Bookstorm

I'm blasting my way through the semester, which is going reasonably well. (I know I bombed my first algebra test, so I need to go back to the drawing board and find a better way of studying for the class.) But I had no idea that Conan the Barbarian was teaching at Trinity College Dublin. It's one of the funniest things I've seen this week, and it almost makes me want to go back to majoring in English. (Sadly, the college already took the page down, but at least we can enjoy it as a cached version.)

I finally received the syllabus to my world literature class, and one thing is apparent to me: my professor really likes poetry. She's also seems like a very nice person, and her syllabus is littered with exclamation points implying cheerfulness and success.

Having very little experience with ancient literature and poetry, I'm looking forward to the class. We'll be starting off with Sappho, the tenth muse. (If the syllabus is any indication, my professor is ecstatic about Sappho.) Other works include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (naturally), Virgil's Aeneid, Beowulf, and a few selections from the Bible. We'll end at the Renaissance, with guys like Petrarch, Montaigne, and Machiavelli.

I've read very few of the works in the syllabus, and there's one work I've never even heard of--the Mayan epic of Popol Vuh. (It's in the creation myths section, taught after Genesis.) And this is partly why I chose the class: I see little reason to sign up for a class in which there's a good chance you've read a lot of the literature. (Shocker: I've decided not to major in English literature, so this will be the only literature class I take.) So it should be an interesting class. I expect no less than an A.

I'm still on a Stephen King kick, since I started Cell earlier tonight. School started up this week, and I spent most of Tuesday wandering around the office, clutching the syllabus to my (required) Intermediate Algebra class and trying to keep my rising panic at bay. (My math SAT scores weren't bad enough to warrant a remedial course, but they weren't good enough skate me into College Algebra. I did, however, score in the ninety-eighth percentile on the critical reading section, and in the high-eighties percentile on the writing section. Go figure.) I'm also taking a four-weekend Psychology course (you read that right--an entire semester of Psychology crammed into eight days) and World Literature to 1650.

This helps explain my sudden urge to read Cell, especially since I spent most of the summer reading The Stand: I wanted to get one more Big Mac into my system before detoxifying with (I suspect) the Bible, the Koran, Gilgamesh, and Homer's Odyssey, among others. Cell is pretty much the kind of trash I was hankering for: the first fifty pages have been nothing but gore, mayhem, and zombie apocalypse. King won't win points for originality: like Night of the Living Dead, he just dives right in, wasting little time with explanation and characterization. The book is mordantly funny, which certainly alleviates the obvious and tired social commentary that always seems to accompany zombie stories. (In Cell, people turn into zombies after using their cell phones.)

Still, Cell is pretty damned fun, which is really all I needed before the semester starts

I finished Stephen King's The Stand a few days ago. It's been nearly fifteen years since I last read it, and I remember being distinctly disappointed the first time around. I've spent all these years wondering why people consider The Stand his best work. Maybe it wasn't horror enough for me--even now, I wouldn't classify it as horror. (It's closer to fantasy than anything else. Richard Matheson is an obvious influence, but I also see shades of J. R. R. Tolkien.) And, yes, it's a bloated work--I remember thinking that the book was very slowly paced, that King took his time advancing the plot. (Even King seems to have recognized this: it isn't until a bomb kills off several characters that everything starts moving again.)

Fifteen years later, I'd forgotten much of The Stand. I didn't remember The Kid, a psychopath whose scenes with Trashcan Man are the novel's most suspenseful. I didn't remember that Randall Flagg, King's most famous villain, isn't in much of the book at all.

I also didn't remember--or perhaps didn't appreciate--how enjoyable and moving The Stand really is.

I'll be the first to admit that King isn't a very good writer. He has a tin ear when it comes to dialogue (does anyone really say, "You know this, don't you"?). He often doesn't know what to do after the Big Event--The Stand's plot comes to a screeching halt after Captain Trips has wiped out 99.9 percent of the American population. His themes and symbolism aren't very subtle (a frail old black woman leading the good guys versus a young white man leading the bad guys). The romance isn't very convincing--it's unclear why Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith fall in love, or why Harold Lauder pines for Frannie. (For what's worth, King has never been good at love stories: he almost--almost--nailed it in Wizard and Glass, but Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story fell flat.) Many of his books don't age well--they're trapped in the years they were written, as evidenced by the pop culture references and dialogue. And King doesn't give his characters a lot of free will, especially in The Stand. The characters are vividly drawn, but they're ultimately pawns in a one-sided chess game. (At one point, Abagail Freemantle, responding to Nick Andros's admission that he doesn't believe in God, says, "Bless you, Nick, but that don't matter. He believes in you.")

Despite its flaws, The Stand is a testament to King's strengths. He's at his best when he has a large cast of characters to play with. And he's a master at characterization--he gives the good guys lots of flaws, and the bad guys some redeeming qualities. (Trashcan Man and Lloyd Henreid are pretty sympathetic bad guys. Let's face it: a villain with no good qualities isn't very fun to beat.) It's clear King is emotionally invested in his characters, since he's willing to sacrifice plot and pacing at the expense of fleshing them out just a bit more.

The result is that, despite its length, I didn't want The Stand to end. (Yes, the climax very unsatisfying--I haven't changed my mind about that--but I think King backed himself into a corner, and he wasn't going to win no matter what.) By the end, I'm rooting for most of the characters. I want Lloyd and Harold to redeem themselves. I want Nadine Cross to fight prophecy and defy Flagg. I want Stu to reach Boulder before Frannie's child is born. I want each character to stop being pawns and start taking control of his or her own destiny.

Some of them do and some of them don't. We may feel controlled by outside forces, but we're largely in control of our own fate. Some of us resign ourselves to destiny, and some of us take control of it. I think the idea that we have free will is largely what makes The Stand such an enduring book.

From act two of William Shakespeare's King Lear:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need--
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!--No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall--I will do such things--
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep
No, I'll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep.--O Fool, I shall go mad!

I think that speech nicely sums up many of themes in the play.

"I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall."

Work was ridiculously busy tonight (and has been for the last few weeks) and that's about as far as I got with William Shakespeare's King Lear.

I'm exaggerating. I didn't quite finish the first scene of act one, but maybe King Lear wasn't the best choice of book to take to work. I love Shakespeare, but his language takes getting used to. One of the last of Shakespeare's plays I read was The Tempest, and it wasn't until the second or third act that I was able to (largely) abandon the footnotes, and that will likely be the case with King Lear. Still, King Lear is pretty enjoyable. I winced at Lear's actions and at Kent's implication that Lear is insane. And I snickered at some of the sexual references ("Do you smell a fault?").

Unlike most of Shakespeare's work, King Lear is one I know almost nothing about. I knew he wanted to divide his kingdom among his daughters, but that's pretty much it. So it'll be interesting to see how things turn out. And this being a tragedy, it won't end well, I'm sure.

¡Viva la revolución!

Just have a couple of quick notes before getting back to homework ...

I'm back in school, which has taken a worthwhile toll on my reading and blogging. But the term ends this month, and I have some interesting crime novels waiting for me: there's Scott Sparling's Wire to Wire, Marcus Sakey's The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, and Gillian Flynn's Dark Places. (I loved Flynn's Sharp Objects--you should read it.) I'm trying to get some fun reading done before next semester.

Here's a video of actors performing monologues from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. (And speaking of Wallace, here's a blog described as "A Visual Exploration of the Filmography of James O. Incandenza and the World of David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest.'")

Have a good summer, kids.

I didn't mean to take such a long break. But rest assured: I live!

I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which is quite good for a short story collection. (Those are always hit or miss, aren't they?) I read Oblivion last year, and the thing that strikes me is the way Wallace's stories are like little novels in themselves. He had an eye for detail that makes his characters and situations rich and more emotionally compelling. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is good stuff. (And in case you're wondering, according to my girlfriend, you should skip the movie adaptation.)

And while I'm on the subject of Wallace, have fun with this endnote generator.

It's probably been fifteen years since I first read Stephen King's The Stand. I don't remember much about it. A virus with a ninety-nine percent mortality rate sweeps across the country, and the survivors are divided into two camps: the good guys go to Boulder, Colorado, and the bad guys go to Las Vegas, Nevada. I remember Randall Flagg and, vaguely, the Trashcan Man.

In other words, it's time to reread it.

Speaking of King, he has a new short story and interview in The Atlantic this month.

JP: It is odd, though, if you think about it, that with all the speeding-up that we're being told about, and the dwindling of the attention span and all that, that people would rather chomp their way through a 400-pager than just get zapped by a little story ...

SK: And so many of the 400-pagers are disposable in themselves. When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: "These are basically books for people who don't want to read at all." It just kind of passes through the system. It's like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any part of you. I don't want to name names, but we know who we're talking about.