Quotes from Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

"Rest, rest and riches," he said--"it's only after forty one begins to value things of that kind. And half one's life, perhaps, is lived after forty. Solemn thought that. Bear it in mind, young man, and it will save you from most of the worst mistakes. If every one at twenty realized that half his life was to be lived after forty..."


The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life. The physical comforts were certainly meagre, but at the Ritz Paul had learned to appreciate the inadequacy of purely physical comfort. It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. At some rather chilly time in the early morning a bell would ring, and the warder would say, "Slops outside!"; he would rise, roll up his bedding, and dress; there was no need to shave, no hesitation about what tie he should wear, none of the fidgeting with studs and collars and links that so distracts the waking moments of civilized man. He felt like the happy people in the advertisements for shaving soap who seem to have achieved very simply that peace of mind so distant and so desirable in the early morning.


Shall I tell you about life? Well, it's like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all round, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It's great fun. It is very much like life. You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally some one in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it. I'm not sure I am not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit every one.

People don't see that when they say "life" they mean two different things. They can mean simply existence, with its physiological implications of growth and organic change. They can't escape that--even by death, but because that's inevitable they think the other idea of life is too--the scrambling and excitement and bumps and the effort to get to the middle. And when we do get to the middle, it's just as if we never started. It's so odd.

Now you're a person who was clearly meant to stay in the seats and sit still and if you get bored watch the others. Somehow you got onto the wheel, and you got thrown off again at once with a hard bump. It's all right for Margot, who can cling on, and for me, at t he centre, but you're static. Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. There's a real distinction there, though I can't tell you how it comes. I think we're probably two quite different species spiritually. -- p.282

南方的文学

上次小麦说起南方的作家，发现我也读过不少南方的文学，非常喜欢。想不如系统的把南方作家都读一读。在网上查了一下，有哪些比较著名的南部小说。看到这个书单(I'm a list person)：

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2009/aug/27/best-southern-novels-all-time/
The Best Southern Novels of All Time

# 1 已读
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1936) (120 votes)

A profound exploration of race and all its attendant complexities. Faulkner’s rendering of the Southern “class” struggle through the life of one figure, Thomas Sutpen, makes Absalom, Absalom! the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American novel.
—Richard King


# 2 已读
ALL THE KING’S MEN by ROBERT PENN WARREN (1946) (80 votes)

Robert Penn Warren’s book is an unqualified masterpiece. It is all-encompassing and eclipses everything else on the list. One could make a reasonable case for its being the greatest American novel ever written. Seemingly nothing escapes its scope or ambition. —Ben George

All the King’s Men is a terribly ambitious and sometimes maddening novel, five or six novels crammed into one. It is cumbersome, perhaps, but it is a generative novel, a novel that is so innovative it changed the novels that followed, or made them possible. Descendents of All the King’s Men are various—from popular political novels to, oddly, road novels like Kerouac’s (there is a whole Beat sequence in Warren’s book—a trip to California). And, in the weary voice of Jack Burden, we hear the slow, cosmic disappointment of Binx Bolling, who came after. —Moira Crone


# 3 读过一半
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1929) (64 votes)

This stylized and ultra-literary concoction still manages to engage us. We work our way through four hundred pages of convoluted, sometimes impenetrable prose—and the members of the Compson family appear before us in all their appalling egoism, fear, greed, innocence, and hubris. Reading, you almost forget that this is fiction—the characters are so fully realized. As the final dissolution of the family comes to pass, you want to avert your eyes but you keep turning the pages—in fear and trembling. An unbearable tragedy, yet simultaneously a joy—as we recognize that the thirty-year-old, small-town author has gone the limit, investing his mind, soul, passion, psyche, everything, in the novel’s creation.
—William Caverlee


# 4 已读
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by MARK TWAIN (1885) (58 votes)

If you can discern anything about the greatness of a book by how often someone has either banned it or tried to have it banned, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn surely must be the greatest Southern novel of all time. Critics can say what they want about the book’s ending, but I challenge anyone to come up with an American writer who was braver, funnier, and more eerily perceptive than Mark Twain. —Bronwen Dickey

Huck, the battered child, and Jim, the runaway slave, are capable of feeling painful sympathy, for each other and for others. Others aren’t so burdened. Huck wishes he weren’t. Others, including the King, the Duke of Bilgewater, Tom Sawyer, a justly popular undertaker, and the River itself, can put on a show. It’s the funniest great book there is. —Roy Blount, Jr.


# 5 已读
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by HARPER LEE (1960) (57 votes)

Okay, this is kind of like voting for Albert Pujols as best hitter—really predictable. But who doesn’t love this novel for its descriptions, its drama and humor, its characters that are now ingrained in the American psyche, and its explorations not only of race in the South but also of femininity and class? Even the questions that hover around the book (why did Harper Lee not write another? just what was Truman Capote’s role?) have become part of its lure.
—Hope Coulter

Even though it simplifies race relations in the South, and even though Atticus really could have done more to save an innocent man’s life, almost every American remembers reading this book as a watershed moment. —Michael Kreyling


# 6 已读
THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (1961) (55 votes)

In Percy’s classic tale of love and longing in New Orleans, Binx Bolling woos his secretary, falls for his cousin, and muses lyrically on the nature of the search. This book has kept me company in China, Slovenia, Argentina. When I’m going to be away from home for any extended period of time, The Moviegoer is as essential a part of my travel kit as my toothbrush. I can open it to any page and instantly feel calmed. “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
—Michelle Richmond

If a better book than The Moviegoer has been written, I’ll cut off my little toe. —Ada Liana Bidiuc


# 7
AS I LAY DYING by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1930) (52 votes)

I once heard a poet say she never reads novels. When asked why, she said, “Because I always get about twenty pages in and then I realize, hmm, THIS isn’t As I Lay Dying.” In comparison, everything else is a bit of a disappointment. —Keith Lee Morris


# 8 已读
INVISIBLE MAN by RALPH ELLISON (1952) (47 votes)

Write a novel this good and this significant that doesn’t die in the pursuit of significance but, instead, comes alive. Go on. We’ll wait.
—Wyatt Mason


# 9
WISE BLOOD by FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1952) (44 votes)

Flannery O’Connor’s seriously dark comedy Wise Blood is among the finest American novels squarely about religion—awash with street preachers, yearning rustics, fake and genuine self-inflicted blindness, roaming pigs, a stolen mummy pressed into service as a faux Holy Child, descriptions of an allegorical sky no one ever seems to see, a soul-consuming gorilla costume, and a battered black Essex automobile as pregnant with meaning as the Pequod in Moby-Dick. It is also a brilliant critique of what O’Connor called the “American tendency to address a problem by changing its appearance.”
—Mark Winegardner

Didn’t she turn over a rock with this one? And she didn’t flinch one bit. Renders the surreal believable. —Melissa Delbridge


# 10 已读
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1937) (41 votes)

Janie springs to life from the pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her half-understood yearning, her wordless understanding, grabs our hearts. Zora Neale Hurston, through her Janie—who, pondering under a pear tree, begins to understand what it means to try to live a fulfilled life—speaks for some of us in words, desires, and thoughts that we did not know could be articulated. She not only lives our experience, she makes it sing. —Jesmyn Ward

前10本已经读过7.5，剩下的 #7 Faulkner 我架子上有，打算读，O'Connor 读完短篇，要继续读长篇的。

11. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers 已读
12. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole 已读
13. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner 已读
14. A DEATH IN THE FAMILY by James Agee
15. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe
16. BELOVED by Toni Morrison 已读
17. THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin 已读
18. THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker 已读

前18本，我读过13本。一方面挺欣慰得，觉得自己这么多年努力读书，还是有些收获的；另一方面又感到有些失落，南方的文学的精华，难道我已经读得七七八八？

后面还有：
19. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
20. THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER by Eudora Welty
(tie). SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy
22. GO DOWN, MOSES by William Faulkner
(tie). GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell 已读
24. THE GOLDEN APPLES by Eudora Welty
25. CANE by Jean Toomer
(tie). THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones
27. BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST by Cormac McCarthy
(tie). DELIVERANCE by James Dickey 已读
(tie). THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy
(tie). A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines
31. BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison
(tie). THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron
....

这个星期，每天早上八点多，收音机里都有一段 Faulkner 的讲话录音。昨天他讲关于 peace 的：

Q. Sir, do you have any solution for a man to find peace if he cannot write, as you?
A. Well, I don't think the writer finds peace. If he did, he would quit writing. Maybe man is incapable of peace. Maybe that is what differentiates man from a vegetable. Though maybe the vegetable don't even find peace. Maybe there's no such thing as peace, that it is a negative quality.

Q. I am speaking of peace in his own heart.
A. Yes, well, I'm inclined to think that the only peace man knows is--he says, Why good gracious, yesterday I was happy. That at the moment he's too busy. That maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass in experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things--that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.

听到他的声音，真感到亲切。我总是想着他在小说 Absalom, Absalom! 中刻画的那个南部，grotesque, mysterious, beautiful, sad, depressed, full of longing, but forever lost.

Book vs. Movie: A Clockwork Orange

Clockwork Orange 几年前试尝读过，读不下去，觉得太难了，好多字都看不懂。

租了电影来看，觉得电影的视觉艺术很棒，配乐也好。

今年年初把书又拿出来读了，终于读完了。才知道我不认识的字都是作者 Anthony Burgess 自己发明的，要根据语法和上下文来猜测。但因为很多是俄文的字根，我自然看得很困难。从网上找到一个“字典”，才看懂了。觉得作者真是天才。

然后又看了电影。Kubrick 当然是天才，视觉艺术的天才。

发现书和电影所要表达的东西非常不同。

故事大致是这样的（书和电影略有不同）。第一部：一个在生活在未来英国社会的青少年 Alex，有严重暴力倾向。他和朋友每天晚上出门，打砸抢奸，无恶不作。后来遭同伙出卖，在一次作案中被警察抓住，送进监狱。第二部：为了早日出狱，他要求接受 aversion therapy。几天之后，他“治愈”了，变得完全不能忍受任何暴力。第三部：出狱之后，他遭受同伙的报复，家人的抛弃，以前受害者的欺负，却因失去自卫能力，想自杀都不行。最后政府为了搞宣传，又把他治回原状。他又开始暴力的生活了。

可是，书比电影多出一章。这第21章使得两部作品的寓意有很大差异。

书的结尾是这样的：Alex 回到暴力的生活后，又过了一段时间，忽然感到暴力很无聊，意识到“that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction. Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.” 他就结束暴力生涯，结婚，生子，"and perhaps even create something... "做了一个正常的社会公民。

电影虽然是在英国拍的，Kubrick 却选择用了美国小说的版本，没有最后一章的内容。

我读书和看电影，最大的收获是读了作者 Burgess 写的前言，主要是关于最后一章的。据 Burgess 说，他的书在美国发表的时候，出版社让他把最后一章删掉：

My New York publisher believed that my 21st chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don't you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of a human life.

I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities....

印象最深的是作者的这段话：

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human characters is se, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.

最好笑的是，因为电影比书更出名，在作者把第21章加上后，很多读者／观众都来信询问。作者说，他的后半生大部分时间就是在 Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention，给读者回信，解释为什么书比电影多出一章来--while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanour. :)

Book: The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

Quote:

In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for a an to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery. p.263

Movie/Book: Into the Wild

5/24/08
昨晚看了电影 Into the Wild，才知道这个人，这家人的事。一边看，一边想，我们能从这个故事学到什么。这个孩子是不是教育失败？

首先，他完全没有按照父母的意愿生活，逃离家庭，不承认父母，心中没有一点对父母的感激。按草叶的准则，他是一个失败的人生。

可是，他独立自主，自力更生，虽身无分文，却过了两年快乐的流浪生活。用浮生和风子的准则，他快乐，喜欢自己选择的生活，是一个成功的人生。

他虽然没有给社会创造很多财富，却给遇到的人带来快乐。他给父母家人带来的是痛苦和悔恨，他的故事给我们外人带来思考和启发。从社会的角度来看，他的人生是有价值的。

最后，他不能按照他的意愿生存下去。他临死前意识到，happiness only real when shared，死之前想念家人，说明他自己选择的道路是不成功的，而且他也意识到了。那么，人生中短暂的快乐，不能决定人生的成功，可是，要多久的快乐才能算成功？十年二十年三十年？后半生？是不是在死的时候，才能对整个人生的成败下定论？再有，谁来下定论？作父母的，是要把子女培养成父母认为是成功的，还是子女自己认为是成功的，或是社会认为是成功的，才算成功？

这个问题越讨论越艰难。

另外，按七月所说，给孩子空间，如果孩子不需要父母，没有信号，父母就不要去打扰他，让孩子自然成长？可是，谁决定孩子需不需要父母？也许孩子的超级独立，是一种对父母需要的表现？电影中的男孩，如果父母能读到他给的信号，能创造一个交流的渠道，是否可以避免悲剧？

当然，电影 version中，最后这个男孩能得到大智慧，父母因为挫折而改变了自己的人生态度，在高一层次上，是否算是一种成功？不论道路多么艰辛曲折，在最后能够醒悟，能够与世界和解，能够认命，make peace with the world，一生也算可以算是完满的。

想到最后，还是觉得，人生道路有各种各样的，没有什么成功和失败，只有不同。每个人只能为了自己最终的内心安详而生活，只能为自己的幸福负责。自己喜欢怎么做，就怎么做吧。最终的心态是最重要的。子女的人生是他们的， 他们也要自己找到健康的心态。做父母的，给子女的影响最大，所以首先要调整好自己的心态，以身作则，能帮就多帮一些。心要大，要开。智慧是快乐成功的唯一要素。

我每次想问题，想到最后，得到的都是一样的结论。怎么回事？:)


11/6/08
昨天我看了这本书。我觉得书比电影好。电影只是讲 Chris McCandless 的 misadventure，但书里写了不少其他人对 Alaska wilderness 的向往和追求，尤其作者年轻时有过类似的 Alaska 冒险的经历，读起来觉得很真切。

我也有 Alaska 情结。在美国读大学的时候，同学跟我说，要想赚钱，就趁暑假去 Alaska 打鱼，男生打鱼，女生在 cannery 工作，一个夏天可以挣五六千块钱呢。因为夏天日子长，每天要工作 10-12 个小时，但剩下时间都是自由的。我就特别向往，向往那种别样的生活。可惜大学我只过了一个暑假，上了好多课，没机会去。研究生的时候，我约了女友一起开车去 Alaska 玩一个月。临走那天她才说不想去了。后来我就更向往了，特别想开车去逛 3 个月。我不想坐 cruise，也许要等孩子长大一些，才能圆了我的阿拉斯加梦，但肯定跟年轻时的那种去冒险的感觉又不一样了。

因为是真事，是报告文学，所以才更令人感慨，感慨生命在青春时的脆弱。

Book: The Brethren by John Grisham

前两天刚读了 The Brethren by John Grisham，小说的一个重要的 subplot 是讲美国总统选举的。书里说，谁的钱多，谁就能赢。读后，我对大选的激情更加淡薄。归根结底还是钱的问题。

CIA director wants to increase military budget, so he picks an unknown Arizona congressman to be a presidential candidate after NH primary, promises to provide unlimited campaign funding. He "creates" terrorist crisis to scare the people, and soon everyone turns to the new candidate. The money comes from defense companies, including "private" companies that nobody knows. The money is used for advertisement, for buying off politicians (to pay off their campaign debts), and such. Throughout the book, the CIA director keeps saying that the one who has more campaign money always wins. The writer John Grisham has worked in a presidential campaign before, so I assume he knows some inside stories.

TTC: 20th Century American Fiction

20th-Century American Fiction
(32 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
by Arnold Weinstein

Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. No first names are needed.
These giants of literature are immediately recognizable to anyone who loves to read fiction and even to many who don’t.

Now, thanks to this course from Brown University’s Professor Arnold Weinstein, you can develop fresh insight into these and eight other great American authors of the 20th century. Professor Weinstein sheds light not only on the sheer magnificence of these writers’ literary achievements but explores their uniquely American character as well. Despite their remarkable variety, each represents an outlook and a body of work that could only have emerged in the United States.

Freedom and Speech

The aim of this course is to analyze and appreciate some of the major works of fiction produced in this country over the past century, using as a focal point the idea of "freedom of speech." The focus on freedom of speech is appropriate for many reasons, particularly:
These texts often invoke the fundamental political freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and many of them take the liberty of articulating the painful ideological conflicts that have punctuated our modern history: war, racism, poverty, drugs, sexism, and the like.
"Freedom of speech" also spells out the key thesis to be presented in these readings: Language itself turns out to be not only "free" but a precious means of becoming free, of experiencing life beyond the constraints of the ordinary workaday world.
The overriding theme in American literature, as in American life, is that of freedom itself, whether expressed in a laissez-faire economy, in upward mobility, or simply in our belief that we can make ourselves and our lives into something beyond the origins and influences of our births, a theme sometimes called the American dream. No other society has ever professed such beliefs, and it is not surprising that our literature has much to tell us about the viability of these notions.
Our Ongoing War for Independence

Why would literature be a privileged record for this special American story about freedom? The answer: American fiction is something of a battleground in the "war of independence" that human beings—white or black or red or yellow, male or female—wage every day of their lives.

Our war consists of achieving a self, making or maintaining an identity, making our particular mark in the world we inhabit. This is a battle because the 20th century American scene is not particularly hospitable to self-making: great forces coerce our lives, forces that are at once economic, biological, political, racial, and ideological.

We are dogged by not only death and taxes but by the influence of family, of business, of society, of all those potent vectors that constitute the real map and landscape of our lives. This vexed and conflicted terrain does not resemble the smooth résumés that are our shorthand for what we have done, but it does correspond to our experiential awareness of what we go through, how we have changed from childhood to adulthood, what our work and friendships and marriages have been and what they have meant to us. Literature enables us to recover this territory—our territory. The texts presented in this course constitute an enlarged repertory of human resources, of the battle for freedom.

The Heroic Self in a Humbling Land

We begin by looking at the great texts and movements of the 19th century, especially our belief in heroic selfhood, and we begin to see and chart the kinds of forces that make up the moving stage we occupy.

Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is among the most poignant descriptions of life at the beginning of the century, but the charm of this small-town narrative acquires a deeper hue when we see the amount of repression and inner violence that Anderson chronicles.

Hemingway’s In Our Time and Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night are both, in their own ways, about American loss of innocence; about how the Great War and the brutality of modern life permanently altered our belief systems. This theme is presented as physical trauma in Hemingway and as madness and decay in Fitzgerald.

Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the ravages of racism in the American South, but it seeks, magnificently, to pair its overt story of carnage and neurosis with another, more elusive fable of love, kinship, and redemption.

We turn to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first—and perhaps the best—account of growing up black and female in America, a story that is expressed in a kind of language and diction that moves breathlessly from the vernacular to the legendary.

Flannery O’Connor’s stories bring a different agenda to our course: the challenge of perceiving the contours of God, spirit, and grace in a seemingly materialist Southern landscape peopled with the lowest profile folks in American literature.

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, once censored and then seen as merely a raunchy drug epic, will be studied as a dazzling and disturbing account of the body in culture, a body that is horribly open and defenseless against the takeovers that beset it.

War returns to our course in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, at once poignant and wacky, speaking to us of mass destruction and of extraterrestrials in the same voice, a voice that is hard to forget.

The course will close with a series of lectures on three of the most significant contemporary writers—writers whose works may not yet be familiar to you.

In his sprawling and audacious Public Burning, Robert Coover uses that most popular American code, entertainment, to present a manic account of the Rosenberg execution and the antics of one Richard Nixon.

Toni Morrison’s fascinating Sula is an experimental novel in which Morrison fashions a group of characters whose lives and values make rubble out of the conventions of humanistic culture, whether black or white.

Finally, Don DeLillo’s appealing, absurdist comedy of modern life, White Noise, depicts our encounter with the technological madhouse in which we live but which we have not quite gotten around to seeing.

Lifelines

These American fictions, seen together, tell a composite story about coping, about fashioning both a story and a life. The range of experiences and subcultures to be found here will dwarf the experience of any single reader, and that is how it should be. Much is dark in these stories, but the honesty and integrity of these writers adds pith and richness to our own lives and makes us realize that reading is as much a lifeline as it is entertainment or education.

Course Lecture Titles

1. American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
2. The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
3. What Produces "Nobody"?
4. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio—Writing as the Talking Cure
5. Winesburg—A New American Prose-Poetry
6. Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
7. Hemingway as Trauma Artist
8. Hemingway's Cunning Art
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald—Tender Is the Night—Fitzgerald's Second Act
10. Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
11. Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
12. Light in August—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
13. Light in August—Determinism vs. Freedom
14. Light in August—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
15. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God—Canon Explosion
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God—From Romance to Myth
17. Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
18. O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
19. Williams Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
20. Naked Lunch—The Body in Culture
21. Naked Lunch—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
22. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—Apocalypse Now
23. Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
24. Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
25. The Public Burning—Execution at Times Square
26. Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
27. Toni Morrison's Sula—From Trauma to Freedom
28. Sula—New Black Woman
29. Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
30. White Noise—Representing the Environment
31. DeLillo and American Dread
32. Conclusion—Nobody's Home

Book: Sister Carrie

I'm so happy to be reading Sister Carrie instead of the Bone People. I read it with great intent, enjoying each word in each sentence. It sounds like music to me.

I read the first two chapters last year when I was nursing. I found it very difficult, and I could not get into the book. I was not in the mood to enjoy it. I felt sad, and I didn't know if I would ever enjoy a great book again. I am glad this book has given me another chance.

There are several books in the past that I could not get into. I will have to give them a second chance. Yes, One Hundred Years of Solitude needs 3 or 4 chances.

book: The Bone People by Keri Hulme

I can't say I enjoyed the Bone People by Keri Hulme. While I was reading it the last two weeks, I was impatient with the book, and speed-read many pages. For one thing, I am not used to the language style. It is said to "follow the rhythms and accents of the Maori idiom". It is very difficult for me to follow. Also Hulme changes her narrative back and forth from third person to first person, and it is confusing, especially if I am speed reading. Most of the passages about Kerewin Holmes, which is over half of the book, read like a private diary. Since Kerewin Holmes sounds like Keri Hulme, and they have similar backgrounds (part Maori, part European, painter, drinker, asexual, etc.), I feel I am reading a badly written autobiography. I do not care about the protagonist, because she is self-absorbing and irritating. I care about Joe, but the book tells too little about him. I care about Simon, and in the book there is a promise of a mystery, but it is never resolved. There is no story in the book, only character studies, of only one character, which is the author, who is often drunk, depressed, or dreaming. I have learned something about the Maori people, but it is only through the eyes of Keri Hulme, whom I have a most difficult time to relate. I do not trust her at all.

The only part I can read normally is the part about Joe's wandering, and about Simon's recovering. Hulme uses normal English in those chapters, and I could understand. Then she switches back to Kerewin, and I am lost again. Unlike the other two characters, I don't understand how and why she is healed. In the end, I don't know what has happened. I am confused from beginning to end.

I got this book because it has won several book award, including the 1985 Booker Prize, an award for contemporary fiction writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. Past award winners include these two that I have read:

1989 - Kazuo Ishiguro - United Kingdom/Japan - The Remains of the Day - (I love it)
2002 - Yann Martel - Canada - Life of Pi - (I don't like)

Also Alice Walker recommends this book. Well, I don't.

Book: Seabiscuit

I got Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit from the library for $0.50, and since it had top rating at amazon.com, I began reading it. When the movie came out a few years ago, I didn't see it in the theater. Everyone told me that it was a "guy's movie". I only saw part of it on a train (from San Francisco to Los Angeles), and thought it was all fictional.

But it is all real in history. Charles Howard. Tom Smith. Red Pollard. George Woolf. Seabiscuit.

This book is not about a racehorse. It is about a lost era, about those "dear, dead days".

After reading the book, I become fascinated with horse race, and I want to go to racecourses and see real horse racing. I have been to Churchill Downs, Santa Anita, and the Detroit Race Course, but I didn't know anything about horse race before, and I missed the real excitement. I have checked to see the racecourses near us. The Hollywood Park is in our area, and it was where Seabiscuit won the inaugural Hollywood Gold Cup in 1938. Santa Anita is like a home to Seabiscuit, and there is a statue of the horse and the jockey Iceman Woolf. So many stories of Seabiscuit happened there. I really want to go and see it again. When I told people that I wanted to see horse racing, they

Here's a list of all California horse racing venues from Wikipedia (there are more from other sites):

Santa Anita Park racecourse
Bay Meadows, San Mateo, California
Golden Gate Fields, Albany, California
Del Mar Racetrack, Del Mar, California
Fairplex, Pomona, California
Hollywood Park Racetrack, Inglewood, California
Los Alamitos, Los Alamitos, California
Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, California

Hillenbrand did a great job digging up lost history, organizing the materials, and telling the life of Seabiscuit and those of everyone around him. Her language is colorful and vivid, and sometimes very sensational. For example:

His (Johnny Pollard) emotions were liquid; his anger was a wild rage, his pleasure jubilation, his humor biting, his sorrow and empathy a bottomless abyss. (p.51)

Below is an interesting "observation" of the depression era:

In the winter of 1937, America was in the seventh year of the most catastrophic decade in its history. The economy had come crashing down, and millions upon millions of people had been torn loose from their jobs, their savings, their homes. A nation that drew its audacity from the quintessentially American belief that success is open to anyone willing to work for it was disillusioned by seemingly intractable poverty. The most brash of peoples was seized by despair, fatalism, and fear. The sweeping devastation was giving rise to powerful new social forces. The first was a burgeoning industry of escapism. America was desperate to lose itself in anything that offered affirmation. The nation's corner theaters hosted 85 million people a week for 25-cent viewings of an endless array of cheery musicals and screwball comedies. On the radio, the idealized world of One Man's Family and the just and reassuring tales of The Lone Ranger were runaway hits. Downtrodden Americans gravitated strongly toward the Horatio Alger protagonist, the lowly bred Everyman who rises from anonymity and hopelessness. They looked for him in spectator sports, which were enjoying explosive growth. With the relegalization of wagering, no sport was growing faster than Thoroughbred racing.

Note the part about "cheery musicals and screwball comedies". See my movie review for the 1930s.

I've just signed up for a membership at The Daily Racing Form. I don't know what I am going to do with it....