Hip Priest

I borrowed Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight (1939) from a friend, and found it an amazing read. It took me a while to get through thanks to my heavy final-year studies, but the novel actually accompanied some of my topics quite well.

I’m studying how law affects gender, as well as victimology at the moment. I have uncovered horrific tales of how patriarchy affects so many women - both physically and metaphorically, and statistics that show how widespread the problem is. The image of Sophia curled up on the bed really chimes with the images of female ‘survivors’ (feminist victimologists’ preferred term for those who suffer from domestic abuse - as opposed to ‘victims’), albeit in a slightly different context:

When he has gone I turn over on my side and huddle up, making myself as small as possible, my knees almost touching my chin. I cry in a way that hurts right down, that hurts your heart and your stomach. Who is this crying? The same one who laughed on the landing, kissed him and was happy. This is me, this is myself, who is crying. The other - how do I know who the other is? She isn’t me.

(Source: thedominican.net)

(Source: observando)

I was chatting to my friend Jon about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) last night, and I decided that I simply starting reading it on the wrong foot. My normal relationship with literature on tumblr is that I read a novel, then post about it. But with Slaughterhouse 5 things worked the other way round: anyone who follows any literature blogs will be aware of the ubiquity of Vonnegut’s work. Quotes, photos, and generally fawning posts seem to glorify his writing above that of all other writers on my dashboard.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that my critical eye would be particularly roving on this occasion. However, apart from the similarities with Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (which preceded it by almost a decade) the novel didn’t aggravate me so much. I believe the explanation of Vonnegut’s tumblr-fame lies with his easy-to-post quirks - exemplified by the photo I’m re-blogging. Arguably this is fine, but whilst some have seen ‘So it goes’ as individual signatures of his writing, I perceive them more as gimmicks. It would be interesting to hear the authors views on the many posts, t-shirts and tattoos that his recognisable style has influenced.

Billy Pilgrim got into a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that. He knew it was going to crash, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by saying so. It was supposed to carry Billy and twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.

After studying excerpts from The Second Sex (1949) in class in Uppsala, I thought I’d get more acquainted with Simone de Beauvoir via the moving record of her mother’s death from cancer - the ironically-titled A Very Easy Death (1964).

Having gone through a similar experience myself I enjoyed the connection I felt with the narrator throughout. Her thoughts were obviously much more developed and rational than mine were a decade ago, but it made me wonder how I will react when I am again confronted with such as situation.

Although I was not with Maman when she died, and although I had been with three people when they were actually dying, it was when I was at her bedside that I saw Death, the Death of the dance of death, with its bantering grin, the Death of fireside tales that knocks on the door, a scythe in its hand, the Death that comes from elsewhere, strange and inhuman: it had the very face of Maman when she showed her gums in a wide smile of unknowingness.

John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) was my latest summer read. I was unsure what to expect when I started, and have been left feeling ambivalent. At times the novel surprised and distressed, then at others it trundled. I found myself disliking the protagonist ‘Rabbit’ intensely despite recognising that he shares both qualities and flaws with people I’ve loved. Similarly, Updike’s matter-of-fact style of writing occasionally bored me and then - all of a sudden - certain passages (such as the one below, and the description of the climax) jumped off the page, conveying the inevitability of tragedy with aplomb.

But in long patches of forgotten pine plantation the needle-hushed floor of land glides up and up, on and on, under endless tunnels of dead green and you seem to have passed through silence into something worse. And then, coming upon a patch of sunlight the branches neglect to keep out or upon a softened stone-filled cellar pit dug by some brave and monstrous settler centuries ago, you become vividly frightened, as if this other sign of life will call attention to yourself, and the menace of the trees will become active.

Another short story which was included in the Edgar Allan Poe collection I was sent recently was The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The thoughtless (and perhaps oblivious) defiance of Prince Prospero reminded me of several literary party throwers. However it was clear from Poe’s description that his parties would be the envy of any of them:

He had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishment of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masquerades. Be sure that they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm - much of what has since been seen in “Hernani”. There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of what might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.

I took a break from novels recently in favour of one of Jean Genet’s most celebrated plays. I was hoping to catch the Genet exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary that my friend is working at but work keeps getting in the way, which is a real shame. The Balcony (1957) is beautifully deceitful play - the illusions offered in the establishment leading to confusion in the characters themselves by the end, and resulting in an amoral dark farce.

Carmen: He’s married, isn’t he?
Irma: As a rule, I don’t like to talk about the private life of my visitors. The Grand Balcony has a world-wide reputation. It’s the most artful, yet the most decent house of illusions…

(Source: parolesdesjours.free.fr)

A good friend posted a collection of Edgar Allan Poe tales to me whilst I was in Sweden, after hearing me express my dismay at being ignorant of his work. Although the copy was slightly less grand than the one pictured above, it did include the The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Purloined Letter (1844), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) etc.

I found them quite enthralling. And whilst I was expecting them to wield an influence over subsequent gothic tales, the bodies walled up in family mansions and murders involving rogue apes certainly made David Renwick (the creator of Jonathan Creek, one of my favourite TV shows) seem a little less inspired.

Having said that, there were fruits that hung higher, such the story on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) was based:

This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbours. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard - about packing it in a box, as if merchandise, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house.

- The Black Cat (1843).

After reading James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) last summer, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) became the next step on my tentative approach toward the literary behemoth that is Ulysses (1922).

Luckily A Portrait… was, like its predecessor, a rather accessible insight into Irish life from a semi-autobiographical point of view. Initially I enjoyed following the protagonist (Stephen Dedalus) and his struggle to evaluate his faith, especially in its similarity to my own. During the middle section - where an entire sermon appeared to be inscribed - this was laid on a little thick, but overall the twos and fros were highly intriguing and even entertaining.

His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of other himself wandering among the snares of the world.

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.