In a Word

So, according to Wordle, this is what Bryan’s Book Blog looks like in terms of word usage and frequency. Pointless information, to say the least, but interesting nonetheless. All I can say is that I’m glad it looks like the word “NOVEL” is used more frequently than any other. That seems to be a good thing for a book blog after all. (You can click on the image for a larger version.)

The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck Centennial Edition

by John Steinbeck

(New York: Penguin Books, 2002)

Trade Paperback, 455 Pages, Historical Fiction

ISBN: 9780142000663, US$17.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of hundreds of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plain-spoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

My Review: As of right now, having read The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath and being someway into East of Eden, I am not quite sure how I feel about John Steinbeck; in regards to him as an author, in regards to him as a storyteller, and in regards to him as an Eminent Author (as the professor of my class claims). This is not to take anything away from those who like Steinbeck, or feel that he is a Great American Author … I am, shall we say, unconvinced of it. Not that there isn’t something to the works of John Steinbeck. After all, if I can argue—and, if I do say so myself, argue successfully—that Stephen King is worthy of critical inquiry (and have been able to write to separate papers to that effect) then I am not ready to completely write-off Steinbeck yet. I am just unconvinced. (I feel the same about J.D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

As for The Grapes of Wrath, some would call this the Great American Novel. That what Steinbeck has done is create a novel that so embodies the true American Experience that it should be taught at all levels, and in spite of what I have stated in my opening paragraph, I would tend to agree with those people to a certain extent. I don’t know that The Grapes of Wrath is The Great American Novel. I’m not even sure that it embodies the American Experience, but should it be taught? Definitely. To high school students and to college students.

If nothing else, The Grapes of Wrath is a fascinating meditation on philosophy (social, political and economic) that uses the Great Depression and the Okie Migration as its backdrop. Is it a communist novel, as some alleged? Possibly. Is it a novel that advocates socialism? More than likely? Does any of that matter? Not really, because at its heart, what The Grapes of Wrath does is humanize a segment of the American population that was being increasingly dehumanized and shows that these are the proverbial OTHERS, but instead are our fellow human beings, human beings that deserve human considerations. That deserve dignity, respect and compassion; things that Steinbeck, in his travels with the Dust Bowl migrants, found were routinely denied these people.

Does that make Steinbeck a communist? Does it make him a socialist? No, it makes him a human being who cares about other human beings, and that is something that is just as lacking today, in 2009, as it was in 1939 when Steinbeck wrote the novel. It is no wonder the reaction that Steinbeck received upon its publication, people who act inhumanly do not like to be shown as acting inhumanly, and even though the novel is seventy years old, it is—to trot out the cliché—just as timely today as it was in the 30s and 40s. The treatment of the migrants is not too far from the treatment that migrant farm workers receive today on farms and towns and cities across the United States, but especially in the West.

Imagine a novel that is written that shows how migrant workers are denied their basic human rights. They are forced to live on the side of the road, in a field or in cramped housing quarters that are less than primitive and don’t even have the basic hygienic necessities, they (and their children) often go hungry, work for a pittance doing hard, back-breaking labor, all so that people in San Francisco, or Seattle, or Los Angeles, or New York can eat a fresh apple, or have fresh asparagus or lettuce on their dinner table. Imagine that these workers, when they go into town to buy the necessities of life, are dealt badly with, cheated, taken advantage of because they have nothing and so, are desperate. Imagine that if they try to organize, or demand that they be treated as fellow human beings, are beaten, rounded up, imprisoned, deported. Now imagine that the author of the novel pointed the finger of blame not only at the farmers, not only at the banks, or the government, but also at you, the Reader, implicating you in the inhumane treatment of these people because you not only benefit from their labor but you also do nothing to ease their burden. Imagine the public outcry that would arise from such a novel, and not necessarily outcry for the better. People don’t like it pointed out that they are acting inhumanely, and will often act to suppress any indication that they are to blame.

These conditions are not just in the past. This is not just something that happened to “Okies.” We are witnessing similar conditions and similar treatment of migrant workers in our country today. The use of so-called “illegal immigrants” to cut asparagus or work in factories or build houses is decried publically, they are labeled a threat to the “American Way of Life” and yet, no one wants to give up their lettuce or cheap clothes or their McMansion (all made possible through the labor of “illegal immigrants”) or even to replace these people in the workforce. We are quite content to eat our apples and oranges and potatoes, just as long as someone else puts the sweat into the harvest effort, who cares if they are paid pennies on the dollar for the work?

The problem is that we, as Americans, obviously haven’t learned the lessons of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and the treatment of the migrants—as shown in The Grapes of Wrath—because we are making many of the same mistakes here and now, that were being made then.

I first read this novel in high school (my junior year, American literature), and I have to say that it didn’t speak to me. Sure, I “got” what the story and message was, and I even wrote a paper on it (“The Christian Allegory as Contained in The Grapes of Wrath”) but it wasn’t immediate to my life, there and then. However, in the intervening sixteen years, I have changed as a person, not the least of which is having become a Husband and Father and Head of Household; the Provider (though to give my wife her due, she does pull in more per month than I do, I’m more of a figurehead, but the concerns are there). In high school I did not identify with any one character, however, this time around, I found myself identifying more and more with the character of Ma Joad. She was the one, the pragmatic leader who does what needs to be done so that her family will survive; so that Ruthie and Winfield have water to drink when they are thirsty and food to eat when they are hungry. She is a caring and soulful woman thrown into the worst of circumstances, which are out of her control, and forced to make hard decisions. I can relate to this as, I imagine, can any parent who cares more than a little about their children. One of the worst things in the world is to hear my three-year-old son say that his tummy hurts because he is hungry, it tears at my heartstrings. Yet, all I have to do is walk in to the kitchen and ask him if he wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or some noodles. I can’t imagine the heartbreak and fear that would arise if the choice wasn’t there. If, as the Joads (and hundreds of thousands of displaced migrants), there was absolutely nothing to offer; if I couldn’t go to the tap and give my one-year-old daughter a cup of cold water to drink when she is thirsty.

Add to this parental response to the novel that there really couldn’t not have been a more relevant time in my life to be reading The Grapes of Wrath, given the current economic climate, that the emotional impact of the novel is almost overwhelming. It is one thing to read about the Joads and their neighbors being forced off their land and out of their homes by heartless banks when the economy is booming. It is another thing entirely to read about such things when home foreclosures are at an all time high and the unemployment rate is higher than its been in I don’t know how many years.

This is what I wrote on that in the front of my book during a class discussion: With the current economic climate (for the sake of argument, let’s just use 2008-2009 as the years for the current Recession) we are now closer to The Grapes of Wrath than we have been since it was written in 1939, during the Great Depression and the events that it describes. Like the Roaring 20s which ended with the Stock Market Crash in 1929, the “Boom 90s” came to an end with the credit and mortgage crises in the early 2000s. Even though it was written seventy years ago (as I have noted earlier) it is a novel that is still very relevant and very current. Though we haven’t had a “Dust Bowl” (knockonwood) we have had some recent natural disasters that underscore the fragility of our economy and infrastructure, and while they have not necessarily decimated farmland like in the 30s, they have crippled the production of our natural resources; Hurricane Katrina, for example, and the flooding of New Orleans and the destruction of offshore oilrigs along the Gulf Coast.

The message of The Grapes of Wrath is one of compassion and understanding. It is a novel that forces us to ask the question of ourselves: What would I give up to help someone else? All too often we either do not ask ourselves this question, and when we do, often we find that we do not like the answer that we give and what it says about ourselves. We teach and talk about The Grapes of Wrath and John Steinbeck and his concept of “WE” instead of “I” … but all too often, we don’t live that message.

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel that turns the mirror onto the reader and forces them to ask the hard questions and to give the even harder answers. It is a novel that, now more than ever, we all should read and take to heart. If not, we will come out of the current economic crisis, but will we be better for it on the other side?

100 Selected Poems

by e.e. cummings

(New York: Grove Press, 1954)

Trade Paperback, 121 Pages, Poetry Anthology

ISBN: 9780902130723, US$11.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: e.e. cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred of cummings’ wittiest and most profound poems, harvested from thirty-five of the most radically creative years in contemporary American poetry. These poems exhibit all the extraordinary lyricism, playfulness, technical ingenuity, and compassion for which cummings is famous. They demonstrate his extrapolations from traditional poetic structures and his departures from them, as well as the unique synthesis of lavish imagery and acute artistic precision that has won him the adulation and respect of critics and poetry lovers everywhere.

My Review: Honestly, what can one truly say about the poetry of e.e. cummings? Like that of William Carlos Williams, after the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the playful and celebratory poetry of cummings is truly a breath of fresh air. More than that. It is a rejuvenating and hope-bringing force. cummings’ poems are poems that are syntactically gymnastic, that break all the carefully constructed rules that poets like Eliot created, and that flip society’s value sets on their head. cummings valued the “life force” and railed against the “death force” in modern life just as much as Eliot did, but unlike Eliot, cummings places his values differently. For cummings, as is shown in his poems, the “life force” he valued and felt others should value were those that went against the status quo of society. Sin, in short. His “death force,” therefore, was the status quo that stifled and oppressed the basic pleasures of human life. Whether the status quo was enforced through religion, law, economics, government, or any other institution you can imagine, cummings railed against all of them.

cummings felt that such institutions were created to serve the people, not to have the people serve them, as had become the case. He felt that mankind had two choices: they could become unanimal or animal; institutionalized or natural, and his poetry invariably advocated for the animal and natural mankind to rise up against and overcome the increasing trend toward the unanimal.

What is, perhaps, the most incredible aspect of cummings’ poetry is that fact that in spite of his poems being written a half-century to nearly a century ago, they are still there, still relevant to our post-modern, 21st-Century lives and they are still daring us to say that cummings had it wrong, that we overcame the unanimalization of our lives and returned to the animal state of mankind, and honestly … honestly I can’t find a single thing that cummings got wrong. Each of his poems still resonant, are still a clarion call for awakening that to say that he knew not of what he spoke/wrote would be tantamount to saying that water is not wet and fire is not hot. At the risk of sounding corny or clichéd, cummings’ poems call out across the decades, showing us the problems of the first half of the 20th-Century, showing us how to correct those wrongs, and then demand that we hold the mirror up to our 21st-Century lives and ask if things are really so different.

Given that it looks like the increasing branding and institutionalization of our lives is not slowing, not enough people read the poems of e.e. cummings, or don’t recognize the warnings that he is calling to our attention. More people need to read e.e. cummings poems. I cannot stress enough just how detrimental that things that he is warning us against are and how important that which he values really is. Find yourself a book of e.e. cummings’ poetry (I personally recommend this particular volume) and take a look for yourself, I am not being trite when I say it may just change your life.

The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Tóibín

(Scribner: New York, 2004)

Trade Paperback, 273 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780743203319, US$13.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora, have come together to tend to Helen’s brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan’s two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the depths of their own histories and to come to terms with each other. The Blackwater Lightship, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. Hailed as “a genuine work of art” (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel about the capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds.

My Review: In his poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said “Home is where, when you go there, / They have to take you in” (122-123). But he also says, in the very next lines, that home is “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve” (125). Now, I have no idea if Tóibín ever read Frost’s poem (I would be surprised if he didn’t, but I can’t say for certain that he did) but the dueling sentiments that Frost expresses in his poetry are the same that Tóibín explores in The Blackwater Lightship.

Tóibín’s novel is one that hinges on the definitions of two words: FAMILY and HOME. What these words mean, in their many incarnations and interpretations changes how one perceives the novel, its characters, and—ultimately—what Tóibín wants to say. Is “family” confined to those to whom we are related to through birth and blood? or is there a potentially looser interpretation of the word that can be expanded to mean those to whom we are closest? Is family and all that that so very loaded word implies “unconditional,” or can we set the terms on which we interact with our loved ones? Is “home” simply the place where we live(d), where we grew up? Or is it something more? What does it mean to “come home” if one has no place one can call “home”?

Through the device of a son dying of AIDS, Tóibín paints a portrait of what it means to be a family and what it means to have a home, by denying the related main characters, Helen and Declan and their Mother and Grandmother, and existence that resembles familial bonds and a place that anyone of them can really call “home.” These are, “home” and “family,” two things that one should not have to work for as do Tóibín’s characters. Discovering that “family” and “home” are “something you somehow haven’t to deserve” is what these characters eventually learn, though it does come—for them—at a price, one that, all too often, family members are unwilling to pay, or pay reluctantly and resentfully.

Lightship is also a novel about enduring the unendurable. I have never had to go through the death of a child or my wife, so I cannot know what an empty gulf must exist in one’s life after such a devastating loss. I can imagine what I would go through (the words “complete ruin and desolation” come to mind) but until I actually am required to go through such an event, nothing I can imagine would be bad enough. It would be completely unendurable.

What Tóibín attempts to teach in this novel is that while one cannot completely isolate oneself from the soul-eroding forces in life, there are ways to inure oneself against these forces. Tóibín does this through the imagery of the eroding sea cliffs in Wexford, Ireland, and the houses that have been claimed by the forces of nature, and those—like that of Helen and Declan’s Grandmother—that have yet not. Through this imagery, one can take the lesson that if one does not prepare oneself, inure oneself, against the eroding forces of life, one will end up an empty shell, a wreck—recognizable as a human being, but soulless and empty on the inside. However, if one prepares oneself against this inevitability (and it is inevitable, the sea will never stop pounding the cliffs at Wexford, and life will never stop throwing the unendurable at us), as begins to happen to the Grandmother’s house, one can prepare for these pressures of life and endure, and come through still whole mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

It is a hard thing to do, endure the unendurable … often it seems that one is screaming into the night and into the dark in search of comforting arms, and none come, and we draw the conclusion that we are alone. Tóibín shows us—through Declan’s struggle—that we are never truly alone as long as we properly prepare ourselves. It is only when we give up that the erosive forces can gain a toe-hold.

I’ve probably waxed philosophical longer than is necessary here, but I loved this book and the many layers it had and the message of hope in the face of inevitability that Tóibín presents, and there is so much moiré to this novel. Just as I cannot be completely sure of Tóibín’s exposure to Frost, I cannot state with certainty that he was also aware of (or, at least, actively channeling) William Shakespeare and Mikhail Bakhtin but Tóibín so perfectly molds the Fool from King Lear and Bakhtin’s theories of Rabelais and the Carnival and the role of the Fool to the demands of his narrative (in the role of Declan’s friend Paul) that I am amazed and awed at Tóibín’s grasp of his craft.

He also uses Irish tradition and culture to such great effect in The Blackwater Lightship, especially the ritual of waking (see also HERE) that one could easily re-title the novel Declan’s Wake, and see the entirety of the narrative as a “grand wake” in the tradition of Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake. The value of storytelling and communication and their roles in the waking ritual loop us back to what it means to be “A Family” and how to communicate with those whom you love and with whom you interact, showing quite effectively, I might add, that the use of language and story is of the utmost importance.

This is a beautiful, powerful and moving novel, and has me looking forward to discovering more of what Tóibín has to offer the Reader. In the meantime, if you haven’t already discovered The Blackwater Lightship for yourself, I cannot recommend strongly enough that deserves to be a priority on your “To Be Read” list.

There's Something About Jane

I don’t know what it is about Jane Austen all of a sudden, but I have to say that I am not in any way complaining. As an English major, part of me feels … uneducated … for not having read such “standards” (canonical?) novels as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma (to just name a few) so, anything that expands my exposure to Jane Austen, even if it is with tongue firmly in cheek and possibly “blasphemous” I’ll gladly embrace. It also doesn’t hurt that these up-coming projects combine my literary deficiency with one of my reading pleasures: the gothic/horror genre of literature. So, here’s looking forward to all three of these coming attractions:

From The New York Times

Austen Meets Alien in Pride and Predator

Compiled by Dave Itzkoff

Published: February 17, 2009

For some viewers the idea of another Jane Austen-inspired period drama is sufficiently monstrous, but a coming film project seeks to update the formula with actual monsters, Variety reported.

The movie Pride and Predator, directed by Will Clark and written by Mr. Clark with Andrew Kemble and John Pape, will juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility. The film, to be produced by Elton John’s Rocket Pictures, is the latest work to mix the hoary costume genre with elements of horror.

A book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith and published by Quirk Books, will combine the Austen novel with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.” And a coming novel by Michael Thomas Ford called Jane Bites Back depicts Austen as a frustrated vampire, taking revenge on those who have made money from her work.

The Pearl

by John Steinbeck

(New York: Penguin, 1992)

Paperback, 90 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780140177374, US$8.00

ABCD Rating: DITCH

When the news of Kino’s great find—the “Pearl of the World”—spreads through the small town, no one suspects its power to deceive, to corrupt, to destroy.

From the Cover: Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the Gulf that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull’s egg, as “perfect as the moon.” With the pearl comes hope, the promise of comfort and of security. … A classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man’s nature, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.

My Review: I first read this novel in—I think—the sixth grade (it was sometime in middle school at any rate) and I remember hating it at that time. It was just so bleak and depressing. Now, I find myself in the position of having had to read The Pearl again for my Eminent Authors: Steinbeck class and, in all honesty, I can’t say that my position on the book has changed much.

I still find this to be a bleak and depressing novel that I just can’t bring myself to like, and it is doubly so now that I am a father, given how Steinbeck ends this allegory … it is an ending that really cut me to the quick and overshadowed a lot of the reading experience for me. (Those of you who have read The Pearl know what I am talking about, and for those of you who haven’t, as miffed as I am at the ending, I can’t bring myself to spoil it for you.)

I am sure that there is much to be said about this book; after all it is an allegorical tale regarding the inherent darkness that resides in the human soul, and how quickly a good man can descend into greed and corruption. Someone in my class insists that the villain in the piece is not Kino, nor the Doctor, nor anyone else. He insists that the true villain of Steinbeck’s novel is US. It is the reader. We are the mob, he said, and the mob is us. If this is true, than Steinbeck’s view of humanity is not much different than the idea that you can keep crabs in a shallow holding tank because if any one crab gets too high up or starts to escape, the other crabs will pull him back down. That is the message of The Pearl then, at least how I read it: that one should not try to get above one’s station in life, because those around you will pull you back down to reality with devastating effectiveness.

Like I said, I don’t see much of redemption and belief in humanity in the book, and I can’t in good conscience recommend The Pearl to anyone.

Selected Poems

by William Carlos Williams

edited by Charles Tomlinson

(New York: New Directions Book, 1985)

Trade Paperback, 302 Pages, Poetry Anthology

ISBN: 9780811209588, US$11.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

From the Cover: With the 1985 publication of Charles Tomlinson’s edition of Williams’ Selected Poems, New Directions introduced a gathering larger and more comprehensive than the original 1963 edition. Opening with Professor Tomlinson’s superbly clear and helpful introduction, this selection reflects the most up-to-date Williams scholarship. In addition to including many more poems, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order. “It isn’t what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art,” Williams maintained, “it’s what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”

My Review: From the first time that I read William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say” in high school, I fell in love with the man’s poetry; it is so simple, and yet so beautifully complex that I marvel at what he has created. We read Williams’ poems as part of my Modern American Literature class, and let me tell you, after having to read the poetry of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams is a breath of fresh air.

Williams’ poetry is a celebration of life and a new kind of pastoral sensibility that Eliot seems to condemn. Whereas Eliot proclaims in “The Four Quartets” that Christ is the only center that anyone needs, that to seek for it anywhere else would be the height of folly, Williams proclaims that a rural awareness, an awareness that encompasses the facts of modern life (i.e. the facelessness of urban living, industrialization, the dehumanization of both man and the workforce, etc.) but also that realizes that life does not have to be about the urban rat race; that there is more to life than what Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Government tell you there is. That one can find pleasure in eating a plum, in being alone, or in being the proverbial Saxifrage in the modern world.

But, what I love best about the poetry of William Carlos Williams is the sheer fun and joy that come across in his words. This is a man who, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I and the increasing “branding” of the American Way of Life, was able to find joy in the little things, in the mundane and everyday, in the miraculous; and what’s more, is he did not need to resort to Eliot’s form of haute poésie and strict attention to form and meter and whatnot. William Carlos Williams is poetry at its most fun, and I highly recommend it; it is truly a ray of sunshine on an otherwise drab day.

New Moon (Audio)

by Stephenie Meyer

read by Ilyana Kadushin

-Twilight Series, Book 2-

(New York: Listening Library, 2006)

MP3 Audiobook, 777.8 MB, 14.8 Hours, Young Adult Fiction

ISBN: 9780739337202, US$54.00

ABCD Rating: DITCH

From the Cover: I felt like I was trapped in one of those terrifying nightmares, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can’t make your body move fast enough. … But this was no dream, and, unlike the nightmare, I wasn’t running for my life; I was racing to save something infinitely more precious. My own life meant little to me today. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella ever could have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just the beginning. …

My Review: To paraphrase The Sound of Music: What do you do with a problem like Stephenie Meyer? Some may ask (and I know one acquaintance in particular that would ask and disagree vehemently with me) Is she a problem? My answer back would be yes, with a but…

As has been pointed out by Stephen King recently, there is not much substance to Meyer’s writing … I think his words were—in essence—She’s just not that good. (Though some could level the same claims (as I have) against King, who (again as I have argued in some papers) is not the literary god that he seems to think he is.) However, when I make the following statement, I don’t believe that I believe I can state with certainty that King’s words had no influence on it: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is not what I thought it was a year or so ago.

I don’t know if it is condition of my just not noticing (or caring) when I first read through the books, or it is something to do with having it read to me this time around (rather than reading it myself) that Meyer’s prose, while adequate to get the story across, is—to use the vernacular—no great shakes. (I’ve probably alienated some of my Readers at this point, and I apologize, but the proverbial shine is off the apple for me.) This time around, I’ve also found Bella’s fawning, complete and unthinking devotion to and adoration of Edward getting on my nerves for whatever reason. If I read (or, rather heard) one more sentence describing Edward’s “perfect, angelic face,” or the “marble perfection” of his body I think I would have lost it.

As I stated in my review of the audio version of Twilight, a lot of my recent revulsion at the series has to do with Ilyana Kadushin’s abysmal reading. Actually, since that review, the acquaintance I mentioned above, the one who is about as die-hard a Twilight fan as any I know, tried the audio version (in order to get her husband in on the “conversation”) and couldn’t finish it. She, too, found Kadushin’s reading to be so absolutely atrocious that she turned it off and just read to him herself. Kadushin’s appalling reading is compounded one hundred percent in New Moon by the fact that she cannot pronounce the words wolf and wolves correctly. She mangles the two, saying woof instead of wolf and wooves (rhyming it with hooves) instead of wolves. This has been a pet peeve of mine for well over two decades and I cringed every time Kadushin said it.

So, in closing, I’m going to repeat my caveat from the end of my review of Twilight: “I don’t know that I would even say that this is an audiobook for diehard fans only, because I believe (knowing a few diehard fans as I do) that even the most ardent Twilighter (did I just coin a new phrase?) would be dismayed and disheartened by Kadushin’s performance. So, unless you absolutely have to hear New Moon read aloud, give this audiobook a wide berth and go back to the print edition. Your fanhood will thank you for it.”

Collected Poems 1909-1962

by T.S. Eliot

(Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1991)

Hardcover, 221 Pages, Poetry Anthology

ISBN: 9780151189786, US$25.00

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

From the Cover: In this volume, one of the most distinguished poets of our century selected all of his poetry through 1962 that he wished to preserve. An event of major literary significance, Collected Poems 1909-1962 was published on T.S. Eliot’s seventy-fifth birthday. It offers the complete text of Collected Poems 1909-1935, the full text of Four Quartets, and several other poems. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, widely honored for his poetry, criticism, essays, and plays, T.S. Eliot exerted a profound influence on his contemporaries in the arts as well as on a great international audience of readers.

My Review: I do not believe that there are very many people that can take an extended reading of T.S. Eliot. It is true that the man is talented, and his poetry is some of the greatest and most literary that is around … but it is extraordinarily dense writing, difficult to unpack and often just downright depressing.

Not that that in and of itself makes his poetry bad. In fact, Eliot’s “lost” and “searching” and “depressed” poetry (like “The Hollow Men,” like “The Waste Land,” like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) is so very much better than his poetry after his conversion to the Anglican Church (like “The Four Quartets” and “Ash Wednesday”) and all of it is heads and shoulders over Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which—according to my Modern American Lit professor—was written in a fit of self-doubt and craving after the approval of the critics. (He also said that it was made even worse by Andrew Lloyd Webber and that the only person that could sit through every performance of the musical’s 21 year run without a lobotomy or committing suicide would be Eliot himself, because it was exactly what the poet was looking for with those poems.)

Yet, whether Eliot’s poems were written before or after his conversion, they are all about one thing: the journey to find a centering force in his life. The difference comes in that the pre-conversion poems all have a sense of searching and ambiguousness about them. For example, “The Waste Land” seems to say, well, here is the Waste Land, there is nothing here to center upon … but I will keep searching and both “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” have similar sentiments: the world is a barren place, a meaningless place, but there must be meaning somewhere and even though I have not found it, I will keep searching.

This sentiment, however, is summed up the best in Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” where in the journey of the magi to visit the Christ child becomes a moment of reflection on a world that has changed, and a questioning of one’s place in this “new world.” It is a brilliant poem.

The switch in Eliot’s message comes after his conversion to the Anglican Church (as I mentioned above). As in his earlier poems, Eliot’s post-conversion poetry is about journey and finding a centering force. The difference is that in these later poems, the centering force is not something unknown, but is Christ and Christian orthodoxy, and that takes a lot of the power out of Eliot’s poetry. “The Four Quartets” is rambling, pedantic and seems more like a lecture from a professor of theology than a poet, and “Ash Wednesday” is reduced to Christian cheerleading with lines like “The right time and the right place are not here / No place of grace for those who avoid the face / No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.”

(No place of grace for those who avoid the face! AGAIN! No place of grace for those who avoid the face! ONE MORE TIME! No place of grace for those who avoid the face! GOOOOOOOOOOOOO JESUS!)

The didactic nature of these later poems simply steals the bite and force of Eliot’s message, leaving the Reader wishing for more verse like “The Waste Land” which, while depressing, at least has the literary power and earnest desire to find an answer, not point to a foregone conclusion.

After reading the poetry of Robert Frost, who also talks of journeys and finding that which will sustain you, Eliot can seem a little overwhelming, and rightly so; Eliot was an elitist who often didn’t care what others thought and couldn’t be bothered if his Readers understood his message (compare to Frost whose persona was that of a kindly country grandfather-farmer dispensing wisdom in verse form).

It takes a strong will and a strong intellect to read Eliot and come away with something—and I am not one of those people. I have little patience for Eliot’s brand of elitism and poetic obfuscation, and in all honesty, if it was not assigned, I would probably not be reading T.S. Eliot for pleasure. That is not to say I did not find it a learning experience … I did indeed learn a lot from reading and studying Eliot, but outside of the classroom, I doubt I’ll have much use for him or his poetry, unlike Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams. But, that’s just me.

This Might Actually Get Me to Read MORE Jane Austen...

My good friend, Sea_Gal (who obviously knows me very well) forwarded me the following links. After reading through them, I could not be more excited for this book to be released. This might actually get me to read more Jane Austen. I need to go and beg Alisa for $12.95 now. Enjoy:

Posted at Guardian.co.uk by Allison Flood, Friday January 30, 2009 11:10 GMT

Jane Austen Fleshed Out With Zombies? Aaagh! Help!

A US publisher is releasing a new bone-crunching comedy version of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth must face off the dubious social manners of the ravenous undead...

I’m trying to imagine the conversation. “Hey guys, you know that old English chick, Jane Austen, who Anne Hathaway played the other year? Didn’t she, like, write a book where a handsome dude gets his shirt wet? I’ve heard it’s pretty good, but I know what would make it even better—zombies.”

Sometimes I despair, I really do. In a move which makes the very worst of fusion cuisine look tame, an American publisher has decided to combine the latest publishing craze—zombies—with one of the most enduring books ever written. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies “features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action”. In an “insanely funny … comedy of manners,” Elizabeth “wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead,” while dealing with the distractions of “the haughty and arrogant” Mr. Darcy.

Okay, I know it’s a joke. I haven’t read it (it’s not out until April), it could be genius—you never know—and I do like the juxtaposition of “Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature,” and “Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn.” But really. How low can you go?

And that cover is going to give me nightmares.

From Chronicle Books

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Paperback, ISBN 9781594743344, US$12.95

(This book has not yet been released. It will be available after Wednesday, April 15, 2009)

From the Cover: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C.E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

I simply cannot wait!