We Interrupt This Blogging Break...

I saw these over at Carrie's blog, and I just couldn't resist.

Which Literature Classic Are You?

J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings. You are entertaining and imaginative, creating whole new worlds around yourself. Well loved, you have a whole league of imitators, none of which is quite as profound as you are. Stories and songs give a spark of joy in the middle of your eternal battle with the forces of evil.

Well, then.

If you want to find out which literature classic YOU are, you can click here to take the quiz. Be forewarned, though, that the quiz questions are a little odd. I think it's pretty transparently rigged for specific results. (I'm just glad LOTR was on the list of available classics.)

What Should I Read Next?

This is a slightly bizarre quiz, the purpose of which is to link you up with books that are similar to what you already like to read. Purely out of curiosity, I typed in The Canterbury Tales and had the following books recommended to me:

The Aeneid
Beowulf
The Arabian Nights
Inferno
Paradiso
The short stories of Guy de Maupassant
The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Apparently, they recommend Inferno and Paradiso, but not Purgatorio?

So, I tried again by going in a completely different direction. I typed in To Kill a Mockingbird and received the following recommendations:

Cry, the Beloved Country
A Light in the Attic (Shel Silverstein)
Setting Free the Bears (John Irving)
The Crucible
All Things Wise and Wonderful (James Herriot)
Sarah, Plain and Tall
The Lottery and Other Stories (Shirley Jackson)
Where the Red Fern Grows
The Good Earth
The Color Purple

Well, I'll give the site credit for range. This list is pretty far-reaching (Shel Silverstein?!) and certainly doesn't box a reader into a specific style or even genre.

Click here if you want some tips on picking out your next book.

Blogging Break

This seems like as a good a time as any to take a spring blogging break. We're moving very soon, and we'll be in transition for a few months. On top of that, a plucky little Trojan virus managed to get past my network of antivirus defense, so my hard drive has to be wiped clean, and all the programs reinstalled. And to finish it off, I have another LSAT to write, so that will take up most of my free time.

So, au revoir for now.

A Little Music and Dance for Your Day...

I came across this elsewhere and had to share it.

It could be subtitled "Awesome Grandma Goes to a Rock Concert." (Seriously. This made me laugh for, like, ten minutes.)

Booking Through Thursday: Bad Book! Bad Book!

This week's question is about the books that made a very bad impression. I'm seldom short of opinions, so I like this question!

What’s the worst "best" book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?

I have no idea if my selection actually deserves to fall under the "best book" category, but it was one that made a number of must-read lists when it was published. Hands down, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is the worst book I ever forced myself to complete. Horrible. Very poor writing, contrived characterization, and transparently weak ideology. I was part of a bookclub of ladies from my church when I lived in Washington, and someone suggested it. I was skeptical but went ahead and bought the book. And it irritated me so much that I returned it to the bookstore.

Book Review: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

I put off reading To Kill a Mockingbird for years. Of course, I knew it was supposed to be an excellent book, very well written with a genuinely edifying story. But there was just a yada, yada, yada quality to the whole thing that kept me from picking it up and reading it.

And it turns out that I was seriously depriving myself of an amazing piece of literature.

If you read my blog often enough, you'll find that this is something of a trend with me. I strenuously resist being told that I must read a certain book (even though I do occasionally dispense advice of that variety...). I'm also not a huge fan of Civil Rights literature, so I don't leap toward books like this eagerly. But in what might be one rare instance, all of the critics and readers who have loved this book were right: it's brilliant, it's extraordinary, it's heartwarming, and it's totally worth reading.

I'm going to avoid providing a summary for several reasons. On the one hand, I think just about everyone has read To Kill a Mockingbird, so there's no point in rehashing the familiar. On the other hand, I'm seriously overwhelmed with life and all that goes with it right now, so I don't feel like belting out a summary. But I will provide my impressions of the book, which might be -- if nothing else -- a little more entertaining.

I don't really know what it is about this book that I like so much. On the surface, it should bore me to no end. Oh, gee: another story about racism in the Deep South. But Lee weaves a tale that is so fascinating, so fun, so intense, and so real that the reader just gets sucked right in. About five pages into the book, I became truly disappointed that no one had thought to nickname me "Scout" as a child -- not because it's pertinent to me in any way, and not because I was in any way like the character Scout. I just thought it was a great nickname, and I grew to appreciate the character so much that I couldn't help but wish I had been a little like her.

On that note, Lee's character development is excellent in the story, and I can't think of a single character that is poorly drawn. (Now, if I were to be completely honest, I'd admit that I have a little trouble wrapping my mind around Jem, but I think that's because he's supposed to be a more complex character whose personality isn't easily defined.) For me, though, the best part of the story has to be Scout's narration all the way through. She's spunky, clever, a little naive at times, but always authentic. I think that's what comes through the most. Scout might be a total goof at times, she has authenticity, and she throws herself into life; and as a result, she gets so much out of it. She can also be downright hysterical at times. This passage in particular tickled me:

The second grade was grim, but Jem assured me the older I got the better school would be, that he started off the same way, and it was not until one reached the sixth grade that one learned anything of value. The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me -- he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

For whatever reason, this made me laugh for about ten minutes (that and the explanation that Scout's ancestor had produced a series of daughters before finally seeing the arrival of a son -- who was promptly named Welcome). And the book is filled with moments like this, painting a picture of Scout's life and interwoven with the somewhat darker facts of racism in her seemingly picture-perfect town of Maycomb. By the time the more serious issues roll around, Lee has prepared the reader for them, and she handles them very carefully; but Scout never loses her tone -- it just grows up a little as she begins to see a side of the world that she doesn't understand and that is entirely unjust. This is probably one of the few books that I'd describe as perfectly written (the other is Ellis Peters's The Virgin in the Ice, but I won't go into that now). It flows beautifully from beginning to end, and Lee never misses a beat. It was the only book she ever published, but it's worth ten (or more) books by lesser authors.

Well, I'm not going to tell you that you must read this book -- if you haven't. But I do recommend. Strenuously.

Year of publication: 1960
Number of pages: 281

Book Review: The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli

The degradations that history has layered on Machiavelli aside, The Prince is quite possibly one of the most interesting political texts that I have ever read. (I'm not sure how much of a competition there is for the qualification of "interesting" among political texts -- which are probably dull for the most part -- but this one is definitely interesting.) His observations are astute; his comments are pragmatic to the point of being cold-hearted but always perspicacious. And his overall thesis is remarkably relevant. I noted this in my Tuesday Teaser post, but I'll mention it again: there's a lot of what Machiavelli says that is clearly being applied to current political situations. I don't know if that's because politicians have absorbed Machiavellian politics, whether deliberately or unconsciously, or if it's because what Machiavelli has to say is just so sensible for the art of governing. Either way, Machiavelli definitely hasn't lost any relevance.

The book itself is quite short. My copy ran only 71 pages, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff crammed into it. Machiavelli covers everything from conquering and acquiring new kingdoms to maintaining a standing army. Concerning the former, he has this to say:

He, therefore, who acquires such a State, if he mean to keep it, must see to two things; first, that the blood of the ancient line of Princes be destroyed; second, that no change be made in respect of laws or taxes; for in this way the newly acquired State speedily becomes incorporated with the hereditary.

Now, whatever you might say about his comment regarding annihilation of the former monarchy, he does make a really pragmatic point: if you're going to invade for the purpose of conquering, you have to do something with the previous rulers. And leaving an eligible member of the family lying around probably isn't going to do much for guaranteeing peace and stability. No, it's not a friendly and gentle approach by any means; but I appreciate that Machiavelli just comes right out and states the obvious. (I also love the bit about laws and taxes; in other words, citizens are far less attached to their rulers than to their laws and their tax codes. It's really true, you know...)

The book is filled with interesting little tidbits like this all the way through. He recommends that princes should pursue solid education as well as strong military training. He argues that a prince needs to give the impression of morality but that he shouldn't avoid having some little quirks. His reasoning in this case is that a prince should aim for respect among his people but shouldn't pretend that he can be perfect. They're more likely to appreciate him if he has a few small flaws that make him unique. This is more than a little intangible to quantify as a successful trait, but I suppose Machiavelli makes a good argument from the perspective of human psychology. And his understanding of human nature is evident throughout the book. I wouldn't say that he offers much of a Christian point of view, but he does seem to have a sense of what drives motives and desires among mankind. He is perhaps a bit cynical in places, but cynicism doesn't overwhelm his arguments.

This is definitely an interesting -- and even a fun -- read, largely because I don't think it's quite what people expect it to be. The term "Machiavellian" seems so extreme in its current negative connotation that you'd think Machiavelli recommended weekly infant sacrifices. But that isn't the case at all. He's just coldly practical about the nature of ruling and very cognizant of human foibles. As a medieval political treatise with strong modern application, this is definitely one piece of literature that I recommend. You might be surprised about how much of a "Machiavellian" mindset you recognize in the US government today.

Year of publication: 1532
Number of pages: 71

Booking Through Thursday: From Page to Lens

I am completely drawing a blank on this week's question, so I'm just going to toss out whatever I can think up now and will probably come up with much better ideas ex post facto.

What book do you think should be made into a movie? And do you have any suggestions for the producers?

Or, What book do you think should NEVER be made into a movie?

I'll do both.

As for a book that should be made into a movie, I'll go with The Hobbit -- since the plans are currently in place, and I think it would make a really enjoyable film. Given the success of turning Lord of the Rings into films, I trust that The Hobbit could be done tastefully and authentically, as long as the producers/director don't try to make it too much like Lord of the Rings. The books are very different and should be treated differently on film.

As for a book that shouldn't, I recently heard that Hilary Swank's production company had bought the rights to French Women Don't Get Fat. It's a diet book -- so I have no idea how it would be made into a movie, but apparently some desperate soul is going to attempt it. Somehow I don't think it has book-to-movie potential, but perhaps a good screenwriter will prove me wrong. If I were to offer another Tolkien response, I'd have to say that The Silmarillion should never be made into a movie, but I seriously doubt anyone would attempt it. That would be like turning the book of Leviticus into a film.

Book Review: The Canterbury Tales (abridged), by Geoffrey Chaucer

When I was about sixteen, I remember my uncle telling me that his appreciation for great literature started when he read The Canterbury Tales. For whatever reason, I bypassed this particular classic by in high school and then in college and didn't read it through until about four years ago. To be honest, I didn't understand all the fuss. (Then again, I did take it with me on a vacation to Mazatlán, so I'm not sure I got as much out of it as I could have since I had designated a Middle English poem as "poolside reading.")

I'm so thankful to read it again, because this time around I can understand my uncle's excitement about Chaucer's great work. The Tales really is a masterpiece of mixed styles, genres, dialects, and so forth -- as diverse as the pilgrims who are on the journey and a true testament to Chaucer's skill as a writer. I should probably admit that I didn't read an unabridged copy of The Canterbury Tales, primarily because the copy I own (having snagged it from my mom) is abridged, and I didn't feel like purchasing a new copy. For the record, this is what is included in my copy:

The Prologue (but of course!)
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Tale
The Wife of Bath's Tale
The Merchant's Tale
The Franklin's Tale
The Pardoner's Tale
The Prioress's Tale
The Nun's Priest's Tale

No, it's not a complete list of the tales that Chaucer wrote for this work, but it does cover the most famous ones and probably the most important ones. Due to the fact that various tales are excluded in between some of those listed above, there are occasional gaps that suggest a missing conversation that didn't quite make it into the edition I own; but otherwise, this is a sufficient copy that offers the reader a good idea of what Chaucer was hoping to accomplish. In all reality, he didn't come anywhere near finishing The Canterbury Tales as he apparently intended. There are only 22 tales in total, and Chaucer planned to write 124, as each pilgrim was supposed to tell four tales instead of just one. If the fragment of Chaucer's vision is any indication of his skill as a writer, I can only imagine what a wealth of literary brilliance we would have today had his plan come to fruition. As it is, though, what is extant is certainly worth reading.

For me, one of the most interesting and the most important qualities of The Canterbury Tales is its linguistic quality. (Bear with me here...) Obviously, the English language did not just appear suddenly in its modern form. It developed over time, and the only evidence we have for that development is the literature that has survived. What's more, spelling wasn't standardized at that point, so the spelling that Chaucer uses can suggest pronunciation, giving to modern readers a much better idea of what a word that we use today sounded like six hundred years ago. Perhaps more important of all, Chaucer doesn't merely write high-flying poetry in The Canterbury Tales. His pilgrims came from a variety of social classes and regions, so he adapts the telling of the tale to the pilgrim's class and dialect. In one case, Chaucer seems to use phrases that suggest a pilgrim from the north of England, providing modern scholars with hints of the difference in dialect between people in the south of England and people in the north. (Even today there's a difference. I recall one professor telling a story about how she saw a newscast with a journalist from London up in Northumberland interviewing a local farmer. She asked him a question and stuck the microphone in his face, only to realize that she couldn't understand a word he was saying. The journalist just shook her head at the camera and gave up.)

So, this receives an obvious thumbs-up from me and a big recommendation. If you can get your hands on a complete version, that's great. If not, reading even a few of the tales will provide a wonderful glimpse of Chaucer's skill. For the sake of ease (and pleasure in reading), I do recommend a parallel text since the Middle English can be tricky at times. For instance, these are the opening lines:

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

If you think that reading an entire book of this could bring you to tears, I definitely recommend a parallel text (or just a translation). Either way, this is a magnificent work of literature, and it fully deserves to be called a "classic." And I'm very grateful that I gave it a second chance, because I would have missed out on something wonderful had I relied only on my first impression.

Teaser Tuesday: Absolutely Machiavellian

My teaser for this week comes from Chapter VI of The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Despite the bad reputation that history has given Machiavelli, I have to say that this is one of my favorite books, if only because Machiavelli is so astoundingly honest about authority and what is needed to maintain it. Quite honestly, I don't see much difference between a lot of what he recommends and what most modern governments do to keep order: they're just a bit more subtle about it perhaps (or not!).

For besides what has been said, it should be borne in mind that the temper of the multitude is fickle, and that while it should easy to persuade them of a thing, it is hard to fix them in that persuasion. Wherefore, matters should be so ordered that when men no longer believe of their own accord, they may be compelled to believe by force...

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should be Reading.

Music: Full Fathom Five

I was in the mood for Meav today, and I'm glad to say that this marvelous piece of music made it back onto YouTube. It's hauntingly beautiful.

The words:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,--ding-dong, bell.

Taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest. (Part of this also made an appearance in T.S. Eliot's marvelous poem The Wasteland.)

Book Review: Night, by Elie Wiesel

This is definitely one of those books that has been on the lower rungs of my to-read list for a while, and I'm not sure I would have read it any time soon if I hadn't decided to assign it to my students this year.

Simply put, this is a very difficult book to read. Of course, I wouldn't say that any story detailing someone's experience in a concentration camp during the Holocaust would -- or should -- be easy to read. But I've read other Holocaust memoirs that weren't quite so painful. Wiesel infuses real emotion, real agony into this story, and rightfully so perhaps. But I can be a coward with books like this, and I struggle to find a way to respond to them.

Wiesel's story isn't necessarily a unique one, but he offers the unique perspective of having been a teenager when he was interred in the concentration camps. He was raised an Orthodox Jew and grew up in a small town in Romania. The other Jewish families in the town saw the Nazi terrors approaching and yet chose to look away, chose to believe that the disaster would not quite get to them. To their own demise, I'm sorry to say. Almost overnight, the Nazis arrive, the ghettos are segregated, and then the Jews are deported. Wiesel and his family end up in the Auschwitz compound; his mother and younger sister Tziporah (to whom the book is dedicated) are sent off to the main Auschwitz camp, and Wiesel and his father end up in Birkenau. They never see his mother and sister again. In the camp, the young man is focused primarily on staying with his father and staying alive. They are eventually transferred from Birkenau to Buna and then to Buchenwald, where the American Army eventually liberates them. Sadly, Wiesel's father dies only months before the liberation.

There is a sense of compartmentalization to the story that is also a sense of hopelessness. I suppose I can see Wiesel's reasons, from a literary perspective. He wants to give the reader tunnel vision and set the reader in the moment, feeling what he felt as a fifteen-year old who was on the cusp of adulthood but had everything in his life ripped away virtually in a matter of a few hours. He's sad, angry, and then he's basically apathetic. He loses his vision for the future; he loses hope; and perhaps most importantly he loses his faith in God. The story concludes rather grimly, just after Buchenwald has been liberated:

I wanted to see myself in the mirror ... I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

And that's all the reader gets. The reader doesn't find out that Wiesel eventually regains his faith in God and that he is also reunited later with two of his sisters who did survive the war. As a result, it's extremely depressing and just ends with a resounding thud of personal torment. In his defense, Wiesel knew this and suspected that this was the reason he had trouble finding an American publisher at first. (He claims that Americans like books with happy endings.) But I don't think it's merely the depressing quality of the story that makes it such a challenge to read: I really think it's the overarching mood of hopelessness. I recall reading The Hiding Place many years back, and what sticks out in my mind now is that in spite of all the horrors that the Ten Boom sisters experienced, they never lost hope, and they certainly never lost faith. They didn't believe that God had done these things to them or, even worse (as Wiesel comes to suggest) that God was dead. Instead, they accepted that man in all his sinfulness had perpetrated great evil and that God in His infinite purposes had allowed it to continue and had allowed them to suffer within it. Yes, The Hiding Place is a depressing story; but it's not a hopeless one.

Would the later facts of Wiesel's life have improved the ending? I'm tempted to say that they would. An epilogue of some kind would, if nothing else, have shined a little light in a dark story. At the end of the day, hope in combination with faith is an overwhelmingly powerful force that can alter even the grimmest perspectives. By concluding as he does, Wiesel almost gives the appearance of succumbing to what the Nazis wanted to accomplish -- forcing people to give up, making humans less than human, destroying all hope. The real triumph would have been to demonstrate that he had overcome his apathy and found hope once again, hope that he could offer to his readers. Instead, he gives us the sense that he survived the Holocaust, but only as an empty shell. He was alive physically, but he was dead emotionally and spiritually. It is the story of night without the promise of the sunrise to follow. Yes, this is a story about the Holocaust and as such is a justifiably sad story. Yes, it is Wiesel's memoir about his experiences, and it is his right to tell the story as he experienced it. But he already had the hopeful vision of life beyond the concentration camps when he wrote the book; so the night was over for him, and he was already standing in the light of the risen sun.

I recommend this book, but with the added caution that readers should consider locating further information about Wiesel and his life to give the story some context. As it stands, this book is almost too much of a downer to take on its own.

Year of publication: 1955
Number of pages: 120

Kind of Random...

I just added a Firefox program called Zotero to my computer. Apparently, it's a research tool so you can keep track of resources, citations, and so forth all in one place. (As opposed to keeping loose pages and notecards.) Anyone ever used this? I'm looking forward to playing with it, because I want to start PhD work in a year or so, and I think this will come in handy.

Booking Through Thursday: The Literary Road Not Taken

This week's prompt from Booking Through Thursday is about those should-have-read-but-just-haven't-read books.

We’ve all seen the lists, we’ve all thought, “I should really read that someday,” but for all of us, there are still books on “The List” that we haven’t actually gotten around to reading. Even though we know they’re fabulous. Even though we know that we’ll like them. Or that we’ll learn from them. Or just that they’re supposed to be worthy. We just … haven’t gotten around to them yet.

What’s the best book that YOU haven’t read yet?

Well, generally I like the classics, so I've read a lot of the great books. I suppose I could mention most of the Narnia books: as I mentioned in my recent essay post, I've read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but none of the others. I also haven't gotten anywhere near the Harry Potter books yet, and having seen some of the movies I'm not inclined to do so.

If I were to select two individual books that I've tried to read but just couldn't get through, I would say The Portrait of a Lady (by Henry James) and The Sun Also Rises (by Ernest Hemingway). In the first case, James just spends too much time discussing what Isabel is thinking and what she might think and what she might do. And in my opinion, Isabel's about as interesting as dry toast, so who cares about all of her hypotheticals? I've tried to read that one three or four times now, and I always give up a few chapters in. With The Sun Also Rises, I get too lost in the dialogue. It's written in English but set in Spain, and Hemingway writes the dialogue as though it's being translated from formal Spanish. So, it doesn't have a natural feel, and I just get tired of the awkwardness after a while.

Essay Challenge: C.S. Lewis Essays

The title of my post might be a little misleading: I didn't read essays by C.S. Lewis but rather essays about him and particularly about the Narnia books. I only read two essays in this case, so I'll discuss each.



"The High Road to Narnia"
By George Watson

At the top of this essay, the publishers have offered the following snippet: "C.S. Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien believed that truths are universal and that stories reveal them." This is a fair enough summary of the essay, so I won't disagree with it, although I do want to offer a further explanation about Watson's argument. More than focusing just on the idea of universal truth (something with which I cannot disagree), Watson starts by zooming in on the idea of Modernism, because both Lewis and Tolkien believed that Modern literature had abandoned the traditions of the past to its own destruction:

Modern fiction, they believed, had lost the plot. Pound and Eliot, who led the Parisian riffraff, did not tell stories, and Joyce and Virginia Woolf seemed to think it the least interesting thing a novelist did. Nobody retold ancient and traditional tales. But art is tradition. The Greeks called Memory the mother of the Muses, and Lewis, whose training was classical, believed that the ancients had got it right. Originality is the most overrated of the virtues... (90)

Watson does go on to temper the arguments from Lewis and Tolkien to point out that not all Modern literature is void of value. But he indicates that at the root of the problem with the literature is its desire for subjectivity in the discussion of truth. Watson discusses a gripe that Lewis had with a textbook in which an anecdote about Coleridge is described. Apparently, there were two men viewing a waterfall; one referred to it as "pretty" and the other "sublime." Coleridge announced that the first man had missed the point altogether. The authors of the textbook argued that Coleridge was being harsh and that the first man was simply offering an opinion that meant something to him. " 'He appeared to be making a remark about a waterfall,' they wrote, but it was no more than 'a remark about his own feelings.' " In other words, the man was really focused on how he felt, and the waterfall was the physical manifestation of it; because he felt good/happy/etc., the waterfall could thus be described as pretty. Lewis, however, claimed that they had missed the point altogether in their opinion. If you say that another person is an imbecile, it certainly doesn't mean that you feel yourself to be an imbecile, does it? (I should point out that the whole purpose of this discussion is to counter the problems of subjectivity on the part of the textbook authors and not to discuss Coleridge's opinion. But on that note, I can't avoid pointing that the authors of the textbook tripped over their own reasoning by failing to acknowledge that Coleridge should himself be entitled to an undisputed opinion... Well now, isn't bad logic fun to laugh at?)

The best way to explain all of this is probably to quote yet another portion of the essay that summarizes one of the problems arising from subjective reasoning:

Two fatal objections stand against subjectivism, whether moral or critical. One is that it involves a contradiction; for if all judgments are merely personal, so is that judgment. "Merely personal" is plainly, among other things, a judgment of value. So the subjectivist is trying to have it both ways, and like a rich socialist he is claiming a silent self-exemption. Inequality is wrong unless it is mine, so give me the money. Morality is merely personal, but my view of the Holocaust or Gulf War is right and others are wrong. All very convenient; but like convenience food, hardly nourishing.

Subjectivism, which denies knowledge, was an essential aspect of totalitarianism, and Lewis, who had fought on the Western Front in 1918, believed by the time he'd reached middle age that he was fighting a second war. "We don't have rulers but leaders," he would say contemptuously...The dictators as both men [the other being Orwell, in this case] saw, were a new breed. They did not merely forbid you to know; they denied knowledge itself... (92-93)

This particular section of the passage earned an excited note on my PDF file, because it created a link in my own mind that hadn't yet occurred to me: totalitarianism is borne out of subjectivity, but it's a distant by-product instead of an immediate one. (Apparently, mind-numbingly bad reasoning is the first...) There was definitely food for thought here.

All in all, a great essay that's well worth reading. I wouldn't call this the kind of essay that will appeal to Narnia fans who are looking for an obvious discussion about the literature itself (and I should point out that the title of the essay is rather poorly directed), but it's a good look at the worldview of C.S. Lewis.

This essay was originally published in The American Scholar.

"Narnia's Secret: The Seven Heavens of the Chronicles Revealed"
By Dr Michael Ward

Unlike the first essay, this one is specifically about Lewis's Narnia stories and offers what was, for me at least, a truly fascinating interpretation. Dr Ward begins by pointing out that literary scholars have always struggled with appreciating the literary (as opposed to moral or entertainment) qualities of the books. Even Tolkien believed that Lewis had kind of "jumped the shark," so to speak when Father Christmas popped up in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The belief has always been that Lewis wrote with a kitchen-sink mentality and included whatever appealed to his whims.

Now, this is somewhat unfair, but no one has been able to offer a clear interpretation of Lewis's purpose in the books, so the kitchen-sink theory has held for now. But Ward believes that he might have a solid line of reasoning for what Lewis was doing. Whether or not he's correct, I can't say for sure, since I've only read the first of the Narnia books; but if nothing else, this is a truly fascinating argument.

Weeding through a bit of tedium, it becomes clear about halfway through the essay that Ward is seeing an astrological argument for the stories. Now, bear with me here (because you'll have to bear with him otherwise, and it takes him a while to get to his point). It has only been since the rise of science in viewing the universe that people have begun to push aside the idea of planetary influences. Ward claims that the medieval church believed the planets had some impact on our lives, and he even cites Scripture to suggest that the Bible does not reject this view. But once Enlightenment views led the way -- rejecting spirituality over pure science -- these beliefs about the role of the planets were reduced to pseudo-science. According to Ward, Lewis believed that this was a mistake:

He concludes that what proved important about it was not the mere alteration in our map of space [relating specifically to the switch from an earth-centric to a sun-centric universe] but the methodological revolution that verified it. Reducing Nature to her mathematical elements, men began treating her as a machine, rather than as a spiritual organism with her own integrity. (25)

Ward goes on to claim that Lewis wrote each of the seven Narnia books around the traditional "seven heavens":

--Jupiter, to represent The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (because the "hidden meaning" of the story is rooted in joviality, stemming from Jove/Jupiter -- also explaining the inclusion of Father Christmas, who is quite jovial)
--Mars, to represent Prince Caspian (the god Mars was connected to woods and forests; the story has strong forest imagery)
--The Sun, to represent The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (the story of a journey to the rising sun)
--The Moon, to represent The Silver Chair (lots of lunar and silver references: someone is a "lunatic," and the chair is silver, representing the color of moonlight)
--Mercury, to represent The Horse and His Boy (references to the Gemini -- among other things -- which is a constellation within the system of Mercury)
--Venus, to represent The Magician's Nephew (discussions of birth, fertility, and so forth -- all connected to Venus)
--Saturn, to represent The Last Battle (referencing Saturn's qualities of death; apparently, the character of Father Time in the story was also called "Saturn" originally)

So, there you are. According to Ward, this was Lewis's overarching plan, but he chose not to reveal it, because he believed that readers would understand this already or that it would ruin some of the allusion for him to come right out and explain it. I'm not entirely sure if I buy Ward's theories, but he definitely makes a persuasive argument for them, and if nothing else they provide a new approach to reading the stories.

Let me point out that this theory does not in any way negate the Christian elements of the Narnia stories, and Ward makes that very clear. (He's also a priest in the Church of England, so it's unlikely he'd make such an argument.) Instead, this is meant to be a system for better understanding Lewis's own inspiration and goals for the stories. For my part, I find it difficult to reject Ward's arguments simply because of the often-negative connotation associated with the word "astrology" for Christians. I'm not looking to read the future by the position of the planets, but if ever a person ticked extra box for the qualities of a Gemini, I'm that person. (Odd that this is the second post I've found myself mentioning this; I guess I had Ward on my mind when I talked about Steinbeck.) I'll even admit that having checked out my natal chart for research purposes, and it's pretty close to being a good description of me. Aquinas believed that the planets held sway in our lives, but that as Christians our goal was to identify the personal weaknesses that might be associated with them and strive to live like Christ. In other words, we might have qualities associated with planetary influences, but that's no excuse to sin. And it's certainly no excuse to open the newspaper to check out the daily horoscope and wonder if it will come true. All of Creation is in God's hands, and the planets move at His command.

Final comment: I'm still going through all of this in my mind, so I can't say for sure what my position is on it, but I think that Ward makes a good point, and I think there's much to learn about the topic in general. Additionally, Ward has a book that might be interesting to some -- Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (from Oxford University Press) -- in which I'm sure he goes into much more detail about all of this. The book has received very good reviews on Amazon, and it doesn't sound like a bunch of numpties read and reviewed it. (For anyone who is still concerned, he's also co-authored a book entitled Heresies and How to Avoid Them, so I'm guessing he's serious about sound theology.)

This essay was originally published in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. Michael Ward also has a website called Planet Narnia.

Poetry Study: Ogden Nash

I feel as though a few of my recent posts have been a bit on the serious side, so I thought I'd post some fun poetry, namely that of the inimitable Ogden Nash.

"The Purist"

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

"The Centipede"

I objurgate the centipede,
A bug we do not really need.
At sleepy-time he beats a path
Straight to the bedroom or the bath.
You always wallop where he’s not,
Or, if he is, he makes a spot.

[Quick injection of opinion: I agree whole-heartedly with Nash about centipedes. As someone who lives in a place where they abound, they are obnoxiously difficult to kill and require a stout shoe and a quick hand.]

"The Ant"

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?

"First Child ... Second Child"

FIRST

Be it a girl, or one of the boys,
It is scarlet all over its avoirdupois,
It is red, it is boiled; could the obstetrician
Have possibly been a lobstertrician?
His degrees and credentials were hunky-dory,
But how's for an infantile inventory?
Here's the prodigy, here's the miracle!
Whether its head is oval or spherical,
You rejoice to find it has only one,
Having dreaded a two-headed daughter or son;
Here's the phenomenon all complete,
It's got two hands, it's got two feet,
Only natural, but pleasing, because
For months you have dreamed of flippers or claws.
Furthermore, it is fully equipped:
Fingers and toes with nails are tipped;
It's even got eyes, and a mouth clear cut;
When the mouth comes open the eyes go shut,
When the eyes go shut, the breath is loosed
And the presence of lungs can be deduced.
Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder,
This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder.
A staggering child, a child astounding,
Dazzling, diaperless, dumbfounding,
Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed,
A child to stagger and flabbergast,
Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn,
And the only perfect one ever born.

SECOND

Arrived this evening at half-past nine.
Everybody is doing fine.
Is it a boy, or quite the reverse?
You can call in the morning and ask the nurse.


"What's the use?"

Sure, deck your limbs in pants,
Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance...
Have you seen yourself retreating?

And my personal favorite...

"Reflexions on Ice-Breaking"

Candy
is dandy
But liquor
is quicker

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Poetry here and here. Also, click here for a biography of Ogden Nash.

Art Study: A Woman Reading

A Woman Reading

Artist: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
(Oil on canvas, 1869-1870.)

I love pre-20th century images of women reading, because literacy rates have not traditionally been high for women. This painting is dated somewhere between 1869/1870, and there were probably many more women with the ability to read in the mid-to-late 19th century than in previous centuries; but still I appreciate an artist who considers this a worthy subject, especially since Corot was known mostly as a painter of landscapes.

If nothing else, it's a beautiful painting.

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Artwork and details derived from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

I've been putting this review off for days, primarily because I couldn't come up with a good way to start it. (Pathetic, I know.) I finally decided that I just had to buckle down and write it, sans any kind of opening zinger.

As with most of the books that I've reviewed so far, I have read The Grapes of Wrath before. I read it in college, and my major memory is of my professor explaining how the Joad family represents the children of Israel leaving Egypt to find the Promised Land (at the very end, that is). I recall that I was pretty much blown away by the story, not to mention this particular interpretation, whatever its actual validity.

This time around, not so much.

Let me state for the record that this is definitely an excellent piece of literature and deserves to be considered an American classic. (There is a shortage of great American literature, so I won't be one to recommend the removal of a worthy piece...) But the story didn't have as much of an impact on me this read. In all fairness, Steinbeck is a truly excellent writer: his descriptions are clear and easy to picture, and the characters are believable, if slightly stereotypical. What's more, he provides these amazing views of the story that might be described as panoramic views and detailed views by alternating chapters about the Joad family and about the condition of the sharecroppers in general. This helps the reader to appreciate the scope of the problem more clearly and to understand just how horrendous the situation was for these unfortunate people.

What bothered me this time around was that I felt as though Steinbeck was pulling the puppet strings just a bit too forcefully in some places. All right, all right: I certainly gained a sense of the injustice that was served upon the farm laborers from Oklahoma and elsewhere as they were searching for work in California. At the same time, it seemed as though there were occasions when Steinbeck was more or less jabbing his pen on the page and shouting, "LOOK! LOOK! THIS IS WRONG!" Yikes. I get it. And I would have gotten it without his sermonizing that grows more frequent as the book progresses. He wants to make sure that readers understand (1) what was causing the problems for the farm laborers, (2) how unfair their treatment was, and (3) what was needed to remedy the problem. There is, frankly, a very strong socialist streak in this book, and it jumped out at me this time, whereas it evaded me when I read it in college.

All of that being said, I have to admit that I don't entirely disagree with Steinbeck on some of his conclusions. I'm not a socialist, but I do think that the farmers treated the farm laborers in a most atrocious way and that there should have been some kind of minimum wage to guarantee that they could survive. Let's just face it: there were serious problems that drove them off their own land (see the image to the left of a dust storm in Oklahoma), and it wasn't as though they could just dash off and find work elsewhere. And the truly abysmal rates that they offered their workers (and the accompanying treatment that they dished out on them) should guarantee some of those farmers a place in one of Dante's Nine Circles of Hell.

But here's the tricky part: Steinbeck wrote the book in such a way that the reader was meant to sympathize with the Joads and their fellow farm laborers and glare angrily upon the people of California who didn't want those laborers setting up makeshift homes near them or taking their land. This might be horrible of me to admit, but I can't entirely blame the people of California for being cautious. They really didn't know what the laborers were going to bring with them in terms of crime and so forth, and I probably would have erred on the side of caution as well. That doesn't mean hurting them, but it might mean setting some boundaries. Would I have wanted my children attending school with some of the children that Steinbeck describes in the book? I just don't know. (In one case, I might be justified: he records a situation in which an eleven-year old boy shot a police officer who harmed his father. I'm all for gun rights, but few eleven-year olds have the discretion to understand self-defense laws.) Would I have wanted the farm laborer families living out of their vans near my nice neighborhood? Probably not. Is that terrible of me? Does that make me a snob? It might, but I'm not going to pretend that I don't struggle with these issues. I remember how sorry I felt for all those people displaced after Hurricane Katrina, but then when I heard about the havoc that they wreaked in the Texas towns where my family lived, my sympathy started to vanish. Now, those were entirely different situations, of course, but the general end result was the same: people who were, in many cases, from very low-income backgrounds began relocating to new areas, leaving the locals in the new areas feeling a little frustrated and uncertain about how to respond. I can understand that. (Maybe it's just the Gemini in me: I see both sides too clearly. Or maybe it's just sin.)

Well, that was probably the most embarrassing thing I've ever admitted in print, but I felt as though I needed to say it. I just don't know how to respond to situations like that. On the one hand, I felt genuinely sorry for the Joads and how they were being treated. On the other hand, I could appreciate the fears of the Californians. So, I absolutely didn't know how to digest The Grapes of Wrath this time around. Truth be told, there is very little in life that is completely black and white, and to me some of what Steinbeck discusses in the book lands heavily in the gray area. (Yes, some of it is very much black and white, but that's not the material that troubled me.)

So...do I recommend the book or not? I absolutely recommend it. My personal questions and some of Steinbeck's stylistic techniques aside, this is still a classic. And if nothing else, it has one of the most controversial final scenes in any work of literature. I mean...Yowza! You can't beat the bizarre image of Rose of Sharon Joad's "mysterious smile" as she tries to help that starving man.

Year of publication: 1939
Number of pages: 581

Teaser Tuesdays -- The Canterbury Tales

I'm still inundated with student work, so I'm back to pulling teasers from books I have to read in preparation for discussing them with students.

This week's teaser is from "The Knight's Tale" within The Canterbury Tales:

He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
Lete I this noble duk to Atthenes ryde,
And al his hoost, in armes hym bisyde.

He conquered the whole realm of the Amazon women,
Which formerly was called Scythia,
And took in marriage Queen Hippolyta
And brought her home with him to his country
With much glory and great pomp;
And he brought as well her young sister Emily.
And thus, with victory and the sound of music,
I leave this noble duke riding to Athens
And, with him, all his force in arms.

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Teaser Tuesdays is hosted at Should Be Reading.