The After-Dinner Payback

I’m not a big fan of poetry and I never have been. A lot of it just seems to go over my head. Or maybe I’m just missing a large chunk of the big picture. For me, poetry has largely been underwhelming or, in case of Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” infuriating. I can never be sure what people are praising when they discuss poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate certain poems. I enjoy epics like Dante’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost mostly because they tell great stories. The same goes for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” But poetry is rarely, if ever, literal; it demands a lot of interpretation and thought on the part of the reader. When I look back on my English courses in high school and college, teachers’ invitations for students to respond to a particular poem were invariably met with blank stares and awkward silences. How we hated critical thinking!

I won’t pretend to understand a lot of poetry or the literary terms associated with it. Since college, all of my experiences with poetry have been accidental. In the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone,” I discovered the poem through music: earlier this year, the band Green Carnation released The Acoustic Verses, which features a beautiful song called “Alone” (listeners can download the song here). I became obsessed with the song after first hearing it and I spent hours on Internet search engines in an effort to track down the lyrics. Imagine my surprise upon learning that the lyrics were actually the words to an Edgar Allan Poe poem.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—

“Alone” has become one of my favorite poems, if only because I love the song it inspired, but I’ve never tried to make sense of it. The imagery is what stands out the most: from the “red cliff of the mountain” to the “lightning in the sky,” the poem is, like much of Poe’s writing, both haunting and mysterious, with a touch of Gothic atmosphere. With its demon-shaped clouds and the sun’s “autumn tint of gold,” “Alone” is the perfect poem to celebrate the transition from summer to fall.

The poem was never published during Poe’s lifetime. It was found in Lucy Holmes’ autograph book after the author’s death.

I’ve tried to start a few books over the last couple of days—including John le Carré’s Our Game and Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders—but I’m just not in the mood to read anything from my to-be-read stack. In addition to Our Game, I have three more le Carré novels waiting for me: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, A Perfect Spy, and The Tailor of Panama. I grabbed these books, along with Christopher Reich’s Numbered Account, after a visit to a friend’s parents’ house, and while they seemed like fun books for a rainy day, I’ve been craving something more complex and challenging, so I won’t feel bad for not getting around to them. I can’t shake the urge to read something by Fyodor Dostoyevsky—Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. For years, I’ve been weaned on a steady diet of pop fiction—I would only dip into the classics on occasion—so maybe this is a sign that my literature tastes have finally matured. Or maybe I’ve matured. I’m sure there are several reasons for this—boredom and maturity being chief among them—but I’ve come to the conclusion that the best books are the ones that challenge me to look at myself and my motivations.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been craving all along.

I realize that January is still some three months away, but that hasn’t stopped me from pondering my New Year’s resolution. I’m horrible about keeping resolutions—I usually forget about them in a matter of days—but I’m good at reading, so I thought my resolution should have a literary slant. I’ve decided that 2007 will be the year I figuratively go back to high school.

I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein until a few weeks ago, and I’m even more ashamed at having missed such a great book for so long. This, of course, prompted me to do some literary soul-searching. I’m beginning to realize that I’m not as well-read as I’d like to be. In retrospect, my high school English classes were woefully inadequate: I’ve never read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, or Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It wasn’t until several months ago that I finally got around to reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. And when it comes to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I barely know what people are talking about.

So for my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to read the classics that high school students seem to loathe. I may even start early. I’m older, so my appreciation for them will probably be greater and in any case, I’m pretty disenchanted with the current crop of serious literature publishers are offering; I haven’t read a contemporary literary novel in over a year. The last one was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I didn’t really enjoy it.

I’m still drawing up the list, but I have a pretty good idea of what I should’ve read in high school. Maybe I’ll pick twelve books I missed and read one for each month of 2007. I’m not sure yet. We’ll see how it goes. I’m still fleshing out the fine print.

But it should be interesting to revisit high school.

I’ve decided I’m not in the mood to read Franz Kafka’s The Castle. It has to go back to the library this weekend anyway and I’m not about to force myself to read it. I just forced myself to finish John le Carré’s The Russia House and I’m not any richer because of it. In fact, I’m slightly pissed. I should’ve listened to the little voice inside my head telling me not to pick the book up again, but I would’ve felt guilty for not finishing it.

But I’m glad it’s over.

Now I’m in the mood for a classic adventure story. After the disappointment of The Russia House, I need a book I can sink my teeth into, something that will make me feel exhausted after I’m done reading it. Something like Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Or maybe Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers also sounds good. Maybe I’ll check out Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I’ll have to kick around a bit more and see what I can come up with.

I can’t wait to go to the library this weekend.

It’s late—1:15 in the morning—and the cat is sleeping peacefully in her chair. I can’t sleep. I felt like writing something.

But I’m not sure what.

I’d planned on starting Franz Kafka’s The Castle this morning, but I decided it can wait another day or so. I have sixty-three pages left of John le Carré’s The Russia House—yes, I’m finally going to finish this troublesome book. The problem is that the story lost steam about halfway through and never recovered. But it also suffers from boring characters who, under the cynical veneer, actually seem to enjoy doing nothing.

If The Russia House is le Carré after the Cold War, I almost wish the Berlin Wall had never come down.

I have an odd love-hate relationship with book lists. I like to read them in order to find books that I might otherwise miss out on, but I invariably feel a twinge of guilt when someone lists a book I haven’t read. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men often makes it onto people’s lists, as does Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, I missed them in high school. Sue me. Or better yet, sue the school board. I still got my diploma.

Drawing up this list often seemed like an exercise in futility. I’d originally planned to list one hundred books, but I had to scale it back to fifty; I read so much that I can barely remember what I’ve read two months ago, much less two years ago. And then there’s the question of how much snobbery I should let out. Do I list James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, thereby showing people how well-read I am? In the end, I decided not to. I wouldn’t recommend Joyce to the average reader—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has its moments, but reading it can seem like pulling teeth—and The Great Gatsby is, in my blasphemous opinion, greatly overrated. But I digress.

So in making this list, I decided to focus less on literary merit and more on enjoyment. These are the books that I couldn’t put down, for one reason or another. They’re the ones that really stick in my mind and I certainly wouldn’t mind revisiting them. Yes, I have questionable taste—Stephen King and Anne Rice made my list, while I intentionally left William Shakespeare off. Boo. And Ray Bradbury is a better prose stylist than Ernest Hemingway. Boo back. So here it is, warts and all—my list of what Stefanie calls “thumping good reads.”

And this time, feel free to sue me.

• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
• The Green Mile by Stephen King
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Inferno by Dante
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• White Fang by Jack London
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
• Mythology by Edith Hamilton
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
• Grendel by John Gardner
• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
• Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
• Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• The Travelling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Beowulf by Anonymous
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

It’s easy to label Meursault as a sociopath; throughout Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the protagonist tells his story with such clinical detachment that I was left wondering if he had any emotions at all. He’s wholly unaffected by his mother’s death and funeral, and when asked if he wants to marry, he tells his girlfriend that he doesn’t care; in fact, he dismisses the idea of love as something that doesn’t matter one way or the other. Meursault’s reaction—or lack thereof—to witnessing a woman getting beaten is perplexing, but he would probably be equally perplexed as to why he should feel anything in the first place.

The more I read The Stranger, the more I became convinced that Meursault isn’t antisocial or even amoral. (At one point, he’s tempted to try and convince the magistrate that he’s really just like everyone else.) Rather, he’s an average man who operates on a different moral level altogether. Emotions hold no interest for him, and he’s even less inclined to offer explanations for his behavior. Meursault is devoid or ambition or ego; he’s content to let life lead him where it will, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the comfort of his routine.

Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that I was disastrous in business. So I went back to work. I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see a reason to change my life.

Routine seems to be a major theme in The Stranger. Meursault is happiest when he knows what to expect. He’s not even unhappy when he’s in prison for murdering an Arab. For the duration of his trial, the routine of going to the courthouse, then going back to prison, gives him a sense of solace. It’s not until after the final verdict and the uncertainty of when he’ll be executed that Meursault finally explodes. Throughout much of the book, his routines give him a sense of control. He knows what to expect from his friends, his lawyer, the magistrate, and the prosecutor. It’s not until the moment that he’s truly on his own, without anyone to care for him and tell him what to do, that his anger at the world finally comes to the surface.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

The Stranger is a book that’s piled with enigmas. On the surface, it’s a simple book, but its true complexity comes in the form of Camus’ unemotional antihero—Meursault is alternately sympathetic and infuriating. And therein lies the book’s real power: readers might find themselves being reflected in Meursault’s puzzling and absurd worldview.

This morning, Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings kindly informed me that I was one of the winners of the drawing for the Autumn 2006 Readers Imbibing Peril challenge. I need to start paying attention to these things; the drawing took place the first week of September. Anyway, the prize is a nifty one: a beautiful and thoroughly annotated edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, edited by Leonard Wolf. I’m beyond excited. Dracula is one of my favorite books, but I haven’t read it since college, and Wolf’s copious footnotes and essays (which include recipes for Romanian dishes) should offer more insight into Stoker’s masterpiece.

Thanks to Carl for the beautiful prize and congratulations to all the winners of the drawing.

Today seems to be one of those days where I feel like writing something, but I’m completely uninspired. The fact is things really haven’t changed around here: I’m still reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and John le Carré’s The Russia House is still on hold. (I’ve decided I’ll get back to it after I read Franz Kafka’s The Castle.) I finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger, but I’m still mulling it over, rereading passages, and trying to get a grip on things. I thought about collecting a bunch of links, but I decided I’m not in the mood to trawl the Internet looking for nuggets of book news; besides, Bookslut and Rake’s Progress, among others, already have the book gossip covered. Could I recycle a past blog? Not really; a quick glance through other archives told me that I don’t have anything relating to books or reading. Damn. And it’s not like I have anything else to offer. Double damn. Maybe with a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a little more time, I’ll think of something.

Or maybe not.

Having something of a phobia about germs and diseases, I’m not quite sure what possessed me to start Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. This book is frightening. Preston’s account of Ebola’s history—from the first outbreak of Marburg, Ebola’s tame sister, to the Zaire outbreak of 1986 and 1987—has a certain depth that is both horrifying and fascinating. Ebola—one of the oldest viruses in existence—takes the worst attributes of AIDS, rabies, and malaria and mixes them into an amplified and highly contagious stew for which there is no cure. With the worst strain having a mortality rate of 90 percent, Ebola is what epidemiologists call a slate wiper. The symptoms of the virus include backaches, lethargy, and dementia; the effects of the virus on the human body are more horrifying than any horror writer’s worst nightmare.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the human body into a digested slime of virus particles. … Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of the blood vessels. … This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin. … Ebola attacks connective tissue with particular ferocity; it multiplies in collagen, the chief constituent protein of the tissue that holds organs together. … In this way, collagen in the body turns to mush, and the underlayers of the skin die and liquefy. … Spontaneous rips appear in the skin, and blood pours from the rips. … Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. … The back of the throat and the lining of the windpipe may slough off, and the dead tissue slides down the windpipe into the lungs or is coughed up with sputum. … Your heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. … You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one side of the body goes paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds.

How appetizing.