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Marginal

July 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

On Death & the photograph.  This 81-year-old, Polaroid-carting, ‘walking, talking photo booth” — and the Next Door hostess — get Barthes.  From today’s Washington Post:

“The camera’s old as [bleep]; it looks like it’d steal your soul,” observes Allory Anderson, a hostess at Next Door, as Bob squeezes his way through the bar just after midnight. “But I’ve got two pictures of me on my fridge from him. I don’t have iPhone photos on my fridge.”

A physical photo, Bob says, is the presence of you in your absence. A photo is not for now or for Facebook. A photo is for later, when you’re gone. It is for finding in a shoe box.

Barthes would see this guy as the Grim Reaper, someone whose presence is explained by religion’s absence: “Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.  Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose form the final print.”

Filed Under: Marginal, Roland Barthes

Marginal

July 6, 2011 By 2 Comments

On How to Mark a Book.  Half of slow reads’s traffic comes from this post, so it is with a dollop of trepidation that I’m revising it.  Annotation is a traditional skill taught in Advanced Placement Language and Literature, and the traffic comes from teachers and students of those college-level courses.  I reread my essay with a teacher’s eye last month since I’ll be using it in a couple of Lang sections this fall.

I got more specific about ways to annotate.  Readers could find each of my eight means in the outline the original post linked to, but each means was described in the outline with little detail and with little reference to which purpose the means served.

Speaking of purposes of annotating, I went from three to four.  Instead of to establish territory, to create trails, and to learn to write, I’m doing to create trails, to interact with the author, to learn what the book teaches, and to learn to write (or at least learn how a book was written).  I included interaction with the author thanks to my reading of Ong, Calvino, and Rosenblatt. who redirected my thinking toward the author-reader relationship that was starving under my essentially New-Critical approach.

Of course, the best advice is ultimately that of Virginia Woolf, who, in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” wrote:

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Filed Under: Italo Calvino, Journal, Louise Rosenblatt, Marginal, Virginia Woolf, Walter Ong

Marginal

May 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

On How to Mark a Book: “I’m not suggesting that you mark every book you own, any more than I would suggest that my dog mark every tree he sniffs. But you should be free to mark up most books in the most worthwhile core of your collection. My dog has his favorites, and so should you.”

A friend this week pointed me to an interview of George Steiner, the literary critic, on YouTube.  In the middle of it, Steiner explicates a Chardin painting, “Le Philosophe Lisant.”  He draws some significance from its reader’s pen:

He has his pen next to his reading.  Serious reading means you read with a pen.  What do you do with a pen?  You underline, you take notes on the page, you write around the margin.  What are you really doing?  You are in dialog with the book, you are answering it, you are speaking to it, and if you are very arrogant and very ambitious, you are saying secretly, you can write a better one.  And that is the beginning of a certain relationship of passionate joy and love with the text.

When I was in my twenties, an itinerant preacher visited our little church.  Mid-message, he asked,  “Who has a Bible that he can’t write in?”

I raised my hand.

“Well, would you get one that you can write in?” he thundered.  A canned rejoinder.

“Oh, I have one of those, too!”

Both our faces went red.

I never saw him again, but I still love him, despite the conventions that we labored under.

Filed Under: George Steiner, Journal, Marginal

Marginal

May 20, 2011 By 1 Comment

On East Coker on the rebind.

Tell me, ye learned, shall we for ever be adding so much to the bulk — so little to the stock?

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track — for ever at the same pace?

Sheall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints — without working one — one single miracle with them?

– Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, and adapted, according to Sterne’s editor James A. Work, from Burton.  (I’m sure Work gives Burton’s first name in an earlier footnote, but as a two-minute Google search proved inconclusive about Burton’s first name, and as Work goes on to say that Burton himself adapted his own version from some unnamed source, and really, in the spirit of the passage, I’ll leave it at that.)

Filed Under: Laurence Sterne, Marginal, T. S. Eliot

Marginal

May 2, 2011 By 4 Comments

On The Language.

“Mowett and Rowan might be given to verse in the gunroom, but they were all hard, tough, driving prose in an emergency.”  - Treason’s Harbour

Patrick O’Brian doesn’t usually get all second order on me, all metacognitive.  He doesn’t often step back, like Fielding or Sterne, and chew the fat about the author’s craft.  Sure, some starving novelist was on Jack Aubrey’s ship awhile back that occasioned a few observations about the publishing industry.  But that was a number of novels ago now, wasn’t it?

I can’t remember what happens in O’Brian’s twenty-and-a-fraction volume Aubrey-Maturin series, so I can reread it every six or seven years.   I’m still usually surprised by a given book’s events.  The timing of the conversations and even the Napoleonic-era sea battles seem as given to chance as the capricious weather and wind that in large part govern the character’s fates.  I usually remember the events when they happen, but I’m also usually surprised by them, surprised that they happen when they do.

To be sure, each novel has a loose plot, and now that I’ve read the series two and a half times, I catch a lot of the foreshadowing I missed (at least on a conscious level) before.  But much of what happens is as arbitrary as the weather, put in ostensibly for realism’s sake: how can a writer always be advancing the plot while still getting across the experience of a tar-melting month in the doldrums, for instance?

It occurs to me that perhaps O’Brian’s series, taken as a whole, is what Mark McGurl and Thomas Wolfe would call a “putter-inner” novel.  Stuff happens for the pure enjoyment of it.  And such relish for words!  Someone has written a 528-page dictionary of the often-obsolete nautical, medical, and scientific terms the book uses (A Sea of Words), a lexicon worthy of Tolkien, whose immense vocabulary, more original than obsolete, came in part from two years as an assistant with the Oxford English Dictionary (A Ring of Words).  And, like Tolkien’s hobbits and elves, O’Brian’s thoroughgoing seamen have the inclination and space between battles to recite rafts of poetry.

Filed Under: J. R. R. Tolkien, Journal, Marginal, Patrick O'Brian

Marginal

May 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

On A Personal Mythology. I woke up this morning and realized I hadn’t done Nic Sebastian’s excellent poems full justice in my post last night.  I just reworked and expanded my review to demonstrate the ties I find between Forever Will End on Thursday, her new poetry collection, and Walter J. Ong’s theory of orality, which has largely driven my thinking about criticism and aesthetics over the past couple of years.  The discovery excites me.  I anticipate a long relationship between me and this excellent book of fresh, primal poetry.

Filed Under: Journal, Marginal, Nic Sebastian
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