Jacqui's Room Notes: the Jacqui's Room Notes

There they are. My 15 Classics in 15 Weeks, with the exception of the ones I had to return to the library. I put Pride and Prejudice in there too, since she started the whole thing. Total number of pages read: 6,453.*

If you are look to the left on this page (you may have to scroll down), you can see the whole list. Click on a title to see the Jacqui's Room Notes.

"What have you learned?"

1. Don't fear Tolstoy.
I liked most of the books, not just appreciated them, but actually enjoyed them. This sounds strange, but the fact is that I'd never have gone into a bookstore and said, "I think I'll try Silas Marner." I tend to focus on modern books and to believe people when they complain about assigned reading. No more.

2. Jane Austen sure could write.
It sounds obvious, but reading the classics was writing boot camp.

3. There are many other goofy-humored book dorks out there.
I can spout all day in a literary way** about Blood Meridian, but I think everyone's favorite Jacqui's Room Notes post is still Moby Dick. Am I right? Tell me, please. Which was your favorite? I'm curious.

4. Six Degrees of Separation applies to writers.
Everybody I read this summer read everybody else. Whitman referenced Melville, who was a friend of Hawthorne, who talked about Dante, who's in Goethe and McCarthy and everybody else, for that matter. And they all loved Cervantes. So my sense that I would be a better reader having read these 15 was spot on.

"But who won???"
I have three winners: Diane T., J.Thorp, and Kristi Valiant, each of whom seems to have read, well, a bunch of books this summer, and to have posted his or her own notes, all of which I found very interesting. Winners will receive a very cool (in a bookish way) small pack of bookish paraphernalia including bookmarks and a "Books! I Need Books!" button.

So, what about you? Did you meet your own classic-reading goal? Tell us about it in the comments.

"What's next?" people keep asking. Well, I have to crawl into a hole and not come out until my YA is finished. You should do the same. Catch up. Get what you have to get done done.

Because in November, you have work to do. You have a novel to write. Stay tuned.


*not counting the middle 500 million pages of Moby Dick, for which "read" is probably an exaggeration
** unintentional sing-song rhyme

Dune: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I make my neighbors wonder what the heck is going on in my sandbox.

At some point, I will draw an intelligent and incisive parallel between the sowing of prophesies in Dune, the 2008 presidential election, and our work as writers. But for now, I bring you:

DUNE, by Frank Herbert*
Synopsisized in a conversation between the narrator and the son of Duke Leto of the Atreides, some photos, and one video clip.

Thousands of years into the future, humans have scattered across the galaxy, inhabiting every planet, even those that seem to present insurmountable environmental limitations. The planet Arrakis has never seen rain. Moisture is so precious that people wear suits carefully designed to recycle the body's own waste water into drinkable form and --

I'm sorry? My suit is going to do what to what? Oh. Huh. Go on.

Into drinkable form, and they carry the tools necessary to extract the 70% water left over in the weight of a dead man. In --

Okay, that is just nasty. Seriously, Dad, are we really going there? Okay, okay.

Inhospitable to humans and patrolled by gigantic toothed worms that digest anything they can find, --

Hee hee. Giant worms. Oh crap! That thing just ate a plane! My bad.

Anything they can find, Arrakis should by all rights be uninhabited and unwanted. But it holds Spice. The highly --

Does that make those maidens the Spice Girls? If you wanna be my lover...

Do you mind?

Sorry.

The highly addictive cinnamon-like spice turns blue the eyes of the native Fremen of the planet and traps all who visit Arrakis in its spicy clutches.

That sentence made no sense.

I am a science fiction narrator; I don't have to make any sense. If you knew more about our world you'd get it already. Just nod knowingly; that's what everyone else in the book does.

(nods knowingly)

Many battle for control of Arrakis and the spice. But who will rule in the end?
The Emperor?

The Duke? The Baron?









Paul?

Me?!

The son of the Duke and the result of some mysterious inbreeding project lead by the Reverend Mother and her coven of mind-reading, butt-kicking mystics.

It will be me! I have drunk the bile of the giant worm and I see it now! I am the messiah, but this is science fiction, so I can't just say "messiah" I have to have difficult-to-pronounce, vaguely-Hebrew-sounding invented words for everything and put them all in a glossary at the back of the book. Anyhoot, I am the Kwisatz Haderach and I can see the past, present, future, the workings of blood cells, and inside your minds, all of you! Also, I can do a whole lot of other stuff you can't! Do you know the prophesy?

(nods knowingly)

I shall lead this planet to freedom with my princess wife-in-name-only (who will someday write my biography in clunky tongue and italicized chapter headings) and my beloved concubine.

It's him! It's him!

Come! Let us fulfill the destiny!


And that, my friends, concludes the 15 Classics in 15 Weeks Remedial Lit Summer Project. Full wrap up as soon as I can breathe tomorrow.

* I've gotten many strange looks from people wondering how I came up with Dune as my last classic for the summer. Here's how it went:

1. I asked people for help choosing the last classic.
2. Someone very wisely pointing out the total neglect of science fiction on my lists (and my literary history) and made a few suggestions.
3. I got to thinking about how annoyed I get when people are snotty about "children's lit" as a genre.
4. I decided I'd better check out some science fiction.
5. I carefully chose from amongst several options using a detailed algorithm designed to round-out my summer literary experience they only had Dune at my local indie bookstore the day I went.

Goethe's Faust: the Jacqui's Room Notes

With apologies to Charlie Daniels. For the full effect, click here to listen while you read...

Goethe's Faust, Part 1, the country music hit

The devil went up to heaven, he was looking to spar with God.
He said, “You’d better bet the devil can get that Faust down there. He’s odd.”
God laughed and said, “No way, Evil Angel. You know Faust’s my favorite man.
He spends his days a-just a-learnin’ stuff and doin’ the best he can.”

But the devil he was cocky, he got God to say okay,
Then Mephisto fell back down to earth, to steal Faust’s soul away.
Now Faust was suicidal; he’d been whining for a while:
“I’m so bereft, ain’t nothing left on earth can make me smile.”
So he thought he’d outsmart the devil, signed in blood and at the end
Added “Come the day you hear me say, ‘stop time!’ you kill me then.”

Faust, it’s you they say’s so smart, come on and use your noodle.
‘Cos hell’s broke loose in Germany and it’s dressed up like a poodle.
While you’re on earth, it’s you he’ll serve with love and smiles and gold,
But when you die, the devil gets your soul.

(feel free to dance during the guitar solos and the next verse and join us for Johnny's performance)

Fire on the streets, twirl boys, twirl.
The devil's gonna get Faust a girl.
Kill her mother and her brother, and her honor too.
Faust'll run away before part two.

Light in August: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which my inner math geek has a field day with Faulkner.

No video today, real or imagined, as I have just written the last* new scene for my young adult novel** and am feverishly typing and compiling.***

I tried a haiku, but really I think of Light in August as more of a math problem where:

Light in August = (Mississippi + August + 1932) x (Pregnant wanderer + defrocked reverend + lying bootlegger + angry biracial murderer)

Or maybe it's a recipe: Faulkner takes vivid, yearning characters and mixes them into a broth of racial tension and southern heat...

Other thoughts (no spoilers):
1. Faulkner's characters are truly unique. They are multi-dimensional, diverse, and far from stereotypes or archetypes. Further, the setting itself, both in terms of time and place, is a character, really, acting to propel the plot as much as anyone else. The book starts as a "what do you get when you cross..." story, but Faulkner follows through and is meticulously faithful to the characters he's created and the world they inhabit.

2. This is the most hopeful depressing book I've ever read. The first character we see is Lena, pregnant and abandoned, walking across Alabama in search of the father of her child. She is convinced his message calling her to him has been lost. "I reckon I'll find him," she says. "It won't be hard." She never wavers from that feeling, and Faulkner paints her faith so simply, so without judgement, that instead of thinking, "That fool!" like everyone she meets, we want her to find him, even though we know it's unrealistic.

3. Lastly, stream of consciousness is more fun to write than to read.**** I very much enjoyed the book and the characters were the main reason why. I felt for them and wanted them all to "win" but even I had to skim towards the end when there were entire pages of internal conflict. I had the strange revelation that, like many beginning writers, Faulkner got worried that we wouldn't get it, so he diluted his beautiful story with a ton of "the point" at the end. Makes me want to go back to the ending of my own book and delete all the "hints;" if it doesn't work without them, the whole thing's not working and spelling it out at the end is far from the answer.

On to Faust...

* And by "last" I mean "last for now" or "last of the ones that weren't written at all before now, to say nothing of the ones that are just sketched out, full of gaps, or abominations to the written word."
** And by "novel" I mean "collection of scattered scenes, some old and some new, that I hope will miraculously congeal into a coherent mass as I type."
*** And by "feverishly typing and compiling" I mean "trying to find my flash drive."
**** Collective sigh of "tell us about it!" from all blog readers

August 25 - Goethe's Faust

Welcome to Week #14 of our 15 Classics in 15 Weeks project.

This week I will be reading Goethe's Faust. Don't get confused; there are a lot of Fausts out there. I am reading Goethe's. The Mighty Thor is livid because whatever version he read in college was like 1,000 pages and mine is only 200. Also I think he is still mad because his roommate acted in the production of Faust someone put up in my college dining hall and it was 4 hours long and the Mighty Thor sat through the whole thing. Nevertheless, I am excited about this play.

If you look left, you'll see next week's book is still TBA. I need your help deciding. What should my final classic be? If you joined us late, the whole point of the project was that I am pretty well-read but had holes in the canon of traditional American and European lit. So, here's the question: what is your all-time, number one, anyone-who-calls-herself-well-read-MUST-have-read-this-book classic novel (that we haven't already discussed this summer)? You can see everyone's original suggestions in the comments here.

It's like American Idol for literary dorks, isn't it? Sigh.

Also, what are you reading this week?

Leaves of Grass: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I lament that my yawp isn't more barbaric.

I want to make you a video masterpiece celebrating Walt Whitman's celebration of the world in "Song of Myself." Can you try to picture it? I want to start with a close up of a blade of grass, green and shining in bright, bright sun, and zoom out to open fields with insects hopping. I want Garrison Keillor reading Leaves of Grass aloud to you:

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belong to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease...observing a spear of summer grass.

I want to flash to indoors, to students poring over books, to people slaving away in cubicles, and for you to hear Keillor/Whitman calling you:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun

And now we flash to clips of all of humanity, as Whitman describes it in list after list, detail after detail, in the poem:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft,
The carpenter dresses his plank...the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whaleboat, lance and harpoon are ready...

And we hear Whitman's challenge to his own writing -- that it be universal and speak to all of us:

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing,
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

Here, I want the images to get faster and faster as Whitman describes all the people his poem is for:

It is for the illiterate...it is for the judges of the supreme court...it is for the federal capitol and the state capitols,
It is for the admirable communes of literary men and composers and singers and lecturers and engineers and savans,
It is for the endless races of working people and farmers and seamen.

I want the images to flash so quickly that they blur and give the vague impression of the human body, which fades even further into a shadowy ghost as Keillor reads:

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.

And with that, I want the scene to explode and become an ocean, placid but vast. The camera moves across it slowly as we hear Whitman's invitation to dive with him into the unknown, to challenge ourselves, to live life to the fullest and however else you might interpret it:

Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

And with that, we are at the edge of the cliffs that overlook the ocean. The camera faces the water and Keillor reads the challenge, the line that I will use as my excuse for not doing a better job summarizing Leaves of Grass:

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

And I want to go back to the grass suddenly, in time to hear Whitman ask:

Who wishes to walk with me?

And you would shout, "Me! Me! I want to walk with you! I want to spend a year lying in the grass analyzing Whitman and celebrating the presence of the divine in everything and, if you believe Harold Bloom and others, doing things I shouldn't mention in a children's blog, and listening to my soul!" And we would all marvel at the egotism and the brilliance of a man proposing that the world needs a poet to speak for all humankind, and that he be that poet, and then doing it. And we would stand amazed at the lyricism, and at the sensuality and we would read aloud our favorite passages and sing that "Sing the Body Electric" song and...

Sigh. Alas, I have only a cell phone video camera and part time day care. So instead, I leave you with the screenplay for my masterpiece, and with this:

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sounds contribute toward me.

August 18 - Light in August

Welcome to Week #13 of our 15 Classics in 15 Weeks project.

Whose idea was this anyway? How many books is one woman supposed to read?!

Tomorrow, I will condense the major poetic masterpiece of America's most influential poet into a brief blog post on Leaves of Grass. Are you curious how I can possibly do so? Me too. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, this week, we will be discussing Faulkner's Light in August. Someone explain to me again why I picked this instead of As I Lay Dying; I can't remember.*

What are you reading this week?

* Actually, I am pretty excited about the Faulkner. But I will admit that when my 15 weeks are up, I may read nothing but the Twilight series and the New York Times magazine for a while.

The House of the Seven Gables: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I offend Hawthorne fans everywhere.

The House of the Seven Gables, a ten word synopsis:

All the coffee in Brazil would still not be enough.

The jacket flap for my Penguin/Putnam edition of this book says:

"This is a tale of an evil house, cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft, haunted by the ghosts of its sinful dead, racked by the fear of its frightened living."

Yeah, boyee! Sounds awesome, right? Also, according to the jacket flap, the bad guy, Jaffrey Pyncheon, is:

"a devil incarnate whose greedy quest for secret wealth is marked by murder and terrible vengeance from a restless grave."

Whoa! How can this not be the most exciting thing I've read yet?!

Yeah. Well. I am 100% positive the author of this jacket flap has never read this book. Most likely, she fell asleep despite having drunk a six-pack of Red Bull. Then she had haunting, fantastic dreams which she mistook for this book and described on the jacket flap.

In fact, the most interesting thing about this book is that the sort of main character's name is Hepzibah, which, in addition to being a cool name, is also the name of a character in another book I read for the 15 Classics in 15 Weeks challenge. Literary Trivia Champion points to the person who can name that other book in the comments.*

I grant you, I did not give Hawthorne the attention he deserves due to being unable to read more than two pages at a time before falling asleep distracted by the move. Please, someone prove me wrong in the comments. Why am I supposed to love this book?! Any Hawthorne fans out there? Anyone? Bueller?

I will try harder on my ten word synopsis. How about this?

Fascinating back story.
100 pages: nothing happens.
Insipid happy ending.

On to Faulkner's Light in August. What are you reading this week?

* No fair participating, Lizard, since you were the literary queen who originally pointed this out to me.

The Good Soldier: the Jacqui's Room Notes

A haiku:

deluded husband
and promiscuous wife meet
not so good soldier

We seem to be on a "deluded/crazy narrator" theme this summer.* John Dowell is the strangest yet. His story is out of order, inconsistent, and full of moments of dramatic irony in which he claims to have been clueless and we readers marvel that he could have been. He makes extreme statements like "She's the only one I ever loved," and then makes them again later in the book about different people. Apparently, greater critics than I have raging debates about whether Ford Madox Ford intended Dowell to be comic or tragic. Without any background in Ford Madox Ford-ology, I'd have to stand in the comic camp. But not like ha-ha funny. More like George Costanza make-you-writhe amusing. Other opinions?

I do think the unreliable narrator point is an interesting one for us as writers. There is a fine balance between having an unreliable character narrate your story (which can be poignant or ironic or funny) and leaving readers feeling YOU are untrustworthy as an author. We want readers to feel like they are in good hands, to feel that they can sink into our books and relax knowing our endings will be satisfying, our plots will seem inevitable within the world we have created, and our characters will behave in ways that make sense for whom we have described them to be. And this takes work, and faithful reverance for our stories and our constructs, and our readers, even when they are 3.

Now, your "that's eerie!" moment of the day:

I planned 15 Classics in 15 Weeks based on what books would be good to read one after the other, so as to have Jane Eyre, for example, with which to relax after Moby Dick. I didn't pay any attention to the content of the books, or the dates I assigned them. Then Pale Fire fell almost exactly on the dates in July on which the book's story takes place. Strange enough. Now, here it is August 4th and I am due to tell you about The Good Soldier, a book that discusses over and over the strange influence the date August 4th has on its characters. Freaky.

On to The House of Green the Seven Gables. What are you reading this week?

* I know. The point could be made that all of Jacqui's Room has a deluded/crazy narrator theme...

In Search of Lost Time, by Proust: the Jacqui's Room Notes

At long last (and I know you have been hanging on the edge of your seats), I present the tardy but heartfelt Jacqui's Room Notes for In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past/Swann's Way,

a video which, like Moby Dick, I created using only my cell phone and iMovie,

in which I attempt to be punny with limited success,

in which you can hear Captain Destructo calling me and then busying himself banging glass spice jars,

and in which, if you get to the last scene and think "Yeah, this is really good but I'm not sure where it's going, which is okay since it's really good, but it's a little too long," well then I captured the mood perfectly, because the book is truly unique in its wandering, conversational style, but I definitely got a little antsy, and also it's cool I got to say "captured the mood perfectly" here because Proust is unparalleled in his ability to evoke the most specific of human emotional states.

I am proud to report I had many tantrums, but no official snabblefrug while uploading. Also, no actual Madelines were harmed in the making, etc. etc.

Enjoy.

Blood Meridian: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I describe things you should not let your children read.*

I cannot be funny about this one. I tried. I wrote haiku instructions for a 1850s borderland scalp hunters. I compiled a page by page body count (into the tens of thousands by page 30). I even tried falling back on my trusty Little People. Everything I tried cheapened the horror of Blood Meridian, and to do so seems dishonest. Because this book is nothing if not full of horror. Why?

1. The story: "The Kid" is a teen runaway who falls in with a marauding gang of scalp-hunters who roam the Mexican-American border in 1849-50, collecting the scalps of Native Americans to trade for gold. They kill everyone they meet, in sleep-disturbingly brutal and graphic ways.

2. The language. Despite the subject matter, McCarthy's prose rolls on, sparse, matter of fact, and relentless. Its have-to-stop-and-read-it-again poetry stands in stark contrast to the violence and cruelty it describes. Observe:

"An ancient walled presidio composed wholly of mud, a tall mud church and mud watchtowers and all of it rainwashed and lumpy and sloughing into a soft decay. The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls" (p.97).

As a reader, it is haunting. As a writer, it is fascinating. McCarthy does not change his tone when the actions in the book grow chaotic and gory, which forces the reader to decipher, to read every word and, thus, to experience every blood splatter.

3. What McCarthy doesn't write is more powerful even than what he writes. He gives his characters zero emotional reaction on the page, which leaves it all to the reader. And in the end (this is sort of a spoiler), he doesn't even describe the final death, just the horrified reactions of those who see the aftermath. This implies that the scene outstrips even the utterly unbelievable terror we have already witnessed, and leaves our imaginations and fears to reconstruct what happened. I love this manipulation.

4. The facts. The book is based on a journal, which, while of questionable reliability, is certainly historically accurate. So we can't blow off what's within as the sick imaginings of a psychopath who happens to write beautifully. In the epilogue, unnamed characters dig holes in the ground, ignoring the scattered bones of those who went before. Presumably, they are laying fence. I was confused as to why, until I realized McCarthy is reminding us that Blood Meridian, and a thousand stories like it, are what built the foundations of the American Southwest.

So, no, I can't be funny, and I can't exactly recommend it. I have started a new list in Cormac McCarthy's honor: Brilliant Books You Shouldn't Read. I am priding myself on not saddling you with any of the 100 horrible images running through my brain. And now, in order to keep myself from having nightmares, I am going to watch this a few hundred times and giggle with childish anticipation.

* Because I know all of your children beg to visit Jacqui's Room.
** And there is so much stunningly beautiful language that I had a hard time choosing what quote to gift to you above.

July 28 - The Good Soldier

Welcome to week 10 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Hey! "Ford Madox Ford" is sort of a palindrome!

After the stomach-wrenching violence of Blood Meridian, it will be good to relax with a book whose own back cover brags:

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

post edited to add: Just started the book. The above quote is actually the first line. Even better...

Wait! Before you leap to conclusions, the jacket flap also promises:

"many comic moments, despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair."

Who's in?

Why do I hate myself?

Tell me what you're reading this week...

Inferno: The Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I sum up a 700 year-old masterpiece in 10 words:

The worse you behave here,
the lower you'll sink there.

Ta-da!

Two bonus thoughts:

1. It was interesting to read this after Pale Fire and its deranged annotator. There are so many references to contemporaries of Dante in Inferno that annotations are essential to comprehending the story; if you don't know Francesca da Rimini*, you can't understand her presence among the lustful in the second circle of Hell. Mark Musa, who translated my Penguin Classics version, is very opinionated and even goes so far as to say, on several occasions, something to the effect of, "Other critics all agree that Dante meant such and such, but they're all wrong." Had I read Inferno before having pondered truth and literary interpretation questions in Pale Fire, I probably wouldn't have noticed the translator's own voice, or distrusted it nearly as much as I did.

2. The Divine Comedy is the ultimate "should have read it" classic. Every canto, at some point, I thought, "Oh! This is like in (insert name of other literary work here). That author must have read Dante." For 700 years, other writers have been referencing Dante. I could cite lofty examples like Shakespeare, but we are a bit Wizard of Oz obsessed these days.** So the whole time I read Inferno, I kept thinking, "This is just like The Wizard of Oz." I mean, Dante/Dorothy is all, "Dude, I had the strangest dream. I woke up somewhere totally trippy and I was confused until Virgil/Glinda the good Witch explained it to me. All I wanted was to get home, but I had to make a long journey past all sorts of weird people like munchkins/usurers on burning sand to find Oz/God and get to Kansas/Heaven. And you were there! But you were a scarecrow/your head was on backwards!"

I know, ladies and gentlemen. It is just this kind of in depth literary analysis you have come to expect here at Jacqui's Room. Somewhere, Harold Bloom is trying to figure out how to get Yale to rescind my degree quaking in his boots.

* According to Musa (p. 119): "daughter of Guido Vecchio da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and Paolo Malatesta, third son of Malatesta da Verrucchio, lord of Rimini. Around 1275 the aristocratic Francesca was married for political reasons to Gianciotto, the physically deformed second son of Malatesta da Verrucchio. In time a love affair developed between Francesca and Gianciotto's younger brother, Paolo. One day the betrayed husband discovered them in an amorous embrace and slew them both." But you knew that already, I am sure. Oh, you didn't? See what I mean about the annotations?!

** And by "we are obsessed" I mean that Tinkerbell sings songs from the play she did at camp so relentlessly that the rest of us are ready to kill ourselves. Trying to write in terza rima...la la la...I could while away the hours, conversing with the flowers, consulting with the rain...la la la... AAAHHH!!!

*** The cover image above is from my Penguin Classics edition. It's a painting by William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, Copy B, Plate 14.

July 21 - Blood Meridian

Welcome to week 9 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

Which is a comedy, right?

What were you thinking?! You hate violence! You couldn't even sit still through Reservoir Dogs! Now you're going to read this?! Do you not remember calling his other masterpiece "All the Really Boring Horses"?

I am back from the beach and ready to do nothing but write.*

Coming attractions include thoughts on Inferno and In Search of Lost Time, seaweed, and The Least You Need to Know: the author-agent relationship...

* And blog. And sell my house. And pack then move then unpack. And figure out why my luggage landed in Detroit smelling like elephant dung.

In Search of Lost Time: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I confess that I have failed you, dear readers, not to mention myself and Proust and a woman in Massachusetts.

I have not finished Swann's Way. (hangs head in shame)

I have plenty of excuses, which I offer you in the sentence length of Marcel Proust:

My agent wants revisions on my young adult novel absolutely positively AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, but certainly before the end of the month, so I have to write 22 scenes by July 30, which is also the day we close on our new house, the purchase of which has required large quantities of time trying to convince the bank/sellers to allow us to close using Monopoly money and the barter system, particularly since we blew much cash this weekend when The Mighty Thor wifenapped me to Chicago to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, where I spent time I should have been spending reading Proust gazing at Lake Michigan reminiscing and thinking about landscape and literature and how I should be reading, but how I am so enjoying the Proust, and what I enjoy most is how it is different from other books in that it is truly about the process of reading it, of sinking into it and relaxing and savoring it, and how I would really be doing it a disservice to read it as fast as I can just so I can say today that I have finished it, especially when I know what an understanding, forgiving, wise, and thoughtful** audience you all are, the kind of readers who would never kick a desperate superhero when she's down, who will read this and smile benevolently and comment, "Oh, yes, Jacqui, we understand and we love you anyway."*

Right? (smiles her cutest smile and bats eyelashes)

* Not to mention beautiful and smart.
** Especially after I promise to finish and synopsisize the Proust by the time the 15 weeks are up, while also keeping up on all my other assignments.

July 14 - The Inferno

Welcome to week 8 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Dante's Inferno.

Inferno is Volume 1 of The Divine Comedy, in which a pilgrim travels to hell.

I will be reading Inferno this week while I board a plane and travel cross country to spend the week in a cottage with the Mighty Thor, Tinkerbell, Captain Destructo, my in-laws, their dog, my niece and nephew, their dog and their cat.

Any correlation between the plot of Inferno and my life is purely coincidental.*

* This is humor. In reality, I am much looking forward to both my in-laws and the beach.

Pale Fire: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I may make no sense if you haven't read Pale Fire. Or even if you have, I suppose.

Foreword
Pale Fire was published in 1962, written after the success of Lolita allowed Nabokov to give up academia and write full time, much as the success of The New Girl…and Me, allowed me to give up teaching first and second grade and write full time, so long as I could find other ways to pay for day care.

Pale Fire also contains my current favorite quote on the fragility and the power of the written word:

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of though, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing… I wish you to gasp not only at what you read, but at the miracle of its being readable" (p. 289).



Pale Fire: a haiku

poem by John Shade
extensive annotations
deranged editor

Commentary
Line 1 “John Shade”
The fictional author of the 999 line autobiographical work “Pale Fire” which appears in the book of the same name, born July 5, 1898, shot and killed July 21, 1959*, under circumstances delineated** in the commentary.

Line 2 “annotations”
Pale Fire is written in three parts: a foreword by the editor, the poem “Pale Fire,” and commentary on the poem by the editor, which composes the vast majority of the book.

Line 3 “deranged editor”
Nabokov is the king of the unreliable narrator. The annotations to Pale Fire are mostly disorganized personal reflections of questionable relevance.*** As we read, we realize the annotator is, at best, bitter and stretching the truth to self-aggrandize, at worst, totally delusional.**** and ***** In the end, we are left enthralled by the language, engaged by the story, and amazed at Nabokov's play with the power of words.

* Being a secret numbers person, I can’t help but be amused by having read Pale Fire on the dates during which the story takes place. Of course, I planned this. Because I am just that organized.
**sort of, see note on delusion of the annotator below
*** much like this blog
**** but funny
*****again, much like this blog

July 7 - A Book by Proust

Welcome to week 7 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Swann's Way Remembrance of Things Past In Search of Lost Time a book by Marcel Proust.

Tomorrow I will attempt to summarize the fantastic, complex mystery that is Pale Fire.

This week, we* are reading Swann's Way, which is the first of seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, which is what all the cool literary scholars (a far different crowd than the cool writers club) now call the novel formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past.

The man who sold me this book from Shaman Drum warned me that "the first 30 pages of this book are about falling asleep, both for the main character and reader."

The narrator in Pale Fire called it, "a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France" and of "unsufferable length" (p. 162).

Here in Jacqui's Room, we call it "beach reading."**

Who's in?

*And I realize that by "we" I mean "me and, well, just me."
** Or "literary penance for having enjoyed the vampire book so much"

Jane Eyre: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I give Jane Eyre a test.

Does Your Book Have All the Elements of a Great Novel? A Checklist.

Hot and heavy romance? Check.

Multiple surprising and dramatic plot twists? Check.

Strong, whip-smart female character who insists on equality with men? Check. And remember, this was at a time when her refusal to be coerced into marriage would have shocked the chastity belts off some folks. Bonus points.

Subtle condemnation of self-aggrandizement and mistreatment of those less fortunate in the name of Christianity? Check.

Mockery of the upper crust? Check. Again, at a time when it was revolutionary? Bonus points.

Lunatic pyromaniac in the attic? Check.

Two hundred page discussion of the intricacies of the skin of the sperm whale? No!

Great novel? Check!


One warning to book-listeners: I did try to listen to the audiotape of this several years ago and fell asleep multiple times. This week, my smart, voracious reader, online friend Sarah Miller revealed to me that she's struggling with the audiobook too. Maybe Jane Eyre is just one you have to read.

This week's Remedial Lit Summer Project book was To Be Announced. I am probably going to read Pale Fire, by Nabokov, which Time Magazine called one of the 100 best books of all time, and about which Time wrote:

A bizarre, three-legged race of a novel, Pale Fire is composed of a long, narrative poem followed by a much longer set of footnotes written by an obsessive, increasingly deranged annotator.

Or, I will read New Moon, the second in Stephenie Meyer's* Twilight series, which is about vampires having sex. Come on, people! How long does something have to top the New York Times bestseller list before I can call it a classic??? I read every page of Moby Dick! Don't I deserve a break? Vote in the comments...

Also, it's my dad's birthday and he just revealed he's a lurker in Jacqui's Room. Happy birthday, Dad!

*Would this be a good time to mention that Stephenie Meyer and I have the same agent, whom I love even though she doesn't hold little parties with me and her and Stephenie Meyer, or John Green for that matter?

Moby Dick: the Jacqui's Room Notes

In which I reveal why it is probably best that I gave up my theater career.

And yes, there are spoilers, though it's not like you can't guess how the book ends, really.

Also, this took me a million years and a snabblefrug* to upload, so you had better laugh. Hard.




* snabblefrug: a small temper tantrum caused by failure of Blogger to upload video properly. Now deleted.