Bookstorm

I can't even remember the last time I wrote a love letter, but I'm sure I might've written would've been laughable and--worst of all--awkward for the recipient. But lovers, take note: there's an art to writing a love letter, and it doesn't have to have to be in iambic pentameter. The real question, though, is whether or not the love letter will survive the digital age.

The classic love letters of the last two centuries, however, have been those of poets, playwrights and novelists, and their theme is tiresomely formulaic. Whether it's John Keats worshipping Fanny Brawne ("I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more--I could be martyr'd for my Religion--Love is my religion--I could die for that. I could die for you"), Victor Hugo rhapsodising over Adele Foucher ("When two souls, which have sought each other for however long in the throng, have finally found each other, a union, fiery and pure as they themselves, begins on earth and continues forever in heaven. This union is love, true love ..."), or Oscar Wilde in raptures over Bosie Douglas ("What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to me"), the theme has been transcendence--the insistence that the loved one inhabits a higher plane of being than the normal run of mankind. One can feel a sense of relief to read the flagrantly pornographic letters James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle when they were temporarily parted in 1909. He encouraged her to masturbate while reading them and called her, among a great many other things, his "darling brown-arsed fuckbird".

Do people send each other love letters any more? Or is the exchange of amorous declarations between partners now forever delegated to the insulting greetings card, the fluffy-bunny message in newspaper classifieds, the wholly unpassionate email, the economical salutation of the text message ("yr hairs so lng yr tits so gr8 theres nuthin bout you I don't r8. fanC a shg?")? Probably. But as recipients of real love letters will tell you, they don't have to be the work of Elizabeth Barrett or Lord Byron, or to insist on the beloved's spiritual qualities, to have an effect. Just a recital of her (or his) most shining virtues can do the trick. As St Valentine probably found when sending that note to his jailer's foxy daughter, 1700 years ago.

At Salon, Laura Miller announced the Good Sex Award, which, of course, celebrates the best in literary sex writing. And as this excerpt from Maggie Pouncey's Perfect Reader shows, good sex writing isn't all about how graphic an author can be.

Christmas morning began with sex. Better, longer the second time around, though less stunning. Flora liked having sex with Paul, but she would have preferred to do it in the afternoon or evening, or at least after she'd had her coffee. She felt incompatible with most men she'd been with for this reason--morning sex. She caught herself missing the sex of her girlhood, which had occurred later in the day. There was something about high school sex. Not skill, of course. And really, she was romanticizing it. She was always doing that, getting the past wrong. But as sex became more competent, more expected, even more pleasurable, it seemed a little less exciting, less dangerous. Gone was the sense of being bad. Where the titillating fear of getting caught? No wonder academics loved adultery (along with the rest of the planet). It saved them from the suffocating appropriateness of the rest of their lives. Growing up, it became harder and harder to feel illicit. So what, you fucked. Big deal, you smoked. Okay, you went on the occasional bender. You were an adult. You knew what you were doing. You used condoms. You understood the risks. You repented with brain-pummeling hangovers.

Here's a story, originally published in October of 1959, by one C. J. McCarthy, Jr.--otherwise known as Cormac McCarthy. Enjoy.

Here's a Sunday-morning round-up for you ...

• Ron Howard wants Javier Bardem to play the Gunslinger in the television adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. (I think Bardem's a pretty inspired choice to play Roland Deschain.)
• Children reenact Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time in ninety seconds.
• I'm hoping to get around to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick later this year. Until then, I'll man up with Jay Parini's account of Melville's bromance with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• I still want to read Adam Levin's The Instructions.
• I read Mario Puzo's The Godfather as a teenager, but the rest of this Mafia reading list sounds excellent.

I think one of the reasons I love Beowulf is because I managed to escape it in high school. (I finally read Seamus Heaney's translation a few years ago. I couldn't finish watching that terrible computer-animated movie, though.) Now The Believer, in a review of R. D. Fulk's The Beowulf Manuscript, asks a "central question": "What happens when an epic, seemingly stand-alone poem returns to its original digs?"

Any high-schooler who's battled his way through Beowulf could tell you that it's long on gore--zany, cartoon-type gore, with a constant lopping off of heads, limbs, you name it. There's a dragon, and a monster named Grendel with a monster for a mother who's a right bitch. It's a wonder Rob Zombie hasn't splattered out some filmic homage. But few readers of Beowulf seem to be aware that it's an excised text, an excerpt from a multiauthor volume that functions as a coherent single work, despite missing passages.

The entire review, which is pretty short, is worth reading. I don't want to read Fulk's book, for reasons unrelated to the review. I'll just stick with my Heaney translation.

"Reading WikiLeaks as literature": sorry, Bookforum, but I beat you to the punch.

I've been reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which, despite being extremely wordy, is a pretty fascinating book. It's tempting to try finding James's own religious views here, but The Varieties of Religious Experience is devoid of any personal opinions. Instead, James uses a variety of first-person accounts to examine the psychology of religion and to further his argument that "[e]very religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents." James, giving his lectures to a roomful of academics, concedes that religious experience may not be worthy of such thorough examination, but the subtitle--A Study in Human Nature--underscores how universal the book really is, and that religious experience, no matter how ridiculous, is worth looking at, especially by science.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, one has to keep in mind that James isn't choosing sides or passing judgment, and that the book isn't about religion itself, but religious experience. James is very objective here; he doesn't ask you to agree or disagree. He presents his anecdotes with no comment, and only asks us to consider them in the context of his inquiry. By carefully stripping religion of its supernatural trappings and giving it back to the laity, James elevates it to the level of common human experience. You may not have experienced religion psychologically, but that doesn't mean James's book is any less palatable.

It's the last day of my vacation, so here's a round-up ...

• Has literary fiction finally come to terms with the Internet?
• Edgar Allan Pooh.
• You may need to set aside a block of time for this, but be sure to check out Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown.
• "Can a novelist write philosophically?": the short answer is yes. This article reminds me of Albert Camus, who believed that the novel was philosophy in images. (And let's not get started on Ayn Rand.)

I'm a little more than halfway through Tom McCarthy's C. And now I learn that, in addition to losing the Man Booker Prize (which I don't care about anyway), it didn't even make the 2011 Tournament of Books shortlist. (That's forgivable, I suppose, since Remainder played in the tournament a few years ago.)

But no matter: C is a very good book. It has a strange, dreamlike quality that stems more from the experience than from anything in the story or writing. I won't say whether it's better than Remainder, since the two books are two completely different animals.

In any case, go and read C. It's well worth your time.

So science--particularly modern physics--really is the devil's work.

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo's most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that's the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo's crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante's Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

[ ... ]

Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante's Inferno--the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar's version of the Inferno's structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture--such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth--would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn't understand how real-world structures worked.