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yspaddadenpenkawr · 2 years ago

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I posted 56 times in 2022

That's 49 more posts than 2021!

6 posts created (11%)

50 posts reblogged (89%)

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I tagged 1 of my posts in 2022

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My Top Posts in 2022:

just finished another book. thoughts on babbitt:

Babbitt is intensely pathetic, and frequently embarrassing. Lewis is often regarded as sort of a second-rate novelist, who strayed from certain novelistic dignities in favor of broader and coarser satire. Maybe so- but I think that he does pretty carefully ride the line between having Babbitt be revolting and sympathetic.

This is a tragedy, but, again, a very distinctly pathetic one. Babbitt has hollowed himself out and given up on any ideals he might have once had. He's a nearly empty-headed hypocrite, of the sort who can be led, sleepwalking, into outright fascism. Over the course of the novel, he gradually, dimly becomes aware of how awful his life really is, but then finds that there is no escape- it's too late for him. He is not capable of doing anything forceful, or standing up for his own ideas. There's no escape in booze, or manly fantasies of flight into the wilderness, or adultery, or radicalism- he's conditioned himself to be so dependent on the approval of his peers that he cannot escape their stifling norms. This is tragic, but it's also undercut by how empty and shallow Babbitt is in practice. He is an intensely bathetic tragic hero: he's not really fully aware of the causes or nature of his distress, and he's only capable of expressing his distress in blustering inanities, barely distinguishable from the stream of hearty nonsense he produces as a happy conformist.

There's little in the way of a conventional plot, though there are detectable arcs treating various themes. The book covers about two years of Babbitt's life, but over a quarter of it- 86 of 319 pages in my copy- is dedicated to documenting, in minute detail, an average day for Babbitt. Lewis's approach is documentary- Babbitt in particular is almost upsettingly believable- and he pays great attention to how characters speak, the physical objects that inhabit their lives, the routines they observe. I know some critics have found this approach stale or stifling, but I think it's valuable, and the verisimilitude of the novel is greatly effective.

For being a century old, it's remarkable how little the book has aged in many ways. There's less emphasis, today, on formal clubs and "boosting" and society dinners and the like, but America today is, if anything, more standardized and uniform and culturally conformist than the America of Babbitt's day; Lewis's satire might be dated in many of its particulars, but in its broad strokes it remains true.

0 notes - Posted November 13, 2022

the two editions of spoon river pose an interesting problem to me.

the first edition of spoon river anthology (1915) collects 213 poems. they are presented as epitaphs, or the voices of the dead buried in a cemetery in a small town in illinois. the poems are interrelated- characters are referred to in multiple poems, and often one character’s testimony will shine a different light on the story of another. it is more than the sum of its parts. the anthology concludes with “the spooniad,” an incomplete (it ends in mid-line) mock-epic retelling a story alluded to in various of the earlier poems. this is kind of an odd way to end the anthology, after the very direct poems going before it; but i think it’s satisfactory as a way of reinforcing the inter-relatedness of the constituent poems, and perhaps emphasizing the living, ongoing nature of the community depicted.

the poet, edgar lee masters, produced these 213 poems at a pretty furious rate, in under a year- from spring 1914 to january 1915. the poems were published in batches in a literary magazine, reedy’s mirror, as masters’ produced them. once he was done, he had them published in book form, and was unmanned by a bout of pneumonia that almost killed him.

once he recovered, in mid-1915, masters decided to expand the book. he may have done this because he felt dissatisfied with the first edition. he may have done it because he found himself in debt, and wanted to try to milk more cash out of spoon river (it was a critical success, but poetry isn’t a very effective way to make a living in america). (years later, chronically penurious, masters would try to cash in again with another anthology titled “the new spoon river,” which was a critical and commercial flop, and which is now almost totally obscure.) whatever the case, in the second half of 1915 he wrote 33 more poems for spoon river, and they were included in a second edition of the book, published in 1916. most republications of the book today are based on the 1916 edition.

the new poems are sort of a mixed bag. some of them add to the original work’s structure by tying in closely with extant characters and events. some of them are a little “off.” while the original batch of poems is very 19th-century oriented (the civil war is a big topic in some of the poems, and i think the latest dateable event referred to is the haymarket affair of 1886), one of the new poems refers to automobiles, and another to airplanes, sticking out rather noticeably.

most substantial of the new poems is a new epilogue. it’s the longest piece in the book by some distance, and, unlike anything else, is formatted as a drama. it is also, frankly, a total mess. it features god and satan as characters, and brings in trickster gods, an ancien regime french couple, and personified forces of nature. it is baffling, tonally inappropriate, and doesn’t tie in to the preceding poems like the spooniad does. most critical literature either ignores or dismisses the epliogue, because what else can you do with it?

anyway. the first edition has a stronger cohesion and a singularity of vision to it. but the second edition has some decent added poems, and also a bloated clunker of an ending. which is preferable? a mystery

0 notes - Posted November 11, 2022

that kind of book cover material that’s like grippy anti-slip stuff should be banned. real bad

0 notes - Posted November 9, 2022

detailed inventory of the books i got at the friends of the library book sale last friday:

fuzz, by mary roach (2021). it’s mary roach again. 5 years separate this book from her last one (grunt, 2016), the longest she’s ever taken between books since she started putting em out. this one is about wild animals and their relationship with humans (the subtitle is “when nature breaks the law” but it’s much broader than that)

the norton anthology of short fiction, r v cassill, ed. (1st edition, 1978). a fat book- 1400+ dense pages on wispy bible paper. embarrassingly dated in some ways: extremely americentric (and secondarily eurocentric): yukio mishima is the sole author to represent the whole of asia (no lu xun? no tagore?), borges represents all of south america (no garcia marquez?). africa is represented solely by doris lessing, who was hardly representative, and spent most of her life in the uk anyway (where’s achebe?). treats genre fiction in an embarrassing, tokenist way: one holmes story for all of detective fiction, one poe story on the weird/horror front; a story apiece from clarke, bradbury, le guin, and vonnegut for science fiction- and some of them are odd choices too- le guin is represented by the frankly underwhelming “the new atlantis” rather than eg omelas or winter’s king, probably because the new atlantis is less overtly speculative, and the fantastical elements can be read as being allegorical. (later editions are somewhat better, i guess- in particular they’ve swapped in more works by women and black authors- but are still pretty americentric, and still embarrassingly out of touch with genre fiction. they did at least swap in omelas for the new atlantis eventually)

don quixote, by miguel de cervantes (1605, 1615), translated and abridged by walter starkie (1954). starkie did a translation of the whole thing in 1964, but this will do for now.

the house of the seven gables, by nathaniel hawthorne (1851). a very beat-up wal-mart-branded mmp

the turn of the screw and other stories, by henry james (1966). a creaky old mmp with the turn of the screw, the pupil, the tree of knowledge, and the figure in the carpet. has a little biographical sketch, brief notes on the stories, and a critical bibliography, because this was a classier time

spoon river anthology, by edgar lee masters (2nd ed, 1916). i actually already have a copy of spoon river- but it’s a reproduction of the first edition, from 1915. the second edition of 1916 added 35 poems- which i now have (the epilogue is embarrassing).

four signet classic editions of sinclar lewis’s novels: main street (1920), babbitt (1922), arrowsmith (1925), and elmer gantry (1927). the same guy likely owned all these originally (two of them have address stickers in them), and he must’ve gotten them around the same time, though they have design variations indicating they’re from differing print runs. they’re in decent condition. unfortunately, said guy apparently did not have dodsworth (1929), which signet did have out at the time. but this is not surprising, as dodsworth has always sort of been the runt of lewis’s five “major” novels, and by far the least popular, barring the film adaptation. signet actually no longer has dodsworth in print in any form, though they have the four others, and it can’t happen here (1935), in current editions of varying niceness

one hundred years of solitude, by gabriel garcia marquez (1967). of course i got it

and quiet flows the don, by mikhail sholokhov (1928-1940). another important work of world literature

0 notes - Posted November 9, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

i’m going to use this blog now. perhaps only intermittently. to make notes on books i am reading. right now i am reading two books. one of them is sinclair lewis’s babbitt (1922).

-focusing on babbitt as the protagonist and sole viewpoint character is sort of a double-edged sword. it allows for deeper-cutting satire in many ways. but also it means you have to spend a whole book with babbitt. babbitt is sort of a horrible person- he’s wilfully hollowed himself out into maybe the worst possible version of himself. he has few if any endogenous desires or ideas

-carol and will kennicott, of lewis’s prior novel, main street (1920) are both deeply flawed individuals. they’re both capable of being naive, narrow, stupid, and pig-headed. but believably so- most people are narrow and pig-headed at times, and both carol and will have strong redeeming features. they’re both treated essentially sympathetically. babbitt is not unrealistically empty-headed or pathetic, but he is empty-headed and pathetic so relentlessly that it risks becoming tiresome. he also, unlike carol, doesn’t really have much of a proper foil- he exists in a society of babbitts, some of them marginally more conscious of their plight, some less so, all of them horrifyingly, cordially alienated

-the book covers about two years of babbitt’s life. but the first seven chapters- 82 pages out of the book’s 315, over a quarter of the book- are dedicated to retailing a single day of his life in detail

-the writing shows an obsessive attention to objects, objects, objects, often over or to the exclusion of people. this is clearly deliberate and thematic. it is a curious effect

-it is also notable maybe how little so much of the book has dated, for being a full century old. babbitts still exist, though in an even more degraded and disgusting state

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.

-i recently read a book of stories by sherwood anderson- another writer of the same generation, with some of the same concerns, as lewis. anderson is a gloomier writer but a less cynical one than lewis. part of the effect of anderson’s writing is that he rarely, if ever, makes you feel like you know more or better than his characters. he avoids dramatic irony almost totally. his characters can find themselves stuck in horrible, seemingly insurmountable predicaments, and you can know them, and empathize, and understand. but you never really feel like you could say to the character, “do this! and it will be alright.” i think this is actually an extremely subtle and tricky thing to do. his ability to do it is part of why sherwood anderson was a genius, though an inconsistent one. (i think joyce achieves a similar effect.) lewis is very different. in being more overtly satirical, he has to make his characters dumber, basically. you have to be hyperaware of their foibles, and either feel superior, or feel chastened for recognizing similar failings in yourself. main street and babbitt are almost plotless, in a conventional sense, so there’s not a lot of dramatic irony per se, but they still to varying extents rely for effect on the reader’s greater awareness, their greater cosmopolitanism, than the characters’.

At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

0 notes - Posted November 9, 2022

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