Death and Swimming

I've moved on to the biography of Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell is This?, which you think would be an upper after Sylvia Plath. It was at the beginning, but now I'm wading into the end of her life and it just isn't happy getting old, especially for Parker it seems. Then, eerily, I hit on the section of Margaret Atwood's thoughts about writing where she considers that all writing is an impulse to avoid a confrontation with death. Nigh simultaneously I'm drowning in death here.

Why, avoidance, do you suggest? And heartily I agree.

Which means that the book I'm touting now is Swimming to Antarctica. What's it about? Swimming to Antarctica - and across the English Channel, the Cape of Good Hope, the Nile, the Bering Strait, and various other really cold, large bodies of water. If it all sounds a bit water-logged to you, take heart! It's actually a very engaging story that doesn't obsess over swimming terminology, water conditions, or minute descriptions of boats. Plus, there's very little death involved! It also makes one very, very glad to curl up with a sweater and several blankets with a cup of hot tea, while reading about someone else plunging into thirty-two degree water.

It's almost a pity I finished it, for my tax forms showed up. Why, avoidance, you suggest? And heartily I agree...

Books... and More Books

I think my period of deadness is almost over, which is good because, for all of the many benefits, zombies don't write blogposts very well.

I suppose this means I fail at Blog365, but I actually made it further than I expected, so I'll go with the feeling of triumph at making it through over a month. Hey, it's better than I did last November!

I've been reading the biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, lately and that is not a book to read when you're feeling low down and blue, I've determined. Or when you're feeling exceptionally happy. So, you have to be sort of fair to middling to read it. Which is seriously limiting my times when I can read this book. In any case, she certainly had a life! It wasn't even a bad life, all things considered, if she had been less depressive and competitive.

I find myself incredibly mad at Ted Hughes now, however. Not because of himself or his relationship with Sylvia or anything, but because he burned the journals she wrote during the last years of her life. Burned them! The first two-thirds of the book is alive with her prose and turn of phrase and then you reach within two years of her death and everything's guesswork from there on out. Argh.

Her poetry is much clearer now, the book explains a lot of the symbols that cloud her verse because they mostly relate to events that happened in her life; her work is very autobiographical.

Anyway, if you've hung on this long, you should definitely read the book. Oh, and also you should read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I've been enjoying it for my Russian lit class and it is a riot! The devil comes to Moscow for a visit and, well naturally, all hell breaks loose. Apparently, it's very popular in Russia even today. With good reason! It almost makes up for the fact that the next book on the reading list looks as though it could substitute in for a brick in a pinch. Seriously, I'm afraid of it. I might slip a disc trying to heft it up to read it.

My Favorite Day (WOL)

I think Sundays are my new official Favorite Day. I don't have to go to class or work or meetings, I can just curl up with my books, take naps, and run silly errands simply to enjoy the weather. My kettle is bubbling, the dishes are sparking, and I wish I could find a job that let me curl up at home and forget the world outside my window even exists for hours on end.

Chocolate... Yum (WOL)

So-late. Must-keep-eyes-open... (snoozing sounds) Work and school have taken a dislike to me lately - I might need to sacrifice a chocolate cake to them this weekend to get back in their good graces. Yum, with lemon icing. No, strawberry! Well, maybe lemon... I'll get back to you on that decision. I just struggled home after my late class on Japanese literature. It went pretty well, I loved the book for this week. It's called The Broken Commandment and it's absolutely beautiful prose. He was heavily influenced by the French naturalists while he was writing it, so not only is the story captivating, you get an incredibly detailed and lovely image of the world that Segawa is moving through. For those of us without the luck to have ever been to Hokkaido, it makes you feel almost as though you have seen those mountains and valleys - and that you desperately want to return. I also learned quite a bit about the class system in Japan during the Meiji, which was fascinating all on it's own. There's my recommendation for your week: chocolate cake and The Broken Commandment - go forth and indulge!

Dozy Days (WOL)

Today has been a very homebody day. I didn't have to work (Hallelujah!), so I just curled up in bed with all the books I needed to read - and maybe a few I didn't, heehee - and luxuriated the day away. I still didn't get all the reading I needed to done, it piles up so fast, but I feel so much happier and relaxed. Truly books are mana for my soul. Yay Sundays!

This Post Brought to You By the Color 'Green'

I managed to finish off And Then today, which did end as unhappily as I predicted. I think. It's somewhat hard to tell. It all ends in a swirl of red, which I took to mean that he had a) committed suicide b) been killed while in delirium or c) gone mad. Unless there's some other interpretation I'm missing, I count this as an unhappy ending. My favorite, of the options given, is that he was killed in his delirium. I don't think he had enoguh gumption to actually commit suicide, but dying would be an infinitely kinder death to him than continuing to live, mad or not. Plus, there was a mention in the book that it was only acceptable to read about a character who had flouted society for love and like them if they wound up dying in the end. Despite not knowing how much I actually liked the main character, it would be very poetic if that quote came full circle.

I talked to a friend today who has just come back from field research in Mexico. Apparently they camped in an active volcano for over two weeks while they examined the wildlife in the area. If you said, Pardon me? when you read that, then you are in line with my reaction precisely. He explained that it was generally only mild activity - boulders, small lava flows - and that other scientists had been watching for the big explosion that's due to arrive, so they were never in danger. I, of course, was still stuck somewhere around small lava flows. Yet I bravely moved past and listened to how beautiful the area was; it did sound nice, he was in the southern part of Mexico in a tropical forest high up on the lip of the volcano. The only drawback, he admitted, was that every single plant fought back and tried to stick them.

I would like to see a rainforest, though preferably not one in a volcano. I can almost imagine how very green it must be, but not quite because while it's easy to focus on how green one leaf must be, it's harder to get the perspective on an entire glade greener than anything I've ever seen. Still, the 'almost' is a very pretty picture, taken nearly entirely from Alabama forests. When I moved to Alabama from my southern Idaho desert, I decided that green was going to be one of new favorite colors right along with blue when we drove into the very first forest. It would be hard to be indifferent to green living down there, it surrounds you so completely. In the summer, I swear you could have drowned in green, if you weren't so busy trying to figure out what joker had switched out all of the air for water when you weren't looking.

Unhappily Ever After (WOL)

Entry for 01/19:
Today is for certain a lazy day. I'm just going to sit about and read my heart out until I have to work. Right now I'm trying to blaze my way through And Then by Soseki. It started out fine, it's slow and philosophical, but I don't mind those type of books so long as the philsophy is sound and the scenery beautiful. Both were just as they ought to be and I was perfectly fine wandering through the life of a character who has no ambition nor inclination to have a sound opinion on anything, when I suddenly walked into the middle of a love triangle and everything has gone downhill since. I dislike sad endings and I know this is going to have one, I just know it. Hence, progression on the novel has slowed considerably.

I'm also reading through a stack of futurist poetry for my Russian lit course, and a bit of proletariat poems as well, which is interesting. Sort of. Some of the poems just basically say, "Yay new order! We rule!," which isn't very exciting to read, but the authors with a pinch of creativity to them are quite good. I've also learned that the first sci-fi novel was written in Russia during this period. It's called We by Zamyatin and it's fascinating, though I'm nearly sure already that it's going to have a sad ending, too.

Why can't they let there be a bit of happiness in the world? There's enough sadness in reality. If book-people can't even contrive happy endings what does that say for the luck of the rest of us?

Atwood Rides Again

I finished Cat's Eye at work this morning - why, yes, it was quite the busy shift - and it was disquieting. Primarily, I think, because Atwood was playing with circular themes. As I read, images, phrases, people, kept circling through the scenes; events that occured one way at a certain point came back and played out differently again. Completed, it was as though I was looking at one of those spiral-graph toy pictures. The ones where you clamped the piece of paper inside and then ran your pencil round and round the different designs until you emerged with a sheet that looked like a cross between a Christmas snowflake and blueprints for a gear. Unless the paper slipped, and then it came out as a young child's scribblings of a mountian or trees or the sun. The brilliance of Atwood is that at times it looks as though she's slipped, that her pencil has gone careening after an errant tree, but then the picture joggles and steps back later and you see that there's an even larger circle that needed that tree to connect.

Is this rambling? It seems like rambling - confused and elated, which is how I finished the book. Then, as I was conveniently already in a library and had an hour left of my shift, I looked up 'Atwood, Margaret.' Now I'm reading Alias Grace. If Cat's Eye was playing with circles, this one is a play on forms. Already, I've flipped from narrative to poems, letters to drawings, newsprint. I don't have a grasp yet on what else she is playing with, my shift ended too soon for once, but I'm already intrigued. I like a writer who is having as much fun writing a work as I am reading it.

As there's already been a murder and an insane asylum in the book, I don't think I'm improving my 2008 vibes too much. For that, a happy note: I noticed this morning, as I was shivering and attempting to speed up the car's defrosting by the powers of my eyes burning through the steering wheel alone, that ice is not really solid. When it's forming, I mean. Goodness knows it's solid enough when you're trying to peel it off of a car. It forms, though, from little snowflakes of ice, chips of water that splay across the surface until they meet another frozen pattern and another. Then they all, apparently, form a union and fight for the right to never leave the window of your car. Things are so much prettier alone.

Day One... Of 365. Oh Dear.

Happy New Year!

Seeing as NaBloPoMo went so well - all eight of my posts - I thought I should expand my horizons. So I've joined the Blog 365 group. This is Day 1 and, hey, I'm posting! Clearly I'm off to a good start.

The holidays are finally over. I love seeing my parents and friends, but there just comes that point when you begin to comtemplate the padded walls of an institution with longing just because you'd get to be alone - and then you know it's time to go back to real life. Or get yourself committed, but that is expensive and I would have to quit my job. So, here I am back in my nice, quiet apartment.

I discovered this weekend that Margaret Atwood apparently wrote more books after The Handmaid's Tale. Why I didn't know this before, I have no excuse for, but I do now and Cat's Eye has become my obsession. There's something sweetly depressing about the book. Elaine is so vivid, so very real, and I'm not sure how my heart can sink any lower as I keep reading. Her story isn't a tragedy, it's a reality, which I think is what makes it sad - and also sweet. Like poison. You read what she sees, what she experiences through her perceptions, which gloss over the reality of what happens with the reality of what she feels at the time, then you are suddenly doused all at once with her realisations of the reality she obscured from herself. It happens over and again, as she ages and thinks that who she thought she was at a time is not who she was or is or can be, but it's a cold shock every time. I want it to be over, I want to piece all the fragments of her life together so that I know the totality of who she has become, what she has pieced together from her life, but I don't want it to end. Part of this is Elaine, but another is Atwood's language, her descriptors, the way she has of describing an object, a smell, a sound, in a way that sounds strange, but is perfectly right. There is verse in her prose.

And so I begin 2008 by describing a depressing novel. I certainly hope this is not some sort of prediction for the year. Just in case: fuzzy kittens! warm mugs of tea! soft robes and good books and smiles! There. That ought to brighten up my future just a bit.