Well you see, it was a busy week, and sometimes it’s nice to have something light to pick up and read over breakfast or whatever….but Confessions of a Shopaholic sure is lame. In a general way, I don’t have much to add to what I said before about “chick lit.” I’m glad I got this book from the library and didn’t pay a cent for it, because I want to get rid of it as soon as possible. I don’t necessarily object to a little mindless diversion. But–what really irked me with this one was actually the same thing that irks me about Bridget Jones’s Diary, although that novel is much more clever and entertaining: what’s supposed to be the charm of foolish, incompetent women? Is it really so hard to imagine smart, committed, capable women in romantic contexts? The answer of course is no, because the supposed “mother of chick lit,” Jane Austen, does precisely that. Elizabeth Bennett does not win Mr. Darcy’s heart by being cute but trivial; she earns his respect and charms his socks off. Anne Elliot doesn’t deserve happiness because she happens into an insight or two after a whole book of being silly and irresponsible: we know all along that Wentworth will be the foolish one if he falls for anyone without her integrity and capacity for intelligent action. None of Austen’s protagonists discovers, conveniently, that having no real interests beyond clothes, shopping, and sex, no professional competence, no ideas of any substance, is actually the way to true love. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” Anne Elliot famously protests when confronted with literary ‘ evidence’ of women’s character. “Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” Yet with the pen in their hands, some women peddle this kind of “sell-yourself-short” fantasy to women–and it sells! Is the appeal of this variety of “chick lit” that it reassures women that not only do they not have to be smart and successful to be attractive but that their failures (blue soup!) will make them more appealing to smart and successful men? Or is it just easier to put that kind of story together than to confront, as Austen does, just what kind of challenge a strong woman poses to conventional ideas of romance, femininity, and narrative? (There’s a kind of equivalent for men in Forrest Gump, I think: better to be mentally deficient but good-hearted, and somehow, by accident, you will win every race.) Once upon a time my (very shrewd and professionally successful) grandmother cautioned me not to beat my then-boyfriend at Scrabble. The message was that brainy women are off-putting, that competence is incompatible with charm. (This theory was wholly undermined by her own life, though she persisted in calling herself “Whistler’s mother,” a label nobody who knew her could ever accept.) Though she was a huge fan of her granddaughters’ successes, I think she was not altogether wrong–not in principle, but in practice. Sex and the City, which looks in many ways like it belongs in the “chick lit” genre, is very smart sometimes about the difficulties independent, successful women face in negotiating romantic norms and expectations (remember the episode in which Carrie buys Berger a Prada shirt? or the one in which Miranda wants to take Steve to an office party?). Sex and the City presents fantasies of other kinds, to be sure, but overall I think it refuses to make its women silly and often this is precisely where their romantic problems begin. In this respect anyway, perhaps the series is more in Austen’s tradition than I would have thought, and certainly more so than even Bridget Jones. In any case, I say go on and win at Scrabble if you can! Your self-respect depends on it.
Fun with Miss Clack (with a nod to the ‘value’ of the humanities)
My Mystery and Detective Fiction class was great fun this morning–and educational, too! We focused on Miss Clack, one of Collins’s narrators in The Moonstone, first as an example of first-person narration, reading some excerpts closely to see how her voice reveals her character, in the manner of a dramatic monologue (allusions to Browning are inevitable, and often helpful, as students are not always accustomed to paying the same kind of minute attention to fictional speakers as they are to poetic ones). As I collected students’ insights and observations about the particular words, phrases, and intonations that give the game away for her, we found many connections between her individual quirks and flaws (so tremendously comic, as rendered by Collins) and themes of the novel–from the limitations of eye-witness testimony to the disruptive potential of sexual desire. Here are two of the excerpts we examined:
1. I find my insignificant existence suddenly remembered by Mr. Franklin Blake. My wealthy relative — would that I could add my spiritually-wealthy relative! — writes, without even an attempt at disguising that he wants something of me. The whim has seized him to stir up the deplorable scandal of the Moonstone: and I am to help him by writing the account of what I myself witnessed while visiting at Aunt Verinder’s house in London. Pecuniary remuneration is offered to me — with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances — and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr. Blake’s cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.
2. When I answered for a loving reception of him at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, the grateful heart of our Christian Hero overflowed. He pressed my hands alternately to his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph of having got him back among us, I let him do what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder. In a moment more I should certainly have swooned away in his arms, but for an interruption from the outer world, which brought me to myself again.
Who wouldn’t want to “gloss” these passages? This session was a good reminder to me that if you are pretty well prepared, you don’t need to script everything in order to generate both interest and substance for your students. The issue of relying on lecture notes has been discussed a couple of times recently at RYS (scanning the posts over there is a kind of guilty pleasure for me–the folks over there say some of the things I’m sure we all think at times but bite back because, well, we’re polite). “Winging it” is risky, though (I certainly didn’t come with just my book and a prayer): you have to have some idea of where you hope the discussion will go, and you also need the cooperation of your students. This group is great, especially for a class its size (about 70): plenty of bright, curious, smart people willing to raise their hand and add something. Mind you, Miss Clack makes our work easy by being so thoroughly despicable and yet so entertaining. Now, what exactly is our Christian Hero doing with her hands?
2 hours later: I had nearly as much fun with a good discussion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my ‘woman question’ seminar, where formal issues about point of view fed into analyses of the way Helen and Huntingdon’s marriage exposes the critical gaps between the ideal and the reality. Without actual power, influence is no better than nagging; without accountability, power mutates rapidly into abuse. As well as dramatizing moral crises, the novel is formally organized to both teach and model moral development. Mornings like these invigorate me, intellectually but also emotionally. With all these heavy discussions going around about the “value” of the humanities and why we do what we do and dare to love it, it’s a relief to be in a context where that value at least feels palpable, even if it is difficult to articulate it.
This Week in My Classes (January 16, 2008)
For me, at least, and I hope for my students, this is a fun week of reading in both of my winter term classes.
Mystery and Detective Fiction: We’ve begun our discussions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, a novel that I enjoy more every time I teach it. My main focus for the first couple of classes is on the way the novel sets us up to worry about problems of interpretation and misinterpretation. With its series of first-person narrators, the novel is self-consciously set up to mimic the testimony of a series of eye-witnesses, but right from the Prologue we know that seeing something with your own eyes is not always enough to tell you just what it is that you have seen: you require an interpretive framework, and the first-person narrators also serve to remind us that these frameworks reflect the presuppositions and prejudices of each individual witness. The prologue also introduces the idea of “moral evidence,” as opposed to legal or circumstantial evidence, which relies among other things on understanding of people’s characters (not something an “objective” outsider like Sergeant Cuff can bring to a case). And it sets supernatural or otherwise unscientific theories and interpretations against reason and common sense. By setting the theft of the diamond from Rachel’s Indian cabinet against the story of its other thefts across history, the novel complicates questions of legitimacy and ownership; by emphasizing the bloody aggression of the English against the Indians, it also undermines the fantasy of the main characters that their home represents order, tranquility, and justice that is disrupted only by the invasion of the “devilish Indian diamond.” “Good heavens, mamma!” Rachel exclaims in Chapter XI; “Are there thieves in the house?”–to which the answer is of course, yes, on one interpretation they are all thieves, even before the diamond goes missing. Today we get to talk about Sergeant Cuff and how far his outsider perspective can move the inquiry forward. If we have time, we might do a bit with Rosanna and her friend Limping Lucy, too, one of the many clues we get that the novel as a whole is not entirely (if at all) behind the values so cherished by our first narrator, Betteredge: “Ha, Mr Betteredge, the day is not far off,” she warns him, “when the poor will rise against the rich.” So much fun, and always we’ll be thinking about how Collins is using the form of his novel–the first-person narrations so similar in effect to dramatic monologues, and the juxtaposition of so many of them as if to model one possible way of overcoming their limitations. (In classes when I teach both The Moonstone and Middlemarch, it’s always interesting to compare his strategy here to George Eliot’s use of her omniscient narrator and manipulations of point of view.)
The Victorian ‘Woman Question’: Here we’re moving into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, another novel that foregrounds issues of narrative construction through its nested narratives and chronological doubling-back. Again, we get a telling introductory piece with the letter from our main narrator, Gilbert Markham, to his buddy Halford; the letter, apologizing for a failure of confidence and making amends by offering up the story of Gilbert’s own marriage plot, raises all kinds of questions about masculinity and friendship, and also, by beginning where Gilbert’s story actually ends up–for instance, after his process of maturation and development–helps us understand what the novel will be about. When the story ‘begins’ we go back to his younger self and realize how far he has to develop before he will be capable of such a letter. Then, of course, when we reach Helen’s diary, we see that she too, so strong and independent in Gilbert’s narrative, has evolved significantly through her own experiences. Today’s reading is the first instalment of her diary, taking her from her first meetings with Huntingdon to their marriage. It brings to life central issues in the debate over the ‘woman question’; one aspect I find particularly interesting is its emphasis on Helen’s desire to be Huntingdon’s saviour–just as she has been taught to see her ‘mission’–but of course, as the novel goes on to dramatize in compelling detail, the female influence she so looks forward to wielding means absolutely nothing in the absence of actual power or leverage, social or economic. I think Bronte handles her first-person narrations really artfully as well; though her characters are nowhere near as diverse (or comic) as Collins’s, they do reveal themselves by their language as well as by their self-reporting.
The Shelf Life (Half-Life?) of Blog Posts
In a piece on the role (or not) of public intellectuals, Russell Jacoby raises some questions about blogging that I’ve wondered about too:
On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or “archived”), has anyone ever looked at last year’s blogs?
“Rapidly produced,” he concludes, blog posts are “just as rapidly forgotten.” Jacoby is interested in how blogging has affected “the quality or content of intellectual discussions.” I’m interested in that too, but for now I’d just like to pick up on the issue of the status of past posts. For instance, as I familiarized myself with academic and literary blogs that looked interesting to me, I often found myself trailing through archives sometimes three or four years old. Some of the discussions–the most ‘occasional’ ones–obviously had become outdated, but others, including discussions of books, retain their currency just fine. But do they really? Well, not in practice, of course. Especially with the backwards chronology blogs impose, with newest always first, they do seem designed to keep us moving on. I’m also not aware of an easy way to locate material in blog archives unless the blogger has a particularly thorough index or set of labels or categories. Especially when discussions link back and forth across different blogs, the process of following older threads is extremely laborious. I guess I’m basically wondering about a couple of things: first, is there some “netiquette” principle that governs when a post ‘expires’ and ought not to be commented on any more? and second, does the perhaps fleeting nature of the attention any given blog post can have, as it is relentlessly shuttled down and down into the archives, add an extra dimension of futility to writing in this form?
Meanwhile, on the subject of public intellectuals, there’s much discussion at The Valve about Stanley Fish, who is busy actually being one, for better and for worse, with his own blog at the New York Times. The enormous chains of comments on his recent posts on ‘the uses of the humanities’ (the first one reached around 500 comments, I believe, while the second one is up to 244 as I write this) suggests the rapidly diminishing returns at this extreme end of the commenting scale. A recent comment thread at the Valve raised questions about the importance of commenting for measuring the success or value of blogging; I’ve noted a couple of times the generally low level of discussion on literary topics and, in a more general way, felt that without active back-and-forth blogging is not as worthwhile or rewarding as I’d initially hoped it would be. But, as blogging skeptics have often noted, the greater the quantity, typically the lower the quality of the discussion. I have only scanned the replies to Fish. In general, they seemed to stand up well to the threads over at the Guardian blog, which degenerate pretty quickly. But even so, who can process so many replies or synthesize them in any kind of meaningful way? (I recommend reading the Valve comments instead; there are “just” about 80 of them, including a number of extremely thoughtful and illuminating ones.)
This Last Week in My Classes (January 7, 2008)
Last week was the first full week of classes for this term and, as usual, it was chaotic despite my pretty thorough efforts to be ready. You just get out of practice at juggling all the parts, at having everything ready to go when you need it, at keeping track of the requests and complications and paperwork. Also, you realize when you get back in the classroom that two weeks nattering at your kids all day and catching up on past seasons of House at night actually diminishes your ability to speak in complete (never mind polite) sentences. However, it’s all underway now and, also as usual, it feels good. The first few class meetings for me are all about trying to get everyone on the same page by giving them some historical and critical frameworks for considering our particular readings. I find there’s often very little common ground among students in terms of preparation, especially since in our department there is no historical survey required before upper-level classes; you’re lucky if very many of them know that Virginia Woolf did not actually know Shakespeare’s sister or that the Romantics preceded the Victorians. And a lower-level survey class in a popular genre, such as the Mystery and Detective Fiction class I’m teaching this term, attracts a lot of non-majors. So here’s how we warmed up:
English 2040, Mystery and Detective Fiction: We led off with a discussion of differences (real and perceived) between “genre” and “literary” fiction, focusing on the different reading strategies and expectations we typically bring to each kind. To get us started on these questions, we read aloud James Thurber’s brilliant little story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” in which an “American lady” accidentally finds herself curled up in bed with Shakespeare instead of the murder mystery she was expecting. Her interpretive misadventures are both comic and revealing, perfect for my purposes. It doesn’t hurt, either, in the tender early days of a professor’s relationship with a class, to get some laughs. The next couple of meetings were spent on some background about detective fiction as a genre, a kind of genealogy taking us from Newgate and gothic fiction, through early practitioners like Poe and related forms such as ‘sensation’ fiction, through the Golden Age and the hard-boiled Americans to feminist revisionists (Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, for instance) to contemporary figures such as Ian Rankin. We’ve also spent some time on the history of policing, and on the characteristic features of the charismatic amateur detective so compellingly inaugurated with Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Next week, we’re done with generalizations and moving into detailed analysis of our first major reading, The Moonstone. Cursed diamonds, eerie quicksand, stained nightgowns, and multiple narrators: who could ask for anything more?
English 4604, The Victorian ‘Woman Question: Here too my opening tactic is laying out some generalizations, this time about the social, political, and historical context of the debate over the ‘woman question.’ Once we get going on our particular literary texts, we will want to spend plenty of time on their formal and aesthetic properties, but we will also be considering how they contribute to this debate by dramatizing or thematizing some of its elements. And most of our readings simply require us to understand some specific issues about the circumstances of Victorian women, particularly in marriage. We begin Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on Monday, for example, an ingeniously constructed, piercingly intelligent and emotionally gripping novel that turns in part on some key 19th-century ideas about femininity and masculinity as well as on the economic and other constraints of a Victorian wife. But this past week our major reading was Mill’s The Subjection of Women–also, of course, piercingly intelligent, and eminently rational and persuasive. We looked at it along with France Power Cobbe’s powerful piece “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors,” which gave us some opportunities to compare the different rhetorical strategies of two writers approaching this highly contentious material from somewhat different positions.
It’s early yet, but I like what I’ve seen of both groups so far. Here’s hoping we can all keep up the momentum!
Go in!
Yesterday I finally mailed off the typescript (all 500+ pages) of the anthology of 19th-century novel criticism that I have been working on for…well, longer than I like to admit. In the end, will it be all it could have been, or should have been? Who can say? What would be the measure? Still, the experience of preparing it has been a learning experience and even, sometimes, a pleasurable one. In honour of its completion (to this stage, at least), here’s what has come to rest in my mind as my favourite excerpt from the 22 essays on the final list. There are many close seconds, including much of David Masson’s British Novelists and Their Styles, brilliant bits of Edward Dowden’s review essay on George Eliot’s novels, and, of course, many words of wisdom from George Eliot herself. But for sheer exuberance at, and generous appreciation of, the multitudinous possibilities of the genre, you can’t beat this conclusion to Henry James’s classic essay on “The Art of Fiction”:
But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. ‘Enjoy it as it deserves,’ I should say to him; ‘take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and don’t listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don’t think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself. . . . If you must indulge in conclusions let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible–to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!’
Sun spots?
Wait a minute: did I miss something? Here’s the plot summary of Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun given in a reputable reference source:
Aisha [one of Soueif’s earlier characters] reappears as Asya in In the Eye of the Sun, a novel about a feminist’s failed marriage to a dry intellectual that has parallels to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Moving between various Middle Eastern cities and using passages from Arab newspapers, this long, detailed novel recalls the anti-Western politics Gamel Abdel Nasser, his death, the 1967 war with Israel, and the rise of Anwar Sadat. Asya ignores public events, tries to immerse herself in Western culture, but is forced into an arranged marriage with impotent Saif, who works for Syrian intelligence. Unhappy with her marriage she studies in England for a doctorate, sees in England’s monuments symbols of imperialism and exploitation of Arabs, blames England for the creation of Israel, and becomes disenchanted with English literature. Bogged down in research at a provincial university, she starts an affair. Learning of the affair, Saif accuses her of selfishness and ignoring the consequences of her actions on others. Seeing the parallel between her personal life and her neglect, as an intellectual, of Egypt, she returns home where she teaches birth control while wanting a child of her own.
I’ve only read In the Eye of the Sun once so far, but I’m not sure the author of this source has read it at all–or else I read it very badly! First, I probably would not label Asya a “feminist,” unless that’s what you call any independent-minded woman. Second, Saif is not a “dry intellectual”; it’s Asya, actually, who comes closest to being that for a while, through her linguistic analysis of metaphors (which I thought was meant as a kind of ‘key to all mythologies’). Third, theirs is not an “arranged marriage” and, far from being forced into it, Asya yearns for it and idealizes it. Fourth, Saif is not impotent; the sexual problems in their marriage arise from Asya’s fears of intercourse. Fifth, she does not go to England because she is unhappy with her marriage, as this summary implies. Sixth, I didn’t notice meditations on imperialism or exploitation of the kind described here, though of course these are themes explored (in a more nuanced way, I thought) in the novel. Seventh, OK, she does start an affair, but (importantly) it’s with an idiot. Eighth, is that why she goes back to Egypt? I suppose that may be an interpretive question, but most of these other points are pretty straightforward ones. It was a disorienting experience (no pun intended?) staring at this paragraph.
Novel Readings 2007
‘Tis the season for it, so here are my lists of my best and worst novel-reading experiences of 2007. I’ve written about almost all of them here at least a little, so I’ve included links to my original posts. As always, I’d welcome comments from other readers.
Novels I’m most glad I read, mostly because of the richness of the aesthetic, emotional, and/or intellectual experience, but sometimes because of new ideas or connections that emerged for my teaching or research:
- Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun. I’m very excited about exploring how this novel, often described as “the Egyptian Middlemarch,” complicates, extends, or revises George Eliot’s themes, especially her theories of sympathy and morality. Obviously one major component of this critical project will be thinking about how the particular historical and political contexts of Soueif’s novel matter to the purportedly universal moral prescriptions of Eliot’s.
- Vikram Seth, An Equal Music. I found this novel tremendously engrossing, particularly in its evocation of the intellectual demands of music.
- Sarah Waters, The Night Watch. This novel is near the top of my list of books I hope to re-read in the near future. I thought its backwards chronology was formally and thematically innovative but it also meant that re-reading will (I think) be quite a different experience than reading for the first time.
- Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April. Lovely.
- Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks and Hester. Just think, there are 85 more. I didn’t actually think either of these was a great novel–nothing very striking aesthetically or formally–but both were genuinely interesting, appealing to both the scholar and the reader in me.
- Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right. it just kept on going and going, and after a while, I didn’t want it to stop. Like the Oliphant novels, HKHWR doesn’t do anything particularly striking with form, but its many parts are managed and balanced beautifully, and like other great multiplot novels, it contains multitudes.
- Monica Ali, Brick Lane. It seemed flat at first, but it drew me in and made me think.
- Eugenides, Middlesex. Parts of it are tremendous, moving, exhilirating–but in the end it seemed unfocused to me, especially because the hermaphrodite aspect seemed thematically irrelevant, like a gimmick. Maybe I just haven’t thought it through enough.
- Carol Shields, Unless. I was more moved by and involved in this novel when I re-read it this year than when I first read it (note to me: make more time for re-reading in 2008).
Novels for which my great expectations were most disappointed:
- Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach. This time his technical skill did not win me over.
- Zadie Smith, On Beauty. Maybe I need to read Howard’s End to really “connect” with it–but it’s hard to see how doing so would quiet my objections.
- Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her. I feel about this as some of Dickens’s contemporaries felt about his novels–leave this kind of stuff to the actual experts, rather than writing up a sociology or criminology treatise in the guise of fiction.
- Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides. Ick.
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights. The critic in me knows better, but the reader in me really doesn’t like this novel.
Books I’m most excited about reading or re-reading in 2008:
- Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. This was high up on my Christmas wish list and I’m so glad I got it (thanks, Dave!). But how am I ever going to read it when I can barely lift it?
- A. S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. Another one from my wish list (thanks, EB!). I might re-read the first three in the series first so that I can appreciate it fully.
- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I thought The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was a lot of fun; Chabon’s a good story-teller, and I love the premise of this one.
- W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz.
- Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. I last read this in 1988; the posts on it at The Valve piqued my interest again.
- Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. I keep trying; for some reason, I’m simultaneously convinced that this will be one of my great reading experiences and completely unable to get past page 1. I’ve read most of Francine Prose’s Mrs. Dalloway Reader with interest and pleasure, but still can’t seem to get on with the original. My theory (OK, excuse) is that Woolf’s style demands a kind of micro-concentration that I am (a) not trained for, since I’m most practised at the big baggy books, and (b) unable to apply because my ‘voluntary’ reading (i.e. not for school) goes on either when the children are milling around or late at night, when things are quiet but I’m tired and rely on some momentum in the plot to carry me along…
- Mitchell, Gone with the Wind. I keep coming back to this novel when I think about issues with historical fiction, as well as problems with identification and sympathy. Write-ups of Rhett Butler’s People also got me thinking about it again. My problem with this one is that the novel is so intimately familiar, even though I have not read it all the way through for about a decade, that I have a hard time focusing on the words on the page.
- Graham Swift, Waterland.
- Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip.
- Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.
- V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas.
- Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise.
Actually, the “want to read” list could just keep growing, so I’ll just stop there, especially since my interests and priorities always shift around a lot as I actually move from book to book.
Post About Books=Lackluster Response?
In his reflections on “The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007,” Joseph Kugelmass remarks “the consistently lackluster response to posts about books.” I’ve noticed something similar in my expeditions around the ‘blogosphere,’ on both academic sites and litblogs, regretted it and wondered why blogging, which seems ideally set up for informal but thoughtful back-and-forth of the kind that so many readers value, does not seem to generate it. Anyone out there have any thoughts on the reasons for that “lacklustre response”? And are there any blogs at which you have seen rich conversations develop about books?
I’ve also seen and regretted the phenomenon that Kugelmass seems to see as a positive development, namely that in response to the apparent lack of enthusiasm for book chat, “most intellectual bloggers turned towards politics and professional matters with increasing frequency.” I’ve regretted it partly, as I noted in my previous posts, because by “politics” they usually mean “American politics,” partly because the political stuff often seems to lower the level of discourse (i.e. people become meaner and ruder, and discussion gets polarized and predictable), and partly because I went online to avoid some of the more confining aspects of professionalism. (It’s true, mind you, that one side-effect of my own blogging experiences has been to make me more appreciative of some features of professionalism in literary studies, including expertise and civility–though it’s precisely the spread of civility in the blogosphere that Kugelmass points to as a problem as he sees it leading to a kind of deadening blandness. He also sees “polish” as antithetical to the spirit of blogging, but given how fast and how publicly you can be taken to task for what you post–maybe rightly, maybe not, depending on the post and the context–there seems more chance of a high quality of debate if you slow down.)
A Very Merry Dickensian Christmas To All!
There’s no avoiding the association of Dickens with Christmas festivity. Indeed, it’s about the best ‘press’ the Victorian period gets, so I figure we should make the most of it. With that in mind, here are some Dickensian links for the season.
First, the TLS has published the second installment of their “guided tour” to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:
Does his ecstasy have something of mania about it? Perhaps. And more than a little of evangelical conversion, surely – though only in the loosest sense. (The religious claims made for Carol, which relishes sensual glut, are overstressed.) Because, far from being reborn into that world of systematic moral conviction inhabited by the Murdstones, the Gradgrinds, or the Revd Chadband, Scrooge is on the contrary released into a profoundly happy uncertainty – “I don’t know anything!” – which describes reality rather well: that state of continuous creation and anticipation which we can call doubt, or hope, as we choose. I think, I am almost sure, that Dickens preferred the latter. (read the rest here; for Part I, see here)
Second, if you’ve got anyone who’s fond of Dickens on your gift list, a last-minute idea might be to head over here for a Dickens-themed e-card.
Third, the Guardian offers up Booze By Boz, including ‘smoking bishop’:
Smoking bishop
“‘A merry Christmas, Bob!’ said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. ‘A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!'” (A Christmas Carol)5 oranges * 1 grapefruit * 1/4 lb sugar * 2 bottles red wine * 1 bottle ruby port * 30 cloves
Bake the oranges and grapefruit in the oven until they are pale brown and then put them into a warmed earthenware bowl with five cloves pricked into each. Add the sugar and pour in the wine. Then, either (i) cover and leave in a warm place for a day, or (ii) warm the mixture gently (do not boil) for about three hours. Squeeze the oranges and grapefruit into the wine and pour it through a sieve. Add the port and heat (again, don’t boil). Serve in warmed cups/glasses and drink hot.
And finally, Patrick Leary of the excellent VICTORIA list-serv sent us all this inspired excerpt from one of R. L. Stevenson’s letters, and I can’t resist passing it along:
“I wonder if you ever read Dickens’s Christmas Books? I have read only two of them yet, and I have cried my eyes out, and have a terrible time not to sob. But, 0 dear God, I feel so good after them, and would do anything to make the world a little better for people. I wish I could lose no time; I want to go out and comfort some one. I shall never listen to the nonsense they tell me about not giving money. I shall give money; not that I haven’t done so always, but I shall do it with a high hand now. Oh, what a jolly thing it is for a man to have written books like these books, and just filled people’s hearts with a desire to do good!”
A jolly thing indeed!
