S/Z: A is for Apple J is for Jack and too much light makes baby go blind

We must remember that it's supposed to be fun! This essay is all about the enjoyment of literature. Barthes's contention is that we cannot enjoy what we do not understand and so...

Barthes is playing with language, playing with form, and playing with us, his readers.

It's also important to know that he was a damn handsome man, as the following photos demonstrate:

I'm not sure why it's important to know this, but it is.

Also, this article is instructive as well as hilarious. My favorite quote, "Among the brand-name French theorists of the mid-20th century, Roland Barthes was the fun one. (Foucault was the tough one, Derrida was the dreamy one, Lacan was the mysterious one — I like to imagine them sometimes as a black-turtlenecked, clove-smoking boy band called Hors de Texte, with the hit album “Discipline ’n’ Punish.”)"

Meteoric Flowers: Visual Image Becomes Metaphor

I'm reading This Is Not A Pipe in preparation for my review of S/Z next month. This reading has also influenced my interrogation of Meteoric Flowers and I'm struck by this sense that these texts are interconnected. The threads curve out from the images in all three of these texts to form a structure that is anti-formal. A post-structure that rejects formal aesthetics in an attempt to move beyond "words and things" in order to create a sensibility that counters the way in which language itself becomes conflated with the ideas it seeks to represent. This is also the dominant idea within Foucault's The Order of Things--Foucault makes visible the minute ways in which linguistic orders construct reality and become static things rather than fluid ideas. Foucault's vision of language warns against our tendency to privilege writing as noun rather than verb--to become consumed by the IS rather than simply is-ing.

Contrary to that consumptive vision of the IS, Elizabeth Willis's collection, Meteoric Flowers, weaves together complexly interconnected visual images that become mobile metaphors for existence amid the "noise of the early twenty-first century" (77). On page 75 she tells us that we all "live under the rule of Pepsi" and in the first poem in the collection she describes the world that clanks "noun, noun, noun." The clanking of the noun-infused world is an irritation, but "sand in the shoe doesn't make you an oyster" (3). There are no pearls here; life, love, technology, and evolution collide to offer flashes of the tenuous and fragile human relationships that form between mother and daughter, teacher and pupil, master and apprentice, poet and reader, word and thing. The language is also strikingly personal--to the degree that one feels almost like a voyeur. The collection is an homage to both Wallace Stevens and Erasmus Darwin, and the influence of both of these writers on the collection is clear, but at the same time the prose poems are intensely personal, almost confessional.

The form is experimental, forcing readers to rethink ideas about the imagined differences between verse and prose. The collection is broken into four cantos, each canto contains thirteen prose poems (or verses), except for the third canto, which contains fifteen poems, and, in an explicit homage to Erasmus Darwin's 1791 publication, Botanic Garden, each canto ends with an editor's note of errata and omissions. However, these notes, omissions, and errata are themselves poems (or continuing verses depending on how you read them). Willis refers to these poems as "lyric interruptions" to the prose cantos. In a note on the text Willis explains:

The investigative energy and poetic ambition of his Botanic Garden (1791) suggested not so much a form as a sensibility with which to approach a period of political, intellectual, and biological transformation. Darwin's poems address everything from the sexual life of plants to the evils of slavery, the conquest of Mexico, Franklin's experiments with electricity, and the relation of poetry to painting. In their unwieldy asymmetries and their sudden leaps between botany, political and aesthetic history, and pastoral romance, this work of the late Enlightenment seemed an eerily apt model for riding out the inter-discursive noise of the early twenty-first century. Poetry, it says, can be at once an account of the physical world, a rethinking of the order of things, and a caprice. (77)

And so it is. If this is Willis's contractual agreement with her reader, then her poems do exactly what they set out to do--these poems are "at once an account of the physical world, a rethinking of the order of things, and a caprice."

I am in love with this collection, admittedly, but one of my favorites, possibly due to my enduring Yeats obsession, has to be

"Rosicrucian Machinery"

The past torches itself like a mummy, dear but misremembered.
What did you manage to remember of your day at the beach,
blood in the sand? We're close enough to touch the bull's horn
with a gasp. Of course I pity a boy among crows. A spectator
trawling for the roundest metaphor to counterweight the stabbing
air. What gives, or gave, to get us here, what wired fluorescence?
The treelike nerves to become all things. Turned in, reflected,
postponed. (46)

What is your favorite image? Why?

Do you see a philosophy of language at work here? Or is it just a figure of my imagination?

What do you think this collection is about? Is it about anything? Or, since Willis invokes Stevens, is it about the "nothing that is"?

Housekeeping: Making Order out of Chaos

The first thing that really struck me about Housekeeping was the water imagery that Robinson uses throughout the novel. It is as if she has made water and it's nature into its own character.  Ruthie's grandfather is killed in a train wreck when it crashes into the water below the bridge, her mother drives her car into the water to kill herself, and the town itself is flooded whenever it rains. And, in the end, as the narrator and her aunt flee the town, they are described as being "above the water."  Though that is their actual physical location, I also think this means much more. What are your thoughts on these and other references to water that I no doubt left out?

Does "good housekeeping" ultimately keep a good house? 

What do you make of Lily and Nona, the two  great aunts who care for Ruthie and Lucy after their grandmother dies?  They only last the winter there, and don't seem to survive the flood.  What drives them away?  For that matter, what drives everyone else away from the town of Fingerbone?

Is Sylvie really crazy?


Is the house ultimately "kept" at the end of the novel? Is the ending positive or negative for you? 


Does this story remind anyone else of Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, or is it just me? 

Commencing with Housekeeping

Hello all, I hope this post finds you excited to get back into our book club.  In attempting to come up with the selection for May, I sat staring at my bookshelf, wondering which book I wanted to read first.  Though there were several I thought about choosing, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping caught my eye, and I remembered all of the emotions it stirred in me while reading it in grad school.  I look forward to digging back into this novel with you.  I find it hard to believe that this was Robinson's first novel.  Happy reading.  See you in May. :)

In which I attempt to get this ball rolling without my book.

Folks, I am going to apologize before I get started here. I packed my copy of My Antonia in a box . . . somewhere . . . because I am moving in 23 days.

Therefore, I am going to have to start this discussion simply off the top of my head. Matty, when you read this, please feel free to add on or completely erase and start over after you have finished yelling at your screen and slamming your head into your desk.

So. My Antonia. I have read this book a sum total of three times in my life, and this time I loved it. I think I'm more informed because I have now lived in the Midwest*, and I understand the imagery and the language, and the lonely-feel so much more.

Let's talk about the tone and feel of this book. How do you feel coming away from it? I feel lonely and alienated and a little sad, because of Cather's gift with language, yes; but also because of the descriptions of those relationships which just slip away.

Let's also discuss vision. How does the way in which characters see each other change? How does awareness of differences suddenly inform their thoughts about each other?

And let's also talk about the biblical imagery. What does Cather mean by it?

Sorry again, guys -- this is all I got, until I unpack that particular book in January.

Write on!

Melly

*But not for much longer, because I am moving!

Drawing a book out of a hat

Matt and I were discussing the possibilities of this month's book, due to new blog by-laws and the time constraints of getting it read by Dec. 1.

We came up with a list. I wrote the names of the individual books on little slips of paper and drew one out of my husband's hat.

The list was pretty impressive. Twelve in total. Some on Matt's side I haven't read, and I daresay some on mine he hasn't read -- but that's the point here, isn't it? To relax, read a book you might not otherwise have picked up (or conversely revisit with an old book-friend) and discuss it, even if it's just to say what you liked and what you didn't. Believe me, we welcome all opinions here.

This month's book is (drumroll, please) My Antonia by Willa Cather. It's not too long, and quite an interesting read.

Enjoy, and we'll see you back here December 1!

Let Us Now Priase Famous Men

I've known a few other folks who've read this book, and have seen some real differences in opinion.  Some thought it was just beautiful, some really loved it's content, some thought it was pretentious, others thought it was just a dressed-up screed.  So, then, a few questions to get us conversing.  Answer which ones you will, as you will:

1--What's your gut reaction here?  I mean that in senses both broad and narrow.

2--Agee and Evans originally had an assignment from a magazine--Fortune, to be exact--to investigate sharecroppers and write a magazine-length story.  It obviously turned into something much bigger and grander, and was never published in Fortune..  Nevertheless, the journalistic impulse is still there, in a mutated way.  What do you make of the shifts in genres here?  Sometimes it reads like a play, sometimes like a piece of journalism, sometimes like a novel, sometimes like a poem.  Why does the book need to be written from so many different aspects, in so many different forms, to accomplish Agee's purpose?

3--Building off that last question, what does Agee seem to think the truth of the book is, the truth of these people's lives is?  It's hard to tell when he's being journalistic and when he's being a novelist (which was his other trade).  Which reveals the reality of the situation of the sharecropper better, fiction or ostensibly truthful journalism?  What does this tell us about how we understand our own contemporary problems?

4--What do we call this book?  How do we label it?

5--Do the photographs work with Agee's text or not?  Is there tension between what they present?  If, indeed, this is so, then why do Agee and Evans agree to pair them?

6--To my reading, this is a book with a very big dose of that great bugbear, liberal white guilt.  Does this negatively affect the book?  Or is it absolutely necessary?

Looking forward to a nice discussion, and hope my selection wasn't too out of left field for everyone!