Blogging in the Doldrums
Detail: “Yûgao, Illustration to Chapter 4 of Genji Monogatari” (C. 1650) / Harvard Art Museums
It’s been an amazing summer. Personally, I haven’t had a summer like this in a while, overlooking a very dry June and the forest fires burning in Canada.
Two Medium posts totaling 2,000 + reads and a ton of people signing on. It stunned me.
When Linda Caroll announced a new Medium publication, The Book Café, I jumped on contributing. I’ve read more book reviews than books—a lot more. Admittedly, writing about writing is anachronistic, but a well written book review soothes the need to find intelligent life in the universe.
Christopher Hitchens’s Arguably: Essays included quite a few of his book reviews. I can’t buy the philosophy behind everything he wrote, but his slashing style of writing slays me. I can well imagine the dinner parties with Martin Amis (son of Kinsley Amis who wrote Lucky Jim, a book I read in college) were every bit the as engaging as his writing. Hitchens was known for his love of the grape and an amazing ability at carrying the conversation beyond when most could keep their heads from off the table. It was smoking that killed him.
Then just this year, esophageal cancer took Marin Amis—the same way it took Hitchens not too many years ago. Seems it is either smoking or alcohol for writers, or both. I don’t smoke.
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The Conscience of a Dog was a total surprise. A book review, whoda thunk? But the publishing editor for The Book Café liked it, and who doesn’t like a story about dogs? I’m sure the fact I included Molly’s sweet mug got attention. For a few years Molly had herself a Facebook page—she was that kind of rottweiler.
While reading Jon Katz’s book, A Good Dog, we were spending several weeks last Christmas in—where else but Duck on the Outer Banks—in a house with an actual bookshelf full of interesting books. Finding books by Virginia Wolfe was a surprise. The beach house tradition is an offering of detective stories, westerns, bodice rippers and board games missing pieces, but rarely books by real novelists. A Good Dog, sat alongside Wolfe’s Mrs Dalloway, her study in interior conversations.
Katz’s story started out as a good read. It wasn’t until I’d reached the denouement that I realized I was reading the wrong book. My book review resulted. I did try to be judicious to the author.
Most of the posted comments on Medium were focused on my own living with dogs. I have loved dogs since I was a cross-eyed kid with glasses. It’s the curiosity, trying to understand other creatures, dogs the most approachable. More so than many humans. I’ve decided the researchers claiming animals have no souls are likely missing their own. Arguably you can’t understand humans either, just speculate in novels.
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The second article was Reading Lolita in Tehran. Probably should have titled it “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran.” One reader from Lviv sent a link to a 1965 interview with Nabokov. She’s a young mother getting over a failed marriage, getting on in the middle of that hell. The Nabokov interview was interesting, but hearing from a writer responding from war-torn Ukraine was humbling.
I’ve since read reviews about Nabokov’s book—see? I told you—and I still am ill at ease with a story from the pedophile’s point of view who’s lusting after a twelve-year-old girl, no matter how well written. I can’t help feeling something about the subject must have attracted Nabokov beyond the wordplay. Maybe I’ll read it when I’m old and gray—oh, wait…
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The death of the novel has been heralded for so long, it is a cliché. The novel comes with a long history, but it hardly seems an anachronism—suggesting something no longer of use in the world—refuted when a teacher such as Azar Nafisi can construct so much of life from the pages she lectures from.
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu from the early 11th century, The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer from the 14th century. Storytelling goes back to nighttime fires.
Genji is a tale of courtly manners and promiscuous princes in medieval Japan. And if you’ve read The Tale of the Wife of Bath, you know she puts them in their place. Five husbands is a record.
Movies and TV, the theater, all these other media have drawn readers away from novels. The best of these are as valid as a novel in showing us to ourselves. In my life, music has been another vehicle into an interior life as great as any novel. Story and the play of words—maybe it will all fade away once we know everything there is to know about everything.
One can hope the novel lives on. I have doubts about its distant second cousin, the graphic novel. Unless Edward Koran is drawing the illustrations, the ones I’ve read don’t have the word power of a real novel. And don’t get me started about chat bots—I’d rather buy bit coins.