Category Archives: Literature

PROMPT: Favorite Artists

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Daily writing prompt
Who are your favorite artists?
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If one means “arts” in the broadest sense of the word, I’d have to say William Blake, because I like both his poetry and his graphic artistry, as well as his particular brand of madness.

If you mean visual artistry (which people often do when they use the term without a qualifier,) I generally enjoy fantastical and imaginative art, but not so fantastical or imaginative that it requires / shows no skill. So, artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, and M.C. Escher top the list.

BOOKS: Wonderful Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek

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Wonderful, Wonderful TimesWonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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If I said this book was A Clockwork Orange meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream it would be in some ways deceptive but in other ways, accurate. The book has none of the otherworldliness of those other stories and, instead, is set in a realistic 1950’s Vienna. Furthermore, those comparisons might confuse readers into not realizing this book is unambiguously a tragedy.

The book is set around four kids (Rainer, Anna, Hans, and Sophie) who like to beat up and rob adults, usually using a kind of catfishing scheme where they trick a middle-aged man into thinking he is about to have a getting lucky with Lolita moment before the other three gang up on the man in a moment of shock and awe. Here lies the “Clockwork Orange” comparison: youths enamored of violence as a means to combat the boredom and meaninglessness of their lives — possibly while passing on the abuse they receive in their own lives.

The “Midsummer Night’s Dream” part comes in with the book’s love geometry. Like that Shakespearean play, there are two boys and two girls and both boys are in love with the same girl (Sophie,) leaving the other girl (Anna) in a sad unrequited territory.

The book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and not only because it deals heavily in sex and violence. There are a couple factors that make the book feel strange. First of all, it is written in present tense. Secondly, it spends a lot of time in the minds of the characters and relatively little time with the action. Thirdly, the pacing of the conclusion and resolution of the book is abrupt and might feel forced — like the author was 245 pages in when the publisher told her that she had 250 pages, maximum, and that she’d better be wrapping it up. I didn’t find any of these factors to be problematic, but I can see how they would rub some readers the wrong way.

If the premise intrigues, you should definitely read this book – particularly if the previous paragraph’s warning didn’t turn you off.

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BOOKS: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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The Picture of Dorian GrayThe Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This is a book about what happens when you hollow out a person of all the complexity of the human condition and idealize them. At the beginning of the story, Dorian Gray is young, attractive, and preternaturally likable in a naïvely innocent kind of way. Almost to the novel’s end, through the magic of a wish made upon a portrait, Gray is still young and beautiful, though that naive innocence cracks under the strain of the impossible bifurcation of man and his soul. The artist, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry (a man who will become a mutual friend of Gray and Hallward) cannot see Gray as a fully formed human being, but rather see him as an emblem of youth and beauty. But this unnatural ideal cannot hold, and a string of tragic deaths will be left in its wake.

The book is full of clever witticisms, albeit often of a nihilistic nature. These are almost all spoken by Lord Henry, who is the Polonius of the story – but a hipper kind of Polonius than Hamlet‘s. That said, it’s telling that toward the end of the book Gray does some of this epigrammatic philosophizing. (e.g. Such as when Gray tells Hallward, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him…”) One might dismiss this as Gray parroting Lord Henry, but I think that life has defrocked him of his naïveté, and he begins to think in ways that were impossible in his [true] youth.

This is a must-read. It’s interesting, thought-provoking, and well worth the time.

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BOOKS: A Double-Barreled Detective Story by Mark Twain

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A Double Barrelled Detective StoryA Double Barrelled Detective Story by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This novella is Mark Twain’s satirical jab at the whole Sherlock Holmes concept. In particular, it pokes fun at a detective who eschews everything supernatural in favor of cold rationality, but who produces results so impossible that they are themselves supernatural.

The story has two temporally disjointed parts that almost seem like independent stories until the very end when all is tied up. (Holmes only appears in the second part.) This works nicely for parody of Holmesian detective fiction as it’s an approach that was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on occasion — e.g. in A Study in Scarlet. The first part tells the tale of a woman who is treated foully by Jacob Fuller, the husband she eloped with but who harbored resentment towards her father, a man Fuller believed felt wasn’t good enough for his daughter. The woman makes her son, named Archy Stillman, promise that he will track down Fuller and make the man’s life a living hell.

The second part revolves around a murder that seems to be independent of the case described above, the killing of a man named Flint Buckner. Here Sherlock Holmes, who happens to be in town visiting his nephew – Fetlock Jones, “solves” the case only to be shown to be entirely and humiliatingly wrong by Archy Stillman using only a superior sense of smell and basic observation of the facts (with no elaborated inductions.)

While I never had anything against the Sherlock Holmes stories — in fact, I enjoyed them all — I did find Twain’s satire amusing and compelling as a story. [And it’s true that Arthur Conan Doyle did regularly strain credulity — that’s what made Holmes an intriguing character.]

Well worth reading.

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BOOKS: The Poet Li Po AD 701-762 Trans. & Ed. by Arthur Waley

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The Poet Li Po A.D. 701-762The Poet Li Po A.D. 701-762 by Arthur Waley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Available online at: Project Gutenberg – The Poet Li Po

Li Po, also Romanized “Li Bai,” is one of China’s most famous poets, the prolific Tang Dynasty poet wrote extensively at the nexus of intoxication and the beauty of the natural world. His well-loved and evocative poem, “Drinking Alone by Moonlight,” is a prime example [and is included in this selection.]

The selection consists of a small number of translations by [20th-century Orientalist] Arthur Waley. It’s only 20-some of the 1,000-ish extant poems of Li Bai, but it does offer variety in form and subject matter. It doesn’t include all of Li Bai’s most anthologized poems, which I consider a plus — i.e. Waley didn’t just assemble a greatest hits album.

The Waley translations aren’t as sparse as many that one will read. That offers the advantage of being clearer in meaning while losing some of the feel of the original. That said, I enjoyed this group of translations and didn’t feel they were too verbose – for the most part. It’s a selection well worth reading for those who enjoy poetry.

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Li Bai [Lyric Poem]

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Li Bai fills his cup;
 Li Bai loves his wine;
  Li Bai sits in moonlight,
 staring at the sky.

Five Wise Lines from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

All art is quite useless.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are fascinating.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

PROMPT: Cultural Heritage

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Daily writing prompt
What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?
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It’s not something that I’ve thought of much. In my youth, I was attracted to most every culture but that of my own ancestry. In my late teens and early twenties, I visited Liverpool two or three times (just across the Irish Sea from my ancestral homeland,) but (sadly) never made it to Ireland. I’ve been to over 40 countries, but not yet my ancestral homeland. I think that’s not so uncommon to come around to an interest in such things later in life.

But the answer to the question is certainly to be found in the literature. Yeats is among my favorite twentieth century poets (if not my favorite,) and Seamus Heaney is certainly in the running. Of late, I’ve gotten on an Oscar Wilde kick, and his work definitely appeals to my ornery yet thoughtful nature. Even Joyce, who I had trouble getting into in his role as novelist, is a writer whose use of language I love.

Five Wise Lines from Epicurus

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Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.

principal doctrines – No. 2

Nothing is enough to someone for whom what is enough is too little.

Vatican Sayings – No. 68

Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

Principal Doctrines – No. 27

Don’t spoil what you have by desiring what you don’t have; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.

vatican sayings – No. 35

No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but some pleasures are only obtainable at the cost of excessive troubles.

Principal doctrines – No. 8

And Five Honorable Mentions:

[T]here are an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it.

Letter to Herodotus

Dreams have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact upon us.

vatican sayings – No. 24

It is pointless for a person to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

vatican sayings – No. 65

But one must not be so much in love with the explanation by a single way as wrongly to reject all others…

Letter to pythocles

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

Letter to Menoeceus

SOURCE: Epicurus. 2021. The Fundamental Books of Epicurus: Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Letters. Trans. by: Robert Drew Hicks & R. Medeiros. Independently published on Amazon. 45pp.

BOOKS: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

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The Creative Act: A Way of BeingThe Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This book offers Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creativity and art. For those unfamiliar with Rubin, he’s a ZZ Top-looking music producer who contributed to a lot of successful albums, ranging from hip hop to the rock-n-roll of Tom Petty. He was a major player behind the Run DMC cover of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” that blew peoples’ minds in the 80’s. Interestingly, Rubin is neither a musician nor a technologist, and I heard him say in an interview that his great value-added was having an extremely high level of confidence in knowing what he liked. Rubin has a persona that is as much guru as music producer, and this book reflects this broad insight and wisdom.

In the book, Rubin lays out his view of the creative process and the mistakes people make with it, but along the way he offers insight into such interesting questions as why some artists only seem to have one major work in them. While Rubin’s experience is mostly with music (though he also worked with comedian Andrew Dice Clay on Clay’s albums,) his book is broadly targeted towards all artists, and he seems to use as many examples from literature and graphic arts as he does from music.

Rubin does sound a bit woo woo here and there, but I found that many statements — e.g. those that spoke of the universe’s role in artistry — could be interpreted in a way that wasn’t necessarily superstitious. While woo woo sounding statements often get on my nerves, I felt Rubin’s use was poetic and spoke to a broader truth.

I’d highly recommend this book for artists and creative types, regardless of field.

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