The Loss of the Creature

I'm working on a big new project for a possible paying job that involves reading lots of essays, and I was going back through one of my favorites by Walker Percy, from The Message in the Bottle, entitled "The Loss of the Creature." This is the essay I refer to when trying to defend my parental inability to get to any of my kids' events with a camera and remember to use it while I'm there. This is the essay I was thinking of this weekend when I packed a camera for a visit with some friends-- bisected by a chess tournament--and finally remembered (with a reminder from FreshHell, who also has trouble remembering to use a camera) to get it out when we came back to their house. This is an essay everyone in the world should read, because it's about how we are able to see things:

"A man in Boston decides to spend his vacation at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, signs up for a two-week tour. He and his family take the tour, see the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we say that this man has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he has. But it is more likely that what he has done is the one sure way not to see the canyon.

Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is--as one picks up a strange object from one's back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on.... if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, "Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!" He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time. The highest point, the term of the sightseer's satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex.

Seeing the canyon is made even more difficult by what the sightseer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known. Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years."

Percy suggests a number of ways that a sightseer could actually see the Grand Canyon, "all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service."

My family needs stratagies like that to see more in an art museum. Usually we try to see only one or two rooms, lest we find ourselves standing in front of one of the wonders of the world yawning and thinking about how much our feet hurt and where the next water fountain might be. Often we try to pose like the sculptures, in order to see how close we can get to what each particular one feels like.

For years we've tried getting into an elevator and facing the back. It's interesting to see peoples' reactions when you get in and do that. What kinds of strategies have you tried for seeing something in a new way?

Book Blogger Appreciation Week Interviews

First up below are my answers to ten questions about books, blogging, and reading sent to me by British book blogger Jodie Baker of Bookgazing. Next are my ten questions and her answers!

Jodie: How long have you been blogging? Jeanne: About a year and a half now. I started one winter while I was sitting around recovering from a knee replacement.

Jodie: Can you explain how you came up with the name for your blog ‘Necromancy Never Pays’? Jeanne: It’s an odd name, isn’t it? The name actually inspired me to start the blog; I keep a brief version of the story up on my sidebar, right underneath the title.

Jodie: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while blogging and what’s the best way it’s affected your life? Jeanne: The biggest challenge for me is finding the time to write at least 2-3 times each week, and to get around to visiting other book blogs at least once a month. I have a husband with a very full-time job, two part-time jobs of my own (one requiring a two-hour commute twice a week), two busy teenagers, and a house full of animals. But the best way blogging has affected my life is that I’ve become at least a peripheral part of some interesting conversations; part-time jobs can be very isolating, so the book blog world has become a part of my intellectual community. Also I got better classes this year because last fall I sent my department head a link to my post about what it’s like to leave a class of first-year students with no real prospects of ever seeing them again, and he took special pains to work out a year-long schedule for me with some upper-level courses!

Jodie: How technological are you and what’s your favourite piece of technology/techy tool (apart from blogs but including domestic appliances)? Jeanne: I have very little technical expertise, and don’t even like kitchen gadgets much. I like ipods; does that count?

Jodie: Do you have a favourite community building event or group in the book blogging world? Jeanne: No because I’ve been too cautious about committing my time and energy so far. I like reading responses to the Weekly Geeks question the best of anything. Do you have a suggestion—because that might help! I feel a bit like the character of Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, who was paralyzed by too much possibility.

Jodie: You seem like a pretty big poetry fan – what do you like best about poetry? Jeanne: I like that moment when you read a line or two and think “I’ve felt that, but couldn’t articulate it until now…”

Jodie: Who is your all time favourite author, the one you’d queue all night to talk to for five minutes? Jeanne: Hmm, this question assumes a live author. I guess it would have to be Jasper Fforde, who wrote The Eyre Affair. I thought about Barbara Kingsolver, but she comes across as very earnest. I once met Ruth Ozeki and felt that she summarily dismissed me as an interesting person because of the way I make jokes when nervous. I can’t see Fforde doing that—or if he wasn’t as fascinating in person as he is in print, we could always have a game of croquet.

Jodie: You read around quite a bit, just wondering if you have a favourite genre or if you don’t why you enjoy reading a little bit of everything. Jeanne: My favorite genre is satire, especially 18^th-century ironic personal panegyric (blame by praise of an individual). But I aspire to be a Renaissance woman. The only genre I really don’t care for is horror. I don’t like to be scared, especially not by made-up stories.

Jodie: Can you speak a little bit about why you’re so passionate about public libraries in Ohio? Jeanne: Because I’m an American, and free public libraries are one of the foundations of our system of democracy. As John Adams said, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” This is carved above the door of my local library.

Jodie: Finally what book/s do you wish more people were reading right now? If you were in charge of the world for an hour what piece of literature would you make it law to read because you think it would do the world good? Jeanne: I’m willing to wish that more people would read Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale or her new novel The Year of the Flood (which is being published September 22) because I think more of us should think about the dangers she exaggerates for effect. (Also I worry that some of the dangers we thought were exaggerated in The Handmaid’s Tale have come perilously close to true.) But I’d never be willing to make a law about reading. You can’t force someone to learn; most people just resist more stubbornly if you try.

Here are my questions for Jodie:

Jeanne: What gave you the incentive to start your blog? Has it given you a reputation for gazing at other peoples’ bookshelves when you’re invited to their houses? Jodie: I’d been reading book blogs for about five years and I always wanted to start one, because not many of the people in my life read as much or as many different types of books as I do. I wanted to be able to form a closer connection with the book bloggers I enjoyed reading and also to take part in community activities like challenges and the 24 hour read-a-thon. I am absolutely the most nosey person when it comes to houses. If someone lets me stay in their house I will check out everything that’s on display (I don’t go through their drawers, promise) especially the bookcases. I’m fascinated by what people read and I add books they own to my personal list.

Jeanne: Which book has affected you or changed your life the most?Jodie: Changed my life, wow big ask. There are plenty of novels that have affected me and made me want to get involved with causes by donating money, but I don’t think that’s really a significant change to my life. ‘Jane Eyre’ is probably the novel that had the biggest impact on my life, by giving me a role model and lots of sensible advice about how to conduct my emotional life. When I took a course on ‘Dracula’ in university I got my first introduction to the different schools of literary theory and that was pretty influential in helping me to develop my thought processes. Finally an author made quite a change to the way I think about life, Stuart Clarke, joint author of an exhaustive series of books on witchcraft throughout history, was my BA dissertation supervisor and he really helped me to think deeply about history and how it applies to current society.

Jeanne: What is your least favourite book or genre, and why? Jodie: I can’t think of one right now, but it’s probably a piece of chick-lit. I have a violent love/hate relationship with that genre. For example I’d defend ‘The Little Lady Agency’ or ‘The Juliet Club’ against the snobbiest of book snobs but I find myself wanting to bash some chick-lit novels against the wall again and again until they change their characters and plot. Violent tendencies, I has them.

Jeanne: You read poetry when you were unemployed for a while, and say it gave you optimism. Do you think this would work for anyone else, or is it a very personal reaction? Jodie: I think this was a personal reaction. I’m the last person to say ‘Hey job seekers, if only you’d let art into your life your situation would seem so much better’. When I was unemployed I was in the privileged position of being able to live at home with my parents and have them buy food for me, which is just not the case for lots of people who have to sign on. Poetry is not going to feed your kids or pay your electricity bill and cold, hungry people tend to find it hard to be optimistic. What poetry can do and what it did for me, was to remind me that I didn’t have to listen to the negative people: the ones who told me it was shameful for people to claim benefits and the ones who liked to explain ‘how the world worked’ to me, or remind me that I was claiming benefit because I had taken a degree I was interested in instead of a practical degree. No matter how depressing the job search got, no matter how many people felt they had the right to foist the opinions they’d picked up from the newspapers on me, when I was already down, there were bigger people out there, creating this astoundingly beautiful art. Even darker, morbid poems contain beauty, a kind of gothic spectacle. This gave me hope that the world didn’t have to follow the grey, set pattern so many people in authority think is the lot ordinary, working people must accept.

Jeanne: Are you a writer? If so, what kinds of project(s) are you working on? If not, what kind of book would you wish to have written? Jodie: Not yet but I hope to change that. I’m always scribbling lines down and I have lots of ideas but I can’t seem to get myself to sustain a piece of non-academic writing. I guess I’m really afraid I have no talent. Oh and I need to learn more about grammar, I suck at grammar. This past year I’ve had a lot more freedom (this is the first year I haven’t had to do some sort of ‘school work’ since I was five) and I have a couple of ideas I’ve started to develop in my head. I always thought I’d love to write comic fantasy, because I’m a pretty sarcastic kind of girl in real life and I think it’s a genre that really stems from a typical British sense of humour. Now about half of my project ideas seem to be for young adult novels. Hopefully soon I’ll know if I can finish a novel, maybe I’ll try Nanowrimo again.

Jeanne: Why do you like reading challenges? How do you choose the ones you participate in? Jodie: I’m a girl who makes lists for fun and reading challenges let you make big lists of possibilities, possibilities that involve books! They also let you read other people’s lists, which is just as interesting as looking at people’s bookshelves to nosey, old me. They’re also a big community effort – bloggers all reading similar kinds of things. It allows you to make comparisons with books you’ve read before and talk about all kinds of books, creating this big web of bookish links. I think that’s a really good way of encouraging discussion. I imagine a group read of a big, daunting classic would be just as interesting. I pick challenges created by bloggers I already know and like, but I also check out ‘A Novel Challenge’ every other month to see what other bloggers have come up with. If I see something that sounds like an area I’m interested in, but never read books from, I’ll sign up, or if I see something where you get to read lots of the kind of books I like I’ll join up. I’m easy and I’m okay with that.

Jeanne: What author would you most like to ask a question of, and what would that question be? Jodie: Arundhati Roy – why have you decided you’re not going to write another novel ? Why?

Jeanne: You collect bookmarks—what do you like about them? Jodie: They’re pretty! To be fair people give them to me, more than I collect them.

Jeanne: Who would you vote for as the worst villain in fiction, and what would be your criteria? Jodie: Like the evilest villain or the villain that was the worst at being villainous? The most incompetent villain I’ve seen so far has to be Dom Daniel from Angie Sage’s first Septimus Heap book ‘Magyk, he’s out foxed by small children and a ghost that makes his hat bigger! The most evil villain I can think of is probably the serial killer in Kathy Reichs ‘Triptych’. The novel relies a lot on the big reveal so I won’t give anything away, but let’s just say the levels of deception and self-deception he manages to maintain are truly frightening and his killer signature is disturbing. My criteria for judging the most evil villain category would be: Must be from non-realistic fiction (I can think of prison guards and dictators from fiction that are suitably evil but the word villain implies a certain kind of evil that you don’t encounter in everyday life (and yes I know there are serial killers in the world, but for most of us they are removed from our reality)). Able to hide his true evil nature from the world and insinuate himself into the company of good people. A crazy level of violent behaviour. Insane self-justification for his behaviour (because true evil always believes it is right to act the way it does). Must be alive and actively villainous in the book (some characters from ‘the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ might have edged my choice out otherwise).

Jeanne: If you could only read books by one author for six months of your life, which author would you pick? Jodie: Tough! It would have to be someone with a huge body of work and an author that I knew I could trust to craft a good story. I think I would pick Terry Pratchett, whose books have a whole shelf in my house. I could re-read his books forever and there are still six or seven I haven’t read yet.

I hope you'll take a virtual hop "across the pond" to check out Jodie's blog (Bookgazing) now that you've gotten to know her a little bit by seeing how she answered my questions!

Restlessness

This morning I'm in a perverse state of mind, for which I blame congress' decision to begin daylight savings time so early that there's not enough daylight.

Many people go around with songs in their heads, and I do that sometimes, but more often I go around for a few days with a poem in my head, and the one that's in there today is really not appropriate for my mood, which is restless. I have a lot of work to do, and rather than finish one project and move on to the next, I'm flitting from one thing to another, as daft as the kitten, who just dug three toys out from under our oven storage drawer and is trying to play with all of them.

Maybe my unconscious is trying to tell me something by dredging up this Wordsworth poem:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Please if some souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

Usually I agree with the point that it's easier to work in a form than to make something up entirely, and most days I work at what I've set myself pretty contentedly (if occasionally contentiously). Usually I think it's the least bad choice for my kids to go to the local public school. But today, in the aftermath of Saturday's 70-degree weather and the time change, I'm not so sure. Eleanor has to take the Ohio Graduation Test first thing every morning this week, which combines fatigue, boredom, and stress. Walker will start soccer practice tomorrow if the doctor says he can practice with his fractured arm. And I need to get done all the things that are due at the end of this week, the second week of spring break at the local college.

Too much liberty. Maybe I need to reread Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, about a character who is paralyzed by too many possibilities. Maybe I need to...oh, I don't know. What puts restlessness to rest?

Beginnings

Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.

Favorite Books

When I go to a party and someone asks what I "do" and I tell them some variation on "I have a PhD in English and try not to waste it entirely," there are two categories of response. One is "oh, I'll have to watch my grammar." I laugh politely at that one. The other is "oh, I never have time to read." I like that one a little better because it gives me a way to say that we make time for what we can't do without.

My favorite response to the what do you "do" answer came when I was still in graduate school. The man who eventually married our friend Miriam said to me "what are you studying in grad school?" I said "English." There was a pause. "Haven't you learned it yet?" he said.

So what do you do when someone asks what your "favorite" book is??? I have various strategies for answering such a question, including picking six off the top of my head, as I did for my blogger profile: Animal Dreams, Love In the Ruins, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Princess Bride.

A strategy that makes more sense is to pick two or three favorites from a specific genre--favorite science fiction books: Stranger in a Strange Land, The Door Into Ocean, Ender's Game.

My favorite way to answer this question now is a strategy I borrowed from my friend Lemming's Christmas letter. She and her husband used to recommend their favorite book of the year. This narrows down the selections to a manageable level, plus you can buy the favorite book of the year for everyone on your list. My favorite book of this past year is Boomsday.

Of course, this strategy necessarily privileges contemporary literature. How can we include favorites from the past? Usually I don't try. There's no need to repeat what thousands of high school English teachers have said before me: To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. One of the purposes of telling other people what your favorite books are is to get them to read those books.

With that purpose in mind, tell me what your favorite books are. I'm the person you know who is most likely to read them.

Repairing or Buying New

A few summers ago, when my children were young and I had more time than money, I put new webbing on a folding outdoor chair. How many people do you know who have done that? Do you know anyone who has repaired a window screen or a vacuum cleaner? When the dryer breaks, is it cheaper and easier to just buy a new one?
Walker Percy saw this coming. In his novel Love in the Ruins he describes a world in which "the refrigerator doesn't work. Nothing works. All my household motors are silent: air-conditioner, vacuum, dishwasher, dryer, automobile. Appliances and automobiles are more splendid than ever, but when they break down nobody will fix them. My car broke down at the A&P three weeks ago and nobody would come fix it so I abandoned it....Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman."
When I first read this, in 1980, it sounded right to me. Twenty-eight years later, it seems to me that it has come way too close to being true.
How did you dispose of your last computer?