The Signifiers Have No Value for Us Anymore

How abnormal is it that I have a sufficiently well-developed personal symbolic system that when I am at a concert and some random dude in a Halloween skeleton costume comes out before the lead singer to ask, "What kind of moth do you want to be?  The kind of moth who beats itself to death against the wall of the lantern, delusionally imagining it to be the moon?  Or the kind of moth who manages to sneak onto a space rocket and flies to THE!  ACTUAL!  MOON!, I don't even have to think before mentally responding, "I want to be the kind of moth who helps to create the moon on Earth with my own hands!"?

I think the problem with the symbolism here is that, as far as I know, most scientists think that the moon that we already have was in fact created on Earth?  On the other hand, I guess it was not created on Earth by the hands of moths, so maybe that's still okay?  Well, okay, the other problem with the symbolism is that moths don't have hands.  But the moon was also not created on Earth by the. . . legs of moths?  Antennae of moths?  Something?

_The Good Place_

For the Record

I apparently realized this back in 2015 when reviewing Perilous Seas on Goodreads, but it's a good realization so I thought I ought to post it here for future reference.

A character type I really, really like is the mentor figure who realizes what the protagonist's destiny is going to be and takes it upon themself to facilitate that destiny without bothering to reveal it to the protagonist.  Examples: Lith'Rian, Navis, Citan, Deth. . . yeah, this pretty consistently comes up as a theme in characters I like.  Those who do it maliciously (Doc Scratch) don't count - only those who either like or are trying to get on the good side of the protagonist, but still don't want to bother to tell them what's going to happen, for whatever reason.

Nobody ever gives me book recommendations on this blog, but if you happen to know of any books (or, hey, even TV shows, these days) that feature this character type, do let me know, please?

On Books

God is something risky to release.
Lock God in a box
With only a tiny pinprick hole for breath
And it will take only seconds -
Of course, when God chooses -
For the air to be full of God,
You yourself filling your lungs with God,
God throughout you so that you too are God:
For God to assert omnipresence.
God menaces because God matters.
God imposes the will of God.
When you are imbued by God,
When the world becomes God,
God takes precedence -
Nothing else trumps God.
God is dominant -
But God is dominant both around and within you.
You walk surrounded by God,
Seeing and hearing and touching and knowing only God,
While breathing in God, God pulsing in every heartbeat,
Your mind permeated by God,
Each thought: God.
This is why we worship God:
What else can we do when faced with something like this?
Let God out - let God let God out -
And that is it.
There will be nothing else but God.
This, this is why, when I am drowning in God's ocean,
A tumult which overwhelms me, controls me,
And then some looming tsunami lulls the water for a moment,
Lifts my head above the tossing waves of God,
Thrusts it confused and disoriented into the thin air
In a brief instant of respite,
I rush to seal the ocean into confinement,
Keyless, holeless.
How else can I avoid a life of staring
At a shut eyelid larger than the universe
With the constant uncertainty,
Never knowing when the vast eye will open,
And I will once again be immobilized
By the transfixing gaze of the divine eye,
Yet no confidence that this time at last
Will finally be the time it never closes again?

Why My Interpretation of "Station to Station" Differs From Others'

Preliminary Notes

• The kinds of interpretations I'm referring to here are like these ones and this one.
• I'm not sure I have a naive interpretation of this song - I mean, "The European canon is here" has always had a very immediate meaning for me, but other that that I'm not sure I made much sense of it before already reading some of the material that's available online.  My explanation of my own interpretation is therefore informed by these other interpretations even as it simultaneously sets itself out in opposition to them.  It's just quite clear to me these interpretations are fundamentally not getting something about what the song means to me.
• Happily for everyone, the lyrics on David Bowie's official site say "European canon," not "European cannon."  Most other lyrics sites seem to say "cannon," which is mind-boggling to me, but on the other hand, like I said, that particular line has a very immediate meaning to me which I suppose isn't quite as immediate for other people.

Areas of Agreement

• The song has something to do with Bowie's mystical interests.  These obviously include Crowley, Kabbalah and the Hindu Tattva system, both of which are explicitly referenced in the song, and may also include Gnosticism and Buddhism.
• The song undergoes a movement from a bare, stark opening section to a wild, euphoric close.
• The song refers to and incorporates Bowie's genuine strung-out, paranoid and cocaine-infused state at the time of its writing.  Cocaine plays a role as a key symbol in or even impetus for the song.
• The song looks back on a past period of joy and happiness, connection, which is now lost.
• The euphoria of the final section is in some way fake or insincere - when Bowie sings "it's not the side of effects of the cocaine,"it probably is the side effects of the cocaine.  When he asks,"Should I believe that I've been stricken?  Does my face show some kind of glow?" the answer is that no, he shouldn't believe that he's been stricken.  Any glow his face does show is a side effect of the cocaine as well.

An Interpretation, With Reference to Others'

• The Thin White Duke was of course Bowie's character at this stage in his career, and so I think the typical reading is that the singer is himself the Thin White Duke.  Possibly because the Thin White Duke is described in the third person, I don't see it that way.  I see the Thin White Duke as an external force, something that is being described in the song but is not identical with the singer.
• The Thin White Duke "throw[s] darts in lovers' eyes."  This connects the Thin White Duke with the concept of love.  Love is blind.  Does throwing darts into lovers' eyes imply that the Thin White Duke is the one blinding the lovers?  The Thin White Duke thus is some sort of mechanism of love, something external to the lovers themselves but that has a power over them.
• "One magical moment, such is the stuff from where dreams are made of" - a line that seems to be discussing inspiration, imagination - not just an external force but an external force that is connected to dreams
• "Tall in this room overlooking the ocean" and "lost in my circle" - the persona of the singer is enclosed or entrapped in a confined space ("this room" implies containment, a small realm).  "Lost in my circle" - a circle is linked to magic, the magician's circle drawn on the ground, but it's also a way of describing something cyclical - a series of events that keep on recurring over and over again in the same order.  From a personal perspective (and also speculating about what drug addiction might be like), it reads as someone caught in an addictive habit or state and on the downside of that.  Unable to escape the repetitive pattern but unable to join it.
• "Flashing no color" - evidently an explicit reference to this Tattva system.  Not knowing about that, the associations I make are twofold - firstly, a further reference to white, the absence of color, and secondly an association with depression - colorless is also emotionless, experiencing nothing, flat.
• "one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth" - Well, this is explicit - something is going from, as Pushing Ahead of the Dame tells us, "Godhead" to "the material world."  But Pushing Ahead of the Dame tells us it's Bowie himself who's making the drop.  I think, again, that I see the Thin White Duke as something outside of Bowie, and thus I maybe see it as something else that's trying to come into Bowie's own material world.  Or, if not that, that the fall was a long time ago - inevitably, and especially in the context of David Bowie, I'm going to interpret mystical references in terms of Valis, and so if it's Bowie that's fallen, he's been fallen for quite a while.
• Why is the Thin White Duke returning?  The Thin White Duke must have been gone for a while.  If he's back now, he must have been somewhere else.  Was the Thin White Duke in Kether?  Is he the one moving from Kether to Malkuth?
• The whole first section seems to be describing a pair of lovers.  After all, when they are together as "we," it is "one magical moment" and "one magical movement."  But they are also separate - now "I" is "here" and "you" is "there."  The persona is stationary, or, if not, then stuck in a repetitive movement.  "In this room" or "lost in my circle."  But the persona's counterpart is moving - "rush[ing] like a demon from station to station."  Together, one could see them as stable ("one magical moment") or moving ("one magical movement").  The separation of the two characters, however, could be part of what's wrong with the persona - he's stuck in a room and lost in a circle because his motive force isn't there, or isn't there all the time.  But the person travelling out alone is "like a demon" - perhaps running about from station to station is not that rewarding either.
• Someone is alone and needs to be returned to.  It would seem to be the person described as "you" returning, since the one described as "I" seems to be staying where he is, but of course it could be that the return of the Thin White Duke isn't directly describing either character.  If the two characters are lovers, then the Thin White Duke is a separate person who throws darts in their eyes.
• The Thin White Duke "mak[es] sure white stains."  Other interpreters see it as cocaine (for obvious reasons), which probably is a relevant theme.  More directly, it's an explicit Crowley reference.  But I, Shelley devotee that I am, cannot help myself in linking this to "Adonais."  In "Adonais," Shelley writes that "Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity."  It's "stains" and "white" in the same line!  As I once already mentioned, Crowley also once wrote a poem entitled, "In the Woods with Shelley,"  (Shelley is obviously Percy B.), which includes the lines, "Spurning the stain of all grief here" and "Loose but your soul — shall its wings find the white way so appalling?" (in reference to Heaven), which is fairly close in meaning to how Shelley used "stains" and "white" in "Adonais"; this is presumably a coincidence but is an unlikely enough one that I find it intriguing anyway.
• In "Adonais," colors represent regular life.  They're an infection that gets in the way of "the white radiance of Eternity."  By the end of "Adonais" the persona is happy to die because that's how you get to the Eternal, which is where love and light and beauty all reside.  It's a Neo-Platonic poem (the epigraph is typically attributed to Plato) where the Platonic idealism is so strong that it almost approaches Gnosticism - life is just a stain on what's really vital, which is something outside of life.  It's an illusion that obscures the absolute and the unified.  White is the color of the eternal, something that's outside of us and the source of us and everything that's of any significance.  This is a key Shelleyan idea - he also calls it intellectual beauty.
• The Thin White Duke is white.  He seems like a representative of Eternity or intellectual beauty.  But, unlike in "Adonais," we're not going to him.  He's coming here, from Godhead to the material world.  And he used to be here before.  It's a return for him to come back here. But in Shelleyan terms, this makes sense.  "The One remains, the many change and pass."  The Eternal is, well, eternal.  It's always been around.  It's only us who don't always recognize it.  This is clearer in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" which posits that Intellectual Beauty, "The awful shadow of some unseen Power. . . visit[s] / This various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower to flower."  Intellectual Beauty is something that we can interact with in this world, but not always.  Its accessibility to us here is "inconstant."  "The painted veil, by those who were, called life, / Which mimicked, as with colors idly spread / All men believed and hoped" must be "torn aside" if we want to view it  (And there come colors again.  White is the absence of color, but also, of course, the unification of all colors.  White represents the unity to be found in Eternal Intellectual Beauty whereas colors are the divided, unified world of real life that is only an imperfect mirror of the true unification of Eternity.).  
• If, as seen from the perspective of a true understanding of Eternity, the colors of life are just stains, on the other hand, from the perspective of someone living life, full of colors, the occasional appearance of Intellectual Beauty would leave "white stains" on the painted veil of reality.
• Eternity is described later on in "Adonais" as "that sustaining Love / Which through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea, / Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of / The fire for which all thirst."  In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," he not only mentions "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem," but he literally addresses Intellectual Beauty as "Thou messenger of sympathies, / That wax and wane in lovers' eyes," which I only just discovered and which makes me wish more than ever that there were any evidence whatsoever of a direct link between Bowie and Shelley.  Anyway, the point is clear - we humans caught in the dismal muck and multicolored falsity of life are relieved by love; Intellectual Beauty and Eternity have some connection with our experience of love.
• None of this is babbling about Shelley is explicitly justified by the text in the way that babbling about the Kabbalah or Crowley is; it might be justified as an authorially-intended reading if there were any external evidence whatsoever of Bowie being influenced by Shelley, but there isn't.  And yet, the reading still works, I think, even if I got it from Shelley and not from Bowie - the Thin White Duke represents the emanation of Kether into Malkuth, the impingement of unified eternity into the material world, and that emanation is something that you make contact with or touch when you are in love.  The Thin White Duke shows up when the lovers are together, throws darts in their eyes and leaves pure white stains.
• The Thin White Duke might be an emotionless thing, in and of himself (are there emotions in eternity).  Might be a threatening thing, actually.  To quote Valis, "if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there."  But, in my reading, he isn't something which is identical to the trap that the narrator is in, lost in his circle.  The Thin White Duke at least looks like the way out.
• The persona is lost in his circle.  He's stuck.  It's the Thin White Duke leaving pure white stains that coaxes him out.
• At first, of course, the persona can't escape the circle.  But slowly he remembers that there is a way out.  He remembers he wasn't always there.  "Once there were mountains on mountains and once there were sunbirds to soar with and once I could never be down."
• Chris O'Leary positions this midsection as the beginning of Bowie's "eventual escape, with release only coming from renouncing magic," writing that the music of this section provides "an audible sense of escape from the bad mojo of Los Angeles" and suggesting that this somehow signals an abandonment or turning away from Gnosticism.  This strikes me as odd - the commentators on SongMeanings seem to get this more right when they point to it as being more a memory of an ideal past that one desperately longs to recover, which is an idea more in line with Gnosticism or mysticism than against it.  Once you're in Malkuth, surely you want nothing more than to get back to Kether?  But the music is certainly hinting at escape, freedom.
• It's hard not to see this as a description of someone beginning to wake from a long depression. It's a bit like Plath in "Black Rook in Stormy Weather": "At any rate, I now walk / Wary (for it could happen / Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical / Yet politic, ignorant / Of whatever angel any choose to flare / Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul /My eyelids up, and grant / A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality."  Depression is being trapped in a rut, unable to escape, having no sense of connection or meaning.  It doesn't lift immediately - you can't go in one magical movement from Malkuth to Kether.  But at a certain point, you remember that things can be different.  You remember that there are other possibilities.  Coming out of depression, some people say, is actually the time when people are most likely to commit suicide, more so than when they're fully in the grips of that.  Maybe in part that's because it's only in coming out of depression that you realize exactly how much you've lost.
• You remember that the Thin White Duke used to be here - once you were touched by this inconstant principle of love - but it's gone now.  How can you connect to it again, since that's what really matters?
• The final section. . . this is the most joyous, ebullient section.  And yet everyone can't help but see it as ironic.  A commentator on SongMeanings writes that it is "cynical" and that Bowie "means the exact opposite" of what he's saying.  Even O'Leary, who does see the song as depicting an escape (but from Gnosticism, not just from depression), writes that it is "resigned" and "a retreat."
• I see this as ironic, too.  But I don't really buy either reading of why it's ironic.  On the one hand, I see the persona as meaning what he's saying.  He thinks he's in love.  I don't think he is, or if he is, it doesn't matter, it's futile and bound to dissipate - but I don't see it as cynical or meaning the exact opposite.  I think it is the genuine words sung by a person who genuinely sees himself as being in love.  On the other hand, I also don't see it as resigned or a retreat.  "It's too late to be hateful"?  That's not a resigned statement; that's a good thing!  "The European canon is here"?  What could be better?!  A retreat from Gnosticism?  But this section is transcendent!  It's ironic, but the irony stems not from the persona's stated emotions but rather from the unreliability of his narration.
• What does the persona think is happening here?  Remember, he was searching for a connection with love, the Eternal, Intellectual Beauty.  And now that he is in love, now that he "won't let the day pass without her," he thinks he's found that connection.  From being lost in his circle and tall in his room, he's managed (so he thinks) to reach outside of himself, to find others, and to find a way back to the happiness that he had lost.  "Stricken" is used here in a positive sense, linked to his face showing a "glow."  The colorless lack of emotion in the first section has now been utterly changed into the return of the euphoria elegized in the second section.  He has that connection back.  He's found the Intellectual Beauty he sought.
• The return of euphoric emotion is characterized as "love," and the link to a supposed "her" that he won't let the day pass without suggests romantic love.
• But there's more to it than romantic love, or, as the "throwing darts in lover's eyes" line suggests, love is something that connects you to a broader sense of the good.
• Shelley characterizes the Eternal as. . . well, eternal.  And changeless.  Something outside of time, something unitary when real existence is manifold.  It is "That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse / Of birth can quench not."  Being alive takes us out of it; when we are dead we will, however, return to it.
• The only way we know, in life, to the Eternal is through love, through Intellectual Beauty, through those things that touch us within time.  But our connection to the Eternal takes us outside of time.  If "it's too late" for us to continue the various emotions and experiences we have within life, then that's because life is over.  But life is over when we tear aside the painted veil.  These references to time coming to an end suggest that Eternity is beginning.
• The European canon is here. . . other people might love other things.  Maybe even the persona loves or thinks he loves some girl.  But I love art.  More than that, part of the power of art comes from its intertextuality.  Art is not reality.  But art seems more real the more people treat it as real.  The European canon - any canon, really - is a web of people making connections to each other, being brought to intellectual beauty by each other and then reaching down from there to give a hand to the next person on her way up.  This can even be seen in this context itself, with Bowie being a Philip Dick reader who references SF in his songs and then influencing Dick to write Valis - all of these things which may not seem to be real are brought into some kind of semi-reality thanks to the weight of the numbers of people who treat them as real.  The European canon is here, combined with all the "too late"s, paints a very definite picture in my mind - an image of the weight of it, all of the art and thought of European culture, finally putting an end to reality, overtaking it.  The sheer solidity of Intellectual Beauty conjured up by all these people - when it doesn't really exist! - in conversation with each other finally coming to fruition.  "If God does not exist in this world...... I will make God with my own hands!"  It's never going to happen, of course.  But then it does.
• Well. . . or that's what the persona seems to be gesturing at.  After a seeming eternity of being stuck in reality and depression, the painted veil, by those who were called life, with no escape, an escape is finally created by the weight of art building up so heavily that even the formerly depressed persona can at last experience love, escaping once and for all from the burdens of time into Eternity.
• That's what I see the persona as thinking.  But is it really what's happening?  Well, of course not.  The persona makes that clear, although, unlike the SongMeanings commentator, I think it's unintentional, that the persona is in a genuine state of delusion at this point.  Why would he even tell us, "It's not the side effects of the cocaine"?  Because he's taken enough cocaine that it legitimately could be the side effects of the cocaine.  The certainty of "it must be love" is undercut by the qualification that this is just what the persona is "thinking."  As the SongMeanings commentator points out, "I must be only one in a million; / I won't let the day pass without her..." is obviously rather ludicrous - that's how everyone who's in love, or even just infatuated, feels, so why would the persona think he's "only one in a million"?  Because he's delusional about the power of his love, thinks it's something unique and transporting when in reality it's mundane and banal.  And, of course, the possibility that he's been stricken is so unlikely that he has to ask us if he should "believe" it, and rather than tell us outright that he's glowing ask us.
• So I disagree with the readings that portray this as someone emotionless trying to fake emotion - I see it as someone who genuinely believes that he is experiencing transporting emotion.  But the issue is that just because you feel something doesn't mean that it matters.
• It is just the side effects of the cocaine.  You weren't really stricken.  You'll have plenty of time to be hateful, grateful and even late again tomorrow.  The European canon isn't here yet and probably never will be.  This is probably the mad god, Dionysus.  You can't make God with your own hands.  And if you lift the painted veil which those who lift call life, you won't find Truth, just "Fear / And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave /Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear."
• "Lift not the painted veil which those who live" is, frankly, fairly apropos in general - "I knew one who had lifted it--he sought, / For his lost heart was tender, things to love / But found them not, alas! nor was there aught /The world contains, the which he could approve."
• The European canon cannot actually transport you to Kether, because there is no Kether.
• The euphoria is going to wear off, and when it does, you'll be right back at the beginning again.
• My reaction to this song is probably heavily influenced by the fact that, when I had my transporting transcendent experience with it, I was listening to it repeatedly.  On YouTube.  I didn't even own it at first, although you better believe I bought it after that.  But at first, I was just  hitting play over and over again on YouTube.  I had to do it manually!  Over and over and over again.  "The European canon is here," and I always made it go back into the train noises.  That was the only way to get back to the sunbirds and the European canon, after all.
• But it's worth noting that every single live performance - and you can go and look at the videos on YouTube - ends with a return to the "Thin White Duke" section of the song at the very end.  Yes, okay, it's the final part, the part that opens up into the "mountains and mountains" section, but still.  It always returns to the downbeat part.  I think it's telling that I picked up on that just from listening to the recorded song, which doesn't actually do that if you're not playing it on repeat.
• It's not a song about a completely emotionless guy trying to fake the connection he doesn't really have.  It's a song about how mania (the mania from cocaine, but the mania from anything really, romance, or art, or religion, or whatever) can't sustain us.
• "I think you can apply that to nearly any of life's pleasures. They all leave you unsatisfied because you try to reach that high every time. You always have to go back. . . . You have to keep trying. You keep going for it. Not just to get the high but you're hoping in desperation that one day the high that you do achieve will stay with you. But of course it never does, so in its own way it's an avenue to insanity. It produces a rat syndrome, you know, where you just go round and round and round. Circularity." (link to link)
• "Dredging the ocean, lost in my circle" (station to station)

21st-Century Naming Trends

David Bowie's musical Lazarus did not receive very positive reviews.  It may not be all that good.  But. . . it's a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, and it features "an otherworldly child who knows all about" the protagonist "and promises to help him return to his little house in the stars"?  "But the hope she brings seems destined to be derailed"?  Who is played by an actress named Sophia? ? ?  ? ? ? ? ? ?  ? ? ? ? ??  ? ?

I could note that there's also evidently a character named Elly, but that one seems obviously coincidental even to me.  If a coincidence ripe for visions of orchestration.

_Crimson Peak_

I saw Crimson Peak today (I don't have any very strong opinion about it - it wasn't boring, but it wasn't all that memorable for me either, although it might appeal more to those with more visual interest than me.), and. . . well, it was obviously meant to be deliberately reminiscent of Rebecca.  It was obviously meant to be deliberately reminiscent of Rebecca because my friend sitting next to me whispered at one point that it was just like Rebecca, and because, look, it's a story about a young woman who marries a more experienced man who takes her back to his creepy mansion (among other elements that are also reminiscent of Rebecca).  Rebecca is a fairly well-known story (my friend has never even read the book or seen the movie, but he still recognized the references), so I do think that references to it are pretty clearly intended to be picked up on by viewers.

However, I couldn't really focus while watching on the similarities to Rebecca, because the story was just so reminiscent of The Portrait of a Lady.  The protagonist is a young woman with some money from upstate New York (albeit Buffalo instead of Albany).  Four of the characters match up pretty clearly to specific characters in The Portrait of a Lady (there was one character whom I just spent the entire movie thinking of as Caspar Goodwood).  There's even one specific scene where a character is introduced playing the piano which really must be a deliberate reference to the introduction of a certain character in The Portrait of a Lady.

I was, therefore, glad to find this interview with Del Toro where he specifically says, "One of the guys that I love and revere is Henry James."  Although of course he explicitly mentions Turn of the Screw, he says enough that I'm pretty convinced that the references to Portrait of a Lady are entirely deliberate.  Good to see my intertextual recognition skills are still on-target!

Unfinished

Oh, yes;
He is waiting.
I had nearly forgotten him, darkness in a hollow cylinder,
A firm body, a slight sword, something I want.
I had nearly forgotten.
Earlier it was his hand on my skull, gripping my head,
Keeping me in place, but then some stranger stole his space
And something else was holding me down in its grasp
So that only one point was in my line of sight,
Only one tune echoed in my brain.
Some things are caves,
Some things cover up caves.
Everything I want is empty.
Substance can just leak out now -
I want to be taken over,
And, whether it is enthusiasm or ecstasy,
I want to lose myself.
Sometimes you are subsumed in a pool,
Sometimes you rush out as the wind.
Either way, it is suspension.
I want to jump in the pool right now,
Because the water is warm and could
Protect me - I want to even if I can't.

_A Handful of Dust_

I am working as a teacher of English in a context where I do not, generally, have much say over what texts I teach.  This can make for awkward situations, as, obviously, being unable to make my own selections about my content can lead to confusion or a lack of focus in my teaching, if I myself don't understand the rationale behind the choice of a specific text (and, believe me, most often very little effort is made to convey the rationale behind text choices at my institution).  A case in point would be that, this year, I was told to teach Evelyn Waugh's novel, A Handful of Dust.  Now, naturally, I've heard of Evelyn Waugh before, and even saw Bright Young Things, the movie version of his Vile Bodies, although I've never read even Brideshead Revisited, let alone any of his less famous books.  But I'd never even heard of A Handful of Dust prior to starting work at this school, so it was certainly somewhat intimidating to be asked to teach a book I knew almost nothing about.  And when I read it, frankly I was mildly confused by it and had to skim a bunch of articles that were shared documents from the department in order to get even the barest sense of what to think about the book.

Now, however, I must say I'm really re-evaluating my initial reaction towards the book and even feel like it was a very good choice.  On a professional level, I'm finding this text much more exciting to teach than the other texts I taught last year.  My school has an odd way of teaching literature to high-school-aged students - we are expected not only to teach texts and close reading but to explicitly teach "theory."  However, because these are high-school-aged students without much background in literary studies, we are teaching them relatively simple theories, which ultimately boils down to teaching them a few theories of tragedy in their first year (Aristotle's, A. C. Bradley's theory of Shakespearean tragedy, Arthur Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man") and teaching them about different forms of comedy in their second year.  When we were doing tragedy last year, I found this remarkably frustrating.  I didn't see that teaching them A. C. Bradley really added much to their study of Macbeth, and in fact it may have detracted from it, since they became more focused on using the theory as a way to simplify the text than actually putting any effort into reading Macbeth.  Similarly, although "Tragedy and the Common Man" is useful for establishing Arthur Miller's intentions in writing his plays, reducing Death of a Salesman to the theory again seems to close down inquiry or take what could be a relatively accessible play on its own merit and reduce it to an example of a broader theory.  I don't think studying the theory along with the play adds very much, and it was frustrating in that it seemed to be a way of protecting the students from having to think on their own.

A Handful of Dust, which we are explicitly teaching as a satire, is a different matter.  The text has a nice mix of being stylistically fairly accessible, so that the majority of my students are able to understand the prose, while at the same time being rather difficult to grasp as a gestalt.  Without understanding specifically that it is a satire, what satire means, and what the purposes of Waugh's satire were, it is difficult to grasp the text fully.  Thus, in teaching the students about the nature of satire and exploring the specific ways in which the theory of satire applies to the text, I feel that I am genuinely doing something useful, helping them to appreciate and get value out of a text which would, without the theoretical elements, be very opaque to them.  Moreover, the discussion of the students' confusions about the text and how the concept of satire may explain them intellectually even as their emotional responses to the text may conflict with what the satirical purpose would gesture towards is interesting and educational for both me and the students; I feel like in our class sessions they're actually learning and doing more thinking because they have to process their emotions and see how they interplay with the actual text (perhaps because the students read the text before they had much idea of what satire was, or because the targets of the satire may seem rather distant to them, they are much more emotionally involved in the text than I was when I read it).  Teaching it, then, becomes educational for me to as the process of dealing with student reactions and squaring them with the theory helps to give me passages into the text and articulate my own intellectual understanding of it.  So it's really enjoyable.

But that's not all.  I can't say I enjoyed the book that much when I read it, as much as I enjoyed coming to a better understanding of it via the process of teaching.  However, on a personal level, teaching this text has also been really rewarding to me because it's brought me to a very Eliot-centric moment in my life.  Of course, A Handful of Dust is named after the line from "The Waste Land" (quoted in an epigram).  There are also key thematic and symbolic resonances between the texts (eg, the use of fortune tellers in both, the travel over the course of both from urban London to a non-Western wilderness landscape) that help to ground my understanding of A Handful of Dust (since, contrary to my expectations when I first read "The Waste Land" back in college, I now have a fairly tolerable understanding of the poem, without, bizarrely, having any clear idea of how I developed it, since I don't remember ever either discussing it in class or reading much analysis of it, and I certainly had no idea what was going on with it when I first read it).  I had an amazing experience privately meeting one of the more passionate and dedicated students in my class, who had finished the text long before the rest of the class had, to discuss the poem with him as a way into the novel, and we ended up spending a couple of hours texting each other that night in order to continue the discussion - it was very rewarding and reminded me of how much Eliot meant to me.  Then this led to me being inspired to think about Eliot in an exciting conversation with reader Abangaku, which was also very inspirational and exciting for both of us, I think, and led me to read "Ash Wednesday" in more depth than I ever have before, which was also very meaningful for me.  In addition, I'm currently on a committee that's working on setting up a program for especially talented middle-school-aged students in English, and so far the most likely name for the program would be the "Eliot Program," although admittedly part of the reason for this is that we're mostly pretty leery of using the name of a white male, and Eliot is nicely ambiguous - which is a shame because, as much as I too am leery of using the name of a white male, I really do actively dislike George Eliot.  But it's probably made up for by the T. S. aspect.

Eliot for me, unusually, is not a school poet.  Most of the poems and poetry I care about are those that I studied in school - even Shelley I took a course on.  I think Blake and Eliot are the only real exceptions to that rule.  With Blake it's obvious that it's the Gnosticism that draws me in.  With Eliot, I have to say, it's Diana Wynne Jones.  Just as Shelley was, Eliot was a huge personal influence on DWJ and was something she drew on in her books - I've mentioned previously my speculations about the Dalemark series.  I think that I was indoctrinated in Eliot's concepts and ideas at a very early age by reading DWJ without even having needed to read Eliot - I really do see Eliot's ideas as being presented and discussed in DWJ's work such that, as rushthatspeaks once wrote, "the emotional logic felt strangely familiar."  Read rushthatspeak's essay on this point for more details.  So, given that I've been reading and loving DWJ since I was eight and the way she thinks has become a fundamental part of my worldview, having this Eliot moment this past month has been a great experience for me - it's one of those moments where my conceptual understanding of the world seems justified, to see Eliot come up everywhere.  But of course it's all a coincidence, a resurgence of a mode of thinking sparked off by a particular text - so I really have to pay tribute to that text and the person who is forcing me to teach it, because it has added a lot of value to my students' and my own lives.

Ramble about a Book

I reread "Another Ambiguous Utopia" today, and it made me want to post something on my blog, but I'm not sure what.  I guess I'll post about something that I wanted to talk to my brother about, but he's not responding to me.

Lately, I've been reading a lot of responses to the situation in Syria and the concept of taking military action there in response to the use of chemical weapons.  It's fascinating and somewhat bizarre to see the contrast between the mainstream media (recently I. . . in a somewhat lengthy story, wound up with something approximating a free subscription to the International Herald-Tribune, which has meant reading a lot more newspaper writing than I had been reading for the past few years), where even those who argue against military strikes seem to see it as an at least moderately appealing option that needs to be persuasively dismissed, and my friends and family, who all just dismiss the idea out of hand and don't see it as even remotely appealing in any way.  But the debates themselves are also somewhat interesting to me, as were the debates about Iraq that these debates naturally remind me of, for a rather odd reason - they are about issues that are so central to my consciousness.

I'm not sure why "the responsibilities of the powerful" and "the ability of those with superior force to actually make any difference" are issues that were so significant in my adolescence, but they really, really were.  In retrospect, given that I was a teenager with the normal lack of power that being a teenager implies and no real ambitions to get any more power than I already had, it seems like yet another one of those odd things (like theodicy) that I didn't really have any good reason to obsess over.  But it was a moral issue that I just kept coming back to.  I wanted to talk to my brother about it because the imaginary game that he, our friend, and I played together wound up focusing on such issues to an odd degree - in a game that started out when I was eleven or twelve with the basic premise of, "A huge force of bad guys are destroying everything.  The good guys get attacked and fight back," it probably says something that at least one of his characters and one of my characters both had huge mental breakdowns about the morality of efforts to defeat the bad guys (who, in all honesty, were significantly more worrying and more of a threat than Syria or Iraq ever have been to the US).  Years and years later, after the Iraqi war, I came up with a plot for a short story (it probably would wind up a novella, if I ever wrote it, given what happens to things I write) taking two of my characters from our game and placing them in an entirely different context but forcing them to have another huge argument over the morality of using power; when I was reading the IHT last week I suddenly had odd visions of my two characters coming on a talk show to discuss their beliefs in relation to the Syria argument.  And it wasn't only those games, either - I also came up with a plot for a book where, I later decided during the Iraqi war, my kind-of-attractive-but-nonetheless-rather-villainous-villain was more or less George Bush (albeit with far more personal reason for his dedication to changing other societies' behavior by force, but nonetheless with no direct stake in the conflict he stirred up other than a desire to use overwhelming power to achieve aims he thought were moral).

Again, it strikes me as odd that this was such a moral preoccupation of mine during my adolescent years in the nineties, long before 2001 brought these issues to the forefront of societal discussion.  It wasn't really something that was all that personally relevant at all since I was neither in a position to be making decisions about that kind of thing nor had the desire to see myself in such a position.  Nor did I have the kind of power where my personally withholding my intervention was something that might potentially have moral implications (at least, no more so than any other person from a relatively affluent background).  When I think about where I came across this obsession and its personal importance to me, then, I kind of find myself thinking of Enchantress from the Stars.  This book by Sylvia Engdahl features, as Wikipedia tells us, "a peaceful, technologically advanced, space-faring civilization called the 'Federation,' which monitors worlds which are still 'maturing,' allowing them to grow without any sort of contact or intervention."  When the protagonist does have to intervene in order to save one civilization from another, she has to do it as gently as possible, making use of the beliefs of the locals rather than the overwhelming force her civilization presumably possesses.  I think this book, despite never quite being one of my favorites, just made a really deep impression on me as a child, both as an ideal and as a concept to argue against.  I definitely do get the sense that all of my later explorations of the concept of power and how to wield it as a teenager really did stem from both the ways in which I found Engdahl's Federation attractive and the ways in which I found it really morally troubling.  It might not have been the most emotionally gripping book (although it's also really, really cool narratively - it really is!), but it was one of the most thought-provoking books of my childhood.  I guess that the same issues also came up in Star Trek, but I never watched that as a child, so this was the one that really made an impression on me and introduced me to those ideas that still come up in serious contexts even today.

Linked Links

Thomas Mann

Jenna Moran
Jenna Moran Addendum
Jenna Moran Part 3
Jenna Moran - Another Take

Something about judgement being founded on the presence of the very emotions that get in the way of the ideal that lies behind the judgement.  Judgement as self-defeating paradox.

Walter Pater - Conclusion to _ The Renaissance_

The thing that fascinates me about the Conclusion to The Renaissance is that it seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't be any good - the text that led to the foundation of a widely criticized faddish movement among youths well over a century ago.  And yet. . .


"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without --our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them -the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the brain under every ray of light and sound-- processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them-- a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

"Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall --movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest-- but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions --colour, odour, texture-- in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step further still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight;that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in to, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off --that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

"Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren. vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve --les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least among "the children of the world", in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion --that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

David Levithan's _Every Day_ and the Contingency of Morality

NB: This post is redolent of spoilers for the book, in case anyone reading this ever intends to read it.  OTOH, if you don't intend to read it, I think I'm fairly clear in what I'm talking about for once?

Being the YA genre fangirl that I am, I have of course known about David Levithan (I keep on wanting to call him David Leviathan) for a while, as he is kind of a big deal.  That having been said, I never particularly wanted to read his books because they seemed to mostly fall into the sub-genre of YA realistic romance, which is not a sub-genre I like all that much.  I consider myself a YA genre fangirl because I love quite a lot of YA subgenres, including speculative fiction, stuff with no technically fantastic elements that nonetheless is far too trashy to portray a convincing sense of reality, and genuinely realistic novels that deal with teens in unpleasant situations and how they live through them.  But I've never really enjoyed the kind of books that focus on relatively normal kids in relatively realistically-portrayed romantic relationships; I tend to find them more alienating and offputting than anything else, so I don't really feel drawn to read them.

I read Every Day because of the recent controversy over this article on "YA Fiction and the End of Boys".  The article and controversy weren't actually all that interesting to me in-and-of-themselves, but the article included the following paragraph on Every Day:

"If books like these reward boys who give up men’s social power, more provocative still are books that imagine erasing men’s physical power. That’s the case in David Levithan’s just-released Every Day, which tells the story of A, a spirit who wakes every day in a different body: sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes trans, sometimes this race or that. Levithan, known for his suggestive work about queer sexuality, uses his central conceit to artfully suggest the complexity of gender and embodiment. But even so, Every Day is haunted by a negative idea of manhood. When A falls in love with a girl, Rhiannon, he does so while inhabiting the body of Rhiannon’s crass, emotionally manipulative boyfriend. The novel’s antagonist, the character who offers A the ability to kill a host body’s spirit and thereby stay with Rhiannon forever, is coded male too. And what these experiences teach A is that being the kind of partner this beautiful, sensitive girl deserves means not being a man. At least, not being her man. It means finding a sweet, artsy, outsider for Rhiannon, and A heading off into a future perpetually separated from ownership of the body’s strength — the ultimate sacrifice of male power."


So what I got out of that was - book about bodiless spirit that possesses a different person each day!  Naturally I wanted to read that book.  It fits in perfectly with my well-documented obsession with fiction about fluid identities, not to mention my well-documented obsession with fiction about possessing spirits.


I did read Every Day, and, as usual, I'm not that interested in reviewing it.  What I can say briefly is that I found it entertaining enough.  It wasn't a boring book, and, what's more, it wasn't interesting simply because it was irritating (as, say, that damned movie Crash was).  It had good parts that were appealing.  But the day after I finished it, I keep on coming back to how irritating I found it, despite my general feeling that I was engaged in the book.  And that seems like something you might write about.  You can't write much about boring stories - it's very hard to say why something just doesn't grab you.  But when something actively pushes you away, that's interesting, and that's why I thought I should try to write about Every Day - because I can't stop thinking to myself, why did I find it that irritating?  

Well, there's a lot of reasons, some of which come down to subjective issues that are hard to break down again -  there's this character who appears on, like, three pages, named Amelia, who I felt had much more personality than any of the main characters in the entire book; I kept on thinking that it would have been a much better book if A had fallen in love with Amelia instead of with Rhiannon since Amelia seemed to actually have an identity, but I suppose this kind of reaction is very personal since different people have very different ideas about what makes for well-developed characterization - but I want to get into one issue I have in particular with the book that I think I can express more clearly.

I'm going to start by recounting the basic plot of Every Day, although, of course, I'm going to do that from the standpoint of what I'm interested in, so this may be limited or biased rather than a thorough, accurate summary.  This entity A possesses a new body every day and has been doing so for as long as they can remember (a sidenote: as annoyed as I was by the book, I am also annoyed by reviews that insist on referring to A as "he" even though it is explicitly stated in the text that "when it came to gender" A is "both and neither."  Insofar as I can tell, the main reason why reviewers are referring to A as male is because they spend most of the book in love with a girl and therefore "sounds male," which makes this even more annoying than it would be if they were just misgendering the character.  Of course, A doesn't tell us which pronouns they prefer, but I have to feel that "they" is more accurate than "he.").  They don't have any idea of why this happens or of anyone else in the world in the same position as them.  There are various rules behind this switch, including that they switch bodies at midnight every day whether awake or asleep, never possess the same body twice, have access to the body's memories (although it takes some effort) and are influenced by its hormones but cannot feel the possessed person's emotions, always possess bodies of a certain age (which they therefore think of as their own age - it is sixteen at the time of the book), can only geographically travel in the spirit between bodies within a limited radius (about four hours by car, it would seem), although if the body travels to Hawaii that day then A will be stuck in Hawaii in their next body, etc.  It's important to note that, on the whole, with only one exception in the entire book (and that one is under extenuating circumstances), those who are possessed don't really remember the possession as a possession, so A doesn't leave any particular trace in the minds of those they have possessed.   A thinks of themself as human, just a rather odd one.  A realized that other people were not like them at the age of five or six or so and was very upset about it at first, but eventually came to terms with it.  At the time of the book's start, as a sixteen-year-old, A realizes that other people have lots of benefits that they do not, all of the advantages of rootedness, connection, lasting relationships, and so on, but they also see the positive side of their own life - they are free of the pressure of relationships, are able to get a wide perspective on the world and thus be wiser than those of us blinded by our own perspectives, are a good observer, and know how to enjoy living in the moment.  A is a fundamentally moral person, as well, if still a sixteen-year-old kid, and has set up rules for themself so as to avoid damaging the lives of those they possess.  Although accessing memories, as stated above, seems to take a lot of effort, such that A avoids doing it more than necessary, and although in order to remain emotionally stable A feels the need to detach somewhat from the lives of the people they possess, A does enough accessing and uses their keen observational skills to try their best to make sure no one notices anything odd in the person's life and that they don't screw things up for the person too much.  A does this purely out of a basic sense of morality and the fact that they feel guilt when they do cause lasting problems for others, since, being untraceable, there are no real potential external consequences for them were they to do anything very terrible.  The same basic sense of morality, of course, means that they don't do anything drastically out-of-character even when it might theoretically help the person; when A winds up possessing the body of an extremely selfish girl, for instance, they muse about how it wouldn't do much good to sign her up to work at the soup kitchen because that's her decision to make, even if she would normally make the wrong decision, and she would just abandon the decision if A made it for her.


So A already has a relatively healthy attitude to what is obviously a fairly difficult situation at the start of the book - as aware as A is of the compensations of their state, it's hard for them to fully appreciate the benefits when the benefits of everyone else's lives are so visible, but A is managing.  The plot of the novel deals with A's steadily decreasing ability to cope after they fall in love (at first sight!  I found this pretty annoying too.) with Rhiannon while possessing Justin.  At first, A starts doing out-of-character things in the bodies they're possessing in order to sneak away and spend time with Rhiannon.  Later on, A actually confesses their true identity to Rhiannon; when she does not automatically reject them and shows some understanding of them (and, depending on what body they possess, some physical attraction, although A really fails to understand or show any sympathy for the fact that Rhiannon's attraction clearly depends on what body A is possessing), their behavior only becomes worse as they genuinely start to imagine that the two could find a way to make the relationship work.  A stops doing a very good job of being a guest in other people's lives and devotes more and more of their time to their own agenda, most significantly when they possess a boy who is supposed to be on a plane trip to Hawaii and actually completely blows off the trip and runs away in order to stay in the Maryland area because they can't stand the thought of not being near Rhiannon (and if they went to Hawaii they would be stuck there).  The subplot which winds up with A being introduced to the character who claims that A is not alone and that there would be a way for them to possess a body for a longer period of time (which A clearly thinks amounts to murder of the original identity) is meant to parallel this general decline in A's sense of responsibility; it's when A, possessing the "sweet, artsy outsider" (although I don't particularly see evidence of the character being an outsider) Alexander, is tempted to murder him to stay in the body forever, precisely because Alexander is such a genuinely kind and good person that his life, friends, and existence are all appealing, that they realize that their love for Rhiannon is getting them to break their own reasonably moral code of rules and that they decide they must get as far away from Rhiannon and the murderer as possible so as to avoid the temptation and go back to their life as an outsider.  And yes, this is obviously necessary in large part because Rhiannon cannot accept A as a disembodied, ever-changing spirit - if Rhiannon were willing to commit herself to A as they are A would probably not have ever come to the realization of their moral issues - but Rhiannon's problems with A are not just about the changing bodies but also with the seeming iffiness of A's behaviour - is what A does fair to the people whose bodies they are possessing?  She isn't sure.  So the arc of the book, oddly enough, is actually somewhat limiting of A's character development; they end up in more or less the same place they started out with in the beginning, only, I suppose, with a greater understanding of both the temptations of being a less virtuous person and also a greater awareness of the consequences of falling prey to such temptations (A starts out the book having no idea that such a murder would be possible).

The premise, then, is one that instinctively appeals to me, but I don't particularly feel that what Levithan found potentially interesting about the premise is the same as what I did.  I suppose one angle to come at this from is that of A as the basically good person - in the context of the book, it makes sense that A would see themself this way, of course.  A may not, in fact, be human, although A certainly thinks of themself as human, but A has never, until the confrontation with the antagonist, interacted with a sentient non-human before, and has been treated by a human by everyone they have ever met until the age of sixteen.  So it's not that surprising that A doesn't perceive themself as different on some elemental level from the species that makes up all of their interactive opportunities, and that they take on a fairly conventional morality from within that species (since, presumably, A has been socialized as much to that morality as anyone raised as human would have been).  This is a perfectly logical and reasonable choice, and it's what makes the central internal conflict possible - well, basically A's desire to be human, both in terms of the relationships with other humans that they can't have but want and in terms of the fundamental moral code that they can have, is what drives the whole possible.  To the degree that we see that level of responsibility to other people that A eventually decides to sacrifice their relationship with Rhiannon to as a measure of humanity, the plot affirms A's decision to consider themself as human; we too can see them as making a fundamentally human decision and to be admired in doing so.

On the other hand, there's another side to that story, as both A and the implied author behind A recognize that there are some distinctions between A and humanity.  A's inability to understand the embodiedness of Rhiannon's affections and their genuine fondness for the advantages of detachment speak to elements of A which are not commonly shared among humans.  The fact that the book ends with A making the decision to reject love and connection in the name of morality also shows that on some level A is rejecting quintessentially human traits; we do not normally expect of your average, ordinary human being that the ability to make lasting connections with other people would come into conflict with the possibility of living morally, and so A, in having to make this decision, is rejecting the chance to be human in that sense even if it is in the name of alignment with the human in another sense.  What is more, the hint of a larger plot in the antagonist being another of A's kind who does not adhere to A's human morality, and who contacts A via a boy A possessed who is convinced that A is the devil, demonstrates that whatever A's kind is, A does have a choice; A is not purely a human in very weird circumstances but is an entity who, for whatever reasons, has actively chosen to construct themself as human in a situation where other alternatives could be proposed with equal validity.

And, yes, I would be more interested in that story.  Although as a matter of credibility I find A's way of interpreting their existence to be believable, it makes for a story that engages with concerns I don't find particularly gripping.  The question of how to balance love and morality is of course a valid one, even one I care about quite deeply at times, but in this story it seems to be passing up so much potential to deal with the more fascinating to me concern of what it means to be human in contexts where that is ambiguous.  An A who had not aligned themselves quite so clearly with humanity and that character's struggles with morality and responsibility would be a more interesting character to me than a character who basically starts out with a very mainstream, uncomplicated view of morality and never goes beyond that intellectually even when they are emotionally tempted away from their beliefs.  I think that is where I come down to being annoyed by the story - because it promises some philosophical depth to me, but that is dragged away.  What the story ends up being about thematically is the importance of both the universal truths that we all share as humans and also the individual idiosyncrasies that make us all unique.  I think this is problematic on the whole because, as mentioned above, Levithan doesn't really do a very good job with the second part - I don't find his characters all that convincing as different people who are each internally unique even as he runs through a large number of external differences - but even if Levithan were a Diana Wynne Jones or Henry James of characterization, I think that this theme is just less interesting to me that one that really grapples with questions of morality and why we adhere to it.  It is never called into question that A owes the kindness of their respect for people's lives to these people simply because A is a good person who is equal to the humans whose lives they inhabit; when A challenges these restraints it is not because A has any philosophical justification whatsoever to do so but merely because love is great and you care less about morality when you're in love.  A's self-justifications as they fall into the abyss are minimal; the story does not engage with the philosophical issues but remains on the level of pointing out that love is sometimes selfish.  This isn't something that comes as revelatory to me, and for me, the more interesting themes would have dealt with what was selfish in the first place, whether a being whose life differs in fundamental ways from humans really does have to live in a way that is morally spotless for humans even at disadvantage to themselves, what alternative lives A could build that would be less infringed on by human norms (keep in mind that A, despite all of the body shifting, does not know how to speak Portuguese, play the clarinet, or do gymnastics, even if they body they're in does, which is fine for a sixteen year-old but is going to be a huge problem when they're 36), and what morality really involves.  So, while I think it's believable that some characters in A's position might react like A, on a personal level I think that's not what I find appealing about the premise, and that's one major reason why this turned out not to be the book I wanted it to be.

Reading _Alice_'s Footnotes

Maybe it's just me, but I find this a hilarious footnote in the heavily annotated edition of Alice's Adventures  in Wonderland that I'm now reading: "The Liddell children had a particularly distinguished drawing-master at this time, John Ruskin. . . ."  What an incredibly bizarre way to describe Ruskin, "a particularly distinguished drawing-master?"  Seriously?  Later on, the footnote says, "He taught Alice drawing in the deanery, lending her paintings of Turner to copy. . .," and I found that hilarious too, but that really is probably just me.  The thing is, most of my exposure to Ruskin was in my summer course back in high school on Victorian literature, where our big joke was that Ruskin suffered from profound lust for Turner because he just would not shut up in any of his work about how great Turner was. . . I suppose by this principle I myself suffer with profound lust for Byron, Shelley, Henry James, DWJ, Jenna Moran, Bowie and Kevin Barnes?

I also seriously had no idea that the Liddell in Alice Liddell was the same as the Liddell in Liddell-Scott.

Obviously, these are the kinds of things I am going to blog about.

_The Sacred Fount_

From the Wikipedia article on The Sacred Fount - "This strange, often baffling book concerns an unnamed narrator who attempts to discover the truth about the love lives of his fellow-guests at a weekend party in the English countryside. . . . many have expressed simple bewilderment over what, if anything, James was trying to accomplish in the novel. James himself said that the book was "calculated to minister to curiosity," but many have maintained that the novel does little or nothing to reward that curiosity. . . .  . Indeed in a letter dated March 15th 1901 to Mrs Humphry Ward James declared 'I say it in all sincerity – the book isn't worth discussing [...] I hatingly finished it; trying to make it – the one thing it could be – a consistent joke.'"


Honestly, it's a pretty amazing book - not that I would recommend it to you if you are not already a James fan.  But coming from my perspective it sort of corroborates everything I've ever believed about James.


Here's a quotation: "If I was free, that was what I had been only so short a time before, what I had been as I drove, in London, to the station. Was this now a foreknowledge that, on the morrow, in driving away, I should feel myself restored to that blankness? The state lost was the state of exemption from intense obsessions, and the state recovered would therefore logically match it. If the foreknowledge had thus, as by the stir of the air from my friend's whisk of her train, descended upon me, my liberation was in a manner what I was already tasting. Yet how I also felt, with it, something of the threat of a chill to my curiosity! The taste of its being all over, that really sublime success of the strained vision in which I had been living for crowded hours—was this a taste that I was sure I should particularly enjoy? Marked enough it was, doubtless, that even in the stress of perceiving myself broken with I ruefully reflected on all the more, on the ever so much, I still wanted to know!"  It's alarming the degree to which I can really empathize with the narrator as James describes him, even if one freely admits that my interests are rather different from his.  But frankly this book is the most accurate, persuasive description of what obsession/inspiration feels like for me that I have ever read.

"Kalifriki of the Thread"

Roger Zelazny's short story in the Hidden Turnings collection, edited by Diana Wynne Jones. I took this out from the library once or twice as a preteen. Then for years it was still listed on the library catalogue as being owned by the library, but the anthology itself had entirely disappeared from the shelves.

I think it says something about the story that I must have last read it well over fifteen years ago, and I have no memory whatsoever of the plot, but I totally still remember the name. I even correctly remembered how to spell "Kalifriki." I should really try to read that story again someday. . . .

Oh. My. God.

When I sign in to my blog these days, it automatically takes me to a page with a link to Google Analytics, which, naturally, I check. When I signed in this morning to post about Rachel and Napoleon, I checked my blog and found that someone had found it with a search on the topic "percy bysshe shelley jervis [sic] cocker quote." Intrigued, I did some research and discovered that this happened. Well, thank you for your help, random Slovakian! Sorry I did not know this before you did, though!

Nature V. Nurture

While everyone has heard of Sarah Bernhardt, and I understand her to be the major influence on the portrayal of Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse, Rachel Felix also gets mentioned several times throughout that novel.  I don't think Rachel is as well-known today (at least in the Anglosphere) as Sarah, but I at least had certainly heard to her thanks to Henry James.  Therefore, I am kind of flabbergasted to discover that there are a large number of living people who are descendent of both her and Napoleon.  Huh.  They at least have a fascinating genetic heritage, even if they aren't fascinating people themselves!

Now, That's What I Call a Quotation!

"If poetry is to usurp the function of religion, then there must be a theodicy for it."


---Janet McCann, From Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The Celestial Possible."

I See Myself as an Endless Fountain of Immortal Drink

A friend linked to a review (of an episode of Legend of Korra, but that's not particularly relevant), offering up the quotation: "When I was a kid, I insisted on being an extra Michelangelo at recess instead of April. (Believe that I had a costume.) The lone female character who hung out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably wasn’t as heinous as I remember... But 7-year-olds at recess have a way of boiling down characters to their defining characteristics, and [t]he job of the designated April was to hang out on the jungle gym until she was rescued, which was boring. An April couldn’t lead the gang. I could sometimes lead the gang, but only as Michelangelo. ...

"So even while watching 'The Spirit Of Competition,' in which significant time is spent on the long-dreaded romantic-polygon plot, my inner 7-year-old was still dead jealous she missed out on being Korra."

When I see people say things like that, I tend to find it somewhat alienating. Here am I, who was once a seven-year-old girl, and I just don't associate with that at all. I didn't have this kind of visceral reaction against the designated female characters in stories, that wasn't an issue for me. So I worry - does that make me a bad person? What does it say about me that I didn't feel that way? Shouldn't I have been offended by the limited roles open to females? Shouldn't I at least have shown more obvious evidence of having actually noticed?

But then I tried to dig more deeply into my memories of the time, and it occurred to me - I wasn't trying to play Michalangelo at seven, but, honestly, I wasn't exactly trying to play April, either. When I tried to envision myself as a character in an already-created fictional world, I was doing self-insert, at that age, and not self-insert as a Mary Sue heroine of either type, either. When I was doing self-insertion, it was as this kind of omniscient, omnipotent authorial figure. I didn't tend to envision myself as any of the characters in fantasy stories that seriously (I mean, I sort of associated myself with Nan Pilgrim in Witch Week in a kind of vague way, but when I tried acting out the book with my best friend, it was Charles's Simon Says spell that I was (alarmingly) obsessed with casting). Instead, I pictured myself coming into the worlds of the realistic fiction I was reading at the time, The Babysitters' Club and Sweet Valley Twins and being in control. When I made up a huge BSC fanfic in my head, it was from Kristy's POV, even though I was a character, and I went around being mysterious and having magic powers and doing strange things to Kristy. There was this one SVT book about how Jessica arranged for Elizabeth to have a really terrible, unpleasant day in order to orchestrate giving her a surprise party at the end, and I hated that plot. I always felt intensely sorry for Elizabeth. So whenever I reread that book I would make up fix-it fanfic where I was the magical omnipotent author-figure saving Elizabeth from Jessica.

Even my imaginary games - the most significant imaginary games from my early life were Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit and Good Mole, Bad Mole, which I played with my grandmother and little brother. I think Good Mole, Bad Mole was the long lasting one. It was a story about an orphaned little girl who lived with her evil stepfamily and whose only friend was the protective good mole, but they were at constant risk from the evil, dangerous, bad mole (I think that Good Rabbit, Bad Rabbit was basically the same plot but with rabbits?). So you'd think that I would be the poor little orphaned girl, right? Except I wasn't. That was my grandmother, and my brother was the good mole, but I was all the other characters, especially the evil ones. I don't think so much that it was that I wanted to be evil, though; I think it's more that the evil characters were in control of the plot, and that's where I wanted to be, in control of the plot.

Later in my childhood, once I was around ten or so, I became more involved in playing more normal imaginary games, the kind where I actually explicitly took on the roles of particular characters and acted specifically from their points of view. And at that time, I did default to playing largely female characters (with the occasional male). Those characters are still too important to me for me to easily classify them as "token females" or "powerful females" or anything like that - to me, they're just a lot of the best characters, and of course the best characters I create would include females, given that I see myself as female and I am the source of my own characters. I don't know how much all of my characters draw on stereotypical tropes of female characters, and to a certain extent I would even have to say it's something I'm uncomfortable thinking about. I love my characters too much and too personally to be entirely comfortable with the idea of confronting the potentially reprehensible cultural detritus that has helped to form them (this is a feeling that I wouldn't say I ever have about, say, books I adore, but somehow when I am the creator it's a lot more personal). Nonetheless, I would say that it's important that my experience of playing the games I love was very much still that part of the enjoyment was the sense of being the author, of creating plot. And this remains a feature of my collaborative imaginative life even as an adult - when I first started playing games like AD&D, I was disappointed because the only role for me as a non-GM was to be the character, not to be the author. And I've desperately enjoyed the "story games" that a friend introduced me to because, even if you have a bias towards one character in those games, you're still involved in collaborative plotting - and that's something that I need in order to feel comfortable with the game.

I think these aspects of my imaginative life say something interesting, especially in contrast with the more oft-told story mentioned above of the girl who wants to play boys' roles, about my imaginative life and what the function of imagination is for me - less the fantasy of escaping into being a different person with a more active role at the center of the story, and more the fantasy of escaping outward, into being someone with less personal stake in the world and a more controlling role at the peripheral of the story. It shows a lot about my personality and my expectations of life and my desires. It also reminds me of one of the many awesome papers I wrote in graduate school, the one about Endymion and Keats' letters. I was fascinated by the way that Keats, as poet writing about characters, tends to figure the poet not as the one in control, the one who was developing the story, but rather makes the poet a passive figure guided by others to create. Perhaps Keats was not imagining himself into his own stories as the author. And yet I have always done so, and I expect this will continue to be the form of engagement with stories that continues to appeal the most to me.