flitting on fiction

I’m not, really …. but The Virtues of a Solitairy Bird is the primary reading for my class in Viral Contagion this week …so I am doing my best.

The novel(?) is written by Juan Goytisolo , who is, according to the back cover flap of the book, “Spain’s greatest living writer”.  The front cover flap says:

For Goytisolo, great writers are ’solitary birds’ whose voice is an enchanting cry that pierces time.

On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St. John of the Cross, himself forced by the Inquisition to swallow his Treatise on the Qualities of the Solitairy Bird. Through a scintillating succession of vision, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saint. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hidous revenge will be wrought on the hertic whose work is seen to be as deadly a contamination as AIDS. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.

And honestly, in spite of having read all but a very few pages, I would have to take their word for it.

Yes, I am in a Master’s level English course - and yes, it would be reasonable to expect that I might be able to read even works considered to be more literary and perhaps more difficult.

But bluddy hell!!!! this takes difficult to a whole new level. Want to read a sample paragraph? Come on - you know you wanna. Here we go - this is in no way one of the most confusing or longest - I specifically chose one from page 11 because Amazon has page 11 in its Read Inside link so if you want to check it out…

as we sauntered nonchalantly back and forth from the salon to the dressing rooms, crossed the foyer next to the showers where several still sprightly young things still the worse for wear were devoting themselves with the same pleasure to the lustral rights and, leaning on the Lady’s counter or the shelf with the illustrated weeklies, we contemplated the couples on the side benches, the tables carefully set out by the waiter, the lamps with translucent glass shades, each with a twisted bronze foot, aligned like the fasces oflectors, the proprietress of the place used to say on evoking its history, the pomp and splendors of the imperial inaugaration

We, presumably, are the residents of the hospital the narrator is in, although my only reason for saying so is that the aforementioned blurb told us that this is where the thing is set.

The entire novel is without sentence structure - while there is some punctuation, and a few stray capitals on a few names, sentences do not begin with caps, nor do they end with periods.  To add to the ~fun~ of reading it, the work is fully justified, which does nothing to improve its readability. Perhaps if it were left aligned, I MIGHT be able to read it without risk of making my eyeballs bleed or my head explode. Or not.

The work was originally written in Spanish and was translated into English by Helen Lane - I hope she was very well paid for this!  She died in 2004 at the age of 83, from a stroke (NY Times) …the article does not suggest that the stroke was brought on by her work but….

Roughing It In the Bush is a series of sketches by Susanna Moodie . Susanna is the sister of Catherine Parr Traill , who I wrote about a couple of days ago, in reference to her book, The Backwoods of Canada.There are others 2 - of the 6 Strickland sisters, only 1 did not write - and not only write, but publish and meet with considerable literary success.

Susanna and Catherine are the 2 best known in Canada, though. Both wrote accountings of their experiences in Canada as emmigrants from England - Catherine wrote Backwoods after only about 2 years here; Susanna’s was written many years after the fact.That, and the fact that Catherine tended to be a far more positive and optimistic writer? person? … perhaps both … make the two works considerably different.

Backwoods is a much more enjoyable read than Roughing It, I think - but as I am reading  the latter again, with an eye to preparing to give a seminar in class next Wednesday, I am finding it to be a lot more rich than I remember. I have read it before - wrote a paper on it even -  but mostly, my impression of the whole thing was that Susanna was just plain old cranky & miserable. And so she was….but now that I am past that, I am finding lots to work with.

I have decided that the topic I am going to consider for the seminar is their portrayals of meetings with Native Canadians….  now to figure out what my main arguments are, and how to make it more interesting than just listenin’ to me go on for an hour…. I really do prefer to get people talking and involved somehow rather than to just read a paper/talk for an hour. My thought is that it would perhaps be interesting to look at some of the key passages and to imagine how the Native people they describe might have written it up if they had been inclined to do so … or, since their storytelling traditions are largely oral, to work on an oral telling from their POV.  That’s what I am playing with, anyway….

Is it Monday again? I know it isn’t…but it feels like it should be a Monday.

I am frustrated and annoyed.

For several reasons…

My CanLit class today was awesome - especially one bit of it… and I even have pictures… but I can’t tell you about it or show you the pictures or anything, and that is SO frustrating. You have no idea!

& I am trying to concentrate - to read a scanned pdf of  Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness and it is a difficult enough read to begin with, but even moreso when I am already frustrated by other things - and when Ross is snoring LOUDLY on the bed behind me in our motel room.

& I found some GREAT books at the Trent library that would help me a ton with the seminar I am to give in CanLit next Wednesday. Took forever to find them, and I was SO hot and uncomfortable the entire time, and Ross kept getting interested in books I was not interested in and I was HOT and miserable and wanted to leave once I had what I wanted - and then when we got to the checkout desk guess what?!  The self-serve checkout machines have been down forever… nothing new there… but the library’s computer system was also down and I was not able to take out a single blessed thing. Because like God FORBID we should ever have to revert to doing things the old way - you know, with a pen & paper… just can’t be done.  It had been down for 45 minutes according to the first guy we talked to … or “just a few minutes” according to the second …  take your pick …. we could leave them there and try again later, or we could wait - but they didn’t know what was wrong with the computers, or if/when/who might do something about it.

Every time I bother with the Trent library I leave there annoyed…. usually, the books I want are not on the shelf even though the computer insists that they are - and asking the staff for help/anywhere else to look invariably results in a vague gesture towards the shelves that you just came from after having spent ages looking for  the book.

Today took the cake though…. would it have killed them to post a sign I might have seen on the way IN so that I wouldn’t have spent so long finding just what I needed only to be told I couldn’t have it? GRRRRRRRRRR!

Today’s reading is The Backwoods of Canada by Catherine Parr Traill. This one is for my course in The Making of Early Canadian Books…   did not expect to enjoy reading it near as much as I am.

I have read a very short bit of her work before - but really didn’t have much recall of it… and then, last evening, when I could not find the book that I KNOW I bought only a couple of weeks ago, I was steaming mad - and not at all disposed to enjoy it… but I am finding it a fascinating look at Canada in the early 1800’s. I am nowhere near as interested in matters of plant life as CPT was - but those bits are easily skimmed in favour of her descriptions of the geography, her interactions with the Irish & Scottish immigrants, and Native Canadians, and the passages about clearing land, building houses and so forth. I am quite sure that part of the reason that I am finding The Backwoods of Canada a such an interesting read is that I do very much enjoy reading old letters - I think that future generations are going to be quite ripped off when they have fewer letters to study.

The book is largely composed of letters, describing the journey CPT and her husband took to get here, and her experience of being a settler’s wife. Even though she & her family experienced a whole lot of hardships & rotten luck, her writing is ever so much more positive and readable than her aptly named (also famous Canadian author) sister, Susanna Moodie, who I am quite sure I will bore you about over the next week or so as I prepare for the seminar I am to give about her work next Wednesday.

Tonight I am reading Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther - which I downloaded from Gutenberg and copied and pasted into MS Word. It is required reading for my course in Viral Contagions….along with a whole lot of other stuff including Love and Madness by Herbert Croft… hmmm…wonder if that is available on Gutenberg…sure would be an improvement over the copy that has been scanned and posted for us. It is just NASTY! Nope, no such luck.

Anyway …I often have difficulty concentrating when reading on computer screens. I read somewhere, actually - wish I could find it again - that part of the reason some of us find screen reading difficulty is because we have inadvertantly trained our eyes to scan downward on a computer screen, instead of from left to right as we do when reading codices (books).

That makes sense to me - but with MS Word, I am able to easily change the view to look like the 2 pages of a book … and that seems to be just enough to convince my eyes to behave. While I don’t have as many buttons/toys while I am in reading view, a right click brings up my highlighter - and really, what else do I need?

So … now I have a way to read in Word… will have to play with Adobe pdf files… see if I can do the same sort of thing there. Would make my life SO much easier - and cheaper, also!