#1: beneath both beauty and ugliness
Hello!
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the first one.
Boredom: I told the students in all my classes this semester that they can't use devices in class, ever, unless they have an accommodation that requires it. I read The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, over the break between semesters, expecting and hoping to be horrified, but I didn't find its argument particularly compelling; its subtitle is What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, but the findings Carr reported in that area seem to me quite inconclusive, if not meaningless. And what’s the Internet, anyway? In middle school, I liked going into the library and seeing what people I could spy on through our text-based school Telnet system. My time, emotions, intentions, the boredom I learned and grew by, weren’t hijacked by that Internet, the way they are when I use my phone. I notice that I'm on my phone for hours & hours on the five days a week I'm at work, and after work, too; on the weekends, I don't reach for it the same way. On breaks, it's easy not to use. I barely pick it up. I relax into boredom, just staring out the window.
Horror: I wrote about the fictionalizing of Henry James in Quarterly Horse: a journal of brief American Studies. In one sentence here, I tried to push away the very idea of John Banville’s Jamesian new novel:
Even more recent, John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond (2017) jams James’s Isabel Archer, the “vivid individual” on which James built The Portrait of a Lady, back into “the house of fiction.”
What I really mean is, let Isabel go! She escapes James, escapes narrative, at the end of Portrait (not a spoiler). And then Banville, starting with his title, just reels her back in. It’s like the sequel to A Doll’s House; why? What would make a writer or reader want to open that well-slammed door? Ibsen and James already held them captive, but they had the personal integrity to ultimately let them be free. At least Alexandra Riply, resurrector of Scarlett O’Hara, had the decency to be a woman…
And no, I haven’t seen A Doll’s House 2 or read Mrs. Osmond.
Glory: Joyce Carol Oates is a genius. When you ask people if they like her, they say, "She's okay. I've read 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,' and Black Water." What other living writer would we reduce like that? Those two texts are dutifully assigned and dutifully read in college classrooms, and then her unfathomable Americanness, with all its nuances, is just put to bed, ignored. I think this is because people don't want to read that much, especially a writer who they have the suspicious might not "count," canonwise.
She has all the awards, the longstanding position at Princeton, but there's just something about her... I think she knows and writes too much of what people don't want to know or read. She's the American Writer: like William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser, class is her topic, the thing she returns to. But there’s so much more; she has so many more obsessions—race, women’s sexuality, fate, food—and endless registers. Not everything she writes is good, but one could say the same about Philip Roth or Toni Morrison or Henry James or Mark Twain. She's a horror writer in the American Grain (love the phrase, hate the book), like Steven King. Like Pound and Eliot, she's a scholar, anthologist, booster, interpreter, reader of American writers, from emerging to canonized to recovered. She is a courageously faithful recorder of American speech, like Alice Walker, or Twain. She's a poet and a political philosopher, both at once, like Robert Penn Warren. She's an experimentalist, resistant to closure, like Emily Dickinson.
Look. One one-millionth-of-a-million of her (this is from them):
He sat in his mother’s latest apartment, on edge with the prospect of seeing what was in the next room, clothes in being a son, a brother, someone dragged to the bottom of the river by chains of blood and love…
Sincerely,
Lucy
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Recommended: 10 Joyce Carol Oates books: Blonde; A Garden of Earthly Delights; them; Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; Lovely Dark, and Deep; American Appetites; We Were the Mulvaneys; A Book of American Martyrs; Wild Nights!; and High Lonesome.
Unrecommended (but subject to changes of mind): In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams; The Shallows, Nicholas Carr; Mrs. Osmond, John Banville; and A Doll’s House 2, Lucas Hnath