Dear Reader

Finished Villette many weeks (months?) ago, but just now getting around to writing this post. After finishing all 600 pgs (glorious in its single spaced, 8pt type), I decided to revisit Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, remembering that they had written a chapter on the novel. Their work was CRUCIAL when writing my undergraduate thesis. If you're interested in reading some eye-opening criticism of Eliot, Austen, Milton, Dickinson, and Mary Shelley, I couldn't recommend this book more.

Here is what Gilbert and Gubar have to say about Villette:

Villette is in many ways Charlotte Bronte's most overtly and despairingly feminist novel. ... Jane Eyre, though rebelliously feminist in its implications, used a sort of fairy tale structure to enable the novelist to conceal even from herself her deepening pessimism about woman's place in man's society. But Lucy Snow, Villete's protagonist narrator, older and wiser than any of Bronte's other heroines, is from first to last a woman without--outside society, without parents or friends, without physical or mental attractions, without money or confidence or health--and her story is perhaps the most moving and terrifying account of female deprivation ever written.

But what reminded me that I needed to write this post was reading this entry over at Powell's blog:

Even Virginia Woolf considered Villette to be greater than Jane Eyre and it is easy to see why. ... Here Bronte was able to hone and perfect her technique within the framework of an adult fairy tale with a cast of highly complex characters. Villette is Bronte's darkest, most complex novel and its heroine, Lucy Snow, is the anti-Jane.

Funny that they would cast both novels as fairy tales. The non-Disneyfied fairy tales of once upon a time were, of course, very tragic and disturbing (Der Struwwelpeter, anyone? Bluebeard!?) So this classification kind of fits the bill. Fairy tales and gothic lit intertwine in really interesting ways. They both use the fantastical, surreal, and sublime as metaphors for real life situations. (Then again, I guess they've been doing that since the dawn of writing. The first poets and storytellers were totally sci-fi and fantasy writers, amirite?)

So here are some more lovely quotes from Villette that, despite all my talk of doom and gloom, aren't so depressing. I promise.

How seem in the eyes of the God who made all firmaments, from whose nostrils issued whatever of life is here, or in the stars shining yonder--how seem the differences of man? But as Time is not for God, nor Space, so neither is Measure, nor Comparison. We abase ourselves in our littleness, and we do right; yet it may be that the constancy of one heart, the truth and faith of one mind according to the light He has appointed, import as much to Him as the just motion of satellites about their planets, of planets about their suns, of suns around that mighty unseen centre incomprehensible, irrealizeable, with strange mental effort only divided.

How could you read that and not instantly fall in love with Charlotte Bronte? I've had a crush on this dead woman since sixth grade.

Whatever my powers--feminine or to the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.

It is right to look our life accounts bravely in the face now and then, and settle them honestly. And he is a poor self-swindler who lies to himself while he reckons the items, and sets down under the head--happiness that which is misery. Call anguish--anguish, and despair--despair; write both down in strong characters with a resolute pen: you will the better pay your debt to Doom. Falsify: insert "privilege:" where you should have written "pain:" and see if your mighty creditor will allow the fraud to pass, or accept the coin with which you would cheat him. Offer to the strongest--if the darkest angel of God's host--water, when he was aked for blood--will he take it? Not a whole pale sea for one red drop.

Okay, well that's a little depressing.

I always, through my whole life; liked to penetrate to the real truth; I like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and daring the dread glance. O' Titaness among deities! the covered outline of thine aspect sickens often through its uncertainty, but define to us one trait, show us one lineament, clear in awful sincerity; we may gasp in untold terror, but with that gasp we drink in a breath of thy divinity; our heart shakes, and its currents sway like river lifted by earthquake, but we have swallowed strength. To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.

Which is what I keep trying to tell my 4-year-old niece, in regards to spiders. Face your fear...and you'll find out they're just small, fuzzy trapeze artists.

Internet Lovelies

IT'S FRIDAY! And all that jazz. I copied these a long time ago. Completely forgot about them. But that's why I'm doing this blog! So I won't forget the nifty things I've read. Yes, even on the internet.

Traditional librarians are like cats, which explains the affinity. They sit quietly in a corner dreaming about chocolate and yarn. The twopointopians are more like puppy dogs. They run around enthusiastically and bark a lot, and are easily distracted when shiny gadgets and squirrels pass by them.

Annoyed Librarian, Link

Real life villains don’t always fit the visual bill as if sent over from the casting department. The real villains aren’t necessarily swarthy, shifty eyed guys wearing turbans or sombreros, swinging from monkey bars with AK’s in their teeth, draped with bandoleers of bullets. Most of the really, really bad guys look like Tony Hayward, like shitweasels with silk neckties, Gucci shoes and MBAs.

Bob Higgins, Link

Most of the people I really, really like went through a slightly freakish Mystery Science Theater 3000 phase at some point...MST3K is a near-perfect cinematic/television experience for people who are not humorless assholes.

Lindy West, Link

I grew up watching MST3K. <3

Every morning, as the sun pours through my bedroom windows and spills across my bed, I awake, the promise of a new day stretching before me like a stupid thing that leads to some goddamn whatever. Ugh, I think.

Shalom Auslander, Link

...fame is the worst drug of them all. At least crackheads only urinate on themselves; fame addicts piss on everyone.

Shalom Auslander, Link

Anthropology 101

I've come to the sad realization that I spend more time reading book reviews than I do reading actual books. Then I end up buying 3 books for every 1 I read. My Amazon wishlist looks like the inventory of a Barnes and Noble.

Regardless, glowing book reviews lead to finding wonderful books, and the blogs have been set all aglow over Hilary Hamann's Anthropology of an American Girl. Previously self-published in 2003, it's recently been re-published and finally gaining some recognition. I'm only a measly 150 pages into it, but by page 35 I had already bookmarked several passages.

The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely.

If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better--a knowledge of beauty, its inflated value, its inevitable loss.

I preferred the apocalyptic terrain of cities--the melting asphalt, the artificial illumination. Unlike Jack, I looked forward to the future. At least when things are as bad as they can get, they can't get worse. the future would be untouchable, hypervisual, and intuitive, a place where logic and progress have been played out to such absurd extremes that survival no longer requires the application of either.
"Notice how all it takes is the Force to blow up the entire Death Star?" I would tell Jack. "The future won't be jet packs and space stations; it'll be aboriginal. The language of the physical will atrophy. Our minds will coil inward, and our eyes will grow large to see beyond the seeable. No one dies in the future. We'll all preserve ourselves to be reconstituted."
"That's the whole fucking problem," Jack would say. "I don't want to live forever. I'm having trouble with the idea of Tuesday."

"You're old when you learn that needs are to be eclipsed by civility. You're old when you join the sticky, stenchy morass of concealed neediness that is society." You're old when you give up trying to change people because then they might want to change you too. When you're young needs are explicit, possibilities endless, formalities undiscovered, and proofs of allegiance direct. If only there were a way to keep the world new, where every day remains a wonder.
"Jack," I said. "Remember how easy it used to be? Remember when friends used to cut themselves and share blood?"

In school eyes are everywhere, there are twice as many eyes as bodies, and in our school there were about a thousand bodies. Highschools offer nothing compelling for all those eyes to regard, nothing other than the vista of teenaged bodies, which is sort of the entire fucking problem.

Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are expected to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to express. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves, This way those who do succumb to the lure of sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. We are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances from men that we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises, then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we were to become expert liars.

Internet Lovelies

Today is a fine day for some internet quotes.

The first is rather long.

Young Download McNulty was scared of the books at first, his Brain Nozzle pumping him full of Video Sprays.... Download picked up the book and kept pressing on its cover, title, and spine, hoping that images would appear. Ruthie told him that books weren't interactive and they couldn't be brain-pumped, that you had to open them up and read the text with your eyes.

She told Download he had to keep his Brain Nozzle on standby. “Read a little,” she said, “and then every once in a while try closing your eyes and entering the mind of the author.”

“What's an author?” Download asked.

“It's someone who's not you who wrote the book.”

“But I'm special,” Download said.

“I know you are,” Ruthie said.

“My dad and teachers say I'm a superhero. I'm the specialest little guy alive. What if this book thing makes me into someone else?”

“You don't have to worry about becoming the author if you read her book,” Ruthie said. “But if you focus on the words, Download, your life may change just a little.”

“Your life may change just a little,” Download mimicked her sarcastically.

There was a huge clatter from the hallway as my fellow aging librarians burst in with their wheelbarrows, quickly grabbing any books they could with their shaking hands while Robbie Pearlmutter of America's Last Bookstore fought them off with his cane. In the corner, Download had already figured out how to open the book and had placed his little index finger on the first word. He traced the word backwards and forwards, finally opening his mouth, like so many children before him.

“The,” he read, holding on to his Brain Nozzle for comfort. And then his mouth formed the rest.

Gary Shteyngart, Link

I'm sure Steve Jobs will be introducing Video Sprays soon. iSpray! (but no porn!)

"A Commercial for Abortion" -- I've always used that phrase as a nickname for The Family Circus.

David Schmader, Link

I started the description of the relationship between girls exactly at moment in which it’s most threatened — when the expert intimacy best friends have cultivated with each other gets transferred to boys. Nothing more tragic than that transfer of intimacy “resources” has to happen between women. Though obviously there are exceptions, it’s safe to say that the pattern is the rule. Friendships between girls don’t crash and burn, they tend to disintegrate. Men are the beneficiaries of all that work.

Hilary Hamann, on writing Anthropology of an American Girl, Link

And

I cooked my wife a one pound hamburger. "It's like Infinite Jest," I said, "You don't have to finish it. Just tell everyone it was great."

@drewtoothpaste, Link

By the way, Infinite Jest was great.

Urkel for President, 2012

I've been slacking on my reading lately. I blame the discovery that I can stream all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through Netflix on my Wii. It's a miracle I get out of my pajamas at all.

But I have managed to read another Sarah Vowell book. This time it was her collection of essays, The Partly Cloudy Patriot. As usual it was hilarious, yet educational. I always come away from her books knowing some odd snippet of history I didn't know before. But best of all, it's pro-nerd, which I can appreciate.

Here are some snippets:

I'm standing at the cutting board chopping sage and it hits me what it means that she is letting me be in charge of the dressing: I am going to die. Being in charge of the dressing means you are a grown-up for real, and being a grown-up for real means you're getting old and getting old means you are definitely, finally, totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother and my sister is a mother and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore, we'll all be dead someday.

Another reason I'm intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels.

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process of making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.

I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-no-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut...What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.

And on patriotism following September 11th:

In the first day or two the [American] flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we're all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the "evildoers," then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that's when the flags started making me nervous. The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government...This deep suspicion of Washington is one of the most American emotions an American can have. So by the beginning of October, the ubiquity of the flag came to feel like peer pressure to always stand behind policies one might not necessarily agree with. And, like any normal citizen, I prefer to make up my mind about the issues of the day on a case by case basis at 3:00 A.M. when I wake up from my Nightline-inspired nightmares.

Internet Lovelies

Forget Random Internet Quotes Thursday. I'll just post whenever I have reasonable amount saved up.

"Trash" and "fluff" are not insults. "Overrated" is.

Link

Criticism is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It can call attention to an unhealthy state of things.

@RiceBunny, Link

It is a mistake to say that freedom is a gift bestowed by a rifle.

comment by rk, Link

I have a 200 game Nintendo collection. By Nintendo, I mean Nintendo Entertainment System. From the 1980’s. It’s pretty sad, but there really is nothing better than drinking highballs while playing Ducktales on an old, shitty television.

comment by Salvatore Pane, Link

People are passionate about a lot of stupid things. It's not a great mantra. Meaning, I think, comes from doing a full accounting of your limitations and assets, your passions and your weaknesses, your belief system and your fears, and then rubbing up against the things that cause you to panic, like an allergy skin scratch test, and find out what your reactions are. Once you figure out how you can contribute to the greater good, once you're able even to define that, you take that information and pour yourself into one direction. Regardless of discomfort or regrets or what-ifs. (And then doing that over and over again, until death.) That does not fit on a T-shirt. That to me is more important than bliss, which would really just lead me back into bed, maybe with a bowl of corn flakes...

...no one is going to drop a meaningful life into your lap. You fight for it over and over again.

Jessa Crispin, Link

Sandy Cheeks

I’m staring out at the ocean from the porch of my rental beach house, wishing I were a writer so I could type something romantic and profound. But a writer I am not. So instead I must quote other talented individuals’ romantic and profound musings.

Finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It was a perfect beach read, and I was completely absorbed in it (while absorbing the sun) for two days. What a gorgeous book. It had its cliché moments, and I could see the ending from a mile away (what a cliché thing for me to say!), but it was great storytelling. And every now and then, you really crave a good story. And the characters were wonderful. The kind of people you wish actually existed (or wish you yourself could be), but only exist within the pages of a novel. Alas.

Here are some passages. Most of them are random and may not make much sense out of context. But I found them hilarious/meaningful, so bear with me.

"I’m not certain that my scruples could withstand the sight of handmade shoes. If I ever do meet him, I’ll take care not to look at his feet—or I’ll lash myself to a flagpole first and then peek, like Odysseus."

"I don’t believe that after reading such a fine writer as Emily Bronte, I will be happy to read again Miss Amanda Gillyflower’s Ill-Used by Candelight. Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books."

"I’m going to step into the meadow of wildflowers right outside my door and run to the cliff as fast as I can. Then I’m going to fall down and look at the sky, which is shimmering like a pearl this afternoon, and breathe in the warm scent of grass and pretend that Markham V. Reynolds doesn’t exist.

I’ve just come back indoors. It’s hours later—the setting sun has rimmed the clouds in blazing gold and the sea is moaning at the bottom of the cliffs. Mark Reynolds? Who’s he?"

"This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it."

"Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I’ll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He’d have to—you’d not grant anyone else something you can’t have for yourself—no love, no kindness, no respect!"

No respect! No respect at all! /dangerfield

Now I have moved on to Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, which is about fossil hunting on the beach. This seems appropriate considering my environment. Chevalier’s book is one of many I recently picked up at bookstores near the beach. Just to show how much of a nerd I am, the first thing I do when planning a trip is scout for every indie bookstore within 50 miles of my destination. (NERD!). Oddly enough, none of them had cats roaming the shelves. But the majority stocked various cat memorabilia (I wonder what they’re trying to say? Hmmm).

My favorite find was a 1949 copy of The Painted Veil by the early mass market publisher Pocket Book.

The cover is so inappropriate and wonderful. I love that Maugham has been pulp-fictionalized.

But here are all the titles I bought:



Does zombie lit and a vegan cupcake cookbook clash? Oh well.

And here are the stores I visited who had websites:

http://www.aziomedia.com/
http://www.pelicanbookstore.com/
http://www.pombooks.net/
http://www.twosistersbookery.com/

Okay, one more thing. I also read the first in the series of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, and one part in particular made me guffaw:



A DuckTales reference!? Absolutely brilliant.