The Literary Blog Hop January 20-23

The Literary Blog Hop January is hosted by The Blue Bookcase.  This biweekly hop is for book blogs focused on literary fiction--head over to The Blue Bookcase to read all about it and add your blog to the link.

This week's topic is a book you hated when forced to read in school or university.  One book immediately came to mind.  Sorry Adam, but I'm going to say it again:  I hated William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch.  There was just entirely too much naked swinging from the ceiling, disgusting descriptions of bodily fluids, and glorification of narcotics for this reader.  I remember I told the professor that it was the first time I wanted to take a shower after reading a book.  In theory Burroughs is a writer of literary merit, and his experimental prose was worth studying.  I just hated it.  The class was a course in experimental literature, and it was one of my favorite classes in grad school.  I ended up loving some of the other books, like Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, and discovered works and writers I wouldn't have read otherwise.

The Literary Blog Hop December 2-5

The Literary Blog Hop is sponsored by Ingrid and Connie at The Blue Bookcase.  Head on over there to read about the blog hop, get the button and link your blog to the hop.  Each week bloggers answer a different question, and the conversation has been interesting:  for me, this hop is not so much about gaining followers as it is about finding new blogs, checking in with old favorites, and having an exchange of ideas.  This week's question is:

What is your favorite poem and why?

Impossible.  Please don't ask me to choose one favorite poem--that is like having to choose a favorite child, or a favorite student.  It can't be done without excessive pain; it can't be done at all.

That said, here is the poem I carry in my head, my notebook, and my pocket:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;--
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.  Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing in this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth

This Wordsworth sonnet captures what I feel about the life of the mind and heart and spirit versus the life of commerce (getting and spending) and the whole business-like realm of life that sits on the surface of what is important and true like a deadly sugar icing, enticing but ultimately bad for you.

Also in my notebook:  "Bright Star" by John Keats.  And I love this one:  "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk"--Keats.  In my brain:  Sonnet 116.  In my notebook--this one by Wendell Berry:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Other poets who mean a great deal to me, in no particular order:  Rilke, Adrienne Rich, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Dorianne Laux, Charles Bukowski, Eavan Boland.

I'm absolutely positive I have left out a poem or poet vital to my soul.  Chalk it up to the anxiety elicited by making such a choice.  What about you Gentle Readers?  Do you have a favorite poem or poet?  Do you carry a poem in your pocket, your wallet, your notebook, your brain?

The Literary Blog Hop November 25-29

Welcome back to the Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by Connie and Ingrid at The Blue Bookcase.

This week's question asks us to ponder and write about a book we would consider a modern classic.  Here are a few I would like to consider:

Cry the Beloved Country is a classic, to my mind, because of subject (South Africa in the years just before apartheid was institutionalized), theme, and writer's craft.  It is a whole, polished work of art, with whole passages written entirely in iambs.  The pieces of the book fit together as perfectly; the book is a beautifully constructed whole in which theme dovetails with language dovetails with character.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my favorite books of all time.  Zora Neale Hurston wrote it in a white hot blaze of creative inspiration, and the characters and images of this book are burned into my brain cells.  Hurston had a fascinating life with many ups and downs, and she ended her life in obscurity and poverty, but her book will live on, I believe.

I'm not sure about much, but I think it's a safe bet that anything written by Toni Morrison will continue to be read as long as there are readers reading novels.  Sula, Paradise, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye.  When you can remember actual lines from a novel a decade after reading a novel, that's some pretty good writing.

Those are my choices.  What are yours?  If you had to choose a book or a writer that will be a classic (some day in the future, soothsayers) which would you choose?

Literary Blog Hop

The Literary Blog Hop is a weekly feature sponsored by The Blue Bookcase. 

This week the focus is on literary non-fiction.

Like literary fiction, I guess literary non-fiction would be

• thematically complex
• crafted with attention to style and voice
• not ephemeral, but lasting
• resonant
• important in some way--perhaps in subject, or in its connection to other works of literature, or to profound issues of history or culture

Examples?  I thought of this:

Gibbon was a stylist, and his work is impressive for its breadth and profundity.

Then I thought of Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own and Moments of Being.

Woolf was an accomplished stylist and rhetorician, as well as a novelist.

And I loved this

and this

Both are examples of literary non-fiction.

But then I remembered this:

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is a masterpiece.  Each time I read this "non-fiction novel" I am stunned by the artistry and craft of Capote's writing.  He inserts himself so seamlessly into his narrative that you forget to wonder just who it is that is telling this story.  In Cold Blood is about psychopathology, the American Dream, American failure, American journeys,American decency and American indecency. It is about narrative and the invisible or partly visible narrator.  In Cold Blood transcends genre:  it is true crime, reportage, psychological study and novel.

What is your non-fiction literary masterpiece? 

The Literary Blog Hop

Thanks to Ingrid and Connie at The Blue Bookcase there is a new hop in town:  The Literary Blog Hop.  If you write about literary fiction or literary classics, this might be your kind of hop.

Here's where I talk about what I'm reading and why it is literary.  Fantastic!  This is my chance to seize all you Gentle Readers by the collars and rave about my love for Trollope.  No, not the fancy lady with the red petticoat.  Not the whipped-cream-topped dessert.  Not the female writer of women's fiction (although she is a descendent).  But Anthony Trollope, Victorian writer par excellence.  When I want to enter a world not my own (yet at times like my own), when I want to fall into a long, good book with compelling characters, a fascinating social world, and just enough incident and conflict to keep me interested, I turn to Trollope.

If you are an aspiring novelist with a demanding job, and you think you couldn't possibly ever fulfill your writing dreams while working, Trollope is a worthy model.  Trollope had a long career with the British Post Office; he wrote his novels in the mornings before work.  Each day from 5:30-8:30 a.m. Trollope sat at his desk and wrote; he required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. In this fashion he completed 47 novels.

Trollope's female characters are another source of admiration for the reader. Given the era (Trollope lived from 1815 until 1882) Trollope's women are free-thinking, independent, and very often of higher intelligence and spirit than their men.  In Phineas Finn, a beautiful and intelligent widow, proposes to Phineas.  In the novel I'm currently reading, The Prime Minister, Glencora (Duchess of Omnium), when told her husband will soon be Prime Minister of England, declares to her friend:  "But if it is settled, I mean to have a cabinet of my own, and I mean that you shall do the foreign affairs."  Trollope's women are sensitive, intelligent, and chafing at the bit society has put in their mouths.

Another reason to love Trollope, if you need one, is that once you have entered his world, you get to stay there for novel after novel.  His Barsetshire series (Chronicles of Barsetshire) provide a complete picture of English cathedral town and county.  That is the place to begin, I think, if you are new to Trollope.  Then there are the Palliser novels, consumed with politics--totally fascinating, fun, and engrossing.  There are six Palliser novels, and I am just beginning The Prime Minister, which is the fifth novel in the series.

Why is Trollope literary?  Because I can read Trollope, then reread him, and never exhaust the meaning of the work.

Literary fiction can be distinguished from mainstream or popular fiction, I believe.  And I don't think it's elitist to say so.  Literary fiction challenges the reader to think, to accept ambiguity, to work a little harder.

Books on my nightstand:  Running the Books by Avi Steinberg, How to Be an American Housewife by Margaret Dilloway, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, Homer's Illiad....

To join in the Literary Blog Hop, go to The Blue Bookcase and add your blog to the linky...