Happy Birthday, Jay

87 years ago, The Great Gatsby was published.

.

"With every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 7

Coming across this Randall Jarrell poem in my Post-War American Literature class in college forever sealed my fascination with fighter planes:

LOSSES

It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores--
And turned into replacements and worke up
One morning, over England, operational.

It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions--
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school--
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."

The said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

It was not dying --no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: "Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?"

Here, Now.

The poem indeed is the long lost startle. The moment has passed, it is again lost, but having been lived, it might be imagined, recuperated. And so it is there again, in the poem, for through language a path to it has been found; it is held now and here in the poem's all too human hands--too human, finite, mortal, so that in one or the other reader, it may also be nowhere.

So, Dr. Gemino Abad writes in his introduction to Joel M. Toledo's second book of poetry, The Long Lost Startle. I serendipitously found this book while waiting in a bookstore for a colleague. We were to buy art materials. The wait led me to find poetry. Poetry, which, I realized, I have been gravitating towards more than fiction, lately. The cache of good poetry proves small these days (I mean, what percentage does it represent in this pop-lit-and-bestseller-that-sells-because-it -is-more-sensational-than-literary-dominated culture?), so that discovering a good book of poems is actually tantamount to unearthing a treasure.

Now you want to believe again, as if you've lost/ how it is to find things. (from "What is Required")

Hence, Joel Toledo and his Long Lost Startle. Following suit his Chiaroscuro, it explores the world as it is in the here and the now, where the "here" takes up the smallest fraction of what here means for most of us, and the "now" is the actual second you are in now. The result is, indeed, the startle that we have long since forgotten, that moment of awe which most of us had lost along the way, having gotten entangled in the speed of our own lives, so that there is no more moment to pause, catch our breaths, and just look and see what's before our eyes, and whatever newness there is that we might find, whatever wonder there might be for us to experience.

The clock declaring its singular point, the hour,/ the now again it is midnight, full minute of it,/ fulfilled and finishing./ ("The Long Lost Startle")

With the moment not even seen, the discovering would be totally out of the equation. And so much, too much, would have been lost.

/And, finding nothing to fear, you lean back into/ the silence that comes next: the lack of clock, the rest./ (The Long Lost Startle")

Lit Geek update # 22: recently read books

A Pale View of Hills (Kazuo Ishiguro):
This is a novel that is very quiet on the surface but is extremely disturbing, underneath. Most everything is undertow. It left me thoughtful, piecing things together, dipping my hand in the water and feeling the current draw me in. Masterfully understated. Definitely another Ishiguro coup de maitre.


Bel Canto (Ann Patchett):
The ending was another "The French Lieutenant's Woman" moment for me. I was completely disillusioned by the epilogue, hence, I went back to the paragraphs prior so that the ending that stayed with me was the one that came before the actual one. We always have a choice; and I chose how the story would end for me. Otherwise, I found the novel beautifully written. Another testament to music's power of transcending all the ugliness in the world.

Lit Geek Update # 19: Stuck

It's been weeks and I'm still reading the same book. It's not the book that's the problem--both the prose and the exposition are very, very good. It's time, or the lack thereof, that's the culprit.

Excuses, excuses.

It's that damn Facebook that's taking me away from my books. LOL

I'm giving myself until Friday. I should be done by then.

Lit Geek Update #16: Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE

I must confess that it took me a while to sink into the novel's realm. My rule of thumb when it comes to deciding whether to finish a piece of literature or not is that I generally go by how the first few pages make me feel and then decide from there. These initial pages will make--or break--the book for me. If they appeal to me, I go on, and if they don't, back to the shelf the book goes. It was different for Neverwhere.

I gave it a chance. I curbed the urge to slam the book shut, what with the unappealing--almost trite--prose the novel began with. I told myself, hey, this is my first Gaiman novel and maybe his works do take some getting used to. Just because I absolutely adored his Smoke and Mirrors (which is a collection of his short fiction), I plodded on.

And I'm glad I did.

To the Gaiman greenhorn, Gaiman's works, I surmise (I say "surmise" because I have yet to read enough of his works to use any other verb), call for suspension of disbelief to be appreciated. As opposed to the magical realistic work, which assumes the "magic" in the fiction to be part of the "real", Gaiman's kind of fantasy employs "magic" that is more protuberant and intruding, and therefore, more difficult to swallow. I know Gaiman fans will probably protest; and that is why I started this paragraph with "to the Gaiman greenhorn."

It was all just part of the "how d'ya do" stage, though. Or, to be more exact, of the first thirty pages, thereabouts. Eventually, in this case, I gave in to the pull of the succeedingly superb, visual turn the prose took. The descriptions were something else, a quality that is most probably consequential of Gaiman's expertise as a graphic novelist. Needless to say, I found myself engrossed in the sea of words and worlds and possibilities given to me by the author. Richard Mayhew's journey(s) with The Lady Door became journeys that I wanted to follow.

I am in the book's final pages.

I'll be reading American Gods next.

Darkness

Victor Hugo:
"Darkness is dizzying. We need light: whenever we plunge into the opposite of day we feel our hearts chilled. When the eye sees darkness, the mind sees trouble. In an eclipse, at night, in the sooty darkness, even the strongest feel anxiety. Nobody walks alone at night in the forest without trembling. Darkness and trees, two formidable depths--a chimeric reality appears in the indistinct distance. An outline of the Inconceivable emerges a few steps away with a spectral clarity. You see floating in space or in your brain something strangely vague and unseizable like the dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce shapes in the horizon. You breathe in the odors of the great black void. You are afraid and are tempted to look behind you. The socket of night, the haggard look of everything, taciturn profiles that fade away as you advance, obscure dishevelments, angry clumps, livid pools, the gloomy reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, the possible unknown beings, swaying of mysterious branches, frightful torsos of the trees, long wisps of shivering grass--you are defenseless against all of it. There is no bravery that does not shudder and feel the proximity of anguish. You feel something hideous, as if soul were melting into shadow.
-Les Miserables, "Cosette" book 3, chapter 5 "The Little Girl All Alone" pp 388-389-
*this section of my copy is shamelessly dog-eared and has been so for the past eleven years*

Neil Gaiman:
""Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now," she told them, "now is the time to be afraid of the dark." Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete."
-Neverwhere, chapter IV, p.103-

*Painting: Sunflower by Gustav Klimt*

Lit Geek Update #15: Last Book I Read

After weeks of installment reading, I finally finished:


My take on it? It's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Enough said.

Lit Geek Update #12

Here, Virginia Woolf writes, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write."

Shakespeare's sister must've had severe clinical depression, tsk, tsk.

If he had a sister.

Re-read the book over a cup of Starbucks' tall mocha latte with an extra shot of espresso. One thing about Woolf's writings is that one reading is never enough. I must've read Mrs. Dalloway thrice and I still feel it's not enough.

Rabbit at Rest

"A & P," Rabbit, Run--I will best remember John Updike for this story and this novel.

He was one of the most prolific writers who lived and the Literary World will surely mourn his passing.

Lit Geek Update #10

Last book I read: Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

This book ended my (relatively) long reading hiatus. Poring through its first page at a bookstore roused my slumbering lust for print on paper. I finished the novel in a jiffy because putting it down without having read it to the last page was difficult. The pepper was as much the absurdity of the image of a dead woman in an erroneously labeled casket brought home aboard a plane and the numerous, similarly absurd stories it brings together to its unlikely wake, as the author's signature masterful hand at language, plot and characterization. Butch Dalisay is "old school"-- and it is a school all lovers of Philippine Literature had better keep themselves in.

For some strange reason, the book made me think briefly of George Eliot's Middlemarch, what with the seemingly random lives that really interlace, the vivid introspection of life's sad ludicrousness and the seamlessness with which the novel's junctures are brought together.

The caustic wit and humor are all Dalisay's own.




What I'm reading now: Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt

Soledad's Sister Over Coffee

I dropped by Greenbelt's Powerbooks yesterday and, instinctively, found my way to the Filipiniana section (love your own!). I spent quite some time browsing through Dean Alfar's A Kite of Stars, making a mental note to buy it the next time I visited a bookstore. I was still, due to time constraints brought on by work, in a reading hiatus and knew that I had to practice restraint if I didn't want one more book to gather dust on the shelf.

I gazed around to look at the other titles, saw a copy of Butch Dalisay's Soledad's Sister on a nearby shelf, picked it up, read the first page, checked the cash in my wallet and promptly headed to the cashier.

So much for restraint. It was just too good to resist.

I read a fourth of it at a nearby Starbucks (the lighting was poor, but I didn't care), sparing a couple of minutes to preach to my friend (who's not that into Philippine Lit.) that he should read the book I was reading if he wanted his opinion of Filipino writers to change. "Read Dalisay, for heaven's sake. This book was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize!" I told him and, satisfied that I had made my point, happily slouched back into my chair to read.

Guess this means the reading is on again. And, boy, does it feel awfully good!

Benjamin Button

Fitzgerald's 1921 short story is much more poignant and infinitely sadder than the movie.

I loved both, though a friend and I agreed that the film needed some cutting down on some parts.

Read and watch!

Lit geek update #9: "The Seventh Man"

These past few months, quite a number of people have landed on my blog searching for a write up on this particular short story. They've most probably ended up disappointed because the only thing I have here related to it is a quoted passage.

So I decided to reread the story and write about it.

"The Seventh Man," which is the thirteenth story in Haruki Murakami's 24-short fiction collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is, in a nutshell, about the trauma a young boy goes through after the death of his childhood friend, K.

K got swallowed by a gigantic wave while the two of them were taking a walk by the seaside after a huge typhoon hit their small town. In usual Murakami style, the description of the tragedy is nothing short of surreal. The imagery is enough to etch itself on the reader's mind, clinging, disturbingly strong.

The shock of the encounter was, naturally, traumatic for the young boy, and this was something he carried with him through adulthood, disrupting his life for the longest time. Right after the accident, he went through a breakdown, suffering deliriums and physical illness. He had difficulty facing the life he had lived before the episode; he was haunted by constant nightmares.

Salvation came, albeit after long years of struggle (or non-struggle) when he came across a bunch of paintings made by K. Inch by inch, he came to terms with his fear, but only when he confronted it, after turning his back on it for so long.

The last paragraph reads:

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that," he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave." (p. 177)

Dear Sir

I thought of posting the comment I wrote on Dr. Butch Dalisay's September 29 blog post, since I haven't really written anything "substantial" recently. At times, all we need is to come across an intelligent, well-written piece to get the wheels in our minds to turn (I could hear the rust of the iron wheels in my mind as they actually began creaking as I read "Barrack's America").


Hi, Sir. I remember my English 42 class well, even though it's been 10 years since I had it (you were my professor, and I was mighty proud to be in your class). I can still hear your booming voice and the distinctly "American" way you'd pronounce my supposedly French name the few times I was actually brave enough to speak in class; smell the old wood of which the chairs were made; picture the green of the trees visible from my seat by the window.

So much for waxing nostalgic. Truth is, I brag about having been your student once to anyone who's actually interested, and I was delighted to read this post, what with the mention of the titles of the stories and poems we once discussed in class.

I am presently working for an American company, my job description being in no way connected to Literature, I am sad to say. The interesting part, however, is that my having read American authors has helped me a lot in understanding the sensibilities of the Americans I work and regularly interact with. Funny how the demystification of a seemingly complex culture could come about so easily when one has been to "that place," if only it be through the workings of the written word. Watching the American-Iraq war would always brings to my mind scenes from Tim O' Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. "The Lottery" continually reminds me that America is not at all the glamourous world that Hollywood paints it to be (not all of it, that is).

I, too, am rooting for Obama. And I know that now, more than ever, he has a chance at victory, what with the evolution that America has undergone, the milestones its people has crossed in terms of looking deeper than skin-deep, since that historic day Rosa Parks refused to budge from her seat in the bus, since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., since Leroi Jones changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka (so close to Obama's name, I must say).

I do not pretend to be an expert on American culture, or any foreign culture, for that matter--far, far from it. And so I am counting on the books on my shelf waiting to be read to educate me on the text that is the world--the same teachers I counted on when I was a student in my Literature classes.


*Pardon the grammatical errors and mistakes in punctuation. I thought of posting the comment here exactly as it was. Imagine my horror when I spotted the slips after it was published. Oh, the pressure of having the audacity to write comments on established writers'--and English professors'--blogs!

Found!

If you're following the developments in the U.S. financial crisis, you might want to go over this interesting article by James Surowiecki in newyorker.com.

And, while you're there, go ahead and check out Deborah Treisman's piece on David Foster Wallace.

Treisman ends the article with a really strong, lingering paragraph:

"Great literature, Wallace once said, made him feel “unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.” He was one of the few satirists able to avoid meanness; he was moral without being judgmental. He took on the absurdities of modern life in an attempt to understand or to parse them, not to mock them. Debating the tone of the title of “Good People,” he noted, “My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?” Gleefully compacted as his language could be, it was designed to be unwrapped—and there was always a gift inside for those who took the trouble. Wallace, who had moved to California in 2002, purposely stayed away from the noise of New York City publishing, but, even in his absence, he had a definite, gracious presence in the world of letters. This new absence will be far harder to bear."

*

David Foster Wallace Dies at 46

A good friend and fellow blogger is devastated at the news of this incredibly talented writer's demise.

I, myself, know how much of a loss this is to the Literary World.

For details, click on this link.

I do have a question, one which I posed to my friend after having heard the sad news. To all the David Foster Wallace fans out there, after having read his works, do you think the cause of his death was illogical?

This, perhaps, is one of the grim sides of being an artist.

Lit Geek Update #7

Last book I read: Imagining Characters (A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre)

This would have to be one of the best Literary Criticism pieces I've ever read. It's written in a dialogue form, a recorded conversation between psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre and A.S. Byatt, who has been hailed as the George Eliot of her generation. For me, though, this description doesn't at all do Byatt any justice because she, on her own, is worthy of being seen as a literary giant, right up there with Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.
The conversation being between two women, it goes without saying that the feminist undertow figures strongly on the book's pages. Nothing radical is presented, at least not the in-your-face kind, although for female readers, the seemingly innocuous ideas would rightly come across as stronger than they would to the casual (read: male--no offense meant) reader.
To put it in a nutshell, the two authors discuss books written by women, giving them a motley richness of readings--mythical, biographical, archetypal, psychoanalytic, structuralist, feminist, etc. Some of the pieces they discussed (and the ones I liked best) were George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Toni Morrisson's Beloved.

Here are some insights which I found really noteworthy:

1. Coleridge's idea of life-in-death, from his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", is a recurring discussion thread in the conversations. It's not surprising for such a dark theory to be associated with the texts, as the texts' writers are women who, at some point in their lives, found themselves bound by the patriarchal social structure in which they lived, which, to some--or more--extent, must have thwarted their supposedly "ideal" (again, as expected by society) perception of how they should have lived their lives. A life strictly patterned (for the sake of conforming in order to avoid stigmatization) after the dictates of a seemingly "moral" or "correct" society would eventually prove to be a form of death, after all. Upto this very day, the emancipated woman is looked down upon; if at all admired, it is done so begrudgingly and with reservations.

2. One of the most beautiful parts of the book is where Byatt dips into Beloved for the section where Sethe, the main protagonist, arrives at the breaking point, having punished herself for so long in desperate longing for a lost child, Beloved, whom she calls "her best thing" and Paul D., her lover, corrects her, saying, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (p. 273). I remember having been moved by the line, as well, while I was reading the novel about a year ago. One of the remarkable differences in the treatment of men-women relationships between literature written by men and those written by women, according to Byatt in the discussion of Villette, is that in the former, women are made to respond to masterfulness whereas in the latter, women respond to kindness (ch. 2). Both authors agree that Paul D's statement embodies their belief that the true literary heroes are the men who see women for what and who they are in themselves, their intrinsic make-up as opposed to their relation to the external world; that prior to being daughters, mothers or slaves (in African-American literature, especially), women are foremost women, and no one has the right to take this from them, regardless of whatever costumes get thrown their way by society.

3. Below is a passage from chapter 6, stated beautifully by Sodre:

"...however horrible the past, you can only live and be sane and integrated if you live in contact with it. The connection with beauty is important--the sense of hope and the will to create a better life are deeply connected to the ability to preserve beauty and goodness in the internal world. One of the fundamental ideas in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory is that sanity depends on the capacity to retain a good, trusting link with good figures in the internal world--the capacity to survive loss through the internalisation of the good experience." (p. 221)

-from "The Seventh Man," Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman-

"It was the biggest wave I had ever seen in my life," he said. "A strange wave. An absolute giant."
He paused.
"It just barely missed me, but in my place it swallowed everything that mattered most to me and swept it off to another world. I took years to find it again and to recover from the experience-- precious years that can never be replaced."

Click here to read more.

Lit Geek Update #6

Last book I read: She Flew The Coop by Michael Lee West

This book is hilarious, had me hooting with laughter and kicking my heels up while reading it. The writing is candid but spiced up with color and wit. Human frailty and resilience are celebrated equally, the setting being the fictional Limoges, Louisiana, a small-town backdrop with quirky characters that just as possibly could represent any community in any part of the world. A lot of recipes, too, that made me go hungry and grab something to munch on just to satisfy the craving brought on by the raw, unembellished description of Creole fare (Gumbo, crawfish pie, jambalaya, peanut butter and bacon sandwich (!), loads of mayonnaise and chili). A light, most-of-the-time-funny-but-when-it's-sad-it's-sad read.

What I'm reading now: What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal) by Zoe Heller