Some of My Literary Scribblings

More Twilight writing: In honor of the release of the "New Moon" film, this post has a roundup of all my latest writing and quotes on the "Twilight" Saga.

Gail Collins' Whirlwind Tour Through Feminist History This is a review, in a feminist context, of Collins' new book.

New Arrivals: Novelist Rachel Sherman on Voicing Three Generations of Jewish Women--an interview with Sherman, author of the recently-released "Living Room"

And two book reviews from print pubs: Review of "Taking Back God," Bitch Magazine, Fall Issue 2009/ Review of "Wetlands" Venus Zine, Summer Issue 2009

Push, by Sapphire

Push by Sapphire


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love it when a book--any book--is hot property. This is certainly the case these days for "Push," which I bought from a book vendor on 125th street. because the title was so popular the weekend "Precious" came out he had to summon another vendor who came sprinting down the street, book in hand.

So is "Push" any good, hype aside? Yes. It's a quick read, and a painful read--Sapphire doesn't pull any punches and her heroine suffers every kind of tribulation imaginable--but I found it incredibly worthwhile first as an example of experimental narrative, second as an incredibly real window into a place and time and a person's psyche. Precious--the abused teen who tells our story-- improves her literacy as she writes, thanks to a second chance school and a visionary teacher, Blu Rain. This leads not only to a leap forward in her ability to tell her story as we read on, but also a new sense of self, an expansion of her goals, an ability to question, if not abandon, the things she repeated like a mantra early on in her tale. As in the film "Precious", you are witness to the awakening of a human being years into her life, "the birth of a soul" to steal the promotional copy.

More than the film, though, which aims for a certain degree of universality, Sapphire's "Push" is meant to really expose conditions in Harlem in the 1980s. This is evidenced by a lot of specific cultural references, but also by the book's coda, which is the collection of writing done by the girls in Precious's class. Each one of their stories rivals hers for horror and sadness, painting a picture of a lost generation of girls, a few of whom have found some light in the darkness by learning the tools of self-expression.

The book is valuable on its own, and is also an interesting counterweight to urban narratives of deprivation and redemption that have a male perspective, like my beloved "Down These Mean Streets."

View all my reviews >>

NYTBR on new Abigail Adams Biography

Abigail Adams, Founding Mother, By VIRGINIA DeJOHN ANDERSON, a review of a new biography by Woody Holton.

"In this account, the self-assertive wife of the second president often emerges as the dominant partner."

If you're anything like me (or you've seen "1776"), Abigail "remember the ladies" Adams is one of your heroines!

Zombies, Zombies, Everywhere--And Natalie Portman?

It seems that Natalie Portman will play the zombie-slaying, nunchuck-wielding, upper-crust gentleman bewitching, Mr. Collins-refusing Lizzie Bennet.

For my thoughts on the matter, I refer you to this previous post.
Any input on the casting, or too sick of the undead to care?

_________________________________

More Jane, and zombies, around the web (it never ends, readers!):

The Transcontinental Disability Choir: Pride & Prejudice & Ableism

People have been adapting and playing with the works of Jane Austen for decades, whether they're bringing them to life on the big screen and staying true to the novels, or taking the plots and characters in entirely new direction...

from Bitch Magazine Blogs

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the movie - undead in a theater near you!

Portman will co-produce with Annette Savitch.Natalie and I are longtime passionate fans of Jane Austen’s books and this a fresh, fun and thought-provoking way to approach her work,” Savitch said. .

from Jane Austen Today

Just in Time for Christmas: Pride and Prejudice and 30% More Zombies

This new leatherette edition boasts 30% more zombies in its expanded version, a new preface by coauthor Seth Grahame-Smith, and thirteen oil painting illustrations by Roberto Parada.Why does the publisher desire you to spend more money on this new edition? Becaus...

from Jane Austen Today

The Jane Austen Backlash!

Jane Austen, "vicious gossip?" Look, anyone who's read any Austen in school knows that there are plenty of people who will dismiss her as boring or trivial - in this regard, 19th century literary critics are rivaled only by 14-year-old boys.

from Jezebel

Today in Jane: Are you a zombie-spinoff lover, hater or both?

Confessions of a Jane Austen-Spinoff Addict: in Slate's Double X, by Sara Dabney Tisdale

(A review of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, which is totally on my Hannukah wishlist)

A sampling:

After all, every fan of Jane Austen fan thinks she is a real fan of Jane Austen – that her understanding of and empathy with Austen surpasses that of other readers, that she and she alone fully appreciates and savors Austen’s merits.

I say this because before I hated Jane Austen spinoffs, I adored them. No—I was addicted to them. But in both phases, I considered myself a Jane Austen snob.

Is it me, or have pop-cultural Austen references just been obliterating even Shakespeare references recently?

"Best" lists stink: Worst books of the decade?

What were your worst books of the decade?: "

It's all very well to make lists of the decade's best books, but surely the worst books would give future generations a truer glimpse of the 'noughties. Let's name and shame.

Thus asks Sam Jordison at the Guardian, who adds that he'd put nearly every single Booker Prize-winning book on his list! Harsh.

So have at it, readers. What books, published between 2000 and now, have been terrible, or overrated, or otherwise unreadable?

Best Last Lines in Literature

We love talking about first lines, but now (thanks to political blogger Matt Yglesias) here's the American Book Review's list of 100 best last lines, as a PDF. It's a little heavy on the po-mo but a GREAT conversation starter.

Here's how I'd arrange my top 15 on the list, based on books I've actually read, and last lines that have made me gasp, sob, cry, shake my head, or think. (The ranking #s from the official list precede them) I think it makes my populist/Victorian/feminist taste very clear. There's a lot of Joyce in here because he's such a master at building you up to a crescendo and then making your brain explode with his last words.

3. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) [You win, Scotty]

4. I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. –James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) [YES! the actual last sentence goes on for pages and pages. I copied out a bigger chunk of the soliloquy here]

11. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the
universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. –James Joyce, “The Dead” in Dubliners (1914) [utterly perfect, comes to mind all the time]

29. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that
things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the
number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. –George
Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72) [A tear-jerker and profound, too. I've written about this one here]

5. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt
Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there
before. –Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) [Just brilliant last line. I <3> Huck.]

14. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! –Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) [My HLP was just talking with me about how Bartleby is the first countercultural hero in Am-Lit]

45. Are there any questions? –Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) [Um, yes, there are a ton. So ironic.]

46. It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just
circles and circles of sorrow. –Toni Morrison, Sula (1973) [This one made me cry, too. Wrote about this here]

77. “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936) [A cliche, but true.]

99. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see. –Zora
Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) [Really triumphant, life-affirming last line, for a heroine who's seen so much death]

56. He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees;
and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear. –Edith
Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905) [Wrote about this here--NEVER fails to make me cry]


64. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the
rain. –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) [Wahhhh]

52. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. –J. D.
Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) [Wahhhh, part 2]

59. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. –James Joyce, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) [So clear, yet so mysterious, a great line to utter when you're on the cusp of a new beginning or endeavor]

41. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering
among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the
grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) [gee, Mr. Lockwood, how could anybody ever imagine such a thing? Maybe by reading the last 300 pages?]

Whitethorn Woods

Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So thus far, this was my least favorite Maeve Binchy, which I expected given that I was rather "eh" about the premise and bought it for $2 Canadian on my last day in Montreal.

The titular woods in Rossmore, Ireland are home to a shrine of St. Ann's that is being threatened with extinction due to a new motorway coming through. Binchy weaves together the stories of dozens of people who live in Rossmore or have prayed at the shrine, leaving the fate of the place itself in the balance until the last possible minute. The theme, obviously, is modernity vs. tradition in Ireland. A lot of the stories are pitch-perfect pleasure-reading sappy, some veer towards being too sappy, but some are unusually sharp and unsentimental for Binchy, including a nasty little murder plot.

Aside from displaying her warmth and emotional acuity, the fact that all the stories are first person reveals that Binchy also has a really great talent for manipulating perspective and unreliable narration. She writes these stories in the voices of flawed people that leave you gasping, somehow, with your feelings of both stern judgment and sympathy for them. Most of the stories in WW are intersecting and paired, too (first you hear from a character, then you hear from his or her sibling/spouse/teacher etc) so you hear bits of the same events from two different points of view, which is very clever and thought-provoking.

So with all this praise, why wasn't this my favorite? Answer: the religious element. It felt a little too hokey, particularly the stuff surrounding the shrine and how the characters truly believe it will answer their prayers. Although Binchy tries to counteract this through the eyes of a skeptical priest (!!) this wasn't enough skepticism to suit my tastes. And more importantly, I'm not sure Binchy really believed it either.

View all my reviews >>

Around the Web

• Bronte Blog has a good wrap-up on various Twilight-Bronte connection articles around the 'nets, including a piece in the Guardian on how Twilight is helping the Brontes by getting several stalled Bronte film adaptations into high gear, and a piece from a Smith college's publication asserting the opposite, for more intellectual reasons.

• Also in the Guardian, a great piece celebrating 150 years of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an EBC favorite. Here's a taste:

Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr Collins had invented – mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel "masterly", and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.

Who could ever forget Count Fosco?

A chat, and the Little Dorrit theme music!

(edited and abridged)

she: did you know
that PBS is re-airing all of Cranford
in December
to prepare us for CRANFORD II: RISE OF THE SPINSTERS
and by that I mean "return to cranford."
WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THAT?

him: omg!!
:)
i will watch some of it with you

she: PLUS they are doing an ALL NIGHT little dorrit marathon on new year's eve
all night baby.
screw going out.
right?

him: YEAH!
@#$%! DAT!
LET'S WATCH SOME ORPHANS GET ABUSED INSTEAD!

she: [snort]
[snort]
that was me doing Mr. Pancks

him: i knew!

me: you're a damn fine gent with no bigad nonsense about you

In honor of said marathon, here's a treat, at long last: the Little Dorrit theme music coutesy of an awesome youtube user named "A Victorian Lady."

Makes me get all weepy and simultaneously creeped out just listening.

Team Ahab vs. Team Dick

Just in time for the holidays, it's Novel-T.com, where you can purchase baseball T-shirts with references to seminal characters and authors in American Lit. Kind of awesome.

Have we talked about how important it is to buy books and bookish stuff for presents this year? Because it is.


Oh and P.S. We need a Brit-lit version, don't we?

NYT 100 notable books list broken down by gender

FICTION: women authors = 20/45 picks
NONFICTION women authors = 13/55 picks (is this possible?)

Last year it was 33/100--and it looks like this year is the same. Big improvement in the fiction category this year, with a drop in non-fiction.

Fact check my hastily-done research: here's the list.

This Week in Jane + An Update

TWIJ:

Cold Case: Jane Austen : At Jezebel, discussing the Morgan Library exhibit and the new theories surrounding Jane's demise.

Jane Austen Movie Throwdown from Jane Austen Today - Vote for the hottest man in uniform from the golden age of Austen adaptations (read: 1995.) It's Ciaran vs. Alan. Go cast thy ballot.

Things That Are True About Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: At Isak, Anna discusses the sheer joy of reading Northanger Abbey for the first time. I feel you sister--some of us will never have the pleasure of opening a brand new Austen-novel again. But we can live vicariously, and we do. P.S. Henry Tilney is a hottie. Oh yes, a man who knows his muslins is not to be ignored.

Speaking of reading an Austen tome for the first time, I'm absolutely finding Wives and Daughters to be among the best of the almost Jane but not quite novels (AJBNQ?) I've ever read. It doesn't have that broad Victorian scope I'm used to from Gaskell, going more into detail about two families and their sorrows and intrigues, which reveals a more direct debt to Austen's novels of manners. I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this book, fairest readers. I never want it to end. Which is good, because it doesn't! (Gaskell died before completing it). Any others who've read the book know what I'm talking about?

I still owe you reviews of Netherland, Push, and Whitethorn Woods among others. Will catch up ASAP--it's a terribly busy time of year, is it not?

Netherland

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a book that's a meditation on setting--time and place--more than anything else. It goes back and forth over time, from London to Holland to New York and beyond. It tells the story of a Hans Van den Broek, a Dutch businessman alone in the Chelsea hotel after 9/11. Hans rediscovers his love of cricket and eventually makes his way back to his estranged family in London, while spending time with an extraordinary denizen of New York, Chuck Ramkissoon, an entrepreneur and dream-spinner of uniquely American, and New York, sensibility.
Netherland doesn't have much plot beyond this, and to be honest I occasionally had to push my way through it, but it did have the most gorgeously evocative and incredibly witty passages. The visuals of the book, from a bedraggled drag queen with angel wings, to a remote cricket field in the outer boroughs baking in the sun, to a mom and her son ice-skating up a river in Holland, have stuck with me--so if you love clever language and vivid prose imagery, I heartily recommend it.

Also, the novel contains allusions to The Great Gatsby which the erudite among you will lap up like thirsty kittens.

And here's James Wood on that very subject, and on the book as 'postcolonialist.'

To sum it up overall, here's my dad's thoughts re: Netherland: "I absolutely loved it, but I can see how would have seemed pretty boring when I was younger." That pretty much says everything I've just said, but far more concisely.

View all my reviews >>