David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997.

This collection of essays is my first foray into reading Wallace. I’ve been meaning to spend some time with his work for a while now, and am now both glad that I have and hoping to find more time to spend with Consider the Lobster and Infinite Jest.

The writing is fun: recursive, exuberant, given to marvellous and unexpected comparisons as a way of bringing a scene to life, and richly evocative: “an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.” What I found most remarkable were the two travel pieces, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” about the Illinois State Fair, and the title piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” about a Caribbean cruise. They feel at first like deeply personal travelogues, essays that describe the scene and bring you into the author’s experience complete with all his entertaining and identifiable neuroses, and seem to lack coherence other than that given by the passage of time. In reading them, though, I came to see that the seemingly-relaxed structure is a front: Wallace has very deliberate points about what it means to be human and what it means to experience, that are worth discovering in his meandering and footnoted-way. And oh, the footnotes ¹ in all their parenthetical and humorous delight, never detracting from the piece but always adding something. One has to read the footnotes!

The only piece in the collection I found myself skimming rather than reading was the essay on David Lynch, and while it examines what makes Lynch a different sort of auteur than many directors, my lack of familiarity with and interest in Lynch himself wasn’t overcome by Wallace’s engaging writing.

Captivating but difficult is the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a piece I wish I had read many years ago. Arguing that television exists as a medium wholly invested in irony, Wallace builds on the brilliant Lewis Hyde to argue “… irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” and thus television can never be a truly effective tool for the novelist: authors of fiction have an obligation to use modern references, to be sure, but to transcend irony to create something else. He quotes Hyde’s idea from “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” that “Irony has only emergence use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” I’m excerpting an idea from a complex piece, but it serves to present Foster Wallace as someone who, in this postmodern age, felt that fiction is more than a player in the great game of deconstruction.

I look forward to the next bit of time I’ll be able to spend with his writing.


¹ and the footnotes to the footnotes ^{2
          2} and so on

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2010.

I picked up this book after seeing it mentioned first on Salon, and then in more detail on Languagehat at this post and then (having myself nearly finished reading the book) at this post. I can’t say that I would have gravitated toward it otherwise: I don’t know why I needed the persuasion, but that Languagehat post convinced me that I would enjoy the book.

The book is a series of essays. Mostly structured around particular Russian books, each essay reveals a great detail about both Batuman’s life and approach to reading and the alternate universe that is graduate school. Isaac Babel serves as the lens for the first essay; the second, fourth, and sixth essays are built around learning Uzbek in Samarkand. The third essay revolves around a trip to Tolstoy’s estate for a conference (her school offering a $1 000 grant for presenting a paper at a conference, and $2 500 grant for research, Batuman applied for the latter, with a proposal to prove that Tolstoy was murdered: a neat idea, but seen through by her graduate school). The fifth piece uses Lazhechnikov’s House of Ice and visits the recreated Ice Palace. The seventh, which gives the collection its name, is about Dostoevsky’s Demons (formerly translated as The Possesed).

Because of their personal nature, the essays are sometimes meandering and lose focus. The Samarkand sections, likely because they’ve been broken up into three pieces separated by two other essays, feel disconnected from much of the rest of the book. While many of the essays do give the feeling of being almost a travelogue at times, they’re not trying to describe a place or even trips: rather, they’re giving a sense of literature and life. They do feel like pieces for The New Yorker, and her work has been published in those august pages.

There are moments which are quite funny, and others which are pathetic (the realisation of what her language and literature teachers in Samarkand are being paid, compared to the remuneration for the University’s rector and her host, is deeply affecting). Occasionally, those two are combined, as the Tolstoy scholars travel to Chekhov’s house and back to their respective institutions. The description of graduate school rings sadly true, though Batuman finds more humour (even if she does so darkly) than I did in my experiences.

I thoroughly enjoyed the collection. I do agree with Languagehat’s conclusion about the unrelenting focus on the exotic, though I wonder if perhaps that’s how to hold the general public’s attention while writing about books most people are unlikely to read in their lives. I do have a renewed desire to finishing reading Dead Souls one of these years...

Ben Karlin (ed.), Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, 2008.

This book is an anthology of comedic pieces from Andy Richter, Will Forte, David Wain, Stephen Colbert (heavily censored), Dan Savage, AJ Jacobs, Patton Oswalt, and others. The title gives you a good sense of the subject matter: every piece is somehow about break-ups and past relationships. Unsurprisingly, they’re variable in quality and humour. The essays from Savage, Jacobs, and Colbert were my favourites. Savage thanks an ex for helping him to realise his own sexuality; Colbert shares (and his wife censors) a reminiscence of a former lover; Jacobs recalls the woman he wanted to date but never could. Each one writes in his distinctive style and with the clever humour the reader expects.

It’s a book that you can enjoy some essays from, be surprised and perhaps discover comedians in others, while not feeling guilty about skimming over the pieces that don’t hold your attention.

David Rakoff, Half Empty, 2010.

I love Rakoff’s writing. I love the way he uses words, the way his delightfully snarky and snide humour enchant the reader and hide Rakoff’s love of the truth he’s writing about, the way I laugh, the way I want to read slowly so that the book will last longer, the way I hear the words in his soft voice and careful inflections. I love Rakoff’s writing, and that makes it hard to write about it any sort of balanced way.

In ten essays, Rakoff jumps from the trouble with Rent and cupcakes to the disturbing cultural insistence that people remain positive even in extreme adversity, with trips to Epcott, Hollywood, and Utah for good measure. His eye is so attuned to both the quotidian and the extraordinary, and he describes it concisely and movingly: he captures experiences in words in ways that inspire me to write (ironically, given the example I’m about to share). Consider this depiction of what the process of writing is like:

It isn't that I don't sympathize with the lassitude. I understand it all too well. Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one's least attractive, that sometimes it's just easier not to do anything. Writing--I can really only speak to writing here--always, always starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food. So truly, if you're already getting laid and have managed to fall in with an attractive and like-minded group without the added indignity of diving face-first into a cesspool every single time you sit down to work, no one understands better than I do why one might not bother. (55)

His metaphors and similes are staggering. He makes an entrepreneur at the Exotic Erotic Ball convention come alive with associations that are at once cliché and fresh: “Decades ago, he would have been a grizzled huckster, an old merchant seaman with fading Polynesian tattoos and missing teeth, producing from his rucksack a cork-stoppered bottle of brown glass. He would whisper of the mysterious contents, a vague pedigree of ground horn, dried animal penis, and the pulverized carapaces of rare insects.”

Rakoff doesn’t write about himself, but he’s present in every essay with an unflinching honesty that makes me want to invite him for dinner (and worry about living up to his standards for both the food and the décor). Describing his response and reaction to his therapist’s death, Rakoff invites one into both the therapy and the hospice room: the emotions are vivid and revealing, necessary and clarifying. My best way of making sense of it is to suggest that Rakoff uses his own life as a prism to reveal the colours that seemed to just be life, refracting the beam to make details come alive so that deeper truths about ourselves can be understood.

Perhaps most helpful and most challenging is the final essay, ‘Another Shoe,’ in which he shares something of his experience with his recent (and ongoing) bout with cancer. He remembers a woman, Brooklyn Mom, with whom he once volunteered, and describes the process of coming to understand what she chose to share about her experience with cancer; he remembers an awkward childhood experience that informs his feelings in the present; of his sense of a lack of larger lessons in the midst of this all-consuming experience. In both his references to movies and books and in the interactions with friends, family, and his own self, Rakoff depicts bleakness and the slight hope that makes continuing possible.

I’m hoping for the next collection of essays. I’m sure I’ll be as effusive again.

David Rakoff,
      Fraud 2001
      Don’t Get Too Comfortable 2005.

I reread Don’t Get Too Comfortable, which book I first blogged about in April of 2007, and then read Fraud. Such marvellous vacation reading. I won’t quibble with what I wrote previously about DGTC — it’s a marvellous collection. The distinction I tried to make, three years ago, about acerbity without meanness is well captured in Ira Glass’s blurb for Fraud:

It’s hard to come up with a pithy remark for the back of this book, knowing that the author could — in half the time and a third of words — come up with something funnier, more piercing, and more deeply revealing. Like a whore with a heart of gold, David Rakoff says all the nasty things we want to hear and then reveals, after we’ve paid our money, that actually it’s all about love.

Glass captures it: while bits and pieces that I read aloud variously made my beloved laugh, or frown and say “he’s kind of a jackass”, Rakoff is always striving to show us more about ourselves and our habits. If you read an entire piece, you never leave it feeling he's a jackass — rather, I came to admire an honesty I wish I was better at mustering. I think that his especial skills is revealing and then mocking the habitual ways of perceiving the world that we take for granted, unwilling or unable to see that there are other avenues to experience what is around us. Fraud is less polished, and has more clever ideas that seem clever (I want to visit the Christmas Freud, and tell Rakoff what I want for Christmas only to be told in return the ways my “wishes are unhealthy or wished for in error”) than is DGTC. Both are so readable, so illuminating, that I kept wanting to read just one more essay before bed.

Rakoff's new book, Half Empty, is due out on September 21st: I’m looking forward to it.

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008.

I loved The Tipping Point. I think it’s a brilliant book, and I learned a lot from it. I’m a little astonished I didn’t blog about it at the time! It was likely because I was in the middle of thesis-ing.

Outliers is told in a very similar way: anecdotes and carefully presented data make sense of truths that are hard to see through the clouds. Gladwell’s lucid prose and brilliant storytelling make it an enjoyable read. My only problem with the book is that there’s nothing to it. Oh, sure, Gladwell convincingly proves his thesis that the success of people are not due to sheer dint of hard work (the old self-made man story crap), but rather that that they’re products of environment, milieu, history, genetics, and deep cultural traditions. He convinced me that it's better to see these successes more as outliers from the statistical mass, than it is is to see them within the usual narratives.

But… so? Yes, it’s a myth that needed to be punctured, but it’s hardly a shock. Gladwell offers no tools to assess situations and histories to determine patterns to make one’s self a success, nor does he offer tools to create effective communities like that of Roseto, PA (a very healthy town that he uses to begin his book). To return to the language of the book's title, there's no attempt to ask major questions about how we can shift the mean toward significant measures of wellness. The trends he thinks about are visible in his rear-view mirror, but never through the windscreen.

Ultimately, I was left disappointed. Gladwell’s book is brilliant at giving the answers to the “what” questions, but never gets to the “so what” questions in any adequate ways.

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, 2006.

I crossed another book off my to read list today, and was surprised to see that I’d neither crossed this one off the list nor blogged about it, though I read it shortly after finishing The City of Words back in the fall.

It’s a lovely book, easy to dip into and read from in tiny pieces at a time—and I’m likely biased, given my own predilections and desire to have (what could justifiably be called) a library of my own, rather than a mere trifling collection of books. Manguel offers fifteen reflections on libraries, each loosely structured around a way of conceiving of a library’s import, meaning, and identity. Yet each of these sets of musings are really more about books in general, and—really—about reading. Consider what Manguel writes in “The Library as Island”:

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading—once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive—is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. As our visitor [a gedankenexperiment of a visitor from the past, looking at our reading habits] would eventually realize, in our society reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.

Hard to see why I might like such a book as this one, isn’t it? I think Manguel is spot on, here. Our society has come to devalue reading, to marginalise it much as the CBC is currently trying to help marginalise art music. Fewer and fewer people admit to me that they have time to read—does being too busy to read really serve as a commendation of one’s own life? Really?—and when they do, it’s usually to complain that it’s not worth the effort, that television provides better entertainment. Reading, Manguel argued when I heard him speak at McMaster just before he gave the Massey lectures, is what keeps us from being barbarians. My own gloss on this idea is that to read is more than to be entertained: it is to remember stories, moments, vibrant images, ideas; reading is an engagement with the real, and it is restorative, invigorating, challenging, and expansive. Reading helps us to make sense of life, and libraries offer the tools to read and to reread, to find new treasures and to re-encounter anew treasures that are only half-remembered.

Manguel’s book is well worth the time spent reading it (I read it mostly on GO train rides into Toronto), both to wonder about our own relationships with libraries and to think again about what a gift reading is in our lives. And as a fun side benefit, you’ll learn both about neat libraries and about neat books. Add this one to your library. You’ll want to return to it.

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, 2005.

I met Rakoff as I met David Sedaris: through listening to NPR’s This American Life. Someday I will recover from my desire to have Ira Glass’s job. Maybe.

This collection of essays is not, generally, laugh-out-loud funny. It’s thoughtful: Rakoff muses and considers. He shares personal experiences, and the essays feel almost like magazine pieces, if the magazine in question happened to be The Believer. They range from experiencing a private resort to fasting, from becoming an American citizen to foraging for food in the wilderness of New York City, and so forth.

My favourite piece is “J.D.V., M.I.A.” In it, Rakoff describes participating in a scavenger hunt in which one elaborate clue leads to the next; I identify strongly with his relative inability to solve the brainteasers, and feeling out-of-place with those who can. For me, it happens when I try to engage with a cryptic crossword: I might get one or two answers, but my brain doesn’t turn sideways that way. Present in the essay is an admiration combined with a sense of self-recognition and self-awareness that appeals strongly to me.

The pieces are pleasant. They are occasionally sharp and acerbic, but never mean. Rakoff tends to move toward a flatter, more descriptive prose style that lacks emotional content, when he wants to convey disappointment or other negative perceptions of some subject, and that habit gives the book a charitable, polite tone. It’s an engaging read, well-worth the time it will take you.

Michael Schwartzentruber, ed., The Emerging Christian Way, 2006. Contributions from Marcus Borg, Tim Scorer, Tom Harpur, Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, Matthew Fox, Bruce Sanguin, Anne Squire, Bill Phipps, Mack MacLean, Bruce Harding, Susan Burt, Donald Grayston, Nancy Reeves, and the editor.

This is a decent collection of essays. It's one of those books that didn't particularly grab me, because I've read chunks of most of these authors before, and none of them really said anything new or dramatic--which is only to be expected, given that many of these pieces have been previously published elsewhere.

I enjoyed Borg's piece more than most of his books that I've read, perhaps because it articulates quite clearly a vision for which I have great sympathy, of faith-in-action, working to bring about the reign of God.

Harpur was Harpur, talking about the historic creeds as stumbling blocks, and the need for creeds more based on a faith that stresses the nature of our relationship with God as transformational. I thought that his offering of a new creed was weak, though he is clear that it's only a starting point. (A better couple of possible starting points, to my mind, can be found in the New Zealand prayer book.) Matthew

Fox's piece struck me as self-serving and egocentric. Bill Phipp's essay was quietly interesting, and worth further thought.

Grayston's thoughts on pastoral care--and really, about faith development--might well be the best thing in the book.

All in all, it's a spotty collection. It's one of those books to dip into, to get myself thinking, but not something that offers a lot of framework or leading ideas, nor really, anything but the questions I bring.

Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2005.

Rhonda Wilcox--co-editor of Slayage--has written a wonderful book. It's entertaining and funny, and remains a careful and intelligent examination of the seven seasons of Buffy as a text. The book is structured in two parts. The first part looks at broad themes across the series: light imagery, naming, use of language, globalization, etc. The second part is six chapters of close reading, one on each of six chosen Buffy episodes ("Surprise"/"Innocence", "The Zeppo", "Hush", "Restless", "The Body", "Once More, with Feeling").

I'm at a loss for further thoughts on the book: I'm still thinking about some of the ideas Wilcox presents, and want to re-watch a number of episodes (especially including those on which Wilcox offers such careful close readings). She has thought very carefully about the show, and her writing on specific topics does a better job of defending the idea of writing about television--and Buffy, in particular--in an academic setting than her explicit defence that introduces the book. In fact, the writing itself offers a strong argument that thinking carefully about television is indeed a thing well worth doing.

Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, 2003.

Archbishop Williams gave the 2001 John Main Seminar Lectures on "the wisdom of the desert"--that is, what's relevant about the Desert Fathers for our faith today.

The book is the edited versions of those lectures, plus a Question and Answer session, that discuss four principal ideas with which the Archbishop engages: neighbours, silence, flight, and stability. Williams starts each lecture with a saying from the desert fathers, understands the saying in its context, and then deals with what it can impart today. As he goes through his lectures, he hits on ideas of vocation and ministry, of what it means to be a member of the church, and of what it means for one's decisions and attitudes to be a follower of G-d.

The Archbishop is compelling; each point he makes is hard indeed to refute, and I found myself increasingly convinced by his arguments. The one flaw of the book is that it feels like a series of talks rather than like a book: two many colloquialisms or standard modes of speech remain that should have been excised.

For people unfamiliar with the Desert Fathers, this book serves as a wonderful introduction, better perhaps than Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert--my copy of which I can't for the life of me find--at helping a newcomer to enter the tradition of the Fathers. It would be nice if the book had more of their sayings; readers are going to want to find a copy of Merton's Wisdom or Sister Benedicta Ward's The Sayings of the Desert Fathers if they want to spend some extended time with the thoughts of the Fathers.

Stephen Platten, ed. Ink and Spirit, 2000.

This book, a collection of four essays that attempt to make some sense of a connection between faith and literature, is the written form of the Launcelot Fleming Lectures of 1999.

Platten's introduction to the collection is a survey of major poems that treat with faith: he spends time with Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, and R.S. Thomas, among a few others, as he describes the shift from a Victorian engagement with both faith and literature to a far more skeptical twentieth century that also attempts to eschew literature. His essay attempts to locate the conversation between religion and literature as it exists and has existed in poetry.

David Scott's piece is entitled "Religion, Literature, and the Third Millenium." He starts with one of the earliest English poems, Caedmon's hymn, and the story from Bede that surrounds its creation. Scott argues that as poetry often needs a midwife to help the poet, so can the Church be such a place, as it was for Caedmon and, at the end of his career, Hopkins. He feels that the tradition of the pastor-poet, a la George Herbert, has fallen by the wayside, but can be recovered: not just from pastors as poets, but from all following a few simple rules. He starts with Mayakovsky's rules for what a poet needs to be of service to the state (existence of a social task that can be accomplished only through poetry, exact knowledge, materials/words, means of production, habit of elaborating words), and adds a few of his own:

"I would add to that, time to be still and let the poems make their journey from out there, into your mind and heart, and through to your hand; a good, no, a brilliant, no, the best library in Western Christendom to let you feed on the tradition; colleagues who understand and use you for what you can do and not for what you can't; the opportunity to keep in touch with poets of all cultures, religions, and nationalities." (49-50)

If these things are provided, Scott suggests, the Church can help to bring forth poetry that speaks to all peoples that have ears to listen.

A.N. Wilson's "Christianity and Modernity" offers a far bleaker view than does Scott. Wilson argues that Christianity is not reasonable, and is dying. As such, literature that is an expression of Christianity will die too. He attributes this death to a loss of common symbols: the Roman Catholic abandonment of the Latin mass, and the Anglican Communion's churches' move from the BCP. Because of the loss of common symbols, there "will be Christians in the next generation, but we can be sadly certain that there will be no Christian literature--that came to an end with the generation of T.S. Eliot." All we have left to look forward to is the rise of an unadulterated religion--one whose symbol is not the cross but the crescent moon, in Wilson's view.

Penelope Lively's essay, "Religion and the Rise of Fiction," was perhaps the most interesting to me of the four in this book. She believes--and I fully agree--that fiction is exciting because it's a place to offer truth and to raise questions. As such, it's an almost ideal vehicle for faith. (She excludes poetry completely from her survey, and I think poetry can do the same thing, but that's a separate issue.) She's also happier about tradition than is Wilson. Her almost Frygian view, that all fiction depends on other fiction and stories, and that we can produce things that are "new" only insofar as we have processed what is past, is one that celebrates what is past. The very richness of past stories ensures the richness of stories yet to be told--and these coming riches will offer us new places, ideas, and methods for offering truth and raising questions: for learning and growing in faith.

The concluding essay, by Richard Marsh, is a single-poet piece called "David Jones and the Elusive Memory." Marsh traces the development of Jones's poetry, primarily as it investigates and tries to make sense of what it is to believe after the Great War. This development coincides with David Jones's conversion to Roman Catholicism, and his conception of what myth means and what its use is. In Jones's conception, "humanity's very nature involves the making of things," and that through "this making, this assembly of signs and symbols, humanity stretches out of itself from the material and visible world towards reality, the ground of which is divine" (109). Central to the making of signs is the Eucharist: worship and poetry together participate in encountering the divine.

The afterword, by Ronald Blythe, is a fairly weak piece that recaps--much as I've just done--the arguments of the four essays and the introduction, and tosses in some deserved praise.

Though I violently disagree with Wilson's polemical essay, each piece in this collection offers interesting insight, and at the very least points to new things to spend some time reading. This book doesn't quite do what I had thought when I bought it, sight unseen: I had expected a more coherent overarching approach to the study of the interaction between faith and literature. Instead, it does something more interesting still: it offers starting points and questions, and will leave me thinking for quite a long time about one of those things that I find terribly interesting.

Mark Edmundson, Why Read?

Edmundson works through a variety of ideas, but this text celebrates two central ideas: a work of literature is true, insofar as it represents life as it is--an ongoing, present tense "is"--and that literature helps us construct what he calls our "final narratives", or helps us establish for ourselves what is important and how we should live our lives. In short, he takes Matthew Arnold and Marcel Proust, and slams them together with Richard Rorty as he tries to convince the reader of his case.

Arnold's position, that literature may have to come to replace religion as a guide to life, seems less likely now with literature's relative obscurity in the place of popular culture, and has certainly fallen into disrepute in the academic world. Edmundson argues that it needs to be revitalised: that it's easy to apply readily forgotten theory to texts, and it's easy to research the texts, but what's difficult and most worth doing is to engage with the text itself and to ask what the texts ask of us, how they ask us to grow. This process is Emersonian, and Edmundson quotes him as saying "The life of man... is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end." Edmundson expands upon this idea by quoting Proust's adage that "Reading... is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it, but does not constitute it," and suggests that it is this life of the spirit that is absent in classrooms. He suggests that that absence may well be why we have fewer and fewer students of humanities in universities these days, as this idea of literature as a touchstone falls further out of favour.

He laments students seeking entertainment instead of education, though he is sharply critical of an academy structured to provide just that. What a literary education does is to wake people out of the slumber induced by the opiate that is popular culture: reading, he tries to convince us, is a powerful force that does more than entertain (and herein lies the distinction between Faulkner and Stephen King), but provokes growth and challenge. Proust comes up again as Edmundson tries to say that a lasting work of literature is one that offers deep, meaningful opportunities for this type of engagement:

It seems to me that they would not be my readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician used to offer his customers--it would be my book but with it I would furnish them the means of reading what lays inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' I should ask whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written."

This idea of Proust's begins the conversation with the question, does this text live? The most compelling comment that Edmundson shares with us comes from Lionel Trilling.

Describing his initiation into modern literature, into Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and their contemporaries, Lionel Trilling writes: "Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me, and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has become very intimate."

Do the texts we read live? If they don't, what fault is it of ours? Edmundson wants this long essay to make us ask ourselves that question, and to take reading seriously.

So there's a summary of the book. Here's what I think.
I take reading seriously.
You have only to take the briefest of glances at how I spend my free time, my money, my thought--this very blog--to see that. This book of Edmundson reads like an argument for the existence of God: it's convincing only insofar as the person hearing the proof already believes. Why Read? hectors, dares, challenges, and never really becomes persuasive, as it would need to if it wants to affect non-readers.

I look to literature as I look to religion, as ideas that I need to examine to determine how to live my life aright. I'm not convinced, though, that we should sell the study of literature as being the modern day vision of a seminary. I think that the study of literature is something that should be shared among those who care deeply about books, and that that's something that we pass on to others we encounter almost like a particularly benevolent virus. Let's take reading seriously because we enjoy stories, and let's leave books like Why Read? on the shelf, taken down only to offer us points to debate.

Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities, 1997.

I hadn't read anything by Wolf, and this one had been recommended to me. Essentially, Wolf argues that women in our culture have an unfortunate time with their sexuality: they're not taught it well; they're exposed to an enormous number of inappropriate/wrong-headed examples, stereotypes, and media portrayals; they're asked to live within false dichotomies; as adults, they all too often remain uncomfortable with their sexualities because of these experiences.

Wolf goes through a number of reasons and offers a number of examples of why these things are true, performing what amounts to a series of close-readings of culture, history, texts, and experiences (her own and a selected peer-group). These close-readings are well and carefully done, and her arguments are persuasive. My hesitancy with treating this book in more of a sociological perspective, as opposed to a cultural studies perspective is caused by the very limited sample space that Wolf employs for the experiential histories that she incorporates into her work. Her conclusions, though, make a great deal of sense. While I'm not convinced that the suggestions that she offers for taking away the stigmatization that affects women in regards to their sexualities will in any way afford a comprehensive solution to the problems Wolf enumerates, her suggestions certainly offer a sensible beginning and important considerations (particularly for those people raising and teaching young women).

Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, 2000.

I've mentioned Lynch's earlier book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. I quite liked the earlier one, and while this newer book doesn't seem nearly as startlingly original as The Undertaking, I enjoyed the time that I spent reading this book.

This book is a collection of essays that muse about what it means to live, and what part death plays in life. The same concerns of the earlier book are reproduced, perhaps with yet more careful reflection about Lynch's position. Given that, then, why read this book? My answer to that question is that Lynch spends more time thinking about and talking about language, and its role in life and death. While that concern was far from absent in The Undertaking, it's front and centre here: he conveys his deep respect for language and what it can accomplish. And that's an idea I'm always happy to read about.

From "Y2Kat":
"I am a slave to words. I am their servant. The acoustics and meanings, their sounds and sense, sometimes make me shiver--the precision, the liberties, the health and healing in their meanings. Language is the first among God's many gifts. To name and proclaim makes us feel like gods. To define and discern, to clarify and articulate, to affirm--surely this is what our maker had in mind when we were made in that image and likeness. Not the beard or lightning bolts or bluster. It was no big bang. It was a whisper. It was a word made flesh--our Creation. And the real power of Creation is the power of words to guard us like angels, to protect and defend and define us; to incite, and excite, and inspire, to separate us from the grunting, growling, noisome, wordless, meowing things. ..." ( 217-18)

I like reading Lynch's pieces not because of any concern of my own about mortality, but because his own sober reflections encourage reflection on my part--about words, about life, about death, and about what it is to think.

Glenn Yeffeth, ed., Seven Season of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show.

This collection of twenty-two essays begins with some degree of promise, examining certain aspects of Buffy. In particular, Nancy Holder's "Slayers of the Last Arc," is a piece that argues that the final conclusion of the show works well both artistically and in the context of the show as a whole. While I'm more tempted by its seductive appeal to Joseph Campbell's outline of the quest myth (from Hero with a Thousand Faces) as an explanation, it is one of the few pieces that doesn't fall into the trap that most of the rest do. That is to say, it has a clear argument and it doesn't just follow a story--it uses quotations from the show to argue a point. It's a real essay!

The other extreme--and I won't pick on a particular author or essay, here, are the pieces that say, wasn't Buffy great? Don't you miss it when X happened? Who really was Buffy's best boyfriend?

So. Some decent essays, some crap. Much like those essays that you'll find online--and in short, spend your time looking for interesting pieces there; unless you can get this Yeffeth book from the library, it's not worth the price of purchase.

Laura Kipnis, Against Love: a Polemic, 2003.

This book, by Dr. Kipnis, is far from as exciting as its reviews and its cover suggest it might be. The book jacket says that the book "examines the meaning and cultural significance of adultery, arguing that perhaps the question concerns not only the private dilemma of whether or not to be faithful, but also the purpose of this much vaunted fidelity." Fair enough, as things go, but let's make it simpler: she says that while love is fun, it's for the short term--and, in most cases, can't be sustained over the long-term. She's quite forceful in her presentation--one might even say that she's polemical...

Her analysis follows in a Foucauldian mould, investigating structures that exist to exert control on a number of levels--the personal, societal, and so forth.

She begins by pointing out that since love, in its first and initial moments is so very fun, it's not something that should stoop to becoming "work," as marital therapists are so fond of arguing is necessary (there are some quite enjoyable moments of railing against just such therapists, too).

The second chapter suggests that binding monogamy is a type of prison: that it exists based on strictures that prevent, on injunctions, rather than being based on love itself.

In the last of the compelling sections--chapter three--Kipnis offers what feels like a fervid paean to adultery. The excitement, the perils, the fact that adultery is ultimately about stealing time for the new lover lead to new perils. What she's asking is why this excitement fades, and why this experience should be denigrated in the public eye when monogamy is a thing of the past (a point that she most carefully explores in this section).

The final chapter deals with fidelity and adultery as reflective of society. It looks at the changes from the unexamined infidelities of Kennedy to the over-examination now current in modern US political culture. Kipnis argues that the development of fidelity in love-based partnerships as a metaphor for trustworthiness in leadership and governance is a very recent development, and that it's not, ultimately, sustainable simply because of the lack of permanence in modern relationships. Her implied criticism--that would be much stronger if it were made explicit--is that a trope that is doomed to failure should be recognised as such by canny participants, who should essay a move beyond it instead of living within the status quo. Obviously, this chapter moves away from an investigation of the personal aspects of love and adultery, and paradoxically, this movement both succeeds and fails. While the final chapter of the book is intriguing, and while it is perhaps the best argued portion of Kipnis' thesis, it doesn't fit nearly as well with what has gone before. This discontinuity, combined with a negligible conclusion that makes no real effort to sum up her work left me disconcerted and unimpressed.

The book jacket asks "What is the trade-off between personal gratification and the renunciations society demands of us?"; the answer that Kipnis provides is that what we give up is not worth the price. Unfortunately, the book wasn't worth the surprisingly long time it took to read: the pacing forces the reader to slow down, and really, it's just not worth doing. Certainly finishing the book wasn't worth the 75 ¢ fine that I've incurred for returning the book three days late.

Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

I reread Lynch's book because I finally bought a copy of it for myself. It's one I've long wanted to own, and its addition to my library seemed like a good time to reread it. I came across this book after reading a profile of Alan Ball in the Globe. This was the book, the profile informed me, that prompted one of my favourite shows, Six Feet Under.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and won an American Book Award in 1998; reading it, it's immediately obvious why.

Lynch, you see, is a poet. His prose doesn't read like most; it's crafted with an eye to evoking images, and to cramming the shortest passages with dozens of finely honed, careful ideas. He points out a number of times in the book that his subject is one of the two subjects that have fruitful for poets--death (the other being sex, of course)--and his own work as a Funeral Director provides a rich repository of observations for talking about people confronting death. His chapters range from describing an idea for a combination golf course/graveyard to a hypochondriac, to an attempt to rebuild a bridge to allow access to a cemetary to a discussion of what it is that a Funeral Director does to divorce to life to death...

Throughout, Lynch argues that we try to ignore and marginalize death. That we seem to hope that by ignoring it, we may avoid it. And yet, he says, it is only by confronting death that we can live. He posits this idea so beautifully that I'll not try further to summarize it here. Instead, I'll tell you to go read it. I think you'll enjoy it; you'd be hard pressed not to.

Northrop Frye, Lectures on the Bible, reprinted in Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible an Other Religious Texts, volume 13 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

I've read--a couple of times--Frye's books on the Bible. Despite knowing his ideas fairly well, it's quite neat to look at these lectures, to try to piece together what changes he makes both when he's presenting the material orally, and when he's talking to students rather than to a (presumably) better educated audience, via the books.

Imre Salusinszky has talked about Frye's career as a spiral curriculum, and anyone who has read much Frye at all realises that NF returns and returns to certain specific concerns--statements like "the function of the metaphor is to release the imagination by paralysing the discursive reason" (468). These lectures are no exception, and they're certainly far from being as detailed an excursion into the world of the Bible than one finds in, say, The Great Code, or Words With Power. Yet they're intriguing in and of themselves to see the manner in which NF shapes his argument. And the conclusion is as good a bit of explanation about how to read the Bible as one can find anywhere in anyone's writings:

You can't argue the poetic statement because it is not a particular statement. It's not subject to verification. So that is why, I think, the Bible presents what it has to say within a narrative and within a body of concrete images which present a world for you to grasp, visualize, and understand. The end that it leads you to is in seeing what it means rather than accepting or rejecting it..." (607)

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being. 1999.

I'm a big fan of Dillard's writing. She has the most amazing ability to contemplate a moment, an image, a fact, and to then use it to talk about what it means to live. She can stretch metaphors--without making the reader incredulous--to talk about just what it is that she's thinking about. For the Time Being is no exception. Indeed, even if you've never read anything else by Dillard, I think you should read this book.

This book is mostly about life. Dillard weaves together stories about births--both healthy and those of children with some horrifying congenital problems--and deaths, and life. She ponders the Earth, and Teilhard de Chardin's study of it, along with her own. In the weft there is Kabbalah, and in the warp, stories of the Sufi mystics. All along, Dillard uses numbers--"It took only a few typhoon waves to drown 138,000 Bangledeshi on April 30, 1991." (109)--to talk about people, but succeeds in her aim: to reject the general case. To celebrate the incredible special-ness that is a life. To celebrate the joy that is life.

Along the way, she thinks about theodicy, and offers her own way of making sense of the tragedies of life. I'll not ruin her thoughts by attempting to condense them; instead, I encourage you to read her book.

She's worth your time.