Another sluggish start to my day. I sat around drinking Diet Coke and reading my email. I got a chapter or two read last night of Roberto Bolano, and would like to make more tonight. Laundry needs done and also cooking yesterday's pork shoulder. That is the morning's to do list.
I spoke with CC last night and then she texted me. That is another problem in the rear-view mirror.
It is going on 7 am.
Sunday morning reading:
After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley review – brilliantly subversive stories
A Hadley story will often require an outsider, or at least someone who thinks of themselves as an outsider – someone who performs that role not so much for us, the readers, but to and for the other characters. Difference is to be cherished, from the ad hoc hippy rituals of My Mother’s Wedding through the faddy diet and spectacular dissociation of Robyn, titular child of Funny Little Snake, to the cast of The Bunty Club, in which three middle-aged sisters still unconsciously await the “all transforming mystery” hinted at by their ramshackle childhood in a house by the sea. Adults who don’t fully remember an odd upbringing are still trying to find somewhere to fit in while their hearts seem to understand that childhood long ago shaped their adult circumstances. You could find this conclusion banal, but the author’s deft switches from comedy to drama won’t permit it. Sometimes a kind of gothic is required to turn the trick: there are pungent, luxurious descriptions of magic gardens, magic houses, magic families, and especially of magic interiors in which something’s not quite right – though never visibly wrong. Rain “comes sluicing” across big windows, wheelie bins blow over, rooms are either “greenish and spectral or bleak with the lights on in the middle of the day”. The disaster is sensed, if never quite consummated.
By combining self-help and literature, the School of Life’s first novel does both a disservice
Co-founded by philosopher Alain de Botton in 2008, The School of Life broadly aims to teach its “students” how to lead calmer, more fulfilling lives. Its publishing arm, launched in 2016, disseminates self-help literature with pithy titles such as Reasons to be Hopeful and A Simpler Life, which purport to blend philosophical wisdom with practical advice. Like De Botton himself, the books are Marmite; while many critique the school for peddling watered-down pop philosophy, its teachings have clearly found a market. The organisation has branches in seven major cities, and its most popular title, Big Ideas for Curious Minds, has sold over 120,000 copies globally, while its workshops on playfulness, confidence and self-awareness regularly sell out. The new book represents a departure, however. Through A Voice of One’s Own, The School of Life is showing, rather than telling, its readers how to live better.
***The ideas the school is attempting to convey through A Voice of One’s Own include the importance of introspection and the formative nature of childhood experiences. The book was produced by an in-house content team and forgoes an author credit. The school’s head of therapy services, Robert Cuming, tells me that several members of the team are training to be therapists (the school offers 50-minute sessions at £115 a pop), lending the book a high degree of “psychological authenticity”. Fittingly, the book’s most salient theme is the value of therapy. Over a concise 165 pages, Anna hits rock bottom before finding Dr Devi, whose guidance begets an assortment of positive outcomes.
Literature has long been used to educate, from the instructional wordplay of Dr Seuss to the moralising works of George Orwell. Even self-help novels have some precedent in texts such as Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, but The School of Life may be the first publisher to own up to its intentions; A Voice of One’s Own is being billed as a “therapeutic novel” with explicitly practical purposes. Lubrano suggests that, in some cases, fiction is more effective than self-help in communicating such messages. “When people read a novel, there’s something freeing about the fact that the character is fictional. You can identify with them but not feel too close to them. You have a little more mental flexibility to take in new ideas without feeling defensive. [Anna is] a prop, but she’s a very thoughtful literary prop.”
Approaching literature in this manner, however, doesn’t always serve the reader. “Characters that primarily represent messages and ideas can come across as one dimensional or pedantic,” says Jolenta Greenberg, who road tests self-help books in her podcast By the Book. “When not done well, the agenda of the author and the story can almost seem to work against each other.” This is often the case with A Voice of One’s Own, where therapy-speak is inelegantly wedged into the narrative. When Anna’s habit of rejecting Nice Guys is revealed, for example, the omniscient narrator declares that “it takes a lot of self-love to forgive someone who desires us”. Such authorial pronouncements may as well come pre-highlighted.
Kicking off our new monthly series about emotions in literature, Sophie Ratcliffe finds the best literary descriptions of hopefulness
Each, when it comes to spirit-boosting, to their own – which is why, maybe, self-help manuals never quite cut it. Hope needs to fit the seeker. Whether we seek our uplift through a begonia, a bargain, a book or a bra, hope’s locus cannot always be planned for. It has a crafty way of taking us by surprise. So much a part of our everyday lexicon (“I hope you are well”, “let’s hope for the best”), that it’s easy to overlook its small, understated poetry. Tentative, temporary, hope turns up when you least expect it. Not always – but, in the words of Sheenagh Pugh, ‘sometimes’:
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
Has Trump really turned on Kari Lake, one of his loudest cheerleaders? by Arwa Mahdawi
Behind These Doors by Alex South review – the valuable insights of a female prison officer
Alienated from her own morality, South is lonely, even by the standards of her profession. Behind These Doors reads like her attempt to alleviate that isolation by taking us inside a world we are reluctant to see, making it our problem too. Of all the great works of prison literature, few have been written by officers. Shane Bauer’s American Prison is the most reflective, though he wrote it as an undercover journalist. In the UK, Neil Samworth’s 2018 title Strangeways: A Prison Officer’s Story zooms in on all the most gruesome details.
For her part, South communicates psychological insights and doesn’t linger on violent scenes any more than is strictly necessary. She generally regards inmates as tragic figures rather than malevolent – young men caught up in poverty or mental illness, which makes it easy for them to make bad choices.
A few of the more manipulative and unrepentant men push South past her limit. She describes them as “vile”, says she felt glad that they were locked up with rats and cockroaches and that she would happily throw away the key. You might say these attitudes spoil the humanitarian mood of the book were they not themselves so human.
Memoirs written by inmates often include a reassuring dose of comic relief. By contrast, South comes across as a professional, committed to her duty. She offers sober exposition of rules, risk assessment and protocol. Perhaps prisoners need humour more than officers do. Inmates use irony to taunt their jailer. Laughing at the gallows is a substitute for redemption. Or perhaps South’s position required her to remain so vigilant that there was no time for funny business. As I went long stretches reading Behind These Doors without laughing, I wondered if it is in fact easier to hold on to your humanity as a prisoner than as a prison officer.
Why Translate Seneca? came through a few days ago, and I finally found time to read it.
Dana Gioia and Mateusz Stróżyński
If Seneca’s plays survived the sack of Rome, the burning of libraries, the leaky roofs of monasteries, the appetites of beetle larvae, and the erosions of rot and mildew, they have not had a conspicuously easier time among modern critics. His tragedies have been dismissed both for too closely resembling Greek models and for too freely departing from them. As the classicist Frederick Ahl has observed, “no field of literary study rivals that of Latin poetry in so systematically belittling the quality of its works and authors.” No Roman genre has suffered more consistent disparagement than tragedy.
The critical challenge in assessing Seneca is quite simple—to see his plays as works of art in their own right and to understand how they fit into the tradition of European tragedy. To begin this task, however, one must be willing to see the changes he made in dramatic style and structure as conscious innovations, not as unintentional failings. For all his learned borrowing from Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, Seneca’s aesthetic has little in common with Periclean tragedy. His dramaturgy marks not only a deliberate departure from the Greek tradition but a radical reconception of the genre from narrative to lyric terms.***
How do we conceive of performing HF for a modern audience?
DG: I wrote the first version of The Madness of Hercules to be performed. I was fascinated by the idea of reviving verse theater. I hoped to create a faithful poetic version of Hercules Furens that worked in live theatrical performance. I wanted the audience to feel the power of both the dramatic action and the poetic speech. There was a young businessman in New York City, Richard Ryan, who told me in a bar one night that he wanted to mount the project. (He was not rich, by the way, he was just enthralled by theater and poetry.) Ryan created Verse Theater Manhattan to stage my translation. He went on to produce many other verse plays.
We made a radical production decision – we trusted Seneca and the play. We cut the text only slightly. The staging was minimal. The actors were directed to perform the text as verse – to let the power of the language animate their characters. The long speeches were not the impediments that most scholars declared; they were the driving forces of each scene.
My translations tried to preserve Seneca’s rhetorical design and recreate the poetry. I thought of the major monologues as great operatic arias for the actors. They need poetry to work. The Madness of Hercules was produced in a mid-sized theater in lower Manhattan. We sold out both nights, and the audience responded enthusiastically.
I think there is something here I want to check out, only I have not found any of his plays in English.
Now, I need to take out the trash and start my laundry and get started on dinner. This is break time: 8:38.
10:03: The laundry is drying. The crock pot is on. I am looking to place "Road Tripping" as a novella.
I am passing on Future Tense books for Shortish. This not to knock what I see on Future Tense's site - they look to be publishing rather interest short novels - but because Shortish goes through Submittable, which makes for a familiar submission process, and it looks as if it has a wider reach.
That can wait till after I get the laundry back here.
The Paris Review has let Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137 out from behind its paywall. Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature as a short story writer. She's got a style that is lively and damned simple, I say that because she brings to life characters that others need novels. Lovely stuff.
10:20 - 10:39: laundry back here, some of the trash out, pork shoulder in the crock pot.
News From the States: A project of States Newsroom - see what else is going on in the country that you do not see elsewhere.
Artship by Lorrie Moore, also from The Paris Review, focuses on Alice Munro back in 2002:
The birth and death of erotic love, and the strange places people are led to because of it, “on the lookout for an insanity that could contain them,” as it is put in “Vandals,” another story in that same collection, is Munro’s timeless subject. In her new collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, showing that the impulse toward love, if not love itself, dies hard, she follows her characters’ erotic lives straight through the chemotherapy ward, into the nursing home, on into the funeral parlor. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” a faithless husband puts his wife into a nursing home only to watch her acquire there a new, wheelchaired beau. In “Family Furnishings” a woman in a nursing home incessantly chants “fit as a fiddle and ready for love.” In “Floating Bridge” a terminally ill woman is led out into the woods for a kiss by a strange young boy who is both god of love and angel of death—Munro would naturally see these figures entwined. In “Comfort” the protagonist has a romantic encounter with an undertaker, whose activities of bloodletting and body cavity drainage (like the taxidermist-lover in “Vandals”) suggest perhaps one darkly funny opinion of Munro’s regarding the drama of love. The narrator of “Queenie,” surrounded by couples, “each…with its own heat and disturbance,” notes her own desire for solitude, “for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.”
Like Henry James, Alice Munro knows that love’s “floating bridge” between worlds—and over swamps—can bring a ruinous fate as easily and indifferently as can its absence. But Munro also knows that the arranging of love, improvised or institutional, and the seismic upheavals of its creation and dismantling—the boards rising and falling precariously beneath the feet—is both a kind of pornography of life as well as the very truth of it: it is often the most persuasive and defining force in the shape of individual existence and individual fate. Not that this is to be valued, or judged—in Munro’s world there is a powerlessness before the whole matter—only that such a thing is to be maturely understood and perceptively watched. “Their marriages were the real content of their lives,” she writes in “Comfort,” “…the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life.” Unlike James, a permanent tourist in the land of marriage and romantic union—a subject endlessly suited to the short-story genre—Alice Munro is intimately informed about what actually goes on there, and it is but one of the many reasons she is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian or French or Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s greatest short-story writers. As the writer Ethan Canin once said, “The stories of Alice Munro make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.”
News from Orthodox Christian Laity:
The Fourth of July is a National Holiday for all Americans, no matter how or when their ancestors came to this land. Whether millennia ago, across the Bering Straits, or in ships of conquest, or ships of slavery, or even just a few weeks ago after a dangerous and arduous trek. The fact is that we are all Americans — worthy of our fellow citizens’ esteem and respect. In a time when our political discourse has deteriorated, and we hear more and more hateful rhetoric, it seems good and just to remember that this is the “Land of the Free.” And such freedom comes as a gift, and as a responsibility.
The Apostle Paul reminds us that our ultimate freedom is of God, and of the interior freedom that consciousness of the Spirit imbues within the human person. The basis of that freedom is love; for to love is to liberate your heart, soul, and mind from the bonds of hatred, prejudice, and envy. Being truly free requires the courage to shoulder the responsibilities of liberty. That is why our country is also called the “Home of the Brave.”
Not everyone takes up arms to defend our land, but everyone can take up the cause. Freedom is not guaranteed by weapons, no matter how sophisticated. Freedom is the vocation of every citizen, who values the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens. For in our democratic republic, how we treat the least of our brethren will determine the destiny of all.
OCA Departments Release “Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs” (REVISED)
The 16-chapter “Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs: A Manual for Adult Instruction,” is now available for free download. A cooperative effort of the Departments of the Orthodox Church in America, the groundbreaking work is an offering to the Church to assist clergy and parishes in their work of instructing inquirers and the faithful in the truths of the Orthodox Christian Faith. This work is not meant to replace time-trusted books and publications which have taught generations but to work in concert with them.
New Lit Mags I Have Not Had Time To Look At:
Historical Stuff:
Thanks to Unruly History in the News #29:
The Crucible: the real witch hunt that inspired Arthur Miller’s play
Miller wrote The Crucible with a sense of urgency. Two of his central themes – betrayal and guilt – were braided together in a play which reflected his belief (underscored, for him, by the Holocaust) that civilisation is fragile.
He was writing, Miller told me, at the “edge of a cliff”.
Miller also confessed to me that he was not prepared for the hostility with which the play would be received. As the audience realised that they were being invited to see a parallel between the events of 1692 Salem and the Hollywood witch hunt then being played out in contemporary America, in his words, they froze.
Standing in the lobby as they left, he was ignored by those he had thought his friends. Actor Madeleine Sherwood, who played Abigail Williams, had a similar experience.
12:14 pm and I feel this day slipping away from procrastination.
For CC, for the next few hours:
sch 12:26 pm
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