Restart with the New Year

Ok, let's get this conversation started again. I am unsure when the January meeting is taking place. I put a guess on the books of the RFB column. So far I am enjoying War of the End of the World. It reminds me a lot of current American politics, odd considering it was published in 1981, of course that is when the right started to take control with the beginning of the Reagan Era. I think it will be a great discussion in February when we will have both the Llosa book and Pedagogy of the Oppressed to discuss and compare. Themes are similar, and not just because War of the End of the World takes place in Brazil.

I like the various agendas and viewpoints which come into play. I also like not knowing anything about this time period of South American History other than that they had been tossing out the European powers, and thus have to find their own way politically. I like that Gall is reading the religious rebellion as if it is a rebellion of the underclass. So far he can't seem to reconcile the conflict of his beliefs and what he is hearing out of Canudos.

Anyway, I have no idea if anyone reads this anymore or checks on it. But there you go.

I really love this book group by the way.

Manhood

Wow. This book nails the experience of my life on the head thus far. A balm to my manhood.

Silence

I am sorry I missed the Silence discussion, too. I probably will reveal too much in this post, but I might as well since we cannot conceal even when we try. I read the book last year, so the following are more of my residual impressions than reference to specific textual events or narrative.

Any book where clergy or spiritual leaders wrestle with suffering and faith and God attracts my attention. What is is to give your life away to serving a being that seems so, well, silent? Deus absconditus. The absent God. The hidden God. In my experience, however, I find that doubt and hiddenness drive me to faith and revelation-- to the Ur of existence. It is the theology of the cross, to use a Lutheran theological category. To hide something is to reveal it. Why would God come in the most obvious and predictable anyway for only the high and mighty to see? Why not come via cross? Silence? To speak of God is only to get it wrong anyway, properly understood. And what is it, at least in the Christian tradition, that the God who creates becomes creature, and then suffers? Most of us avoid suffering; but who enters it when you do not have to? The cross, doubt, darkness all remain compelling reminders to me of God's presence. Pomp and circumstance, the glory of kings and presidents, powerful corporations and churches all remind me of evil and pride. Thus, God's problem: How do you convey you are a being of humility and compassion? To announce it calls attention to yourself, undermining who you essentially are (I am more humble than thou art). To not announce it is silent, yet true to character.

I don't know. I just think God seems to be more present where human beings say God is not; and God is less at where people seem to think God is. No wonder Jesus hung around the seemingly most apparently anti-god people of all (sinners!), since that is where God is most at work. True teachers find their deepest meaning and purpose among the ignorant, not the educated.

Silence

I'm sorry I missed the discussion of this book. The few things I've seen in about it seemed to center on questioning the nature of God, or arguing Rodrigues' belief: ie, did he ever truly believe, had he lost his faith before he was tested, etc.

It seems to me that, yes he was questioning the nature of God which is rational vs the total dogma which he had been taught - but he was also questioning that dogma. His 'apostasy' was a result of the realization that God didn't require that of him (or care?), but more along the lines of Jesus' words ".. feed my lambs ..", realized that his duty was to humanity, God's children. From there the question would seem to be 1) was this simply a rationalization on Rodrigues' part, or 2) a true epiphany of God's true will?

Nathan

Bravo Richard!

Silence is a great book. I have already finished it. Awesome. Thoughts to come....

The View From Here: Lynda Barry : Poetry Documentaries : Video : The Poetry Foundation

The View From Here: Lynda Barry : Poetry Documentaries : Video : The Poetry Foundation

from "Four Walls" by Ian McGilchrist

I read this this morning in the current issue of Poetry magazine:

When I left the world of academic English literature it was not because I was any less passionate about poetry, but because I did not want to spend my life operating on my friends. I thought I might kill them. Later I learned of Ted Hughes’s dream about the fox that came to him, singed and smelling of burnt hair, put its paw on the essay he was writing, leaving a bloody mark, and said, “You are destroying us.”

for more of the article on the effects of poetry and psychology go here

...for futher reading

I know you purists out there are only interested in finding the true meaning behind the author's purpose via your own inquisition to the novel. However, if you're interested in some interesting fact-finding, insightful background, and simple allusions DFW kept secretly hidden, then go to google books and look up "Understanding DFW" - you can read it online. Go to the "Broom" chapter.

I love finding the back channels...I'm just sayin.

His non-sequiters

What I really enjoyed was Rick's sad stories that he reads to Lenore for entertainment. I laughed because the guy put more detail into narrating the story than the college student put into writing it. Talk about false identity! Too bad his sexual potency wasn't as long as his story-telling. Poor poor pitiful Rick.

Current favorite Quote, Still Early in the Book

". . in even more liquid hues the ghostly scene of Lenore and me running toward each other in slow motion through the pale gelatin of our respective inhibitions and various troubles." p. 61.


Yes, it is part of the over-the-top diction of Mr. Vigorous. That whole chapter "5 - -1990" cracked me up with the wildly weird sappy language that guy uses.

"Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed."

". . . not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in a kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become wholw, two now utterly superflous fleshly stems of overblossomed flora,trailing hoes on the ground, husks."


and on and on and on.

I highlighted the parts that sent me into stunned laughter.

Dig the new upgrade!

I'll have some stuff to talk about on DFW. I'm half way done, so be ready...(this is a note to myelf, you don't have to be ready.)

Silly Word Site

http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html

The Malaisian's Life

OK. I liked this one, too: Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.

Favorite Quote from The Moviegoer (with the exception of Kierkegaard's at the beginning)

"What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life."

Worth a Look: We are all Living in a Collaborative SF Novel

This web site here was left in a comment on my blog. It is interesting enough to spend 10 minutes of your life on.

review of The Winter Vault

First, when I started reading this book, I knew that most of the rhetoric would be profoundly saturated with beauty and delicacy. It started out as such, being taken away to some foreign continuum where people and places can perceive language and complexity beyond the surface. The gossamer dialogue betwixt the two lovers conveyed insatiable desire for each other throughout their lives together, as well as apart, this Jean and Avery. Throughout this book I was taken to war-torn Poland, romantic Canada, and in the archeology and arcana of the Nile River. What made this rhetoric transcend these romantic concessions was that it was all part of one vein, one filament – and that was to make connections with the world. When you live, make connections with those that want to hear you intimately or indirectly, and give way to those that judge you. In death, make connections to what has been provided for you, your friends, your experiences, your surroundings, so that your burden becomes a part of you.

The Winter Vault took us beyond the regularity of life, and transposing a world where every detail is an explosion of meaning. Even in setting, at one moment we are finding the love of Jean and Avery, followed immediately with the experience of living in the Congo – with life and death in this tragic venue. Michaels adds spectacular insight to flora and biology to combine nature and imagination to this beautiful story. Now don’t get me wrong, at times, the weight compounds with the losing track of the story because of the language, and you can become frustrating – the sinews of her syntax breathes very heavy at times. Once that happens, take a break from it. Like Yeat’s Byzantium – it is a place where you are welcome, once you accept your welcoming. This winter vault, where the dead rest, will be remembered for some time.

Overall, I did enjoy this book – but it’s a type of book where mood plays a major role. The story takes a back seat to the encapsulating, blossoming world that the characters are weaved in. The tangential tone is that much more fulfilling, and the language plays a vital part. Can you dig it? I knew that you could!

Waiting to be Buried

"No two facts are too far apart to be put together." (p. 123)

Throughout The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels lays down the facts of the stories the characters tell in an intricate mosaic where by the end a larger tale of memory, Identity, Loss and Love emerges. As Avery explains in one of his stories about his father,

"Every object,' my father used to say, 'is also a concept.' If you place two or three or ten things next to each other that have never been next to each other before this will produce a new question. And nothing proves the existence of the future like a question."

The question the novel poses is how do we create meaning with the life we are given and the losses we suffer. The answer, Michaels, provides, is: we create it together. "We teach each other how to live" (p.324).

We are more than our personal narratives, of where we are born, who our parents were, our jobs, the broad sweeps of history we have experienced. We are all of these things in complex powerful ways, but we are also all of the people we come into contact with, and the stories we tell each other. All of these things intermingle "until it was impossible to tell them apart, the memories that belong to me and the memories that didn't, as if by virtue of collective loss they became collective memory" (p.305).


There is of course much more going on in this novel than my brief discourse. I wallowed in this book, the language was stunningly beautiful. The ideas and the way she played with those ideas were a joy. One of the better books I have read in years. "Just by living . . . we change the world, and no one lives without causing pain" (p.333).


I also found it interesting how almost all of the books we have read could be found in this book, from Bhabha and liminal spaces, to Lewis and belief, to Hedges and the force of war to give meaning. We have read some good books. Thanks to all of you for reading with me and letting me listen to you think.