A little bit of this and that

Tags

Alain de Botton, Fiction - Novel, Loretta Chase, Margaret Atwood, Philosophy, Romance Novel

Why, yes, I forgot I had a book blog. Nothing new, really. Although, after the bibliographic flurry of the last weekend, I came to the startling realization that I had other interests—like, um, a computer game that involves building a Roman city from scratch, and zombies, and Downton Abbey.

And, well, I’m not missing reading too much. I look at my shelves, smile sunnily, realize that they haven’t been clamoring for me, shrieking from their confines. [In fact, the past couple of the days, my usual reading buddy put on her judge-y face and asked, “Why aren’t you reading?” And I shrugged and said, “You know, I’m kind of chill not reading.”] I’ll pick up a book soon, it’s nothing to worry about. I’ve had the urge, though, to read and commit to a fat book—a fat, consuming book. The Pillars of the Earth is grinning smugly at his shelf-mates, as is The World According to Garp. And, heh, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. I’m not ready for all that yet, but, you know, I’m chill.

I did read some really good books last week—Eileen Chang’s short stories, Bauby’s heartache-y memoir, Eugenides’ beautiful spectacle of I Do Not Know Yet. I’m biding my time, though, to talk about them. So, yes, the next time I remember having a book blog, I’ll attack those books.

Three books to dust off this blog with, now. The books below, for posterity’s sake—they’re not AwesomeSauce, but they’re not icky books; I guess they’re good books? Good, in a “Yeah, shrug” kind of way? Although, of course, I expected them to blow me out of the water—aren’t those normal reader expectations? Bleh. They’re just, you know. Shrug.

Take Alain de Botton’s The Romantic Movement, which I bought because de Botton is auto-buy, and especially because this hints at the wonders his On Love wrought on me. I hate to pull a comparison between the two, but if a brawl broke out in a seedy bar somewhere, On Love will throw chairs and knee groins, and The Romantic Movement will be ensconced in a corner table, surveying the proceedings with a sniff-ish air.

Like On Love, The Romantic Movement—subtitled “Sex, Shopping, and the Novel”—is an examination of a trajectory of a love story. Our girl’s resigned, bitter, idealistic longing for a soulmate. Our guy’s casual breeze into her life. How they fall in love, or how they say they fall in love. What makes it a de Botton novel is the author’s constant intrusion: Shopping will summon Emma Bovary, wine-tasting might summon Proust.

The main difference, though, between TRM and OL is that the latter made you invest in the characters, the people involved in the love story the author-narrator is dissecting. TRM looks at them as specimens, sometimes as vehicles for theory and embodiments of Perfect Examples of X—they were rarely actual people for me. I suspect TRM is more detached, if colder. There is the same erudition, of course, the same breathlessness for the language. But the tone and treatment can make you cringe with unease at times. These characters are bugs, and you’re just peeking into the Petri dish with de Botton over there.

Also. Loretta Chase debuted a new series with Silk is for Seduction—about three sisters who are dressmakers. This one’s about the eldest who plots to get the nearly-affianced Duchess of Something or the Other on her client list, because, damn, that will ensure her shop’s success. How does she go about it? By being all vamp-ish and court-y over the Duke. Whose pending-bride she wants to dress. Okay.

Guh, I don’t know. I liked the vibrancy of the heroine, how ruthless and conniving she could get. I did appreciate having a historical romance heroine who had a profession, and is quite good at it, thank you very much. But though I like those, I know—I felt—that they just didn’t make good romance fodder. I mean, she and the hero have no quiet time together. Shit’s always happening. Moreover, I felt that, ugh, her profession and her shop—and, you know, that little business about the class difference—stood in for their love story. How Marcelline [I think that’s her name, haha] fought for her profession, how good she is at it, and, later, how the Duke got all helpful and shit? Yeah. That was their relationship.

The writing was accomplished, the detail that went into making a credible dressmaker was impressive. But did I roll around the bed squealing over this book? Did I giggle like an idiot, or cried like one in Angst Timez? Nope.

And then there’s Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. This was just not my kind of book, although I did went all giddy at the thought of retelling Penelope’s story—or, at least, offering a rightful elaboration.

But I should’ve known there would be a Relevant Social Message crouched in the trappings of the myth. Which, by the way, was told in a too-prosaic language for my sake. [By the way, “The Odyssey meets Desperate Housewives” is just not my kind of cake.] Maybe the disconnect between these two factors—the agenda and the delivery—turned me off? Maybe I just wanted a myth-retelling to roll around in? Because, dammit, from what I remember in school, I really loved Penelope. So, yeah, I wished this had more, well, weight. More stuffing. More.

- – -

If you’re still with me, I suppose you’re thinking that it’s no wonder I don’t want to read. Heh. But no, no, I’ve got good books under my belt, and I can’t wait to share them with my cobwebby white space in my corner of the Interwebz. Just, you know, after I build an Olive Farm. And maybe see what else the Dowager Countess is up to.

“The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. . .” – On Love, by Alain de Botton

Tags

Alain de Botton, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Philosophy

22 of 2011 ▪ On Love by Alain de Botton.

1. I first learned about this novel [philosophy tract cum novel?] after I finished my first reading of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. I wanted more of the wonder and beauty of Barthes, and my internet digs led me to de Botton’s first book. About a year later—and another reading of Barthes—I saw this book in a bookstore. For some inexplicable flash of idiocy, I put it back on the shelf. I have been pining for it ever since.

2. And then I found it, and immediately plonked it into my shopping basket. I read the first third of the book back in November. I was all-too-easily falling in love with the book, with our narrator, his particular neuroses, his words. I grew to loathe Chloe for being the object of our narrator’s longing and devotion. [I guess that’s self-explanatory.] And then, for some inexplicable flash of idiocy, I set the book aside almost as soon as I got home from the hospital, and then my mother borrowed it, and then she gave it back, and I still didn’t pick it up until a few days ago.

3. The oft-quote first paragraph of this book. I’ve copied it into notebooks, into this very blog. When my mother asked me what the novel was about, I said, “It’s weird. It’s a love story, but every ‘stage’ of the love story, almost every moment, the narrator’s philosophizing. Explaining. It’s like a rationalization of love.” And my mother said, “How else should you treat love?” And I let her read the first paragraph. And she smiled and took the book from me.

4. When I returned to the book a few days ago, I read it from the beginning. Went through their conversations in the airport, went through our narrator’s computations of his romantic destiny, past their awkward lunch, past the first time they made love.

The philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub. In both arenas, because the body is predominant and vulnerable, the mind becomes an instrument of silent, uninvolved assessment. Thought’s infidelity lies in its privacy. “If there is something that you cannot say to me,” asks the lover, “things that you must think alone, then can you really be trusted?”

I wasn’t thinking anything cruel while I ran my hands and lips across Chloe’s body, it was simply that Chloe would probably have been disturbed by the news that I was thinking at all. Because thought implies judgment, and because we are all paranoid enough to take judgment to be negative, it is constitutionally suspect in the bedroom. Hence the sighing that drowns the sounds of lovers’ thoughts, sighing that confirms: I am too passionate to be thinking. I kiss, and therefore I do not think—such is the official myth under which lovemaking takes place, the bedroom a unique space in which partners tacitly agree not to remind one another of the awe-inspiring wonder of their nudity.

I made notes and stuck Post-It flags and sighed and swooned and shook my head and agreed, breathed, Yes, dammit. I read it during lunch breaks, on the train commute home, in a café packed with young’uns too not-in-need-of-coffee. I read, and I read.

5. Could I quote this entire book, this wonderful oddball beauty of a book? Sentences like, “One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.” Or, “I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.” Or, “If one is not wholly convinced of one’s own lovability, receiving affection can appear like being bestowed an honor for a feat one feels no connection with.” Or whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters.

6. What a daunting undertaking, all these notes about love. Then again, haven’t we all done so? Analyzed, and belabored the point. To seek to define the other, to seek to measure their love, even as we struggle to subject ours to the same scrutiny?

7. Funny how one unfolds a love story through philosophy. I suppose it’s fitting, I suppose among the hundreds—thousands?—who have read this novel there are those who’ve thought, “Why did I not think of this first?” Then again, “Could I even do this?” It seems exhausting, mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. To define love through a narrative, define it explicitly. To put on the philosopher’s hat at a jaunty angle. To love deeply, and think endlessly—needlessly?

8. Then again, have we embarked on complicated equations to formulate the probability of having met and loved someone? Have we ever tied Marxism to the first fight we ever had with the person we now love? Have we drawn comparisons between a sulk and political terrorism?

Though ordinary terrorists may occasionally force concessions from governments by blowing up buildings or schoolchildren, romantic terrorists are doomed to disappointment because of a fundamental inconsistency in their approach. You must love me, says the romantic terrorist; I will force you to love me by sulking at you or making you feel jealous. But then comes the paradox, for if love is returned, it is at once considered tainted, and the romantic terrorist must complain, If I have only forced you to love me, then I cannot accept this love, for it was not spontaneously given. Romantic terrorism is a demand that negates itself in the process of its resolution, and brings the terrorist up against an uncomfortable reality—that love’s death cannot be arrested.

Have we related the delusions inspired by love to the medical case of a man who, out of the blue, thought that he was a fried egg? Have we told our lovers, I marshmallow you, because we found the phrase “I love you” too exhausted, too emptied of meaning, and any other word would have done? [Show of hands, please.]

9. There’s something terribly cold about this entire process. Shouldn’t love be fluffy and mindless? But there’s something terribly sweet and earnest about all these rationalizations—This is my love, this is how I love you, and this is what it means, that is, it means the world to me. That is, it’s sweet and earnest because, well, there’s the attempt at coldness, at objectivity. But love draws you in. Love defeats the purpose. Love kicks philosophy’s ass even when the two pretend to be all happy-chummy.

10. “I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one’s fears, or a morality of one’s disappointments. Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled t reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed—and therefore never stray far from the ironic.”

11. I saw what you did there, Mr. de Botton.

12. Barthes said, “. . .the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.” Exhibit more of your sappiness, darling, and say, “But thank goodness for these books, once in a whle I need not feel lonely.”

13. Holy cheesecake, kids, I sound drunk.

My copy of On Love was bought (PhP 499) from the Cubao branch of NBS about a year-ish ago. It looks purdy among my growing collection of de Botton books.

From Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Tags

Alain de Botton, Excerpts, Philosophy

My friend Nash lent me Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, as some kind of philosophical self-help book, get-over-yourself therapy. My notes are rather whiny and could very well remind one of emotional-diarrhea, and so I am sharing with you an excerpt that’s not exactly the reason why Nash lent me this book in the first place. Ahem:

Every great work of art, suggested [poet, critic, and Oxford University professor Matthew] Arnold, was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they [found] it.” They might not always realize this ambition through overtly political subject matter — indeed, might not even be aware of harboring it at all — and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always a cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to connect the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities, to nurture his capacity for empathy or rebalance his moral perspective through sadness or laughter. . . . Art, [Arnold] insisted, was “the criticism of life.”

What are we to understand by Arnold’s phrase? First, and perhaps most obvious, that life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshiping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behavior of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humor or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films — can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

For posterity’s sake. La-dee-dah. Take care, everyone.

Some choice certainties about good books, ineloquence in the face of said good books, and me having read — and still reading — some good books lately

Tags

Alain de Botton, Books About Books, Essays, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Jude Deveraux, Siri Hustvedt

Have reunited with Siri Hustvedt, and it feels so good. I’m running out of her novels to read [I have one left on my shelves], and I’m branching out to her nonfiction. Here’s a passage, from “Being A Man,” from her book of essays A Plea of Eros:

As a reader of books, I’m convinced that words have an altogether magical power to generate, not only more words but fleeting images, emotions, and memories. Certain novels and poems have had a power to unearth raw and unknown parts of myself, have been like mirrors I never knew existed.

I agree. And, mm-hmm, most especially when it comes to good books. I have no idea how to even begin defining what good is — I don’t know how to offer a general definition [which, then again, I think would be lame], but I’m almost always certain of what is good for me. And goodness, for me, is almost always a visceral thing. I can, under duress, articulate why the crafting is good, why the elements of literature fall in the most perfect way [like when I had to pretend I was smart enough to talk about du Maurier's short stories, even if they scared the bejeebies out of me].

But most days, with good books, a Post-it with  Yes scrawled all over it would be enough for me. Most days, I’d much rather daydream about how my heart hammered inside my chest at a pivotal scene, declare that it was the right book to read at the right time, feel in my bones that a book was written for me, or just launch into an as earnest-as-I-could-manage blathering love letter to the text [and the author].

It’s the books that rob me of speech that I love best. It’s the books that translate this critical ineloquence to things much more important in life — loving, my own fictions, battle-cries — that I turn to over and over, that fill me with so much wonder and gratitude that, at the very least, I get to read books.

But there’s a need to give tribute to such books. And that’s where the trouble starts. Yes, as a reading journal, this blog is a depository of all things squeal-worthy in my reading adventures. But sometimes it’s just so goddamned hard to talk about these books. It’s constantly empowering and humbling at the same time, to have read a book that has touched you greatly, and facing the fact that, well, there is no way you can talk about it oh-so-calmly. I can be earnest, I can write love letters, I can say Yes over and over again, but a part of me demands that I write a fitting tribute. Hell.

Last night, I finished rereading the first romance novel I ever read: The Duchess by Jude Deveraux. I am, as usual, having difficulty trying to articulate why it’s good to me, why it has remained so good after all this years. The homecoming aspect is a part of it, yes, but I want to elaborate. I want to tell you all how the heart-thudding is so different when you’re 21 as opposed to reading it for the first time on the sly at 9. I want to tell you all that this is still one of the best exultations of love that I have ever read, regardless of its flaws. I want to tell you all that I was absolutely certain I would be feeling this way even as I began the book — hell, even when I picked up the book from the bookstore.

Like one of the books on my Currently Reading stack, On Love by Alain de Botton. I began this book on the tenth floor of a Medical Arts Tower, me sitting beside a four-year-old adorable stranger who later introduced herself — “I’m Lexine. I can do cartwheels.” Odd place, but today was an odd day. Anyhoo. So. The novel began — its first chapter, “Romantic Fatalism” — thus:

The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings? And though our prayers may never be answered, though there may be no end to the dismal cycle of mutual incomprehension, if the heavens should come to take pity on us, then can we really be expected to attribute the encounter with this prince or princess to mere coincidence? Or can we not for once escape rational censure and read it as nothing other than an inevitable part of our romantic destiny?

I’m seeing it as a merging of a thesis on love and romance [if I were feeling catty, I'd put on my glasses and intone, Romantic Idealism and the Amorous Object] and an actual relationship. Of the ideas of love and romance applied to, or used as an elaboration, of this actuality of love and romance between two people. Or vice versa. It’s a love story, but it’s also a philosophical text. Whatever it is, I am swooning.

I just began this novel — I’m at p.26 as of this post — but I am absolutely sure that I’ll really like it. That I’ll be charmed beyond sense, that I’ll invest in these characters, and write all over the margins. That I’ll keep on swooning. And that, when the time comes, I will be struck dumb, right in front of this laptop, trying to think of all the other ways to say, “Good God, this book was AwesomeSauce.”

Why, yes, I’m back to square one. Aherm. Good night from my part of the world, kids. I’m off to bed with de Botton.

When We Read for Other People: Me and The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton, and Then Some:

Tags

Alain de Botton, Art & Architecture, Excerpts, Philosophy, Reference

The house gives signs of enjoying the emptiness. It is rearranging itself after the night, clearing its pipes and cracking its joints. This dignified and seasoned creature, with its coppery veins and wooden feet nestled in a bed of clay, has endured much: balls bounced against its garden flanks, doors slammed in rage, headstands attempted along its corridors, the weight and sighs of electrical equipment and the probings of inexperienced plumbers into its innards. A family of four shelters in it, joined by a colony of ants around the foundations and, in spring time, by broods of robins in the chimney stack. It also lends a shoulder to a frail (or just indolent) sweet-pea which leans against the garden wall, indulging the peripatetic courtship of a circle of bees.

The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread.

Our third anniversary’s coming up, P. and mine, and I scrambled to get him a bunch of things that he better be happy about or else. Ahem. One of them, The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. I figured he’d like it — he likes philosophy, he likes pictures, he likes aesthetics. See, P. is an artist, and you might have seen some of his works around this blog. But he’s also an architect, even though he’s not architect-ing away as he paints full-time now. His architect’s license is a very peculiar thing to me. It’s him, but not quite him.

I remember that around the time we first, well, got together, I made a conscious effort to brush up on my Arts education. I know a little bit of this and that, but I needed to study. I needed to learn how to cock my head just so when de Kooning would come up, or be able to comment on Jackson Pollock’s realism before he went all splotchy, or be able to say why I don’t like Gauguin much but Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele can give my soul the shivers every  damn time.

So I read. I spent many an afternoon those early days poring over as many of P.’s art books as I could, bought the occasional biography, and just looked at a lot of art. It’s contrived, yes, very much so. The old Oh, the things we do for love, won’t really fly here, I know. But, still: Love makes us reckless; awareness, pretensions — they’re part of that. And though it may not have been pure-intentioned at the beginning, I grew to love what I was reading. I stopped reading them if only for conversation, if only to say Yes, I am interested in what interests you.

I know the unspoken dictum, that point of pride: I read for myself, I read because it makes me happy. Self-pleasure, really. But I’ve found another dimension for this noble selfishness — we do read for other people, and we do it because we need to. And I’m not talking about assignments or blog tours. I’m not even talking about seeing something on another person’s blog that interests you.

Although it may start this way, it’s not about being liked. Or even being able to hold conversation. Perhaps, it’s quite basic: We genuinely want to make friends. And so we make an effort. We want to know the other. We want to have something with this person, and we look for what makes his soul tick is.

And always, it seems, always we hope whatever that is makes our soul tick too.

A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling . . . Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

So, before wrapping it and hiding it away, I read The Architecture of Happiness. It’s a mix of history, philosophy, and yes, architecture and aesthetics. The history of the aesthetics of structure. The philosophy behind the ever-changing history of architecture. It was a wonderful read — an illuminating overview of how the places we exist in affects our psychology, and vice versa. The language is, as I’d expected, clear and fluid; never wooden, never pedantic. This is prose:

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

I admit that I would never have picked this up if I did not love an architect. I know I would have read, instead, the author’s On Love, or his more directly-philosophical books about Proust, for example. I’ve always wanted to read those, the former especially, but The Architecture of Happiness was low on my want-to-read. But here I am. And I loved this. I loved this distinct from the way I love it — by default — because it’s a passion of my boyfriend’s. I love it, I do. It made my heart a-quiver.

I’ve read for other people too. My mother loves A.S. Byatt, and I girded my loins to read Possession. My friend Carina loves John Green, and so I read Looking for Alaska. When asked what his most favorite book is, P. answers, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Poet-friends have infested my once-so-prosaic life, and so I read poetry — willingly this time, not scorning the academe-processes I’d latched on to the genre. I’ve bought books because people I love swear the heavens would unfasten every time they read them. Sometimes the heavens would unfasten for me. Sometimes they don’t.

There are many reasons we read, I know that. I’ve found few people have owned up to reading for other people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. I think it’s a matter of being open to have one’s soul or mind struck by what has already struck another person. I think it’s a matter of being able to learn how to love something beyond another person’s love for it. No matter how contrived — even devious — our initial intentions may be.

My name is Sasha Martinez, and I read for other people.