Mommy, I Want A Pony!

My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara; +6; Literary Fiction; Carrie at We Read to Know We Are Not Alone

In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that I did not technically read this book. Many, many years ago, my mother read it to me. Every night, for several weeks, she would read to me just before I went to bed.

To be even more honest, I really only have a clear memory of the beginning of the book.

The beginning; all was good in my world. I had my awesome mother reading me a story that she loved. The main character had a bad relationship with his father. His father was distant, domineering and either unconcerned with his son's feeling or incapable or understanding them. Given my opinion of my own father at the time, I was just giddy to see an “accurate” representation of Fathers. I don't remember if I ever said anything about that to mom.

Speaking of moms, the main character's mother was pretty much perfect; rather as I thought of my own mother at the time.

Oh, and there was a horse. Yes, the boy at the center of the story was in rather desperately in want of a horse of his very own. He gets the horse, loves the horse and finally lets the horse go. There's also a bit about a cougar and also something about at thunderstorm. It's a whole big metaphor or growing up; or whatever.

All the subplots and subtexts aside, because of when this book came through my life, it'll always be about the mother and the father.

As much as the father is distant and, frankly, cruel the main character craves his attention, affection and approval. As marvelous and reliable as the mother is, the main character treats her as a throw-away; he mostly ignores, or tires to ignore, her. He can only be himself, be free when, he moves beyond them.

Oh, well. What do you know? I guess it is a whole big metaphor for growing up, after all.

Or whatever.

Note on Structure

This is supposed to be a one-post-per-day Monday-Saturday thing, but then I fell behind. There will be no playing catch-up. If I miss a day, I miss a day. I won't do extra posts to make up for it.

Sex Pigs?

Lord of the Flies; William Golding; Literary Fiction; +10; Lucy Snider at Look What I Found In My Brain!

There was a lot of sex involved in my reading of this novel.

No, no, I didn't have a lot of sex while I was reading it... Neither meaning of that, actually.

No, but reading a book about a group of violent young boys seems to make girls talk a lot about sex. Short version: turns out most of us would rather do Jack than Ralph. Even in fiction, nice guys finish last.

There's also a lot of weird sex stuff going on in the book. Aside from Piggy's sexual fixation on Ralph and Roger's sexual fixation on Jack, and Ralph and Jack's perverse and ultimately mutually destructive inarticulate, violent attempt at courtship, there's the whole thing with the pigs.

When Jack's band hunts and kills the sow... It's gang rape. The enthusiastic, crazed, myopic boys, frustrated and possessed of an excess of energy, chase, bring down and impale, repeatedly, the only female creature they've encountered. As if that weren't enough violent, sexual imagery on its own, Golding makes a point of spicing things up with descriptions of the panting and the squealing done by boy and sow alike. He also has an extremely graphic description of one of the boys' spears (subtle, I know) entering the sow's anus. Yes, it really was that gross.

Not long after the sow-hunting/gang-bang scene, we get the fainting at the sight of the dead pig, enacted by one of the more frail members of the tribe. I always thought it sounded like a variation the Oedipal complex. The pig has already been established as a metaphor for the sexual female, but this pig also issues condemnations and proclamations of its omniscience. Also, the pig is a source of nourishment. It just always screamed “fear of the sexualized mother,” to me.

New Life, In Various Ways

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino; Fiction; +12; Akshay at The Occasional Review

This is one of my all-time favorite books It's part fairy tale, part philosophical text; its got this whole freedom to be yourself, ease of self-recreation thing working. It's not without similarities to objectivist literature. Unlike Ayn Rand, though, Italo Calvino is more interested in telling a story than beating you over the head with his ideas. Beating, until the bleeding starts.

The really interesting thing, for me anyway, is that the book is actually narrated by the eponymous Baron's brother. From the very first page, the narrator speaks in adoring tones about his brother. I think that helps explain the fact that the Baron doesn't actually die. He builds a hot air balloon and sails off into the endless blue sky.

Okay, okay, I know. It's an obvious metaphor for death. But, it also protects both the narrator and the reader from the physical reality and the immutability of that death.

I think that's really what makes this novel seem like such a fairy tale. It's not just the ease with which fantastical things happen; it's not the relative lack of strife in the lives of the central characters, or the speed with which that strife passes away. It's the way that the story leaves the main character suspended in a state of contended existence, forever.

On another note, the Baron has several lovers, but never seems to build any Swiss Family Robinson-style tree-houses, nor does he ever leave the trees. So, I have to wonder... How do they stay balanced up there?

Come si dice "Realpolitik"?

The Prince and Selected Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli; Philosophy; +5; The Prince at BrothersJudd

The Prince is a dense read.

The Discourses are a lot more fun. They're little fun-size candy bar versions of the same basic ideas expressed in The Prince. So, yes, they cover the same general territory, but they're fun-sized. Also, they resemble candy bars. Much more pleasant.

Machiavelli's repuation as a heartless arse is really so undeserved. It's not, however, surprising. He's relentlessly blunt. He doesn't mince words, he doesn't pretend that politics is idealistic, or that politicians (statesmen, princes, whatever tickles your pickle) are altruistic. Even in an age when we are constantly reminded that these are basic facts of life, his writing is like a series of slaps to the face.

Both The Prince and The Discourses are written as advice to statesmen, but they read as explicit warnings to the people. Do not trust your government. The state does not care about you. You are a pawn. The object of the statesmen is to protect himself; the object of the state is to perpetuate itself. All things we pretty much know, but to be reminded of them in the blunt, realistic terms of a man telling the rulers how to defend themselves, enrich their states, and manipulate their people, they sound particularly chilling.

It's not shocking that he's been vilified as the originator of underhanded, manipulative politics; a sort of demonic precursor to Ludwig August von Rochau and his realpolitik. But that's not really fair. The real villains are... well... us. Humans in general; the politicians who behave so badly, and the people who have spent millenia studiously allowing them to do so. All Niccolo, and later Ludwig, did was to record faithfully the modes and functions of the real world.

But, in another lesson from Niccolo: tough titties. Them's the breaks. It sucks. Get over it, get with it, and get ahead of it.

He's the Man with the Plan

Beowulf; anon.; Epic Poetry; +11; Paula Stiles at Suite101

What can you say about Beowulf? It really is the sort of thing where people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing that they like.

I happen to think it's great fun. There's just something about epic poetry. After a while, you just sort of sink into it; while it takes a while to get into the rhythm of the words, once you do... It's transporting. Really otherworldly.

Of all the epic peoms I've read, of which I'm not claiming to have read many, this is by far my favorite. I've got a thing about Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic myths. I love them. Love them, the way some people love crystal methamphetamines. I go a little crazy when talking about them, reading them, or listening to them- so much so that I've pretty much been banned from discssing them around any of my acquaintences. Ah well.

But when reading something like "Beowulf," I really can't see, no matter how hard I try, how anyone can be bored with it. It's got everything: hot babes, manly men, evil monsters, big battles, stuff that goes "bump" in the night. This poem and its A-S,N&C bretheren are much, much closer to occidental society's prototypical blockbuster than many people seem to think. In terms of entertainment, we owe a lot more to the barbarians of the frozen seas than we commonly acknowledge.

I only wish this poem could supplant "The Odyssey" in remedial english classes the nation over.

Well, that's not quite true. "The Odyssey" is fun, too. I wish "Beowulf" could be given a little more attention outside of college Medieval History classes, though. It's too much fun to be allowed to languish.

Paris, Now Also City of Nightmares

Perfume: The Story of a Murder; Patrick Suskind; Mystery/Thirller/Horror; +10; Stephen Silver at sfsite.com

I've always been fond of identifying obscure literary devices at work, so on that count this is my all-time favorite book. The entire book (the whole fucking thing) is synesthetic. Absolutely everything that can be, is described in terms of scent. Viewed strictly from a lit-crit perspective, it's a stunning achievement. I keep rereading this book, trying to deconstruct his use of that device. It's so smoothly done, so closely and carefully and consistently (just a little polysyndeton there) woven into the story that it's... It just blows my mind.

It's also a fun excuse to talk about the Synesthetic Metaphor, my absolute all-time ultimate favorite literary device. This device seems uniquely suited to the English language, which is possessed of one of the broadest vocabularies on the planet. While not as well-suited to the creation of new words as, say, German, English almost madeningly adept at appropriating foreign words. (Ex: schadefrude, chef. Interestingly enough, both these words have strictly English equivalents, which are far less popular: epicaricacy and cook ((the noun)), respectively.) In 1920, W. P. Reeves wrote that English was "overlaid with more foreign words than any [other] living tongue..."

The synesthetic metaphor, often as simple as the phrase "sweet sounds," is terribly common. It's also incredibly effecient. By modifying "sounds" with "sweet" the writer is able not only to imply a technically harmonious composition, but an emotionally gentle and pleasing one as well. In the case of third-person limited narrative, it is especially useful.

Compare: "James played the harmonious melody, enjoying the soothing effect it had on his troubled soul, small though that should be."/"James removed himself to practice, the sweet sounds providing small consolation." The synesthetic metaphor implies all of the same technical and emotional content as the more prosaic version, while allowing for greater amounts of information to be added in a smaller amount of space. It allows the prose to be evocative rather than descriptive; it goes to the heart of the "show, don't tell" dictum.

Synesthesia itself is also a wonderful component of most "purple prose." That's a style with a really bad rap, I know, but it can be well-done and when it is, it's truly wonderful. There is a certain richness to synesthetic description which cannot be equaled with regular prose. Dark sounds, golden sounds, drab sounds and other variations on "visual hearing," just like "auditory gustation" ("bombastic spices"), or "oflactory sight" ("rancid scene," "balmy tableau") come closer to describing the intangibles of an experience than even a good string of abstract nouns. In the case of "gustatory olfaction" or "olfactory gustation," one can attribute the effectiveness of the description to the fact that taste and smell are fairly unified biological processes, broken apart rather cruelly by language; the synesthetic metaphor that reunites then doesn't so much blend two different senses as it does reunite the two parts of a single sense.

So why is snyesthesia so very evocative? Probably because it comes closer to a right-brained perception of the world than most other linguistic devices. Language is, after all, a child of the left brain. The left brain thinks in terms of order and classification. The right brain, on the other hand, thinks in terms of undefined sensations. Simply by using words, one moves a perceived thing (be it a sight, sound, smell, taste or even an emotion) from the right to the left brain. By using a descriptive method that defies the logic of the left brain, one forces the right brain to take part in understanding that perception. It creates a more complete and sense-oriented understanding of the thing described, one that touches not only the analytical mind, but the emotional, instinctual one.

Rock on, synesthetic literature!