it’s not a slow dance, this modern romance

As usual, I’ve left my reading for class till the nth hour (literally), so I’m attempting to read very fast. But Derrida, whose reputation for incomprehensibility is notorious, does not lend himself to speed-reading. Contrary to expectation, I’ve found him remarkably exciting, thus far. Reading theory seems to me to be the intellectual’s fix: it’s a way to read about the mundane world in abstract, even astonishing terms. It makes everything new, it peels the layers off, one by one, in a tantalising strip-tease of ideas but what you find underneath is nothing like you expected.

I’ve decided to reform my decadent ways. I’ve been sleeping too many hours a day, watching too much House, spending too much time on Facebook talking to people I really don’t care about except as sounding-boards for my boredom and neglecting the pursuit of potentially intellectual things. And of course, eating way too much junk.

No more of this, I say! Nose to the grindstone, back to the wall, nose in a book, and all the other cliched metaphors you can think of for serious study in response to the peril of being proven second-rate shall be the order of the day.

In other news, Ireland tickets have been bought. Now we just need to find places to stay, things to do and of course, a damn visa that allows us to enter!

—

Ah, I could have spent words uselessly on questioning my actions, recent and imminent, but I’ll save it for another rainy day.

milk chocolate butter biscuits

…are my new vice.

I can consume huge numbers of these strangely yummy things everyday. Oh well, at least I’m usually reading one of my course texts while I’m eating them (okay, sometimes I’m compulsively watching American sitcoms). I’m currently sitting pretty after having spent (nearly) all day reading Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government and attempting to correlate it to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. That constituted about 50% of the work I was supposed to do for Wednesday. I also had to read Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte which I’m about twenty five pages into – epic fail; and an essay by John Sutherland on the Victorian Novelists which just made me very happy.

I love nonfiction that makes me happy. I’ve realised lately that well-written nonfiction can be even more absorbing that the best/worst novel.

So with about 70% done, I’m not too badly off. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go crazy tomorrow, what with class, a workshop on the fin-de-siecle, a meeting about the PG journal and the postgrad society thing. Phew.

[Being busy gives one such a sense of purpose! I needed something to take my mind off my ridiculously persistent crush on that random man anyway]

a myriad coloured spinning threads

Middlemarch is admittedly intimidating in appearance. At nearly 1000 pages, spanning every conceivable social class and exploring the lives and actions of more than ten “major” characters, perhaps only the most inveterate literary time-travellers would undertake to read it. Which is probably to the detriment of all the other cowardly 21st centuryites who shy away from such an effort of imagination, because Middlemarch is one of the most engrossing, books you will ever read.

I like books that I can get inside. And in this one, there were so many instances of complete identification; when you study literature, it becomes considerably rare that a book subdues your critical side and appeals purely to the emotional and indifferently intellectual. I probably will not be able to offer insight into Dorothea Brooke’s character, or make and defend complex arguments on the metaphorical significance of such-and-such or remark on the interplay between so-and so. Middlemarch is full of opinions and ideas and symbols and metaphors for you to comment on, but speaking solely as a reader and not a student, it is so much more – it makes you laugh, cry, rant, curse and for the space of a few days, transported to a provincial Midlands village in the middle of the 19th century.

There is a curious charm about stories that are long, rambly, eventful and end happily, without being puerile, superfluous or narrow in their intellectual appeal. Middlemarch is a satisfying affirmation that “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it”.

thanklessly

Finally finished The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which I’ve been sitting on for the last week. And what do I get for ploughing through all of that intense characterization and careless wit? A haphazard, slightly unoriginal plot twist (almost an afterthought!) and, yes, that’s right, an OPEN ENDING.

I abhor open endings. Grr.

In the book’s defence – it’s a good example of the transitional period between Victorian and modernist ideas, values, language and style; Isabel Archer is a literary heroine I identified with quite strongly, and finally, it did manage to make me cry.

Think I’ll take a break from fiction for a while.

—

Sometimes, there are things, there are people, there are places that you feel like you understand better than anyone else. The entire world thinks you’re thoroughly stupid for even undertaking to care about any of the above, but you still continue to do so, because even though you’re doing a thankless thing – like defending a genre, tolerating a partial friend and going somewhere you’d rather not go – you just go on doing it. It doesn’t cost you much, but it doesn’t give you anything either. And yet, you continue doing it, smiling at the pointlessness of the act, but smiling all the same.

Maybe someday you’ll regret it.

But future regret is better than present discomfort, arguably.

time travel.

From Jane Austen to Leo Tolstoy, I’ve felt love, pain, fear, loneliness, despair, joy and loss. This is why reading the classics makes me so happy. I’m sitting here at 1.06 am, and I am fully convinced that there is no other kind of literature I would rather read.

Onward ho, to Henry James. And then, who knows? Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Aphra Behn and AnthonY Trollope are scattered on my table and shelves, waiting patiently.

Mini reviews:

Mansfield Park:

Fanny Price isn’t half as annoying as she’s made out to be, Edmund Bertram is immensely likeable at times, thoroughly irritating at others and Henry Crawford seems like a much more desirable man. However, I really liked the well-drawn relationship between Edmund and Fanny, which is more long-standing and realistic (though also incestuous by our standards!) than the whirlwind witty romance of Elizabeth and Darcy or the socially approved match between Marianne and Colonel Brandon!

Northanger Abbey:

Definitely my number three Austen, after Emma and P&P. Henry Tilney is simply delightful with his quick wit and genuine kindness towards the admittedly silly Catherine Morland. I liked how the novel mocked Gothic conventions as well as the attitudes of readers towards them with a particular brand of gentle irony that seems to be toned down, or at least, more serious in Austen’s later novels.

Anna Karenina:

It took me nearly two weeks to plod through it, and at particularly slow points, I must confess I committed the sin of wondering why Anna Karenina is such a celebrated novel. Nevertheless, by the end, I knew why. It left me with a strange sense of joy, at Levin’s finding his purpose in life as well as Anna’s tormented end. Somehow, Tolstoy managed to present, argue and attempt to answer all the questions of life, love and death that have ever struck me.

Ah, Vronsky! Byronic heroes are just one of the many reasons I love the classics. But that having been said, Levin is far more alive, a real flesh-and-blood man.

The more I see of real men, the more I am convinced that the ones made of words are ineffably superior.