Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 6

Sei Shonagon and her glorious lists

Here's a Christmas gift: this post, by the delightful Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown (recently the organizer of #mooreandme), which explains why and how Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book should seem familiar to contemporary readers:

But the book, despite being written from and about a way of life that ended centuries ago, reads as nigh-freakishly contemporary. In point of fact, it is not just contemporary, but (she said, causing every Japanese classical scholar in the entire world to simultaneously have an aneurysm and die, due to her massive lack of scholarship) bloggy. Reading Sei Shonagon is almost exactly like reading a thousand-year-old Tumblr. It's about everything, it's about nothing; it's deeply boring, it's riveting; it's shapeless, it is its own shape; it's catty, touching, lyrical, banal, witty, self-absorbed, indiscreet, pensive, gossipy, introspective, everything, held together only by the force of Sei Shonagon's personality.

Dear Lord, Sei Shonagon's personality. One does not get introduced to it; one ENCOUNTERS it, and hopes the experience leaves no lasting scars. Ivan Morris, the translator of the version I own, sums her up as follows: "A complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors." Now, there are two things to notice about this passage: First, that Ivan Morris is not so great at summing up (those are a lot of adjectives, Ivan!) and second, that it is absurdly reverent and polite. In fact, Sei Shonagon was not "impatient" or "intolerant" or anything so socially acceptable as those adjectives would imply: Girlfriend was, in a word, fucking mean. She hated children, poor people, ugly people, people in bad outfits, people with an inadequate number of servants, their servants, her servants, servants in general, and everyone else in Japan who had the misfortune to be less intelligent, well-connected, and sophisticated than Sei Shonagon — which, in her view, was everyone, with a few necessary exceptions being made for the Royal Family. She really did love the Royal Family, however!

Shonagon was both bloggy and poetic. Her longer prose entries can be striking and evocative, but her lists do something else, something finer and more unique, something that reminds me of modernist poetry. (The slippery prose-poetry nature of her work seems to be catching if you only borrow her style, too; I wrote something I thought was a piece of flash fiction, after Shonagon, and LCRW published it as a poem.) Maybe the most tumblr-ish of all are the pieces that aren't quite prose scenes or lists, just opinions, boldly stated. For example:

19. Oxen Should Have Very Small Foreheads

Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair; their underbellies, the ends of their legs, and the tips of their tails should also be white.

I like horses to be chestnut, piebald, dapple-grey, or black road, with white patches near their shoulders and feet; I also like horses with light chestnut coats and extremely white manes and tails — so white, indeed, that their hair looks like mulberry threads.

I like a cat whose back is black and all the rest white.

[The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, transl. and ed. Ivan Morris, 52]

Why should oxen have very small foreheads? They simply should, and Shonagon will tell you about it if you let her. And you should.

Gathering gifts

This is probably the second least holiday-ish holiday season I've had — I have no courses or teaching to take a break from, end-stage dissertations do not give you downtime unless you force them to, and for various family reasons I won't be traveling. But that doesn't mean I'm not still enjoying choosing gifts for people, and reading gift guides, like the ones I linked in my previous posts.

So! Here are a small number of books and other things I'd recommend if you're still searching for last-minute presents:

A Very Short Introduction to Biography , Hermione Lee. A nicely sized survey of the history of the genre. I'd probably use this as a text if I ever get to teach one of the classes on biography that I've designed syllabi for, and not just because it's full of useful information — it's also an enjoyable read.

Georgette Heyer's Regency World , Jennifer Kloester — for friends of yours who really want to know all the workings of the ton. (And I'm going to stop there with books or I'll be adding to this entry all day.*)

Qwirkle, a game marketed for children but hilarious when played by grown-up humanists. You want the cubes, not the tiles.
Robyn's Body Talk Pt. 1 and Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid, for people who need some good pop music.
Small batch jams from Confituras, a local Austin business. (I believe all their offerings are gluten free.) They wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas, by now, but would make a nice present later too.
Pears from Harry & David. These are grown near where my mother lives in southern Oregon — we drive by their orchards on I-5. They're actually kind of worth it as a splurge.

Plus a few links before I retreat back to the land of dissertation and other grad-school-related stress:

An article title I could've written myself: Your Attacks on Genre Fiction Grow Tiresome.
Lit Folks Are Hip. The captions say so.
Sara Ryan's interview with Jenny Davidson — I'm saving this till after I've read The Explosionist, but I'm actually also using one of Davidson's academic books for diss research right now, so I was happy to see this, which focuses on her fiction.
The Lapham Quarterly's fascinating piece on the dwindling and disappearance of Barbara Follett, child prodigy of letters.
A Roman-era statue emerges from the sea on Israel's coast.
The Google Labs ngram viewer, if you haven't played with it yet. There are apparently some questions about the reliability of its dating metadata, but it's still a nice hint of the ways large-scale research in the humanities can evolve from here.

* You could also, if you were so inclined, pre-order the Alcestis paperback for someone you love! It's out February 1 but will probably ship early from Amazon (the hardback sure did), and of course the e-book version (Kindle, Sony Reader) gets delivered instantly.

Lambda Literary's gift guides

The Lambda Literary Foundation blog is also featuring a series of specialized LGBTQ gift guides, including a list "for your bisexual best friend" that features Alcestis. Here's the guide in its entirety, with more than 75 books listed.

If you aren't a supporter of Lambda Literary, now is an excellent time to join up and show some end-of-the-year love.

Hipster Book Club holiday gift guide

This is possibly the best thing I've found on the internet lately, and I'm not even saying that because Alcestis is included in it: the Hipster Book Club's holiday gift guide. Ten pages of quirky, funny book recommendations, with categories from "Geek Love" to "Ladies' Choice" to "General Fiction." If you want to buy books for people this holiday season but you haven't been satisfied by the best of lists at the Times and etc., go here. You will find things to give, and you will also add many things to your own to-be-read list.

In other book news, Hemingway's The Garden of Eden has been adapted for the screen — this interview with the screenwriter dances delicately around the question of how to adapt the work's sex scenes, and in fact the whole relationship between the main character and his wife, given what it has been taken to suggest about Hemingway's own relationships with women.

Speaking of adaptation: I'm not even much of a Sherlock fan, and Graham Moore's The Sherlockian sounds like great fun.

And finally, if you need something pretty to look at, here's the trailer for Terrence Malick's next movie, The Tree of Life. It looks… exactly like a Terrence Malick movie. Which is more than I can say for most films.

Whew.

So! To make up for that brief absence, here's a nice announcement: the Blanton Museum Book Club will be reading Alcestis and discussing it on January 20, 2011. I'll be leading the discussion. This book club meeting is linked to the prints exhibition Robert Wilson in Four Acts, which just opened at the Blanton and runs through March 13, 2011. Here's the Blanton's description of the exhibition:

Artist Robert Wilson—a University of Texas at Austin alumnus, native Texan, and The Blanton's 2011 Gala honoree—is best known for his video and theatre work. However, as part of UT's 1986 Guest Artist in Printmaking Program, Wilson made two suites of prints. Alcestis is named for the wife of King Admetus from Euripides' eponymous 438 BC Greek tragedy who offers herself as a sacrifice upon learning that her husband will die unless he can find another to take his place. Alceste illustrates Wilson's stage design for Christoph Willibald Gluck's 1767 opera of the same name, based on Euripides' myth. Robert Wilson in Four Acts presents these suites alongside a study for Alceste and video documentation of Wilson's production of Gluck's opera.

And here's the amusing part: if you click the Book Club link above, you'll see that it still lists the January 20 book selection as Ted Hughes's translation of Alcestis (the Euripides version). But no, my friends — I have replaced Ted Hughes! I feel as though I ought to notify my alma mater about this.

Also, here are a few links I've collected during the week:

Ellen Ripley Saved My Life: a post by Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown. This is the third of three related essays, and speaking as someone whose notion of a strong woman was also unduly affected, in my teenage years, by Joss Whedon's psyche — it's amazing.
A charming slideshow of doodles left on the whiteboards in the main library (the PCL) at UT.
And another charming interview with Justin Cronin about The Passage, this one at Goodreads.
Foxes playing in the London snow.

Band of Thebes queer lit survey

A quick post tonight to mention the Best LGBT Books of 2010 list posted this week at the Band of Thebes blog. I contributed a recommendation, as did 79 other writers — including Lillian Faderman, whose recommendation is exactly what I almost submitted! (She nominated The Little Stranger, which, while not explicitly a lesbian book, certainly read as queer to me too.) My choice was Emma Donoghue's lovely Inseparable. But do go and read the whole list. It's added many things to my mental TBR pile.

And speaking of Emma Donoghue, here's a great review of Room, if you haven't read it yet. I think it was probably my favorite book of the year, period.

Q&A with me at Laura Maylene Walter's blog

Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor's School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked on the high school lit mag together, as Laura mentions in her blog post. (I haven't thought about that lit mag for so long. Oh dear. Layout flashbacks.) I wrote poetry back in high school, but Laura's always been a fiction writer, and a very good one, too. She recently won the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and her first short story collection, Living Arrangements, is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2011.

Natural, fun, etc.

In the Independent, Arifa Akbar asks if "fictive sex" can "ever have artistic merit." The context here is the annual Bad Sex Awards, given out by the Literary Review. Since I think the answer to that question is indubitably "yes," I was particularly intrigued by this piece of information:

Ironically, the bad sex awards were originally conceived, in 1993, to celebrate good sex, before the editor, Auberon Waugh, was advised by co-founder, Rhoda Koenig, that this might be "less interesting" than plucking out the clichéd and the corny.

I would love to see a Good Sex Awards shortlist. (It could be a cute stunt for the Review, if nothing else.) I'm sure Koenig was right that Bad Sex Awards get more attention — pointing and laughing usually does — but I'm not sure that mocking poorly-written scenes is automatically more interesting than celebrating good ones would be. Good sex in literary fiction is probably rarer than bad, and sex that many readers can agree is good might be even more uncommon. For example: I totally don't agree that writing good sex is reducible to Geoff Dyer's claim, quoted in Akbar's essay, that descriptions of sex must "be absolutely explicit — no metaphors, no hyperbole." (Then again, I do remember some of the horrifying metaphors cited in previous Bad Sex Award lists, so maybe that's not a bad place to start.)

And I think Akbar's onto something, here:

The most interesting writing about sex in the past two decades has arguably come from gay and lesbian novelists – Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White – who have touched ground where there has still been sensibilities to disturb and imaginative barriers to break down.

I'd also be interested in a broader conversation about sex in genre fiction, if we're discussing the breaching of imaginative barriers.

Finally, Akbar covers the point that writers usually make when talking about sex in fiction: the "so what?" question.

Koenig casts doubt over this rationale: "I do think writers should ask themselves 'is this sex scene necessary?' In other words, what will we learn from following the people into the bedroom that we will not learn from simply being told that they have gone to bed together and liked it or disliked it or felt guilty about it or whatever?"

There are three sex scenes in Alcestis and one almost-sex-scene that dissolves into chaos thanks to some god-conjured reptiles. (Seriously. Drawn straight from the myth.) In my opinion, these scenes are all necessary for plot and character development, but their existence has made me squirm on occasion. I remember copy-editing one of the sex scenes while sitting at the laundromat — the scene with dubious consent, of course, because what else would you end up copy-editing at the laundromat? — and hoping that the bored middle-aged lady next to me wasn't peering over my shoulder at the manuscript.

I don't really feel that way about the published book; I think I've become comfortable with the idea that the book is, in large part, about desire. But giving public performances where I read about desire can still make me blush a bit. In a talk last spring, I read the almost-sex-scene along with a few other sections of the book. Even though I'd practiced the reading in advance, I hadn't quite realized what it would be like to read in front of an audience a scene that sounds like it's about to include sex. There was definitely an anticipatory and slightly uncomfortable feeling in the room, right up until the snakes appeared and the audience realized I wasn't actually about to read a detailed account of the main character's deflowering. I haven't yet decided whether or not to include that scene in any future talks I give. Maybe I'd be able to enjoy the slightly uncomfortable vibe, now that I know to expect it. Or — maybe not.

Anyway, to sum up, here's Seanan McGuire posting on Twitter, just a few hours ago:

… though I should add that the eighteenth century proved that even books full of nuns aren't necessarily sex-free. (I'm looking right at you, Monk Lewis.)

A good message for the holidays.

A number of the It Gets Better videos have made me teary. But what I like most about this one is the sheer number of faces you get to see — all of them sharing their happiness and their healing.

An early happy Thanksgiving to you, Americans, and happy day, everyone else.

Miscellany again

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don't even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I'm sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer's spoken questions. And here's the Times review of Ozick's new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton's grandmother's recipe to make you "the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town." In 30 days. In case you're on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on "what freeze/fight/flight" has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use "#alt-ac" as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn't recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with "#altac," or even "#alt_ac"?)