Tom Stoppard: Complete Plays Volume 2

 It is in the fabric of this volume, consisting as it does only of dramas written for radio, that it feels somehow more and less complete than Stoppard's fully staged works.  There is something liberating about not being beholden to visualization.  The fact that these plays are entirely auditory means that there is no imagination required.  What is on the page is all there is, unlike staged works which are designed to incorporate the additional elements of set, lighting, costume, etc.  The mind needn't wander.  The writer has possibly even more freedom.  He needn't ask himself while writing, "Is is possible to do this even?" It is all possible.

And yet these freedoms from constraint are also limitations.  The first apparent of such limitations is that of length.  So many of the ideas Stoppard considers here are left undeveloped, with the possible exception of "In the Native State," the longest of the radio plays.  It is a great comfort to know that there are three stout volumes filled with his other works on my shelf, and plenty of room for these ideas to blossom.  The other unique feature of these plays, however, is analogous to the limitations of reading a fully staged work.  Stoppard so often relies on the main creative tool allowed to an audio drama: simultaneity.  It is manifestly impossible for me to experience the words on the page in parallel as they were intended, and, as with other dramatic works, there is simply no substitute for the experience of the finished product.

Scott McCloud (ed.): 24 Hour Comics

 The nature of this book is such that the project/concept itself is more open to interpretation and reaction than the works it inspired.  Certainly certain among the offerings in this collection are outstanding in their own right.  Neil Gaiman and Steve Bissette, unsurprisingly, contributed my favorites and the latter in particular hit a little too close to home--in exactly the way good art and literature do.  

However it is the phenomenon itself that is most revealing to me.  The idea that extreme time constraints force something out of your subconscious that maybe would have remained buried if you were more at leisure, and that works that come from that deep well are often more vivid and real than things which are more conscious and deliberate, well this idea has a great deal of support from my own personal experience.  I'm sure it's no coincidence that a few days after reading this collection an idea for a short graphic novel sprang fully formed into my consciousness, and I have begun giving birth to it.  It's a shame that my artistic skill is not uup to the task of completing it in 24 hours. 

Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber

 It strikes me as a little odd that I don't have a lot to say about this groundbreaking and important work.  In fact, that's largely what I have to say about it: that it was important and groundbreaking.  If I didn't know better, however, I would assume that it was one of the author's early works.  It is vivid, engrossing, and wildly passionate.  Her strengths are on full display: creating a mood, scene, and images that work together to create the equivalent of a painting on the page.  Nonetheless, the additional elements that one might expect of a mature writer are somewhat lacking: clarity, flow, thematic development, cohesion . . . the impression is very much that of a gifted young writer with a great deal of promise, but room for growth.  One wonders if she ever took the themes that she obsessed over in this mid-career work any further, and lived up to its potential.  I'm very certain that it is worth reading her later works to find out.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays

 In the margin of "Psychological Observations", one of the essays in this collection, next to the sentence "It is true, indeed, that character always forms a consistent and connected whole; but the roots of all its qualities lie too deep to allow of our concluding from particular data in a given case whether certain qualities can or cannot exist together," I have scrawled angrily, "Ummm . . . then why do you do it so often?" (64).  This was neither the first nor the last time that Schopenhauer inadvertently revealed his blind spot in this collection, but it was the most suitably anecdotal.  The perceptiveness, objectivity, and rational acuity that he brings to bear resonate nicely with my own skeptical, even cold, nature.  He lacks, however, a certain quality, of which deficit he seems unaware, even as he sings its praises: perspective.  

I have written before about Schopenhauer being imprisoned in his own experience, but the irony in this collection is that he specifically praises the virtues of a broad perspective, even while failing to notice the walls of the well in which he is sulking.  He seems incapable of noticing the inconsistency of claiming that women are incapable of patience, and then on the same page proclaiming, "The course of our individual life . . . may be compared to a piece of rough mosaic.  So long as you stand right in front of it, you cannot get a right view of the objects presented.".  He proposes that "we can get a general view only from a distance," while stubbornly refusing to adopt such a distance himself (65-66).  

Thus is it that we find such glories of reason and objectivity as the titular dialogue on religion--incomparably and shockingly fair in its treatment--in the same volume as such grievously outdated items as "On Physiognomy", wherein he asserts that everything you need to know about a man is visible in his face.  When it comes to things he knows, Schopenhauer is incisive, fearless, and to my belief correct.  When he speaks of things of which he doesn't know, the results are far more mixed.  This is, of course, so normal and human as to be a solipsism, and not a problem in itself.  The problem is that Schopenhauer doesn't know what he doesn't know, and thus treats himself as an authority in areas where he is laughably oblivious.

Which fault makes me think about my own blindspots.  Both by nature and by nurture, I am pretty sympathetic to Schopenhauer.  I too look at the world, and see it as objectively evil and cruel, and furthermore especially evil and cruel to those like me who can see it clearly.  I too despair of reality, of human existence at least, and cannot keep quiet about it.  It's possible that I see one layer beyond what Schopenhauer can, that where my reasoning, education, or intelligence trail his, at least my perspective is broader.  I wonder, however, if I am falling into the same trap. Surely there is yet another exponent of this fractal that we inhabit, one beyond what I currently take into account.  What is it that I don't know I don't know?

Giacomo Leopardi: Canti

 Reality wears many faces.  Although I see it differently from Leopardi, rather as a diseased tree bearing poisonous fruit than a singing girl, the effect is the same.  We are seeing the same thing.  The void.  The unbearable pain of existence against which all we can do is wail out in the wilderness, bereft even of the hope that we will be heard.  

Which is my characteristically melodramatic way of saying, although I cannot relate to the specific triggers of Leopardi's existential angst--frustrated love, life in a dissolute world that shames the glories of the past, imprisonment in a body that will never do me credit . . . oh.  Yes, I see now.  Oh my. 

Mercifully, it is not only this despair that Leopardi and I share.  Like so many who face the void, we both can see something inside of it.  There is peace to be had, as he says, in helping others, in seeing our place, in drifting anonymously in a meaningless sea, and, although he mentions it surprisingly little, there is also peace to be had in writing something wonderfully melodramatic and throwing it to the wind.

Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks

 "But little Hanno saw more than he was meant to see, and his eyes, those shy golden brown eyes ringed with bluish shadows. observed things only too well."

Little Hanno.  What could have happened if he had lived?  What would his life have been?  It's such folly to ask what happens after the final act of a play, after the curtain has drawn for the final time at night.  The answer is, of course, "The actors go home."  And yet we cannot but wonder what could have been for Hanno, if another life was possible for him, or for any of them.  If perhaps Tony could have been happy with her doctor, of Thomas with his flower girl.  We are even programmed to expect such an ending, to see in the gentle foreshadowing the possibility of some small happiness--in spite of the subtitle's warning: "The Decline of a Family".  No, happiness was not possible.  The world, and the book,  that they lived in would not allow it.

And yet, suppose it was possible for Hanno to escape.  I do not propose another ending of the book, but rather that Hanno escaped the pages of the book, the doomed story that was written for him.  If he were trapped, not in the pages of a novel, but rather in the real world, it's entirely possible that after his father's death, and the liquidation of the family business, his mother whisked him away to Munich.  There, safe from the pressures of business and the keeping up of burgher appearances, he could pursue work in a field more suited to his sensitive nature, perhaps studying writing or journalism.  Perhaps at the Technical University of Munich.  

Perhaps his writing would be well-regarded.  He might even publish a novel in his twenties that would later be cited as a reason for his being given the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Ah, dare we suppose that his sensitive nature might even find liberty in romance?  That his apparent love for the young Count Kai might find its adult expression?  No, this would be too much, even for the real world.  He would likely meet the external pressures of society and the internal pressure of his forbidden desires by marrying, perhaps a Jewish woman from an educated, well-regarded family.  Even this would likely not give little Hanno any rest, however.  A marriage of escape and denial is happy for neither party.  Besides which, the world would soon be at war.  

If not in marriage, perhaps there would be joy in parenthood, then.  As many as six children, what a joy!  And all of them marvelous, writers, actors, scholars, and one marine biologist who would go on to be known as The Mother of the Oceans for her tireless work in their behalf.  What joy this would bring, unless the world once again went to war.  Hanno's Jewish wife, and his refusal to compromise his morals, would surely make this period difficult as well.  They would have to escape, perhaps to America.

Finally, in America little Hanno would be free of the cruel European world that had held him under its thumb for 65 years.  That is, if it were not for the rise of McCarthyism.  He would be so many of the things they would hate, fearless, staunch, sensitive, and egalitarian.  No, this new world would offer no peace to a boy like Hanno.  He would have to return to Europe.  No doubt he would die there, aged 80.  

And so it was that Thomas Mann died twice.  He sealed himself in a book at the age of 25, and stayed there until his body caught up 55 years later.  His extensive journals reveal the upsetting ways his heart stayed, and will stay, forever in Lubeck, aged 15, holding the hand of his young friend the count, seeing more than he was meant to, and in the only small solace, finding a way to write it down.

Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower

 I really wanted to like this book.  The characters were so vivid, the writing so fluid and honest, and the main character in particular so relatable. 

Like her, all I really want is to be heard.  My ideas make perfect sense to me, and I have devoted a lifetime to thinking them out, writing them down, and testing them in the brutal laboratory of life.  I'm not even attached to the idea that they are True or Right.  I would just love for someone to hear them without laughing or scoffing or backing away slowly, as though from a madman.  This world is terrifying and cruel, and at times seems to be teetering on the brink of exactly to the sort of collapse Butler describes.  In fact, her account of the fall of America seems entirely plausible.  The only thing that keeps me going most days is the possibility that I understand something real, something to which others are blind, and that I may have not entirely wasted my time here.  In so many ways, I am Lauren.  I feel her pain, her drive, and her clarity.  I would even be her if it were not for one thing:

Her ideas are sooooo stuuuuupid.

If there were any ring of truth in the ideas of Earthseed, which Butler presumably means to be taken in earnest, I would convert right now.  I'd change my official religion from Bokononist right this moment.  Where the book succeeds on every other level, however, it fails in this: to provide a philosophy any deeper than a flimsy NYT self help book.    I wanted so badly to get on board, to form an Earthseed cult and start recruiting.  At the very least, I wanted to enjoy this book.  But I  . . . seriously, I just can't.

Dances With Wolves

 I still remember the awe with which this movie was received when it was released, and being specifically struck with the gumption it must have taken for Kevin Costner to reveal his own bare buttocks (gasp!) on screen.  Some years after its release, I sat down to watch it with some friends on a battered VHS tape.  I fell asleep a quarter of the way through.

At least twenty-five years later, I can appreciate what I was unable to at the time.  The slow, vaguely European way the camera makes love to the scenery, in particular, was probably what put me to sleep at that first viewing, but finds a sympathetic audience in me now.  Unfamiliar as I was with the way indigenous people were usually treated in film, the novelty of a respectful treatment that gave agency to its subjects was also lost on me at that time.  

But I have missed the sweet spot where I might have truly appreciated this film.  I am too old and jaded to accept lovely cinematography as a justification for a film;  to me it is now merely frosting.  Likewise, I have become far too aware of the realities of Native American life to accept what was, at the time, rather a progressive approach.  The film is not as deplorable in its treatment as its predecessors, but still bears the marks of the white gaze, the noble savage trope, and the sanitization of complex issues. This film probably earned its accolades at the time, but while I am now prepared to stay awake for it, I cannot bring myself to bestow laurels today.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El Hablador

 When I last visited Llosa--has it really been over a decade?--I was tickled by the way I allowed myself to be confused by the identities and names of the different characters.  Was I an obtuse reader, who missed obvious markers early in the book and labored under an unintended misconception?  Was it a trick of language and/or translation?  Or was Llosa really clever enough not only to trick me, but to leave me wondering if I had actually tricked myself?

It is edifying to be able to report that not only is Llosa that clever (and correspondingly that I am not hopelessly obtuse), but that this cleverness has a theme, one that I merely suspected was intentional in La Ciudad y Los Perros, but occupies the very heart of El Hablador. It is, in fact, taken even further.  "Who is a person in relation to their name?" is broadened until the reader asks along with the various Habladores of the book, the writer, the narrator, and the eponymous speaker, "What is reality in relation to what is said about it?"

Llosa's answer, to the extent that he can be said to offer such a thing, is from a certain perspective, "Reality is what we say it is."  The stories that we tell about ourselves, our family, our culture, or reality itself, become real by virtue of the speaking.  Coy as ever, though, Llosa also allows himself a certain amount of wiggle room by offering multiple viewpoints and variations on the stories he tells here.  The central figure in the matroyshka of speakers, Saul, even peppers his stories with "Eso es, lo menos, lo que yo he sabido," a hedge that acknowledges the implicit fuzziness of the reality we create by speaking.  Which version is correct?  Which speaker is telling the truth?  And, as an important substrate, which view of important cultural and political issues is right and just?  It is no surprise that Llosa's answer is a non-answer, an irresolution, a return of the reader's gaze inward to ask "What has been said, Escuchador, what did it create for you?"

Italo Calvino: The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount

"Books are my religion," I said to a friend today.  He is not of a particularly literary bent, so he thought I meant that I just really, really, like them.  I do not like them; at least, I don't particularly enjoy reading as an activity.  I don't read for pleasure.  I read for understanding, and on rare occasion reading leads not only to understanding, but to being understood.  These moments are the equivalent of getting the Holy Ghost in church.  They are the moments where the divine is suddenly accessible to me personally.  I thought Italo Calvino understood me before these novellae.  The Baron in the Trees spoke to myself as a child.  His Italian Folktales (which some digging has revealed are far more his than not) spoke to myself as a scholar and a lover of stories.  But these two.  Man.

It is as though he is writing to me retroactively from the grave.  How did he know that I would be reading "The Nonexistent Knight" at exactly the moment I was struggling to believe that I even exist?  And even more startling, how did he arrange for me to read "The Cloven Viscount" after my own left side had been torn away in an accident?  This latter is far too specific.

I view my own religion, that of Books, with the same skepticism I apply to all religions:  it's fine unless you believe it.  I know very well that it is in my nature as a human to see myself in places that perhaps it is not.  And I know that it was possible for Calvino . . . no, for my friend Italo to have written what he did--not because it's specific to me, but because it is common to all humans.  But I can perhaps be forgiven for taking these moments of religious experience to heart, and allowing myself to be reassured that I not only exist and am whole, but that someone, even if he's been dead for thirty years, cares.

Meredith Talusan: Fairest

During the still incomplete process of trying not to be a trash human, there has been a certain amount of tension between my highly visible privileges (white, cis, and male), and my more subtle membership in less privileged groups (my disability is not obvious, and I can theoretically tone down the queerness if necessary).  The fact that my privileged aspects are the first thing one knows about me means that, even though I am technically disadvantaged, I largely navigate the world as though I were not.

Like any thinking privileged person, I am a vocal ally for trans people, women, and people who experience racial discrimination ("people of color", as some would say).  And like any self-aware ally, I am pained by the realization that my allyship is constantly corrupted by my concern with how I am perceived.  Perhaps I feel the danger of "performative wokeness" so keenly because I am such a performative person by nature that every action is in danger of being insincere.  I actually don't even know if it's possible for me to totally decenter myself.  Even this admission is itself somewhat performative, in spite of the fact that no one I know personally is ever likely to read this.  Everything I do is corrupted by the instinct to center myself, based on decades of being told by society that I am important.  Every action I take on the behalf of others, if I am not careful, could easily turn me into a micro-aggressor, a micro-oppressor even.

And there is a specific variety of performative allyship that pains me: the expression of rightly monnikered "white liberal guilt".  It hurts because it's so very true.  I do feel guilty.  I feel guilty that the black friends I grew up with didn't have access to the same things I did.  I feel guilty that I didn't see it clearly enough at the time to do anything about it.  I feel guilty that my family is comfortable from, in reverse chronological order, blindly accepted advantage, the enslavement of black people, and the theft of native land.  This guilt sometimes grabs the steering wheel and forces kneejerk answers to questions of inequality.  Its instinct is to always take the side of an oppressed group, sometimes thoughtlessly. 

As I read this book, my white liberal guilt kept grabbing for the wheel.  It kept looking for ways to root for the author, a trans woman of Asian descent.  It gave her the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, made excuses for her, and fought tooth and claw against the instinct that she was perhaps not a victim in her story.  How could she possibly be the villain, an oppressor even?  WLG would not allow the consideration of such a possibility.

This battle continued until the point at which she leveraged her white-passing beauty to try and steal her best friend's lover.  It was at that point that my WLG lost.  It wasn't just this grotesque betrayal, a villainy so profound and clear that in a fiction we would criticize it as a caricature, but also the offhandedness with which the author seemed to view it.  There was no glimmer of remorse, of self-reflection in the way she presented the story, and it stunned my WLG long enough for it to become clear what I had been trying not to see all along: this woman is a sociopath.

Nor was I disabused of this notion as I finished the book.  The scales dropped from my eyes, and the deficiency of her narrative popped into focus.  Until that point, I had only been vaguely aware of a general insincerity in her style.  Afterward, it became clear that what I was really feeling was an absence of human warmth.  What had before seemed like an overedited concern with the way she was portraying herself, was suddenly seen for the incapacity for empathy that it truly was. This white-passing trans woman had, seemingly without remorse, become that which I am terrified of becoming,which fear led me to give her the benefit of the doubt for 3/4 of the book: a member of an oppressed group who overcomes that oppression only to become the oppressor.   

Italo Calvino: Italian Folktales

What a lovely gem to have stumbled across in the bargain bin.  I love Calvino already, and have several of his books on my shelf, and even though not technically his original composition, this one definitely can stand happily next to them.  Discovering it was not unlike unearthing a chest of jewels in your garden when you were only intending to plant potatoes.  Each tale has its own charm, though some of them are charming merely in the familiarity of a new spin on a tale we've already heard in some other form.  Others, however, are entirely original, while maintaining the familiar flavor and tropes of a folk tale--at once sparkling new and  comfortably old.

I know people who collect trifles on a particular theme.  Some collect elephants, ducks, or cows.  Others Star Wars or Lord of the Rings memorabilia.  The feeling this book inspires is that of finding a new, previously unimagined item that fits right in with the thing you were already collecting.  The tropes are so familiar, and the stories so new, that I even set about to categorize them a bit.

Trope	Stories
Princess prisoner of a creature	2, 3, 6
Taking the place of the rightful heir/beloved	2, 3, 12, 16, 32
Prepare three unlikely bribes	3,11, 38
Three impossible tasks	3, 5, 27
Water/grass of life	3, 48
Tricked into suicide	3, 24, 29, 37
Three sisters	4, 9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 29, 35, 50
Omnipotent ring	4, 42
Stave off assault with clever delay	4, 24
Youngest child bravest/cleverest	4,9, 12, 19, 24, 26, 31, 45, 47
Young man sets off to seek his fortune	1, 6, 13, 27, 43
Jealous courtiers’ plot backfires	6, 11, 15
Smuggled into the maiden’s presence	7, 33 45
Ugly, jealous servant/stepmother etc.	8, 18, 31
Jealous older siblings’ treachery	12, 50
Giving birth to an animal	12, 19, 31
Regional characteristics	10, 21
Love beneath its station	13, 22, 31
Three brothers	14, 46, 47
Nuts filled with treasure	14, 19
The frog/snake/parrot etc. prince/ss	14, 15, 18, 19, 30
Sequestered beauty	15, 18, 33, 36
Treacherous old woman intermediary enables insidious royalty	15, 50
Reward for curing the the prince/princess	15, 18, 39, 41
“my son/husband/daughter will eat you if he finds you!”	19, 45
The boy is clever, but the girl is more clever and has her revenge!	21, 36
The comb becomes an obstacle	8, 22
Servants don’t have the heart to kill	23, 31
Maybe unique?	25, 40, 44, 49
Failing to fulfill a simple requirement	27, 35, 45, 50
Laughter is rewarded	29, 38
Maiden dressed as a man	18, 21, 31
Stealing from thieves	13, 31
Seemingly abandoned, enchanted palace	32, 35, 43, 48
Hollow animal that plays music	7, 33

I only went through the first 50 in this way, but one can see the pattern.  What a joy, one that I have already recommended to others.

박경리: 뱁새족

이와 같은 고급 책 읽으면 아직 문학으로 분석할 힘이 없다.  아쉽네.  아직 토지를 읽으면 안 되네.  그러나 문학에 대해서 배운 게 별로 없어도 내 자기 한국어 습득에 대한 걸 배웠다.  읽으면서 단어, 표현, 속담 다 노력하면 이해가 됐지만 책을 전체적으로 이해가 안 되는 것을 보니 나의 다음으로 극복해야하는 장벽을 알게 되었다.  다행이다.  앞길이 보이네.

더 익숙하게 만들어야하는 한국어의 특질은 바로 담화 표지다.  뱁새족을 읽으면서 누가 뭐라고 하는지 추적이 정말 안 되었다.  발언자뿐만 아니라 흔히 장면도 나 모르게 바뀌어 혼란스러워졌다.  이제 한 발짝 뒤로 물러서서 다시 아동책에 초점하겠다.