Multiple Reading Personalities

Has it been two months? It has been. A long silence, and yet I kept thinking about this place. I have to admit that this thinking was a source of stress more than a source of pleasure: I have been reading quite a lot in the past 62 days, and I kept thinking I should come back here and report. And I kept not finding the time. And it felt like an obligation I was not fulfilling.

What was I doing instead?

Reading. A few fiction books, some literary criticism, a lot of class material. I finally gained access to the website for my distance learning class on November 27th, and I then discovered that a lot of mid-year reports were due for mid-January, so there was that to get ready for. I learned (or relearned, for I had studied it in high school… Fifteen years ago) an insane amount of Latin: only level 2 Latin was open, so I had to cram levels 1 and 2 into my head in 6 weeks (you are supposed to take one level a semester, so that was… a lot). I also started translating for kiva.org (that one is more an excuse, as I really haven’t done all that much yet) and working at my local university, which needed an adjunct to teach French 101. With all this going on, my husband and I still found a week to travel to France over Christmas, another week to get over the germs we collected there from my niece and nephews. And we bought a house for my in-laws, who need one.

It’s been busy, and not a little stressful… I love it though. I love the university environment though I haven’t had much chance to properly explore. I love my classes. I love dreaming about next year’s master’s, because I already know that I want to enroll for one (and I’m even beginning to ponder on subjects). I love struggling with Proust, and Simon, and Barthes, and Rilke, and all these crazy-difficult-twisted-unusual writers in my program. I love the moment when you finally crack the code, and even though I started the year highly disappointed that I skipped the 19th century and was sent straight into the 20th, I am finding strange rewards in it.

But I need to release some pressure, and I want to come back to writing here every now and then. It might get more bloggy, more rambling, more… I don’t know. Personal. Stilted. Notebooky. Whatever comes! Everything goes! An online journal where I sometimes play the wannabe lit major, I guess, even though I’m not sure what the point of an online journal is. Even though nobody wants to read the excruciating thoughts of a rookie student muddling through a program for which she’s wholly unprepared.

In short, I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Even this note… Stream-of-consciousness, and except for a little check-spell, I don’t think I’m going to edit it. I’m just not going to think too hard about this space for now. Just going to go on instinct for a while.

Ok, let’s try. Multiple Reading Personalities, take 2?

Just as I was going to start redacting the note I’ve been meaning to write for a few days on Proust Du Côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), I got my first paid translation job! It was poorly paid and a rush job if there ever was one, but it was also a fun and easy subject (tourism in the New York area) and most of all — it was my first “official” paid translation. So tonight is still not the night I will be writing about my recent readings, but I hope to have some time tomorrow morning.

I also want to talk, albeit probably briefly, about The Tanslator’s Revenge. I am now reading through Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man, as I landed a French substitute teacher gig and will be teaching these texts next week. After that, I don’t know if I will continue with more Proust or if I will be unable to resist Hélène Berr’s journal, which was part of my recent book arrival. Proust is the reasonable choice, and I very much enjoyed Swann’s Way, but Hélène’s book is calling to me. Decisions decisions!

Look what came in the mail today…

11 textbooks (mostly Latin, Roman civilization and linguistics), 10 classics for school (Proust, Rilke, Gauthier, Modiano, Claude Simon, Georges Perec) and EIGHTEEN various books. THREE of which I paid for — the rest courtesy of my bookstore owner friend and from another friend, who works for a publishing house in Paris.

We used to be very close, but we lost touch for many years, and now have a very intermittent relation… So this came as a total surprise! For hours, I couldn’t stop giggling with the intoxication of knowing loved ones love you back. That, and new books!

The cats must have been feeling my happiness, because they invited themselves in the pictures instead of going straight for the empty box. Of course, they then disappeared in cardboard heaven.

Now all I have to do is decide where to start reading!

I have to apologize, once more, for introducing a little dose of French here, but you have to understand: I am distraught.

Yes, I knew it was going to happen. That psychopath Achilles killed Hector.

I tried to push the moment as far back as I could, reading very very slowly, and even starting a new book despite my promises to myself not to start anything until I had finished the Iliad. But finally last night I just could not delay the inevitable any longer, and I read through the death of Hector. I was very stoic for a while, at least until Andromache started weeping, and then I started crying too. Such a weakling.

Oh, and the other book that I picked came from my first time volunteering with the Library sales team. It is a fun experience, and I got to feel very young, as the rest of the volunteers (except for one woman who must be well into her forties) are all sixty and older. They are very nice, and I am so happy I get to sit with a bunch of white-haired people to drink weak coffee and eat bad cookies at the morning break, and to listen as they are telling stories of things that had happened last week or 40 years ago. One woman told about how she sold her car to get a TV in the fifties — this is the same woman who reads at every single meal and comes to help the Library every week for four hours even though she has a bad back. I’m already feeling very fond of her. I was very excited when I got back home after this, and I think Chris thought I was a little crazy.

I can’t wait to go back next week!

Doing my blog tour today, so many books appealed that I started scribbling down titles on a piece of paper. I wasn’t really thinking while doing so, but when I reviewed the list later, I was amused to see within a few lines of each other Black Milk (a Turkish novel from Elif Shafah, on women’s relations to creativity, located in one of my favorite cities in the world – Istanbul), Black Juice (from Margo Lanagan, a writer I’ve been meaning to discover) and the anthology Black Water (an 1984 collection of supernatural stories Audrey Niffeneger mentioned in her recent Goodreads interview).

All these dark liquids somehow reminded me that I didn’t review Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls — a vampire book I read under the pretense of the R.I.P. Challenge. To tell the truth I haven’t much to say about it. It is the story of a young vampire searching for his family; he will have to choose between kindred creative/ tortured souls and his blood kin – vampires lost in blood and sex lust. 

I’m not a prudish reader, but the abundance of incest/ pedophilia was a little ridiculous and just killed any eroticism. I wasn’t shocked so much as bored – the worst thing that can happen to a story. The problem was compounded by the fact that the two characters I was most interested in (Ghost, a “sensitive”, and Christian, an old vampire) did not gain the depth I was hoping for. I really wanted to get to know them, and was really curious how their stories would intertwine. I also wanted to see a female character that wasn’t a thinly veiled plot device… In the end however, I didn’t get any of my wishes. So while not exactly bad (after all, I wanted something to happen, so I had some interest), the novel just didn’t feel substantial. I have a feeling I’ll forget it entirely pretty soon.

I am under the charm of Homer, and I have to admit I didn’t expect the pleasure. I was dubious whether I would enjoy reading the Iliad for two reasons. The first and most minor one was the question of suspense. Of course (I thought - and have been proven at least partly wrong) I know what happens in the Iliad. Knowing where a story is going is generally not a huge deal for me, but it certainly doesn’t help if the writing is not sufficiently interesting to take me in.

And that leads me to main my worry: the Iliad is poetry, and I am reading it in an English translation (that of Robert Fagles). I started reading poetry in English only relatively recently (Dickinson first, a hideously frustrating experience, followed by Keats and then a translation of the Russian poet Akhmatova), and so far it’s been… I think the right word is sad. In my native French, the first book I really, really loved (after my Black stallion era, that is) was a collection of Verlaine poems plucked from my parents’ bookshelves. Other poets (Beaudelaire of course, but also Mallarmé or Eluard among others) captivated me at other times. I was also always fond of reading rhymed theatre, the perfectly balanced verses of Beaumarchais, Rostand or Corneille giving me immense pleasure. But in English? Almost nothing. A few tingles with Keats, but none of the overwhelming physical well-being that I associate with poetry. None of the intensity of feeling that the specific rythms of a tense or luscious poem will instill. Until now.

Homer is much more brutal than I expected; he is downright gory at times. Eyes burst open, brain matter splatters inside helmets, entrails cascade on the ground – repeatedly. He is also very visual, constantly weaving striking similes into his tale. Finally, the verse itself, at least as translated, is halting, rushed, constantly driving forward. Sentences are long (not many places to stop), but with constant breaks in their rythm paralleling the back and fro of the action. I think these three elements are helping me feel the epic more than decypher it.

I can’t help but hope that this will prove the “breakthrough book” that will help me learn to enjoy poetry in English. Wouldn’t I better enjoy it for what it is? I am trying to keep my hopes in check, but my mind is racing back to that volume of Keats and wants to go and try again… Try again…

Today, finally, is a gothic day full of anguish!

Well, I mean this in a good way. For one thing, I’ve finally come to a place in Udolpho where there is action and drama to sink my teeth into, but more importantly – my lovely husband has soft-launched The Blood that Bonds, the website on which he offers his vampire novel as a free ebook.

 Now, you can’t expect me to be objective, but… I’m bursting with pride! The site is a wonderful mirror to his talents as a writer and a webdesigner, and more than that it reflects his generosity and his need to share. He poured love, time and effort on the site, and he took the opportunity to work with a great comic book artist. And and and… and it’s just FUN!

For all you vampire fiction fans out there, I hope you enjoy it!