Reading for Believers

Checking in...

2012-01-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

Anyone have any recommendations?

Anyone have any news?

Marriage in Middlemarch

2011-12-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's a sign of a love for gossip that I've been enjoying the peek into people’s marriages in Middlemarch. Unfortunately - or fortunately for my curiosity, the two Eliot features most prominently are the ones that are failing.

Even if it turns out that he is a genius of a doctor, Lydgate certainly doesn’t seem to be a very good judge of women. First he falls for a black widow of an actress and then Rosamond, who has her own means for sucking the life out of a man. I’m wondering if she has any redeeming qualities. Is the case of the Vincys a warning of sorts to parents? If you spoil your children, they’ll either turn out self-absorbed like Fred (who at least is earnest) or selfish and conniving like Rosamond.

While the marriage of Dorothea and Casaubon seemed gloomy from the beginning, I initially thought love existed between Lydgate and Rosamond. In both cases the couples don’t seem to know their chosen spouses very well. Although it was aggravating that Dorothea was so blind to Casaubon’s pinched true nature, you have to admire her devotion to her vows and her persistence in trying to make Casaubon happy. But I can’t say I can think of anyone I’ve ever met who had this kind of relationship.

On the other hand, the relationship between Rosamond and Lydgate is immediately recognizable. He fell for her beauty and from her behavior during courtship imagined her the model of femininity. She imagined him to be a potential savior of sorts who would raise her up from her present circumstances. But then she turns out to be less flexible and docile than he imagined, and he doesn’t live up to her hopes for a more exciting life. It’s almost painful to read about how they destroy their relationship that seemed so promising: he expects her to be obedient; she’s secretive; he believes he knows best and shouldn’t trouble her with the money issues, but he’s irresponsible for buying what he couldn’t afford. Meanwhile, she seems to have no care for preserving their state. At least he attempts to protect their relationship by trying to keep alive the image of what he loved about her, while she seems determined to tear him down with her secrets and silent treatment.

It’s hard to imagine that the Lydgates can repair their relationship, unless Rosamond has some kind of conversion experience and recognizes her selfishness, and Lydgate stops treating her like she’s child, even though she acts like one.

Since Casaubon dies, the possibility of a relationship between Will and Dorothea is out there if both parties were willing to throw riches and public opinion to the wind. But I still don’t think they seem suited to each other. Even though she’s idealistic, he seems too romantic for her. Is public opinion right in this case?

Maybe I have lost my sense of romance because I also think Mary Garth should marry Farebrother and not Fred. Fred seems destined to disappoint her since he can’t seem to get over his love of a good time. Farebrother is so kind and companionable that you can imagine and healthy relationship between him and Mary.

At least Mary has a good example of marriage in her parents. The Garths seem to be the most happily married couple in Middlemarch. She recognizes his faults but still loves him for his goodness, and he recognizes her intelligence and good sense. Theirs is the one marriage that seems built on honesty and respect for each other, in addition to being genuinely affectionate.

Ironically, the little glimpses into the Bulstrode’s marriage seem to suggest that they can weather trials. If Mrs. Bulstrode can still feel compassion and pity for her husband, even though he has deceived her, perhaps they can pull through their downfall.

I’m embarrassed by how little I remember from this book the first time I read it. Thus, this quote from Robertson Davies on my new “Reading Woman” calendar from my mother-in-law jumped out at me: “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” (I know everyone is supposed to use interactive computer calendar apps, but this calendar has great art and good quotes and lots of space for writing stuff to do; it makes me happy.)

A short study in contrasts

2011-12-21T05:03:00.000-08:00

I don't have a well-formed review to write here because I need to focus my brain on getting through the next few days, but I've been thoroughly enjoying Middlemarch, which I started since I didn't order Mortal Love. I was reading two long books, Middlemarch, and the latest from Ken Follet for the wives club book club. Follet’s book is nearly 1000 pages, but I skimmed the last 400 in a few hours. I couldn’t/wouldn’t give the book any more time, even though the historical bits about WWI were interesting. All the characteristics of a bestseller: pedestrian language, love affairs galore, predictable characters.

Meanwhile, Middlemarch is worth savoring. I rarely get more than one or two chapters read a day, but I usually find a corner to bend down every time I read. I was reminded of reading Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, about diagramming sentences, when the author picked several sentences from James Fenimore Cooper to diagram as an example of long unwieldy writing. She also quoted Mark Twain making fun of Cooper’s effusiveness. Some of Eliot’s sentences could surely rival or top Cooper’s for length. But after reading at the fourth grade level (or lower?) in Follet’s book, I was happy for the challenge of Eliot’s vocabulary and structure. (I do, however, find Dorothea’s goodness a little too good. She really didn’t recognize Casaubon’s pinched ways or Ladislaw’s devotion? And she smiles radiantly a few too many times.)

To illustrate the differences, a couple of selections:

From Fall of Giants:

Ethel, daughter of a coal miner and one-time housekeeper to an earl, listens to her father speak at a memorial service: “Ethel was proud of him. This honor acknowledged his status as one of the principal men of the town, a spiritual and political leader. He looked smart, too: Mam had bought him a new black tie, silk, from the Gwyn Evans department store in Merthyr.

He spoke about resurrection and the afterlife, and Ethel’s attention drifted: she had heard it all before. She assumed there was life after death, but she was not sure, and anyway she would find out soon enough.”

From Middlemarch:

Dorothea, like Ethel, turns her thoughts to a man she thinks she loves and admires, her fiance: “Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea could have cared about any share in Mr. Casaubon’s learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighbourhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along.. . . something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?”

You’d think that, with all the improvements in education and opportunity, the contemporary writer would outwrite his predecessor. A sad commentary or just a difference in style?

Mortal Love and Italian Shoes

2011-11-23T19:19:00.000-08:00

I know almost everyone is elbow deep in turkey preparations for Thanksgiving. At least, not our foreign correspondents, but all of us here in the US. Except I'm not because my Irish sister-in-law has the honor of hosting our extended family for Thanksgiving and she always goes overboard and makes far too much food so I'm probably going to make some rolls and pecan pie in the morning before we head over but otherwise I've been shirking holiday preparations and instead have been hunkering down with books. At least when the kids let me, which honestly isn't very often. Lately I've been longing for those single days when I could spend an entire day in bed with a book and only have to get up to eat. I tried to do that today but it was raining out and the children, seeing me sitting in one place, kept bringing me picture books to read to them. Still, I managed to finish Mortal Love this afternoon by locking myself in the bathroom during the boys' nap time. And now I'm trying to think what I think about it and what I can possibly say. But I thought I'd just jump in and say something to get the ball rolling and see if anyone else wanted to jump in with something that is a bit more substantial.

First, a greater contrast between this and the book I finished immediately prior to it I don't think I can imagine. Italian Shoes (I wrote more about it on my blog and incidentally I'd highly recommend it as a good, quick read that would be worthwhile discussing as a group. I thought there was some real meat to chew on and some interesting themes) is so stark, bleak --Spartan really-- while Mortal Love is so lush and overwrought, with a kind of hothouse quality. Italian Shoes opens with the narrator, a solitary hermit, on an ice-bound island off or Sweden who has had minimal human contact for the past dozen years. The cast of characters is small and the action minimalist. Mortal Love is bewildering in its operatic cast. I often forgot who was who as it shifted from the Victorian to the contemporary, from the coast of Maine to New York from London to Cornwall and back again. It's an interesting study in contrasts both in subject matter and narrative style.

I didn't dislike Mortal Love; but I'm not sure it was the book I wanted to read just now. I spent the first two thirds of the book feeling rather lost and unsure whether I really wanted to continue. I thought it pulled together by the end but am still not sure I'm satisfied by the ending. I didn't think that anything in the narrative really prepared me for the role that Valentine was going to play at the climax. It felt a bit deus ex machina. But maybe I was just being a sloppy reader and missed some major textual flags. That happens sometimes.

For me the novel does raise one interesting question. It posits that human creativity is mainly the result of the fact that we are mortal and finite. If we lived forever like the fairy-folk, it suggests, our drive to create art, music, poetry would disappear. It's not a new idea for me; but as I read it here suddenly it seemed like a false idea. I'm not sure I agree that mortality is the root of creativity. I think that rather it is because we are made in the image and likeness of God and one aspect of that likeness is that we share in God's creativity. I suppose you could argue that the fairy folk being soulless beings are not made in God's image and thus do not share in the divine gift of creativity. But then you're actually arguing that creativity goes along with having an immortal soul not with a finite being. Anyway, the novel's worldview is pretty pagan so I'm not sure I'm being fair by trying to read it with a Catholic sensibility.

One gripe... it kept knocking me out of the narrative because it was so jarring. The word "refractory" kept appearing where I'm pretty sure the author actually meant "refectory" as a room in the big English manor house. I kept wondering what the heck a "refractory room" was and it wasn't meant to be an important detail at all. It wasn't just once or twice and I can't think why the copy editor didn't catch it. More, I'm not even sure from context that the author realized that a "refectory" is a dining room since in one instance the list of rooms included both "refractory" and "dining room".

Ouch.

2011-11-15T03:45:00.000-08:00

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

From the Prelude to Middlemarch. As far as I've read. Couldn't find the Elizabeth Hand book at the library, although I knew a girl by that name, so in the meantime...

An Invitation and a Book Suggestion

2011-11-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

As we all know, Otepoti resides in the ass-end of the world, while most of us (with some notable exceptions) appear to reside in the Rust Belt. And, as you all know, Otepoti made a memorable trip to my notch of the Rust Belt last spring. Well, guess what? She's coming back.

As some of you know, we recently got our Letter of Approval from China to adopt Jude, who's now nineteen months old; it came, in fact, exactly a year to the day that we first learned about him. And those of you who know my older son know that it would be something of a disaster, and not a little one, for him if I were to go to China for two weeks and leave him behind (which is why I bring him with me on my out-of-town gigs). So my husband will be making this long journey on his own.

But not entirely on his own. Otepoti has offered, with a generosity beyond any generosity I've ever known, to meet up with him in China and bring Jude back with him. And then she'll be hanging out with us again for a couple of weeks at least.

This will be sometime probably in late January - early February. If any of youse (if I may lapse into the Mutterspräche) are free to make a road trip then, you will have another chance to meet our awesome sister in Christ, and, if I can plan it all, to attend Jude's baptism. All are welcome.

On to the book suggestion. It may be a bomb. Is anyone interested in reading Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand? It's a sort of quasi-fantasy that involves time travel, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Robert Graves's White Goddess, and also sex and drugs. Elizabeth Hand an Irishwoman from Yonkers, my former neck of the woods. It may not be interesting to anyone else but me, and that's completely all right, but I thought I'd toss it in.

A Review of Amy Welborn's new Memoir: Wish You Were Here

2011-11-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

by Melanie Bettinelli
(I went ahead and turned this comment into a post, because why not?--BD)

I'm trying not to be all gushy and fangirl about Wish You Were Here. Amy's was one of the first ever blogs I read and I've always felt she was sort of a kindred spirit. And I remember reading what she wrote at the time of Michael's death and her blog posts about Sicily so I sort of feel like I'm approaching the book with a very strong predisposition to love it. And maybe there are funny echoes in it for me in that I've never really wanted to go to Sicily very much until I married a man who is half Sicilian and then we discussed it as our dream honeymoon but couldn't actually afford to go. So there is that layer of the emotions from my own marriage weaving throughout.

All that said, I do think its a magical (I've not read Didion's book; but I can already tell you this is completely different) sort of mash up of travel memoir and a very Catholic exploration of grief. She does both genres so well but the way she slips seamlessly from one to the other is sort of breathtaking. (See, I'm gushing.) Just to do a reality check I read a chapter to my sister this evening while we were making dinner. Oh even better than I thought. The prose is lyrical but down to earth. The imagery doesn't beat you over the head but somehow the details of every tourist stop are marshaled so that you are constantly staring death in the face. Most of all what strikes me is how faith informs everything. It doesn't make death and grief easy, doesn't make it go away. Just that it is the medium in which they happen.

Ready to Read

2011-11-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

Otepoti has threatened to remove her wonderful conversion posts if we don't start talking about books again soon. I'm here to remedy the problem by:

A) publicly imploring Otepoti to leave her posts up
B.) getting the ball rolling on another book
C) talking about my own reading.

With A accomplished, I now ask of you, "Believers in Reading," would you like to read a book together? And if so, who would like to choose one? I believe that Melanie, Dorian, Pentimento or Otepoti would be the likeliest choices for choosing, so if any of you are reading something interesting and would like company, please, speak up.

Alternately, I could tell you that I have picked up my first non-Walker Percy book in about six months, and it's A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower. I love the way Byatt writes, even though she's anti-Christian by her own self-description. She seems to have an accomplished sense of the Christian mentality regardless. I'm only about one relatively thick chapter into the book though, so not entrenched enough to recommend or the opposite.

I enjoyed an interview with Joan Didion in the most recent Poets and Writers magazine (the link is not the actual interview to which I'm referring). Notable in that Didion made a name for herself as an essayist, but never felt like an accomplished writer until she had written a novel. She's just put out another memoir (following the Year of Magical Thinking) concerning the death of her daughter, which deals with her sense of failure as a mother. Should be a lighthearted read. Heh.

I tried reading a short by Ursula le Guin recently and didn't finish. I keep trying to make myself like fantasy writing--and it never works out. This is how I have made it through thirty six years of my life with four male children and have never read any Tolkien. If anyone has fantasical writing that I might like in mind, please recommend. Of course, I could just call it quits on trying to read fantasy, and stick to my memoir-reading.

I'm feeling the urge to delve into a classic right now. I would like to A) make sure I still have the concentration for great literary works, and B) Not have to worry about whether or not the book is worthy of my investment. Anyone in the mood for Middlemarch?

Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute

2011-10-17T00:27:00.000-07:00

“There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.” C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I mentioned a while ago how my dear old aunt, poor lady, came to stay with us in the final six weeks of her life. (No moral heroism here, mind you: when the hospital says, hop it, because it’s Christmas the day after tomorrow, the relatives had better have their ducks in a row. This is the reality of living in a country that is steadily working its way down the OECD tables.)

We nursed the aunt as well as we could, with flowers and conversation and visits from friends and basin baths, as she faded and dried into a pressed-flower version of her former self. The last day, the process sped up beyond expectation. Her body started shedding fluid dramatically.

(This is really a mercy, since it helps the body produce natural analgesics against the pain, but, still - And also, as a nursing note, if the Hospice people suggest a catheter, don't say, no, you don't want her to get a UTI. )

As she was struggling up to the commode for the last time, she said, fiercely, out of clenched teeth, “I hate this.” Dying, she meant.

Confession was like that. It was like dying, and I hated it.

I can’t quibble with its efficacy, though. When I fronted up, like Hagrid at a Hogwarts school desk, to an old wooden kneeler made for a past generation of smaller-framed penitents, I still didn’t know if I could do what I had to, so I think the grace of the sacrament took over. I asked a blessing, choked a bit and began the sentence that had to be said. “Father, ten years ago, I – “

Do you know, Father was actually sorry for me. After I spilled the rest of my dirt sheet, there was a happy lift in his voice as he gave me absolution. It must be a good day’s work to release someone from soul-killing sin. As he gave me a petit rien of a penance, he said, “Well, now you’ll know how light Catholics feel after confession.”

Well, no, not really, because we Kiwis wrote the book on low emotional affect. To me it was as when, after giving birth to a child, you get up off the bed and find that, since your spine is still an extreme S-bend, normal walking is yet a day or two away.

And yet, if I prod that terrible spot in my memory, the place that used to make me blench, and, if I thought of it while driving, want to wrench the car into the nearest power-pole, there is nothing there. The abscess has been closed over. Thanks be to God.

So on to the happy business of Confirmation and First Communion. I took the name of Monica; may St. Monica guide our adult children into the Church. “If your saint is Monica,” I was told, “all you have to do is pray and weep.”

The confirmation made me catch my breath a little. It’s a closure on twenty-one years of Reformed worship, and it puts me definitively outside that camp, and excommunicate. And I did so think I had the right of it, back when I chose that. Perhaps the difference is now that I think Christ has the right of it, and I have to be where He is. “So, let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach.”

As to the wonder of the Eucharist: it’s an odd thing, being (as I often have told you) mumblety-one years old, to be so little again, to look up to see this Person. I fumble for words and fall silent.

The moment of taking communion, though, since that’s when grace meets nature, that I can speak about, at tedious length. Father gave me the Host and then watched with something like questioning as I consumed it. I realized where I knew that expression from, that mixture of absorbed love and concern – will you eat? Do you know how good this is for you?

I recognized it because I’ve had that look on my own face half-a-dozen times, when I’ve approached a baby with a spoonful of carefully confected solid food, his or her first, knowing that when and if the food goes down, life will be forever different.

Here is the beginning of the rest of your life, child. Will you eat this, baby? Please don’t spit it out of your mouth. Do you know how good it is?

Do you understand what pains it cost to make?

If the date didn't change

2011-10-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

Happy First Communion, Otepoti!

Sacraments of Healing

2011-10-09T04:53:00.000-07:00

Sacraments of Healing, Booklet Seven, "What Catholics Believe: An Introductory booklet series", The Catholic Enquiry Centre, Wellington, www.catholicenquiry.org.nz

"No, it wasn't a dream," said Edmund.
"Why not?"
"Well, there are the clothes, for one thing. And you have been - well, un-dragoned, for another."
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

"Crap," I thought, when Betty Duffy pointed out that I was not, as I thought, dashing off occasional notes to friends, but in some sense Blogging My Conversion, "now, since it's the next way-point, I'm going to have to write about First Confession, aka Reconciliation, aka (in these parts) Hohou Rongo, and I really don't want to do that."

People say they loved their first confession, and some practical people advise taking a large handkerchief, but my problem is with the examination of conscience. Fifty-mumble years old, committing mortal sins on a regular basis: it's Zeno's Paradox. However fast I tally the sins, I'll never catch up to the present. It's dreary work, too. It consists largely of discovering that I am far from being the person I think I am (mostly moral) or the person I pretend to be (mostly harmless).

I've also made the strange discovery that, however intimidated I have been all these years by my mother-in-law, she is more frightened of me. Poor woman. All these years when we could have been, if not besties, then at least comrades-in-arms.

But my worst problem has been a failure of memory altogether. This is partly because the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity combined with the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness adds up to excusing moral failure as unavoidable while passing the penalty Higher Up. Why register failure when the books are cooked? But some sin is so heinous that the Calvinist cop-out cannot cope, and then memory corruption kicks in for self-protection. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

So, I had such a sin straitjacketed away, and I'd half-forgotten it. It was pretty bad. It was bad, and not pretty. It was the work of a moment. I cried off and on for about a year after I committed it. If I'd managed to fornicate on the Sabbath while committing it, it would just about be a perfect strike against the decalogue. Somehow I had suppressed the memory till this very week, till this day, Sunday.

I had forgotten it; God had not: still merciful, and still with the sense of humour. "Father," I said to our priest after Exposition today, "since I'm coming into the Church on Saturday, when would it suit you to hear my confession?" "Monday, after Mass?" he said. "Yes," I said, thinking of my half-finished Examen and this unsavoury addition, "I think I can pull it together by tomorrow." "Oh, no, how about Thursday? I have a funeral on Wednesday," he said. "Yes," I said, eyes widening a bit, "fine."

Friends, if I read this elsewhere, I would suspect the writer had sugared it up to make a better story, but I assure you this is not the case. I will be confessing this awful sin, one which has roiled years on my soul, on the ten-year anniversary of my committing it - to the very day.

See you on the other side - after my un-dragoning.

A recommendation

2011-09-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

I feel sort of trivial writing about Young Adult books here after Otepoti’s moving post, but The Book Thief was so good, I wanted to say something about it. I started to write about it before I finished it because I was enjoying it so much, but I worried that the ending would disappoint. I shouldn’t have -- throughout the last chapter, I was in tears, but although the ending is full of tragedy (the book is about a German girl during WWII), it is also full of hope. This book lives up to its jacket blurbs – it really is stunning. I felt like I couldn’t move after I closed the cover.

The story is a bit difficult to figure out in the beginning, until you realize the narrator is Death, and he rambles. But eventually the narrative voice gets stronger. Death narrows his focus to Liesel Meminger, a foster child in Germany at the outbreak of WWII. She is not Jewish, but her foster father was saved from death by a Jew in WWI, so he is reluctant to join the Nazi party even though he loses customers for his painting business. He also loses his son. But he gains a relationship with the son of the man who saved him (and taught him to play the accordion), when that man’s son seeks him out for help. So a Jew hides in the basement while Liesel deals with her feelings of rejection, her sorrow over her little brother’s death, and her difficulties in school and life – hunger, loneliness, confusion over the changing political landscape. But she finds purpose when her foster father begins teaching her to read the book she picked up (or stole) off the ground at her brother’s funeral. As Liesel becomes a better reader, and shares her knowledge, she and the hiding Jew and her foster parents find consolation, common ground, and hope in books.

The story moves slowly, but it is beautifully told. Markus Zusak is a poet. The form might be difficult for a preteen reader; actually this book could be just as much at home in the adult section as on the YA shelf – but the preteen who sticks with it will surely feel as enlarged after reading it, as I did. It’s a good book for reading in small snatches, conveniently, because the language deserves to be savored.

For example, this scene, in which Liesel, the book thief, hears a noise in the night after her foster father has been drafted, and she sneaks out of bed to discover her foster mother, a curmudgeonly woman, sitting in the dark holding her husband's accordion:

"Many minutes dripped past. The book thief's desire to hear a note was exhausting, and still, it would not come. The keys were not struck. The bellows didn't breathe. There was only the moonlight, like a long strand of hair in the curtain, and there was Rosa.

The accordion remained strapped to her chest. When she bowed her head, it sank to her lap. Liesel watched. She knew that for the next few days, Mama would be walking around with the imprint of an accordion on her body. There was also an acknowledgement that there was great beauty in what she was currently witnessing, and she chose not to disturb it."

I read this book in between some other books that I didn’t like so much, and its beauty was a stark contrast. While reading Anne Rice’s Feast of All Saints, I couldn’t find a single character I really liked; in The Book Thief, I loved them all. They were all human, flawed but worthy of compassion. which I suppose is one of the themes of the book: the discovery of the humanity of those around us. Another theme: Liesel learns that while words can be full of truth and beauty, they also can be used to spread lies and ugliness. Her friend the hiding Jew Max writes her a simple but straightforward story about the intangible gifts she has given him with her words, but he also illustrates how insidious Hitler’s propaganda has been.

It was back at Christmas that I bought this book for my 13 year old. He wasn’t as impressed by it as I was, but did agree that it was good. I didn’t read it before giving it to him because I wasn’t in the mood for one more Holocaust story. But it isn’t the typical story. There is no suspense about what is going to happen because you know the story from history books and because Death tells you who is going to die. But you keep reading because you want to know how it happened, how it changed these people, how they persevered. And the reading is rewarding – even though the book is not explicitly religious (other than in the certitude that Death is gathering souls – but taking them where?), it clearly shows that sacrificial love makes life meaningful. I hope that my kids who read it are strengthened in the belief that relationships and words matter.

Hidden Manna

2011-09-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

When I visited with Julia earlier this year, we talked about everything, but especially about faith, and she and her husband took me to Mass with them. I was awed by the beauty of the Catholic Easter, but still a country mile off in understanding. Just before I left for New Zealand, I said, sadly, "I can't be a Catholic: I can't understand the Real Presence." (I meant, of course, I can't believe the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist - because who could ever understand it?)

Then, in June, I stumbled across the "Called to Communion" website, and read the three big articles, "Ecclesial Deism", "The Canon Question" and "The Visible Church." They blew my Reformed Protestantism out of the water. Simple obedience and love of Jesus required I draw near Him in His way, not mine. I had well and truly removed any possible plea of invincible ignorance, as a defence against joining His Church. I emailed Julia, saying, "I think I have to become a Catholic. I can't believe I just typed that."

So I started limping off to daily Mass, feeling shell-shocked and mortified, wondering if I'd ever feel whole again, or if I'd just be walking wounded for the rest of my life. I believed, as hard as ever I believed anything, that I had to be there each morning, that the Mass is the prayer of Christ's people, but secretly I doubted that I'd ever be given the gift of faith in the mystery. I feared I'd always be kneeling at the back, hiding from direct view of the altar behind someone else, in case God saw me there, a bacillus on the Petri dish, desperately afraid of the penicillin.

For this I had paid with the loss of a close and fervent church community, one friendship completely lost, another permanently bent, a son alienated and slightly disgusted, a daughter saddened and confused, and, oh, yes, after the Reformed Church discipline process is complete, I will be officially excommunicated and the church members will be obliged to treat me as a "publican and a sinner." I can't deny that it has seemed hard.

Well, in case you didn't know this, the Lord is merciful. Stumbling in the dark, I came across my next hand-hold.

On his surpassingly excellent apologetics blog, "Shameless Popery", Joe Heschmeyer recommended a book, "The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist," by Rev. James T. O'Connor. I ordered it, and accidentally had it sent by fast post. (Cost of book, $12; postage, $30: this is the price we pay for living in Narnia/Middle Earth.)

This book has been a well of wonder, as it shows the Fathers from the earliest times paying homage to the daily miracle in terms of Eucharistic realism.

I had come from a Memorial Supper tradition, where the elements, ineffective and earthbound in themselves, serve to remind us of our God-given faith. I had advanced so far as to regard the Eucharist as a miracle on a level with the Incarnation.

"Why," I thought to myself, with the lofty insights of Epistemology 101 and Metaphysics 102, "just as God's naming of Christ as the Logos is His pre-emptive refutation of Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists, establishing ultimate meaning at the heart of the universe, so the Incarnation is God's pre-emptive refutation of the English Empiricists, with their doubt that the supernatural can ever impinge on the natural. And the Eucharist is God's (almost humorous) repetition of the feat, as He enters His world, over and over again, in rooms great and small. Why didn't I ever think of that before?"

But this book teaches me that the Eucharist is even more: it is the prime miracle; it is the reason the Incarnation happened - to enable this even greater thing, a running tap of grace, which is made available to ordinary men and women, every day. Even I, non-partaker that I remain for now, am blessed by it. Even those who don't know that they are blessed by it, like my brothers and sisters at Reformed, cannot remain untouched.

About a Protestant Lord's Supper, Fr. O'Connor has this to say: "Such celebrations are certainly opportunities and occasions for receiving divine grace, even though they are not the efficient and effective causes of such grace as is the case when a valid sacrament is celebrated. Although the Catholic Church believes that the Lord is not corporally present in such celebrations, he is surely spiritually present and prepared to bestow on those who participate worthily and with faith a share in the immeasurable abundance of blessings that his Passion and Resurrection won for the human race. In their own way - comparable to a para-liturgical action within the Catholic Church - such celebrations may even be said to participate in the efficacy of the Eucharistic Mystery and are surely a means that mysteriously and gently orients the participant toward full union with the Catholic Church and the Sacrament that creates the Church and that she daily celebrates." pp164-165.

So here, as in so much else, those of us who are still afar off look up to see that the grace available through the Protestant churches is a gift of the true Eucharist.

Well. My world is well-lost for this.

[I just got a phone call from my RCIA leader. I will be received into the Church on Oct 15. Padre Pio, pray for me.]

Summer Reading: Vogue Magazine

2011-08-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Technically, it's the September issue, but it had Kate Moss on the cover--apparently she got married recently--and I don't know why it seemed worth it to throw the mag in the cart at the check out counter just to see Kate Moss's wedding pictures. But it did seem worth it for some reason.

It wasn't, of course. Her dress was uninspiring. Her beau looks like kind of a hot dog. The flower girls were nymph-like and delightful, and her Cotswold Church idyllic. But why can't I believe in love for Kate Moss?

These are deep thoughts, I know. If I could be any guest at the wedding I'd be Daphne Guinness, just FYI.

I used to read good books. Here's the link for Suite Francais, though I think you did it better, Em.

Breaking out of the Summer Reading Slump?

2011-08-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally finished a book!

I'll get to that in a later blog post. First, a few notes about the books I've started and haven't finished. Several of them were ones that people expressed some interest in when I suggested them, so I might as well give a brief report. I'm thinking the reason I've been plodding along with several books is perhaps that all of them are non-fiction and are so much easier to put down one when I get to a bit that's slow.

I've been enjoying Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset; but I'm not moving through it very quickly. You can laugh if you want to, but I was several chapters in before I realized it was a biography and not a novel. I know I'm not a careful reader, but it was still pretty funny. I found myself thinking: "This book really reads like a biography." And then I actually looked at the cover and discovered it is a biography.

It's not surprising that Undset is a good biographer since she is such a great novelist. She does know how to pace a story. And I love the way she approaches medieval history from a modern viewpoint. She explains those aspects of the medieval world that she anticipates will be strange for a modern audience so as to make sense of Catherine's life as a product of the world, but she doesn't let the historical details get in the way of showing who Catherine was as some historians seem to do. As a believer, Undset takes Catherine's faith seriously. When dealing with the miraculous she walks a nice path between being willing to credit eyewitnesses and accept the possibility of the miraculous, while also satisfying a more modern taste for critical examination of the credibility of witnesses. Here's a passage that exemplifies her approach:

But in our time and the language of our time the expressions we use for religious emotions and religious experience have become worn out and meaningless; words which in Catherine's language are as shining as new-minted gold, become, when repeated by us, worn-out coins, which have almost gone out of circulation. Catherine speaks of VIRTU, and for her the word retains its full weight; it means a vital and powerful pursuit of high ideals. "Virtue" in English has no connection in the popular mind with capability, capacity for goodness; we think rather of virtue as something slightly sour, weak, and boring. Catherine's eternal cri du coeur, GESU DOLCE-- GESU AMORE, is filled with very different associations from those which occur to us when we read "Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love." A sweet-Jesus, a lady-Jesus; Jesus-Love-- a substitute or sublimation of sexual love. In Catherine's language, and when she lived, sweetness was also a name for strength, for all that is good and at the same time gentle and merciful. That goodness must also at times be hard and aggressive, no one knew better than Catherine. For her and her contemporaries, even for the hosts of people who in practice tried to forget or deny it, it was acknowledged that AMORE, love, is fundamentally an expression for the connection between God and the soul of man. Analogously one can speak of AMORE, love, between people-- between children and their parents, between man and wife, between lovers, between brothers and sisters, between spiritual relations; and it can be a power of good or evil, according ot whether earthly love is in harmony or disharmony with the will of Him who is AUCTOR VITAE-- the origin of life. It is perhaps even more difficult for present day people in Protestant lands to understand her attitude towards the two Popes whom she can in the same letter call Christ-on-earth, the immortal Peter whom Christ has built His Church upon, and advise, command and admonish them for their human weaknesses; or she can turn to the Pope like an unhappy little girl to her father, calling him Babbo--"Daddy", in Italian baby talk. For her it was no contradiction, beyond the fact that all human relationships are full of contradictions, that Christ had set a vicar over His faithful as long as they live on earth, and that He demands we should show His vicar honour and obedience, even though the vicar may be unworthy to fulfil his mission. No one can know whether the Holy Father has been a holy man until his death-- and as it has been put in the hands of men to appoint a man a the Vicar of Christ, it is only to be expected that the voters will all too often vote from impure, mean, or cunning motives, for a man who will become an evil to the Church of God on earth. God will nevertheless watch over His Church, raise and restore again what mankind may ruin or soil; it is necessary, for mystical reasons, which the saints have partly seen and understood, that the offence should occur. But woe to that person through whom the offence comes. . . .

I think I got bogged down and lost steam when the focus of the book shifted from Catherine's interior life to her political activity. Her early years are all lived quietly at home in Siena but then she receives her marching orders and starts writing letters to Popes and various political figures. All of that requires quite a bit of explanation so as to follow the intricacies of medieval European politics and I think I just find that less interesting than the interior stuff that is directly about Catherine.

I've been having similar problems with the book about Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, Man of the Beatitudes. It's a good book by Frassati's sister, Luciana, but much of the focus is on his social and political life and the interior life isn't as clear. The first book I read about him was the second book she wrote, My Brother Pier Giorgio: His Last Days. I think by the time she wrote that book, Luciana had grown in understanding of who her brother really was. It is a much deeper, more thoughtful book, but it has a very limited focus, recounting only the details of the final week of Frassati's life. I'd love to read a book that examines his entire life with the insight Luciana turns on his final days. Anyway, my interest started to wane in a section where Luciana recounts Pier Giorgio's political activities. Notice a trend? I have a very short attention span for politics and political history. All the political parties and minute details of shifting power kind of make my eyes glaze over. Especially when I'm trying to snag brief reading snacks while hiding in the bathroom as the children squabble outside the door.

I'm out of time for tonight. The toddler has an ear infection, the baby is teething, and my husband is in Spain. So I'd better call it a night. I'll write about the book I actually finished next time.

Fear of Sixteen

2011-08-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

I want to note my thanks to you all, for teaching me the words of the daily intention. It did change my life! Because when I first got to "in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father" I had a mean-minded flick of "why should I pray for the Pope's intentions? Can't he pray for his own?" Erk. I'm ashamed to write that, but it really was my first reaction.

Unless you're a prospective convert from an anti-hierarchical, non-episcopalian Protestant schism, you probably could never understand the combined fear, loathing and awe in which the Holy Father is held in such circles.

I well remember watching the televised coverage from St Peter's Square as Benedict XVI's election was announced, and the grudging respect granted this event by the roomful of reformed people I was with. We all knew, I think, that somehow, he stood in some relation to us, that we owed him - something - but we weren't sure what. Also, those Latin numerals inspired the fearsome realization that he has a full fifteen predecessors, and that's just the Benedicts.

So the daily intention worked a small miracle to me. No sooner had the grumble, "why should I?" passed, then it was followed by "Because he's my Father. We're family. And he probably, no, almost certainly, prays for me, as the rawest, oldest, most stiff-necked member of an RCIA group."

So the daily intention laid on my shoulders the beginnings of obedience, that yoke and burden which are, respectively, easy and light.

Thanks, guys.

[wipes grateful tear]

Jocelyn

[I promoted this from comment to post, because it's time I had the courage of my convictions.]

A New Direction

2011-08-02T18:53:00.000-07:00

We seem to not be reading anything.

For everything, a season. I'm wondering what you guys think about making this a place where we can post notes on what we're currently reading rather than choosing a book and reading together.

Catechism of the Catholic Church #1

2011-07-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

"Without the Creator, the creature vanishes." (GS 36)

Comment exhaustively, or, if on holiday with small children, exhaustedly.

Friends, I thought through my issues with privacy, and I wondered why it would bother me, if, in fact, someone other than yourselves read my posts and managed to connect the internet handle with the person. It's a fear of being known, I guess, and being declared, definitively, a hypocrite. "Wha-a-? She wrote that? Pfft, anyone would think she was a saint."

Internet anonymity: it's the Tarnkappe of today, the cloak of invisibility that lets you get what you want without the cost. I want to vanish, but at the same time, I'd quite like it if my posts were recognized as genius. Just - don't watch me over here, yelling at my children: swearing, quite possibly. [Betty, I think you wrote something along these lines, lately. If I'm plagiarizing, I apologize.]

Fortunately for me, God isn't going to allow me the vanishing option. He sees me in my sinful skin. He sees me "naked and ashamed", and the worst thing about that is, I'm not even ashamed for the right reasons: I'm ashamed that I can't make myself perfect, all by myself, and snaffle the credit. Yet He still holds me in existence with His gaze.

If He blinks, I'm gone.

[Something about this connects with "Till We Have Faces": did Peter Kreeft quote this piece of the catechism in his considerable lecture?]

Current reading

2011-06-30T04:59:00.000-07:00

Alright, I want to apologize for my pathetic leadership on Til We Have Faces (which I did like, though I didn't say anything about it) by sharing some book recommendations with you all. One of the lovely aspects of this forum is that anything you ladies recommend is so good and readable

Julia and Melanie mentioned Room first, and now I'm dying to discuss it with those who've read it already. They've already covered the basics of the plot: a young woman and her son held in captivity, narrated by the five-year-old boy. I flew through the book and made Darwin read it as well so that we could talk about it. I'm a squeamish person and was very wary of the subject material, but Emma Donoghue handles her narrative with an exquisite sensibility.

What I'm pondering right now is the twisted way in which Ma's captor tries to establish this marital relationship with her, down to the put-upon husband routine when she asks him for anything.

The whole "memoir" is constructed as the introduction to the publication of a newly-discovered and authenticated Shakespeare play about King Arthur (the entire play is included as the last fourth of the novel). The author, taking advantage of his contractual obligation to write the introduction, uses his platform to explain why he thinks the whole piece is an elaborate forgery by his father. The novel is amusing, if the interpersonal relationships get a bit strained and irritating by the end, but the play, The Tragedy of Arthur, is pretty darn good. I'd pay to watch it on stage, that good.

Here's another book in which an author constructs a whole body of literary work to support the narrative. A minor academic, researching the famous Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers a long-hidden and smoldering letter from Ash (renowned for his faithfulness to his wife) to the poetess Christabel LaMotte-- two literary lights who were never supposed to have met, let alone corresponded. The resulting novel is a literary thriller, detective story, romance (both ancient and modern), and compendium of "source material" from these two poets. I'm not the most familiar with the work of the Victorian poets, but A.S. Byatt doesn't seem to strike any false notes in her creation of the oeuvre and letters of Ash and the lesser-known LaMotte. I might have been convinced that these were authentic works if I hadn't been told otherwise by the friend who recommended the book to me.

But skip, I beg of you, the crappy movie (which consistently underwhelmed, except for the eye candy of Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle playing the Victorian poets).

What are you ladies reading?

Binx and me: towards a sacramental life

2011-06-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

This morning, Pentimento Very Kindly (that's her full name, you know) sent me the words for a prayer of spiritual communion. So I wrote it out in spider-scratch and took it along to Mass this morning.

When I was writing it out, a tiny Protestant niggle kicked up: if this prayer is answered, and Jesus comes into my heart, then why bother with receiving communion? Can't we cut to a couple of hearty hymns and coffee?

That just shows that I don't have anywhere near the Catholic mind, I guess. When I saw the Mass, I understood that not partaking (when you could) makes as much sense as whipping your brain out, putting it in a jar on the mantelpiece and feeding it virtual experiences.

We're embodied. The sacrament meets us, body and soul. Though I know I will need this coming year of RCIA to shred my residual Calvinism, I want the sacrament to be my life, health and strength.

Binx has the same Protestant problem as I did. He has put his brain in a jar, and is feeding it movies. But he is a mystic without direction, and only movies can numb his sensory overload.

"[...] but then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. [...] In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry's attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. [...] He is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in."

Binx knows that there should be sacraments; he just doesn't realize where they are.

"I asked Harry if he would excuse me. He was glad enough to, since I was not much use to him, sitting on the floor. I moved down to the Quarter where I spent the rest of the vacation in quest of the spirit of summer and in the company of an attractive and confused girl from Bennington who fancied herself a poet."

If he could get to the sacraments, he would find the rotations and repetitions that make sense.

There's more here than I have time to think about now.

Thanks for your prayers.

Pilgrim's Progress

2011-06-22T00:29:00.000-07:00

I thought you might appreciate a progress report. I went and visited a priest, a lifetime first, and have made contact with the RCIA co-ordinator for the diocese.

Pentimento has been kind enough to teach me the rudiments of the rosary. It's still a guilty pleasure to kneel and ask the help of a Mother, who, if everything you say about her is true, doesn't actually despise me.

I have written a letter to the Session of my church, outlining my decision and a few reasons, and have posted it, so currently I am waiting for the sky to fall. I will be visited with cake.

Additionally, there will be a church discipline process. I expect I might be asked to confer with my elder.

There will be many hurt feelings over this, since I haven't mentioned anything of my internal debates to my two closest friends, both church members. (I didn't feel I had the liberty to unsettle them with my struggles.)

There will also be family difficulties. While I still have three children at home (hence my haste in this process), and an unruffled atheist for a husband, I also have three grown and gone, two of whom are professed (Protestant) Christians. There will be words. May they be charitable ones.

I wish I could take off the bandage by tiny degrees, but time is short. If nothing else, our year of earthquakes has shown us that we can't boast of tomorrow.

Here's a link to a post I've found supremely helpful in overcoming that most Protestant of stumbling-blocks, our Lady's title of co-redemptrix.

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/11/mary-as-co-redemptrix/

In the Lord,

Jocelyn

How Does Your Library Grow?

2011-06-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

+JMJ+

While the latest online expression of bibliomania reminds Mrs. Darwin's other half of what it was like to start building his own library from scratch . . .

. . . certainly by age ten I had caught the book bug, and talked about "my library", which I consciously built--acquiring copies even of books my parents already owned so that years hence, when I was on my own, my library wouldn't have gaps in it. (Ah, the idealism of youth. I did not realize how inevitable it is that every library have gaps in it.)

. . . an impending move across the world threatens an older library Emily J has been building for years:

If I keep these books, will I be retaining a bit of the college student I once was? Will I maintain a certain elan if I have these books on my shelf? The problem is not only that I don't have enough shelves, but that that student is long gone. Why is it so hard to let go? Stripping away the accretions of the last few years is more painful than plucking eyebrows. This stuff represents a certain identity I don't have anymore. And the possibility of an academic identity that I will never achieve. I need to make a clean break. Detachment, detachment! one side of my mind keeps chanting. The other side whines, but I love this!

I'll bet even the ancient librarians at Alexandria had to face the fact that they'd always have gaps in their collection, although I don't know whether there were enough scrolls in their age for them to worry about having to trim some fat. In any case, the library was destroyed, thus becoming one of the hugest gaps in humanity's collective hoard--a loss we still feel today, an age when we are glutted with endless new things to read.

All this talk of tending libraries from infancy to maturity--with new hints that dedicated librarians might also have to guard against senility--has inspired a couple of organic metaphors.

The garden that needs as much regular weeding as regular watering.

The bowl of yeast we have to keep feeding if we want our daily bread.

I'm sure I'll be able to come up with more in time . . .

Peter Kreeft on Till We Have Faces

2011-06-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

A reader shared a link on my blog to this Peter Kreeft lecture on Till We Have Faces. It's more than an hour long; but very worth it. I feel like several pieces clicked into place for me. The interplay between Christianity and the pagan myth, the role of the Trinity. And what Ungit is all about. Actually, by the end of the Q&A session at the end of the talk I was in tears. So I thought I'd throw it out there if anyone is interested.

I am not making any progress on The Moviegoer, alas. I just don't think I'm in the mood for Walker Percy right now. I was hopeful; but I don't think it's going to happen.

And I suppose it's my turn to pick a book for June, right?

Anyone want to read Sigrid Undset's Catherine of Siena

Or a biography of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frasatti

Or Women, Sex and The Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching by Erika Bachiochi?

Or Pope Benedict's Light of the World

The Moviegoer

2011-05-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

If anyone still wants to post on "Till We Have Faces," please do. And if anyone wants to post on something else entirely, please do. I'm going to go ahead with Percy.

In re-reading this, I keep thinking about my old La Leche League friends, a group of beautiful, creative, nice, generous, caring, self-styled sexy mamas who are also completely wack-a-doodle. Some of them would self-identify as Buddhist, a couple are Christian, but hip Christian, if you know what I mean, and the rest are completely anti-religion, but pro-love, and have hearts and stars surrounded by swirly marks tattooed on their forearms and lower backs.

In the past year, after extended breast-feeding, attachment parenting, home-schooling co-op style and eating about ten tons of scones, half dozen of them left their husbands and became lesbians. I'm not making this up.

And what does any of this have to do with the Moviegoer?

These are the kinds of doobies of disfunction that people roll when their personal definition of niceness and goodness are the only parameters they have for how to live.

I love the scene where Binx listens to "This I Believe" on the radio. (p108)

"I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual--

Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.

I believe in music, in a child's smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.

This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt's house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.

…I believe in believing. This--I believe."

What does it mean to believe in believing? To value one's own opinion above any other-- to consider oneself beyond question, without flaw. "Belief" takes on its own authority, even if the object or subject of belief is ridiculous. How many times have you heard someone say, "Isn't it enough that I try to be a good person? I may not go to church every Sunday, but I care about others, yadda yadda…" So fine, it's good to be good. It's nice to be nice. Congratulations.

"Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian." (108)

Everyone Binx encounters is either good, nice, dead or Presbyterian, and not one of them cares what he has to say. He asks them questions, they ask him questions, but about one hundred percent of the time, Percy mentions that so and so wasn't listening for the response to his question.

"One hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead…" (228) There's no questioning or informed decision making. The self IS the decision.

Binx won't pick a side between liberal and conservative, but in acknowledging the humanism that most people espouse, he has tacitly chosen to be "other."

"Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive."

Binx has chosen to let his own opinions remain open to scrutiny. The sign of life is opposition, either to oneself or to others. Is he still selfish? yes. Is he still flawed? Yes. But he's not guilty of the kind of hubris that causes one to declare their life's work: "To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off." (101) A life's "value" similar to those inspiring quotes by Rumi that my La Leche League friends love to put on their Facebook status--to change the world with a smile, to write love on their arms, to be the change you want to see. So self-satisfied. And so vague.

While Percy never makes a plug for Catholicism in The Moviegoer--for someone even marginally acquainted with the faith, he gives no choice. It's a question I ask myself sometimes, when I encounter people who seem to know exactly what they're going to do in life. They don't question or doubt their decisions, and I wonder, "How can you be so certain you are right? Why don't you question yourself--that it's the right thing to get a job, or get your tubes tied, or leave your husband?"

The cost of being so self-certain, of never doubting or learning from or listening to others, is death. You become immovable, uninterested. Or you become Kate, discovering that what she's been told all her life--that she's the authority on herself--is false. When she realizes she's not actually the authority--then what? She wants either to A) Die or B) be told what to do.

Hello Magisterium.

Walker Percy anyone?

2011-05-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of The Moviegoer, I'll pay someone to read it with me.

Jumping in on Lewis

2011-05-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I would rather wait and let someone else lead the conversation on Till We Have Faces, but I finished it on our recent trip to Texas and am already forgetting some of the thoughts it inspired. I had read the book before (maybe 10 years ago?) and remembered the plot but not the nuances. I commented to my sister on the phone thatI like this book, but it’s not on my list of favorites, and I have a hard time putting my finger on why I don’t LOVE this book, because I love the idea of it and I love the ideas in it. On the other hand, I didn’t love CS Lewis’ space trilogy either, so maybe it is that his fiction, aside from the Narnia books, doesn’t have the luminosity of his apologetics and memoirs. Maybe it’s the dream sequence at the end that seems like an artificial appendage. Maybe it’s just my taste buds.

Even though I don’t have this one on my all-time fave’s list, I did like it better this time around, especially reading it right after my recent review of world lit. Orual’s complaints don't seem quite so farfetched this time around. She’s so bristly and self-defensive that she is difficult to like as a heroine, and I think when I read this book the first time her faults seemed less excusable through the lenses of my own idealism. Her selfishness in her treatment of Istra/Psyche is so obvious to the reader that it’s hard to sympathize with her when she blackmails Psyche. Nonetheless I had more empathy for her this time, maybe because it’s so tempting to see yourself as ugly and unloved, the injured or aggrandized party, and to waste emotional energy contemplating how others have failed or abandoned you. I can only guess as you get older, you gain more and more experience in the shortcomings of human love. You would think that loving others would get easier with practice, but it’s easy to imagine how Orual doesn’t want to grant the people she loves the freedom to leave her. I didn’t want the Fox to leave her either. I fear that my own brand of love tends dangerously toward the devouring variety, also.

And what heartbreak to learn at the end of your life how much your selfishness has hurt others when you thought you were loving them. It’s hard to imagine that Bardia would’ve lived his life differently if his queen and his wife were less jealous of each other, but maybe he would have suffered less if they were more generous in allowing him freedom to divvy up his time between them the way he saw fit.

I’m still unclear about what to think about Ungit -- and how much of the pagan world is Lewis representing as figures for Christian faith? Is she supposed to be a fearsome pagan earthy fertility goddess to be abandoned, the Eternal Feminine, or some allegorical figure for the desire for fruitful rituals and faith? What does Psyche’s trip to the underworld to get Beauty for Ungit mean? That Psyche’s figurative death and resurrection out of love for Orual make Orual beautiful and worthy of standing before the god? It's tempting to read this as allegory, but then the characters don't fit in a neat box, like the Fox who seems to represent the rational view of life, but he loves poetry and the girls and seems to want to believe in something.

Because You Care...

2011-05-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

I solved my wedding shoes problem by wearing black pumps with this dress instead:

Except my dress was navy blue and looked better on me than it does on the model, because I fill it out nicely. Take that, ten-year-reunion.

And I read Till We Have Faces! But I'm still chewing on it. I was struck by Orual's refusal to allow herself to be joyful in any circumstance -- she's so shut into herself and her own loves that she can't open herself to happiness.

Until We Read Until We Have Faces

2011-04-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

Ladies, I made a big deal about how I'd waited to read Until We Have Faces with you all, and then Holy Week and Easter happened. What I'm saying is that it's still sitting pristine up on the mantel in my library. Life is going on at a tremendous pace -- on top of our own sorrows and joys we've had the sorrow and joy of the Church. And this weekend I'm going to the long-anticipated wedding of an old friend, before which all fiction pales. I will try to read this week and put up a post, but I don't know if I can make any guarantees.

So, feel free to discuss Until We Have Faces if you're ready to talk about it. But if you really want to help out a friend, recommend some shoes to go with this dress:

And do it fast. Because I only have until Saturday before I have to make a stunning impression on college friends I haven't seen in ten years.

Leontes and the Annunciation

2011-03-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

Last month I read the first act of The Winter's Tale on the same day that my husband and I had an argument. I did something he had specifically asked me to do (or so I thought) and it caused a big headachy disagreement. I found myself empathizing with Hermione, who did exactly what her husband Leontes asked her to do and found that it sent him around the bend. Don't you just want to shake him, when he assumes that she's done his bidding for nefarious reasons?

Leontes is an extreme case, of course, but I think many of the most painful kinds of conflict arise when one person assumes wrongly that he knows another's intentions. It doesn't have to be "You wanted him to stay because you're having an affair with him". It can be any variation on "You did this deliberately to hurt me," from a child's assertion that his brother tripped over the Lego structure on purpose to a great-grandma's certainty that an oversight was a willful slight.

There's something so appealing about the belief that we've seen into another person's heart that I think those assumptions are particularly hard to let go of. We know what's true and we won't be dissuaded. I haven't finished the play yet but I don't imagine it will be agreeable for Leontes to realize that he's been acting like an idiot.

Today's a good day for thinking about erroneous certainty, I think, because the more we know that we're right, dernit, the harder it is to say "Be it done unto me...." I'd like to think I'd never let a misperception send me off the deep end like Leontes, but I have certainly caused damage hanging onto my own faulty assumptions. It's poison on a smaller scale, but it's poisonous nonetheless. Food for thought, on the day when we honor the one whose submission to truth crushed the serpent's head.

Heather King on Faith and Stories

2011-03-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Did you see Heather King's latest essay at Patheos, The Word and Our Stories?
I thought this passage was particularly illuminating and very much reminded me of our discussion about the endings of memoirs:

To be a sober alcoholic is to have a very particular experience of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Just as the Gospels mostly lead up to the Passion, then give us a very short, very patchy glimpse of the Resurrection, an alcoholic's story—what it was like, what happened, what it's like now—is generally about three-quarters "drunkalogue" and one-quarter sobriety. That's not because sobriety is less "important," but because the Resurrection is inherent in the way the story is told, which is with humility, gratitude, and often humor that would do the nearest Comedy Club proud.
As with the Gospels, the drunk's Resurrection is patchy, ephemeral, incapable of being held onto. Just as on the road to Emmaus the disciples recognized Christ in the breaking of bread and he immediately vanished from their sight, an authentic story describes our moments of joy, our epiphanies on earth, as fleeting. An authentic story imparts the sense that—just as with those post-Resurrection stories in the Gospels—sometimes we "see" Christ, sometimes we don't; sometimes we recognize him in the flesh, and sometimes we experience him more as spirit.

The Winter's Tale for the Tail of Winter

2011-03-07T06:58:00.000-08:00

Looks like the vote is The Winter's Tale. Looking forward to it, ladies.

In Like a Lamb

2011-03-01T19:55:00.000-08:00

Happy March, everybody. At my house the daffodils are peeking up through the soggy leaves and my children are telling me that 40 degrees is plenty warm enough for going coatless. I think we're all eager for spring.

This is my first post here-- I'm Jamie, mother to five, wife to one. I have some ideas to throw out for our March book.

First idea: one of my plans for 2011 is to finish the works of Shakespeare, and I wondered if you all might be interested in a Shakespeare play. One suggestion is The Winter's Tale, which is all about persecution and betrayal and persevering when your husband goes crazy. (Not that anyone here needs advice on crazy husbands.) Also on my list for the year is Henry VIII, which might spark some fun discussion.

No pressure whatsoever to join in the crazy Shakespeare project, though. Further ideas: I'd also be interested in reading Diary of a Country Priest, or a Wendell Berry novel, perhaps A Place on Earth.

Tell me what you think, please. Can we aim to settle on something by this weekend?

Another Unhappy Marriage?

2011-02-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

Nick Joaquin gives us another look at marriage in our second short story for February: The Summer Solstice.

I wasn't actually going to introduce this as a story about marriage--although, after May Day Eve, of course that is what it looks like. What I wanted to do was mention Joaquin's fascination with the way pagan and Christian traditions have fused together in Philippine culture, to the point that they are as impossible to tear asunder . . . kind of like a husband and wife. =P

Obviously, the text itself bears out the marriage imagery, with Lupeng and Paeng's union becoming a kind of microcosmic expression of the tension between the cult of the Tadtarin and the devotees of St. John the Baptist.

In the May Day Eve discussion, Emily described the story as "another depiction of an unhappy marriage"--which rather surprised me. I've always seen Lupeng and Paeng as an ordinary couple: no longer ecstatically in love, perhaps, but not likely to separate, either. She's very restless in this story, and maybe she has been restless for a long time but just doesn't know it until she sees their driver uncharacteristically afraid of the wife he usually beats on a whim. It awakens something subversive in her--and then the attentions of the shallow Guido, who claims to find the old and overweight Tadtarin beautiful, make it worse.

Meanwhile, in space of three days, the celebration of St. John's Day, which is the "masculine" festival of the story, is swallowed up by the celebration of the Tadtarin, which Joaquin seems to say is the former's feminine counterpart. They are in a marriage in which there are only two options: the female submitting to the male's whip . . . or the male crawling on the floor to kiss the female's feet.

Not that it's much to worry about. I'm sure that by the next day, all the "possessed" couples are back to "normal."

Another Poem with Another Mirror !

2011-02-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

Just when you thought the only one you had to worry about seeing in a mirror was Bloody Mary . . .

Mirror
by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

I read this poem with a tutee earlier in the school year and now it is one of my favourite Plath poems of all time.

Things in the Glass

2011-02-11T20:19:00.001-08:00

This evening I was shelving books in our home library when I came across a volume of Bartlett's Quotations and upon flipping it open, saw this poem by Sarah Morgan Bryant Piatt (1836-1919):

My mother says I must not pass
Too near that glass;
She is afraid that I will see
A little witch that looks like me,
With a red mouth to whisper low
The very thing I should not know.
--The Witch in the Glass, 1888

Here's proof that looking glass legends have a long history in America! Or, Mrs. Piatt's husband served as American Consul to Ireland, so perhaps she picked up the story there.

The sum and total of my knowledge of Sarah Morgan Bryant Piatt.

Leaping into February!

2011-02-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

When I was younger, Manila had a huge power crisis that called for the rationing of electricity. There wasn't enough to go around, so everyone had to endure hours of blackouts (which my fellow locals have inexplicably called "brownouts" since before I was born) on a daily basis. The worst ones, as you can imagine, were those which came at night.

I wish I could recall all the scary "shorts" I heard at school in those days. Half urban legend, half familiar-sounding folktale, they all had something to do with darkness and candles and mirrors. The one I found most memorable was the first version of "Tres Marias" I had the dark pleasure of hearing.

The next time the lights go out, a breathless classmate told me, I should go to the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, hold up my candle for light, close my eyes, say, "Maria, Maria, Maria," and open my eyes . . . and then I'd see "Maria" in the mirror before me.

Who this "Maria" was, nobody ever explained. You're supposed to know it in the part of your mind that understands scary stories.

Anyway, I very nearly tried summoning "Maria"--just to see if she would appear--but never got around to doing it after I heard that if you knock on the mirror instead, you'd summon the devil. For even then I had no doubt that, unlike "Maria," he seizes every opportunity to come when he's called.

The rolling blackouts had stopped completely by the time I was in the sixth grade, with my homeroom on my old school building's third floor--a level which had near-mythical status in the eyes of everyone in the lower grades. The "Tres Marias" story had been adjusted accordingly: if you want to see "Maria," everyone knew, all you had to do was remain on the third floor after the dismissal bell, wait for everyone else to leave you behind, and then say her name three times. I don't know if anyone ever tried it, but I know that everyone who had ever had to go back for something at the end of the day always took a friend with her--and that they always came back at a run, hands tightly clasped. (Heck, I once did the same with a girl I didn't even like and for whom the sentiment was mutual: for those frantic five minutes, we were besties!)

I mention these memories not to be tiresome (Forgive me if I failed!), but to introduce our first Nick Joaquin short story of the month: May Day Eve.

Joaquin is well-known for taking these kinds of legends and folktales--the kind that are only fully alive in an oral tradition--and weaving them into his otherwise realistic fiction. And I think the reason I love him so much is that the same oral tradition he draws from is part of my reality.

So when I came to that part in the story where Agueda stands in front of the dark mirror to chant the incantation--having convinced herself that she doesn't really believe in it and is only doing it to prove her superstitious friends wrong--I knew it wouldn't end well.

But this is more than a story of what you see in mirrors you aren't supposed to be looking into, and I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks of it after you've read it.

Before We Leap into February . . .

2011-02-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

(Before you begin, please know that I beg your tolerance if this post comes out badly. I just surfaced from a Big Bang Theory marathon and I sound like Sheldon in my head. Which is all wrong, I know, because he's far more elegant with words than I will ever be.)

Well, it seems that my turn to pick a book has come around only a couple of months after I first had it.

Now, I don't want to defy the arrangement of the alphabet or anything, but as a relatively new member myself, I'm willing to trade months with either Jamie or Dorian now, so that another newbie can get her feet wet faster! =)

Of course, one could argue that the alphabet is The Alphabet and that I have to choose a book whether I like it or not . . . in which case, I just have one question:

Do you want to read something else Filipino or should I go for something more "international"?

PS--Happy Candlemas, everyone!

Charlotte Bronte's "Biographical Notice"

2011-01-28T18:18:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

I'm rereading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights with a tutee this month. The text includes an "Editor's Preface" and a "Biographical Notice" written by Charlotte, which have been reprinted in (as far as I can tell) all subsequent editions. I found this passage from the Biographical Notice, which is about herself and Anne as much as Emily, especially interesting:

Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the "writing on the wall," and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation. We have a right to rejoice when a true seer comes at last, some man in whom is an excellent spirit, to whom have been given light, wisdom, and understanding, who can accurately read the "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" of an original mind . . . and who can say with confidence, "This is the interpretation thereof."

Living authors like Heather King can show up in the comboxes and make everything more interesting, but we can only guess what the dead ones might think of us!

Interestingly (perhaps ironically!), this Biographical Notice is also where we find Charlotte's famous description of her other sister Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall as "an entire mistake." She was never happy that Anne had had it published, and after Anne's death, she kept the publisher from printing any new editions. She clearly believed she had accurately read the "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" of her own sister's mind--and I suppose that of all the critics who have ever lived, she has the strongest basis for saying so. But were her actions condescending or what?

Wide Sargasso Sea, or Bertha's story

2011-01-25T19:10:00.001-08:00

Alrighty, Blogger has already eaten this post entirely, so let me reconstruct it if I can...

Anyway, around mid-century the author Jean Rhys, a native of Dominica, was struck by the idea of writing the story of Bertha, Mr. Rochester's mad Creole wife. In 1966, she published Wide Sargasso Sea, a re-imagining of Bertha's back story, which was a critical success and won a major literary prize. It's billed as having an anti-colonialism bent and also as being a feminist narrative, but whatever -- it was a good read. Told from multiple view points, it follows Antoinette Cosway (later Bertha Mason) through an isolated childhood to a quickly arranged marriage with Mr. Rochester, to a passionate newly-wed existence that begins to implode when Mr. Rochester learns some of Bertha's family history. The truth is pretty fluid in the book, so it's hard to know what did and didn't really happen, but I found it engrossing even if I wasn't ready to assign in canonical Jane Eyre status.

I easily found a copy in my library and breezed through it quickly, so if anyone's out and about this week (before we shift to our as-yet-unassigned February read), pick it up and let me know what you think.

While researching movie versions (Netflix has both adaptations, but they're both labeled as being fairly explicit in a way the book is not), I came across the Sock Puppet Theater version. It has little do with the actual plot of the novel, but it's so charming I must share.

jane's ideas on marriage

2011-01-25T05:59:00.000-08:00

warning: Spoilers ahead

Can I say how much I enjoyed reading Jane Eyre? How little I wanted it to end--and yet, I also didn't want to stop reading. This is the dilemma I always hope for in a book, and it's so hard to come by on the NYT notable book list. Why do I keep looking there when the best books are sitting on my shelf unread? I won't make the mistake again soon.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the ending of Jane E. and how it could easily have ended with Jane's discovery of Rochester's secret--a tragedy. I wonder what editorial decisions went into to turning the narrative around, giving Jane a new life, giving her a family and money. I wonder if Bronte always knew that that was where she would take her heroine.

That image of the tree, struck by lightening, two separate trunks cleaving to one another until they both decay--I couldn't decide if this was a beautiful metaphor or a depressing one. On one hand, we all decay--as Mrs. D so beautifully noted in her last post. Isn't it better to meet the inevitable with another self at our side?

On the other hand--with all of Jane's comments on not wanting to lose her independence, and of not being Rochester's equal, at this stage in the narrative the decay aspect of the metaphor looks like a condemnation of marriage.

I know I'm drifting dangerously close to a feminist reading of JE, but what does it say that a marriage did not take place between Jane and Rochester until she had acquired a fortune and been wooed by another man, while Rochester lost half of his fortune, was physically maimed, and shunned by society? Is this really a marriage of equals? And if so--why is the cost of equality so high for Rochester? I realize that his loss of looks, sight, fortune and esteem all serve to bring down his pride, and give him a taste of the suffering that Jane has experienced for her entire life. But the book gives me enough faith in Jane to assume she could be his equal even without all his loss (perhaps even an equal in pride--which is perhaps what Bronte wanted to avoid).

Found myself a bit jealous of the later descriptions of their marriage--spending all day reading to one another and describing the scenery. I suppose, as with everything else, there can be too much of a good thing--but I don't see it happening soon.

Jane and Appearance

2011-01-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

Jane emphasizes her appearance. She doesn't fit the fashionable type: tall, dark, and elegant. Over and over again she describes herself as plain, having irregular features, small, etc. This is comforting to the reader; almost every woman secretly worries she's some kind of ugly, and it's good to see the less beautiful girl get the man and the fortune. When I first read Jane, at 13, I felt a great kinship with her, although my features are generally regular and at the time I had a long thick mass of curly hair that was to die for. Still, I've never had a Grecian nose, so I was just like Jane, right?

This time around, I read from the perspective of an older, long married woman, and Jane sounds a dream of lost youth. I'm 32, and I've had five children in fairly close succession, which has irrevokably changed my body in ways obvious and and not so visible. Taking a break from reading Jane, I looked in the mirror and was underwhelmed: I have the bad skin and flaking scalp of winter dryness, my hair wants washing because I can't be sure of getting hot water in the shower, my hands are cracked and scaly, I have lines on my face and an increasing number of gray hairs. Jane sees herself as dull and uncompetitive; I (like Mr. Rochester, I guess) saw a fresh girl at the height of her powers. Gawd, I feel old.

More fun, in March

2011-01-22T20:17:00.001-08:00

The new Jane Eyre opens March 11th. Betty, let's you and me meet up and go see it together!

Have a little fun with me

2011-01-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

Reading Jane

2011-01-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

Ladies, I'm still reading. This is my third or fourth go-round with Jane, so this time I'm taking it in a leisurely fashion, trying to catch nuances and themes that eluded me in my younger days. This paid off on the first page or two -- I'd never realized that the pictures in the book Jane reads in the breakfast room (the book John Reed throws at her) are the unconscious basis for the paintings that Jane shows to Mr. Rochester. (I say "unconscious" because although I haven't reached that scene yet, I believe Jane tells Mr. Rochester that she didn't paint from models but from her imagination.)

Oddly enough, on this reading, Mrs. Reed became a much more human character to me. Before she'd always seemed a monster of injustice, barely short of a caricature. Now I could see her frustration, dealing with a child she didn't understand, cognizant enough to know that Jane is different but not intelligent or compassionate enough to learn how to best manage her. I confess: the moment where Mrs. Reed holds Jane down in her bed and dares her to speak another word resonated with me. I've done my share lately of dealing with fractious children behaving in ways I can't explain, sassing me (so it seems) when I'm tired or cranky or in pain, and the temptation to grab them and make them shut up is great. I don't sympathize with Mrs. Reed, but she's become a more complex character to me, and I admire Charlotte Bronte's ability to create a character, even one who only features in a few chapters of a long book.

No more human now than before, however, is the odious Mr. Brocklehurst, that paragon of hypocrisy -- and that's odd, because he is apparently based on the real head of the school Charlotte Bronte attended, the school at which two of her sisters died of tuberculosis. Perhaps the horror of those schooldays was still too raw to Bronte to allow her to give nuance and subtlety to the man who perpetrated such injustices.

I had to buy a new copy of Jane Eyre, having lost the one my grandmother sent me ages ago. Ladies, Penguin has a new line of clothbound hardcover classics that are a delight to look at and hold. I bought Jane Eyre and Little Women (which cover is charmingly patterned with images of scissors), and I can't stop looking at them and picking them up.

Jane again

2011-01-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Readers, I didn’t want this book to end. I stayed wrapped in its spell all weekend. My husband has started to resent dear Jane since I preferred to cuddle with her and a cup of hot tea, rather than cozy up on the couch for movie-watching with him. So finally I savored the last few pages and put it down Monday morning. It cast such a spell, I hated to leave that world.

But to put a finger on exactly what is incantatory… the language, the romance, the setting, the loftiness of Jane’s faith in the individual soul?

Like Melanie, I'm looking forward to other comments, because I just have some rambling thoughts, no coherent argument, to make.

After Betty mentioned our friend’s essay on the romance of domesticity in Touchstone, along with the fact that I started a biography of Lord Byron’s wife and sister, I found myself questioning whether Jane was a Romantic or not. She is practical and resourceful and doesn’t seem to suffer self-doubt, but she has this restlessness even at Morton. She trusts that passion is the mark of true love, but she believes it is better to be “free and honest” schoolmistress than to be “a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles.” She certainly has high standards and believes strongly in the equality of souls, although she appears to treat servants and her country students with condescension. Her joy in finding she has cousins whom she loves (as opposed to the Reeds) and her satisfaction with her quiet marriage seem to quench any restlessness of her heart; she finds perfect contentment in her small cottage life reading and talking – a romantic - but not capital R Romantic - happily ever after ending.

Some other questions:
Is there any conflict in her rejection of Mr. Rochester’s initial proposal and her offer to go to India as a helper to St. John but not as a wife? On the one hand it seems like she doesn’t care about appearances (despite her faith in physiognomy) as long as she knows she is doing what is right, but on the other hand, you’d think she be able to accept Mr. Rochester’s explanation of why he thought it would be okay to marry Jane because he had talked himself into believing that the first marriage was illegitimate. But Jane is willing, although she dreads the idea, to risk being “the instrument of evil to what you wholly love” rather than risk living in sin.

St. John is an interesting character – are we supposed to admire him or see him as a fanatic? I thought how he described Jane was interesting when he first calls her “impassioned” and then clarifies: “I mean that human affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you. I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus; any more than I can be content… to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountain – my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed – made useless. You hear now how I contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot, and justified the vocations even of hewers of wood, and drawers of water, in God’s service – I, his ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness. Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.”

This speech of his, too, stuck out: “It is hard work to control the workings of inclination, and turn the bent of nature: but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get – when our will strains after a path we may not follow – we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste – and perhaps surer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.”

If he had decided to be a soldier or statesman instead of a clergyman, would he have been able to marry Miss Oliver and to find an outlet for his energy in those pursuits? Or would that have made his soul smaller? Is his example a justification of celibacy to a culture that prized marriage so highly?

On another note, do you think novelists were especially susceptible to faith in physiognomy? The idea that you can read a person’s personality in the prominences and valleys of their face seems quaint now, but is there enough history in people’s faces that the only fault is to regard it as a science?

Jane Eyre reading notes

2011-01-14T11:45:00.000-08:00

I just finished Jane Eyre after two nights of staying up far too late because I just couldn't put it down. I can't wait till everyone else is done. In the meantime I don't have much coherent to say; but thought I'd post some of the notes I made as I was reading.

First, this passage amused me-- I actually chuckled out loud as I sat in the OB's office attached to the fetal monitor for my non-stress test-- because although the language is not at all contemporary, the sentiment expressed by Miss Ingram against pretty men who are concerned only about their appearance is similar to one I've heard in rants against "metrosexual" men:

"Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!" exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. "Poor, puny things not fit to stir a step beyond papa's park-gates; nor to go even so far without mama's permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman-- her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour; let their motto be: -- "Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my advice were I a man."

And another bit that amused me is the way Jane and Mr Rochester bicker a bit over money before she sets off to see Mrs. Reed:

"You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!" he growled, "At your peril you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I've a use for it."
"And so have I, sir," I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind me. "I could not spare the money on any account."
"Little niggard! said he, "refusing me a pecuniary reuest! Give me five pounds, Jane."
"Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence."
"Just let me look at the cash."
"No, sir, you are not to be trusted."

My edition, the Signet Classic, has an afterward by Arthur Zeiger of The City College, New York in which he complains about how stilted Bronte's dialog is to a modern ear. I didn't notice it to be stilted at all; but then maybe I'm used to reading period novels. In any case, the above exchange is certainly one of the better bits of dialog.

Another of Zeiger's complaints I found much more apt and that was about the plotting. I'll agree that I found I had to turn a blind eye to the improbability of Jane's turning up at her cousins' doorstep when she flees Thornfield. That did strain the limits of my credulity and I just had to accept it. Though at the same time, I wasn't really bothered by the telepathic communication between Jane and Mr. Rochester which leads her to reject St John's proposal and instead return to Thornfield. So perhaps I'm just an inconsistent reader.

One last unconnected thought was about the nature of Bertha Mason's mental illness. Especially after working as a receptionist and doing the billing for a group of therapists for a while after college, I am fascinated by the way mental illness is portrayed in literature. Sometimes you can guess what the condition would be in today's diagnostic terms. At other times, it seems so hard to figure out. A large part of the barrier is just that mental illness was understood so differently that I think the symptoms are even perceived and described differently. In the same way, I also sometimes have a hard time figuring out physical ailments in older novels.

All this is really random. I hope someone else has a bit more focus than I do right now.

More on Jane Eyre

2011-01-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

This morning NPR had a bit about a study done some years ago on inmates who had attempted to assassinate political figures. The researchers found that many of the would-be assassins were motivated by a desire for notoriety, in revolt against anonymity and failure. For some reason it reminded me of this passage from chapter 12, when Jane describes her restless nature.

“I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.

Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it – and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended – a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, to laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."

Not trying to say that having a restless heart makes you a would-be assassin, just noting the universality of that sense of longing for more.

I must be here to fulfill some kind of quota

2011-01-08T00:22:00.000-08:00

I think what happened here is that Betty, MrsDarwin, and Melanie decided to remediate my poor reading habits as documented elsewhere, and the rest of you took pity upon me. Or else you didn't know that I snuck in with a fake ID, I don't know.

I've been blogging for so long (HI ENBRETHILIEL REMEMBER ME?) that I can't imagine the world really needs to know much more about me, but I see that the protocol is to write a contributor bio. So.

I've wanted to be a writer and a teacher my whole life. Something along the lines of saving the world through writing a lot of things in its general direction, or something. And yet I managed to go through my entire undergraduate education without taking a single English/Lit class. I find this shameful and consider it an indictment of the AP program in this country. I also am really good at skimming.

Anyway, so now I write about teaching, and teach at people if they will hold still for long enough. I read constantly but a lot of it is either online news and commentary (cough: blogs) or textbook/nonfiction reading. I also have terrible, terrible book amnesia. Did I mention I am here as a charity case?

It appears that we are supposed to reveal our Texas connections so I will say: I currently live in Texas. I am not from Texas. (But Texas wants me anyway).

I'm from a college town in Georgia - I guess you could say I'm a southern expat. I loved growing up around University People. University People were the smartest, tweediest, most unironically hip people in the world, and I was sure I would join their ranks until I got a little sidetracked. Which is okay, because I think I'm more suited to hopping from one interest to another rather than focusing on a particular area of study. That's what I tell myself.

So, thanks to you all for your hospitality, and tell me what to do next.

Starting Jane Eyre

2011-01-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

I'm only on chapter five; but thought I'd start the ball rolling anyway.

Reading about how unloved Jane was as a child I find it amazing she didn't turn out as twisted as Mrs Reed accuses her of being. I can only think that the affection that Bessie shows her does mitigate the lack of affection and the outright cruelty of her aunt and cousins. Or is a wonderful demonstration of how resilient children really are.

The detail that stood out most in the first chapters was about Jane's doll:

To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must always love something, and in the dearth of worthier objects of my affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown; and when it lay there, safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

I think what strikes me most is how puzzled the adult Jane is at the memory. I suppose in part her reaction seems odd because it's such a contrast with a Christmas picture book I've been reading over and over again to Isabella, The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden, which is the tale of a little orphan girl who falls in love with a doll. And of the doll who falls in love with the girl. Godden takes it for granted that a doll is a worthy object of affection for an orphan child. Though she also provides Ivy with an adoptive family at the end of the story, so I suppose the doll is necessary but not sufficient. Godden has written quite a few doll tales, all of them are at least in part told from the dolls' point of view.

Jane on the other hand seems to feel some distaste for her childish affection for the doll. I can't tell if it's just that it was meant to be a rather hideous and pathetic doll or if it's a more general feeling of revulsion for that much emotion being lavished on an object rather than a person. I suspect the latter though since she refers to it as a "graven image". We're meant to see it as a sort of idolatry.

Guest Post: Heather King Responds

2011-01-07T06:04:00.000-08:00

MrsDarwin sez: I wrote to Heather King and asked if she'd be so kind as to comment on our reading of Parched, and she was gracious enough to stop by, and to write a guest post in response.

If you're not reading Heather's blog, Shirt of Flame, then tolle et lege nunc.

Hi there folks--please know how honored I am that you read Parched, and how gratified I am that you liked it (I think)...For me, the story of a drunk who gets sober is a death and resurrection story, and death and resurrection is the deepest, most interesting, most ever-astonishing story possible.

I've been reflecting lately upon the trajectory of the story of Christ in the Gospels: a very long lead-in to the Passion, then the Passion, then the fairly short "description" of the patchy, ephemeral, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Resurrection. The Resurrection is inherent in the way the story is told. No victimhood, no whining, no anger, no blaming, no reproach, no glamorization of evil, no melodrama made out of (though no diminishing of either) Christ's own suffering. And I think that same trajectory, and that same approach, is what makes for a good memoir. If ever there was hero, it is Christ, but even for Christ, the focus was on the Father, and the Father's glory, not on him.

I agonized long and hard over the family member aspect of the book. One brother asked to be taken out completely, and when I talked to the lawyer from the publishing house (who goes over the memoir with a fine-toothed comb) I was shocked when he at one point asked: "Is there any chance that your mother would sue you?" I said, "WHY?" And the passage he quoted was the (obviously exaggerated for comic effect) one where I described my friend coming over for supper and my mother serving everybody a teaspoon of mashed potatoes and three peas! Which could apparently "damage her reputation in the community."

I replied, "Truth is an absolute defense to a slander claim and I have seven brothers and sisters who would take the stand and say it was more like TWO peas"...

But seriously, my mother loved the book, or said she did. I had a reading in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, next to the town where I grew up, and the whole family, or those who lived in the area, came. After all, I dedicated the book to my parents, profusely thanked them, gave my mother credit for saving my life, and took full responsibility for my actions during and after drinking. But it's true that different family members have a very different view of, and very different experiences of and interpretations of the same event. So I have been very careful in writing about my family, and in fact have hardly done so at all, since...

Here’s to more good reading, and true writing,

Heather

Thoughts on Parched and Memoirs

2011-01-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

Ladies, my home internet was finally set up -- in my own home, at my own desk. It feels like old times as I sit here typing with a baby on my lap (and she sits too; that's how long it's been).

My copy of Parched arrived before Christmas, but Darwin seized upon it first. Thus I first encountered it in the snippets I read over his shoulder. I saw Heather exploring her grandmother's house, then I next encountered her in seedy bars, then suddenly her family was staging an intervention, then she was singing in the kitchen of the rehab house, and these were all isolated vignettes. I found it hard to imagine how the threads would be connected: how, from the wondering child delighting in snooping around grandma's house, did she descend to the sad woman hunched in the living room being confronted with the damage her drunkenness had done her family?

He handed me the book at 11:30; I put it down at 2:45.

Perhaps it underscores my self-absorption, but I spent the rest of the night laying awake composing my own memoirs. Although her descent into the depths was hellish, I knew by the very fact that I was reading her published memoir that she came out all right. But it was the format of the memoir that intrigued me. Right at the beginning I was seized by the minor detail, underlining her family's borderline poverty, of how the children wore plastic bread bags in their boots to keep out the cold. Heather King and I don't have many points of similarity (I'm a very slow drinker, for starters, so I've never been drunk in my life), but at that moment I was transported back into my own childhood, in the kitchen of our trailer, sitting on the peeling sheet vinyl floor, as my mother fastened bread bags around our socks with big rubber bands before we wrestled on our snow boots -- something I'd forgotten; something my own children will never have to remember.

Of course the problem with memoirs is that they necessarily involve other people; people who are often still alive and may disagree with one's interpretation of their actions or motivations. There are many episodes in my own life I wouldn't put into print until my mother was dead; I wondered how Heather King's family, and her mother, in particular, felt about her book. Did her mom feel that she'd been unaffectionate? Would she say that Heather was making a big deal out of nothing? I ask honestly; I loved the early family sections because family life is so universal that even without being like my own family (now or then) many sections rang true and clear. I don't have a similar paradigm for drunkenness.

I've been reading Heather's blog, Shirt of Flame; I wonder if we might contact her and ask her to comment over here on our reading of Parched. (Betty, you'd enjoy her current post, which includes a fine dissection of Jonathan Franzen.)

Next book

2011-01-04T05:33:00.000-08:00

Just got home last night, so apologies for the late response to Betty's cue to pick a new book.

And of course, I can't decide, so time for a vote:

1. Something old: Jane Eyre or The Scarlet Letter. I haven't looked at either of these since high school. Wanted to reread JE before seeing the movie, but Hawthorne is shorter, and rereading "Young Goodman Brown" a couple months ago made me want to go back to Hawthorne.

2. Something newer: These choices are kind of cheats because I finished them on our trip: Sticking with memoirs, we could read Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking about her husband's death. A little slow, but a tender portrait of a celebrity marriage that worked amid reflections on loss.

or

A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott. I loved and hated this book. Would love to hear someone else's take on it. If it were made into a movie, it would be rated R for sex and language, but lots of Catholic overtones. Young unmarried editor at a vanity press gets into a relationship with one of her authors who can't finish his book about a bigamist. She also is sorting through her feelings about her parents and other relationships. Interesting, sometimes irksome characters, but I was intrigued by the conclusion.

or

Short stories by William Trevor: A Bit on the Side. I'm actually not quite done with these. But like the McDermott, I'm having a love/hate relationship with the book. Mostly love. I hadn't read any Trevor before.

or

Something different: The book from the pope, Light of the World. I just ordered it for my dad for Christmas and it came to my house instead of going to him.

So cast your votes. I'm open to suggestions, too, if there is something else you've loved and want to share.

Favorite Quote from Parched

2011-01-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

"It was as if the part of my brain that governed experience had been lobotomized, and this sense of being so deeply separated from my truest, sanest self--the fact that on one hand I felt compelled to engage in behavior that basically consisted of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and that one the other hand I was somehow willing it--created a moral/psychic conflict of such ghastly proportions and satanic complexity I simply tuned it out. Unable to reconcile my warring parts, I stuffed my feelings, tamped down every uncomfortable emotion, compartmentalized myself into two different people--good versus bad, self-pitying versus compassionate, sarcastic versus thoughtful--never knowing who I was, or able to predict who I was going to be on any given occasion." (pp 148-9)

2010-12-30T07:31:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note...

I think we'll continue to choose books in alphabetical order by the first letter of our screen names:

So after me this month follows:

Emily J--January
Enbrethiliel--February
Jamie--March
Melanie--April
Mrs. Darwin--May
Otepoti--June
Pentimento--July

So, Emily's been in town this past week, and I know she's still on the road, so it might be awhile before she gets something up here--but we did get to chat a little about the book. Making a comparison with Mary Karr, which is difficult not to do, seeing as both authors overcame addiction by conversion, it seemed as though the conversion portions of both books were rather brief.

I understand there are numerous different reasons why this might be so, and I know Heather King writes about ongoing conversion elsewhere. But I was thinking specifically about the memoir genre, and how one weakness of the genre would be that the author has to fabricate an ending that hasn't actually taken place--particularly if that ending is of a spiritual nature. We know the authors accepted Christ, but do they finish the race? We cannot know.

Even though I'm drawn to a more personal style of spiritual writing, or testimony, the whole bit is plagued by this kind of, "...And then I found Jesus" simplicity. It feels like an easy ending.
Still, I'm not sure what the alternative would be.

I was reading through some old journals lately, and it was funny how quickly my own reversion took place. It really was the turn of a page--one day I decided to love Jesus. I made a few necessary ammends in my life, and all those pages of preparation and suffering were over. One day I didn't love, the next day I did.

Maybe the ending is just that easy. I don't know.

Loss and Redemption

2010-12-18T22:34:00.000-08:00

I have only read a few pages of Parched and don't have anything as interesting to say as Melanie and Betty in their discussion in the comments, but I thought I’d throw this thought out there as a new post just to continue the conversation. After reading the first chapter and knowing where the story is going, I found myself wishing that I had a drinking or drug problem or some other scandalous situation, just so that I could struggle through a tragedy and survive, and so that I could have an excuse for the self-pity I wallow in at times. I can’t blame my minor woes on anyone other than myself, because I’m the one who makes them up. I’m like the prodigal son’s older brother who complains about the lack of appreciation. The virtue of gratitude seems to come easier to people who have lost everything and had life restored. I just heard a new story of loss and hardship from Katrina the other day, and found myself wishing we had been here so we could lose everything, too. (Maybe this is related to the anticipation of Christmas glut.) What I should be feeling is immense gratitude that we have been spared those sufferings and a sense of admiration for those who have suffered much and survived. I know this in my head, but it’s easy to let the poor me story crowd out those virtuous thoughts.

So perhaps my Advent challenge as I read the rest of this book on the trip to gather with family is to remember how blessed I am. We helped sort the gifts for the giving tree at church the other day, and I saw the name of a family from our school. Their kids are at the parish school on tuition assistance because they lost their business in Katrina and then lost their home in a foreclosure and had to declare bankruptcy. They went from riches to proverbial rags overnight. There but for the grace of God go I.

But perhaps I belittle the losses I have experienced, and I know I forget the communal nature of suffering with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Reading dark and grungy tales confirms that the story of our souls is one of loss and redemption. I am reminded that even if the ways that we give into the temptation to isolate ourselves are only venial instead of mortal sin, they are a rejection of grace requiring a conversion of heart. So I'm interested in reading more to find out what King's initial moment of conversion was, to discover how she continues to turn away from the urge to give into temptation.

Heather King's "Parched"--First Impressions

2010-12-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

I’m about halfway through the book, and should finish with one more night of good reading, but I wanted to get something up here for those who are ready to begin the discussion.

I’m enjoying the non-linear story-telling, sort of weaving the different elements of her life into a full portrait of the addict, but that leaves me with a non-linear approach to discussing her work. The following are a few pulled quotes that spoke to me, and a couple reasons why they did.

*

“When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.” (p 12)

Comparing this detail with other addiction stories, “Lit” and “The Edge of Sadness” it seems a recurring attribute of addiction is self isolation. I think it’s interesting how most addictive behaviors (internet use comes to mind) at first appear to be a remedy for isolation, but eventually become a reason to self-isolate.

*

“When it came to sibling dynamics, this meant we had one basic mode of communication—ridicule; and one base mode of interaction—violence.” (p 35)

For some reason this makes me want to have more kids. It gives me the sense that a lot of what happened in my childhood, and is currently taking place between my children, might not be as out of the ordinary as I thought it was. Sure it’s painful for everyone—but so’s life. And it does sort of confirm my suspicions that these modes of interaction among siblings can help build character.

*

“And it occurs to me now, as I write, that those two things I did at Nana’s—daydream and snoop—are pretty much what I do today for work.”(47)

This whole scene with her Nana was so touching to me, and also very similar to my own experiences with my Grandmother. I loved every minute of it. And again, it gives the idea that child-rearing is rarely as complicated as we want to make it. Give a girl a drawer to go through and she’ll be happy for a loooong time.

*

One of the most enjoyable elements of this book for me is the freedom with which she writes about the darker episodes of her life. I know that sounds oxy moronic, but it gives me hope for the kinds of books that can be written, read and accepted into the Redemption Narrative. We’ve discussed here before how glossing over details, like Merton’s illegitimate child, and Dorothy Day’s abortion, causes us to underestimate the immense power of God’s mercy. To me, all these details, though they detail a life of incredible suffering, help to affirm the life of faith.

An Excerpt from Parched

2010-12-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

For those who can't get their hands on the book right away:

http://shirtofflame.blogspot.com/2010/12/unsung-saints-continued-mary.html

"Parched" by Heather King

2010-12-03T06:33:00.000-08:00

Parched it is. And I'm sure all of you already read her blog, but if not please check out Shirt of Flame.

...Would like some Divine Intoxication myself.

How are we feeling about December?

2010-12-01T06:26:00.000-08:00

I think we're starting our list over again this month--which makes me chooser.

But is December too busy? Want to wait until January?

I plan to do much reading this month either way. On my list, if any of these should appeal to this group:

My copy of Heather King's "Parched" finally arrived, as did my copy of Jonathan Potter's "House of Words" (poetry).

ALso on the list:
1. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi--started this last night and didn't want to go to sleep. Funny and dry, full of interesting passages, though Steven Riddle says it might get rough in the middle.

2. "Comedy in a Minor Key" and/or "Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson--these just came in on my interlibrary loan, and Francine Prose said they're genius. I'll read anything Francine Prose tells me to.

3. Still wanting to read Murial Spark, Dorothy Sayers, and Marilyn Robinson's "Gilead."

4. Something "Advent-y."

Opinions?

On Tagalog vs. English

2010-11-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

Our discussions of language in the Philippines reminded me of some related observations by another Filipino writer that have always intrigued me. They're from the writer and critic Bienvenido Lumbera, but I came to them second-hand, in the essay Expression in the Philippines by my own favourite local writer, Nick Joaquin.

. . . Lumbera stimulates as he explains the absence of irony in Tagalog writing (writers in the vernacular have for sole tradition writing as naive as Florante at Laura, and for outlets commercial pulps with iron taboos) and the pronounced irony of Filipino writers in English (though generally of the middle class, they're alienated from it and moreover are spared the temptation to write for profit because they have no commercial outlets).

Lumbera's thesis was published in 1967, five years after F. Sionil Jose's first Rosales novel was published, and seventeen years before Po-on. All these books were written in English--but you can buy Tagalog translations, I think. (LOL!!!)

Later in the essay, Joaquin continues:

A related mystery is the continuing "naivete" of writing in the vernacular, including Tagalog. The language problem of the Filipino writer is usually posed as a choice between the native tongue and a foreign medium. But Bienvenido Lumbera has made a most perceptive redefinition of the problem: the choice is really between a written literature and an oral one. The modern writer writes to be read; it's not so much his training in English as the readership he would reach that obliges the 20th-century Filipino to write in English. However well he may know Tagalog, he cannot write in it because, in a sense, Tagalog is not yet a written language. What Tagalog literally has is an audience that does not so much read print as listen to it, the way it listened to bard or storyteller in pre-Hispanic times. It's still in the age of the ballad, not yet in the age of prose.

Po-on and the sense of home

2010-11-18T13:32:00.001-08:00

I was pondering the title -- why "Po-on"? Why not "Rosales" or "Journey", since most of the book is concerned with those? Po-on itself only makes a brief appearance at the beginning, and then everyone has to pack up and get the hell out.

Then I realized that this is rather a silly question for me to ask, who am moving back to my family's old stomping grounds. I think that once you bond to a certain location, you can't get it out of your blood. I've wanted to come back to Ohio for years now, though when I first left I was chomping at the bit to get out. Istak's family, being forced to leave quickly, had to carry Po-on with them. They had no chance to leave the place behind or sever ties smoothly. Almost anywhere they settled would put them in mind of Po-on, whether through similarity or, more strikingly, through dissimilarity.

Damn Good Writing

2010-11-17T06:28:00.000-08:00

Starting a new thread, since the comments are stretching out on the last one.

I just want to say how much I'm enjoying the narration in Po-on. Mrs. Darwin mentioned that it was written in English; I originally thought it was a translation. But I think the ESL quality of it is what appeals to me so much--the simplicity and straightforwardness of the language (almost, but not quite, monosyllabic), and yet the most expressive arrangement.

Mayang doesn't just get mad. "It was her time to be angry."

And Istak calming himself, "Let me not think ill of my father, for he has suffered."

The dialogue has each character sounding like an oracle, which should be annoying, but it's not.

"Will you pray the nine-day novena by yourself and keep the year of mourning?" he asked.

"Everything else that must be done I will do."

That's getting pretty close to iambic pentameter, and I've had to stop reading several times to dwell on a line of dialogue here and there, or some descriptive detail, like the rays that "impaled the mists upon the kapok trees."

I love being in competent hands. Thanks, E, for a fun read.

First Impressions?

2010-11-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

+JMJ+

Although I knew almost as little as everyone else about F. Sionil Jose's Po-on before I started reading it, I was definitely able to put it in a context. That is why I first put it off for so many years and then came to like it so much.

The reason I put off reading it was that I thought I would hate it.

I certainly hated the two novels that were required reading (by law) in high school. They were written during the time the events in Po-on are supposed to be unfolding (I think the central character of this story even gets to read one of them); and they are some of the most bare-faced propaganda in the world. They are read primarily because of their historical significance (which I don't dispute) and the deep, dark desire people in government and public schools have to stick it to the Catholic Church (which they should finally acknowledge). Very recently, while with a friend from Canada, I described the more famous of the two novels as "the Mein Kampf of the Philippines."

And well, I thought Po-on, written in its shadow, would be more of the same.

After all, isn't one of the more famous stories about Jose that he read that famous novel as a boy and wept inconsolably at the fate of its two young altar boys--one of whom is beaten to death by a sacristan, the crime covered up by the clerics? (I do understand. I was staggered the first time I read it . . . and still skip those chapters whenever I have to reread the story again.) I asked myself whether he could possibly write a novel set in an age when clerical abuses were at their height that could also be fair and honest about the historical context. (Am I just showing my own inflexible bias here?)

But really, I think there was more to this chapter of the Philippines' story than the theme The Catholic Church was holding us back. I'm just never optimistic about historical novelists getting that. It's just so easy--almost traditional--to blame the clerics.

And yet . . . despite the fact that in the very first part of Po-on, we see a priest take advantage of one of the girls in his catechism class, and then learn that he was responsible for getting a (possibly innocent) farmer's hand chopped off in the name of "Spanish justice" . . . I think Jose is exploring a new theme. Maybe something along the lines of, After a long, hard, bloody labour, the Catholic Church finally gave birth to the Philippines.

So . . . what were your first impressions?

More Thoughts about A Song for Nagasaki

2010-11-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Well, then I was going to continue to post my thoughts as a comment below because I was too lazy to start a new blog post; but it got to be too long for a comment.

Like my previous comment, this is just a string of random bits, expanded from some notes I made as I read. Not really a coherent train of thought.

I think the moment in the book that most moved me was Chapter 26 "The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry", the chapter about Nagai's daughter. Her story is so sad, though I know it is not unique. It makes me think differently about how I react to my own children's tears: "Our childhood is happy because we can cry. We know that if we cry, our mother will come and comfort us. At times since your mother died, Kayano, I wanted to bawl my eyes out. But an adult cannot do that; only a child who has a mother can." How often do see their crying as an annoyance and an intrusion. How often do I deny them that comfort when they are crying because it is inconvenient to me?

The story about six year-old Kayano saving the pineapple juice and carrying it home from school because she thought her sick father would enjoy it.... I so could see my little Bella doing that. Another moment that made me cry. And that I had to read to my sister and to Dom, to anyone who would listen.

Also, in this chapter Glynn quotes from some of Nagai's books in which he writes down all the things he wants to tell his children before they die. that are not available in English, but which he says became bestsellers. So tantalizing getting a little taste of books I'd love to track down and read:

I'm sure you remember the fairy tale of the bluebird of happiness. When your mother dies, your bluebird, alas, flew away. You will not find your bluebird again except in heaven. Heartbreaking.

I don't frequently read biographies because they are so often dry. Like the bio of Jane Austen I've attempted several times but it's so weighed down with attempts to create the historical milieu through detail after detail that the story gets lost. Glynn knows how to tell a story and obviously cares about Nagai as a person rather than a subject.

I found the connections that Glynn drew between Nagai's prayer practices and traditional Japanese culture fascinating. I'm thinking of the passage in chapter 15 when Nagai is in China for the second time. Glynn writes about Nagai's adaptation of the Buddhist Nenbutsu prayer:

"Nagai's Christianity was deepening, but its style was becoming more Japanese.... Nagai began praying a kind of Christian Nenbutsu. He would choose a short passage from the Psalms or from the pocket New Testament he always carried and repeat it over and over.... His body and mind became almost numb as he worked around the clock, but he kept his spirit at peace by continually murmuring: 'The Lord graciously restores the dead to life.' Another of his Biblical Nenbutsu was a line from Isaiah, prophet in exile: 'For your sake we are massacred daily and reckoned as sheep for the slaughter."

While I don't doubt that Nagai was drawing on those roots and integrating Christian and traditional Japanese prayer practices; still what struck me about the prayers that he prays is how much they resemble the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic's practice of the Jesus prayer. Glynn says that in Nenbutsu the goal is to escape preoccupation with the past and the future and to dwell in the Now. Not at all very different from the goal of Christian prayer, except int he awareness that to be in the Now is to be with Christ.

Likewise with the Parable of the Bare Hut in chapter 25. Nagai's hut is modeled on the huts of Buddhist pilgrim hermits and the later tea hut/private chapel of Christian baron Lord Takayama. But at the same time the Christian tradition in the West also has a history of hermits withdrawing to live alone in spare huts. The early desert fathers, the Irish monks on the islands off the west coast in their little beehive huts. Of course the difference in Nagai's hut is the emphasis on gracefulness and beauty that the Japanese aesthetic brings. In that way, the traditional tea hut has a very different spirit from the crude huts of Western monastics. Perhaps it's more akin to a Benedectine aesthetic, which tends toward balancing beauty and austerity.

If I had any quibble with Glynn's approach, perhaps is was the excessive focus on Nagai's Japanese exceptionalism that de-emphasizes a continuity with traditional Catholic practice. I suppose I'm still thinking of Silence and the insistence that Christianity is somehow a foreign invader that is swallowed in the swamp of Japan. Although I think the fact that it survived underground for centuries without any priests in itself rather belies that claim. Anyhow, it seems to me that Nagai's life shows much more clearly how inculturation happens, it's subtle and nuanced blending the best of East and West. He reads the text of the Book of Revelation onto the landscape of the atomic wasteland of Nagasaki. Far from being a foreign invader, Christianity gives him a rubric that makes sense of the tragedy in a way that native philosophy cannot.

It was especially interesting the contrast between Nagasaki's peaceful celebration of the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the violent protests in Hiroshima. Glynn lays almost all the credit for the difference at Nagai's door. This deep-seated and widespread influence made me wonder whether there has been or might ever be a popular movement in Japan for Nagai's canonization.

About November . . .

2010-11-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

+JMJ+

This is an awkward post for me to write because I barely survived October, the month when Horror movie connoisseurs are pelted with requests for "scary" recommendations. Picking movies for other people is like building a glass house and handing out stones at the house warming party--or at least that has been my experience.

Picking books for other people is almost exactly the same, but with hand grenades instead of stones. My recommendations hardly ever go down well. (Do you suppose that might be due to the way I preface them with comparisons like these? Hmmmmm . . .)

I'm not really sure what the criteria for choosing our books is, and my original idea, from when I was still expecting to be "Miss October", was Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear all of you cringing from here, but this novel really is an incredible expression of faith. Undead faith, yes, but faith nonetheless.) Since then, I've mellowed out a bit and have settled on two possible picks for November. I figured that if I gave everyone more of a choice, I wouldn't be hated so much in the end . . .

#1) Po-on by F. Sionil Jose

Since we had so much fun reading poems from New Zealand last July, I thought I'd suggest something from my own part of the world. Po-on is the one Filipino novel I automatically recommend to anyone who is curious about Philippine literature. It is an epic--a Historical spanning ten of the most tumultuous years of the Philippines, which saw the end of Spanish colonisation and the beginning of American rule. The whole nation's history becomes the central character's personal history.

The above is a rather dry description, so I'll just point you ladies to my non-review of Po-on and my character sketch of Istak Salvador on my blog.

#2) The Other Shepards by Adele Griffin

Just in case everyone would prefer some lighter--or at least shorter--reading, here is a Young Adult recommendation. YA and MG are the genres which take up most of my shelves, so trust me when I say that one doesn't have to be part of that demographic to enjoy them.

A few years before the two Shepard sisters were born, their three older siblings died together in a huge car accident. Although they never knew them, they are haunted by their memory every day, living in the same house the three grew up in and even going to the same school. And it turns out that their lost sister and brother are the toughest act in the world to follow, especially in their own parents' eyes. I mean, how do you compete with seemingly perfect ghosts who have taken the best of your parents' love with them?

There is an element of fantasy here--which I guess is something to be aware of if you prefer your fiction as realistic as possible. And if you don't mind another shameless plug, I wrote about The Other Shepards very recently, too.

On A Song for Nagasaki

2010-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Betty - In response to your post below: As I was typing this, it crossed my mind that you might have posted something, but then I thought you had been too absorbed by Jonathan Franzen. So I'm glad to see you are reading this book, too. What are your thoughts? I couldn't pull together any statement or concerns about this book, but I am enjoying it and finding it more a source of consolation than of conversation. Here's what I typed up this morning:

I guess I’ll break the silence on A Song for Nagasaki. I am still slowly working through this book a few pages at a time before bed. I think what I like best about it is learning about Nagai’s integration of Eastern values with Christian faith (along with the tutorial in the Japanese vocabulary for these values).

Some incidents described by Glynn stand out: One is the story of Takashi’s visit to the site of Japan’s victory over the Mongals with the help of kamikaze, the divine wind, that confirmed the indomitable spirit of Japan.

Another is the death of Takashi’s mother, when he looks into her eyes and becomes convinced, through chokkan, or intuition, that the human spirit lives after death. Her death also sends him back to Pascal’s Pensees, which become the spur to the begin his spiritual life, although he seems always to have been open to spiritual truths, the wisdom of the heart. I liked how he begins to see the beauty in simple things, like green tea, but only when he realizes that looking for meaning for his life in the words of others only complicates his thinking, does he begin to understand that his life only needs to make sense to himself, like the complicated patterns of the lace makers.

This book makes a good companion to Silence since it describes what happened to Christians after the faith was outlawed in Japan and how they persevered in their faith and worship in spite of great danger. The description of the Christmas celebration was also moving, as was the history of the priest Nagai visits to ask about faith and to learn how to pray. The priest apparently taught Nagai well, since his prayers keep him sane during the war with China and perhaps even are the source of the miraculous arrival of back up troops at the last minute.

I keep meaning to look up The Ten Foot Square Hut, the short book that Nagai thinks about when he wakes up after his night of carousing with a case of meningitis and has to miss giving the graduation speech. The first line sticks with him: “Ceaselessly the river flows. . . The eddying foam gathers and then is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitat.”

Ironically – or providentially – shortly after I read that Marge Piercy poem about Ruth and Naomi that I posted on my blog I read the chapter about how Midori accepts Takashi as a groom and agrees to follow him even though he tells her he may die of radiation sickness from his research. I liked her response: “It will be my privilege to share in his journey, wherever it leads and whatever happens on the way.” Midori’s gentleness and open ear, her strength and grace like the bamboo, make her as saintly as her husband, although such meekness as she displays would seem unnatural in our culture. Perhaps the most vivid scenes are those of the husband and wife together, such as when selfless Midori carries the ill Takashi on her back through the snowstorm or when Takashi tells her he is going to die and she responds with strength, saying “We said before we married . . . that if our lives are spent for the glory of God, then life and death are beautiful. You have given everything you had for work that was very, very important. It was for his glory.” Her words free Takashi from guilt, but later, when fear of an American attack is imminent, he discovers her weeping on the floor after she thought he had gone.

Last night, with the attention of someone reading news of the grotesque, I read the chapter that describes the dropping of the bomb. The author makes it clear that the government of Japan had become corrupt under the military dictatorship, but he also doesn’t shrink from telling how children and parents and innocence and beauty were scorched in the heat of the atomic bomb. Collective guilt still feels oppressive. I’m looking forward to reading how Nagai held on to hope in the face of grave losses.

Almost Done...

2010-10-25T19:17:00.001-07:00

About halfway through A Song for Nagasaki...is anyone else reading this month? Is anyone else still here? Are we dead?

A Song for Nagasaki?

2010-10-06T12:40:00.001-07:00

Wanna take September off?

2010-09-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Then we can come back in October with Melanie's choice, followed in November by Enbrethiliel?

"Not Much of the Truth in Any Technical Sense"

2010-09-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

+JMJ+

Although I am not yet finished with The Liars' Club, I went back to the first chapter last night and reread Mary Karr's explanation of how the original Liars' Club got its name.

What seemed to be an unfortunate nickname from "somebody's pissed-off wife" turned out to be the perfect description for her father's group of friends.

Of all the men in the Liars' Club, Daddy told the best stories. When he started one, the guys invariably fell quiet, studying their laps or their cards or the inner rims of their beer mugs like men in prayer. No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed. He mastered it the way he mastered bluffing in poker . . .

I think that Karr is a real sport for warning us, about fifteen pages into her memoir, that she, too, might merely have the gift of knowing how to be believed . . . that her stories might not tell the truth in any technical sense . . . that the bullshit might get as "high and deep" in her own stories as her father's friends, riveted despite themselves, suspected it got in his.

In an earlier thread, Betty and Emily wondered how much of Karr's memories are "a bit fictional," with Emily teasing Betty about making autobiographical stuff up all the time, too. And I thought about my own autobiographical writing and realised that, heck, I "make up stuff" all the time, too. (No, I don't lie. I make up stuff. That is, I don't tell untruths; I make up stuff about the truth.) And from my experience and from what I know of similar writing by others, it seems to be a natural part of telling the stories from one's own past.

All this reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle's comment that there is a difference between fact and truth. It's a romantic distinction to make when one is reading any of her novels, but it's much more problematic when one is reading her non-fiction. Take her memoir Two-Part Invention, with a title nearly as frank as The Liars' Club: her children have described her account of their family life as "pure fiction" and "good bullshit"--and they didn't mean it in a good way. I was so impressed that I decided never to read any of L'Engle's non-fiction ever again. I didn't want her children, who presumably knew her better than any starry-eyed reader ever could, thinking of me as yet another gullible guppy.

Yet they probably, like Karr's mother and sister, don't really care. It gets high and deep in any memoir, I think. And who better than our family to call us out on what we make up about the truth? But Karr's point seems to be that it's not the technical truth that matters in memoirs.

Liar's Club again

2010-09-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

Finished Liar’s Club just before company arrived for the long weekend. Was talking about the book with my sister-in-law, and she said “Wait is that by the same author as a book called Cherry? I loved that book.” Did you finish it, Otepoti?

Liked this last quote. It stood out after the discussion about the stories we tell about ourselves in the last thread.

“All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. I never knew despair could lie… It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have freed us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters. I’m thinking of the cool terminal of white light the spirit might fly into at death, or so have reported after coming back from various car wrecks and heart failures and drowning, courtesy of defibrillator paddles and electricity, or after some kneeling samaritan’s breath was blown into stalled lungs so they could gasp again. Maybe such reports are just death’s neurological fireworks, the brain’s last light show. If so, that’s a lie I can live with.”

(I copied this in the car on a scrap paper, so now I’m not sure I copied all the words correctly. Apologies for mistakes.)

So what’s on for September? Whose turn is it to pick?

The Liar's Club

2010-08-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Steven King said he was blown away by Mary Karr's use of the colloquial in The Liar's Club, and I have to say that I am too. "I shit you not," is not even the best of it. I keep thinking I can predict what she's going to say next, and how she's going to say it, and I'm always wrong. It's a pleasure to be surprised.

Lead Balloons

2010-08-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

It seems that Lit is going over like a bit of a lead balloon, at least in part because some people don't have access to it. Betty and Enbrethiliel are reading The Liars' Club instead (well, Betty did read Lit, too). Does anyone want to join them? I have reserved it at the library; strangely, Lit was easier for me to get. If not, we can chalk it up to the doldrums of August and wait until September.

Faith and Drinking

2010-08-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

In contemplating Mary Karr's conversion experience, I recall how one of the things that led me back to the Catholic Church was my relationship with a man who had "gotten right-sized" in Alcoholics Anonymous. He was, like me, a cradle-but-lapsed Catholic, returning to his faith when he entered sobriety. The reason for his return was that he realized that his being able to stay sober -- one day at a time -- was wholly beyond his power, and that it could only be God who was keeping him from picking up a drink. Until he had surrendered his craving for a drink to God, he told me, he would sit in AA meetings, shaking and with sweat streaming from every pore because he wanted a drink so badly. But he had nearly drunk himself to death while on a business trip, and had woken up in the ICU; he had checked himself into detox during his Christmas-New Year's break from work because he knew he had to stop drinking or he would die.

A month or so ago, when I wrote a long blog post about the conversion of the actress Ève Lavallière, someone wrote a comment casting doubt on the sincerity of her faith, seeing as it had come to her in the midst of personal suffering and turmoil. All I can say is, this is undoubtedly the door to faith for most of us. Some of us are lucky enough to have received the gift of faith in childhood, and never to have strayed from it, but they are outnumbered both on earth and in heaven by the eleventh-hour converts. And there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents, etc.

I remember my old boyfriend C. telling me about how a friend of his in AA said once that drinking was just something you did while you were driving around looking for drugs. C.'s own sponsor in AA was killed in the World Trade Center. I have a particular affection for the gallows humor Mary Karr relates from "the rooms," i.e. the rooms where AA meetings are held. I've been to a few AA meetings in my life and more Al-Anon meetings than I can possibly count.

Kiwi and Brie

2010-08-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Pentimento, for steering us to Mary Karr. I found the poetry collection and all three memoir volumes at the library.

I expected to have to reserve, and wait and wait, but no. That saddens me, because books as good as these shouldn't be on the shelf, to the left of Kerouac, to the right of Ginsberg and under Atwood and Capote. They should be zinging around with the velocity of a squash ball, getting thumbmarks and food stains.

I've started with Lit, because I didn't know any better, not having registered Mary Karr before. (I live a sheltered life.)

There's a heap of gorgeous stuff here - Dev's take on the necessity of the crucifixion - "It's like Pulp Fiction - what else would get our attention?" alone is worth gold. There's also Janice's remark on the value of kneeling in prayer - "It makes you the right size" (or words near that; I'm writing in a hurry here, because the possums have gone to the playground with their older brother, and I have a scant half-hour before the blitz starts again.) But what got my laugh, for obvious reasons, was the privileged preschool child and his kiwifruit and brie sandwich, "I first had this sandwich in Vienna."

Kiwifruit are school lunchbox material here, folks. Mothers stuff them down their children as fast as they can, because they're so much cheaper than oranges and have twice the vitamin C. (And are sovereign against constipation, too, in case your children have not gorged enough to find out.)

We tried the Brie and Kiwi combo at lunch. "Baby-foody" was the verdict. So we urge you all to stand proud in your great tradition of peanut-butter-and-jelly, the sammy Dev was getting instead of B & K. Gourmet food is just peasant food with a plane ticket.

Anyway, wasn't peanut butter invented (or at least promoted) by Booker T Washington? (No. George Washington Carver, apparently. Close but no cigar.) That's another reason it's a great food.

Thanks again for this book choice, Pentimento.

Sinners Welcome

2010-08-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

I first became interested in Mary Karr when my Jewish-atheist sister-in-law gave me her book of poems Sinners Welcome for Christmas a couple of years ago. The essay linked to below, "Facing Altars," is included in the book. This is the title poem:

I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:

no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses,
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He'd sailed past the clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of him

a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.

Cussing

2010-08-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

It strikes me that Lit probably contains more swear words then any other book we've read here. I hope that doesn't offend anyone (unfortunately, it's pretty much the way I talk to myself in my own head, though I do try to restrain myself in polite company).

"Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"

2010-08-06T04:49:00.000-07:00

Here is an essay by Mary Karr that appeared in Poetry magazine in 2005 and was reprinted in her volume of poems Sinners Welcome in 2006. It's a nutshell of her conversion (she describes herself upfront as a cafeteria Catholic, which is not unexpected), but goes on to write very cogently and movingly about the sacramental in poetry.

Beauty, Truth, Sordidness

2010-08-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

I picked up my reserved copy of Lit at the library the other day and started it on the way to New York, where I had a family event to attend this weekend. One issue it brings up for me right away is the balance between the literary portrayal of what is sad, shocking, and disturbing, and the redemption that we assume will follow (we assume it because we know that Mary Karr eventually became a Catholic). How much sordidness is enough? How much is too much? I often ask myself this about my own anonymous confessional writing, and I think that the only reason to talk about these things is to demonstrate how, in the end, the lotus has bloomed out of the proverbial mud; "Where sin did abound, there grace did abound ever more."

Thank You

2010-07-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for indulging me this month, as I renewed my acquaintance with Joseph and Baxter. It has been wonderful for me and I hope it has been interesting for you.

By way of an epilogue, here is one last poem from Baxter, again a devotional. I think it is interesting how close it comes to ordinary prayer, drawing on the Scriptural images that the Lord gives us, the better to understand Him. The best prayer is poetry, and vice versa.

Song to the Lord Jesus James K. Baxter

Lord Jesus, you are like the sun in the sky,
The light shining in our darkness
So that we ourselves can become the light.

Lord Jesus, you died in pain on the cross,
You rose again from the dead.
Now you live within us,
You live our lives and die our deaths with us.

Lord Jesus, all that is in heaven belongs to you,
All things that are on earth.
Send your Spirit like a river of clear water
Flowing through our hearts.

Lord Jesus, you are the house and we are the timber,
You are the vine and we the branches.
Send your Spirit so that the vine may flower,
Heal in us whatever is at fault.

1972

Te whakapaingia o to tatou Ariki, ko Ihu Karaiti, ki a tatou katoa, ake ake ake, amine. (The blessing of the Lord Jesus be to us all, now and forever, Amen.)

Lit?

2010-07-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

Does everyone want to do My Friends by Emmanuel Bove for August? Because if you'd rather, I'm kind of interested in reading Mary Karr's new conversion memoir, Lit.

For Fun - Who Doesn't Like Camels?

2010-07-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

Poem About Camels M.K. Joseph

Said the preacher:

Consider the camel
It is easier for this crature
(Think of its hump! Its size!)
To creep through the eye of a needle
Than for a millionaire
To enter in the gates of paradise.

John Brown II
Had inherited a fortune
And a devout nature from his father
Who ground the faces of the poor all week
And on Sunday went to chapel
Hearing the preacher's comment on the camel
He got the right idea
Set up the Brownian Institute
And bred the animals in captivity

smaller and smaller
smaller and smaller . . .

When he was forty, the Institute
Had camels no longer than Alsatian dogs
At fifty, terrier-sized
At sixty, no bigger than hamsters
It became a race against time, the whole nation
Was agog, when on his deathbed
John Brwon watched
With a magnifying-glass gripped in a palsied claw
While a skilled operator gently seized
With tweezers a small creature
Like a hump-backed flea and carefully
Passed it through the eye of a large darning-needle

Hallelujah hallelujah
All the angels cry
John Brown II enters heaven
Through a needle's eye

Now once a camel heeded
The traditional lore
Which told him it was harder
For a camel to enter heaven
Than for a millionaire
To pass through the eye of a needle
So he began to breed millionaires

smaller and smaller
smaller and smaller . . .

My name is John Brown XXXV
Two millimetres high
And I'm sick of being stuck forever
In this goddam needle's eye

Hallelujah hallelujah
All the angels cry
Caravans of Camels enter heaven
Through a needle's eye
Laden with Sheffield needles
paper hats
dates
cigarettes
gold
myrrh
frankincense.

. . .

If there's a serious point to this poem, it may be about the dangers of private interpretation of Scripture. This is a problem, believe me, of which your token Proddy is very much aware. If I solve it, I'll let you know...

And since I've begun with a poem that very well might appeal to children, I'll continue with a few of James K. Baxter's poems, written for our School Journal. The School Journal, supplied to every school in the country, provided employment for quite a few writers who otherwise would have found work at the Post Office or not at all.

The Tree House

John and Judith
And Billy and me,
We have our own house
In a willow tree.

It's built of boards
And battens and tin
From the packing case
That the tractor came in.

Up the slipper trunk
Of the tree we climb
With a rope to help us
One at a time;

But once we're up
And safe inside
Only the wind knows
Where we hide.

Down in the paddock
The brown horse neighs
And in stormy weather
The whole house sways

Like a ship at sea
While the branches roar
And birds fly past
At the open door.

The Shepherd

Where rivers tumble
In gorges deep,
High on the mountain
I muster sheep -

The scraggy, wild ewe
That has never been shorn
And the big, rough ram
With his curly horn.

The sun shines down'Like a burning-glass
As they nibble the fresh, green
Tussokc grass.

The tracks they make
With their nimble toes
No one but me
And my old dog knows.

With a long, low whistle
I send him out.
He cocks his ears
To hear me shout.

He is tired and dusty
Before the night -
His tongue hangs dripping
And his teeth gleam white.

When the cold stars glitter
And my door is shut,
We sit by the fire
In our mountain hut.

1953

Five Poems

1. The New Bidge and the Old One

The new bridge is made of white concrete.
Its piles go down into th river bed
To stand against the boulders washed down by the winter floods.
The old bridge is made of grey timber.
It has been standing a long time
And the wheels of the logging trucks have worn the planks thin.

Side by side the two bridges stand.
The boy Tame sits on the old one in the sun.
He thinks, 'Down there the taniwha lives,
Where the water boils up under the willow roots.
He is strong and old,
He was here even before the pa began.
He'll push the bridge down if he doesn't like it.'

When he looks at the new bridge it seems to him
The piles have already begun to tilt a little.

2. Fishing

In the bare evening, the sandflies rise from the river.
If you have bare feet, they bite your ankles,
And when you kill them it leaves a small stain of blood.

Tame and Rua are fishing from the clay bank.
Tame's line has three hooks and a sinker,
But Rua's line is baited with muka
Where the eels can bite and snag their teeth.

Rua feels a sharp tug on the line.
He pulls it in quickly.
A grandfather eel wriggles on the bank.
He dumps the eel in the pit they dug
Before they started fishing.
The eel twists and turns like a big snake.

It is almost too dark to see your hand
When you hold it in front of your face.
The wind is getting colder.
Rua says, 'I'll take that one
Up to Rangi's place.
He might like to have an eel for dinner.'

3. Gathering Watercress

Whetu goes with a bucket to gather watercress
And her younger sister trudges beside her.
The creek spreads out in a bog at the bottom of the paddock,
And the white roots of the watercress
Go deep in the mud.

This time the cows have been in the creek before them,
Trampling the liaves,
Nibbling atthe flower heads,
Making great holes with their hooves,
Stirring up the mud.

Whetu says, 'Over by the bank
There are some leaves left.'
They wade across and begin to pick them.
Whetu's legs are longer than her sister's legs.
Once or twice she goes in up to her knees
But her sister gets her dress muddy.

That night Mrs Pohatu cooks the watercress
With meat and pork bones in the big pot.
The watercress is beautiful to eat.

4. The Hangi

Tame's father is making the hangi.
Rua's uncle is helping him.
First they dig a deep pit in the ground,
Then they pile up wood with round stones from the river,
Then they set it all on fire.

The fire burns for half and hour.
They rake away the ash and leave the stones,
Three pigs' heads,
Corn and kumara,
Half a sack of potatoes,
The two halves of a sheep,
And four pumpkins chopped up in pieces.

They cover it all with sheets, then with sacks,
Then they pour on water,
Then they cover the whole heap with earth
So that you can't see any steam at all.

Three hours later they uncover it again.
The kai is all cooked; it tastes better
Than anything you ever tasted.

Whetu's grandmother says, 'That was a good hangi.
They didn't let the smoke get into the meat.'

5. Outside the Meeting House

Whetu's grandmother and her friend Puhi
Sit outside the meeting house.
They wrap their shawls tight around their heads
And talk about old times.

'Kua ngenge oku waewae.'
'My legs are tired today.'
'He tino makariri te hau.'
'The wind is very cold.'

But they sit and talk together
Outside the door of the meeting house
On the concrete step
Just where the wind doesn't blow
And the sun shines warmly.

They talk about their sons and daughters,
Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
The tangis they have been to,
Friends who are still alive
And friends who have gone to God.

The sun is warm now,
It shines out between the clouds,
Their two hearts are full of peace.

1972

And Now For Something Completely Different

2010-07-27T03:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd balance things up by posting a couple more of Joseph's poems.

Stevie Smith, the British poet of "Not Waving But Drowning" fame, once said that she liked to write her cat poems, but that critics always thought she was letting the side down, when she wrote them. This cat poem by M.K. Joseph is so multi-layered, no critic could possibly object, but perhaps it's a bit try-hard for contemporary taste.

I liked it, once, but now I haven't the faintest notion of what it's about. Ideas, anyone?

The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus M.K. Joseph

(paste-up, with montage of old movies)

Paracelsus claimed that he could make homunculi
(Little men) a span high, growing the lifeseeds
in vessels buried in dungheaps to maintain
a mild and even heat . . . Wise Paracelsus believed that if a rose
was burned in a crucible to finest ash
then in the heatshimmer as the smoke ascended
it would hover and shape itself into the grey
ghost of a rose. My grey ghost hand
plucks from the air, presents to you
This ghost of a rose.

When Nijinkski danced the Spectre of the Rose
leaving the dreaming girl he seemed to
float out of the window into the moonlight
light as a rose petal
then fell into a chair
backstage, where two attendants worked him over
like a heavyweight boxer's seconds with towel and sponge.

That was Jean Cocteau's story, perhaps he was lying.

Cocteau the magician conjured an Orpheus
who could walk through mirrors into death's kingdom.
He also had a story about cats. It went like this.

'The English poet Keats once rode
At night-time through an gloomy wood
When all at once he seemed to hear
A sound of tiny trumpets near.
Dismounting from his horse he sees
Small torches flickering through the trees
Bobbing and twinkling two by two
And presently came into view
Cats all dressed in funeral black
Marching along the woodland track.

Only the tap of drum is heard,
Six drummers pass without a word,
Then the trumpet's mournful cry
As six cat-trumpeters march by,
Six cats in mourning for the dead
Wave six black banners overhead,
With trumpets' cry and tap of drum
And flapping bannners on they come.

Then guards-men cats with arms reversed
Of which six musketeers were first
To fire the volley at the grave,
Six swordsmen-cats with whiskers brave,
Six grenadiers with drooping tail,
Six pikemen with pikes at trail,
Six cat-princesses glided by
Blackveiled and sobbing bitterly.
Last came six blackgowned pallbearers
Bearing heavily on their shoulders
The coffin draped, and on it set
A tiny golden coronet.
Silent they marched by where he stood
And vanished in the darkling wood.

When many a weary mile was past
Keats reached a friendly house at last.
Beside him on the hearth-rug sat
And purred a handsome ginger cat
As resting by the fireside
He told of his strange evening ride -

Torches and drums and minstrelsy
Banners and guards and heraldry
Princesses sobbing bitterly
But when he came to the coronet
Upon the little coffin set
The cat said: That means I'm king
Of all the cats. With sudden spring
He cleared the windowsill and quite
Disappeared in the summer night.'

(And when Swinburne died - so Karl Stead
told me - Yeats said
Now I'm king of the cats).

but Mary Shelley heard of this from Monk Lewis
at Geneva in the summer Frankenstein,
she also believed that if a cat ate roses
it would turn into a beautiful woman.

'Quickly, come quickly, the little cat
is eating the roses. It will turn into a beautiful woman
with green eyes and short sharp fingernails.'

O catwoman mother of monsters
may the pads of your paws be
as soft and pearly as rose petals
your claws no sharper than thorns.
(A huge hand ripped off in a closing door
clawed with gigantic thorns.
Where could this be? In the arctic hut in
The Thing from Outer Space
the tall walking vegetable vampire*
whose seedlings must be nourished
with human blood. Trapped in the end
screaming in electric arcs
fried down for compost.)

*(played by James Arness later known as Matt Dillon.)

[Samuel Johnson had a cat named Hodge.
When it fell ill his friend the barroom doctor
Levett prescribed a nourishing diet of oysters.
Dilemma: should he send his black servant
Francis Barber who might feel put upon
running errands for a fat old cat?
Solution: Doctor Samuel Johnson went himself
to Billingsgate to purchase oysters for
Hodge who recovered. This is a digression.]

Doctor Pretorius (played by Ernest Thesiger)
was a paracelsian who kept his homunculi
imprisoned in glass belljars; when they knocked
with tiny fists upon the glass it rang
like toy telephones: this in The Bride of Frankenstein
In which the Bride (the Monster's of course: Frankenstein's
bride was played by Valerie Hobson who later
married a British Cabinet minister named
John Profumo, which is stange but not relevant)
was played by Elsa Lanchester who in 'real'
i.e. offscreen life was married to Charles Laughton
who was Quasimodo in the second Hunchback
of Notre Dame and Doctor Moreau in The Island
of Lost Souls in which the leader
of the Beast Men was Bela Lugosi who
(need I say it?) played the title-role in the original
Dracula in which Renfield the madman
who ate flies was Dwight Frye who acted
the malignant hunchback who in Frankenstein the first
selected the wrong brain for the poor Monster
(doomed from the start) who was played
by Boris Karloff who was played by
a very gentle Englishman named
William Henry Pratt.

Ash in the crucible revives
Roses and monsters hover in the mind.

Bernard de Fonatanelle who lived for a century
And dreamed of men dwelling on other stars
Also listened-in on the conversation of roses.
He overheard one rose say to another
No gardener has ever been known to die.

Song to the Lord God on a Spring Morning

2010-07-25T03:41:00.000-07:00

This is more a straight devotional poem:

Song to the Lord God on a Spring Morning James K Baxter

The guitar is playing in the morning
And the tame goat browses on heads of grass
Close to the sawing block. I hear the voices
Of many friends on this spring day
Like music to me, because God has lifted
A mountain from my soul, and the winter has gone.
Alleluia. Adonai.

I need not complain that youth has gone
Or that the sins of morning
Haunt me at noonday. Whoever has lifted
The burden of Christ will find that an armful of dry grass
Is the same weight as the cross. Man only lives for a day
Yet he can hear the singing of strong voices.
Alleluia. Adonai.

Love is the answer to the dark voices
Of the demons that trouble us when youth has gone,
Saying, 'You fool, you have had your day
And wasted it.' The spirit of a spring morning
When the wind moves gently over the grass
Is enough to tell us that the stone at the door of the tomb has been lifted.
Alleluia. Adonai.

I have seen the boulder lifted
From the back of the tribe. I have heard their singing voices.
I have felt their hands like the wind on the grass
Stroking my cheek, when it seemed all hope had gone,
'Piki to ora ki a koe. The morning
has come. E koro, be glad and eat a kai with us today.'
Alleluia. Adonai.

Therefore, whatever another day
May hold for me - exile, darkness, and the rod of Pharaoh lifted
To scourge my back - this brightness of morning
Cannot die. The murmur of many voices
Will stay with me when the light has gone
And my days are like an acre of burnt grass.
Alleluia. Adonai.

So small a price to pay! The Maori bones beneath the grass
Of the graveyard sing of the resurrection day
When chains of darkness will be gone
And the yoke of sorrow will be lifted
From the necks of the poor. A choir of many voices
Goes with me into the blood-red morning.
Alleluia. Adonai.

The light of a new morning is bright on the grass
And the voices of the poor are welcoming the day
When the cloud of night will be lifted and Pharaoh's kingdom gone.
Alleluia. Adonai.

1972

Betty Duffy Will Like This One

2010-07-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

Bonfire James K. Baxter

They have lighted a bonfire on the beach beyond
The old shellfish midden - the young ones jiving and
Stamping their feet in the flicker of the flames,
Barefoot, their heads tilted back,
Utterly absorbed.
The gaunt man watching
Thinks - 'Hooligans' - and his wife - 'How heavy
This drugged weight that I must carry
Always uphill . . . '
Some will go
Home later, but others two by two will vanish
Into the dunes, wearing their jeans and sandals -
And like a slow vapour from the ground,
Or silence between words, the hunters who made that
Midden of shells with a different colour of absence
Possess the widening flesh. A child conceived out of these hot embers
Will hear the surf's voice like a stumbling language
And be a masterless man.

1967

The Maori Jesus

2010-07-24T01:27:00.000-07:00

+JMJ+

James K. Baxter has said that a poet is "the sore thumb of the tribe . . . a bad smell in the nose of good citizens."

If that was his mission statement, I think he managed to live up to it.

Of course, I have The Maori Jesus in mind . . .

**********

The Maori Jesus by James K. Baxter

I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour
He wore blue dungarees.
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelt of mussels and paraoa.
When he smiled it looked like the dawn.
When he broke wind the little fishes trembled.
When he frowned the ground shook.
When he laughed everybody got drunk.

The Maori Jesus came on shore
And picked out his twelve disciples.
One cleaned toilets in the Railway Station;
His hands were scrubbed clean to get the shit out of the pores.
One was a call-girl who turned it up for nothing.
One was a housewife who'd forgotten the Pill
And stuck her TV set in the rubbish can.
One was a little office clerk
Who'd tried to set fire to the Government Buildings.
Yes, and there were several others;
One was an old sad queen;
One was an an alcoholic priest
Going slowly mad in a respectable parish.

The Maori Jesus said, "Man,
From now on the sun will shine."

The first day he was arrested
For having no lawful means of support.
The second day he was beaten up by the cops
For telling a dee his house was not in order.
The third day he was charged with being a Maori
And given a month in Mount Crawford.
The fourth day he was sent to Porirua
For telling a screw the sun would stop rising.
The fifth day lasted seven years
While he worked in the asylum laundry
Never out of the steam.
The sixth day he told the head doctor,
"I am the Light in the Void;
I am who I am."
The seventh day he was lobotomized;
The brain of God was cut in half.

On the eighth day the sun did not rise.
It didn't rise the day after.
God was neither alive nor dead.
The darkness of the Void,
Mountainous, mile-deep, civilized darkness
Sat on the earth from then till now.

**********

I first read it in 2004. And after all these years, it's still my favourite Baxter poem and it still makes me feel like a "good citizen."

August

2010-07-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

I've gotten really busy all of a sudden, and am thinking of passing off my choice onto the next person. That is, unless everyone would like to read a really short book: My Friends by Emmanuel Bove. Let me know.

Can't I Just Post a Picture of My Bookcase?

2010-07-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

+JMJ+

I just spent the past few days reading everyone else's bio and wondering which of them I could persuade to write mine for me, knowing that I had to get it right the first time because I could only ask that sort of thing once. As soon as one person knows about the secret but isn't also "in" on it, the game is up. Luckily for me, I found an excellent co-conspirator who agreed to do this post and never reveal to anyone who she was. You ladies are really nice people, you know? =)

Have I thanked you for letting me join your group yet? If not, let me do that now. It's really wonderful to be here.

I probably should have just posted that picture of my bookcase (that is, my main bookcase; of course I have several), because reading has made up the greater part of my identity since I learned my alphabet. Sometimes I'm really glad to be "The Reader" of the family--or the student flat--or the classroom--or the office. Then someone asks me a question like, "How many books have you read in your entire life?" and seriously expects an estimate, and it just gets weird.

Anyway, I've lived in the Philippines all of my life, except for the two crazy years as an English major in Wellington, New Zealand and a little under six months total vacation time visiting relatives in the United States.

My first full-time job was as an English teacher in my old high school. I lasted two years before I resigned, demoralised and depressed. I've only done tutoring and freelance work since then, following behind real educators with a mop and a bucket. It's actually very interesting work for one who can look at it in the right way. One excellent benefit is that I get to read and write as much as I please. And now, perhaps, other English teachers are handing out demerits left and right to students who are plagiarising my more literary blog posts for their papers. If it wouldn't take up so many words, I'll explain why that is so ironic.

I don't have any children of my own, but I make do with my little brothers--who are still young enough to put up with my bossing them around. We read together every evening that they spend the night (and some evenings when they don't), not just because I think it will improve them, but also because I think they should have some meaningful memories of me. Twenty years from now, if their adult selves come across future editions of Donald J. Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown, Louis Sachar's Sixth Grade Secrets, or Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee and they feel a wave of warm nostalgia, then I'll know my life has not been in vain.

Whether I am teaching, tutoring, blogging, or big sister-ing, I am actively engaged in the reading and regurgitating of books. It has been the theme of my whole life and I am honoured to get to do a little of that here as well. Thank you again!

Te Whiore o te Kuri by James K. Baxter

2010-07-21T04:21:00.000-07:00

1.

Two trucks pass me in a cloud of dust
As I come up the road from the river,

So I put the bathing towel over my mouth
And breathe damp cloth. Taraiwa on the bridge

Is cutting the iron struts with a blow torch,
But he tells me - 'Kua mutu' - 'the oxygen is finished.'

I climb the long track to the wharepuni,
Meditating on the words of Thomas Merton -

'At the end of life God presses down a seal
On the wax of the soul. If the wax is warm

'It receives the mark; if not, it is crushed to powder' -
So be it. My own heart may yet be my coffin.

Up here they give me a cup of crushed apple pulp
To drink. In autumn the kai falls from the trees.

2.

The dark light shines from the graves of the saints,
By which I mean the humble ones

Buried beside our house and under the bramble
That hides the fallen pas where sheep are grazing

And leave their clots of wool. The dark light shines
At the heart of the tangi where a tent has been put up

To hold the coffin, and a widow with a
Three-day-sleepless face is waiting for the

Resurrection. I remember
When the church was shut at Ngaruawahia,

Kneeling instead in front of the stone statue
Of Te Whaea, darkened by rain, eroded by moss,

Under an apple tree. The dark light shines
Wherever the humble have opened a door for it.

3.

A giant weta climbs the curling ladder
Of the scrim beside my bed. I don't want

The scratching of this amateur bush demon
Interfering with my dreams,

Or love-bites on my neck. First Steve comes through
With a saw - 'To cut him in half,' he says -

Then Zema - 'You're piss-poor, Hemi,
At killing' (she giggles) - but I get a shoe

From the other room, stand on the strongest chair,
Wield it by the toe and belt him - crack!

The weta, trailing white guts, drops to the floor,
A three-inch dragon in his broken armour,

Poor creature! I finish him off with another blow
And lie back to read while the mosquitoes play their flutes.

4.

The rain falls all day. Now the tanks will be full.
The road down river will turn to wet porridge

And the slips begin. Herewini told me
How Te Atua warned him that the bank would fall,

So he left the grader and came to shift his mates, -
They ran to safety and the bank did fall

Silently, eighty tons of earth and boulders,
Burying him to the armpits. His leg is still blue

Where the great stone cracked it and the bolts were put through the bone,
But he can walk on it. The drips from the holes in the roof

Spatter in the kitchen, on the boards behind the stove,
At the foot of Francie's bed. Beyond the lid of cloud

I hear the droning of the birds of Armageddon
That one day will end the world we understand.

5.

The tribe in their own time are making a fowl run
Below the big chestnut. Therefore I wake

To hear the screech of nails being dragged with hammers
At the front of the house - Steve and Gregg

Doing what once would hardly happen
In two years. One by one the girls

Come in to visit their old hairy koro
On the broad of his back in a sleeping bag

Resting his rheumatism - Te Huinga,
Zema, Francie, Cam, they bring in coffee,

But stay to sit and open out their thoughts
And put their heads on my pillow. Some people think

I keep a harem. No, my back's not strong enough.
I keep a chook pen for birds of paradise.

6.

'Te whiore o te kuri' - this is the tail of the dog
That wags at the end of my book;

After a dispute with one dear Maori friend
I walk all night on the road to Raetihi,

Thinking, 'Twenty-four miles will pulp the pads of my feet
Till the soles of them swell up like balloons;

'Pain in my feet; pain of my hara.' This morning
I saw the sun rise molten and red

Over the hill at Herewini's house
At Raetihi. But staggering on the stones

Last night, I had to stop, and looked up at the stars
And saw those ribs of white fire

Hung there like the underside of punga leaves
Planted for our human shelter.

7.

To go forward like a man in the dark
Is the meaning of this dark vocation;

So simple, tree, star, the bare cup of the hills,
The life-long grave of waiting

As indeed it has to be. To ask for Jacob's ladder
Would be to mistake oneself and the dark Master,

Yet at times the road comes down to a place
Where water runs and horses gallop

Behind a hedge. There it is possible to sit,
Light a cigarette, and rub

Your bruised heels on the cold grass. Always because
A man's body is a meeting house,

Ribs, arms, for the tribe to gather under,
And the heart must be their spring of water.

1972

. . .

"koro" - old man. But Baxter was only 46 when he wrote this. Perhaps it's partly that he felt his body breaking down, perhaps it testifies to the demographic skewing of the Maori population, which has a huge preponderance of young people. Actually, I am unhesitatingly addressed as "E kui" - old woman, and I am just about fifty.

Te Whaea - the Mother

hara - sin.

This is the final poem in Baxter's last collection. Baxter wrote many other poems in this loose sonnet form. I'd like to type out "Autumn Testament" for you, but it is 48 stanzas long!

Best,

Jocelyn

M.K.. Joseph on Married Love (This is Not a Sex Post*)

2010-07-18T01:21:00.000-07:00

Since I seem to be circling around the theme of married love, here is the first of a two-poem pair by Joseph. Since I also like John Donne very much, this particularly appeals.

POEMS IN THE MANNER OF DONNE, ON TEXTS BY SIR THOMAS BROWNE

Meditation on a Time-Piece

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.

As on a clock-face the artificer
Doth lay two hands which readily shall go
Turned by the cunning engine: the first one slow
Doth pace; th'other pursueth her
As in a race he runs, and passing on
Circles the dial twelve times to her one;
Nor shall they confer
At noon or midnight till the full race be run,

So are we two: for as at first we lay
Together on the noon-stroke, now I roam
Busily round the dial, while you at home
Pass (what the hour hand's hour is and) your day.
Now in these circlings we may daily meet
As hourly do the hands each other greet,
And can we never say
That time shall yet be ours, till all hours are complete.

Yet this our clock runs not on hours but years
Cycles and centuries, as measured are
By magian transposition of a star
Or no-map-marking Aztec calendars.
Upon eternity's still ceaseless ground
Plato's Great Year goes wheeling round
All minuted with prayers
That we together be when God's great midnight sound.

. . .

I really like sonnets of the shakespearean form, and the solid couplet at the end of this one is particularly satisfying:

CINDERELLA

She was content in the kitchen, hugging cheap dreams
Until that old woman, starting in a puff
Of ashes, clothed her in cobweb and moonbeams,
Conjured a coach from rats and kitchen-stuff.
At midnight the dress upon the dancing-floor
Lay dirt and glimmer, the slippers were ice-hard,
The clock-prince chimed along the corridor,
She fled him weeping through the palace-yard.
But the old witch had her way; the messengers
Went out to match the slipper to the true princess.
Dragged in her rags before the tittering courtiers,
Put to the question, she could only whisper Yes.
In glass-heeled slippers she minces towards the tomb
Beside her bridegroom ticking like a bomb.

. . .

Best to you all.

*Betty Duffy, I'm looking at you...

He Waiata mo Te Kare

2010-07-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

In his later years, Baxter became very taken up with the injustices and spiritual dislocation of Maori people. Eventually he started a commune at a place called Jerusalem, on the Wanganui river, not far from the Catholic mission started by Mother Mary Aubert. His much-tried ex-wife stayed behind in Wellington. Alcoholism affected his health, and he was then moved to a commune in Auckland. He died there at 46.

He Waiata mo Te Kare

1.

Up here at the wharepuni
That star at the kitchen window
Mentions your name to me.

Clear and bright like running water
It glitters above the rim of the range,
You in Wellington,
I in Jerusalem,

Woman, it is my wish
Our bodies should be buried in the same grave.

2.

To others my love is a plaited kono
Full or empty,
With chunks of riwai,
Meat that stuck to the stones.

To you my love is a pendant
Of inanga greenstone,
Too hard to bite,
Cut from a boulder underground.

You can put it in a box
Or wear it over your heart.

One day it will grow warm.
One day it will tremble like a bed of rushes
and say to you with a man's tongue,
"Taku ngakau ki a koe!"

3.

I have seen at evening
Two ducks fly down
To a pond together.

The whirring of their wings
Reminded me of you.

4.

At the end of our lives
Te Atua will take pity
On the two whom he divided.

To the tribe he will give
Much talking, te pia and a loaded hangi.

To you and me he will give
A whare by the seashore
Where you can look for crabs and kina
And I can watch the waves
And from time to time see your face
With no sadness,
Te Kare o Nga Wai.

5.

No rafter paintings,
No grass-stalk panels,
no Maori mass,

Christ and his Mother
Are lively Italians
Leaning forward to bless,

No taniko band on her head,
No feather cloak on his shoulder,

No stairway to heaven,
No tears of the albatross.

Here at Jerusalem
After ninety years
Of bungled opportunities,
I prefer not to invite you
Into the pakeha church.

6.

Waves wash on the beaches.
They leave a mark for only a minute,
Each grey hair in my beard
Is there because of a sin,

The mirror shows me
An old tuatara,
He porangi, he tutua,
Standing in his dusty coat,

I do not think you wanted
Some other man.
I have walked barefoot from the tail of the fish to the nose
To say these words.

7.

Hilltop behind hilltop,
A mile of green pungas
In the grey afternoon
Bow their heads to the slanting spears of rain.

In the middle room of the wharepuni
Kat is playing the guitar, -
"Let it be! Let it be!"

Don brings home a goat draped round his shoulders.
Tonight we'll eat roasted liver.

One day, it is possible,
Hoani and Hilary might join me here
Tired of the merry-go-round,

E hine, the door is open,
There's a space beside me.

8.

Those we knew when we were young,
None of them have stayed together.
All their marriages battered down like trees
By the winds of a terrible century.

I was a gloomy drunk.
You were a troubled woman,
Nobody would have given tuppence for our chances,
Yet our love did not turn to hate.

If you could fly this way, my bird,
One day before we both die,
I think you might find a branch to rest on.

I chose to live in a different way.

Today I cut the grass from the paths
With a new sickle,
Working till my hands were blistered.

I never wanted another wife.

9.

Now I see you conquer age
As the prow of a canoe beats down
The plumes of Tangaroa.

You, straight-backed, a girl,
Your dark hair on your shoulders,
Lifting up our grandchild,

How you put them to shame,
All the flouncing girls!

Your face wears the marks of age
As a warrior his moko,
Double the beauty,
A soul like a great albatross

Who only nests in mid ocean
Under the eye of Te Ra.

You have broken the back of age.
I tremble to see it.

10.

Taraiwa has sent us up a parcel of smoked eels
With skins like fine leather.
We steam them in the colander.
He tells us the heads are not for eating.

So I cut off two heads
And throw them out to Archibald,
The old tomcat. He growls as he eats
Simply because he's timid.

Earlier today I cut thistles
Under the trees in the graveyard,
And washed my hands afterwards,
Sprinkling the sickle with water.

That's the life I lead,
Simple as a stone,
And all that makes it less than good, Te Kare,
Is that you are not beside me.

Glossary:
He Waiata mo Te Kare: A song for Te Kare (the object of my desire)
wharepuni: meeting house (though this is not the usual word, wharenui)
kono: food basket, again not the most usual word, rourou.
riwai: potato. Amusingly, this is because the commonly-grown Victorian variety was "Levi"
meat that stuck to the stones, i.e. "should have bought fish and chips" hangi food!
inanga: "trout" greenstone - has pretty ripples through it, like a fish.
"taku ngakau..." my heart is yours.
Te Atua: God.
"The Tribe" - Baxter's commune group.
pia beer
whare: house
kina: sea-urchins, a delicacy (I've not eaten them though.)
Te Kare o Nga Wai - Te Kare of the Waters (weeping, possibly.)

Stairway to heaven and tears of the albatross are both tekoteko (grass-stalk panel) patterns.
pakeha - anyone who isn't Maori.

tuatara: wiki it. They are strange and fascinating beasts.
porangi: madman
tutua: a nobody.
"I have walked barefoot..." the North Island is known as Te Ika a Maui, Maui's Fish. Auckland is at the tail, Wellington (capital) at the head.
pungas: tree-ferns
E hine: girl
Tangaroa: sea-god
moko: facial tattoo. Now undergoing a revival.
Te Ra: the sun
Taraiwa: driver

..................................................

I'd like to have heard Jacqui's side of their marriage, but she has been very reserved. And I'm sure Baxter was as full of shit as anyone. However, this poem just does it for me. It speaks of a true and deep love. (Though perhaps not one that brought either partner much happiness.)

Arohanui to you all.

Jocelyn

Poem in the Matukituki Valley

2010-07-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

http://tpo.tepapa.govt.nz/ViewTopicExhibitDetail.asp?TopicFileID=0x000a4ace

This is a link to another early poem of Baxter's. This one is so popular, that our national museum has put it up as part of its archive. There's a nice photo there, as well.

I think this was written prior to Baxter's conversion, but it's pretty obvious that he's feeling his way towards the Church.

I've often walked through this valley, which has steep bush-covered sides. It turns into mountain-climbing territory fairly quickly.

I don't expect I'll walk there again: I'm no longer nimble enough. So by reading this poem I relive it.

And now here's another poem by M.K. Joseph:

Distilled Water

From Blenheim's clocktower a cheerful bell bangs out
The hour, and time hangs humming on the wind.
Time and the honoured dead. What else? The odd
Remote and shabby peace of a provincial town.
Blenkinsopp's gun? the Wairau massacre?
Squabbles in a remote part of empire.
Some history. Some history, but not much.

Consider now the nature of distilled
Water which has boiled and left behind
In the retort rewarding sediment
Of salts and toxins. Chemically pure, of course
(No foreign bodies here) but to the taste
Tasteless and flat. Let it spill on the ground,
Leach out its salts, accumulate its algae,
Be living: the savour's in impurity.
Is that what we are? soimething that boiled away
In the steaming flask of nineteenth century Europe?
Innocuous until now, or just beginning
To make its own impression on the tongue.

And through the Tory Channel naked hills
Gully and slip pass by, monotonously dramatic
Like bad blank verse, till one cries out for
Enjambement, equivalence, modulation,
The studied accent of the human voice,
Of the passage opening through the windy headlands
Where the snowed Kaikouras hang in the air like mirage
And the nation of gulls assembles on the waters
Of the salt sea that walks about the world.

. . .

What interests me about this poem is that no-one would write it today. We simply don't have that sort of crisis of identity hanging around us, but, my word, we certainly did, back when I was a child in the 60's and 70's. We were having great difficulty realigning ourselves away from British apron-strings.

Perhaps we're not so assured of a national identity that we take it for granted and no longer think about it. There might be a "who are we?" poem or two still in the pipeline of some poet. But we certainly won't be agonizing as to how British we should try to be...

The Wairau massacre - you might be able to wiki it, but if it's not there, the interesting thing about it, is that it is not (as you might think) British soldiers/settlers slaughtering poor helpless Maoris. No, it was a wildly skillful Maori chief and warrior called Te Rauparaha, who made mincemeat of some hapless scratch militia of pakehas (British settlers). I think about fourteen people were killed.

OK, one last poem before I go and do the dishes. Also by M.K. Joseph:

For My Children

To you who have come
In this tired time
Ruled not by the stars
But by two wars

What can we give
Excepting love
That having no end
Pays no dividend?

And what bequeath
But island earth
From Eden yet
Whole seas apart?

But still the spring
Renews its song
Immortal life
Through bud and leaf

And so we pray
No cliff too high
No gulf too deep
For hand and hope.

. . .

Arohanui to you all,

Jocelyn

"Inscription on a Paper Dart" Selected Poems 1945-1972

2010-07-10T01:56:00.000-07:00

Inscription on a Paper Dart - M.K. Joseph

Take now this tome of criticism
Judicious, up-to-date and learned
And let it fall upon the ground
Ponderous as a ton of lead.

I fold a sheaf of verse at random
(This one perhaps) into a paper dart,
Launch it on an auspicious up-draught,
Watch it gliding out of sight.

Pious Muslims it is said
Treasured each scrap they came upon
Of paper lest it should contain
Some potent text of the Koran.

Even pious Muslims now
Let the crumpled fragments pass
And give their holy custom up
Knowing that the world is full of trash,

Yet some old turban'd holy man
Passing down Hiriri Street
Seeing the name of God somewhere
May pick this up and cherish it.

Drunken Gunners - M.K. Joseph

The gunners move like figures in a dance
Harmoniously at their machine that kills
Quite casually beyond the shadowed hills
Under the blue and echoing air of France.
The passing driver watches them askance:
'Look at the beggars - pickled to the gills.'
Yet bodies steadied in parade-ground skills
Correct the tottering mind's intemperance.

Housed under summer leafage at his ease,
Artillery board set up, the captain sees
His rule connect two dots a league apart
And throws destruction at hypotheses,
Wishing that love had ministers like these
To strike its distant enemy to the heart.

......................................................

Jocelyn (Otepoti) here:

The second poem is a much-anthologized relic of Joseph's war service, and if you're thinking, those Kiwis, they're pretty obsessed by war, aren't they, then you'd be right. I don't know why that is, except that we've been so isolated from major conflict that perhaps we feel drawn to stare into the abyss, and jump in now and then. (There were NZ troops in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and are still in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and peace-keeping troops in Vanuatu and elsewhere.)

But the first poem, the title poem of the eponymous collection, published 1974, is the one that sold me on Joseph's poetry, back when I was sixteen, and I haven't stopped loving Joseph's work. Unlike, er-hmm, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, which I was already well-over by then, having had a brief flirtation with that piece of sixties kitsch culture.

Now you can tell me what outgrown tastes of your teenage years now embarrass you, and what has proved of lasting value.

A couple of my favourites

2010-07-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Bay James K. Baxter

On the road to the bay was a lake of rushes
Where we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos.
Now it is rather to stand and say:
How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,
The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss:
Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names
And a hut on the shore beside the maori ovens.
We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek
Or swam in those autumnal shallows
Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs
Upstream, and waiting for the taniwha.

So now I remember the bay, and the little spiders
On driftwood, so poisonous and quick.
The carved cliffs and the great out-crying surf
With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.

A thousand times an hour is torn across
And burned for the sake of going on living.
But I remember the bay that never was
And stand like stone, and cannot turn away.

. . .

Elegy for an Unknown Soldier James K. Baxter

There was a time when I would magnify
His ending; scatter words as if I wept
Tears not my own but man's; there was a time.
But not now so. He died of a common sickness.

Nor did any new star shine
Upon the day when he came crying out
Of fleshy darkness to a world of pain,
And waxen eyelids let the daylight enter.

So felt and tasted, found earth good enough.
Later he played with stones and wondered
If there was land beyond the dark sea rim
And where the road led out of the farthest paddock.

Awkward at school, he could not master sums.
Could you expect him then to understand
The miracle and menace of his body
That grew as mushrooms grow from dusk to dawn?

He had the weight, though, for a football scrum,
And thought it fine to listen to the cheering
And drink beer with the boys, telling them tall
Stories of girls that he had never known.

So when the War came he was glad and sorry,
But soon enlisted. Then his mother cried
A little, and his father boasted how
He'd let him go, though needed for the farm.

Likely in Egypt he would find out something
About himself, if flies and drunkenness
And deadly heat could tell him much - until
In his first battle a shell splinter caught him.

So crown him with memorial bronze among
The older dead, child of a mountainous island.
Wings of a tarnished victory shadow him
Who born of silence has burned back to silence.

. . .

Otepoti here. These are both fairly early poems. His later work is much sparer. Unfortunately my copy of Baxter has disappeared, dammit - that's the trouble with favourite books - they're too good not to be shared, but you always risk losing them - same as children, really.

A taniwha is a river guardian, living in the water. Not quite a god; they were never prayed to or propitiated, but every stream has one. They're depicted sometimes as lizard-like creatures.

Poisonous spiders, by the way, are not a big problem in New Zealand. There's only one, the katipo, and as far as I know, no-one dies of their bites.

Maori ovens are groups of rocks gathered for hangi cooking - a pit is dug, a fire is built in it, the rocks (of a type that won't explode) are gathered and piled on top, they are well-heated, the fire-pit is cleaned out, the rocks are put back in, the food in baskets of flax or modern materials, goes in, there are soaked sacks laid on top, then the earth is shovelled back over, and the whole thing is left to steam - three hours or so.

The food is unforgettably delicious, if it's done right, and it's a good way of cooking for a big, big group in the outdoors. The Wikipedia entry, however, says, quite rightly, if you rake off the earth and no steam comes up, then shovel the earth back on and buy fish and chips.

Calling Enbrethiliel - did you ever have hangi food while you were here? Was it good, or the "should have bought fish and chips" sort?

The second poem: NZers rushed off to both World Wars in huge numbers. For WW1, the NZ soldier deaths were the highest per capita of anyone. There are memorials all over the show - every small town has a stone soldier leaning on a rifle, or some such, and a sad list of names underneath, often several members of a family. It's a melancholy sight.

James K Baxter came from a famous conscientious objector family, so I think this poem is remarkable in its restraint towards the enterprise of war, considering. It haunts me somewhat, now that I have two sons in the armed forces.

Dear Old Aunt

2010-07-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry, folks, a family situation has blown up which will take all my time for the next month or so.

My aunt (78) has been in hospital with a stroke and while we were looking after her affairs, we found that she is in a very bad way for money.

At the moment, we are planning for her to move in here with us, while we sort out her affairs. This will also be the safest thing for her, health-wise. She's a bit wobbly since the stroke.

So I regret that I'll be unable to sort out any NZ reading for you, but if you do find any James K. Baxter or M.K. Joseph on the net, they are both well worth reading.

Every blessing to you all.

Not to Write a Big Sex Post, or Anything...but...

2010-07-06T11:17:00.001-07:00

Would anyone like to join me in discussing topic A? Mrs. Darwin I figure is probably not going to be able to join me on this one, new baby and all (CONGRATULATIONS DARWINS!!!! I'd cook you dinner if you didn't live so far away!).

Anyway, just wanted to say one thing about the sex scene in Pettigrew (let no sex scene go undiscussed).

I feel like the sex between Major and Mrs. Ali came out of left field. I suppose I partially expected it, but did not need the relationship to be consummated to be convinced of their affection for one another. And in fact, I thought the author was using the sex as a symbol of MRs. Ali's rejection of the fanatical religious persuasion of some of her relatives. In one conversation she is accused of turning to the dark side, and Mrs. Ali says, "Yes, I'm a fornicatinng whore" or something like that--and anyway I think that sex as a symbol of religious rejection is a card that gets overplayed.

If Mrs. Ali is going to reject her Muslim faith (and I guess it's not clear that she does), why is having sex the only tool authors seem to use to show a character's rejection of religious oppression?

ALSO, A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
Enbrethiliel is joining our group! She will post a hello one of these days, though I'm pretty sure we all know her.

So the book choosing list for the next few months goes like this:
Otepoti--July
Pentimento--August
Melanie B--September
Enbrethiliel--October

and back to the beginning.

What would you like to read next?

2010-07-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

What would you like to read next?

Would you like to try something from my part of the world? Just for the kicks of trying to figure out some-one else's cultural references?

I was going to suggest "The God Boy" by Ian Cross. It's very old now, though, and may not be in print anymore. Plus, the Catholicism theme is not (as far as I remember) sympathetically handled. I would not be trying to be insulting in suggesting it, quite the reverse, I'd just be interested in your views, but I'd hate to alienate and offend you.

How about something New Zealand, but not Catholic? "Bulibasha" by Witi Ihimaera. Or "Whalerider" by the same author, if you want a book that has a film attached to it. I can help you with the Maori words and phrases.

Other than that, how about some poetry? There's James K Baxter and also M.K. Joseph, both fine Catholic poets, in my opinion. Baxter was a bit of a renegade; M.K. Joseph was an academic. If you can't get copies, then I could photocopy the stuff and post it to someone. Or scan it to a disk and send it to you.

Best to all

Major Pettigrew the Merchant Ivory Motion Picture

2010-06-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

Greetings to you all, friends,

So who are we casting for the (inevitable, unquestionable) film? Emma Thompson for Grace the gracious neighbour - but who for Major Pettigrew and the obnoxious Roger? Jim Broadbent is too fat, and Colin Firth isn't quite old or young enough.

Did anyone else find the peripheral relationships - father/son, major/neighbour, son/girlfriend, major/abdul wahid MUCH more interesting and better drawn than the central love interest?

Would any else have liked a little more of Jasmina's internal monologue? I also wished that the Major's character hadn't existed quite so much in tart reaction. Though - I guess that's the implication of "reactionary".

Anyway, thanks for that. I enjoyed it, and I read it ON TIME.

wOOt!

Jocelyn

Major Pettigrew makes his rounds

2010-06-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

Betty Duffy bought a book and passed it to her sister.

Her sister read the book and passed it to her mother.

Their mother read the book and passed it to the grandmother.

The grandmother will read the book and will pass it to an aunt who will pass it to another aunt, and then it will go through the cousins.

Then they'll all go see the movie. Or they'll dream about pooling their resources to go stay in a little cottage in a town in England like Edgecombe St. Mary's.

Actually I'm sorry I finished the book so soon, because I'd like to spend a few more hours in that world.

So although it is a rare event in our family to pay full price for a book, the $25 for Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, divided at least five ways turns out to be a very good deal for several hours of absorbing entertainment.

I wish I were as talented as Major Pettigrew at coming up with polite slights. He says the things you only imagine you should have said hours after the conversation is over. And the objects of his pointed remarks rarely seem offended, or if they are slightly offended, as in the interesting conversation with Abdul Wahid when he is staying at the Major's, they end up having a meaningful discussion. I found it hard to believe, however, that Roger never felt more injured by the criticisms of his avarice. But I did find it believable and likable that the Major recognized in himself the flaws of his son in his desire to possess the Churchill guns. Since BD and I recently spent several hours with my aunt looking at our deceased grandmother's photographs, letters, and jewelry, this topic was fresh. Our family hasn't suffered from disagreements over the division of our grandparents' household, but it's easy to see how a thing can become a totem almost of the original possessor and imbued with more value than the relationship with the siblings who actually are a living part of the original.

I also found myself wondering about Nancy, the first Mrs. Pettigrew. She seemed so different from Mrs. Ali. I suppose it is too much to ask that more be told about the relationship between Nancy and the Major in a novel like this. My husband has always claimed that he wouldn't remarry if I died before him, but I wonder if I died relatively young, if he would marry someone completely different from me and how the kids would feel about it. Sure to be complicated.