Live from Bread Loaf

Greetings from Bread Loaf, where I sit, wishing I'd had time to read all of the books they told me to read before I got up here - they weren't kidding! Now that the secondary sources have been assigned and papers are coming due, there is not a moment to spare. It's extremely rigorous, my peers are intelligent and intense, and I am loving it.

Yes, it's hard to completely throw myself into the program with a 10 month old at home, but she's probably also a good break from the hard thinking. As with most things in life, this is an exercise in time management.

And speaking of, I should get back to my essay on Emerson and Wordsworth . . .

Bah, Balzac

I decided to forgo Balzac for now and jump into The House of Mirth as my next novel - it's been immediately gratifying from page one. In Lily Bart, I've finally found a character I am interested in and sympathize with from page one (not page 200!) - I actually had to force myself to turn out the light last night (usually I'm forcing myself to keep it on). What a treat. In the meantime, I'm going to try to crank through the Emerson essays and The Scarlet Letter, as I've already read them in my younger days.

A dollop of Trollope

Actually, it's been much more than a dollop. When I first opened The Prime Minister, I looked at the last few pages and saw it was less than 400 pages long. Perfect, I thought! I'll breeze through this! Well, I got to page 300, looked at where I was, and realized something was amiss, because it didn't even look like I was halfway through the book! The book is in two volumes - BLAST!

I realize I sound like a big whiner complaining about the length of these books, but it really is just that much more daunting as I think to how much I have to still read before classes start, and suddenly 400 more pages are thrown at me. Eeek!

I am enjoying the book, though - he's living up to his own dictum of making fiction readable. Some of the political portions get dull, but the villain, Ferdinand Lopez, is a lot of fun, and I do really want to find out what will happen to his unfortunate wife, Emily. The interplay between The Duke and Duchess of Omnium is also very interesting, and seems a very honest portrayal of marriage.

Next up, Balzac, and again, The Writer's Almanac has gotten me in the mood just in time:

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century — La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.

He wrote about everyone and everything, about banks, offices, factories, the stock market, the media, and the first commercial advertisements.

Balzac had a huge influence on later 19th-century French novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Henry James thought he was the best novelist of all time, and Willa Cather once said, "If one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live." Today, Balzac is rarely studied in American schools. Even in France, Balzac's novels are outsold by writers like Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Collette.

Balzac said, "All happiness depends on courage and work."

Sound the trumpets! I finished Our Mutual Friend this morning! As predicted, the bad people die (or are exiled from England in shame, perhaps a fate worse than death!), the good people marry, and the best people end up happy and with lots of money. Hope that didn't spoil the ending for anyone out there reading along!

Next up, Trollope, and just in time, for he celebrated a birthday this week. So, those of you that were not thrilled with Dickens, how about The Prime Minister, by Trollope? Hopefully he will be true to his word and it will be READABLE. Here's another amusing biography care of The Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, (books by this author) born in London, England (1815). His father was a British gentleman who had failed at being a lawyer, a scholar, and a farmer, and the family sank deeper and deeper into debt. The children at school made fun of his worn, muddy clothes and his teachers were exceptionally cruel. He later said, "[I may have] been flogged oftener than any human being alive." The only reason his family didn't fall into complete poverty was that his mother started writing books for a living, and he looked up to her so much that he decided to become a writer himself.

He got a job in London as a postal clerk. He struggled to pay his bills, he had a series of unhappy love affairs, and nothing came of his writing. Then, in 1841, he was offered a transfer to Ireland, and he saw it as a chance to make a clean start.

In Ireland, Trollope developed a social life for the first time. He went hunting, and he went to pubs and he fell in love and got married, all within a few years. Once he had settled down to his new life, he began to write fiction. In his job for the postal service, he rode a horse over all the rural routes himself, to ensure that a letter could be delivered to the remotest possible areas. It was while he was riding across the countryside that a fictional English county called Barsetshire sprang up in his mind.

In just eleven years, between 1855 and 1866, Trollope published six novels about the extended families and parishioners and civil service workers living in that imaginary county of Barsetshire, novels such as The Warden (1955), Barchester Towers (1857), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866), all of which were best-sellers.


The novelist Henry James said, "Trollope did not write for posterity. He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket."

Anthony Trollope said, "Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/04/24/index.html

Still chugging through Dickens. I'm over half way now, and there are numerous characters that I truly don't care about one bit and am getting pretty annoyed by. Luckily, people are starting to die, rather than new folks getting introduced - hopefully this trend will continue and I'll have fewer characters to keep track of in the second half of the book!

In the meantime, I heard this on The Writer's Almanac this morning: the 2 tidbits in red were choice, I thought, and shed some light on James.

It's the birthday of the novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.

At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.

But he wrote almost 10 million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

He became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain in World War I. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ April 15, 2008

1/4 of the way through!

200 pages into Our Mutual Friend, only 600 to go! It took about 80 pages, which felt like an eternity, to get all of the characters introduced and connected to one another in one way or another, and now that I've slogged through, I can really enjoy the story.

Having not read Dickens since Great Expectations in high school, I had forgotten what a wonderful observer of character he is - I care about the good Mr. and Mrs. Boffin and I laugh (sometimes to keep from crying) at the ridiculous Veneerings. I can't help but sympathize with Dickens' strong distaste for the nouveau riche, and wonder what he would have to say about modern America and our often obscene obsession with material possessions and status. It's as if the Veneerings have only multiplied.

On a very practical note, I sincerely have no idea how one is expected to be a working professional and also get all of this reading done before the summer session. I think next summer I will be sure to avoid choosing 2 courses from the very wordy 1800s!

Wikipedia's entry on Our Mutual Friend has a long (though incomplete - gulp) list of the major and minor characters in this work - could be a useful reference . . . en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mutual_Friend

My copy of The Golden Bowl hasn't arrived yet, so that is going to have to get shelved, and I'll start where I'm supposed to start - with Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. Several nutty family members have mentioned they want to read this one along with me - well, folks, if you're up for 800 pages of Dickens (and probably as many characters to keep straight), I'm happy to have you join me!

For any other friends, family members, or total strangers who might want to read along with me this spring, here are the course descriptions and reading lists:

Fictions of Finance
Nineteenth-century England, France, and America witnessed the transformation of the capitalist enterprise: both moved from societies dominated by industrial production to those in which finance capital generated vast new fortunes—and vast new possibilities as well of social disequilibrium. At the same time, the realist novel emerged as the dominant social form, defining the lineaments of experience for an enlarging middle-class readership eager to understand the complexities of this brave new world. What, this course wonders, do these two phenomena have to do with each other? What new plots get created, what new character-types get shaped, in the realist novel to register, manage, negotiate the transition into this new world? How do authors respond to their own role, as authors, in this sphere? How do changing notions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racial, and national (or even, in James, global) identity get made and remade in this fictional encounter? These will be some of the questions we discuss as we make our way through a number of great, complex, and long novels that redefined as they participated in the fictions—and the facts—of finance. Students will be required to write two papers, one short, one long. Please read Our Mutual Friend before the summer begins, since we'll really have only a week to devote to it.

Texts: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Penguin); Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (Penguin); Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low (Penguin); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Scribner); Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Penguin).

Identities in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
This course turns on the fundamental questions of how nineteenth-century writers both chronicle and help create the processes by which Americans articulate various types of identity, from the personal to the communal to the national. In pursuit of some answers, we will read the following primary texts in this order listed below.

Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," "Self-Reliance," "Fate," and "Experience" in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Random House); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Modern Library); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Norton); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton); selected poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. A substantial packet of secondary readings will be assigned in Vermont.

Here we go!

My revitalized reading life begins with The Golden Bowl, by Henry James (for my "Fictions of Finance" course this summer). I saw it on my dad's shelf when I was home visiting for Easter, and thought I'd just dip in . . . it probably wasn't the best book to start with. I'm now successfully chugging through, but the first few pages were pretty daunting. Maybe I shouldn't have been trying to read it in the kitchen with family floating in and out . . . maybe I needed coffee . . . maybe this is going to be harder than I thought . . .

Any Golden Bowl fans out there?