blighty, part 4.
Back in Britain and safely bestowed! I am nearly all unpacked in my delightful room, which (aside from too little closet space) is the best possible room; I have all my photos and postcards up so it feels like home. One of my flatmates is arriving tomorrow and oddishly is due for a visit sometime this week. I miss California and all the hilarious ridic people I hung out with there, but this is a new adventure.
I'm excited.
I also got a package of books from yeats and spent the next two hours hacking away at the sack it was tied up in with my keys (I have no scissors); and ahhh now I have all these beautiful books. Thank you, bb! I'm definitely looking forward to thumbing through all of them at some point, and I've already started O, Pioneers!
Some books I have read:
Kaddish & other poems, by Allen Ginsberg.
I love Allen Ginsberg with all of my heart - no, that's wrong, with all of my heart that manages to ignore the way I find the Beat movement fundamentally misogynist, and that shows, the way Ginsberg tends to treat typists and vaginas as interchangeable. I… don't want this to sound like a "yes, but", I feel like an acknowledgement of such wouldn't give a complete picture of my ~reading experience~?
Kaddish is still a violent, beautiful, sickening and saddening poem, and Ginsberg is still one of the best poets I have ever read. The first time you read it it kind of sweeps you away and the second time the impact doesn't lessen:
One night, sudden attack -- her noise in the bathroom -- like croaking up her soul -- convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth -- diarrhea water exploding from her behind -- on all fours in front of the toilet -- urine running between her legs -- left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces -- untainted --
At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling Police, yelling for her girl-friend Rose to help --
Once locked herself in with razor or iodine -- could hear her cough in tears at sink -- Lou broke through glass green-painted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom.
It's so much more terrible when you think about how it's his mother. ('Love, your mother / which is Naomi --')
I love how for Ginsberg, everything is jumbled and furious: politics, art, sex, family, God, beauty horror… yet I will say, though, just as one of my favorite poems in Howl was a small verse about how the only word is love, this small poem about longing is, just:
Message
Since we had changed
rogered spun worked
wept and pissed together
I wake up in the morning
with a dream in my eyes
but you are gone in NY
remembering me Good
I love you I love you
& your brothers are crazy
I accept their drunk cases
It's too long that I have been alone
it's too long that I've sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don't care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic
Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers
Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst
Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes
Just, that last line? Ughhhhhhh.
Also I love a good sardonic wit:
I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor -- 'Terrible presence!' I cried 'Eat me or die!'
It got up that afternoon -- walked to the door with its paw on the wall to steady its trembling body
Let out a soul rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth
thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico
Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice 'Not this time Baby - but I will be back again.'
Not this time Baby!!! Man, the silly sexiness of it. (It's a metaphor for God.)
And and and, so much affection for Ginsberg the human being, Ginsberg the poet, Ginsberg the yearner for eternity:
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.
Fuckkk. <333333
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.
Kind of a mixed one, for me. I didn't start to love Great Expectations until I was taught it, and there was plenty to love here, but ugh ugh ugh Dickens why are the women characters you love to love always so - good? Even more saliently, why are they always so boring?
I feel like Little Dorrit could be an interesting character, is an interesting character when Dickens lets go of his idealization-of-women-as-saints to examine what she thinks:
'The Princess, after crying a very little for the loss of the tiny woman, dried her eyes and got out of her carriage at the place where she had stopped it before, and went to the cottage and peeped in at the door. There was nobody to look at her now, and nobody for her to look at, so she went in at once to search for the treasured shadow. But there was no sign of it to be found anywhere; and she knew that the tiny woman had told her the truth, and that it would never give any body any trouble, and that it had sunk quietly into her own grave, and that she and it were at rest together.
'That's all, Maggy.'
The sunset flush was so bright on Little Dorrit's face when she came thus to the end of her story, that she interposed her hand to shade it.
'Had she got to be old?" Maggy asked.
'The tiny woman?'
'Ah!'
'I don't know,' said Little Dorrit. 'But it would have been just the same, if she had been ever and ever so old.'
[…]
'Nor the tiny woman hers?' said Maggy.
'No,' said Little Dorrit, with the sunset very bright upon her. 'But let us come away from the window.'
I love love love love love it when Dickens does things with light ('with the sunset very bright upon her'!!), and right at the beginning:
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than any other time, before or since. Every thing in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.
Also that repetition.
I find the trouble with a lot of Dickens' novels is I always fall in love with the dark, menacing, troublesome women with whom he always finds a need to reform. But when they're evil or bad they're just so obviously interesting. In her own voice:
She was worse at home than she had been at school. She had a crowd of cousins and acquaintances, and we had dances at her house, and went out to dances at other houses, and, both at home and out, she tormented my love beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her - and so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them all - and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in our bed-room at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river - where I would still hold her, after we were both dead.
Evil lesbians! Boy, Dickens really has a thing about intimacy between women, doesn't he?
I feel like if you read this review and then read the book you would be really disappointed because it isn't largely about evil lesbians or interesting quiet women -- rather the psychology of imprisonment and a ridiculously elaborate plot -- but ahhhhh. /o\
I Left My Grandfather's House, by Denton Welch.
First of all, I feel like I should tell everyone to read In Youth Is Pleasure and come back when they're done. I read a library copy last year? And then I was thinking about how I absolutely must own my own copy and ordered it off Amazon and came back to it and reread In Youth Is Pleasure and ahhhh so good. I Left My Grandfather's House is the bonus bit they stuck on the back of the volume I now own, so it's kind of hard not to make comparisons.
I feel like Denton Welch actually reworked a lot of the themes that appeared here into In Youth Is Pleasure (he started work on that less than a month after writing this): the English countryside, neuroticism, family, food - to great effect? So in that sense this is kind of a nascent version of In Youth Is Pleasure, and I enjoyed it, but there weren't any passages that leapt out at me. Still, worth a read I guess. Especially if you are SUPER INTO In Youth Is Pleasure (and you should be).
Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard | The Lives of Animals, by J.M. Coetzee | Women & Violence, by Barrie Levy | Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural, edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn | Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolano | Corridor, by Alfian Sa'at | Collected Plays One, by Alfian Sa'at | Trilogy, by Haresh Sharma | Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, & Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block | Bloomability, by Sharon Creech | Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall In Love, by Maryrose Wood | High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang | The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby
I'm excited.
I also got a package of books from yeats and spent the next two hours hacking away at the sack it was tied up in with my keys (I have no scissors); and ahhh now I have all these beautiful books. Thank you, bb! I'm definitely looking forward to thumbing through all of them at some point, and I've already started O, Pioneers!
Some books I have read:
Kaddish & other poems, by Allen Ginsberg.
I love Allen Ginsberg with all of my heart - no, that's wrong, with all of my heart that manages to ignore the way I find the Beat movement fundamentally misogynist, and that shows, the way Ginsberg tends to treat typists and vaginas as interchangeable. I… don't want this to sound like a "yes, but", I feel like an acknowledgement of such wouldn't give a complete picture of my ~reading experience~?
Kaddish is still a violent, beautiful, sickening and saddening poem, and Ginsberg is still one of the best poets I have ever read. The first time you read it it kind of sweeps you away and the second time the impact doesn't lessen:
One night, sudden attack -- her noise in the bathroom -- like croaking up her soul -- convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth -- diarrhea water exploding from her behind -- on all fours in front of the toilet -- urine running between her legs -- left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces -- untainted --
At forty, varicosed, nude, fat, doomed, hiding outside the apartment door near the elevator calling Police, yelling for her girl-friend Rose to help --
Once locked herself in with razor or iodine -- could hear her cough in tears at sink -- Lou broke through glass green-painted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom.
It's so much more terrible when you think about how it's his mother. ('Love, your mother / which is Naomi --')
I love how for Ginsberg, everything is jumbled and furious: politics, art, sex, family, God, beauty horror… yet I will say, though, just as one of my favorite poems in Howl was a small verse about how the only word is love, this small poem about longing is, just:
Message
Since we had changed
rogered spun worked
wept and pissed together
I wake up in the morning
with a dream in my eyes
but you are gone in NY
remembering me Good
I love you I love you
& your brothers are crazy
I accept their drunk cases
It's too long that I have been alone
it's too long that I've sat up in bed
without anyone to touch on the knee, man
or woman I don't care what anymore, I
want love I was born for I want you with me now
Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic
Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers
Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst
Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes
Just, that last line? Ughhhhhhh.
Also I love a good sardonic wit:
I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor -- 'Terrible presence!' I cried 'Eat me or die!'
It got up that afternoon -- walked to the door with its paw on the wall to steady its trembling body
Let out a soul rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth
thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in Mexico
Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice 'Not this time Baby - but I will be back again.'
Not this time Baby!!! Man, the silly sexiness of it. (It's a metaphor for God.)
And and and, so much affection for Ginsberg the human being, Ginsberg the poet, Ginsberg the yearner for eternity:
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.
Fuckkk. <333333
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.
Kind of a mixed one, for me. I didn't start to love Great Expectations until I was taught it, and there was plenty to love here, but ugh ugh ugh Dickens why are the women characters you love to love always so - good? Even more saliently, why are they always so boring?
I feel like Little Dorrit could be an interesting character, is an interesting character when Dickens lets go of his idealization-of-women-as-saints to examine what she thinks:
'The Princess, after crying a very little for the loss of the tiny woman, dried her eyes and got out of her carriage at the place where she had stopped it before, and went to the cottage and peeped in at the door. There was nobody to look at her now, and nobody for her to look at, so she went in at once to search for the treasured shadow. But there was no sign of it to be found anywhere; and she knew that the tiny woman had told her the truth, and that it would never give any body any trouble, and that it had sunk quietly into her own grave, and that she and it were at rest together.
'That's all, Maggy.'
The sunset flush was so bright on Little Dorrit's face when she came thus to the end of her story, that she interposed her hand to shade it.
'Had she got to be old?" Maggy asked.
'The tiny woman?'
'Ah!'
'I don't know,' said Little Dorrit. 'But it would have been just the same, if she had been ever and ever so old.'
[…]
'Nor the tiny woman hers?' said Maggy.
'No,' said Little Dorrit, with the sunset very bright upon her. 'But let us come away from the window.'
I love love love love love it when Dickens does things with light ('with the sunset very bright upon her'!!), and right at the beginning:
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than any other time, before or since. Every thing in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away.
Also that repetition.
I find the trouble with a lot of Dickens' novels is I always fall in love with the dark, menacing, troublesome women with whom he always finds a need to reform. But when they're evil or bad they're just so obviously interesting. In her own voice:
She was worse at home than she had been at school. She had a crowd of cousins and acquaintances, and we had dances at her house, and went out to dances at other houses, and, both at home and out, she tormented my love beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her - and so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them all - and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in our bed-room at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river - where I would still hold her, after we were both dead.
Evil lesbians! Boy, Dickens really has a thing about intimacy between women, doesn't he?
I feel like if you read this review and then read the book you would be really disappointed because it isn't largely about evil lesbians or interesting quiet women -- rather the psychology of imprisonment and a ridiculously elaborate plot -- but ahhhhh. /o\
I Left My Grandfather's House, by Denton Welch.
First of all, I feel like I should tell everyone to read In Youth Is Pleasure and come back when they're done. I read a library copy last year? And then I was thinking about how I absolutely must own my own copy and ordered it off Amazon and came back to it and reread In Youth Is Pleasure and ahhhh so good. I Left My Grandfather's House is the bonus bit they stuck on the back of the volume I now own, so it's kind of hard not to make comparisons.
I feel like Denton Welch actually reworked a lot of the themes that appeared here into In Youth Is Pleasure (he started work on that less than a month after writing this): the English countryside, neuroticism, family, food - to great effect? So in that sense this is kind of a nascent version of In Youth Is Pleasure, and I enjoyed it, but there weren't any passages that leapt out at me. Still, worth a read I guess. Especially if you are SUPER INTO In Youth Is Pleasure (and you should be).
Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard | The Lives of Animals, by J.M. Coetzee | Women & Violence, by Barrie Levy | Half + Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural, edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn | Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolano | Corridor, by Alfian Sa'at | Collected Plays One, by Alfian Sa'at | Trilogy, by Haresh Sharma | Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, & Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block | Bloomability, by Sharon Creech | Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall In Love, by Maryrose Wood | High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang | The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby