quacks like a blog, dances like a book-lover

[truepenny]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden says it for me and says it better:

At the moment, really, the most rational possible reaction to the Bush administration's national-security policy is to light one's hair on fire and run down the street screaming about Jesus.

But in lieu of that, you can always attend a candlelight vigil near you. (Link found via the incomparable Mesile.)

***

Bookslut led me to this one. Britain's Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (here complaining about how these kids today don't read the classics) has a list of books for creative writing students to read. Here's his list, along with reactions by a variety of people.

Now I looked at this list:

Motion's must-reads
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Ulysses by James Joyce
Emma by Jane Austen
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Waterland by Graham Swift
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

And I admit, my first thought was, Huh?

I've read five of the nine, the first five to be exact. All of them except Emma I read because they were on the reading list for my Master's Exam. (Emma I read 'cause I'm geeky like that and I wanted to.) Now, my Department and its Program are admirable in many many ways, but "radical" and "cutting edge" are really not words one would choose to describe them. (Jane Austen's on the M.A. reading list, too, but the book IIRC is Pride and Prejudice.) So can we say, Hello canon? Yeah, we can. We can say it real loud and maybe bust somebody's eardrum, too.

The four books I haven't read are the twentieth century literature part, and the chief thing I notice about them (because I'm feeling bitchy and strident--but NEVER shrill--this morning) is that they're all men. So the list is 7 to 2 in favor of the men, and the two women represented are about as safely canonical as someone with two X chromosomes can be. (I love Jane and George, I do--tho' I love George more in the breach than in the observance--but they are not threatening. Not even a little.)

Granted, Motion's list is specifically meant to redress a perceived lack of familiarity with the canon (although he doesn't phrase it as such, and I'm kind of thinking that might not be an accident), but STILL. (I said I was feeling strident, right?) I'm also not quite sure what, besides being "well-rounded," which, frankly, Socrates, I don't think is a sufficient end in itself (there's no use in being "well-rounded" if it doesn't inform how you think and act and live), a creative writing student is supposed to gain from this list.

So I'm making my own list. Nine books, like Motion's, that I think are "classics" and creative writing students should have to read. Feel free to join in.

1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
2. Yes, okay, fine, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
4. Villette by Charlotte Bronte.
5. Bleak House by Charles Dickens [ETA OR Moby-Dick by Herman Melville].
6. [REVISED: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. You may substitute The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark if horror gives you the deep-down heebie jeebies.]
7. Watership Down by Richard Adams. (No, I'm not kidding.)
8. The Dead Zone by Stephen King. (I'm not kidding about this one, either.) [ETA OR Beloved by Toni Morrison.]
9. Wild Life by Molly Gloss. (Okay, not technically a classic yet, but it needs to be shoved in everybody's face until it BECOMES a classic, because it is that damn good.)

My list is more subversive than Motion's, but that's because I think the canon is a tool of oppression in the hands of the Western imperialistic, patriarchal, phallocentric literary regime which reifies text into fetish ... oh god I'm stopping before I hurt someone. What I mean is, I think the canon per se is bullshit (anything that makes me read James Fenimore Cooper in high school is arrant nonsense) and I think if one's going to make lists of this kind, they should not be REINFORCING THE GODDAMNED CANON, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK.

Anyway, that's my list. You can notice the strong slide toward the sfnal as we move into the latter half of the twentieth century, but that's because I think that's where the action's at. Sure I'm biased, but so is Motion.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, *blush*, because my memory of it has been so colored by the movie: (a.) Emma Thompson is amazing and (b.) I have a neon-pink irrational Thing for Alan Rickman. Also because Elinor is my favorite of Austen's heroines.

It wasn't a thoughtfully pondered critical decision, and I won't attempt to defend it. Pride and Prejudice would be a much more sensible choice.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

The movie of it is indeed MOST excellent. It reduces all that whining, weeping, lying insensible Marianne crap to her just checking eagerly for letters on several occasions. Most satisfying.

I've been collecting Austen movies on DVD. I chose the Thompson version of S&S (accept no substitutes!), the A&E miniseries of P&P (Colin Firth! Crispin Bonham-Carter! etc.), and the fairly recent PERSUASION movie with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. Couldn't decide on EMMA, though, and ended up getting both the Paltrow movie (mainly b/c of Jeremy Northam) and the A&E version. Am still pondering what to do about NORTHANGER ABBEY and MANSFIELD PARK. A friend recommended the recent kind of weird MP, but I want to see it before I buy. The only NH adaptation I've seen was a BBC one from the 80s.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The recent Mansfield Park is indeed very weird, although I quite liked it. Except for the problem I always have where I want her to end up with the rake (and that's just me). Fanny Price is rather a different person than she is in the book, but I tend to count that as an advantage.

Those are the only two I've seen, although I did startle and amuse my husband when, watching Clueless on cable in some motel room or other, I suddenly sat straight up and shrieked, "This is Emma!" (I live under a rock--all I'd known about Clueless was that it had Alicia Silverstone in it.) I like Clueless quite a bit better than I like Emma as a novel.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have seen no films, but you are not the only one who wants Fanny to end up with Henry Crawford.

I think Mansfield Park has the worst most unconvincing "told not shown" end of any book I have ever read. I know she backs away in P&P and Emma but good grief, after all that set up and all that detail, she says "Scarcely had he done regretting Mary Crawford, and observing to Fanny how impossible it was he should ever meet with such another woman, before it began to strike him that a very different kind of woman might do as well -- or a great deal better; whether Fanny herself were not growing as dear, as important to him in all her smiles, as Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love." (MP, Wordsworth Classics edition, p.468) Whereupon my suspension of disbelief goes whizzing out the window and ends up somewhere near Chichester -- did she have a page limit in which to finish the book, or what? Did she not dare have the brother and sister reform? The book should have had as long again to come to that conclusion, if it wanted to bring me there with it. Six pages of exposition, after carrying me all that way with soppy pious Fanny?

Every so often I manage to persuade myself that I have done it an injustice and read MP again, and every time it fills me with fury at that point, and I kkkkkt impatiently at Austen.

My favourite is Persuasion which makes a wonderful paired reading with Shards of Honor as books about grown up romances and the fortunes of war.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Persuasion is my wife's favourite Austen.

I've only managed to finish one of her books (P&P) because, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I find Austen's tone/style so annoying. I'm still at a loss to find a sympathetic character in P&P, with the possible exception of Jane. I get this incredible, barely contained anger from so much of her writing, even though it's couched in a seemingly light, mocking tone. Hell, even the opening sentence of Emma seems to mock her heroine even before she's fully introduced. But maybe I'm being over sensitive. I should probably have another go at the books.

You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Why? Why, why, why, why? Fanny is, I admit, a little bland - but what has she done in your eyes to deserve being landed with the most repellant character Jane Austen ever invented?

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, no, I don't actually, because he turns out to be scum.

But he's INTERESTING, and that tends to be my number-one criterion for ... well, for almost everything. This is why my favorite characters are always villains or antiheroes. it's why I adore Georgette Heyer's Venetia and have read it so many times it has its own private groove worn in the surface of my brain.

In general, Austen seems to have believed that interesting people make bad spouses. (That's the only reason I can think of to saddle Northanger Abbey Henry with clerical orders; clearly it tames him, makes him safer.) I don't believe this, and so when I read Austen I tend to end up reading against the text, sometimes rather violently. The exception is, of course, Pride and Prejudice, where even though I do think Darcy's rather boring, he's the most interesting character the book has to offer--except for Mr. Bennett, and even my perverted imagination recoils from THAT scenario.

But, especially in romance, and even more especially when the woman/viewpoint character is herself rather dull, I need the guy to be compelling. That's probably where that's coming from.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[papersky.livejournal.com]

And heck, he want to see her in Portsmouth, he offered to take her home, he was positively heroic that day. I don't think it's reading against the text to see him as a rake capable of reform. I think he'd had a bad upbringing and then been misunderstood. I also feel terribly sorry for poor Maria.

Austen is usually very much better than that at directing my sympathies, which is why I suspect she lost her nerve at the end, or couldn't have written a novel where Edward married Mary and Fanny marries Henry and Maria, in her unhappy marriage, becomes a lot like her Aunt Norris.

Why is that end -- the degree and amount of exposition in that end -- acceptable? Consider MP as if it were not hallowed canon, as if it had just been written and you were reviewing it -- would you think that was OK?

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

No. Because the point at which we realise that Henry is total unforgiveable scum is when he seduces and abandons Maria Crawford at a time when he is supposed to be unofficially pledged to Fanny - for no better reason than that Maria had the effrontery to act like she didn't love him any more. If Jane Austen had lost her nerve and not let Henry plunge to the doom his character flaws consign him to almost from his introduction, but rescued him and permitted him to be "reformed" by marrying Fanny, I think I would perpetually have felt a little disturbance in my mind about them, much as I feel about the early hero/heroine couples in Heyer: sure, it's okay now, but what about five or ten or twenty years down the line?

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

But Mister Bennett is a very dodgy piece of work (as a man, not as a well drawn character). A weak man who takes refuge in his library and takes pleasure in constantly undercutting and teasing his wife and younger daughters, who are so patently incapable of dealing with, or even understanding, his withering wit. Not a nice man at all.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I didn't say he was nice. I said he was INTERESTING.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I think I could get tired of his wit pretty bloody quickly in real life. But I take your point.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Well, no, I don't actually, because he turns out to be scum.

*brushes hand over forehead, sighs with relief* Yes, he is, isn't he? (By sheer coincidence, I decided to re-read Mansfield Park this morning, and by the time I got to the office, I'd remembered how much I dislike Henry Crawford.)

I do like Venetia (though have you noticed that the introducion of hero to heroine is performed in the same kind of style as in Regency Buck, but this time assuming that the heroine is a person in her own right and not a frightened teenager? I love the anti-hero in V - I loathe the hero in RB) but I have to admit that my two favourite Heyer husbands are Freddy in Cotillion and Adam in A Civil Contract. (But my absolute favourite Heyer man is the Duke of Avon... which sort of proves your point.)

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude, I hate EVERYBODY in Regency Buck. She's got a couple like that--April Lady is another--where I just want to tie them all in a sack and drop them in the Thames.

And I just realized that my whole interesting better than safe/dependable/lovable/etc. thing probably stems from having read Devil's Cub at a young and impressionable age and totally imprinted on it. Because the crush I had on Vidal--you could have navigated by it, I am not kidding.

I don't want Vidal any more. I want Damerel. But I agree that Avon is right up there in the ranking, along with Sir Tristram Shield and Sir Richard Wyndham. Not necessarily to marry, although I think Tristram and I could scrape along together tolerably well, but, you know, just to have. (Yes, I know, deplorable sexist blah blah objectification-cakes, but they're fictional characters. And I love them for their minds. *g*)

Really, I think Avon would drive me batshit, but he'd be a perfectly splendid fellow to have around.

Sister!

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hate everybody in Regency Buck. The lot of them. (In April Lady I can live with the two girls - I feel like at least they'd probably be better once they grew up - but everyone else? They've had their chance. Drown them.)

Vidal I never liked much - his sole good quality was that he almost appreciated Mary at her true worth. But the Duke of Avon? Wonderful. (I mean, hell on legs, but wonderful.)

The thing about Heyer is that she invents spectacular heroes and heroines whom one can love for their minds...

Re: Sister!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Remember, I was reading Devil's Cub at ... fourteen? Fifteen? I hadn't realized yet just how very completely I would hate being in a relationship with someone like him. I do actually think he's rather sweet--for a sociopath--and I love him for knowing he's in way over his head and still trying, doggedly, to do what he perceives of as the right thing. Come to think of it, Vidal's an awful lot like Spike ... which means I'm not actually over the whole bad boy thing after all. Damn.

But yes to the characters-you-can-love-for-their-minds thing. That's why I read (and reread and reread) her. And am developing this craving to go off and reread her again.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that the only person at all like that who I met in real life, I made a complete cake of myself over.

Re: You want Fanny to end up with HENRY CRAWFORD???

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Avon or Vidal?