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With apologies to Charlie Daniels. For the full effect, click here to listen while you read...

Goethe's Faust, Part 1, the country music hit

The devil went up to heaven, he was looking to spar with God.
He said, “You’d better bet the devil can get that Faust down there. He’s odd.”
God laughed and said, “No way, Evil Angel. You know Faust’s my favorite man.
He spends his days a-just a-learnin’ stuff and doin’ the best he can.”

But the devil he was cocky, he got God to say okay,
Then Mephisto fell back down to earth, to steal Faust’s soul away.
Now Faust was suicidal; he’d been whining for a while:
“I’m so bereft, ain’t nothing left on earth can make me smile.”
So he thought he’d outsmart the devil, signed in blood and at the end
Added “Come the day you hear me say, ‘stop time!’ you kill me then.”

Faust, it’s you they say’s so smart, come on and use your noodle.
‘Cos hell’s broke loose in Germany and it’s dressed up like a poodle.
While you’re on earth, it’s you he’ll serve with love and smiles and gold,
But when you die, the devil gets your soul.

(feel free to dance during the guitar solos and the next verse and join us for Johnny's performance)

Fire on the streets, twirl boys, twirl.
The devil's gonna get Faust a girl.
Kill her mother and her brother, and her honor too.
Faust'll run away before part two.

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In which my inner math geek has a field day with Faulkner.

No video today, real or imagined, as I have just written the last* new scene for my young adult novel** and am feverishly typing and compiling.***

I tried a haiku, but really I think of Light in August as more of a math problem where:

Light in August = (Mississippi + August + 1932) x (Pregnant wanderer + defrocked reverend + lying bootlegger + angry biracial murderer)

Or maybe it's a recipe: Faulkner takes vivid, yearning characters and mixes them into a broth of racial tension and southern heat...

Other thoughts (no spoilers):
1. Faulkner's characters are truly unique. They are multi-dimensional, diverse, and far from stereotypes or archetypes. Further, the setting itself, both in terms of time and place, is a character, really, acting to propel the plot as much as anyone else. The book starts as a "what do you get when you cross..." story, but Faulkner follows through and is meticulously faithful to the characters he's created and the world they inhabit.

2. This is the most hopeful depressing book I've ever read. The first character we see is Lena, pregnant and abandoned, walking across Alabama in search of the father of her child. She is convinced his message calling her to him has been lost. "I reckon I'll find him," she says. "It won't be hard." She never wavers from that feeling, and Faulkner paints her faith so simply, so without judgement, that instead of thinking, "That fool!" like everyone she meets, we want her to find him, even though we know it's unrealistic.

3. Lastly, stream of consciousness is more fun to write than to read.**** I very much enjoyed the book and the characters were the main reason why. I felt for them and wanted them all to "win" but even I had to skim towards the end when there were entire pages of internal conflict. I had the strange revelation that, like many beginning writers, Faulkner got worried that we wouldn't get it, so he diluted his beautiful story with a ton of "the point" at the end. Makes me want to go back to the ending of my own book and delete all the "hints;" if it doesn't work without them, the whole thing's not working and spelling it out at the end is far from the answer.

On to Faust...

* And by "last" I mean "last for now" or "last of the ones that weren't written at all before now, to say nothing of the ones that are just sketched out, full of gaps, or abominations to the written word."
** And by "novel" I mean "collection of scattered scenes, some old and some new, that I hope will miraculously congeal into a coherent mass as I type."
*** And by "feverishly typing and compiling" I mean "trying to find my flash drive."
**** Collective sigh of "tell us about it!" from all blog readers

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Welcome to Week #14 of our 15 Classics in 15 Weeks project.

This week I will be reading Goethe's Faust. Don't get confused; there are a lot of Fausts out there. I am reading Goethe's. The Mighty Thor is livid because whatever version he read in college was like 1,000 pages and mine is only 200. Also I think he is still mad because his roommate acted in the production of Faust someone put up in my college dining hall and it was 4 hours long and the Mighty Thor sat through the whole thing. Nevertheless, I am excited about this play.

If you look left, you'll see next week's book is still TBA. I need your help deciding. What should my final classic be? If you joined us late, the whole point of the project was that I am pretty well-read but had holes in the canon of traditional American and European lit. So, here's the question: what is your all-time, number one, anyone-who-calls-herself-well-read-MUST-have-read-this-book classic novel (that we haven't already discussed this summer)?

It's like American Idol for literary dorks, isn't it? Sigh.

Also, what are you reading this week?

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Welcome to Week #13 of our 15 Classics in 15 Weeks project.

Whose idea was this anyway? How many books is one woman supposed to read?!

Tomorrow, I will condense the major poetic masterpiece of America's most influential poet into a brief blog post on Leaves of Grass. Are you curious how I can possibly do so? Me too. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, this week, we will be discussing Faulkner's Light in August. Someone explain to me again why I picked this instead of As I Lay Dying; I can't remember.*

What are you reading this week?

* Actually, I am pretty excited about the Faulkner. But I will admit that when my 15 weeks are up, I may read nothing but the Twilight series and the New York Times magazine for a while.

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A haiku:

We seem to be on a "deluded/crazy narrator" theme this summer.* John Dowell is the strangest yet. His story is out of order, inconsistent, and full of moments of dramatic irony in which he claims to have been clueless and we readers marvel that he could have been. He makes extreme statements like "She's the only one I ever loved," and then makes them again later in the book about different people. Apparently, greater critics than I have raging debates about whether Ford Madox Ford intended Dowell to be comic or tragic. Without any background in Ford Madox Ford-ology, I'd have to stand in the comic camp. But not like ha-ha funny. More like George Costanza make-you-writhe amusing. Other opinions?

I do think the unreliable narrator point is an interesting one for us as writers. There is a fine balance between having an unreliable character narrate your story (which can be poignant or ironic or funny) and leaving readers feeling YOU are untrustworthy as an author. We want readers to feel like they are in good hands, to feel that they can sink into our books and relax knowing our endings will be satisfying, our plots will seem inevitable within the world we have created, and our characters will behave in ways that make sense for whom we have described them to be. And this takes work, and faithful reverance for our stories and our constructs, and our readers, even when they are 3.

Now, your "that's eerie!" moment of the day:

I planned 15 Classics in 15 Weeks based on what books would be good to read one after the other, so as to have Jane Eyre, for example, with which to relax after Moby Dick. I didn't pay any attention to the content of the books, or the dates I assigned them. Then Pale Fire fell almost exactly on the dates in July on which the book's story takes place. Strange enough. Now, here it is August 4th and I am due to tell you about The Good Soldier, a book that discusses over and over the strange influence the date August 4th has on its characters. Freaky.

On to The House of Green the Seven Gables. What are you reading this week?

* I know. The point could be made that all of Jacqui's Room has a deluded/crazy narrator theme...

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In which I describe things you should not let your children read.*

I cannot be funny about this one. I tried. I wrote haiku instructions for a 1850s borderland scalp hunters. I compiled a page by page body count (into the tens of thousands by page 30). I even tried falling back on my trusty Little People. Everything I tried cheapened the horror of Blood Meridian, and to do so seems dishonest. Because this book is nothing if not full of horror. Why?

1. The story: "The Kid" is a teen runaway who falls in with a marauding gang of scalp-hunters who roam the Mexican-American border in 1849-50, collecting the scalps of Native Americans to trade for gold. They kill everyone they meet, in sleep-disturbingly brutal and graphic ways.

2. The language. Despite the subject matter, McCarthy's prose rolls on, sparse, matter of fact, and relentless. Its have-to-stop-and-read-it-again poetry stands in stark contrast to the violence and cruelty it describes. Observe:

"An ancient walled presidio composed wholly of mud, a tall mud church and mud watchtowers and all of it rainwashed and lumpy and sloughing into a soft decay. The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls" (p.97).

As a reader, it is haunting. As a writer, it is fascinating. McCarthy does not change his tone when the actions in the book grow chaotic and gory, which forces the reader to decipher, to read every word and, thus, to experience every blood splatter.

3. What McCarthy doesn't write is more powerful even than what he writes. He gives his characters zero emotional reaction on the page, which leaves it all to the reader. And in the end (this is sort of a spoiler), he doesn't even describe the final death, just the horrified reactions of those who see the aftermath. This implies that the scene outstrips even the utterly unbelievable terror we have already witnessed, and leaves our imaginations and fears to reconstruct what happened. I love this manipulation.

4. The facts. The book is based on a journal, which, while of questionable reliability, is certainly historically accurate. So we can't blow off what's within as the sick imaginings of a psychopath who happens to write beautifully. In the epilogue, unnamed characters dig holes in the ground, ignoring the scattered bones of those who went before. Presumably, they are laying fence. I was confused as to why, until I realized McCarthy is reminding us that Blood Meridian, and a thousand stories like it, are what built the foundations of the American Southwest.

So, no, I can't be funny, and I can't exactly recommend it. I have started a new list in Cormac McCarthy's honor: Brilliant Books You Shouldn't Read. I am priding myself on not saddling you with any of the 100 horrible images running through my brain. And now, in order to keep myself from having nightmares, I am going to watch this a few hundred times and giggle with childish anticipation.

* Because I know all of your children beg to visit Jacqui's Room.
** And there is so much stunningly beautiful language that I had a hard time choosing what quote to gift to you above.

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In which I may make no sense if you haven't read Pale Fire. Or even if you have, I suppose.

Foreword
Pale Fire was published in 1962, written after the success of Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up academia and write full time, much as the success of The New Girl…and Me, allowed me to give up teaching first and second grade and write full time, so long as I could find other ways to pay for day care.

Pale Fire also contains my current favorite quote on the fragility and the power of the written word:

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of though, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing… I wish you to gasp not only at what you read, but at the miracle of its being readable" (p. 289).



Pale Fire: a haiku

Commentary
Line 1 “John Shade”
The fictional author of the 999 line autobiographical work “Pale Fire” which appears in the book of the same name, born July 5, 1898, shot and killed July 21, 1959*, under circumstances delineated** in the commentary.

Line 2 “annotations”
Pale Fire is written in three parts: a foreword by the editor, the poem “Pale Fire,” and commentary on the poem by the editor, which composes the vast majority of the book.

Line 3 “deranged editor”
Nabokov is the king of the unreliable narrator. The annotations to Pale Fire are mostly disorganized personal reflections of questionable relevance.*** As we read, we realize the annotator is, at best, bitter and stretching the truth to self-aggrandize, at worst, totally delusional.**** and ***** In the end, we are left enthralled by the language, engaged by the story, and amazed at Nabokov's play with the power of words.

* Being a secret numbers person, I can’t help but be amused by having read Pale Fire on the dates during which the story takes place. Of course, I planned this. Because I am just that organized.
**sort of, see note on delusion of the annotator below
*** much like this blog
**** but funny
*****again, much like this blog

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In which I give Jane Eyre a test.

Does Your Book Have All the Elements of a Great Novel? A Checklist.

Hot and heavy romance? Check.

Multiple surprising and dramatic plot twists? Check.

Strong, whip-smart female character who insists on equality with men? Check. And remember, this was at a time when her refusal to be coerced into marriage would have shocked the chastity belts off some folks. Bonus points.

Subtle condemnation of self-aggrandizement and mistreatment of those less fortunate in the name of Christianity? Check.

Mockery of the upper crust? Check. Again, at a time when it was revolutionary? Bonus points.

Lunatic pyromaniac in the attic? Check.

Two hundred page discussion of the intricacies of the skin of the sperm whale? No!

Great novel? Check!


One warning to book-listeners: I did try to listen to the audiotape of this several years ago and fell asleep multiple times. This week, my smart, voracious reader, online friend Sarah Miller revealed to me that she's struggling with the audiobook too. Maybe Jane Eyre is just one you have to read.

This week's Remedial Lit Summer Project book was To Be Announced. I am probably going to read Pale Fire, by Nabokov, which Time Magazine called one of the 100 best books of all time, and about which Time wrote:

A bizarre, three-legged race of a novel, Pale Fire is composed of a long, narrative poem followed by a much longer set of footnotes written by an obsessive, increasingly deranged annotator.

Or, I will read New Moon, the second in Stephenie Meyer's* Twilight series, which is about vampires having sex. Come on, people! How long does something have to top the New York Times bestseller list before I can call it a classic??? I read every page of Moby Dick! Don't I deserve a break? Vote in the comments...

Also, it's my dad's birthday and he just revealed he's a lurker in Jacqui's Room. Happy birthday, Dad!

*Would this be a good time to mention that Stephenie Meyer and I have the same agent, whom I love even though she won't help me stalk Stephenie Meyer, or John Green for that matter?

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In which I reveal why it is probably best that I gave up my theater career.

And yes, there are spoilers, though it's not like you can't guess how the book ends, really.

Also, this took me a million years and a snabblefrug* to upload, so you had better laugh. Hard.




* snabblefrug: a small temper tantrum caused by failure of Blogger to upload video properly. Now deleted.

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East of Eden
with apologies to Ruth Krauss's The Carrot Seed.

An Irishman planted a farm in the Salinas Valley.
His wife said, "I'm afraid it won't come up."
His seven children, one of whom the novel says eventually gave birth to Mr. John Steinbeck himself, said, "I'm afraid it won't come up."
And his xenophobic but grudgingly admiring neighbors said, "It won't come up."
Every day, the Irishman pulled up the weeds around the farm, philosophized about the nature of human existence, and dug in the ground for water.
But nothing came up.
And nothing came up.

Meanwhile, across the quickly-changing country in Connecticut, a man named Trask had two sons and named them Adam and Charles.
Now, when an author refers to the Bible, and names the son everyone loves something that starts with A and the son everyone's afraid of something that starts with C, well, you can guess how the story goes.

Steinbeck writes, "We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil." He set out to write an epic family drama, the first and only novel, a biblical allusion, a story of our country at a certain place in time, and a history of a landscape he loved. All at once. And then he did it.
And yes, there is a serpent, or a demon maybe, and battles both internal and violent, and beans and whorehouses, and Henry Ford is a character, and there are great, funny lines mocking human proclivities like, "If necklaces made of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops." But back to the story.

Everyone, including the member of the Trask family who ended up moving next door to the Irishman, kept saying it wouldn't come up.
But he still pulled up the weeds around it every day, made fascinating and spot on comments on the nature of evil and narrative, and dug in the ground for water.

And then, one day, well, I won't say if a carrot grew. If I spoiled this one I would be sent to an eternal personal purgatory involving mushrooms, too-high heels, and soulless, grammatically sloppy chick lit.

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Silas Marner, in ten words:

Betrayed weaver counts gold.
Treasure stolen.
Child appears.
Love wins.


Two thoughts on Silas Marner:

1. Strong story, deep emotion, complex characters and relationships, and tons of tension. I actually very much enjoyed it. So much so that I pulled Middlemarch off the shelf and read the introduction. Phrases included: "completely different from Silas Marner," "difficult in many ways," and "despite the monotony of the beginning." I put it back.

2. Eliot was writing Romola, a sweeping history of the Italian Renaissance, when the story of Silas Marner, "thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating." She stopped writing to whip off Silas Marner. I often say my best writing comes when I take a break to write a story that's "not the book I'm writing." I think a sense of freedom and relaxation of pressure come when we tell ourselves, "Oh, this is nothing." And that freedom can spark our best work. I wrote The New Girl...And Me (back then in was called Shakeeta's Iguana) on the train in Chicago, on my way downtown. I started my first chapter book on a whim waiting for my brake pads to be replaced. If you really want to have fun with your writing, tell yourself, "Nobody is ever going to read this," and see where your imagination brings you.

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Welcome to week 2 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Silas Marner.

Wow. This is a lot shorter than Don Quixote. Sure am glad I picked it instead of Middlemarch.

This is where we shall discuss Silas Marner or whatever you are reading this week.

Oh! I get it. Silas Marner like the guy with the gold. Duh.

Have fun!

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Don Quixote read too much.
Thought he was a knight.
Grabbed his squire, Sancho Panza
And set off to fight.






Declared his love for Dulcinea,
Fought giants in her name.
Got mocked, pinched, butted, robbed and kidnapped.
She shunned him all the same.






Stayed deluded 1,000 pages,
Ended up beaten and bleeding.
Realized he'd been mad, then died.
Such are the perils of reading.

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... is finished. But Blogger was down this morning, so you'll have to wait for the photographic evidence of my genius re-enactment of the travels of the knight errant and his squire...

Also coming soon, how books are better than therapy, Hephzibah's influence on my summer reading, and a virtual party to celebrate having finished my novel... Stay tuned.

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After much nonstop blather careful consideration and some coin-tossing weighty decision-making, I have finalized (sort of) my Remedial Lit Summer Project list. Here 'tis.

1. Don Quixote
2. Silas Marner
3. Grapes of Wrath (or East of Eden)
4. Moby Dick
5. Jane Eyre
6. Remembrance of Things Past (just Swann's Way)
7. Blood Meridien
8. The Inferno
9. The Good Soldier
10. The House of the Seven Gables
11. Light in August (or The Sound and the Fury)
12. Leaves of Grass
13. Faust
14. TBA
15. TBA

I left myself the last two blank until I see other people's lists. Because I am a follower and will want to copy. Also in case in the middle of the summer I can't take it and need to announce that the latest copy of Us Weekly is a "classic."

Some addenda to the rules, because Jacqui's Room is like my first grade classroom and I want everyone to succeed.

1. I am reading 15 books. You can choose as many as you think you can reasonably do in 15 weeks. You can skip weeks, read the ones on my list that you've missed, however you want to set it up. "Winning" just means making your goal.

2. We all reserve the right to give up on a book, if we've made a valiant effort. Life is too short to read books we hate. I (and your conscience) will be the ultimate judge of whether your effort is valiant. With input, of course, from Kristi.

3. That said, I refer us all to Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer, in which she reminds us that classics are classics for a reason, and even if we don't personally connect with them, they have lessons for us as writers (fighting not to add "and as people" too cheesy, but can't stop myself -- help!). Actually, I think I'll keep that book nearby all summer since she reads a lot of the ones on my list.

We start Monday. Or whenever you get here. Post your list and get ready to dive in.

One plea: if you are joining us and plan to purchase your books, please try to use your independent bookstore. As tempting as a giant Amazon order would be, I had to put in a word for your local indie. Find one here. Or at least order from Powell's.

Happy reading!

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Thank you everyone for the tips and comments. The renovation is making good progress so I thought I'd show more pictures. As the work goes along we keep finding out about problems in the house that are being fixed now and it's confirming that this work really needed to be done. As it stands our badly damaged bathroom floorboards have been repaired and fresh plywood laid on top. I went for a visit yesterday and it looks fantastic. This is the bathroom now:
I wasn't going to post the pictures, because they're kind of boring, but then I had another look at how it looked just two days ago and it reminded me what a transformation it is! The picture at the top of the post is our hallway now. The post below is the kitchen. Remember the big pile of old tile and flooring? It's all been cleared out (onto our front porch for now).Believe it or not, the kitchen area in our house is an addition. That means the original house was probably around 300 square feet - smaller than our old studio condo. It was a worker's cottage built probably just before 1930 - I keep imagining everyone huddled around a stove in one room. Not the luxury we enjoy today! Incidentally my dad was the one who researched the age of the house by looking in public records. He got back to before 1930 but those records are on microfiche only and very difficult to read.
Anyway the snowballing isn't quite over as ripping out the cabinets damaged parts of the walls (see above), and we've never liked the wall tiles that are there and carry all the way to the floor in places. Also putting new cabinetry over old tiles we're planning to replace doesn't make sense. Trying to take them off has just caused more damage so now we're looking at replacing those areas of wall with fresh drywall. More cost again, but well worth it. We can also easily wait until later to add new backsplash tiles.

The fun part of all this has been using the IKEA templates to plan our new cabinetry. We're not going to get it all right away - but being able to add pieces over time is one of the great things about IKEA. Unfortunately their online planning program isn't available for mac or I'd be all over that. But the little punchouts and grid they give you work well too. We've chosen the Lidingo style (a town in Sweden the Beatles visited in 1964 apparently), I think it will be really pretty and of course it's affordable too. It's basically the same white look as our new Liatorp bookcases, our Pax wardrobe and our new bathroom vanity. Our whole house is going to match. For the walls I'm considering Benjamin Moore's "grey cashmere". It's a very soft grey with a hint of sage/green.

Here's a picture of the Lidingo cabinetry from the IKEA website:Not that our kitchen will look like this! But this is the inspiration.

p.s. when you go to IKEA now you need to buy plastic bags for five cents if you want them. When I went, the proceeds were being donated to Tree Canada. Even better if you can remember to bring your own cloth shopping bags. Finally an excuse for my tote bag sewing compulsion... Read the rest of this post

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