This week we’re having a “craft session” in writing class. This means no manuscript critiques; instead, discussion and one or two in-class writing exercises. In preparation we’re to read the first 50 pages of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s profile of the crusading Dr. Paul Farmer, and the short story “Magda Mandela” by Hari Kunzru.
As we read Kidder’s nonfiction work, our instructor has asked us to “think of fiction that has a similar narrative structure. The obvious one, for me, is The Great Gatsby, with Tracy Kidder as Nick Carraway and Dr. Farmer as Jay Gatsby. Also think about the difficulty in writing abut a person who is larger than life, whether real or fictional, with ‘Magda Mandela’ in mind.”
It’s a pleasing assignment. For the first part, I’ve got Cakes and Ale, Prayer for Owen Meany, and, even though it figures a quartet, not a duo, A Dance to the Music of Time. Pale Fire might also qualify, although that parallel would have Kidder twisted out of all recognition: cracked, from Zembla, and suffering mad halitosis.
Thinking about larger-than-life characters my mind keeps flashing on how in Gothic novels the male lead (terrible, mysterious) is sometimes introduced as a potent presence thumping around another part of the manor — sensed but unseen — an eminence for the narrator to wonder about from afar, sometimes for days before a first meeting. (Incidentally, this is how Melville introduces Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, just replace the crumbling manor with a ship.) It reminds me a little of the first of the Vera Pavlova poems I linked to the other day, where the “he” of the poem grows from the size of a speck to glacier-like immensity. But I’d guess we’re supposed to be thinking more concretely, e.g., CHARACTERS WHO SPEAK IN CAPS LOCK: VIABLE OVER THE LONG HAUL?, etc.

• Imaginary trip: Bomarzo, a park of monsters and harpies located near Viterbo, a couple hours’ drive from Rome.
• Read some of Henry James’ writings on Rome or download Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
• ALN vault: Terry shares his favorite Henry James anecdote, Wharton’s account of getting lost with James in Windsor.

I mean to respond more fully to OGIC’s lovely post about the children’s classics you first discover as an adult, occasioned by her reading of The Hobbit. For now, though, I just wanted to share an excerpt from a TLS article I recently came across which describes Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and their writing circle.

Tolkien and Lewis formed the spine of the Inklings, regularly convening to read and discuss one another’s work in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. There were nineteen members in all, and Glyer excels at depicting their world, with its petty rivalries, joshing honesty (“he is ugly as a chimpanzee”, wrote Lewis of fellow Inkling Charles Williams), its wit and learning and championship of scholarship for its own sake. The Inklings were often supportive and sympathetic (“the inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me”, wrote Lewis in 1949 on receipt of another instalment of The Lord of the Rings), but were capable of ferocious criticism if it was felt that a member had done anything less than his best (“You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!”). Tempers must surely have become frayed at times – as Tolkien became unyieldingly critical of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (“about as bad as can be”) or as the English don Hugo Dyson met the latest bulletin from Middle Earth by (according to Tolkien’s son Christopher) “lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, ‘Oh God, no more Elves'”.

I read The Hobbit for a junior-high English class, but didn’t read The Lord of the Rings trilogy until college. It was summertime, and I was visiting my parents in Asheville. I have a vivid memory of finishing the first volume in the middle of the night and sitting in the parking lot outside the Little Professor Bookstore (at a soon-to-be-defunct location) the next morning, waiting for it to open so I could buy the next book in the series.

For those of us who live in backwater movie markets: Dana Stevens notes that the Wes Anderson short Hotel Chevalier, an accompaniment to the filmmaker’s new movie Darjeeling Limited, is available on iTunes. Even better, it’s free!
A.O. Scott’s review mentions that the 13-minute film is being shown at tonight’s New York Film Festival, but won’t otherwise appear in theaters. It will, however, be included on the DVD of the film.
Interestingly, the notices for Hotel Chevalier have been far more positive than the mixed reception for Darjeeling Limited, so it’s worth checking out.

• Amazing video podcasts of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on the ones titled “Gallery Explorer: –“, hope in vain for Dark Side of the Moon to start up. (Also available on iTunes.)
• Daily dose of tumult on the heath and in the snow: Revisit Vera Pavlova’s “Four Poems” from the New Yorker.
From a 2002 interview with Pavlova:

What are the main critical views of your work?
They go from one extreme to another! On the one hand, I’m regarded as a sort of male invention. On the other, I’m an earth mother, concerned with gynaecological matters and not metaphysics. Also there is the psychoanalytical view, which says my poems are a clear case of intersexuality.
What’s that?
All I could find in a dictionary was: “Intersex, an organism in which
there are no clear indications of male or female gender.”
So, a sexual zero! And what follows from that?
That there’s nothing especially female or male about poetry.

• Ursula K LeGuin’s tough yet clear-sighted review of Jeanette Winterson’s new sci-fi novel, The Stone God. Of the recent spate of literary writers working in genre, LeGuin writes: “I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.”
• The Financial Times‘ Rosie Blau lunches with Winterson at Alastair Little, in London. Winterson is charming; champagne, prawns, risotto and lost bread with honey roast plums are consumed.* (Via Light Reading.)
• Review of Alastair Little.
* Your link-gatherer is currently on a no-sugar, no-booze diet. Expect a continued bounty of food links, lingering appraisal of other people’s meals, etc., until it all goes tits-up with the order of a case of these.

Edmund White has written a fascinating piece for the NYRB on Henry James’ letters. The essay focuses on James’ and his brother William’s education, including this intriguing linguistic bit:

In 1855 [Henry James Sr.] accordingly bundled the family off to Europe–to Geneva (surely the least sensuous city on the Continent), where little Henry was taught by French-speaking governesses, then sent to the Pensionnat Roediger. When their father’s enthusiasm for this institution inevitably waned they all moved to London where tutors were engaged again, though their governess Mlle Cusin was retained and brought over from Geneva to continue teaching them French. It was during these years that the boys acquired their nearly perfect and certainly idiomatic French; the self-critical James could say, “My French astounds me–its goodness is equalled only by its badness. I can be terribly spirituel, but I can’t ask for a candlestick.”
In later years Henry would be guilty of Gallicisms (“the actual President of the United States”) and would scrawl hasty notes to himself in French. His letters in these two volumes are peppered with French phrases, two or three a page. After addressing Thomas Sergeant Perry in French for a full page, Henry (at age twenty-four) switches back to English but deplores the loss of the intimate tu (“How detestable this you seems after using the Gallic toi!”). Some of the strangeness of James’s prose in these early letters can surely be explained by his translating back into English from French. For instance, when he writes Perry in 1860 from Paris he describes what he sees out the window of his hotel and refers to “a grasp of warriors” passing by (a phrase which surely began life as une poignée de guerriers). Or when James talks of a Swiss mountain trail that took eighteen years to “pierce,” he’s obviously translating back from percer. Richardson remarks on similar mistakes in William’s English, though in his case the source of the errors was German.

I was thinking a little about this sort of thing — crossing languages and how speaking one affects the other — over the weekend. Currently, I speak appalling French and Spanish, and I’ve been considering adding some hideous Latin or Greek to the stable. Just idle, What Would George Eliot Do-type thoughts before bedtime.
If you’ve invested a lot of time with flash cards and language labs and still never cleared “appalling,” you may look for consolation. And for me, that’s come from what the other language, no matter how imperfectly mastered, has revealed or reminded me about English. Etymologies, sentence structures, relationships between word families: All of these get thrown into sharper relief. For instance, reading García Márquez in Spanish, you might come across espuma for shaving lather, and so lather and foam get tossed around in your brain for a while, in a way that is gratifying and/or makes you seem a little high, depending: Lathered waves, espuma, spume!
That’s the train of thought that got me to the Latin and Greek. I’m not sure which, if either, I’ll try to learn (recommendations are welcome). For now I’ve been entertaining myself with the various Amazon reviews on the different textbooks (Teach Yourself Pig Latin in a Day!) available.* Here’s an excerpt from a review of Introduction to Attic Greek:

I’m not sure how to answer the chap who thinks learning a language ought to be a distractingly entertaining experience. But let me try. Language learning can indeed be accompanied by merriment at times, usually during the immersion phase and often at the expense of the learner. I’m afraid we’ve missed that boat by a couple millennia. If the pure cerebral rush that comes with the gradual mastery of the inner logic and outer mechanics of your target language is not sufficient stimulation in itself, then the learner might be better advised to stick to Spanish, where he can start pretending to make sentences almost from the outset.

Something to keep in mind.
(Link to White article via Maud.)
* I really love reading Amazon reviews — I don’t know why, possibly because I don’t get out much: It’s people-watching for agoraphobics. Like sitting on a bus where everybody around you is talking about books (and Harriet Klausner rides every line). For a long time my favorite was one that took Zadie Smith to task for not writing well enough about menopause in On Beauty. It was the abundance of clinical detail that really made the case.

• Kevin Kinsella’s interview with Anya Ulinich. I hope to pick up her novel Petropolis this week; you can read the first chapter here.
• Beckett for Babies. (O Aulenback! how I have missed thee.)