Shortly after her "custody" the woman realizes that she can see ghosts. These ghosts are targeting the children and the woman feels it's her duty to protect them.

This story is strange, but it's not scary in the least. Maybe it was in it's time, but certainly not now. I found it to be overly wordy. "I said to the man, because I felt like saying so, what a wonderful day it is, if I do say so myself, which I indeed did say to the man." Maybe this is also a trait of classical writing? This is NOT an example from the book - I don't dare pick that retched thing up again - it's my personal example of "wordyness."

I believe the point of the story is to ask the question "are ghosts for real?" If you already have an answer for that question then don't waste your time with the book. If you have a curiosity in the subject matter and a passion for classics - this may be the book for you. I won't dismiss it entirely, it really just wasn't my style.

from      The Aspern Papers by  Henry James:

I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice. Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose,

Small canal - Venice and its Lagoon -Ponte dei Sospiri-Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo - Piazza San Marco

SEE : Blogroll LINK -----  Città di Venezia

The Turn of the Screw revolved around the accounts of a young governess charged with the care of two children left by their uncle in his country mansion. She claimed seeing two ghosts who were after the children under her charge.

My problem is on the reliability of the governess’ narration. I find it interesting that like the narrator of "The Friends of the Friends," the governess also strongly, and often hysterically, imposes her own interpretation to her companion’s actions.

She perceives ghosts that only she can see yet claim that the others are only pretending not to see them. Was she seeing real ghosts or were these mere hallucinations?

The children are naughty and she attributes this to the evil influence of the ghosts. Is this not only the result of the abnormal circumstances of their upbringing – the untimely death of their parents and the neglect of their uncle?

And could it be that the extraordinary circumstances of this remote country house that turned the screw on her and eventually loosening the screw on her head as well as a result?

The book was rather short at around a hundred pages but one that took longer for me to digest. ■

After days of putting down The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories by Henry James in favor of other books, I finally got through reading it.

I read the first two stories on different earlier occasions but didn’t find much of it to my taste. I liked the third - "The Friends of the Friends" - best:

A lady – the narrator of the journal that made up the story – spiritedly arranged the meeting of two friends who share many qualities. Among others, the man, who is also the narrator’s fiancé, and the other lady, shared a history of seeing ghosts.

The meeting was delayed, appointments were passed up. And when it looked as if it was finally pushing through, the lady narrator herself sabotaged the acquaintance to avert her jealousy.

It was on the night of this missed encounter that the fiancé claimed to his having seen the other lady. The narrator, knowing that her friend died of heart failure that very night, told her fiancé that he saw a ghost.

In the end, the narrator accused the man of falling for the memory of her dead friend and eventually broke up. The man died shortly after and the narrator concluded that it was

a direct contribution to my theory… It was the result of a long necessity, of an unquenchable desire… a response to an irresistible call.

So much for the other two seeing ghosts: the narrator herself was the one who saw ghosts everywhere - nurturing them between herself and her fiancé. ■

(Book jacket image: "First Letter" by Martin Lam Nguyen, oil, 1996)

How does the reader of a novel (or a person remembering or daydreaming) construct that internal, imagined world that extends over time and seems to occupy a space of its own? Until twenty years ago, most believed that we imagine within the medium of language. Then psychologists like Allan Paivio and Stephen Kosslyn showed that we think also by means of images, triggering a debate between the propositionalists, who define thought in terms of idea (or word), and the imagists, who insist we think in picture-like ways.

Opdahl shows that emotion represents elements that elude those two codes: relationships, intangible mental states, large entities like cities or eras, and--always--context or background. Emotion provides the primary mode of the identifying reader, as he or she shares the emotions of the protagonist.

Although the affective code is ignored today, it is natural and even inevitable--a process we know even if we are not aware of it. Emotion is meaning because it represents first the significance of the object and then the qualities that create that significance: the object itself.

Some readers will appreciate this book as an analysis of several novels or as a definition of an affective criticism, as it studies the function of emotion in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, John Updike's The Centaur, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Opdahl shows that an emotion criticism is practical, effective, and illuminating.

Other readers will appreciate this book as a survey of the literature on emotion and mental representation, noting its solution of a major problem. How freeze an otherwise fleeting emotion long enough to examine it? How make what is exquisitely private public? The answer lies in the work of literature, which stabilizes human emotion on the page, for all to see.

For all readers, however, the ultimate point must be the demonstrated existence of the affective code. Emotion not only gives voice to our feelings but stands for something other than itself: it is depictive as well as expressive, serving as an effective mode of thought. To understand this fact is to revise the currently accepted models of the mind, shared by aesthetic critics and cognitive scientists alike. It is also to understand the important contribution the humanities can make to our understanding of the processes of thought.

Published by Bucknell University Press, 2002.

Having tired myself with Henry James’ second story, I cautioned myself from proceeding with the third tale and took up Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the shelf instead.

“Owen Wingrave” is centered on a dispute between a young man who refused to become a soldier and relatives who wanted him to continue the martial tradition of his forefathers. Not that I got along with it that much though.

I find Dostoevsky’s confused men and saintly prostitutes more appealing in spite of James rebuke for Dostoevsky’s fiction as “baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings.” Still, I’ll have to go back to the third story in the selection and the last - the novelette The Turn of the Screw and hope it won’t disappoint.

Perhaps it was the fact that my younger sister has devoured all those presently fashionable Stephanie Meyer books and I wanted to review my knowledge on vampire lore. But I naturally stay away from everything that’s over-hyped, thus making Bram Stoker’s Gothic Classic the perfect companion for the weekend. For sure, I could have read other references on the subject. Still, there’s no substitute for a good story.

Of course, the tale itself has become so much a part of popular culture that I believe there’s no need to repeat it here.

When I was still in elementary school, I recall watching the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula with some family members. I can’t remember much of it but I think it stayed close to the novel in the main except for the love angle between the count and his lady victims when he arrived in England.

I expected much mention of the 15th Century Romanian prince Vlad III the Impaler in the classic book since his tale is one of the elements from the movie that I still committed to memory. However, the reference to the historical figure in Stoker’s novel was discursive and not really in depth:

Ah, the tragedy of knowing a work of fiction first from a film adaptation. ■

I started the evening rereading "Brief Interviews" and felt convicted and abased, recognizing in myself too much of what the Depressed Person says. And you, dear friend, are the beleaguered Support System with whom I (i.e. the depressed person) try constantly to really truly literally "share," to whom I reach out for a glimmer of connectedness, for whom I try to Be There. To see myself thusly has only exacerbated my isolation-feelings, my anguish, my sense of injury, my feelings of abandonment. I'm nothing but a cracked bundle of need, a pail of neuroses. I think my three therapists would agree.

In that story the therapist dies "without leaving any sort of note or cassette or encouraging final words for any of the persons and/or clients in his life."

For a moment I fantasized about DFW being my fourth therapist and indulged the ghoulish question that first struck me when I heard about his suicide:


Did he leave a note?


At any rate he left a cassette, and you found it. You're right. It may be eleven years old, but Charlie Rose's interview of David Foster Wallace covers 80% of what we've talked about, minus the sex. And I mean that literally--every time women appear, it's a negative for him. He's unhappy or exasperated with their role in his artistic world, and the feeling seems mutual.

On Unforgiven:

What's interesting is that I don't know a single female who likes the film. Females think 'Western?' It stinks. And if you can get them to watch it, it's not a western at all. It's a moral drama. It's Henry James, basically. It's very odd.”

Charlie gets worked up about this, agrees, and adds that this is the greatest rift his girlfriend and he have ever had about a movie.

(And there's Henry James, king of the tragedy of manners, large as life. In a Western, no less--the one genre he might be least expected to appear in. I may have to watch Unforgiven after all.)

Wallace is even less happy with feminists who interpret the length of his books as having to do the length of his dick. I don't blame him. First, it's not true. Secondly, it's not surprising that he prickles. The stakes of that sort of criticism are higher for him than they are for most. Returning for a moment to the irony of our generation constituting a Demographic, nothing would be quite so humiliating, for the culminating practitioner of a particular brand of artistic self-awareness, than to be found guilty of a truly unconscious influence.

But the dick's not totally off the table. The Chronicle published an article on "intellectual crushes"--the brainy attraction a student feels to a certain kind of teacher. If anything, it's the organ responsible for this feeling, the "intellectual dick," that is the Firecracker's great preoccupation (and Wallace is one, make no mistake). The writers he mentions---Delillo, Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon---were all well-hung in this department, and are all regular recipients of the male Firecracker's admiration and energy. This isn't penis envy, which Freud reserved for girls, and which it is evident, I think, that I suffer from. But it's close.

Wallace says Lynch's obsession is "The unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal." This truly brilliant take on Lynch gestures, I think, at what appeals to the cerebral Male. Let's drag Henry's brother William into this and call the Firecracker's fierce (and not unjustified) admiration for Lynch, Barth et al. what it is, at least in part: a drive. Earlier than sex, but post-pre-Oedipal. It's tribal and does not easily admit women--let's be frank, it works better without them. It's the universal desire to get lost in the funhouse and wee vigorously into the Po-Mo Stream of Consciousness (sponsored, alas, by the Depend Adult Undergarment).

Urinal cakes, mirrors, death diapers and the sublime, all in a tidy package.

Of Delillo and company, DFW says: “It was the first generation of writers who actually read a lot of criticism.” I think he's right. He says, too (and this is exactly what we've been discussing---the problematic desire for a relationship of exclusivity in art) that irony, cynicism, irreverence---the tools that made these guys great---have now entered the culture.

“SO,” says DFW, “I don't consider myself a post-modernist.”

The coordinating conjunction doesn't follow, goddammit. (This reminds me of a kindly academic who, when asked what he was doing for Christmas, said "Well, my cat died, so I'll be spending it alone.") In that story, it's the coordinating conjunction that gets you in the gut.

As for the leap in logic here: Why "so"? Is it because the value of his work depends to some extent on his tools not having (ahem) "entered the culture"?

I know this is a dominant view. I just want to see it ably defended by the Firecracker population, and it grieves me--selfishly, heartlessly--that DFW, articulate and talented as he is, the ultimate Firecracker, even expressing a wish that his head won't explode--is no more.

This, for example, helped:

Charlie: “But you like movies.”
DFW: “I do like movies.”
Charlie: “English Patient.”
DFW (drinks water, looks back in disbelief): “You're seriously asking me for my ... of English Patient?”
Charlie: Yes.
DFW pauses.

I think The English Patient was an extremely well-done slick commercial movie. I thought it was beautifully lit... I thought you know the desert looks like a body, it's kind of erotic. I thought it was David Lynch Lawrence of Arabia. I thought the story was somewhat predictable and some of the sentimental stuff at the end seemed like stuff I've seen too many times before.

It's a brave stab at diplomacy. I haven't seen The English Patient, but I can certainly imagine what he means. It's no coincidence that he invokes Lawrence of Arabia, a gorgeous film known for powerful male relationships, most of which center around a particular kind of compelling hero-worship and flirt constantly with insanity, and--excepting a little ululating from the sidelines--for its notable absence of women.

Other revealing, and dare I say it? touching moments:

DFW: “I'm gonna look pretentious talking about this.”
Charlie: “Quit worrying about how you're going to look! Just be!” (Very Whitmanesque.)
...
DFW: “You confront your own vanity when you're going on TV.”

To quote him: “Most of the things that are leaving my mouth seem to be mean.” I don't mean to mock, except in fellowship. I admire the hell out of Wallace in this interview and in many of the things of his I've read. Something of a mildewed sparkler myself, I want kinship. I want the right to praise and to pee standing in solidarity and to stop, as he put it, "hating the teacher for the wrong reasons." Because he was the real thing---a true Firecracker, one of the Elect.

That's why, after the first minute of dumb shock, his death wasn't a surprise.

Fondly,
Millicent

Intimate terms with the object. This helps. Maybe this is what distinguishes the explorers of yore---Lewis and Clark, Columbus, Ponce de Leon et al.---from the new ones. They (we?) don't really want to bring back potatoes and spices and the Hottentot Venus. Quite the contrary---it's more about hoarding. This is a different impulse, a quest for private communion. Except that "communion" might be the wrong word, since there's nothing common about it, and the worst outcome is really that the beloved object will become mainstream. At best, we're like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We might share with those who know enough to know that there is a code.

I get the impulse to ferociously protect one's private bond with something. In my case, though, it's almost a defensive move, because I'm wounded when someone I show it to doesn't like it. What puzzles me about the Firecrackers is that the object with which they're intimate is lessened when someone whose opinion they don't respect does. According to your lover analogy, this would be something like harlotry. Loverly jealousy?

I think you're dead right about the demographic problem: is it that "communion" has become distasteful because we understand advertising too well? Is it that, in liking the same thing as someone we don't like, we watch marketing boxes converge, so that we're all in the same target audience? Is it that we want to "go off the grid" like Freegans do, to cheat The Demographic the way our parents fought The Man?

Obvious point about nonconformist conformity: Our parents became The Man, and it's the tragedy of a lifetime when we're catapulted out of our rugged individualism and pegged squarely into a round demographic hole.

It reminds me of John Marcher in Henry James' "Beast in the Jungle." Do you know this story? He goes through his whole life hubristic, complacent, a ruminant dilettante filled with an almost religious certainty that something remarkable is going to happen to him. His life will be defined by an Event, what James' father called a "Vastation." Marcher subjects May Bartram, the woman in love with him, to a lifetime of audiencehood. She's his chief witness, the only person to whom he confessed his secret belief, and she honors him by believing it, and she waits with him her whole life.

He's a believer in Destiny, in Greatness, in the fact that he has been uniquely Marked. His tragedy---the revelation, at the end---is that nothing ever happens to him. The whole Greek tragedy he built himself has no oracle. There's no destiny, there's no Event, there's just a long life unpunctuated by anything except empty nouns, somethings, successive clauses, unseized opportunities.

God. "Pocketful of Miracles" it is. I need them.

Fondly,
Millicent

Book: Henry James - Portrait of a Lady

Situation: A half-naked tattoo-clad man is adjusting his crotch approximately ninety centimetres away from well-dressed suit engrossed in his book. Well-dressed suit pauses. Looks up. Smiles into the middle distance that is the man's tattooed chest. Looks back down. Starts reading again.

Henry James: 1, Half-naked man: 0

Many, far more qualified, people have written about the structure of a story, and so I shall confine this post to how I am setting up the structure for the Dark Star Chronicles. If you wish to use these methods for your own stories, feel free, after all there are only seven or eight different stories that every other is based on anyway.

As I have mentioned previously, I have a fifteen month plan for the Dark Star Chronicles, which started on 1st September 2008 and will finish in November of 2009 with it's final publication (of volume one anyway!). How I plan to write and release each section of the story is in itself setting out my own story's structure.

The first chapter I plan to have as an online entity for people to read the first Monday of December. This release will continue on the first Monday of every month until the final chapter on 2nd November next year. For this reason, you can see that each chapter is a short story in itself (which you could argue is true of any chapter in any novel, whether it be serialised or not).

So, I have one story in twelve digital parts. I plan to publish a hard (paper) copy every three months that can be bought from the website, to build up a library of the story (these publications will also include extracts from this blog as well as research and sketches from along the way, but I digress). So the twelve parts can also be collected as four, for want of a better word, seasons.

Aristotle famously wrote how every story has three parts: The beginning, the middle and the end. Syd Field (and others) in analysing movies and their screenplays has broken down these three acts into a time structure that more often than not relates to 1/4 : 1/2 : 1/4 (next time you watch a film, notice how the first major action / shock / event happens after the first twenty minutes or so).

Taking Aristotle and Syd Field's suggestions on board (who am I to argue with them?), my three acts will run as follows:

• Act 1 = Season 1 = Chapter's 1 to 3
• Act 2 = Season 2+3 = Chapter's 4 to 9
• Act 3 = Season 4 = Chapter's 10 to 12

Conveniently enough for me, the writer Doran W Cannon breaks down the three acts even further, into three more parts which may now dictate the "theme" of each Chapter as follows:

• Chapter 1 = Stimulus - the opening hook of the story that stimulates the main character into action
• Chapter 2 = Polaris - the bridge from the stimulus that sets the stage for the catalyst
• Chapter 3 = Catalyst - the event that reacts to what came before and leads the main character into crisis
• Chapter 4 = Crisis - the point of no return, where the main character faces a fight or flight decision
• Chapter 5/6+7/8 = Catharsis - the main character has to overcome many obstacles placed in his way
• Chapter 9 = Epiphany - the main character realises what caused the crisis and how to remedy it
• Chapter 10 = Remedy - the hero begins the actions required to resolve the crisis
• Chapter 11 = Climax - the hero wins, good defeats evil
• Chapter 12 = Resolution - loose ends are tied up or just "happily ever after"

To confuse you all a little further, I see each chapter as a stand alone story in their own right (think of them like an episode of a TV series). This then dictates that each chapter also divides into the three acts structure described above.

I have thought a lot more about this, but I have already written quite a large post now. I may write more on this tomorrow. As ever, your comments would be greatly appreciated!

2. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, lyrical and funny at the same time, was so much a joy a read that I finished it in one sitting.

The novel of almost two hundred pages is basically about two city boys who were exiled to the countryside for reeducation during Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The two were entranced by the daughter of a local tailor. At the same time, they stumbled upon a suitcase filled with banned Western classics which they read in secret.

Through these books, one of the two, who already was the peasant girl's lover, sought to make a cultured lady out of her and sought his friend's help. Little did they know the regret that this would cause them in the end. After some twists and turns in the story, the girl runs off to the city in the search for more refinement. Well, they were just too successful.

3. Daughters of the Vicar is a far shorter work of little more than seventy pages. Ironically, it took me more time to get through Lawrence's tale of love set in a grim and destitute coal mining community of early 20th Century England before the First World War.

4. I'm also going through the Oxford World Classics Henry James selection, Turn of the Screw and Other Stories. The book revolves around ghosts stories and what seems to be psychological themes. I've only been through the introduction, prefaces and the first tale: in "Sir Edmund Orme," a young lady is stalked by a ghost that those who truly love her see.

5. Meanwhile, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades provides my first introduction to the writings of the late Oakley Hall. This is the second book I've read with Bierce as the protagonist since Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo. Interestingly, I never came across any of Bierce's own prose. Well, except perhaps for some entries from his The Devil's Dictionary which serve as epigraphs to each chapter of Hall's historical thriller. ■

The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser, Little Brown & Co. 

Readers may be forgiven if the title of de Kretser’s third novel fails to captivate. Not only does The Lost Dog continue her preference for curiously static object names (following The Rose Grower and The Hamilton Case) that do an injustice to the complexity of her themes, but it seems to evoke a little too readily a growing genre of literature whose popularity would seem close to the saturation point. Ever since John Grogan’s Marley & Me proved a surprise bestseller in 2005, stories of man’s best friend, whether fiction or memoir, have been wet-nosing their way onto bookshelves like insistent Shih Tzus. Most recently, Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain has taken the trend to its logical extreme by employing a pooch protagonist as narrator. While that is one way to stand out from the litter, the preponderance of literary terriers and retrievers is beginning to bring to mind the unfortunate image of a publishing puppy mill.

Curiously, though, de Kretser’s book can’t really be lumped in with these other works, for the search for the titular stray isn’t the overarching narrative concern. Instead, the real lost dog here is the owner, an Indian-Australian Henry James scholar named Tom Loxley, whose week long search for his pet prompts an inquiry into the nature of modernity, reality, and identity. One might go so far as to say that James is more central to the novel than the dog, which is never even named (unlike Tom’s book: Meddlesome Ghosts: Henry James and the Uncanny). What de Kretser hopes to produce here is a psychological study of perception on the order of “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Jolly Corner,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” Whether she succeeds depends on the individual reader’s tolerance for stylistic abstraction and the relatively disassembled state in which she presents her plot pieces.

The lack of assembly becomes pronounced a third of the way into the narrative when de Kretser introduces what should be the novel’s unifying focus——we learn the mysterious background of the artist Nelly Zhang, whose house Tom rents in order to complete his scholarly study of the Master (and it is while on a walk near the bordering bush that Loxley’s dog runs away). A decade and a half earlier, Nelly’s husband, Felix Atwood, vanished without a trace while being investigated for shady finances. Nelly subsequently became a tabloid suspect in his disappearance, especially after she seemed to stoke the mystery with a series of paintings ridiculed in the press as “Nelly’s Nasties.” De Kretser even excerpts one disapproving review from an “eminent critic”: “Zhang (re)presents the symbolic violence of authoritarian modes in images as ambiguous as they are oppressive. Nowhere in these paintings is the phallocentric will-to-power explicitly critiqued. The refusal to engage in direct visual discourse is ultimately elitist and unsatisfying.”

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to build suspense when one is throwing around words like “phallocentric”—even when parodying them. But, Nelly isn’t Loxley’s only concern. The declining health of his aged mother, Iris, also preoccupies him. One of the most dramatically satisfying interludes occurs when Tom must clean the bathroom after his mother loses control of her bowels; the humiliating episode confirms for the protagonist the indignity of corporeality. De Kretser also goes into the Loxley family background, giving the storyline a colonialist spin by exploring how his father, Arthur, met Iris in India after WWII and how her desire for bourgeois prosperity landed them in Australia. Just how issues of immigration and identity relate to both Nelly’s mystery and Tom’s lost dog remain frustratingly unclear, however. At times, it feels as if there are three novels in one unspooling as the transitions between them are abrupt and often stagy. “But it might have begun long, long before that evening in Carson Posner’s gallery,” begins the introduction to the Arthur Loxley flashback, “It might have been historical.” One wishes a brave editor to have written, “Or it might just be a digression.”

In addition to structural problems, there are moments when the stylistic compression required to stitch these disparate plotlines together results in some downright dubious sentences. Describing the reaction to “Nelly’s Nasties,” de Kretser writes, “A rock star who collected art was quoted as saying he was struggling with aesthetic and ethical objections to Nelly’s work.” Perhaps Australian rock stars are that articulate—Colin Hay, maybe?—but the line strikes me instead as an instance of the authorial voice intruding into the narration out of sheer haste. De Kretser’s occasional reversion to such academic prose is curious given a late set piece in which Tom attends a hiring-committee meeting at his university—a scene that is needlessly populated with pompous tweed-and-political correctness types. At this point in literary history, there would seem little real value in parodying the professoriate; not only has it been done to death by David Lodge et al, but also it adds nothing to the story. Additionally, if one wants to mock the hallowed groves of academe, one shouldn’t sound like a denizen.

Despite these flaws, The Lost Dog still has much to recommend. For starters, the characters are intriguing and sustain interest through the plot’s patchwork discontinuities. Tom Loxley is the most rewarding of de Kretser’s overt Jamesian analogues; emotionally detached before the dog’s disappearance, he struggles in the classic mould of John Marcher and Spencer Brydon to come to grips with lost opportunities and disappointments and to balance his attraction to Nelly against the mystery of her missing husband. Nelly, too, is a thoroughly enjoyable creation, at once firmly committed to her aesthetics and yet winkingly aware of the pretension that seems inseparable from art. The putative antagonist, Carson Posner, is every bit as arch and manipulative as a Gilbert Osmond type should be, and several minor characters add local Aussie color. De Kretser’s eye for setting is likewise exquisite; aside from atmospheric evocations of paddocks and eucalyptus, she invests a great deal of effort in wringing poetry out of landscape, which pays off handsomely in conveying Tom’s ephemeral disconnection. Indeed, the chimerical is far more affecting here than in the constant references to James’s meddlesome ghosts.

Again, the overall success of The Lost Dog depends on the reader’s tolerance for its loose, baggy form. The Anglo literary establishment certainly hasn’t held its unshapely development against de Kretser. Despite the general consensus that the novel represents a bit of a retreat in ambition after The Hamilton Case, The Lost Dog recently made the longlist for the 2008 Man Booker Prize (it was also named Book of the Year in Australia). While it is unlikely to win top honors, the recognition is certainly deserved for de Kretser, if not necessarily for this particular work.

*

Kirk Curnutt is the author the novel Breathing Out the Ghost. His next work, Dixie Noir, will be published in November 2009.

One thing that stands out is what the characters are and what they've become.

Olive is dim in her perception of progressivism and Basil is equally so in his view of conservatism. In the end both have ultimately failed. Of course Ransom gets Verena but he fails himself and his chivalrous notions in his dogged pursuit of her.  Olive implodes over the loss of Verena exactly as Mrs. Luna said she would, "mark my words...she will give Olive the greatest cut she has ever had in her life."

Olive, the close-lipped woman who Verena describes "has got such an open mind, it's as wide as the sea."; destroys her standing with the progressives all for an infatuation with Verena Tarrant. Basil runs slipshod over his ideals also. What a conception Mr. James must've had putting together Ms. Tarrant. A beautiful impressionable young girl who can be made suitable for mass consumption through Olive or honed into a submissive housewife through Basil.

Our first impression of Basil is one of a meek Southerner.  With Olive it is of a woman who can barely control her rage at the opposite sex. Which begs the question, why did she ever invite him up to her abode in Boston? Why intitiate a relationship with a man from a perceived backwards part of the country?

When last we see Miss Chancellor she is nothing but a shell of her former self. WIth Ransom he is on top of the world at having beaten his kinswoman in a quite seriously life or death match.

James spurs the reader on to pick a progressive or reactionary. I can't stand either characters' railleries at each others ideals.  Nor can I stand Verena Tarrant's innocence.  Though I did find it amusing that Ms. Chancellor would throw money at Selah and Mrs. Tarrant in order to gain sole influence over the precious girl. You see Verena is torn, she hasn't conviction or willpower to hang on with either one though there are scenes when she vociferously sides with Olive. The Bostonians seems to have taken something from me rather than gifting me.

The dark humor and irony of the novel are superb though. For instance "There were so many things that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her friend's earnest efforts to teach her." Verena is incapable of holding her own thoughts, she is merely a vessel for any crew that wants to man her.

One of the key things Simmons recommends is that we read the great classics, not to imitate them (god forbid!) but to deepen our appreciation and awareness of style, language and technique. I couldn't agree more.

In fact, I've decided to 'take him on' and broaden my reading diet, particularly with the classic novels. Madame Bovary seems to be a particular recommendation of Simmons, who argues that it represents a fictional fault-line, a before and after moment for the novel. So, I thought that might be a good start - I know, it's unbelievable I still haven't read it. Have you?  I downloaded a free copy, well-rendered as a PDF, here.

Simmons also highlights Henry James as one of the greatest stylists in modern English, managing to capture vast import and subtlety into what he says and, above all, what he doesn't say.

I happen to have a copy of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw to hand and I decided to give it a go. It has some fine and chilling moments of horror, as well as an intriguing is she/isn't she psychological plot-puzzle that has kept readers and critics entertained ever since its publication.

However, in my view, the style is somewhat opaque, particularly the dialogue, and is not a great model to learn from (except perhaps for what not to do). Nineteenth Century people may well have thought and spoke in the strangely periphrastic, stilted, and at times incomprehensible way that James makes them do here, it is hard for me to judge. But I've read Wilkie Collins and Dickens, and MR James for that matter, and their characters don't seem to, unless it's a particular trait and is fully intentional.

Simmons writes amusingly of his undergraduate attitude to Henry James and his layered style (he tried to avoid reading him as much as possible), but notes his growing appreciation for him as a master of deep and complex prose as he got older, and more experienced, as a writer.

I'm sorry to say, though, that I am still not convinced. So, in the spirit of fun, and to illustrate my problem with The Turn of the Screw, which I've heard so much about, and which has frankly disappointed me, I give you a sample from a lost early version of the story:

Whether he saw now the measure of it, or I of myself, was now no longer to be the question. If only, I forced myself to concede, it were. But no, that thought was merest whimsy, no more of the slightest possibility, or of even the grossest supposition or manner. Now, I was only too painfully aware, only the merest trace of what might not have been said or known was there left, mingling too unkindly with the sighs of the frosty evening air. But had I not known of it always? Was it for him, in that monstrous moment, to be vouchsafed that I, as it were, not from the want of it, but alone, as though at once, should perceive, in the most exquisite detail, the knowledge that he, were he only to share it with me in the merest instant or breath, to be? Was I that condemned? I think that if I had, at that precise instant, but paused a moment longer, to accept within myself the truth of it, then I would truly have been lost, As it was, the anguish of the instant all but rushed in upon my soul, and I confess I broke, with all the pent up fury and anger and hatred that the pettiness of not having known of it before could have meant, to him, for he it was, I understood that now, and I ran. Out into the silent garden, its cold embrace and bare winter branches seeming only to mock me now, and I flung myself down upon the close-cropped croquet lawn, and I wept. For how long, I shall never now recall, it might have been an eon. But at last, the sobs subsided and I returned, with slow and dreadful steps to the drawing room to watch a bit of tv.

There's lots like that. Of course, I'll give James another chance, and I'm aware I'm being very silly, but he's lost some points with this story... unless the joke is on me and I have completely missed the point...

Perhaps the style is supposed to be like that as it reflects the state of mind and confusion and repression of the heroine. Oh dear... D**n you Henry James! You win again!

It is better to have written a damned play, than no play at all – it snatches a man from obscurity.
(Frederic Reynolds, The Dramatist)

I don’t read many current children’s books but my young friend Melissa showed me some of the Moomin stories, which I rather liked the look of. They’re not English.

I’m into children’s books that are also fit for adults (and not adults pretending to be children, which is absolutely fine, but different from what I’m thinking about, as it involves more nostalgia). Everyone says Philip Pullman: is it true? And surely he can’t be the first?

I do think we are in something of a golden age of children’s literature. There are some very fine authors out there – Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is very well written (he beats J.K. Rowling hands down in terms of his prose), Anne Fine, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy, Terry Deary (who writes good fiction in addition to his hugely popular “Horrible Histories”: his Tudor Chronicles series is very good), but especially Michael Morpurgo who doesn’t talk down to children, but tackles some difficult issues with honesty; The Butterfly Lion is a gorgeously written tale and, in honesty, I’ve never felt let down by his books. Nice chap too.

A book I was very attached to back in the day was Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, or what I’ve since realized was a highly abridged version of it. At least once I read it from cover to cover under the bedclothes by the light of a torch.

I did somehow miss out on a lot of the classics when I was young, like Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Just So Stories and no doubt loads of other stuff. I am gradually putting this right.

As for C.S. Lewis and his Narnia crap, when I first read those books I wasn’t even aware that they were Christian allegories, apart from the last one; I find this aspect of his work greatly overstated, though I haven’t actually read them for over 30 years. No doubt I will again before too long. I hope I don’t find them repellent.

I remember a wonderfully lugubrious comment by Alan Bennett to the effect that he did not take to books in his local library because they were all bound in an identical austere style, which made “Milly Molly Mandy look like The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

A book that I loved was John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk. The world in its pages was a place of limitless and magical possibilities – how I wanted the world to be, and it both frightened and thrilled me. I actually can’t remember the story very clearly now, just the feeling of it (but that for example you should be able to talk to the cat, seemed to me how the world should be). There was something very exciting too about the idea of having a whole other life (occurring pretty much in a constant wash of moonlight in my mind) that you led while your parents were asleep.

Other little boys have birthday cards in the shape of footballs or sports cars. My mother confirms that when I was six or seven, I asked for, and got, a birthday cake in the shape of a book.

I think I read so much not so much because of interest in the content matter, as some sense that here was something where I was in control and had ability.

I read both David Copperfield and Ivanhoe when I was seven. Although the school scenes in the former struck me as highly convincing, (given the nature of my prep school) I got through Ivanhoe by the same method as I have later used for Henry James’ The Ambassadors, the Swann and Odette bits in Proust and Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church. I turned the pages and noticed the words, but with little sense of what they meant.

Henry James at The Rose, Kingston

Portrait of a Lady - the Kingston ROSE theatre 26 August - 6 September
Post performance talk: Tuesday 2 September

Audio described performance: 6 September 2.30pm. Touch tour at 1pm.

Suitable for all ages.

Matinee(s) Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday 2.30pm

Evening(s) 7.30pm

Adapted by Nicki Frei
Directed by Peter Hall
Presented by Theatre Royal Bath Productions & The Peter Hall Company

Nicola Frei's stage adaptation of Henry James' novel, directed by Peter Hall, opens The Peter Hall Company residency at the Rose Theatre, Kingston.

The cast includes Catherine McCormack (The Land Girls, All My Sons), Niamh Cusack (Heartbeat, A&E), Finbar Lynch (Proof, Not About Nightingales), Jean Marsh (Upstairs Downstairs, Boeing Boeing), Oliver Chris (Green Wing, The Office), Anthony Howell (Foyle's War) and Christopher Ravenscroft (The Ruth Rendell Mysteries).

"Catherine McCormack is unquestionably fine" The Times

Set in London, Rome and Florence, The Portrait of a Lady tells the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, young American heiress, who travels to Europe on a voyage of self-discovery.
Links:

http://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/
2.

London Hip-Hop, Funk 'n Soul at Ascot

The Common Moral Cause Fri Aug 29 2008 8:00P The Jagz Club & Restaurant, Ascot

The Common Moral Cause are an exciting ten piece outfit who combine an eclectic mix of urban jazz, funk, hip-hop, R'n'B and soul to create a fluid funk flava that they can call their own.

Their unique sound and engaging live performances has already seen them play numerous sell out gigs across the country and make appearances at the London Astoria, Oxford's Zodiac and the Jazz Café.

Their debut EP Causality (the principle that there is a cause to everything that happens) has just been released, with their follow up CD Big Sound set for release at the end of the summer.

TCMC are on the regular playlist for Maidenhead's Green Apple 88.4FM, and have appeared on BBC radio Manchester. To date they have had a few limited TV appearances with Odis making it through to the quarter finals of ITV's X Factor and keen fans will have spotted the Mole spitting his rhymes with style on Channel Four's Faking it.

The Show:

Friday, 29th August
Show will start at 8.00
Ticket cost: £6.00
Entrance for the night is £6. Doors open at 7.30pm for dining and 8.30pm for drinking. 2 courses for £22, 3 courses for £26.

The Links:

http://www.myspace.com/thecommonmoralcause

http://www.jagz.co.uk/

Station Hill, Ascot

Also look out for TCMC at the Iver Carnival
Iver High St, Iver, Bucks, London and South East
Cost : FREE September, 13 2008
---------------------------------------

Also at JAGZ Station Hill, Ascot this week:

Fallen Heroes

Fabulous and highly entertaining six piece band that always create a really groovy atmosphere with their eclectic mix of New Orleans R&B and funky Street Beat.

Upcoming show:

Saturday, 30th August
Show will start at 8.00
Ticket cost: £8.00
Doors open from 7.30pm. £26 for 2 courses and entrance (£30 for 3 courses). Entrance for the bands is £8 but is strictly

limited and on a first come first served basis. Entrance for dining or just the band INCLUDES free entrance to the nightclub

http://www.myspace.com/fallenheroesinfo


3.

Shepperton 'Hometown Heroes' play The Hob, Staines

Photo- Mindy Coe

Loaded Dice at The Hob, Staines Sunday August 31 8:00P £3 on door

Best UK Live Unsigned Band

The Loaded Dice were formed 4 years ago and early success saw the band reaching the live televised UK final of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. Their catchy riffs and strong vocals led to an invitation to perform for 4 successive years in The National Rock and Pop Festival at the NEC Birmingham. Competing in the National Youth Battle of the Bands (which they came a close second in 2005.) Recently the band won the National live and Unsigned South Coast Idol competition, beating over 10 000 acts and winning the title of “Best UK live and unsigned band.”

Currently the boys are involved with Future Music Management developing the band. They clearly love playing together especially on stage and are always ready to entertain and perform to their best. They have taken their music further a field, twice touring Spain to take part in music concerts.

Loaded Dice are:

Lui Matthews -vocals
Anthony Wilkinson - Guitar & backing vocals
Ian Lennon - Bass
Steven Wilkinson - Drums & backing vocals

http://www.myspace.com/theloadeddice

If you miss 'em they will be back at The Hob on Sept 14th (but catch 'em quick because these boys are gonna be BIG!!!)

Photo by:

http://www.myspace.com/mindycoephotography

4.

Rock, rock, rock (and Ska) at The Hob Staines

The Stilts at The Hob Staines, Sunday August 31st 8:00P (with Loaded Dice)

The Stilts play balls-out rock and roll with lashings of punk and ska thrown in. Citing influences ranging from The Clash and The Who through to Cage the Elephant and The Paddingtons, the band’s sound is the result of a sonic collision between the garage band revolution of the sixties and the current wave of alternative indie. Not confined to any one style, The Stilts create music that rocks and deliver it with the punk energy it deserves.

Formed in North-West London in 2006 The Stilts have made practising an obsession and obsession an art form, creating an impressive range of their own material. Over the last year and a half they have worked their way through quiet Monday night gigs to packed weekenders in top venues, delighting promoters and picking up fans on the way.

The Stilts now have a reputation for jumping sets packed with raw energy, which has enabled them to build a dedicated following on the London gig circuits. Having been tipped for prime slots on a host of mainstream radio shows, they expect to be heard on the air in the near future.

The band continues to raise expectations, incorporating innovative sounds from their current influences and regularly introducing new tracks to their sets, keeping fans hooked and converting non-believers.

Mr Fred - sings and strums

Here - licks and shreds

J - thumps and rumbles

Trigger - hits things

The links:
http://www.myspace.com/thestilts

Lots of Fun !!


5.

Classic Rock from The Blue Fuses, Staines

The Blue Fuses Aug 28 2008 8:00P The Staines RIVERSIDE Club Laleham Road

Blue Fuses is a great Surrey-based rock covers band, doing mostly 70's - 80's stuff - from AC/DC to ZZ Top via a number of bands with colours in their names, particularly Black, Pink and Purple. You will love them... lots of audience interaction and some nice set-pieces. They went down very well the last time they played STAINES.

Check our review of last years Blue Fuses gig here

http://www.myspace.com/douglip

if you miss the Blue Fuses in Staines this week you can catch them at:

October, 25 2008 at The Cardinal Wolsey
Hampton Court Rd, Hampton, London and South East KT8
Cost : £2

Get Your Tickets for Beck Theatre, Hayes

The Beck Theatre
Grange Road
Hayes
Middlesex
UB3 2UE

-Visit AdPontes-Staines Regularly for Staines Arts-

That said, I have started taking reading seriously again. For the past half year (or more), I've felt too lazy / busy to read the pile of books I've either bought, acquired or borrowed from friends. The number grew in time, and my irritation at my non-reading life haunted me most nights.

But.

Last Monday, I finally finished reading The American by Henry James, after carrying it around with me for the past four months or so. I guess I would have finished it sooner, if I had actually forced myself to. But then again that would defeat the purpose of "reading for pleasure," and I would have enjoyed the classic (headache) less than I did. Anyway.

The American, as what the book's introduction states, is probably James’ most melodramatic work ever. I felt like I was taking a scene from a Filipino telenovela and transforming it into text, and I have to admit that sometimes I cringed at the apparent absurdity of the situations presented. Christopher Newman, the main protagonist, is wonderfully boring at times and brutally frank most of the time, and his "flatness" is made more apparent by the irritating yet interesting characters which surround him. Madame Claire de Cintre was sickeningly perfect in most of the other characters’ eyes that images of annoying Mary Sues popped in my mind more than once. Yet I couldn't stop myself from feeling for Newman when he found out how the Bellegardes had “done him wrong,” and I had to root for him when he craftily devised a plan to get even and force them to give back something(one) important to him. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the fifth to the last chapter, I already guessed what the ending of the novel would be, and I was a little bit disappointed with Newman’s (in)decision about his so-called “revenge” (and Madame de Cintre’s stubbornness – although I must admit it added depth to her character and I silently applaud her for that). Nevertheless, I have to commend James for taking it “there,” and Mrs. Tristam’s final evaluation of the situation was fairly accurate:

(please highlight to read text) >>"Well then," she said, "I suppose there is no harm in saying that you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable. My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right."

The final line “Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it.” is the perfect ending for a not-so-tragic story, as it leaves both character and reader hanging to countless what-ifs that, sadly, will remain what-ifs for all time. Yes. I’m afraid not all love stories have happily ever-afters (I tend to believe that more myself), but one can never be too sure if Newman (or Claire) was really in love in the first place (or if they were, it was in the twisted way only people like them could).

And now, after battling with James’ long descriptions of French toilets, tapestries and tricks, I started reading (last Tuesday) Ninotchka Rosca’s Twice Blessed, a novel which earned praises from my college best friend as a book that history buffs would love. Unfortunately, I’m no history buff, and my few and in-between encounters with that dreadful subject have left me scarred for life. Of course, that would never stop me from finishing a book, and I’m currently in the sixth (or is it seventh) chapter, reading a few paragraphs on my way to work, while riding the LRT2 or bus, or whenever I feel lazy to read manga at home. And the allusions to certain non-fictional characters are pretty obvious, unless I’m overreading the whole thing again (as I tend to do sometimes). The plot is interesting so far, what with the conflict between Blackie Garcia, the traditional politician / incumbent president who refused to step down from power, and Hector Basbas, the presidential candidate (or he already won, as their group claims) with fresh ideas, reforms and connections with prestigious clans in the country. Katerina Basbas-Gloriosa gives me a chilling impression of a former First Lady who has a fetish for shoes. That said, I will have to finish the whole work first before I can give opinions on the issues Rosca deals with.

So.

I’m definitely going to read Soledad’s Sister by Butch Dalisay, but that would have to be dealt with later than sooner. I still have Bleak House by Charles Dickens, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to wrestle with it yet, not after my affair with Great Expectations.

Hmm.