Stephen Dadelus' Lonely Heart's Club Band

Made of happy things.

I'm about 40 pages into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Despite it not being anywhere near my summer reading list, I'm really liking it, and it's only like 300 pages so I might finish it in the next couple of days. Here's an excerpt from "Stick Silvertail", as promised:

Each shipment of goods for the general store meant that Stick would be first in the door the next morning, feeling every fabric and smelling every preserve, as though he had discovered some ancient buried tomb full of luster and magic. Polly introduced him to cakes and muffins and pies, and all other baked foods, and Stick would go to his room at the end of every day and write down a list of all the new things that he had discovered and loved. He would write things like “Horse Shoes” and “Blueberries” and “Chocolate” (this was an especially magical day), “Beans”, “Baked Potato”, “Nails”, and “Knitting”. At first, he had hoped to show his lists to his father, to prove him wrong about the human world, but as the days went by he thought less and less about going back to the manor under the river. He hardly ever went down to see it, and he never crossed the bridge, not knowing that the house on the other side was where he was born.

Sorry that there isn't more, but I really did like that paragraph. If you feel the need to read more, give me your address and I'll mail a copy; it should be done with the editing and such by the end of the weekend.

Also;

Still feeling love, guys. I need to go back in time to the fictional 1930s and propose before my heart just turns to goop and goops out of my belly button, or however that could work metaphorically...

Reading on Easy Street

I can't always stick my nose into the heavier volumes of classical literature. Really, I would like to think of myself as one of those "only the classics" types, but every now and then it's good to find a novel and spend a couple nights with less intense fare. It's the same with everything else, really: you could try to live a life watching Bergman films, having dinners of roasted vegetables and merlot, but ever now and then you need to just eat a burger, watch The Mummy, and drink a beer.

So I needed a literature break, if you will. After all, I had just finished re-reading House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (it's still fantastic), and was deciding between finishing Paradise Lost or starting Goethe's Faust. The second part of that sentence alone should make you roll your eyes, or maybe even throw up. Anyway, I was a bit sick of things that required analyzing. So I went to the library and grabbed two books: Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

In theory, the two books should go hand in hand, and are a good companion to the last "light reading" type novel that I read, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Though of course neither come close to Chabon's prose or his story, at least Carter Beats The Devil proved itself to be a satisfying lead, despite a penchant for swashbuckling. Water for Elephants is promising, but falls flat at the end, victim of its own predictability.

Carter Beats The Devil is a very fictional retelling of the life of Charles Carter, one of the more well known magicians of the early 1900s through the 1920s. Though the story does not necessarily pull any new or fantastic plot turns and twists, the vibrancy of it, especially in the world of early 20s San Francisco that Gold paints. In truth, it does almost everything that a good story does; it gives us a hero, a villain, a cast of familiar characters, a love interest, and just enough of a plot twist at the end to leave us impressed and satisfied. Gold's prose is impressive, and though at times he seems to lose direction, the novel's second act is a well-paced mystery-thriller. That, and Gold seems to have such a fine understanding of stage magic and its application, that we are given just the treatment that the audiences back then got: we are both amazed by the effect and impressed by its secrets. The final magic spectacle, where Carter indeed does beat the devil (here in the form of a vengeful and psycopathic rival magician) made the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I imagined seeing it in the theatre. This is a perfect beach or rainy day read, and should only take a few days. Still, if you have nothing else to do, give it a go, it's bound to entertain.

Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants is also a story about entertainers, but instead of creating the mystery and intrigue that it seems to promise (or that any story about circuses in the Great Depression would (think Carnivàle)), ends up being a sappy love story, with colorful images that, unfortunately, don't have enough space to hold the novel up. The story is told as a memory, an old man named Jacob Jankowski remembering his early days working for the circus during the 1930s. Jacob himself is an almost nauseatingly good guy, and his altruism and style of talking ("It's hard to conceive of such evil.") make him seem like an unbelievably flawless character. The "incredible odds" which Jacob and the horse trainer, Marlena, need to overcome are hardly so; and the last few chapters involve nearly everything falling into place so easily that you have to wonder if there was really any struggle at all. The book has so many elements in it that would give it strength, but in the end it all seems thrown away. Certainly it's not a short book, over 300 pages long, but in the end I wanted an expansion of everything--time, place, descriptions of locations and minor characters. Instead, the more colorful elements of the story are rushed through for the sake (I suppose) of Plot. And though Gruen seems to have a pretty good idea of what she's talking about, and the era seems well researched and understood, it's still slightly off, or off-tempo; so she's playing the right tune, but there's something not quite enjoyable about it. Of course, if what you want is total escapism, well, go for it. But in my opinion, if it weren't for the sex, you could do a book report on it in 7th grade.



Now that those two books are over, I have a couple more lined up to read: there's a collection of essays on medieval bestiaries, jung, more folktale books, and, of course, the ever-present Paradise Lost, which I keep coming back to and leaving all over again. It's all right though, it forgives me every time.

Cataloging

Hey, I bet you think I mean Looking at Catalogues! Nope. I mean it in the boring sense. I mean, here are the books that I've read over the semester, my rating of them (out of 10, of course), and a short review. Thus I will be able to look back on what I read, because I tend to forget pretty quickly.

20th Century British and Irish Studies: Virginia Woolf, Pacifism, and Feminism

Mrs. Dalloway Probably my personal favorite of Woolf's novels. (9/10)
To The Lighthouse Another great one, though some of the characters seemed too stilted at times. (8/10)
A Room of One's Own The better of Woolf's feminist essays. (8/10)
Three Guineas The worse of Woolf's feminist essays. (4/10)
The Years Beautifully written but incredibly long. (7/10)

20th Century Studies: Postmodernism

A Postmodern Reader I honestly think that if it weren't for the philosophy crap, Postmodernism would generally seem like an okay idea. (5/10)
A Wild Sheep Chase Interesting at first, but the story became so uninteresting and hard to believe that in the end I didn't care about the stupid hypnotic religion cult sheep. (4/10)
Midnight's Children Magical Realism! Eastern Theology! Noses! (8/10)
Mao II Tended to dry out after the first half, but pretty interesting, engaging, and easy to get into. (7/10)

Shakespeare and the Renaissance

Hamlet Um, well, it's Hamlet. Best play ever written. Not really, but pretty flawless. (9/10)
Twelfth Night Very fun and clever, one of my favorite Shakespeares and possibly my favorite comedy. (9/10)
Henry V Okay, yes, it's great. But the speeches are too long-winded and the stereotypes are annoying. (6/10)
Titus Andronicus So me saying that I'm sort of in love with this play will make me come off as an awful person; because it's not so greatly written and it's full of rape, dismemberment, and people pies. But....yes, I'm sort of in love with it. (7/10)
The Merchant of Venice Ugh. No redeeming characters. Awful take on society. I don't even see how it can count as a comedy, while most of the scenes are tense. Not really that great, you guys. (5/10)
The Winter's Tale A sweet, sweet beauty of a play, that desires a good filmed adaptation. (7/10)

Metaphor and Thought
Arcadia Oh Tom Stoppard, you're soooo clever. Still, was a lot of fun to read, though the philosophical doscourse can get carried away at times. (7/10)


My other class was Grammar, and there weren't any deep readings in that. So hey, all in all it seemed like a pretty nice semester! I'll leave you with a short excerpt from my final project for Virginia Woolf class, an experimental journal (here I'm trying to fiddle with stream-of-consciousness):

now it is silent, though not completely. a truck from the construction site had been whining constantly in a low and insipid tone for nearly an hour, and the person living above me (who i do not know were i to encounter them in an elevator) has stopped doing what sounded to be bouncing a basketball continuously while i was trying to nap. even so, it is never silent here--a car skids outside, the elevator climbs smooth and well-oiled, a door slams, someone cooks in the kitchen. i would cover my ears, but then would be berated by the noise of my own blood. i tried to take a shower, just now, but the truck's whirr followed me even there. now clean and sitting on my bed, i can revel in the silence that is really less-noise around me. it seems impossible to me. october commands silence. i don't know how i stand it.

there is one place in the world where i know it is silent. my grandfather's farm in stony ford, california. to get to the nearest town takes an hour's drive through the gentle hills spotted with cows and horses and jackrabbits and families of quail. trees top the hills like many-branched candelabra. in most months it is hot beyond belief, but at least there is silent, walking down to my grandfather's pond, or sitting, as my mother did when she visited him years ago when she was younger than me, on the top of the hill behind the house he built himself, watching the world retire again and the air punctured with cicadas. and that place has a silence you notice-even on the quietest days in the suburbs where i grew up there is still the din of voices and cars and the buzz of electricity. but not at stony ford. no, there it is a waving peace, letting your ears suddenly realize that there is empty and beautiful air around them. it is like so many people say about the country: "a guy can really breathe out here".
here, i'm afraid, there is no (or very little) room to breath. the molecules of carbon expelled from the mouth must immediately fight with falling pieces of steel and pounding slabs of wood, boiling water and mutters and groans and bangs and booms and crashes and creaks. the walls whistle and pop.


I really like "the molecules of carbon expelled from the mouth must immediately fight with falling pieces of steel and pounding slabs of wood, boiling water and mutters and groans and bangs and booms and crashes and creaks." part. I'm proud of that.