some read-y stuff and some other stuff

So I finished the Great E. I think I’m actually warming to Dickens. I can’t decide if Dickens’ moralistic approach to his characters is false (and therefore not helpful in literature) or if I just have a heart the size of a walnut.

I guess Dickens annoys people because his reformer tone doesn’t just extend to social issues but to everything. It’s kind of like having a high-minded uncle leaning over your shoulder and breathing into your ear the whole time, and your liking for Dickens definitely depends on your tolerance for being preached to

A multitude of forms to finish. You’d think the good people of Britain would be easier about me coming into their country, and taking up a space in one of their great educational institutes that would otherwise have gone to a talented young Britisher. Judging from the visa process it’s almost like they don’t want me there

Tomorrow I go back for the third time. I swear Frodo would have given up by now if it was him

ever closer

So it’s been awhile since I posted anything (if like a couple weeks counts as ‘awhile’). I finally *wait for it* finished ULYSSES. Or most of it. Or at least the half I was supposed to finish. It still counts as an achievement quite epic. I’m pretty sure there’s a guy called Leopold Bloom in it, and another guy called Stephen Dedaelus, and I’m almost sure it’s set in Ireland. Some other stuff is going on too but that’s Higher Level Analysis.

I’m reading Great Expectations. I still have mixed feelings about Dickens. I can roll my eyes at some ridiculously slapstick character one minute, and then genuinely laugh when the character does something funny the next. To be fair to the man, he wrote before soap operas had appropriated sentiment and ridiculous coincidences and made them silly. I guess the thing I’m still kinda iffy about is how his characters are all Characters. They have more trademarks and stereotypes than humanity sometimes (especially his villains), but take what you get, right? At least he doesn’t reference Greek myth when Pip butters toast

October swings closer. I don’t feel particularly coherent right now, but this past year has been really good for me.

See you kids on the other side

James Joyce

Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.

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I have finished Middlemarch, and Katherine Mansfield, and my Browning readings, and now I am going on to ULYSSES.

Cue boss fight music. After this, it’s Great Expectations. The title is ironic because that is perhaps the opposite of what I have in Dickens.

Visa muddling about. People. Getting some geek kids together again and going back to my roots (gaming, duh).

I AM A SECRET AGENT ENTERING YOUR HOMES

ugh

Some days I hate you so much, Mr Murakami.

You must have had some pretty shitty experiences, huh.

What would I do without language? I dunno, slash some shit up maybe

I am really looking forward to university, and I am so grateful for the people I have, and how good God continues to be to me.

What a strange day

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Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea

murakami

I just finished After Dark. Within every book of murakami’s, there’s a sentence or a phrase or a conversation (it’s normally a conversation) that makes you go yes. YES. and then you cannot put it down until you finish. Sometimes it’s on the 5th page, sometimes it’s on the 100th. But it’s there.

I finally figured out why I like him so much. There are many reasons, but the one I’ll tell you about is that he Understands. This isn’t a cliche. He really understands that We, the general We, are alienated from ourselves and from each other. We don’t know what we want. We don’t know what to do. We do not understand each other. This isn’t an emo statement. One of his characters would probably express it as a ‘basic condition of modern life’ and then charmingly link it to an anecdote about cats.

I always get this weird urge after I finish a book of Murakami to pound the streets and grab a stranger and tell them life-stories. His books make you feel like you can. Like, why not? Every character in a murakami novel is a secret store of understanding and wisdom, or at the very least, empathy. Never underestimate empathy in literature.

Anyway this is one of the reasons I’m doing lit.

a survivalist’s guide to vic lit

It’s 5 am. I have just slogged through the last three hundred pages of Portrait of a Lady from 11 pm last night. It is some of the saddest shit ever, since I read Hundred Years of Solitude.

I googled the book for some sense of resolution. Instead I get shitty post-60s American lit analysis that insists sexuality is a ‘major theme’, I guess because the phrase ‘hard manhood’ is used once to describe Caspar Goodwood. Spare me.

Shitty lit analysis annoys me because the subject already has enough reputation for flakiness as it is, without people trying to impress their lit professors by dragging out every pop-lit issue they can think of.

It’s perhaps a mark of Henry James’ ability that I find myself deeply annoyed at fictional characters for their fictional life decisions. Weird.

My liner-notes are going nuts in this Henry James novel. I am deeply, deeply impressed by how intelligently this man understands his characters, and how well he treats them. Everybody makes sense. You feel like you know these people, that you’ve met them or their doubles before. It’s almost voyeurism. It makes me feel like diving back into Tolstoy again which is a neat accomplishment

There is a strange and subtle art to churning out these massive tomes

infuriating

Vic Lit is alternately enchanting and infuriating. It’s so bloody restrained. All the useful information about characters is out there by the hundredth page, but the whole novel is padded out with witty conversations, little subtle intrigues that seem quite petty today, and scandals that aren’t very scandalous (Lord _ had an affair…twenty years ago! :O )

Look if somebody’s going to get stabbed step to it, alright. If the heroine is going to fail miserably at life can she do it WITHOUT having to arrange a garden party or an elaborate ballroom dance

I swear, it’s bad enough that the most racy thing that happens is someone makes a forward comment about how they harbour a secret passion for somebody else. They will actually say the words ‘I am harbouring a secret passion for somebody else.’

This statement is never acted on until maybe 200 pages later. And by acting on it, I mean they will maybe, perhaps, say the name of the person they harbour a secret passion for. In confidence. At midnight. In a secluded barn. It’s amazing the Victorians didn’t die out, since the stuff leading up to a single marriage can be the sole subject of a six hundred page novel.

I’m actually quite enjoying Portrait of a Lady though. Really interesting character studies. I just wish it was shorter, and the studies more to the point

to distraction

As per my new career of literature I am annotating Jane Eyre as I go along like a good little lit student. My comments in the margins start off with observations like ‘relig. hypoc. see notes’ and ‘note: char. of Roch.’. Gradually by the four hundredth page they devolve into little notes like ‘Huh!’ and ‘COME ON, BRONTE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU’. It’s like shouting at the television during a Liverpool match

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

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I cannot believe I have never read T.S. Eliot.

I blame his distinctly un-sexy name. You might pursue a Woolf or indulge a Wilde, or even be singed by a Heller, but T.S. Eliot just makes you think of bankers. Unless it makes you think of T.S. Eliot

Do yourself a favour and read that excerpt aloud in your most mournful, poem-y voice to find out what I’m blathering on about. And then go buy an anthology