the pencil reads

posts on articles, books and movies

Herzog

Thursday, June 30, 2005
Moses E. Herzog is a modern-day hero. As his life crumbles about him -- his wife leaves him for his best friend, he gives up a scholarly career -- he writes unsent letters to both the living and the dead, revealing his innermost thoughts. At the edge of sanity, Moses' words are startingly true, deep with thought and emotion. At the end of the book, Moses thinks:

I will do no more to enact the pecularities of life. This is done well enough without my special assistance...

Anyway, can I pretend I have much choice? I look at myself and see chest, thighs, feet -- a head. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside -- something, something, happiness... "Thou movest me." That leaves no choice. Something produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce orange, as grass green, as birds heat. Some hearts put out more love and some less of it, presumably. Does it signify anything? ...

Is it idiot joy that makes this animal, the most peculiar animal of all, exclaim something? And he thinks this reaction a sign, a proof, of eternity? And he has it in his breast? But I have no arguments to make about it. "Thou movest me." "But what do you want, Herzog?" "But that's just it -- not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy." (340)

Bellow is a master with language. I will leave only one example:

Herzog felt nothing but his own human feelings, in which he found nothing of use. What if he felt moved to cry? Or pray? He pressed hand to hand. And what did he feel? Why he felt himself -- his own trembling hands, and eyes that stung. And what was there in modern, post ... post-Christian America to pray for? Justice -- justice and mercy? And pray away the monstrousness of life, the wicked dream that it was? He opened his mouth to relieve the pressure he felt. He was wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again. (240)

Will have to re-read this book, preferably after I pick up a little French!

Literature: An Embattled Profession

Friday, June 10, 2005





By Carl Woodring
Columbia University Press (New York, 1999)

Woodring really has quite the knack for imagery. In the opening sentence, Woodring describes literary study as a “besieged baronial mansion, with parapets erected to make it equally fortress and prison”.

In Chapter four, Disruption, Deconstruction, and Diaspora, Woodring criticises the weaknesses in literary study as a field, namely,

1. The focus of theory in the modern study of literature.
While Woodring appreciates that theory has brought new light to the genre, he describes it thus: “Focus on theory has intensified an unearned vanity. Good work has been done, but it is as if we accomplished the basic research for which no application was ever to be sought, nothing that served any purpose beyond the sharpening of minds – like the sharpening of knives for the display under glass in a museum.” (69)

2. Academically trained fiction
“But academically trained fiction, introducing further subtleties of technique to be admired as variations on narrative, threatens to merit William James’s assessment of his brother as being able to do everything to a story except tell it. The academy, which has produced both author and audience for such fiction, would do better to teach undergraduates exactly, exactly what is wrong with novels by John Grisham and Danielle Steele.” (73)

3. The use of Freudian analysis
“Authors of books claiming intellectual and moral superiority over a writer or other accomplished figure as subject seldom apply a Freudian scalpel to their own motivation.”

4. The fragmentation of literary study
“What deserves rebuke in literary and cultural studies today is the fragmentation – a seriocomic scenario in which sodden firefighters spray water on each other while the house burns down.” (93) The Modern Language Association in Detroit increased from 62 sessions in 1947 to 745 sessions in 1997 to accommodate the “Marxists, feminists, Sassurians, Lacanists, Ricoeurists, Bakhtinists, biographers, New Historicists, classicists, Romantics, gays, lesbians, whateverists” (94).

Woodring also comments on other theories of literary criticism, such as the deconstructionists, new historists, Marxists, etc. He suggests that the solution is not to eliminate diversity but to discover and promulgate what is common.

Catch me if you can

Tuesday, June 07, 2005
I think this may be the first book I read where I actually preferred the movie. My favourite chapters were the chapters on forgery and the intricacies of the cheque numbering system; the least favourite were the ones on the doctor and the lawyer scam.

Frank Abergnale is really quite a remarkable man. He has guts like a bullet train, and is not totally without morals. For example he never cheats individuals, only large banks and MNCs. There is something Robin Hoodian in this policy that is very appealing to the working class. Surely the public will cheer if I were to cheat LTA or ST or GV of some money right now. But I have too many scruples.

Tolkien: A Celebration

Wednesday, June 01, 2005
What a gem of a collection! The collection starts and ends with essays by people who knew JRR Tolkien personally, giving this collection the perfect start and finish. Tolkien's literary legacy, as expounded on in these essays, is bursting with layers and wonders of meaning.

Take this: the ring of power symbolises the will turned in on itself. It is empty in the middle, the gradual but sure erosion of the true self. Wearers of the ring become invisible, cut off from all normal relations in the world.

Or this: Samwise Gamgee represents all the readers. Like us, he loves to listen to stories, and he is pulled in by his ears by Gandalf while listening at the window. Near the end of the novel, he wonders if others will speak of his and Frodo's stories as well, linking this story into the larger narrative of myth and reality.

Or Lambas as the eucharist.

Or Frodo being the chosen one to destroy the ring -- hobbits being the shortest, weakest, humblest, simplest creatures -- just as the last shall become the first.

Or how the heroes pass through a kind of darkness and death experience to new life -- Gandalf on the narrow bridge of Moria, Aragorn in the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo when stung by Shelob.

Or the prevailing sense of hope even in utter despair.

NB: This is a collection of writings on JRR Tolkien's works and the spiritual values that undergirded his imaginery Middle-earth. It is edited by Joseph Pierce and the essays include the following: Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien, George Sayer; Over the Chasm of Fire: Christian Heroism in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, Stratford Caldecott; The Lord of the Rings - A Catholic View, Charles A. Coulombe; A Far-Off Cleam of the Gospel: Salvation in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Colin Gunton; Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper

The World and Other Places

I read Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places before the busy week at work. The World and Other Places is a collection of short stories, including Psalms, Orion, The World and Other Places, and The Poetics of Sex. I read her first novel a while back, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which was a riveting read that got somewhat rambly at the end.

Winterson's work is full of sentences that take you by surprise at the precision of truth in them. Her images are often biblical, requiring a profound sense of the metaphors in the Bible to understand. For example this, when she describes calling a puppy by its name: "The moment between chaos and shape and I say his name and he hears me."(4) This of course reminds me of the moment of creation, where God brings order out of chaos with a spoken word. Other sentences also captivate me, such as this: "She is painting today. The room is orange with effort. She is painting today and I have written this."(45)

I enjoyed the story of Orion and Psalms. Orion is a myth explaining why the Orion constellation cannot be seen in November, the month of Scorpio. In Psalms, the conflict between obedience and rebellion is played out in the conflict between Psalms the turtle and Ezra the imaginary rabbit. Psalms the turtle is eventually drowned, leading to a stream of other biblical pets: "the Proverbial fish, Ecclesiastes the hen, who never laid an egg where [they] could find it, Solomon the Scotch terrier, and finally Isaiah and Jeremiah, a pair of goats who lived to a great age and died peacefully in their pen." Ha ha! Actually I find the story sad, but still, it is very funny.