spH8.dpuf

Abandon book!

Saw a semi-interesting column on abandoning books on the Guardian today.  Original post is here.  I think it might have been better had the author given space for folks to comment (below the line or BTL in Grauniad parlance) on books that they had abandoned.  In that sense the Goodreads bit (and infographic!) are definitely better.  Feel free to add your comments about your own abandonment strategy below.

Hard to believe I couldn't find an appropriate image on the web, but I had to draw this (badly) myself...

There was quite a long period in my life where I finished books no matter what.  (Though there were a few books that I was supposed to read in undergrad that I simply couldn't get to and never started...  Seriously, one semester I was taking 4 English lit courses and had to read 4-5 novels a week with response papers and everything.  Way too much and something had to give.)  Despite the cartoon above, I did read Moby Dick all the way through (just for fun) and even Spenser's Faerie Queene (one of the top 10 boringest books in the world according to Jasper Fforde -- though this I probably would not have finished if I hadn't been reading it for a course).

I still tend to try to finish books, though in the case of non-fiction that is not grabbing me, I am a lot more inclined to skim than I used to be.  I currently have 50 pages more to go in Hubert Damisch's Skyline: The Narcissistic City and am not liking it at all.  This is one that I am pretty tempted to just abandon.  Non-fiction books that are written in obscurant language (unfortunately a lot of cultural studies fall into this category) now generally get the boot from me.

In the realm of fiction, I am certainly more willing to abandon novels, particularly when I don't feel the authors are "playing fair."  I don't have to necessarily like all the characters in a book (though I probably need to like one or two to have any investment at all), but mostly I don't want the plot to be advanced by totally random incidents or really implausible coincidences.  This is why I ultimately stopped reading The Sea Captain's Wife and perhaps wouldn't have even started Eliot's The Mill on the Floss had I known the ending.  I really hate books where people who seem reasonably intelligent or at least reasonable suddenly start acting stupid.  Othello is just this side of the line (but at least we have some indications where his self-doubt (that his wife could love him for himself) combined with Iago's treachery lead him astray).  Of course, most sitcoms require that people act foolishly for 20 minutes so that things can be explained/resolved in the last 5 minutes.  On the other hand, I don't watch much TV -- largely for that reason.  TV/book characters that are at least consistently foolish are acceptable (if a bit wearing), so Arrested Development, for example, doesn't exactly violate my rules.  It also does a much better job of leading into implausible situations organically (and they build across episodes, which is a plus).

Anyway, I would say I first I categorize books into two piles -- those that are classics that I want to read no matter what and those that are more discardable (literally in the overflow boxes in the basement).  It would take a lot for me to abandon a book in the first category.  The last time I did that I can remember was Mosley's Hopeful Monsters.*  I tried to read this book three times but finally gave up.  I think the single biggest flaw for me was that both of the (alternating) narrators sounded almost identical.  They both had this amazing ability to recall not only what they said, but what they meant to say, from 20 or even 30 years in their past.  It was such a stupid and annoying convention (like a verbal tic but written out). I basically decided that, despite the backdrop of important things going on such as the development of nuclear bombs and Western European history being decided and what have you, Mosley was actually a pretty crap writer who certainly hadn't learned his craft.

With the more disposable books, I try to decide within the first 25 or certainly 50 pages if this book has potential and is worth reading.  Once I do commit to that kind of book, I usually do finish, unless I feel the author simply has tricked me or is toying with me (like Powning) and I throw down the book at that point.  Perhaps the oddest abandonment for me was Jorge Amado's The War of the Saints where I simply couldn't care about any of the characters and the fact that the author kept taking us on detour after detour.  I'm sure he was trying to portray this village in some sort of Felliniesque way, but I lost interest about 150 pages in and tossed the book.  It just didn't seem to be getting any better and Amado was spending so much time on the more unpleasant characters (clearly to be setting them up for a fall later, but I couldn't even be fussed into sticking around to see it).  I did like his earlier novels Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, but I don't feel I have the time to reread them and see how I feel about them today.  I vaguely remember that they were slightly more straight-forward reads with more sympathetic characters.

I don't think I will post a list of all the books I've ever abandoned, but if I can think of any other memorable cases (or abandon more books in the future) I will mention them below.

* Actually, now that I think about it, I did abandon Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections nine or so months ago.  Not because he was such a snob, but mostly because I found where he was going in the novel was so boring (dysfunctional family dynamics in suburban U.S.) and so better done before by others (John Cheever, John Updike).  It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I stopped caring, but I must have been pretty frustrated, because I abandoned it in an airport lounge, knowing that I had another 3+ hour flight ahead of me.  I managed to buy The Mill on the Floss as an emergency backup.  Though I didn't really care for that book either, I did finish it; it was still a better investment of my time than the Franzen.

For better or worse, I find the father in Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy to be an unsympathetic and bullying character, but the dynamics are a bit different from The Corrections (the children have a harder time escaping his influence for one thing).  Certainly the setting is more alien, which piques my curiousity.  I'd say in general I consider Mahfouz to be a superior (and subtler) writer than Franzen.  All of which contribute to the strong likelihood that I will complete The Cairo Trilogy when there are at least some surface simularities to other works which I have abandoned.  Well, I don't have to be 100% consistent in my reading habits, and it's nobody's loss but mine if I end up giving up on a stone-cold classic.

Update 08/26/2015
On the trip to Chicago I ended up doing a high-level skimming of Charles Palliser's The Sensationalist, which I did not care for at all.  It was a mix of the empty, cipher-like characters of Satin Island and the sexual escapades of Bukowski's Post Office (though the females are almost interchangeable here).  Still, I finished it.

In contrast, I gave up on Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond after 100 pages.  It was supposed to be a light take on the activities of Anglican missionaries in Turkey, sort of a blend of Graham Greene and Barbara Pym, but I found it really tedious, largely because of the affectless voice of the narrator, who feels excluded from this community because she cannot in good faith take communion, since she is having an affair with a married man.  Anyway, I saw that some people loved the novel, but a slightly larger group disliked it and quite a few really hated the ending, which put the narrator in a very poor light.  So I jumped ahead and read the conclusion, which does seem somewhat abrupt, perhaps ripped from Bowen's To the North, where at least the ending is a bit more organic to the rest of the book. If this is indeed her best novel, I am not likely to be reading any more Macauley.

Barbara Pym: a Re-appreciation

It's interesting (to me at least) how certain authors start bubbling back up in my mind, putting claims on my time.  While I have a fairly set agenda for the moment, tackling both some of the really daunting classics of 19th and 20th European fiction -- and some shorter one-offs that I can clear out of the boxes in my basement -- some of the lesser known works by female authors (being reprinted by Virago Press) are also asking for some "equal time."  So I did borrow an early novel by Barbara Comyns and am midway through it already (I really appreciate the fact that most of her novels are so short!).  Anyway, Barbara Pym is an interesting case where she isn't exactly obscure, but she is on the neglected side (though there have been some Pym reading groups inspired by Virago Press bringing out most, though not all, of her works again).  Unlike Molly Keane (also reprinted by Virago) who voluntarily stopped writing for decades, Pym was more or less dropped by her regular publisher who rejected An Unsuitable Attachment (despite Philip Larkin advocating for its publication).  She simply couldn't get published after 1963, though she did keep writing.

Then in the late 70s there was a wave of appreciation for her (at least in part spear-headed by Larkin) and suddenly she was publishable again and Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died came out.  Unfortunately, she didn't have that long to appreciate this renewed interest, as she passed away in Jan. 1980.  A Few Green Leaves probably would have benefited from a bit more back and forth with her editor(s).  Quite a few works came out after her death and it isn't entirely clear if she would have made changes or indeed withheld them from publication (particularly true in the case of An Academic Question).

Anyway, this should be her complete works in order of composition:
Civil to Strangers (written 1936, published posthumously 1989)
Crampton Hodnet (completed circa 1940, published posthumously 1985)
Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Excellent Women (1952)
Jane and Prudence (1953)
Less than Angels (1955)
A Glass of Blessings (1958)
No Fond Return of Love (1961)
An Unsuitable Attachment (written 1963, published posthumously 1982)
An Academic Question (written 1970-72, published posthumously 1986)
Quartet in Autumn (1977)
The Sweet Dove Died (1978)
A Few Green Leaves (1980)

I did read all of these works back in the early 90s (it's possible I might have missed one), though I am not entirely sure I read them in the "proper" order.  I recall that while they were enjoyable, many of the novels do sort of blend into each other, especially Some Tame Gazelle through A Glass of Blessings.  However, I suspect this is a case (like the major Austen novels) where they are better appreciated by a slightly more mature reader.  So I am definitely considering giving them another go.  I probably will skip the first two -- as well as A Few Green Leaves, which is generally not considered a terribly successful novel.  However, I do have a special fondness for An Academic Question (ironically this is generally considered the least Pym-like of all her novels and one actually cobbled together by her literary executor).  I suspect I will like (or at least appreciate) her "autumnal" novels Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died more on the second go-around, and maybe still more when I hit my 60s.

I guess I don't have anything particularly profound to say about Pym at the moment.  I'll probably use this space to keep track of my efforts to reread her novels (so in this case Rr will stand for having re-read one of her novels).  Another book that I plan on re-reading -- and actually sent off to a cousin in the meantime -- is J.F. Powers' Morte d'Urban.  His work is almost the flip-side of Pym's where she writes about how women sort of fall in love with curates, and in some cases actually catch them (one major difference between the Anglican and Catholic role in village life*).  And Powers writes from the perspective of Roman Catholics priests, with his greatest creation being Father Urban -- a worldly priest sent into rural Minnesota who slowly finds his calling again in this alien environment. (Powers was Catholic, but not a priest himself.)  I might tackle Morte d'Urban after Pym's Less than Angels, and if I feel particularly inspired after that, then intersperse his short stories and his other novel with her later novels.

* On the surface, Anglican priests can cause more "mischief," since they are actually marriageable men and thus can cause more of an upheaval among unmarried, "churchy" women.  At the same time, they reinforce the idea that the married couple is the natural unit in society, particularly village life.  In contrast, Roman Catholic priests, no matter how kindly, are slightly alien** and above family concerns.  They may live among their flock (though more likely they live in rooms attached to the church) but are apart from them and have fewer worldly concerns.  This separation is a direct consequence from centuries of elevating the priesthood above the laity. In other words, a design feature and not a flaw...  The flipside is that the more "democratic" religions (to some extent even including Anglican/Episcopal sects) don't aim for such a clear separation between spiritual leaders and followers.  They find it more genuinely inspiring for spiritual leaders to be more closely aligned with the parishioners and to have a greater stake in their day-to-day struggles.  I can't take credit for this idea, as it was relayed quite well in a video op-ed on MSNBC here.  The key proponent was Father Alberto Cutié, a former Catholic priest who became an Episcopalian in order to marry the woman he fell in love while remaining a priest.  He is quite convincing (of course to someone sympathetic to his ideas) and charismatic.  However, he comes from the New World (Puerto Rico, Cuba and Miami) and not an English parish, as I had remembered the bit (conflating this with Pym's world in my mind).  The video piece is definitely worth a view, though it is certainly stacked against "stodgy" Catholic practices...

** In a really well-done story or novel, a Catholic priest might even be a bit of a free-radical -- a term (borrowed from chemistry actually) sometimes associated with Shakespeare's Puck, i.e. a character who isn't particularly grounded and who sets off reactions among the other couples but doesn't himself (or herself) end up in a relationship.  Just as with the role of married priests in the village, this is not an original idea of my own.  I'm quite sorry that I can't seem to track down the source, as it really was quite a clever theory,.

Anna v. Molly - some thoughts

So I have managed to get through Anna Karenina for the first time (not that long actually after reading Madame Bovary for the first time).  And realistically for the last time.  There are certainly some very fine passages, but the novel as a whole didn't grip me enough to even contemplate reading it in its entirety a second time (it is simply too long). I generally found the philosophizing sections, mostly but not entirely found when Levin is center stage, to be boring.  (I really don't think that many modern readers are going to be too interested in Levin and Kitty, and I'm fairly sure they get sidelined in the various movie adaptations.)  I absolutely could have done without the last 25-30 pages when Levin comes back to some kind of faith in God.  In contrast, I would at least contemplate rereading The Brothers Karamazov again, which also has very long and sometimes tedious philosophical passages.  Certainly Dostoevsky comes from a darker place than Tolstoy, but I can't recall if he ends in the same place (acceptance of God's existence and reliance upon His mercy) in this novel or if it is a more ambiguous resolution with different brothers finding their separate ways (and some remaining in the "dark," i.e. sticking to their nihilistic theories).  There's definitely something about reading the novel as a young man and again as an old(er) man, which I could pull off for Crime and Punishment and The Brothers K* but obviously can't for Anna Karenina.  This essay by James Hynes, while a bit snarky in places, captures quite a few of my thoughts on the novel (even reading it as a older reader).

In general, I agree that Tolstoy does have keen insight into the difficulty of communication -- how even when we attempt to be sympathetic to others, there is some barrier to really understanding the other person.  And he is quite good on how people may be in accord for a long stretch, and then fall (a bit) out of sympathy for all kinds of reasons, esp. other problems in their lives that suddenly intrude.  He's quite good on how fragmentary people's thought processes are with many different things going on in the background. He doesn't develop this quite as much as Virginia Woolf and certainly not Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, but he definitely seems one of the parents of stream-of-consciousness in literature, which I will return to below. 

I definitely agree with Hynes that Anna Karenina is one of the most spoiled novels in history, but just in case:

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Seriously, who doesn't go into this novel knowing that Anna throws herself under a train?  Of course, knowing this, you find the opening scene where a railroad worker is run over to be maybe just a bit heavy-handed in the foreshadowing department.  Maybe the opening worked better when the audience truly came to the novel fresh.  Certainly, it is hard to recreate a time when railroads were still a bit of a novelty and the danger factor was much more on people's minds than it is today.  (Though the railroad has actually become a bigger part of my life after the office relocation.  I hear the horns blowing several times during the day.)  Even though Tolstoy apparently found himself more sympathetic to Anna than when he started writing the novel, women just couldn't "get away" with adultery.  If anything Anna has a longer run of the good life (before and even after her declaration to her husband) than other adulteresses in literature, esp. Emily Bovary.  

And so this brings me to Molly Bloom, perhaps the third most famous adulteress in literature (assuming we don't count Helen of Troy, who was forced into adultery by the gods).  While the official line on divorce in Ireland (at the time Joyce was writing) was hardly more enlightened than in Russia during Tolstoy's period (and possibly even worse), Joyce still signals that attitudes are changing.  Moral slips (from either side of the marriage) don't have to have fatal consequences.  While Bloom is Jewish and an outsider to much of Dublin's society, you still get the sense that even for a full-blown Irish couple the disgrace of adultery (or even attempting to get a divorce or more likely an annulment) isn't going to lead to some fatal stand-off.  And society is better for that, Joyce seems to say.

I can't really tell if Ulysses is a direct response to Anna Karenina or not.  There's an awful lot going on in the novel.  In many ways, Joyce is responding to the entirety of Western literature, starting from the Greeks, but it really struck me as I got to the "fatal five"† chapters of Anna Karenina that Joyce was riffing on Anna's disorganized thoughts‡ and showing what would happen in a more accepting framework.  Instead of choosing death (to essentially spite Vronsky!), Molly finds herself back in love with Bloom (or at least partially so) and chooses love/life.  Obviously it is easier to forgive if one is not the injured party (and how much better if one doesn't even give up one's lover and remain married).  Perhaps Anna would have chosen differently had her husband gone ahead and given up their son (which he might have been convinced to do during his first magnanimous phase).  I'm struggling to remember if Bloom had had any slip-ups (or at least any successful assignations since he certainly seemed open to the idea) or if the moral weakness was only on Molly's side.  For that matter, I can't really remember why she ended up fooling around with Boylan, other than he was handsome and charming (not too dissimilar from Vronsky perhaps) and good in bed.  Well, another reason to try to tackle Ulysses again in a year or two.

Some of the other parallels are weaker.  Joyce may have been making a bit of a comment upon the trope of the character representing the author, as Levin is a transparent stand-in for Tolstoy.  (Again, almost anyone coming to the novel today knows this, but it might have been a surprise at some point.)  Most commentators say that Joyce the author is actually split between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.  On the other hand, Bloom has a much more even temperament (than Levin, for instance) and is maybe closer to Oblonsky, without his public successes and ease in society.  Boylan is certainly a pale shadow of Vronsky and hardly merits more than a mention here and there.  Joyce certainly downplays the implications of adultery on family life, whereas it is absolutely central to Tolstoy.  On the other hand Joyce does seem to be following Tolstoy in making this a novel about ideas and the human thinkers who run around town and try to sway others to their point of view.

I'm hardly the first to make the Anna-Molly connection, but it struck me powerfully when I got to the last few chapters and saw where it was heading.  Even knowing the outcome didn't detract from the power (and perhaps horror) of her irrevocable decision.  Hynes touches on this connection, and perhaps R.P Blackmur as well.  He is on the obscure side now, but was an influential critic in the 1950s and 60s.  He has a series of essays on the major (massive) novels that were the touchstones of what the educated folk read back in his day.  Indeed the book is simply titled: Eleven Essays in the European Novel (Essays about Anna Karenina; Ulysses; Madame Bovary; Doctor Faustus; The Magic Mountain; Crime and Punishment; The Possessed; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov).  With the possible exception of the Thomas Mann novels, this list still comprises the core of European novels that a literature major would be expected to know today (and come this fall I will have read all but the Mann).  Proust is missing of course and Virginia Woolf, to say nothing of Kafka's Castle.  Calvino might be added to the list and possibly Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  Perec might be added as an experimentalist following to some extent in Joyce's footsteps, but really drawing more directly on Calvino.  There is an outside chance that in the future the European canon would include outsiders such as Stefan Zweig and Irene Némirovsky (Suite Française and some of her earlier works).  But it's a pretty good starting point, even today.  Anyway, I haven't decided if I am ever going to scale Mann's Mountain.  If I do, then I will probably at least skim Blackmur's essays to see if we are of the same mind about these novels.


* There are probably 4 or so other novels that I really enjoyed in my 20s but worry whether I will enjoy them as much now.  I have no idea when I would ever have the time to get around to this "experiment."  I think I need to be in a better frame of mind in general before I risk it (after all, I definitely wasn't as grabbed by Cat's Eye the second time around -- it was better to have the memory of a great read than the reality of the second-time reading).  On the flipside, I did like Bulgakov's Master and Margarita as much on second reading, though that was a particularly odd case as I read two new translations back-to-back, literally chapter by chapter.  As usual, Pevear & Volokhonsky was the best.  Probably I would start with Bell's Waiting for the End of the World, then Crime and Punishment, and fit Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage in there somewhere, then Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and eventually Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.  In many ways, it is easier for books that I partially liked but partially resisted (like the Faulkner) since I know I will read it differently the second time around and might well appreciate it more.

† Part 7, Chapters 27-31.    ‡ In Chapter/Section 18 of Ulysses.
I'll definitely read these two passages back-to-back again at a later point.

Rejection letters - you're doing it wrong!

The title is actually a bit of a spoof of a series that has been appearing in Slate.com of late. They claim that they have the only correct way to prepare a recipe or performing some household task and everyone else has been doing it wrong!

While I certainly don't think I have a foolproof way of generating rejection letters, I have noticed a really disturbing trend of really unhelpful rejection letters.  I suppose this comes from a combination of factors:

1) Times are still quite hard and there are far too many people going after the same jobs, the same leads, the same opportunities, etc.*
    This leads those on the receiving end to feel they don't have to worry at all about the feelings among the rejected. 
2) Whether this is precisely a function of being overwhelmed by applications (including a lot of very good ones) or being overworked because employers have cut so far back on staffing, employees in service and quasi-service positions are just more curt these days.
3) The big casualness has crept in and standards are just lower these days.
    (Insert standard Gen. X bitching about Gen. Y -- and the Millennials!)

The rejection letters I got 20 or so years ago were often a bit more helpful, and in one or two cases, they encouraged me to try again or even to submit to other journals that might be a better fit.  This has not been the case for anything I've sent out over the past 10 years.  Indeed, I've gotten quite a few (job) rejection letters over the past few years, most saying something like "there were 100+ applicants for this position" and "this has led to many qualified applicants not getting full review of their files."  In other words, don't take it too personally.  While this being treated as a number is fairly painful, it is honest -- and these employers don't string you along forever.  I've hung onto a few of these letters, mostly to keep me grounded when I start thinking too highly of my abilities.

However, I really have a problem with potential employers -- or in this particular case a publisher -- who string you along until the very last moment, making you think that you have passed the first round(s) of screening, and then being rejected without any meaningful comment or suggestion(s) for improvement.  I think that is unfair.  Fortunately, I never held out so much hope on a long-shot job that I didn't go after other positions, though some people have done that.

In the case of my manuscript (a poetry anthology), I am upset that they held onto it for 9 months, which is really quite a long time, then rejected it saying it wasn't suitable.  I could definitely have shopped it around elsewhere during that time, so that was a real opportunity loss for me.  Frankly, I don't think it was unsuitable as it was very much in line with anthologies that this publisher used to publish.  Perhaps the economics of the industry have changed, but that would have been a more helpful response than what I got from them.

What I am calling for is for companies to stop wasting others' time (and certainly to not treat it as worth so little, the way they are doing now).  If you are overwhelmed by submissions, do triage early and send out mass rejections (with the "not suitable" line) within a month or so.  And if you hold onto a job application or a manuscript for over 6 months, then really you owe the rejected parties at least a paragraph of why they (or their manuscript) didn't make the cut.  Holding onto something for 9 months will lead authors to think they have a chance and have made it past a hurdle or two.  If so, they should be told (even if that doesn't change the fact of rejection).  But if they weren't suitable from the getgo, don't waste their time (and yours, since authors tend to call or write in, even if instructed not to).  I've tried to live up to this standard on my end and certainly have never left anyone on the hook longer than absolutely necessary.

As for the poetry anthology (on the theme of transportation), as much as I would love to just recreate it on-line (and not worry about being paid), I just don't have the rights to do so.  It really would have to go through a traditional publisher who could negotiate for those rights with the various poets (and their estates!).  I think I'll regroup for a while and then approach another publisher who still publishes such anthologies.  It would be a shame for the work I did (mostly last summer -- a full year ago now!) to go for naught.

* As an aside, we certainly seem to live in an era where you can give away as much as you want to on the internet, but if you want to be paid as a creator of content you probably are not going to be discovered as a true unknown.  Having connections (and schmoozing) and outright nepotism always mattered a lot, but now they seem to be the only things that matter, sad to say.  It's a pretty high barrier even to find a literary agent willing to take you on today (not that I've tried) and without that, you have low chances of breaking in.  The motto of Chicago politics is more apt than ever -- we don't want nobody that nobody sent!