Books, Church, Blogging - Let's Call It A Sunday

 I am up a little earlier than the alarm clock, romping through email. The Guardian sent out its book reviews.

I learned Boy George could write: Karma by Boy George review – loud, vainglorious and very funny, but I am not sure if the reviewer liked the memoir.

If Boy George were the conductor of an orchestra, the cymbals would be constantly crashing. Karma is loud and vainglorious and doesn’t always paint its subject in the most flattering light. But it’s revealing, often very funny, and ultimately offers up abundant proof that some people simply live their lives at a higher frequency, and that they always, but always, demand an audience, envy, recognition, a standing ovation. Ta da.

I jumped on Stuffed by Pen Vogler review – tasting history, and left a bit underwhelmed. Too British a story? Too broad a review?

As I mentioned last night, AS Byatt died. Today, The Guardian highlighted an interview from 2009, Writing in terms of pleasure. I am beginning to think I like her even more than I did from reading her.

Her nature is not to mock or sneer. She might not think something is much good - but she'll think about it patiently, assess it fairly, and then judge it with a presbyterian directness. There was a great hoo-hah when she wrote a negative review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the New York Times. It was claimed that she was "just jealous". But she simply described, conscientiously if a little irritably, what she saw: "a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children's literature". It was "infantile" - a word not meant as a sneer, but as a straightforward diagnosis.

There is also a mention of Excel timelines. I need to try that. It probably beats doing math on the back of an envelope!

I find this admirable:

She identifies the same soppy spirit in the second half of the century: "I don't like the 1960s either. The last big novel I wrote was called A Whistling Woman and it was about utopianism on the one hand and a dangerous sort of mystical romanticism on the other. I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."

Byatt may be serious, but I think it's a mistake to see her as humourless or intellectually snobbish. After our interview, she and her husband laugh about the wit of a football crowd - England fans chanting to the Belgian team: "You're French, and you know you are."

What distinguishes her is a sort of grounded curiosity. She has been a visible admirer and encourager of younger writers including Hensher, Lawrence Norfolk, David Mitchell, Adam Thirlwell and Ali Smith. Her advocacy is "not entirely disinterested, because I wish there to be a literary world in which people are not writing books only about people's feelings. If you notice, all the ones I like write also about ideas. You know, there's been that sort of clonking account of what was good about British writing which was McEwan, Amis, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes - but there's all sorts of other things going on. In fact I admire all four of those writers . . . and they don't only do people's feelings but nevertheless it's become ossified."

As is usual with The Guardian, there are at the bottom links to all their material on the subject. I mentioned the collection of short stories I read but did not give its title. It was her Little Black Book of Stories, some of which were as scary as anything written by Stephen King and which I assumed were written by someone younger than her actual age. 

I do not know if it was I too busy trying to make a loving to pay attention to writers and books, or if what sources of information I had access to did not promote AS Byatt. I fear the latter. When I went back to reading seriously, the question started to arise why a particular writer had been blocked from view and who benefitted. (I think it actually began when I finally read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from there it did pick up steam as I read people who available to my high school English teachers). I put Byatt on the list of writers I wish I had read when younger.

All I can hope for now is to point out people who are worth reading. The ones I learned from. The ones who punched holes in my small-mindedness. I cannot say that they are good for you — like cod liver oil. More that they will challenge you. That Moby-Dick is better than the teachers/academics would have you think; that Shakespeare has more life on the page than we let ourselves think. No, I cannot say this way is safety, more like the world is a strange place, so check out these wonders. Life is too short to not pay attention to the wonders. To do otherwise is to wallow in despondency.

Moving on, and not, I kept crashing and ran out of time yesterday, to mention tow piece from The Brisbane Times' book reviews. 

One of which is another book that I might have had access in high school or college, and only found by going to prison, and which is a delightfully dangerous book — Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil coming to Stalinist Moscow. There is a theater adaptation, a preview of which The Brisbane Times headlined with This book inspired Mick Jagger, terrifies Vladimir Putin and may be cursed. If I had read this, or Gogol, I might have learned to read Russian novels much earlier.

 He hopes then that the process of making The Master and Margarita could be an example of how to do things differently and make theatre that looks and feels different.

“That’s Bulgakov’s point: you can just begin by thinking differently and imagining differently. It’s a tricky way to work, and there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be any good either,” he says with a laugh.

 The other was The novel tackling the myth of Australia’s ‘bloodless’ creation — certainly not the American myth, but worth looking at another's myths and comparing with our own.

Now, to get ready for church!

Back from church, back from jawboning with the neighbor, it is going on 1:30 pm.

 When I went looking for a link to The Master and Margarita, I found Bulgakov’s World: The meaning of “The Master and Margarita”. I read this after church today.

I thought about the novel but struggled to find its meaning back then, and I kept coming back to the book, again and again, every few years. I’ve read it again several months ago but this time I decided to look for some explanations. I was happy to find the course of lectures by Marietta Chudakova who is an expert on Soviet literature and the works of Mikhail Bulgakov in particular. She created a very detailed and content-rich lecture available on arzamas.academy, where she explained the meaning of “The Master and Margarita” in Russian. This post is a translation of this very lecture. If you are interested in learning more about it in English, you can purchase the book called “Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times” she wrote.

I thought it rather interesting - stuff I had no way of knowing when I read the novel became clear.

Two more rejections arrived today.

riddlebird passed on “Reunion”, which I admit is a bit of a wispy story.

 Unfortunately at this time we are declining your submission. We know this can be frustrating, but know we appreciate your hard work. Thank you for sharing your piece.

Good luck with your endeavors!
Sincerely,

Gabrielle Belknap
riddlebird

The other rejection came from The Paris Review (my idea to punch up):

Please forgive the delay. Owing to the overwhelming number of submissions we received, decisions on submissions have taken us longer than we anticipated. 

Thank you for your patience while we evaluated "Their Bright Future." We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in The Paris Review.

Yours sincerely,

The Editors

http://theparisreview.org

Romping through but conquering the email inbox. It did lead me to GREEK INTELLECTUAL LIFE UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE (and left me feeling rather proud of myself by knowing most of the people mentioned, even if I had read none of them).

More blogging done. Nothing with the pretrial detention journal, so let us say I only batted .500.

Downloaded some music.

For dinner: lentils, green peppers, and catfish; seasoned with a jalapeno and garlic and onions.

I really like Grace Potter:

For CC, what I think is Bo Diddley's best job of singing:

I forgot to mention yesterday I sent off my pay stubs to my PO. I also asked if he had been sending my polygraph exams results to my counselor. Anyone want to take any bets the answer is no?

It is 7:17 pm, and I am going to work on "The Dead and the Dying".

That is the end of my this day.

sch