Emily Says...

One of the authors I'm studying this year is Emily Dickinson. This is a mixed blessing, for while I fell in love with Emily's poems a couple of years ago—she is now one of my favourite poets—, studying them for the French "aggregation" feels like raping the text.
Below I've posted one of her poems that speaks to me the most, especially because of my current situation. The two last lines are interesting as they seem to encapsulate an idea central to postmodern/Emerging Christianity.

Some keep the Sabbath going to the Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I'm going, all along.

Quill in Hand

While reading a friend's poetry blog, I realised that I've been neglecting my own for a while. I was working at my Masters thesis this year, and now I'm preparing for that oh-so-French ordeal, the agrégation, so I haven't had much time to publish anything lately. The last time I completed a poem was over a year ago. But I haven't been completely unproductive. At the beginning of the year, around February I think, I had an idea for a novel. It partly evolved from a different project which I was working at the year before (see here for a snippet) and which was much too ambitious for me at the time, but most of it is new. I've been thinking it over during the past six months, trying to come up with a few things. I wrote a few scenes here and there. I managed to (mentally) paint the setting. During the summer I concentrated on the characters quite a bit. They are taking shape, coming to life, becoming "fuller", which is a lot of fun. Thanks to that, I've been able to concentrate on the plot more in the past few weeks. Nothing is fixed or definitive yet, of course, but I have an idea of what I want to get at. I don't want to talk about it too much yet, but I suppose you could say that it's a sort of coming-of-age story set around a second-hand bookshop (nope it's not a Black Books rip-off, as fun as that would be!) in a fictitious town in France. I've no idea if I'll ever finish it, or ever dare show it to anyone, but still, it's something which I'm starting to get quite excited about!

PS: this is a small text I'd written with the story in mind, but I've no idea if I'll include it or not.

Wrapped Up in Books

I've no time to update my blog these days. I'm really busy — and not in a trendy, livin' the vida loca, out-every-night way. In a monastic, nose between the pages, dreaming about words kind of way. I'm wrapped up in books.
And that's cool with me.

Books

I was just browsing Youtube videos and found this short stop-motion, which I thought was very sweet and cleverly-done. Bravo to Molly Green for making it.

Famine

Famine by Liam O'Flaherty follows a family of pratie farmers, the Kilmartins, as they face the potato blight, hunger, disease, the risk of eviction and British oppression in the Black Valley in County Kerry. The book is great in communicating what it must have felt like to struggle for life during the Great Irish famine of 1845-1849, and helps the reader understand why the trauma is so firmly engraved in the Irish psyche.
Liam O'Flaherty was a communist, and this is reflected in the novel, in which religious identity appears less important than class in defining dominant-dominated relationships. However O'Flaherty was no pacifist and this comes across very clearly, as he glorifies martyrdom, revolution and spreading blood for one's class and country. This talk of violence may seem naïve, misguided or even sinister to us today, but the book dates back to 1937, at a time when Ireland was a very young republic and was relying heavily on its set of Republican symbolism and myths to consolidate itself. But the novel does help give an idea of the suffering the Irish people went through during the Famine, which caused several of them to turn to violent revolutionary struggle.
The book is still relevant today as it deals with several issues that many people have to struggle with : identity, oppression, religious hypocrisy, violence/peace, and emigration.

The Jungle

I finished Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just a few days ago. It's about a family of Lithuanians that has immigrated to the USA in the early 1900s, lured by the American Dream's promises of wealth and happiness, only to end up working in the infamous factories of the Beef Trust in "Packingtown", Chicago.

I was looking forward to the novel as I expected it to be a bit like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath : both authors were investigative journalists and Socialists. Unfortunately Sinclair isn't as skilled a novelist as Steinbeck is : his characters are rather flat, so when the book's working-class hero, Jurgis Rudkus, loses everything, it doesn't move you as much as when Tom Joad sees his family disintegrate. The plot isn't very solid, but it serves the author's purpose : to expose the gritty reality of life for the American underclass. And it's shocking : some of the things Sinclair describes are so horrible that he couldn't have made them up. He saw them during his investigations.

His muckraking novel shocked the nation, but not in the way Sinclair hoped for. Instead of striving to improve working people's conditions, all that the readers cared for were the parts in the books which dealt with the terrible lack of hygiene in the meat factories. (The public outcry actually led to a Pure Food Act)."I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach", Sinclair lamented.

But what interested me the most about the Jungle was the fact that it's a Socialist book, written by a dedicated Socialist in 1906, just a decade before the Russian Revolution. It's a socialism that hasn't yet discovered the excesses it would lead to under Soviet rule, and yet you can already detect some of the seeds of this future state-socialism. For example, the ''people" are always referred to in a very paternalistic, patronising manner.
Yet Sinclair isn't completely utopian either; he very honestly states that Socialism won't solve all of the world's problems, that there will still be conflict, but he argues that it would be a better alternative to capitalism.

In the last chapters, once Jurgis has seen the light (Socialism is clearly described as a new "dispensation", a new "revelation"), he witnesses several discussions between Socialists with very different ideas : for example a debate about religion between a Swedish professor and anarchist and an American ex-minister. The latter argues, in Tolstoyan fashion, that Christianity has been distorted by the institutional church and that Christ's message of peace, love and social justice has been forgotten. (It is worth noting that Upton Sinclair was himself some sort of a Christian socialist.) Something which was true in Sinclair's time, and which is equally true in Western christianity today, where the Church-body has become the church-institution, where spiritual and material salvation are seperated and where man-made rules become more important than compassion and love.

I'll finish with a quotation from the novel. Referring to a bunch of rich christians trying to evangelise the starving poor, the narrator exclaims:

"They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?"

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is an enlightening book, and is an easy read. It was written over twenty years ago, back in 1985, but it's even more relevant now than it was then.
Its author, media theorist Neil Postman, is now dead, but Penguin published a 20th anniversary edition of the book, with a preface by Postman's son.

Postman argued that the change from the Age of Typography (the printed word) to the Age of Television has not only had a huge impact on Western culture, it has changed how we approach the issue of knowledge (epistemology). The written word can convey statements that can be either accepted as true or refuted, but images don't offer that possibility : they can ony be looked at.
The author illustrates this with the example of advertising : in the mid 19th century, advertisements in newspapers were paragraphs of rational discourse which gave information about the product. On 20th century TV advertising (and even more so on 21st TV as well as online advertising), slogans, jingles, music, pictures and videos are used, and there is no true description of the product itself : what is important is that it looks good on the silver screen. The actors are there not to give ant new insight about what they're presenting, but because they have pretty faces and look perfectly happy : implicitly promising the viewer that to reach a state of beatitude, all you need is to buy the latest car, or ipod, or chocolate bar.

If things stopped there, it would be bad enough. But it gets worse. Politics and democracy are threatened by television. To quote Postman, "we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control". In other words, images speak louder than words. It doesn't matter what a politician thinks about climate change or social justice or immigration, what really matters (to the viewer at least) is how good the politician looks on TV, how he speaks, how he dresses, where he goes on holiday, how pretty his wife and children are and so on. This was already the case in '85 when the book was written ; it has become the same in France with Sarkozy, the King of Bling, and his groupie wife Carla Bruni (who advertises for her husband through her music albums, among other sings). If we've begun to chose our rulers because they look good on the telly, that is a very scary fact. Hitler looked good in uniform.

To conclude, there is also an interesting chapter on religion and its relationship with TV : with the likes of televangelism. I'm not going to go into the details, but basically, the author argues that even if isn't the intention of TV preachers (though I may suggest that often it is), the fact of turning a religious service into a show and more significantly the fact of turning themselves into performers is, ironically, a form of blasphemy : the preacher is glorified, not the deity.

The book is really worth the read. And it needn't make you feel guilty about watching the telly : the author himself argues that the only harmless TV is "rubbish" TV. TV is okay as long as it sticks to mindless entertainment. It becomes dangerous when it starts dealing with serious issues... as it inevitably turns them into a form of entertainment.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Last week I finished a book I had started to read months ago, but never had time to finish because of coursework : Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Published in 1848, the novel had a lot of influence in its day, as it highlighted the plight of ordinary working people in Manchester in the 1840s. Being both a literature lover, a history enthusiast and a socialist, I had high expectations. And I wasn't disappointed.

I'm not going to say much about the plotline because I don't want to spoil the story for anyone. But the novel centres on two working class families and the struggles they go through everyday : hunger, disease, death of loved ones, appalling living and working conditions...

Elizabeth Gaskell was by no means a socialist so I wasn't expecting to find any socialist critique of capitalism in her novel. But she was a social reformer. Although she didn't want to see the end of the capitalist system, she was genuinely concerned about the plight of the less fortunate, and she set out to let England know about the terrible living conditions of the working people in Manchester. In fact, she exposed herself to a lot of criticism from the people who frequented her milieu, who were often mill owners and "masters", of the class which she berated in her novel for not being attentive to the workers' needs.

But the most important theme in the novel is arguably the theme of reconciliation. Gaskell was a Unitarian Universalist, in fact married to a Unitarian preacher, and she strongly believed in human goodness. Many have criticised her for this, but I don't think she meant it in a naïve way. She does seem to have believed in evil. But in an age when most people believed the working class to be a horde of brutish, degenerate and evil animals (remember that this was the age of phrenology and misapplied Darwinism), Gaskell was really eager to show that these people were in fact human beings, just like their masters, and she actually tried to explain why they sometimes resorted to violence. If the characters she created (both working people and "masters") are almost always redeemed from their propensity for evil, and ultimately become reconciled to their fellow human beings and to God, I don't think it's because of any naïveté on her part, but rather because she believed that it was really possible for people to change, and hoped to see it come true.