Langue Division

hello again

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:08:00 +0000

Holy crap, it's a new post!

Since I last remembered to update this thing, I've had my first barbecue of the season, paid doctors to remove part of my intestines, starting a nonfiction writing project to give myself something to do when I'm not working on fiction, and written about five more books on the Fill in the Gaps blog (Blindness by Jose Saramago, Collected Prose by Paul Auster, First Childhood and A Distant Prospect by Lord Berners, and The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France).

Now that that's out of the way, I wanted to talk about two non-Fill in the Gaps list books I've read recently, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Red Meat Cures Cancer by Starbuck O'Dwyer (which I hope for his sake is his actual name, because the implications are just too depressing if he chose a name that dumb as a psuedonym).

Red Meat Cures Cancer was a book I found on our bookshelves one evening while browsing for something light to read (my wife insists that her ex-husband is responsible for purchasing it). I was planning on just spending an hour or two entertaining myself before going to bed. Instead, I ended up staying up until four in the morning reading the novel cover to cover, which I don't mean as a ringing endorsement -- far from it, in fact. You see, Red Meat Cures Cancer is one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune of reading. It is a ham-fisted, dull, aggressively banal story about an executive in a fast food company trying desperately to hold on to his job and pension by reaching new lows in advertising, a story wholly reliant on jokes so old and tired that I'm not sure it's fair to call them jokes anymore.

No, I couldn't stop reading it because I could not believe that such a thing was printed and put in a bookstore where people could see it. I couldn't believe that O'Dwyer held the manuscript for this novel in his hands and, rather than burn it, decided that it was good enough to send out. I couldn't believe that there exists in the world a literary agent willing to shop it around to publishers, an editor who liked the damn thing enough to buy it, and a publisher willing to sign off on the editor's decision. I hoped that somewhere in those pages I would come across an okay joke, a nice turn of phrase, anything at all to justify the book's existence.

I didn't find a damn thing.

From now on, every time I find myself sinking into writer's block because I'm worried that what I'm writing will never get published, I'm going to think about this book. If O'Dwyer can get that thing published, a chimp with a claw hammer firmly embedded in its skull has a good chance of seeing its name on a book jacket.

Verghese's Cutting for Stone, by contrast, is a beautifully written novel, a fluid, effortless read that moves along much faster than most books its size (560 pages). The ease at which the narrative moves forward is even more impressive considering the complicated medical procedures Verghese describes and the rich detail of his prose (I found myself thinking of A.J. Cronin and Gita Mehta while I was reading it). The narrator of the novel is one Marion Stone, who is born (alongside his twin brother Shiva) to a young nun working in a hospital in Ethiopia. From there, the narrative intertwines the story of Marion's life with the drama of rural medicine, the lives of the other inhabitants of the hospital, and the history and culture of Ethiopia.

One of Verghese's strengths is that there are no throwaway characters in the novel. Even the minor characters are fleshed out just enough to make them feel like real people, and every last one is integral in some small way to the overall scope of the work. At times he has a tendency to pile descriptions and events on top of one another until the combined weight of it all becomes too much and the scene collapses into bathos, but considering everything that Verghese does right in the novel that's a minor complaint.

"Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:43:00 +0000

J.D. Salinger
1919 - 2010

merry happy etcetera and so forth

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:49:00 +0000

I just thought I'd drop by and assure everyone that I'm not dead, or if I am nobody's bothered to tell me yet. I've just been busy elsewhere in life and so on, but I will be back after the new year to post sporadically, as per usual.

Until then, enjoy your personal Saturnalia or what have you. I know I'll enjoy mine.

pronunciation via cool internet gadgets

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:23:00 +0000

As per usual, I received a great many books for my birthday (I know, big surprise, right?), including The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Later, while discussing book-related things with my stepfather-in-law I began to say the author's full name, then promptly stopped myself. I was okay with Alfonso, and Casares was no problem, but Bioy? How do I pronounce Bioy? Bee-oy? Byoi? Something else entirely? I went with just Casares to keep the conversation moving, but that small ignorance on my part stayed in the back of my head the rest of the night.¹

That little incident was not an isolated event, either. Many times over the years I've wanted to mention an author who was relevant to the conversation at hand only to realize that, while I knew what his or her name looked like visually on the page, I was completely clueless as to how it actually sounded when spoken aloud. For example,

Barthelme: Bart-ul-me? Bart-helm? Barth-elm?

Goethe: Go-uth? Go-et? Goo-tuh?

Borges: Bor-gus? Bor-hees?

It's not like most of the names I wanted to pronounce could be looked up in the biographical section of the dictionary, either. Then last year the internet decided to give me a hand by launching a cool little website by the name of Forvo. Forvo works as a huge pronunciation guide where native speakers of various languages can come and submit mp3 clips demonstrating how to pronounce a given word. The usefulness of the site isn't limited to author's names, of course, but that's mainly what I've used it for.

Since I stumbled across it, Forvo has taught me that Borges is Bor-hays, Barthelme is Bar-thal-uh-may, and Goethe is . . . well, I doubt I'll ever feel like I'm pronouncing Goethe correctly, but I suppose I can't have everything.

¹ It's Bee-oy.

well will you look at that

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:26:00 +0000

There is a pattern I've slowly come to notice in which my age seems to increase by one year on a roughly annual basis. Today I have turned twenty-nine, and all is well.

Oh, and I wrote another review over at the Fill in the Gaps blog, this time on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. You can read it here. McCarthy writes stark, brutal things, but the Old Testament themes he deals in transforms that violent content into a commentary on all the aspects of human nature most of us would rather ignore. My respect for the man and his prose grows with every novel I read, and I think it would be a shame if he isn't eventually awarded a Nobel on the order of Borges', Nabokov's, and Tolstoy's snubbings by the award committee.

gaps and the filling thereof

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:57:00 +0000

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I've been participating in the Fill in the Gaps 100 Project, a great little challenge for anyone who loves to read. The idea is simple: put together a list of one hundred books you've been meaning to read but haven't for whatever reason, and give yourself a deadline of five years to finish reading the books on that list. Participants are encouraged to discuss books, organize reading groups for some of the more intimidating reads they have in common, post reviews, etc.

There's some other fine print in there, like an "acceptable gap" exemption for a certain percentage of your reading list, but I'm not interested in half measures--for me, it's all one hundred or bust. You can read my list here (eleven down, eighty-nine to go), and all my posts can be found here, although from now on I will also try to remember to post a quick note here whenever I write a new book review.

And hey, if any of this sounds interesting to you, then head over and join up yourself! This may be the academic OCD talking, but it's deeply satisfying to check things off a reading list.

of siblings and nerdery

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:56:00 +0000

Last Friday, a UPS delivery man dropped off a box on our doorstep. We've been receiving plenty of boxes filled with wedding presents lately, most likely because we got married recently, but this one was a bit more puzzling:

Apparently, someone had seen fit to send us a box full of Jones Soda. Sure, it seemed like a strange thing to use to congratulate newlyweds, but if nothing else I figured it was better than receiving something less useful like, say, a second toaster, a package of doilies, or a pipe bomb¹. After inspecting the bottles more closely, however, I noticed there was something decidedly different about them:

That's right, someone didn't just send us a box of soda, they sent us a box of Magic: The Gathering themed soda. But who did it? The box didn't contain any receipts or packing slips and the shipping label on the box was addressed to me, so the packaging was no help in identifying the culprit. More importantly though, why would someone send me these sodas? Was it a message--an edible insult, perhaps? Did I just find out that I had the world's geekiest stalker? The box was heavy on calories, but short on answers².

The mystery persisted until a friend of mine took a closer look at the package and noticed the listed phone number wasn't mine. The number that was there sounded familiar, though, and a quick check of my cell's phone book gave me an answer: the person who sent me a box full of sugar and embarrassment was none other than my own brother. I then sent him the following text:

I just received the soda. You are a dork.

A few minutes later, he replied:

If I'm a dork, why are you the one with a box of Magic themed soda in your house?

I suppose the lesson here is that no matter how many miles separate you or how many adult responsibilities you take on, there's no outgrowing the pleasure of antagonizing a sibling.

Also, as further proof that I have no sense of shame, I served those sodas to guests at a barbecue the next day.

¹Yes, I'm well aware that there are several contexts in which a pipe bomb would be very useful indeed, but I'm trying to write a post here that won't get me red-flagged by the FBI.

² I know this is a terrible, groan-inducing sentence, but I can't bring myself to delete it. Call it perversity, but it fills me with an odd sense of pride³.

³ Before you ask, I have no idea if this endnote thing is going to end up being a regular thing. Chances are it's just a passing phase, much like bed wetting or storing the remains of last week's hitchhiker in the crawlspace. If my wife happens to be reading this, I'm just kidding, dear. There's no need to check the crawlspace. Or, for that matter, the tool chest in the closet, the cooler underneath the old tent in the carport, or the box of polaroids in the back of the filing cabinet. On second thought, it might be best if you just forgot this post ever happened.

festina lente

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:07:00 +0000

When I started my novel writing project, I thought it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to figure out. After all, I had plenty of prior experience writing short fiction, poetry, academic papers--hell, I'd even taught writing courses. How much different could a novel possibly be?

As I've come to learn over the last few months, a whole lot different. After all of my early novel starts hit dead end after dead end, I tried consulting some books on novel writing (typical researchaholic thinking, I suppose: when in doubt, hit the books). I'll spare you all a tedious recounting of each and every book I consulted, but the one that had the biggest impact was No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the guy who started National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it's more commonly known, but I hate cutesy abbreviations so I refuse to call it that). No Plot? No Problem! advocates writing novels in a breakneck, marathon fashion wherein the goal is the completion of a 50,000 word manuscript with a deadline of thirty days. To this end, Baty offers plenty of tips and strategies and makes the whole thing sound fun and interesting, which it is, at least at first.

When I tried Baty's method, I managed to produce plenty of text, but about two weeks in I began to realize that the increased output didn't matter because every last thing I wrote was crap. Not a damn bit of it was usable, and I ended up discarding everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to badmouth the approach--according to the National Novel Writing Month website, in the last ten years over 70,000¹ participants have met the 30 day/50,000 word deadline, so it's clearly effective for some writers. What the experience underscored for me was that other people's writing strategies were just that: strategies that worked for other people. I needed to learn how I write novels, and the only person who could teach me that was me.

I began trying out writing strategies of my own devising, mixing and matching various techniques and schedules, and in the process discovered a great many ways how not to write a novel. But I stuck with it, and a few weeks ago I finally hit on a solution that works for me: notes. I don't mean a few here and there, I mean lots of notes. Tons of notes. Notes piling in snowdrifts around the room and threatening to trap pets and small children in avalanches. Okay, so maybe my note output isn't quite that out of control, but on average I write about three to five pages of notes for every one page of fiction. The reason for that disparity is partly because writing all those notes gets helps me get rid of the squirrely extraneous stuff bouncing around in my head so that it doesn't muck up the fiction, but mostly it's because writing them forces me to justify to myself each and every writing decision I make. If I can't identify a solid reason a scene needs to exist, or a plausible motivation for a character's actions, then the idea in question doesn't get written. I talk myself out of writing a great many things these days, but the things that do get written are more effective, more substantial. And best of all, I rarely have to discard anything.

¹Granted, the National Novel Writing Month website lists only 37 participant-written novels that have gone on to be published, giving the whole endeavor a discouraging .0005% publication rate, but I have a feeling the written to published ratio isn't much better for all the non-marathon written novels written out there.

marital interlude

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:24:00 +0000

I've been neglecting to post much of anything here in the last few months, but for once I have a pretty good excuse: I'm getting married on July 25th, so arranging, planning, financing, and contstructing all the wedding-related stuff has taken priority. So it goes.

I've been keeping up with my writing elsewhwere, though. The novel writing is progressing slowly but surely, and tomorrow the first part of a four-part article I wrote concerning 4-3 and 3-4 defensive schemes will be published over on Seahawk Addicts, a Seahawks fan blog I've been editing for the last year or so.

I'll be sure to tell you all how things went when I get back on the 31st, but until then hooray for writing, double hooray for marriage, and go Seahawks!

"ye olde" should be grounds for a justifiable homicide defense

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:01:00 +0000

I am most likely alone in this sentiment, but I get inordinately angry every time I see "Ye Olde" written on a shop sign. And no, it isn't because "Ye Olde" is a sad, overused marketing ploy meant to imbue a store with a certain sense of age and pedigree that in reality only succeeds in insulting the intelligence of everyone involved, although that is a pretty good reason for hating the living hell out of the phrase.

I hate "Ye Olde" because everyone insists on pronouncing "Ye" as "ye" when it's actually pronounced "the." Yes, that's right: "ye" is just "the" wearing an idiotic wig and glasses.

This whole mix-up began with the original version of English, which historians have creatively named Old English. Aside from sounding like a sort of Scandinavian German, Old English also made use of several letters that are no longer around today:

Ææ - ash, which makes the same sound as "ae"

Œœ - ethel, which makes the same sound as "oe"

Ƿƿ - wynn, which sounds exactly like "W"

Ȝȝ - yogh, which makes the same sound as "Y" when it isn't busy sounding like "X" or "W"

Đđ - eth, which sounds like "th," and

Þþ - thorn, which also sounds like "th" but was a much more popular letter than eth.

Most of these either fell out of use early enough to not cause much trouble (yogh, eth, wynn) or were just other letters glued together and thus relatively easy to exchange (ash and ethel). Thorn is the exception, as it managed to survive just long enough to ensure that centuries later I would want to murder random shopkeepers.

You see, the first printing presses were made in continental Europe, not England, and as a result nobody thought to crank out a batch of the English language's wonky special letters. As a work-around, printers substituted a Y whenever they needed a Þ, and sometime in the intervening years everyone decided that it was time to retire thorn and just use "th" instead.

I can't help but wonder if those printers would have made a different choice in typography if they'd known that a few hundred years later a bunch of business types would decide it was a good idea to ape old timey spelling in their store names without actually knowing a damn thing about how any of those old timey spellings were meant to be pronounced.

"I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:57:00 +0000

J.G. Ballard
1930 - 2009

productivity via anachronism

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Has it really been that long since I posted here last? Time flies when you're recovering from surgery, I suppose. Anyway, I am still not dead, in case anyone was curious.

In the last couple months, I've been trying to solve a problem I've been having with my writing output. You see, I write most easily with a keyboard, but the keyboard I am using to type this post has a flaw, and that flaw is being attached to a big, time-sucking distraction: the internet. The easiest answer to this issue (aside from just canceling my internet service, which isn't going to happen) is to grab one of the dozens of legal pads scattered throughout the house and go sit out on the porch to write everything longhand, but that isn't without its flaws either, the main one being that I grasp pens between my thumb and forefinger like a hamfisted toddler (see picture) which makes my hand cramp up long before I'm done jotting down scenes and ideas.

So, I've been stuck choosing between writing via keyboard (potentially higher output, but with great temptation for distraction) and writing via hand (no distraction, but far less output per writing session), and for the most part I've done both in rotation in the hope that things would even out. Then a few weeks ago lawyer fiancee talked me into accompanying her to an estate sale to both look for decorative things to use in our wedding this summer (which was the main draw for her) and comb through the dead person's house for awesome cheap books (which was how she sold me on the excursion). We ended up leaving that sale with a handful of books, zero wedding decorations, and this $5 answer to all my writing productivity woes:

I wasn't sure why I was buying it at first. I mean, who the hell uses a typewriter these days? Plus, it isn't like that ugly 70s two-tone yellow & brown color scheme is terribly attractive, so it wasn't going to be used as a decoration. But then I tried writing with it one day, and I've been addicted ever since--all the benefits of a keyboard, none of the distraction of an internet connection. Perfect! Typewriter ribbons are still readily available and reasonably priced, so I don't have to worry about this being just a temporary solution.

I guess all I had to do was look for something that, technology-wise, fell squarely between the computer and the pen. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but back when I was planning on becoming an engineer (a plan that lasted until I realized 'round about three dimensional calculus just how much I hated math), my uncle the electrical engineer gave me a framed list of engineering rules to live by as a gift. Even after I switched over to English, I kept hanging it up on the wall in every place I lived because that damn list refused to stop being right about everything, and this time was no exception: "In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point." Well said, engineering rule list. Well said.

Besides, nothing will make you feel more like a writer than filling a house with typewriter sounds. CLACK CLACK CLACK-CLACK CLACK DIIIINNGGG

in case you were wondering what it might be like to grow up without a sense of irony

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:35:00 +0000

apologia pro mea...uh...what's the latin word for absence?

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:06:00 +0000

As per usual, I have been negligent in my blog-updating duties for the last month or so. Along with the usual holiday travel merry-go-round, I've had some health issues that included some time in the hospital--I'll have to have a surgery (likely sometime in early February), but it's nothing serious. Bottom line, I will be fine and ready to get back to neglecting to update this blog in no time at all.

In other news, I'm finding that learning how to write a novel is heavy on the trial and error (particularly error), but I'm enjoying the process immensely. Did I mention the whole getting married thing? If not, I am getting married sometime in July. Life is good (aside from the hospital stuff I mentioned, I mean, but I suppose that depends on how much you like subsisting on Jell-O).

Oh, and Happy New Year's Eve--here's hoping all of you enjoy your small corner of the international drunken debauch tonight. See you next year!

P.S. I just looked it up--the word is absentia, apparently.

pretty much says it all

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:33:00 +0000

Writing and literature can wait--for now, I give you this, courtesy of CNN:

historical drift

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:06:00 +0000

One of the reasons I love to buy old fiction anthologies is because tastes in literature change so much over time. Take a look inside an anthology that was published even just twenty or thirty years ago and you'll be sure to find more than a few authors whose work has since fallen out of favor for any number of reasons. Some we no longer read because our cultural sensibilities have changed (Rudyard Kipling's racist imperialism makes for an uncomfortable read these days), some because they've been overshadowed by other writers from the same time period (Ford Madox Ford is the poster child for this), some because of a sadly petty resentment of the praise and success they'd previously enjoyed that leads many to drastically downplay their importance (Ernest Hemingway is currently the target of just such a backlash), and some are simply forgotten in the shuffle (Laurence Sterne? William Gaddis? John Gower?).

The non-literary parts of history are also susceptible to the exact same shifts in contemporary taste. Recently, I've been reading The Development of Modern Europe by James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, a college history textbook published in 1907. For your reading pleasure, here are the two passages from Robinson and Beard's preface that made me start thinking about this subject:

It has been a common defect of our historical manuals that, however satisfactorily they have dealt with more or less remote periods, they have ordinarily failed to connect the past with the present. And teachers still pay a mysterious respect to the memory of Datis and Artaphernes which they deny to gentlemen in frock coats, like Gladstone and Gambetta. The gloomy incidents of the capture of Numantia are scrupulously impressed upon the minds of children who have little chance of ever hearing of the siege of Metz. The organization of the Achæan League is given preference to that of the present German Empire
. . .
In preparing the volume in hand, the writers have consistently subordinated the past to the present. It has been their ever-conscious aim to enable the reader to catch up with his own times; to read intelligently the foreign news in the morning papers; to know what was the attitude of Leo XIII toward the social democrats even if he has forgotten that of Innocent III toward the Albigenses.

If you recognized more than two or three of the names above, then you've got a far better grasp of history than I. I don't really have anything else to add, other than that it continually amazes me how much knowledge falls off the back of the cart while we're all busy piling new stuff on the front. So, in lieu of insightful analysis or any sort of real definable conclusion to this post, here is a wholly unrelated picture of former Canadian PM Jean Chretien strangling a protester:

you should probably run

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:48:00 +0000

The following has absolutely nothing to do with literature or writing or anything else. It is, however, the most delightfully surreal thing I have seen in a long, long time:

apologia pro mea haerese

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:49:00 +0000

Okay, so it took me a month to get around to this post, but after a nice long rest (and a win by the Seahawks, woo-hoo!) I figured it was time to get back to it. And by "it," I mean that explanation of literary analysis I promised I would write. So, here goes:

What the Hell Is Literary Analysis?
or
What Is It That You Liberal Arts People Even Do, Anyway?

Whenever we read a book or poem or comic book or whatever, part of what makes up the reading experience is the reaction we have to the content of what we're reading. And by reaction, I'm talking both intellectual and emotional--even if a given work only makes us feel bored or indifferent, that's still a legitimate reaction evoked by our interaction with the text. What literary analysis does on its most basic level is examine a given text through a good old-fashioned close reading in order to better understand what it was that made us react to it in the way that we did--in other words, analysis simply entails all the things that we can see and read into a given work.

Most people who don't understand the analytical process think of it as a sort of literary scavenger hunt, wherein people like me wade through the words in order to find the one correct meaning for the text at hand. What they don't understand is that there is no one right meaning. I cannot stress this enough. If you don't believe me, drop by a couple of churches this evening and ask each of the ministers to explain to you the meaning of a few key passages from scripture; I guarantee that you'll hear more than a few different ideas about what those particular words mean, and several of those will likely contradict each other entirely. Think about it: if multiple interpretations exist for a holy book that's been endlessly scrutinized by legions of clergymen and scholars over the course of hundreds if not thousands of years, then chances are all those non-holy books out there can have a few different ways of looking at 'em, too.

I'm tempted to say that every analysis of a text is equally valid no matter how much they contradict each other, but just like that tired old saw "there's no such thing as a stupid question" the words barely have time to leave your lips before someone pipes up to ask the absolute dumbest question it's ever been your misfortune to hear. Likewise, there are plenty of analyses out there whose ludicrous statements are only matched by their complete inability to come to a point of any sort. Even so, the general idea that one analysis of a given work is just as valid as any other is a sound one more often than not, and it's a good concept to keep in mind.

And Now for a Brief Check-In with Reality

Now, all that is well and good, but is all this analysis strictly necessary? Do you have to be able to delve into a book and analyze its contents in order to enjoy it? Nope, not in the least. In fact, if all us lit-dork types were suddenly to die tomorrow from some sort of horrible book-borne illness I doubt it would matter much to the vast majority of the reading public, nor do I think that our loss would register as even a half-point blip on the Dow or any other economic index. Despite what your English teacher or Lit Prof may have told you, people can and do lead happy, fulfilling lives without ever once dirtying their hands by thinking about what all that stuff by Chaucer and Shakespeare et al was maybe trying to say.

What literary analysis can do for us is augment and enhance the natural response we already have to literature. Reading closely and deeply can reveal things about a work that you never would've noticed otherwise--a well-written novel can contain a staggering number of subtle, fascinating layers of connections and ideas and information, and poetry in particular is notoriously difficult to comprehend without multiple careful read-throughs. Analysis may not be necessary for you to enjoy a book, but it can and will deepen your reading enjoyment and appreciation for what the author is able to do. Plus, the better you get at it, the more accessible all those big, difficult, intimidating books out there will become.

Okay, This Analysis Thing Sounds Interesting, but How Do I Do It?

Granted, you may not be asking that question at all, but if you're still reading this post I'm going to assume that you're at least moderately interested in the subject. Besides, it's my blog and I get to do this up any way I want, so neener neener.

It's easy enough to say that literary analysis is a nice rewarding thing to do, but when you're first trying your hand at it the whole process can seem pretty daunting. In many respects, it feels a lot like being told to sit down and write a five-page essay on anything you like--having no limits at all has a tendency to freeze many people into total inaction. If instead the essay assignment asked you something more specific like "research and discuss several possible solutions for world hunger" you could get started on the assignment right away. Likewise, setting some limits on what you want to keep an eye out for in a given work will give you a starting point and a direction to follow.

For literary analysis, it is literary theory that provides the starting point and direction for the analysis. Think of theory as the ideological and/or methodological vantage point from which you begin your analysis; theory is merely the particular magnifying lens through which you view the text. From hereon out, I'll be spending the rest of the post introducing you to some of the major theories in brief, simplified form. By no means should you take this list as being authoritative or exhaustive--it's more of a appetizer sampler platter than a full-course meal. There's a whole lot more nuance to each and every one of these theories, and if someone asks I can go into more detail about a particular one. Until then, enjoy!

One last thing: not all of these theoretical approaches work equally well for every text, so don't make the mistake of swearing eternal allegiance to one and only one school of thought. Instead, think of each one as a different tool to add to your analytical toolbox--and remember, some jobs require more than one tool, so don't be afraid to mix and match approaches and viewpoints as you see fit. You can also find a list of books for further reading at the end of this post, in case you'd like to learn more on your own.

Here There Be Theories

Reader-Response Criticism
This one is the easiest of all the theories to understand. Reader-response criticism focuses on interpreting the work by examining how the reader reacts to it. After all, we're all individuals with our own unique set of experiences and behaviors and thoughts, and that is going to make our individual reactions to a text unique and highly personal. Say you read a story that makes you think about a trip to the zoo you took with your grandfather. What was it about the story that made you think about that trip? What do the two have in common? Did both make you feel the same way, or did something similar happen in the story and the trip? Or perhaps the story made you think about something else entirely, or simply made you feel a certain emotion. Examining the text to see what it was that made you feel or think the way you did is what reader-response criticism is all about.

Feminist Criticism
Feminist criticism is more of a group of loosely related approaches than a unified theory, but to a certain extent the same could be said of all these different theories. In general, feminist critics take issue with the way that women in literature tend to be stereotyped as "angels, bar maids, bitches, whores, brainless housewives, or old maids" (quoted from Bressler's book, page 154) and assert that the ways in which men and women are treated differently in a given text can and should be examined. Are women objectified more than men (i.e. do the character descriptions ogle the woman's breasts and butt but fail to extend the same eye-candy treatment to the man's anatomy?)? How are men and women treated differently by society in the work--do they experience different restrictions or expectations that are dependent on gender?

As an aside, feminist critics are also responsible for unearthing a great many women writers who have been unfairly ignored and forgotten over the years. If you've ever read anything by Kate Chopin or Mary Wollstonecraft or the Bronte sisters or a whole host of other women writers, you have feminist critics to thank for bringing them back to everyone's attention. As long as we're on the subject, How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ is a good, entertaining book dealing with all the various ways in which works by women have been marginalized and ignored over the years.

Marxist Criticism
While Marxism is concerned more with economic and social theory than literature, it does prove useful from time to time. A Marxist approach to literary analysis involves looking at a text in terms of social class and economics. Who is in charge, and who is doing the work? Do the characters have to earn a paycheck, or do unseen servants do all the work for them? What are the acceptable beliefs and behaviors in the society portrayed in the work, and who do those beliefs benefit more (if anyone)? From where does oppression arise in the text, and whom does it oppress and why?

New Historicism
This one is my personal favorite. New Historicism (and yes, there was an "Old Historicist" approach once upon a time) sees texts as products of their own time period--in order to better understand a novel by Dickens, for example, you would need to learn about the society and culture in Victorian England (especially with regard to how the poor were treated), just like you might want to study World War I to better understand All Quiet on the Western Front or read up on Hinduism and Ancient India before getting into the Bhagavad Gita. Books aren't written in a vacuum; every text has a social and historical context, and understanding that context will help you to understand the text. The New Historicist approach is especially useful to people who love to research things, but even in small doses it can prove eminently useful.

Let's take The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, for example. When the novel was published in the mid-1880s, slavery had only been outlawed twenty years previously, and the casual racism and bigotry espoused by many of Twain's characters was very much alive and well. Indeed, the perceived racism of the book is the main reason that so many modern readers have tried to get it banned from schools and libraries, although when the book was first published people tried to get it banned because they found its usage of ungrammatical dialogue offensive (they were perfectly okay with the racism, apparently). However, after doing even just a single Google search worth of research, one learns that Twain wasn't espousing racist views in his novel, he was attacking them. Quite a difference a little research makes, no?

Psychoanalytic Criticism
I don't have much to say about this one, except that Freud based more than a few of his psychological theories on literature (like his Oedipal Complex, taken from Oedipus Rex by Sophocles) and his method for interpreting dreams is essentially literary analysis wearing glasses and a fake mustache. Also, doing a Freudian reading of a text (where you more or less try to read as much dirty, kinky stuff into the work as possible) is hilarious and works really well on Emily Dickinson poems.

...Okay, so there's a little more to be said. Psychoanalytic Criticism does do a good job of pointing out that certain things like symbols (crosses, swastikas, etc.), colors, certain jobs (doctors, police, etc.), and various abstract concepts (death, motherhood, etc.) carry with them meanings and emotions that are universal for everyone (or at least everyone in a given culture). These symbols are called archetypes, and a great many works are simply lousy with them.

Deconstructionism
Oh man, do I really have to try to explain Deconstructionism? I should warn you that reading anything by the people who came up with this approach is an invitation to an aneurysm, but there is one simple deconstructionist lesson that you can use without too many headaches: beware of taking binary pairs (i.e. opposites) for granted. In our language we tend to define concepts in pairs of opposites like "good" versus "bad" or "hot" versus "cold," and we almost always see one of the two as being superior to the other. That isn't too much of a problem with a binary pair like "good" versus "bad," as you probably won't find many people who would argue that "good" isn't preferable to "bad." The trouble starts when we look at other binary pairs like "man" versus "woman," "Christian" versus "Muslim," "Englishman" versus "Frenchman," and "gay" versus "straight"--in each of these cases, an awful lot of very serious problems (including more than a few wars) have resulted from one concept being viewed as being somehow better than the other. When you notice one of these binary pairs in a given text, try asking yourself these two questions: which of the two concepts in the pair is being privileged, and what are the problems that may (or did) arise from that?

For Further Reading
Introductory Overviews:
Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics
Booker, M. Keith. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism
Bressler, Charles. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice
Harmon, William. A Handbook to Literature (not an overview per se, but a good dictionary of literary terms)
Anthologies of Lit Theory Essays:
Letich, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Richter, David H. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends

wherefor literary analysis?

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:34:00 +0000

The next subject I'll be dealing with on this blog is literary analysis. A great many resources exist on how to go about it--resources like every English major program in existence and the entirety of literary theory--but if you're wondering why literary analysis and its ilk deserve to exist at all, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to find a real, substantial answer.

It irritates me to no end when scholarly-type stuff simply assumes that its raison d'etre is so patently obvious that it needs no explanation--which leads to a lovely situation in which anyone who doesn't understand why it exists is worried that he or she will be branded an idiot if they do ask, so nobody does. I guess you could say I'm a big fan of something Irving Langmuir once said: "Any person who can't explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan."

If there's something in particular you'd like to ask or have explained regarding lit analysis (or anything else, for that matter), go ahead and ask. The teacher in me loves to have a good question to answer.

take that, puny insects

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:08:00 +0000

We have (well, had) a problem with ants trooping through the skylight in the master bathroom at our new place and tromping all over the countertop. Sunday, I bought a bag of diatomaceous earth (which is composed of the fossilized remains of the microscopic buggers you see in the picture) and dusted the countertop with some yesterday, just to see how well it works.

There is now a desiccated ant graveyard surrounding the sink, and no ants crawling through the skylight. This shit be awesome.

modernism and postmodernism, part two

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:16:00 +0000

In part one, I discussed modernism (link), and now in part two I will be covering postmodernism. As I mentioned last time, there are elements in postmodernism that are continuations of what modernism started, but it also has other traits which are wholly its own, so the separation between the two isn't terribly clear cut. To refresh everyone's memory (both yours and mine), here's a quick rundown of some of modernism's chief characteristics:

rough timeframe: WWI - 1960s
focus on blue collar, working class characters (response to Victorian focus on upper class)
more taboo/risque subject material used--sex, adultery, etc. (response to Victorian prudishness)
WWI had major impact on trust in government and church; industrial revolution led to increased feelings of alienation, oppression
epistemological focus (epistemology: concerned with knowledge about being or existence and the ways in which this knowledge is obtained--or fails to be obtained)
sister genre: detective fiction (also has epistemological focus)

Let us start with the second and third points in the above list. Just as the modernists turned their attention to the working class, the postmodernists turned their attention to even more marginalized groups: minorities, homosexuals, the homeless, the insane, and so on. Likewise, the modernists' usage of taboo subject matter has been greatly amplified by the postmodernists, as anyone who has read a novel by William S. Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon can attest. Drug addiction is a common plot element in postmodern fiction (Naked Lunch by Burroughs,; Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace), but so are sexual extremes like incest (The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison), necrophilia (Child of God by Cormac McCarthy), and sadomasochism (Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon). However, I would like to stress that in very few, if any, of these works are these behavioral extremes glorified or celebrated. If anything, these subjects tend to be broached by postmodern authors because ignoring them doesn't make them go away. They are extremes, yes, behaviors shunned and despised by the vast majority of humanity, but nevertheless they remain behaviors that can and do still occur--there always have been people ready and willing to do such things (if you don't believe me, read about Nero or Caligula in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars or Thomas Granger in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, to cite a couple of examples off the top of my head), and there always will be.

Just as a large part of the impetus for modernism was born in the trenches of World War I, some of postmodernism's origin can be found in the Second World War. By the 1930s and 40s, the creeping dread of the industrial revolution had given way to a starry-eyed optimism about the power of science--that is, until WWII crushed that hope. As Kurt Vonnegut explains in Palm Sunday,

An enthusiasm for technological cures for almost all forms of human discontent was the only religion of my family during the Great Depression...But I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

. . .
How sick was the soul revealed by the flash at Hiroshima? And I deny that it was a specifically American soul. It was the soul of every highly industrialized nation on earth, whether at war or at peace. How sick was it? It was so sick that it did not want to live anymore. What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so "destabilized," to borrow a CIA term, that the briefest fit of stupidity could easily guarantee the end of the world?

In short, people believed in the power of science to cure humanity's ailments...and then they watched science get dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and learned that the Holocaust was made possible by marrying genocide to modern factory technology. The world learned once again that science could hurt just as easily as it could heal.

World War II was followed soon thereafter by the Korean War (which ended in an armed standoff that endures to this day), the Vietnam War (the effects of which need no explanation), and the simmering paranoia of the Cold War. Add to that Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Iran-Contra scandal, and all the other myriad political scandals over the last several decades and starting in the 1960s you get a cultural environment in which public distrust of the government is a foregone conclusion. Not only that, conspiracy theory grew from being a pastime of the lunatic fringe to being on the verge of mainstream acceptance, and all that disillusionment, distrust, and paranoia is a major element in works by Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, and many other postmodern authors. And if that wasn't enough, the back-to-back assassinations of Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy in the space of a few short years made it expressly clear that, despite all its innovations and scientific breakthroughs, the human race is still rife with intolerance, hatred, bigotry, and violence.

Postmodern fiction is also marked by an acute sense of the constructedness of history--just as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle pointed out the fallacy of there ever being a completely objective vantage point from which to view and measure scientific experiments, there are no outside viewpoints from which to objectively view and record human history. Crack open any American history book from the 1990s or earlier, and the history you will be treated to is largely that of white Americans--and more recent textbooks’ attempts to fix this problem are lukewarm at best. Where in all that history are the blacks, the American Indians, the Hispanics, the Asians, the Jews, the homosexuals? Where are their historical experiences in all of this? Thanks in large part to several sweeping cultural changes over the last fifty years--Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement, the Bureau of Indian Affairs' switch in focus from assimilation to self-determination, reparations for Japanese internment during WWII, increasing public and political pressure on the Gay Rights and Immigration Reform fronts, etc.--one of the main goals of postmodern fiction has been to give voice to those marginalized voices, and in some cases even attempt to write them back into an historical narrative they never should have been written out of in the first place. It is to that end that Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gerald Vizenor, Joseph Heller, Ricardo Martin Cruz, J.M. Coetzee, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others have devoted the majority of their literary output.

This awareness of the constructed nature of any narrative has also led authors like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson to call into question the idea of journalistic objectivity, and the same thing can be seen in the blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction in novels like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. So as you can see, although modernist fiction (and its sister genre, detective fiction) were highly interested in epistemological concerns, postmodern fiction turns its attention further inward to question even the most basic assumptions about the world. That’s right, it’s time for yet another big word straight out of Philosophy 101: ontology. Whereas epistemology is focused on studying knowledge about being and existence and how that knowledge can be obtained, ontology is focused on studying the nature or essence of being and existence, i.e. things that defy epistemological queries because they are by their very nature things that cannot be measured or quantified, things like the nature of reality or identity. If it sounds to you like there isn’t much difference between epistemology and ontology, you’re right: these two branches of philosophy are pretty much two sides of the same coin. Both are interested in more or less the same subject matter, but epistemology looks outward for answers while ontology looks inward. It’s this ontological focus that’s responsible for much of the ambiguity and confusion and narrative fragmentation found in so many postmodern texts--the trusted old linear detective’s method of collecting evidence and puzzling out clues doesn’t do much good when the question at issue is something as intangible as the sterility of one’s existence (The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon) or as all-encompassing and inescapable as the reliability of empirical reality (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Dick).

Another interesting effect of all this heightened cultural analysis and self-awareness is a marked streak of self-reflexiveness in postmodern fiction--in other words, postmodern novels tend to be novels that know they're novels. Granted, self-reflexiveness in fiction is nothing new—Laurence Sterne used it throughout his wildly eccentric novel Tristram Shandy in the mid-18th Century, and in the early 17th Century Miguel Cervantes worked it into the opening chapters of Book Two of Don Quixote--but never before the postmodern era had self-reflexive fiction existed in such profusion. For a good example of this literary device, see Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut, which includes a scene in which the author writes himself into the book so that he can sit in a corner of a crowded lounge and watch his characters move and act as he simultaneously writes the story, worrying all the while that doing things this way probably means that he is schizophrenic. In another famously self-reflexive moment, B.S. Johnson interrupts his novel Albert Angelo towards the end of the book both to explain what he was trying to achieve in writing it as well as explain to the reader his core belief about writing fiction: "Telling fiction is telling lies."

Another reason for all the experimentation and playfulness in postmodern fiction is that it draws a heavy influence from the visual arts. While the modernists were busy doing their own thing in literature, avant-garde artists like the Dadaists,

Surrealists,

and Futurists were doing their best to rethink the ways in which we see the world--why stick with the way everyone has been copying the realism of the old masters, when you can do something new and exciting? Why do we have to keep making our art the same way we've always made it? This same yearning for innovation is widely prevalent among postmodern authors--as Jeff Noon explains in his writer's manifesto (link),

Almost every novel published this year will use a template invented three centuries ago, and set in stone during the Victorian age.

. . .
The narrative fabric of the latest cult movie is woven through with jump cuts, freeze-frames, montage, slow motion shots, tracking shots, hand-held camera techniques, and the like. House, hip-hop and garage recordings contain elements of remixing, scratching and sampling.

We can also look at the branching narratives of computer games, at the strange connections that hypertext links reveal on the internet, at the games played with image and text in a graphic novel.

All of these are fluid mediums, for a fluid society. Set against such material, no wonder the contemporary novel seems moribund. As writers, we need to open ourselves up to this fluidity. What are the prose equivalents of the tracking shot, the hyperlink, the remix, the freeze-frame? As readers, we need to bring the expertise we use when enjoying a film or a piece of visual art into our appreciation of the novel.

Multiple other expressions of this same sentiment have resulted in the widespread experimentation with the formal structure of the novel that we see today by postmodern authors. Some of these experiments are limited to the structure of the narrative, like the nonlinear format of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or the achronological sequence of chapters in Heller's Catch-22. Others prefer to tinker with the physical construction of the novel, as seen in Mark Z. Danielewski's typographical experiments House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, or in B.S. Johnson's more radical experiments like cutting holes in the pages of Albert Angelo or his infamous unbound book-in-a-box The Unfortunates (which, coincidentally, as of last month is once again in print and available in its original format: link to Amazon). Still others have taken a more systematic approach by deconstructing and rearranging the text of their work, as seen in Burroughs' usage of cut-up and fold-in techniques (as seen in The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) and Jeff Noon's own Cobralingus method (which he explains in detail in Cobralingus). This experimental mood has also led to the blurring of the demarcation between pop art and high art, as seen in the comic book medium used by Art Speigelman to write his Maus books, Ricardo Martin Cruz's prolific use of rap slang and imagery in Straight Outta Compton, and Noon’s usage of electronic music rhythms and remixes in Needle in the Groove.

And just like last time, if some of you are thinking this whole spiel is only relevant to upscale martini-sippin' tenure-havin' literature, then you'll be interested to know that just like modernist fiction and detective fiction, postmodern fiction also has a sister genre: science fiction. Like postmodern fiction, science fiction took off in a big way after WWII helped to make terms like "atomic" and "radiation" household words. And if you thought postmodern fiction was heavily dependent on ontology, science fiction is even more so: time travel, dystopian futures, parallel dimensions, the environments of other planets, all of these are essentially story devices that tweak with the universe as we know it at a fundamental (i.e. ontological) level. As such, there is a great deal of bleed-through between postmodern fiction and science fiction, and an awful lot of debate along with it as to which books belong to which category, although most of this debate tends to center around authors objecting to their work being labeled science fiction. Vonnegut describes this dilemma rather adroitly in his essay "Science Fiction" (which you can find in his book Wampeter, Foma, & Granfalloons):

Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines . . . And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I did not know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.

Urinal or no, works by a great many authors have found themselves firmly entrenched in both the science fiction and postmodern sides of the literary restroom. Nobody is going to argue that Philip K. Dick or Gene Wolfe, for example, aren't science fiction writers, but a great many of their novels (like Dick's VALIS and Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy) also evidence the same self-reflexiveness and narrative experimentation that are so prevalent in postmodern fiction. Likewise, William S. Burroughs and Italo Calvino are clearly postmodern authors, but both have written novels (like Burrough's Nova Express and Calvino's Cosmicomics) that make extensive use of ostensibly sci-fi tropes like aliens, rockets, and space travel. Some critics have chosen to take the easy way out by arbitrarily designating authors as being purely sci-fi or postmodern, but in doing so miss out entirely on the complexities to be found in the hundreds of works that span both genres.

Both science fiction and postmodern fiction have also been heavily influenced by the proliferation of high tech devices in the last few decades. Indeed, the computer I'm using to create this post (via an internet connection, no less) far outstrips the technologies found in science fiction works written just a few decades ago (for example, the android in Dick's story "The Electric Ant," whose program is fed to him by a punch tape, or the judicial supercomputer in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man whose vacuum tubes have to be warmed up for a few minutes prior to use)--compared to those, I already appear to be living in a highly science fictional future! As such, postmodern fiction is heavily laced with the technological gadgets that already fill our homes (like DeLillo's focus on the ubiquitous presence of television in White Noise and Americana) along with explorations of the effect these devices have had on our lives at an ontological level. In science fiction, the cyberpunk subgenre in particular explores much the same subject of technology and its effects on us--and judging by the foreboding worlds found in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) and Samuel R. Delany's apocalyptic Dhalgren, the effect isn't necessarily a positive one.

And yes, Delany and Gibson have been accused more than once of being postmodern authors, too--honestly, sometimes I think the line between postmodern fiction and science fiction has become so blurred that at times I wonder what the practical use of distinguishing between the two really is. But, that's a discussion for another time--for now, if you have any more questions about postmodernist fiction, modernist fiction, or any request for another -fiction you would like to see discussed, feel free to respond in the comments.

Update (posted 10/27/08): a new reader, stacy, has been kind enough to point out some interesting caveats and criticisms with regard to my definition of postmodernism. You can read stacy's remarks by looking at the comments for this post. Thank you, stacy!

the calm before the pomo

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Before I get to the big post that's been lurking for awhile, I just wanted to take a moment to answer the question Dwight asked me a couple days ago (or rather, the machine gun burst of several questions he asked all at once). Back in February, I met a woman who is insanely awesome. We hit it off immediately--technically, our first date lasted an entire weekend, if that tells you anything. She's smart, literate (you should see our combined library), gorgeous, funny, and will hereinafter be referred to in this blog as Lawyer Girlfriend (y'know, since she's a lawyer and all). She also has two girls (ages seven and eleven) who are both pretty damn awesome in their own right. As of a week or two ago, all four of us now live together in a nice little house in a quiet neighborhood. There's also a palm tree out front, but that's neither here nor there. In short, life is good.

The long-delayed post on postmodernism will show up sometime later today. I've been feeling healthy enough the last few days to resume working on it, but I also managed to slice off part of one of my fingers the other day while chopping vegetables (including a respectable piece of fingernail), so typing has been going slower than usual.

the ghost phone

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:39:00 +0000

Hello again, everyone. Things are starting to stabilize again health-wise, but if it was only my health that was keeping me from blogging I would have been back a week ago. Unfortunately, I also had to deal with the technological undead--a phone line from beyond the grave, if you will.

My girlfriend and I just moved into a place together--a home big enough to house both her girls and my books--so we had to go through the usual rigmarole of transferring utilities and services to the new residence. Power, garbage, and water were no trouble, but then we discovered that the last tenant had failed to turn off her phone line. Normally, this would simply be a matter of contacting the previous person and reminding them to shut off the service . . . except in this case that wasn't going to be accomplished without breaking out the ouija boards and lighting some candles.

You see, the last person who lived here forgot to turn off her phone due to a slight case of death. So, although she clearly no longer lived at the home (or anywhere else, for that matter), it was the phone company's stance that her line should live in memoriam until such time as her next of kin could be contacted to turn it off. I finally succeeded in doing just that, only to find out when the technician showed up to set up my internet connection that the zombie line had somehow survived the cancellation order. It figures--out of all the undead phones that could have chosen to haunt me, I got stuck with one that was bent on sticking around for a few sequels.

I spent an hour or two on the phone with a bored man at a call center, after which I was told a stake had been put through the damned thing's heart. Only, not so much--it finally took another on-site tech armed with patience and a long list of phone numbers for people in the know to exorcise the stupid thing, and even then he had to spend an hour and a half making calls to people in a wide swath of different states.

So yes, the hell-spawned unlife has been extinguished, and in its place is internet access for the living. Now all I have to do is finish that two-parter I started--stay tuned...

health

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:36:00 +0000

Those of you who've been reading this blog for awhile already know this, but for the last year I have been slowly recovering from complications brought on by some old neck injuries. If you've been wondering why it's taken me so long to get to the second half of that modernism/postmodernism post, it's because I've been experiencing more problems than usual lately. It's nothing to worry about, just the regular ebb and flow of recovery--the frequency of my posts on this blog tends to have a direct correlation to how I'm doing health-wise.

The good news is, I'm starting to do better again, and if this keeps up I'll finally be able to put up the second half of that post and move on to another topic. I can always come up with literary topics on my own, but I do take requests if there's something in particular you'd like to know.

See you in a bit!

update later this week

noreply@blogger.com (M.) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:55:00 +0000

I'm knee-deep in end of quarter academical obligations at the moment, but modernism and postmodernism part two should be up and available by the end of this week, if not sooner.

Also, I picked a template that devoted more screen real estate to actual posts and less to the links off to the side. Hooray, etc.

Okay, back to Suetonius...