Romola rocks

Read Romola whilst stuck on British trains – the trip home morphed from 7 hours long to 27 hours long due to a spot of snow on the tracks and proverbial inselaffen administrative chaos, but that was fine with me, because I had a kabillion pages of Romola to read, plenty of chocolate flapjacks to stuff into my gob, and got to spend the night at Rodelinda's, whose life true to name is taking a bit of the turn for the operatic.

Anyways, Romola was fucking awesome. Obviously George Eliot lived out all of the talent that is no longer available in that country for making the trains run properly. Sometimes I like to imagine that purgatory isn’t a separate world – that it’s nicely integrated into this one – and that Mussolini for his sins is now a daily Oxford to London commuter who has to take First Great Southwestern, and is of course utterly helpless when it comes to making the trains run on time, the poor evil fuck.

But no complaints, again, because I have travel insurance and, as I say, it gave me the time to read the mighty beast Romola, which kicks Daniel Deronda’s ass, and I loved Daniel Deronda. I guess Romola's not so popular anymore because it seems so different from the questionable-class superBrit George Eliot we’re trained to know and love – 15th century Florence, for God’s sake. But it isn't some awkward Victorian precursor to the piles and piles of Angloshit that have been composting on the shelves of bookshops written by limeys etc. dealing with crushing regret/condescending glee they weren't born wops. No.

No. Romola is like Mediciean fanfic written by a genius who Lorenzo himself would have bankrolled. Romola rocks. And the heroine of Romola, Romola her name is, is one of the all-time best female characters ever. And this from the writer who wrote one of the best all-time male characters, Adam Bede. George Eliot is fucking mental, man. She was magic. There are very few writers I'm aware of who can write either gender believably and George Eliot may be the only one who can do both. Also Thomas Hardy. He can do both. Nobody else springs to mind at the mo. In all the other books I can think of right now, either men or women and usually both just seem to show up as plot points instead of people. There's Dorothy Sayers, actually, she could do both. There are probably a lot more. My brain's just at half-mast at the mo due to the hot pizza chef always being at the gym when I go. Maybe he's been sacked. Anyways, Romola, it's great.

In which I discover the limit of my personal tolerance for post modern relativism and the narratives of the loser

I've been totally drawn into Far From the Madding Crowd, which is even beating out the AK 47 book. Mind you the AK 47 book is far too narrative-y for me. I just want dirt on how people get them, who sells them, and how and when knock-offs start getting produced, all that good, if dry stuff - and so far the book, which is decently well-written however much I complain, is just stories about people who had or loved or shot or invented AK 47s.

That having been said there was a good narrative about a north Vietnamese guy who was supposed to have shot down a B-52 with a Kalashnikov. That sort of thing in more depth would be nice to read about the Vietnam War - something from the perspective of the north Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, which whatever you think about the wherefores really did something amazing in historical terms; rather more amazing than what the US managed in the same conflict. Gender terms, too. All those women fighting. I'm not the only one that fascinated, of course. A while ago I saw this 1967 article from Time. "Sullen, sloe-eyed Victoria-Charlenes" - wow. The whole article reads like a justification for little old ladies or pretty young ones getting napalmed once in awhile. Fascinating.

But now I'm at the point of being sick of hearing about the conflict from an American perspective, be it yet another book or fucking pacificist-martial movie or hippie movie or Rambo movie or rant about the loss of America's innocence, like Cuba and the Philipines and all of that pre-World War II manifest destiny crap was just some sort of forgettable childish temper tantrum or whatever the fuck else. When I was a history student I was sometimes unhappy about how the perspective of the victor was so necessarily dominant in the records of past conflicts - I felt like I was missing big parts of the story - but in this case I'm starting to realize that the perspective of the loser really has its limits too, in terms of failing to be interesting rather than obsessively navel-gazing. On a human level, Americans were a tiny minority of the people who were fighting and getting horribly traumatized and slaughtered there, and on a political level the outcome turned out to not matter much for them - they lost and somehow their international empire kept ticking over. So really, how many Apocalypse Nows can I take seriously before getting to hear something from the perspective of the victor?

Well, I'll do some serious looking later - after the AK-47 book and after Far From the Madding Crowd, which is a monstrous big beast of a book, and will take a long time despite being compulsively readable and full of male passion. I think that's one of the things that makes me love Thomas Hardy - I think he had a remarkable talent for passionate male characters - George Eliot had a similar talent. I have the same sort of crush on Gabriel Oak that I've got on Adam Bede, and Farmer Boldwood is really unsettling as well.Both Hardy and Eliot also had a remarkable talent for imperfect women who manage to fuck everything up due to masculine traits in their personality, which hits home with me a bit. I haven't fucked everything up lately but I mustn't get too complacent.

Christmas books

¡Guerra! was good. Recommend it. Very well written and hardly twee at all. Ghosts of Spain was more a collection of anecdotes and self-conscious but inevitable condescension. Don't not reccommend it, but don't reccomend it either. Very Guardian. The author's phrasing suggested that what he didn't understand wasn't quite worth understanding, in opposition to ¡Guerra!.

Now reading Far From the Madding Crowd. I fucking love Thomas Hardy, I can't help it. There's something about those overworked, laborious sentences of his that is absolute butter on my toast. And his feeling for scenery, even if he does use sentences no self-respecting modern writer would ever allow to run on so, is flawless. Look at this paragraph he uses just before he describes a painful boy-girl meeting:

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

Now, I don't know if either the boy or the girl is going to chuck themselves in the river before the end of the story literally, but one or the other is sure to figuratively . . . maybe both, maybe one of each. I don't know, because Thomas Hardy is one author who I must insist lead me gently to the conclusion, so I don't know what's going to happen. I've decided that's why Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles just haven't worked out for me, since far too many film versions had let me know what would happen - it's not like they're fundamentally more depressing than some of the others I've loved.

However, the Hardy was interrupted by a late Christmas present from the F-word, Michael Hodges' AK-47: The History of a Gun. That man knows me fucking well. Only on page 20 so far so will hold off on judgement. So far a bit pop, but oh well. I'm back at the fucking office as of yesterday so my brain is toast enough to enjoy pop.

Four escape routes

Speaking of escaping into books during a time of fuckery: the bookshop across from my favourite grocery store where I picked up Decline and Fall as soon as finishing Brideshead Revisited is fucking ace. This weekend I got quite a haul besides the Waugh:

Goodbye to All That - sqeeeeeee! Robert Graves is awesome on a stick. No wonder Ava Gardner hit that when it was already old enough to break. And there's so much more of him to read as I've only had the awesomeness of I, Claudius/Claudius the God and his Greek Myths. Both are really really worth reading no matter what sort of relationship you think you have with classical studies, and the Greek Myths is earth-shaking, as far as I'm concerned anyways. Each chapter tells the myth in a way directly drawn and referenced from a range of source texts, and, following the references, gets re-interpreted Gravesianly - through the lense of murderous fertility cults, matriarchies, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. And he is just the silkiest, friendliest writer - a real sort of formality to his phrasing which is nonetheless inviting, engaging - a nice big wingback easy chair; imposing, but upholstered with comfy velvet instead of patrician oxblood leather.

Mummy won it as a school prize some decades ago and it was sitting on my grandparent's bookshelves when I was a bored 13-year-old; one thing led to another, and, well, I don't think there's a single work that's had more of an influence on my symbolic or metaphorical thinking than that one, for better or worse. I didn't buy into it but I swallowed it whole, if you can see the difference. Part of my brain forever.

Grapes of Wrath - for the F-word. He hasn't read it yet. Enough said.

Far From the Madding Crowd - someone told me that this was the least depressing of Thomas Hardy's books and that it was even more or less funny. Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Personally I didn't think the Mayor of Casterbridge was depressing, I thought it was just awesome. Okay, the will at the end from the guy as read by his !!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! pseudo-daughter was tragic - it was a tragic book - but depressing? Anyways. I'm nonetheless curious about Far From the Madding Crowd. And I'm running out of Hardys that I'm willing to read. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I gave up on that one halfway when I fully realized what a downer that was going to be - and Jude the Obscure - uhm, no. I've heard too much about it.

Murder on the Orient Express - it's a Poirot novel so I was hoping it'd help with my perceptions of Belgian retardation. It didn't. But I enjoy the language - already archaic - it happens so fast! Pukka sahib indeed.

Of truth and coincidences

'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'

Shit.

So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .

But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."

We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.

So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.

'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'

Poor little good girl

Oh my god, I can't believe how good The Mayor of Casterbridge is. It's like Piers Plowman fucked D. H. Lawrence and their baby was raised by Sir Walter Scott. I chose this book in part because I didn't know what it had to offer - back in my days teaching wops and frogs how to speak English, an intermediate edition of Headway featured excerpts from the wife-auctioning chapter - that's all I knew of the book, though it was enough to pique my interest as it was a pretty great excerpt.

The great prose and the hijinks just don't stop, and there are some stunningly good portraits of really unacceptable people, sort of circling like pre-occupied sharks around Elizabeth Jane . . . I suppose he had a thing about nice girls . . . there's always a nice girl somewhere in his books that I've read, a nice, natural girl like Thomasin or Tess or Elizabeth-Jane who gets buffeted about by the passions and pretensions of everybody else whilst cherishing healthy and strong emotions herself.

"There's husks and dust on you. Perhaps you don't know it?" he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. "And it's very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there's chaff on them. It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you--blowing is the best."

As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, "O, thank you," at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in no manner of hurry to be gone.

"Ah--now I'll go and get ye an umbrella," he said.

She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in undertones, "As I came down through
Cannobie."

And now she's looking for a furze-cutting man, that's what I am

Once more - bam - the weekend is over. I really, really hate this about the passing of a chemically depressive state. At least a slow burn of mild braindead makes time crawl. Feeling very bitchy this morning. Not just because we got a new bookshelf this weekend and our library has morphed from piles on the floor to nicely arranged tomes on a shelf (I've even grouped the authors, something I haven't had the mental organization to do since 1996) so I know exactly what I'm not reading as I walk out the door to work.

Not just because I listened to an interesting broadcast this weekend whilst sewing which managed to incidentally spell out for me that part of what makes me hate my profession is its ecological parasitism - a fact I was aware of, but which I'm usually able to bury under five or six layers of rationalizations. My relationship with Buddhism is limited to watching 27 episodes of Monkey! but when people get going about it, it reminds me that there are some good and bad choices to make for oneself as a moral creature that I'm not making right now - all I'm making is money. Ouch. I can say to myself endlessly 'it's okay, I'll stop in a year and a half, in a year and a half everything will change,' and maybe it will, but it's not a year and a half from now yet and in the meantime I don't like the ethics of what I do.

No, on top of all that, I've had motherfucking 'Uptown Girl' stuck in my head since I woke up. I know it was a huge success as a single and probably made Billy Joel millions of dollars, but seriously, as an aesthetically aware creature what possesses you to unleash four minutes of such shit on your fellow humans? Ugh.

Possibly what got it stuck in my head was reading the first ten chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge last night, since Thomas Hardy's novels are all about uptown girls and downtown guys, or vice versa, in the framework of rural England. At least I think they are, I'm just getting my feet wet with Hardy, having only read The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles before. I didn't enjoy Tess of the D'Urbervilles - it was a very good book but it was too heavy for me at the time at which I was reading it. The Return of the Native I liked better, though it was also quite heavy - I think because in The Return of the Native, I felt less sympathy for the main characters, though Eustacia really struck a nerve, she seemed so real, than I did for poor Tess. The Mayor of Casterbridge also promises to be heavy. It opens with a wife-auctioning scene, in which the protagonist Henchard gets loaded and sells off his woman and child at a country fair. And hijinks ensue.

Sometimes I wonder if I like sort of depressing authors like Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham as a sort of hangover teenage Curehead thing - if I've just replaced whiny Robert Smith vocals with whiny British authors dealing with the deterioration of their country's social and economic edifices. But then I get over it. I like Thomas Hardy, at least, because of his incredible powers of description - not just of people, but of place and ambience. Read this, from the beginning of chapter 11:

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain (. . .) The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers (. . .)

Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

So nice.