Don't Mess with Alaska, and other lessons

Before I do a little blurb about Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild", I have to link here (Grizzly Man) because it's a strikingly similar story and Werner Herzog is the shit.

In Search of the Miraculous:

 "Is there anybody out there still experiencing anything besides somebody else's book commenting on somebody else's book? Where do we turn to find the experience—preverbal, nonverbal, subverbal, transverbal—on which the books and reports must finally be based?"



Aside from the obvious irony that I'm commenting on Krakauer's book commenting on the above quote, Roszak totally has a point.  Though as a literature lover, I have to argue that the experience of reading a great book or a classic has merits -- if I had a choice between traveling the world and reading a library, I'd do both.  Do you really need to have been on a whaling ship to understand Moby Dick?  No.  And even if you had been, the book isn't really about whaling, in the same way that Lord Jim isn't about Indonesia.  I guess in answer to Roszak's question, you could turn to find experience anywhere (where is there greed, where is there racism -- with regard to Moby Dick/Lord Jim examples).

Now quoting Krakauer:
"[Chris] was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with [Jack] London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness." (44)

Ah!  So, he turns to find the experience in the wild, but ... the book's not really based on life in the wild.  No matter.  The ordeal is an exercise in solitude, based on the latter part of Tolstoy's life (who may I add died alone at a train station -- perhaps not the best role model for hermitage), and a weirdly selfish venture.  I had a more visceral "WTF" reaction to McCandless' story when I watched the movie adaptation a few years back, and I think Krakauer's writing was more understanding and empathetic because I found my position softening a little.  But only a little.  For a guy that was so interested in humanitarian crises and social injustice in the world (e.g. food shortage in Africa), he was remarkably self-absorbed.  Like the cliche, "Be the change you wish to see in the world" -- kinda hard if you remove yourself from society and the world. 

Krakauer notes that Chris was "relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it ..." (55).  For a student of Tolstoy, he was pretty anti-social -- because really "War & Peace" is an epic generation-long love story.  And of all experiences, isn't human intimacy the most difficult? 

And then this moment, which just broke my heart:

"When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex ... [I] bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick." (60)

"Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow." (132)

Bottom Line:  I suppose that gets at the heart of why I always find his story so ingratiating and tragic.  Like, go travel through Mexico and live off the Alaskan land if that's what it takes to have a revelation about life, but to have impacted others lives so negatively is sad.  I love Jack Kerouac because while he zoomed around the continent, he did it with friends and always sent his mom postcards.  He also penned several influential books and did not starve to death alone (with the nuance that it was slow alcoholism). 

This Happened.

Mr. [Philip] Roth says he wrote to Wikipedia directly about the issue and got back a note from a site administrator: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

- from NYTimes

To the Lighthouse and the Letter H

While I was in the midst of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" (hark! a reprieve from Game of Thrones!), this article generated quite the buzz: The Top 10 Most Difficult Books.  Recalling the angst of many classmates during "Mrs. Dalloway" in college, it seems Woolf's writing inspires a love or hate reaction.  You either bang your head against the wall because WHAT DOES IT MEAN or you let the prose carry you forward.  After "Game of Thrones," reading a sentence by Virginia Woolf was like a refreshing splash of water on a hot day.  

There are so many levels to talking about "To the Lighthouse" that I've decided to focus on three of the big picture themes: structure, time, and (some) communication.  If for whatever reason I ever need to reconsider the socio-economic undertones of the book, well, then, that's another post.  Much of this post will be quotations, because sometimes my blabbering just dilutes things and this is one of those times.

Godrevy Island, St. Ives Bay, where Woolf visited

"Woolf described the structure of To the Lighthouse as if it were a letter H, 'Two blocks joined by a corridor,' in which the uprights, the first and third sections, recorded a day in the lives of the family on holiday, although substantial changes took place between the two."  (Cambridge Companion, Julia Briggs, p.74)

The above quote is brilliantly true and frames the entire novel in a simple yet elegant fashion.  In the book, spinster Lily Briscoe struggles with her painting hobby as Woolf presumably strugged with the novel; how to capture it all, how the light and shadows must interact, what's the structure that will be most perfect and illuminate fundamental truths of life:  "To say: 'But this is what I see, this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast" (p.19).  I thought it was interesting how much the grey-green color is emphasized throughout but that Lily's painting attempts to buck that trend with bright blues and purples. In any case, the book IS the painting and Woolf says as much in her personal letters:

"I meant nothing by The Lighthouse.  One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together."  (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1923-1928)

Which is the same reason for Lily Briscoe's final artistic vision at the end of the novel; drawing the line of The Lighthouse down the middle of her painting.  It holds her vivid portrait of the Ramsays cottage (and her time with them) together.  The Lighthouse also functions as the bridge to the H structure; "Time Passes" but The Lighthouse remains.  Like the saying goes, the more things change the more things stay the same.

For as much as the book is about time passing and the transience of existence, it's also about repetition.  The waves, the beacon from The Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay pacing up and down the terrace, and the nostalgic repetition in the second half of the novel.  Woolf practically bangs the reader over the head with it: "It was to repeat that they met" (p.21) and, "He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition" (p.23).  The subject of the latter being Mr. Ramsay the philosopher.  His work is described as imagining a kitchen table with no one there -- more or less what occurs in the "Time Passes" section -- and seems to connect with a quote from Mrs. Ramsay ("For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time" p.88).  Ramsay and, to a different extent, his wife are painfully aware of their mortality and insignificance. 

Mrs. Ramsay says that the sea "made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow -- this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror" (p.16).

Her husbands shares the shelter of domesticity a few pages later, with one of my favorite sentences of all time:  "He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes" (p.44).   

In both cases, the emphasis of nature eating away at civilization and humanity is tempered by domestic duties.  Mr. Ramsay glumly notes that, "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" (p.35) and Lily Briscoe picks up the theme on the beach, saying the "distant views seem to outlast the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest" (p.20).  Towards the end of the book, Lily seems to connect this mortal transience with the urgency of her painting:

"... She could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps the last time, as a traveler, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again" (p.194).

Sound advice for the reader in the aptly-titled "The Window" section, for one may never see Mrs. Ramsay or Prue or Andrew ever again.  Blink and you'll miss the parenthetical deaths. 

Lastly, sticking to a theme that really defines Virginia Woolf's work, the novel depends on relationships between characters.  The narrative floats from one to another and portrays attempts at understanding, at empathy and sympathy.  All the characters are perpetually trying to see what the other characters are thinking, to imagine or persuade their thoughts.  Much like Lily's translation from sight to canvas, the thoughts-to-actions route is imperfect and muddled, thus compounding the tragedy of mortality.  "She had done the usual trick -- been nice.  She would never know him.  He would never know her,"  Lily realizes after conversing with a guest (p.92).  Another acute moment occurs after Mrs. Ramsay's death, while Lily is trying to paint the empty steps where once she had sat (p.178; and likely mimicking Woolf's own grief after the death of her mother):

"For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ... It was one's body feeling, not one's mind.  The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant.  To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.  And then to want and not to have -- to want and want -- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"

And finally, an equally poignant moment of non-communication between Mr. Ramsay and his two older children as they reach The Lighthouse, ten years past the initial expedition that never was (p.207):

"They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you.  But he did not ask them anything.  He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it.  I have found it; but he said nothing."

The Castaway

On "Tropic of Cancer"

I used to get Henry Miller and Henry James mixed up, and always thought "Tropic of Cancer" was a book about some hot steamy island written in the 1970s.  Recent years have brought clarification.

Part of the incentive to read this novel was a reaction against "50 Shades of Grey" (I'll read some REAL literary erotica!) but there is actually very little sex in "Tropic,"  though there are plenty of sordid details about the female anatomy and an overabundance of the word 'cunt'.  Enough intimate scenes to warrant banning the book in 1930-40s America and igniting a censorship battle.  So, okay, yes this was scandalous in the pre-war years a la "Lady Chatterley's Lover" but the content pales in comparison to some of Chuck Palahniuk's books, for example, and it didn't really trigger a shocked/offensive reaction.  At this point, our culture is so saturated with sex that 'cunt' isn't so much a gasp-inducing dirty word as it is a physical fact (probably more like how Miller thought of it anyway).





The writing style and philosophy of "Tropic" reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson and particularly Jack Kerouac -- capturing a fast and disorganized, chaotic lifestyle in stream-consciousness format with a heap of absurd comedy.  A celebration of being poor/unemployed/drunk with friends.  Miller was surely an influence on Kerouac, but I adored "On the Road" and had a much more sympathetic reaction to that novel than I did "Tropic"  (maybe because of the location? Americana vs Paris?).  I kept picturing scenes from the movie "Moulin Rouge" with the stereotypical and romanticized Parisian brothels.

Bottom line:  "Tropic of Cancer" didn't hold any novelty for me, though it was moderately interesting and well-written.  In the 80-some years since it was written, most of the story's become cliche (oh a starving artist in Paris!  oh he has quite the rampant sex life!), but on second thought is probably still relevant via the Occupy movement.

Regarding Henry Miller & sexism:  The Devil at Large: Erica Jong and Henry Miller

Regarding recent criticism of "Tropic of Cancer":  The Male Mystique of Henry Miller and Response Letters

Regarding the awfulness of "50 Shades of Grey':  50 Shades of Argh by Erica Jong

The David Foster Wallace Experience

My purpose in grabbing "Consider the Lobster, And Other Essays" off the sale rack was to see if I'd be into this whole thing and willing to tackle "Infinite Jest" (a considerable investment) at some point in the near future.  Thanks to snippets of hearsay, I'd always been intimidated by Foster Wallace's writing and presumed it was exceedingly cerebral, etc etc.  But he's actually funny!  See:

This is probably the place for your SNOOT reviewer openly to concede that a certain number of traditional prescriptive rules really are stupid and the people who insist on them ... are that very most contemptible and dangerous kind of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong.
(p.100, Authority and American Usage)

Though the above-cited funniness is buried in the midst of one of the denser essays.  There were two particularly brilliant essays:  "Up, Simba" and "Host" that I will enthusiastically endorse to anyone who will listen to me.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
(p.187, Up, Simba)

... The single biggest reason why left-wing talk radio experiments ... are not likely to succeed, at least not on a national level, is that their potential audience is just not dissatisfied enough with today's mainstream news sources to feel that they have to patronize a special type of media to get the unbiased truth.
(p.316, Host)

It's these moments of  'WHY, YES!' clarity, combined with weird humor and amazing linguistic gymnastics ("Dostoevskynalia") that made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace.  And he writes like this about everything!  Lobsters, Kafka, 9/11, the dictionary, porn, whatever!  The total high of gleefully connecting with a new author is countered in this case with the fact that he's dead now and I missed all his book talks and I really feel that no one else is currently writing like this.  Some parts of Dave Eggers, Franzen at the end of "The Corrections" maybe, and definitely not Jonathan Safran Foer.

Well.  Looking forward to settling in with "Infinite Jest" at least.