Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence, 2011.

Fish’s book is a paean to good writing. He believes that all good writing starts with writing good sentences, and that we don’t do a good job of teaching our students how to write such sentences; we get bogged down in confusing grammatical points or offer vague descriptions instead of offering good ways into good writing. Fish proposes that “(1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships” (16). The essential problem with his book is revealed in this definition: the book will be appreciated and enjoyed by those people who already like sentences, and have a handle on how they work, while those who do not will neither profit much from the book nor enjoy it.

Throughout, he offers studies of good sentences and describes why they work. Fish is engaging and readable, and even entertaining at time. Where the argument wobbles is in the presentation of exercises to help the prospective writer (his audience) learn to write sentences as good as the superlative examples being studied: Fish’s own sample responses to his prompts aren’t in the same league as the originals, and feel both woefully imitative and wan in comparison. He points this fact out himself, too frequently, and both weaknesses distract from the argument. Yet his examples! And his close-readings that so wonderfully explicate why his examples are as good as they are! Fish produces an unexpected study of excerpts of some of the best writing I have ever encountered, and this book is worth reading for these choices alone.

When he moves in the final four chapters from form to content, Fish offers a few brilliant and constructive ways to think about writing. Perhaps most significant of these is his way of describing how first sentences should work. Instead of thinking about “topic sentences,” writers should remember that “First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them” and thus “First sentences have what I call an ‘angle of lean’; the lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate" (99). This idea is still one for people who already grasp the concept, but it is as elegant a way of thinking about how to begin a piece of writing than any I have encountered.

It is a book to read if one loves both reading and writing, and I’d advise the prospective reader to anticipate both felicities and disappointments in their time with How to Write a Sentence.

Stan Persky, Topic Sentence: A Writer’s Education, 2007.

I started reading this one based on the Globe’s review of it (I should really start recording when I add things to my to-read list; I think I acquired the book shortly after it came out, and have only just finished it). It’s been bed-time reading—most of its sections are sufficiently short that I culd read one or two before going to sleep—and with my earlier bedtimes of late, I’ve been doing more of such reading.

Topic Sentence is an intriguing collection. Almost every piece therein is at least partially a memoir. Organized into “Before,” “During,” and “After,” the collected thoughts examine what it is to write well—poetry, memoir, and essays. They describe relationships with some of the most prominent poets of the twentieth century. One of my particular favourites, “The Horses of Instruction” is one of the best pieces of writing about education and philosophy that I’ve encountered. The pieces in the “During” section revolve primarily around Persky’s sexuality—both his life experience, and his making sense of society and culture—and comprise some moving and insightful writing. The epilogue to “Eros and Cupid” is genius.

As you read this collection, your own sense of writing is likely to shift: whether it’s a renewed appreciation for words in “The Translators” or the attempt to survey aspects of what it is to read the times one lives through—and especially the work of Orwell, Isherwood, Miłosz, Creeley, or contemporary music—Persky’s clarity and thoughtfulness are well worth the read. Like some of my other favourite writers, he is clearly interested in everything and wants to think deeply about what he encounters: it’s been nice having him as a teacher while I’ve read his book.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, 2007.

The English Patient was for me one of those books that changed the way I read. I think what I responded to was something I’d call opacity: the way Ondaatje simultaneously reveals and hides facets of the characters and details of the plot to create a landscape and mood at once clearly visible and at the same time cloudy and uncertain. This opacity of writing seemed to capture something of what life was like, a verisimilitude that I had yet to encounter or perceive in any other writer.

I’ve since read all of Ondaatje’s other work, and spent time writing about it and even teaching his work. While I’ve enjoyed much of his other work, The English Patient has remained a touchstone text for me, along with a couple of the poems that act in similar ways. Where Coming Through Slaughter and In the Skin of a Lion try to accomplish this opacity, they’re not quite as good as my first encounter; Anil’s Ghost was a tremendous disappointment to me. He’s sufficiently important, though, that I needed to read Divisadero.

It’s a strong novel, perhaps as good in my estimation as In the Skin of a Lion. The first half of it revolves around two daughters and an almost-brother, a family and a relationship with it that is fractured irretrievably by an episode of violence. The sisters part company, and the father is a figure lost in mist thereafter, referred to only vaguely. Each sister bears the scars—an important idea indeed for Ondaatje—of this encounter as they progress through their respective lives, and the scar tissue is rubbed and agitated in a variety of new encounters and relationships. The second half revolves around the life of a poet, and the relationships in his life. These two portions are interwoven only minimally, and I’m glad for the serendipity of just having finished reading some of Dillard! (In fact, Ondaatje quotes a beautiful portion of Dillard near-ish to the end of the book.) The reader is left to make connections for herself or himself, and to come to whatever understanding of the story is possible for her life or his life. In fact, I think the connection is left perhaps too tenuous, and just a few scattered lines might have left me thinking of this book as an interconnected whole rather than two intriguing novellas linked so very barely.

It's a good book, and well worth the read. For me, though, it's no The English Patient.

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.

Nick Hornby, Polysyllabic Spree, 2004.

This collection of articles appeared in Believer magazine from September 2003 to November 2004. Hornby starts each piece with two lists: books bought that month, and books read.. He then goes on to talk about why he bought what he did, why he read what he did (and why he didn't read), and what he thought about books that month.

In short, the pieces aren't really reviews, although they sort of are--and so I needed to read the articles just because of the similarities to this very blog. All of his essays are breezy, chatty, and light: they take reading seriously, as an absolutely essential part of life, but he never takes reading too seriously. Reading is essential to Hornby's life, but never becomes snobbish about any notion of canon.

I enjoyed reading his reactions to various books. I loved watching how one book led to another and how one blurb on the back of a book could lead to the next. These articles are far more fun as a description of a reader than they are of the books mentioned within the pieces. Pick it up: it's a quick read, and if you're one of those people who can't stop reading, then you'll love this book.

One short example of the way Hornby writes about books:

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. "The Magic Flute" v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. "The Last Supper" v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. ...And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.

J. Peder Zane, ed. Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, 2004.

A collection of essays each entitled "The Most X Book I Read," where X ranges from Memorable to Maddest to Double-D-Daring to Smokin' to Technically Elegant to Unpleasant to...

It's always fun to me to see how others have reacted to books--especially ones I've read, but really any book--and so this was a diverting, if unexciting book. It's not worth shelling out for, but as a library book, not a waste of time.

I will quote a segment from "The Most Elegant Book I Read" by Howard Bahr, referring to William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. It struck me as true and sad, especially after reading last week of the decline of reading in the USA; it's a sic transit gloria mundi et ubi sunt for reading. Pompous and pretentious, it's nevertheless honest, and I sympathize with Bahr:

In our culture, we no longer care to make distinctions, and we have exchanged even the pretense of Percy's "exterior" for the cheap illusion of honesty. To those who find this occasion for applause, I submit the following answer to a question on my final exam last spring:
There is also a reason for people to dislike literature. The reason literature class can be dull and difficult is because of poetry analization[sic!]. The common man dislikes poetry because he does not know the meaning of half the words being used.
Also, if one did understand the vocabulary of the author, it would still require deep thoughts from the reader to grasp the meaning of the poem.
I would probably enjoy literature [the lad goes one,] if there was no such thing as technology. Technology has made easier for people to be lazy and simply flip on the television rather sit down and read a book.
You may supply the missing words yourself, together with the larger implications of this remarkable admission. Let us be common. Let us find the great voices of humanity dull and difficult. Let us, above all, celebrate laziness, avoid deep thoughts, and blame it on technology rather than our own tragic indifference. Thus the marrow goes, and all our vitals, and at last our collective soul. (228-29)

Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by Robert D. Denham.

I love spending time with Frye. Denham's done a good job of selecting a number of intriguing statements, any one of which is worthy of careful thought & reflection.

The problem I had with this book is the problem I have with any collection of aphorisms: one doesn't run into the next, the way the ideas do in Frye's own published work--and one of the thing's that's exciting about Frye is the way each idea produces the next, in a fun interplay that may be the best reason to read him. So: a collection of aphorisms is slow to read, and leaves one with little memory of specific ideas (despite 30+ Book Darts), unlike what a coherent argument produces in me by sympathetic vibrations.

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.

Russell Smith, Muriella Pent.

A poet from the Caribbean comes to Canada on a six-month residency. He stays at the home of a recently widowed woman (Muriella, herself) who aspires to be a writer herself. Complications with the sponsoring Arts Board, comments from the poet that are astute but not politically astute, other artists, interactions with the two students drawn into Muriella's orbit--Brian and Julia--combine to tell a comedy of manners that is about writing, art, and love.

That's a short blurb that might well fit on a book jacket, and as such it does Smith's novel a great disservice. For while this book, like his earlier ones, has its flaws, it's a beautifully and carefully crafted story that reveals a much more observant storyteller whose craft has been carefully honed.

While the obsessive fascination with sex and physical appearance has not left, it serves to advance the story as well as character development in this novel. The miscellany of forms--narration, epistolary excerpts, news/magazine clippings--offers differing perspectives without feeling cobbled together. Most importantly, the story, built around four intriguing people, is captivating and thoroughly enjoyable.

Smith is reading from it next month (tickets available at Bryan Prince, among other places); that event is something to look forward to.

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.

Michel Tremblay, Birth of a Bookworm.
Trans. Sheila Fischman.

Any reader--and by that word, I mean anyone who is consumed with reading--will love this book.
Tremblay describes, in a series of vignettes, his growth as a bookworm. Each major development happens in relation to a particular book or set of books. We learn of his dismay--so amusing, given what Tremblay does for a living--at his first non-picture book, that had words set-off as dialogue as with a play! I read with sympathy of his desire for Snow White to end differently, and his subsequent imaginings and tellings of what just might happen next. Of being so enveloped in Gabrielle Roy's The Tin Flute, that he missed most of a familial vacation. Of his first exposure to drama, in Agamemnon. Of becoming sick, worried about a character in... of falling in love with a character... of reading almost all of the books from the Index...

Tremblay writes movingly about these defining experiences, capturing--as he is well-able indeed to do--the sorts of exchanges that he'd have with his mother as they argued about this book or that, about Michel being unwilling to remove his nose from a book. These stories will ring true for any reader. You will remember your own cognates of these experiences, and you'll smile, being oh so very happy yet again to have discovered the wonder of books.

Robert Waldron, Walking with Thomas Merton: Discovering his Poetry, Essays, and Journals.

I'm getting ready to give a short talk about Merton's poetry, for a Lenten series at my church. Naturally, in addition to rereading Merton's poetry like a dervish, I'm reading others' writings about Merton's poetry, too. This is quite a new little book that details Waldron's efforts to get ready to give a day-long retreat based on Merton's poetry. Hence me picking it up.

Waldron's book is a journal he kept while preparing for the retreat. There are some lovely, well-considered and argued ideas; there's more uninteresting gobblety-gook. But the whole book's only 106 pages, so the skippable bits won't wear on you too much.

If you're interested in the poetry--and you've read it--you might enjoy this book, as an example of how someone else approaches teaching it. If not, or if that idea doesn't interest you, don't worry yourself. Go read the journals (again). They're so much fun. And even if it does interest you, you're better off with the more academic & much better written Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton, by Michael Higgins.

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)

Daniel Pennac, Better Than Life.

A gorgeous little book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

It's a book about books. About the joy of reading. About how to encourage others--especially children and students--to read. His idea? Nothing new, or unique. Read. Share your love of reading. And don't force others to read.

I've mentioned, before, his Reader's Bill of Rights. This book spells them out and explains the rationale behind them. Really, all they are is a set of rights that we extend to ourselves that we don't necessarily extend to children. Pennac says we should; he's right.

This is a short, quick read. But you're going to keep coming back to it. You're going to read it more than once. It's that good. And you're going to enjoy it, that much.

Pennac's words, to end with: "The act of reading, when well done, preserves us from everything, including ourselves." (§ 33)

I am rereading an old favourite.
You see, I met, at a party this last Saturday, a woman I shall refer to as M--. a lovely woman, indeed, and we got to chatting. In time, I learned that she was an English grad, too, and so we got to talking about what we're reading, and what we've loved of late, and what we'd recommend, one to another.
M-- was quite surprised that I knew whereof she spoke, when she told me that she works in Wymilwood (I didn't tell her that I've always felt that the /y/ should be short). She seemed even more surprised that I know the geography of the campus wherein that building is located, given that I am not a graduate of that august institution. "Why," she asked, did I know this? So HE came up. And having explained that he's a source of abiding interest for me, we chatted about HIM for a space. M-- mentioned that she'd not read much of him, but that she's been impressed by his turns of phrase, his grace and elegance in his writing. So we talked about what I like of his, and why I'm so interested in his thought.
I recommended to her two of my favourite books. Volumes One and Two of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939, edited by Robert D. Denham.
One might have thought that this would be the end of that. That, since I've read these books an inordinate number of times, the only outcome of
this recommendation would be that, hopefully, M-- too would come to love these books. That I'd remember the conversation when I glance to the left, from my computer screen, and see a shelf and a half groaning under the weight of thick green tomes.
And yet.
Despite having many other things to read, I'm rereading these letters. I blame M--.
Why reread? Because these books are addictive.
Because, despite the fact that I feel discomfited by my seemingly voyeuristic role as I read these letters between two young lovers, I can't help but marvel. At the wonders of love, as found between two people so completely suited one to the other. At the scoldings, the advice, the longing to hear from the lover so cruelly held at distance. The joy of receiving the next letter, and the savouring of the reading of it. The attempts to slow down the reading; the pausing, the sheer comfort & joy derived from hearing from the other.
These letters almost form an epistolary novel. We read of Helen & Norrie's love for one another, of their despair at being apart, of their trials & tribulations, and of the thoughts that they can't but share with one another.
To read these letters is to share in the reflected joy of the happiness that the two feel because of one another. And so I am happy, indeed, to read these letters again, though. So, thank you, M--, for making me think of them again.
I do hope you enjoy reading them yourself.

from letter 13, NF to HK (July 1932)

I have judiciously weighed the question of whether or not I should "mind very much" your saying that you love me and have decided that I do not. I find the statement even agreeable. But you frighten me a little, you sweet child. "Love" may mean anything from a quiet friendship to an overwhelming passion. It may be anything from a purely sexual impulse to a declaration of honourable intentions based on a close survey of the economic field. In the sense that I like you better than anyone else of your sex, I love you. I love you in the sense that I would do anything for you. In the sense that no revelation of weakness in your character would diminish my respect for you. In the sense that I think of you a great deal, and always affectionately. And so on. But if I were to go into poetic ramifications of the subject, and tell you that you filled my days with sunshine and my nights with longing, I should be merely a liar, and you would be well advised to regard me as an insidious and designing villain. Don't you see, darling? I can't write you a sustained love letter, because when I try--and I have tried--the result sounds like a Chopin nocturne scored for brass. It acts like a tonic on me to hear you say that you love me, certainly. But it does make me rather nervous to be carrying such a warm and pulsating little heart around in my pockets. I'm afraid it might drop out and break.
- (1.53-54)

from letter 19, NF to HK (Summer 1932)

There are so surprisingly few things that really matter. Music matters, and babies matter--so do poetry, sunsets over marshes, plain food, and people's flea-bitten souls. But that's about all. So why bother about anything else? People who laugh at dreamers and star-gazers merely can't distinguish what's necessary from what's important. A wash-basin is necessary, but it isn't important and should be minimized. These practical-minded people are also necessary but not important, which is why they hate to feel slighted.
- (1.80)

from letter 88, HK to NF (20 August 1934)

I should like to kiss you good-night,--all I can do is love my little candle [by which HK was writing the letter], and it is fading out. So I shall think about you, and how much I love your face and your eyes and your hands and the way you talk. And next winter when I listen to a Mozart Quartet I shall remember how much you love it too. Because you and I have many things to do--my darling, I can't feel lonely when I have you. Even if you are in Stonepile and I am in a female gathering hearing tales of how seasick one can get.
I feel like talking to you for hours on end.
- (1.319)

So there are nice things about having a mother who's a librarian. She brings me home books. On the other hand, there are some bad things: she brings home books.
This week's "Matthew, I thought that this might interest you" is called God's Bestseller: William Tyndale, Thomas More, and the Writing of the English Bible--A Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal, published this past August by St. Martin's press, and now widely available.
Short version? Don't buy it.
Longer version?

The author--Bryan Moynahan--seems to be confused as to whether he's trying to write a hagiography, a biography, a thriller, etc. ad inf. This lamentable fact is almost certainly due to a desire to make the book appealing in as wide a variety of circles as is possible. After all, a book about a guy who was persecuted by the Roman Catholic church for having the audacity to translate the bible into a language that people actually spoke? It's a story that sells as well today as Foxe's book of martyrs ever did. And why not capture the biography market, too, without appearing stuffy? So. Quite a nice attempt to cover all the bases at once, but please, hire another 8 guys.

So. I mentioned John Foxe's Book of Martyrs [yes, it can also be spelled Fox, but Foxe looks cooler.]. Nifty book, btw, that details the early Protestant martyrs. For quite a long time, it was this book beside A Pilgrim's Progress and a bible as one of the first that nice English Protestants would want in their homes. What's the problem with this being the source that seems to get the most prominence in Moynahan's study of Tyndale? Oh right, the fact that it's polemical, anti-catholic, and tends to invent stuff to fit its needs for proselytizing &c. Now, of course, Moynahan does use other sources, but Foxe is the one who seems to be kept constantly in view of the reader.

The hagiography, as mentioned above, annoys me. The book sets up a fairly vicious Thomas More against Tyndale, and celebrates Tyndale with hardly more than the occasional equivocation. Now, was more ruthless in routing out heresy? Sure. And it wasn't a nice time back then, so yeah, heretics got burnt. I don't mean to minimize how we all should rightly be appalled at that fact, but it's history. A more balanced presentation of Thomas More would have helped [throw in some nice details, make him look a little appealing], as would have a more balanced presentation of Tyndale done for him.

um... forgetting that Latin is an inflected language, and that syntax isn't crucial to meaning? Kind of a big thing to forget, and indicative of the lack of full understanding about how languages are used to convey meaning. Yes, the Vulgate was written in a particular style. But that's just one possible translation.

Perhaps a little less waxing rhapsodic about how gorgeous Tyndale's phrasing is? Yes, the man had a way with words. Maybe a little bit of explanation about why, rather than bludgeoning the poor reader with interminable lists of examples of nice turns of phrase. Y'know, maybe some talk about scansion? explaining How latinate cadences--the cursus tardus, the cursus planos, the cursus velox--work to make it sound good, rather than just saying--well, Tyndale studied rhetoric at Oxford, so, man, he knew what he was doing? I dunno, stuff like that? If you're going to talk about language, make a freakin' effort to do it decently!

There are quite a number of decent comments about word choices. I like the discussion (73) about why Tyndale chose "love" instead of "charity" for the greek 'αγαπη from the text for 1 Cor. 13.13, basing his decision on the Old English "lufu" rather than on the Latin "caritas."

The book, on the whole, does not seem overly well organised. Moynahan bounces from one idea to another; the book could use a decent editor's hand in reshaping and reordering most of the material.

Ok, I'm done complaining. The book entertained me, at least. I didn't have too many overpowering urges to throw it down in disgust. Just a general feeling that the book could be a lot better, had the author picked an audience and written to that audience. And maybe been a smidgen more balanced... fortunately, not something a cursory review like this one has to attempt to do.

STC needs--and this is not, for me, a new thought--a good editor. He meanders so.
I like a good meandering as much as the next person, especially when we slip readily from English to Greek to Latin to French. I do have trouble remembering the ultimate purpose, though, of the argument, when we meander so.
My comment the other day about footnotes made something else occur to me, upon rereading. That is, when I pick up the book, it takes me a while to get used to it. There is a rhythm to prose from that time period, a delay that is not present in so much of what I read. I adjust, and am always fairly happy when I recognise that I have done so, but it takes a few moments. Once the adjustment happens, everything is so much easier to follow.
Except for the meandering, sometimes.

From Chapter I: "As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style; first, that not the poem we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry. Second, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious as their diction."

So far today:

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
- I'm in the middle of chapter two.
- It's amazing how interesting STC's footnotes are. I find that I get lost in their arguments. By the time I'm done reading one, I've forgotten what he was discussing before I jumped to the footnote.

from The Postmodern Bible by "The Bible and Culture Collective"
- I'm reading chapter two, "Structuralist and Narratological Criticism," and hoping it will annoy me less than chapter one ("Reader-Response Criticism") did.
- This book reads overly like a textbook, and so far doesn't seem to be presenting any intriguing new ideas.