Literary Ring-a-Round-the-Rosy

May 3, 2005

Behold, we show you an irony. Richard Lawrence Cohen first says we're in some ways up to the minute (!!?), and then pelts us with literary hot potatoes. As though that would bother us after all those aeons of meteor showers.

Well, we're willing, even if the results create an unedifying mix of stuffy, banal, and pretentious.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be? (That is, which book would you want to preserve by memorizing it?)

Along with everyone else, when we saw the movie, we left the theater asking ourselves this question. Good little grad students that we were then, the conclusion was to be efficient and historical and memorize (in the question's universe, not for real) Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English, so as to preserve the narrative forms and the language. This is assuming some other reliable person has chosen the King James Bible.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Doesn't every woman love Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey (text only, no TV or movies), and the fearlessly honorable Mr. Knightley in Austen's Emma?

3. The last book you bought was...?

Four paperpack volumes of Anthony Powell's astonishing between-the-wars English masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, which all of Chez Dilys enjoyed after having exhausted Trollope's novels. A few years ago it seemed wise to economize on non-essentials, and we began to request and borrow books from the public library, buying only the ones that insisted on being re-read. A Dance to the Music of Time is a keeper, an entire universe full of haunting, provocative, reflective and moral creations.

Next on the list for buying is The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar. It is likely that the Voice of History that selected the new Benedict XVI is intent on a post-postmodern serious religious language and POV, and von B. is the most likely place to start. The editor, Edward T. Oakes, S.J., in our opinion never touches a subject without bringing sizzling warmth and clarity, including his  biography of von B.

4. The last book you read was...?

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Possibly getting the memo decades after everyone else, The Chez came to regretful consensus a few months ago and realized that television-for-entertainment is a dead loss. So a DVD library is building, beginning with known quantities including the Granada series of BR with a script by John Mortimer. We particularly enjoy the interplay of reading and watching good film renditions of the classics, have also been on a run of Jane Austen and Shakespeare. 

The take-away from this viewing and reading of Brideshead (the title refers to the headwaters of a river called the Bride) has been the pertinent-to-modernity hard truth that human frailty, self-indulgence, and perversity we always have with us (and in us) for the foreseeable future. Changing the metaphysical frame to make Evil seem Good, however, is an entirely different, worse, and more devastating leap of faithlessness. Talk about cutting off the branch on which souls and the culture sit...!  

5. What are you currently reading?

Another classic, long-lived book which treats ultimate questions, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, also the result of recently seeking out the [bad] movie with Yul Brynner. 

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

OK, for the most part it's oeuvres. But if Tom Hanks could have a soccer ball, to each his own.

• The writings of David Berlinski, Black Mischief, The Advent of the Algorithm, and so on, supposedly about the history of science and mathematics, but mostly his enchanting intelligent persona writ large. Talk about a crush!
• All the novels, with memoir and biography, of Barbara Pym. Novels include Crampton Hodnet, Excellent Women, Quartet in Autumn. It would be a taste of home, even if home is not 30's - 50's England.
• The plays of Shakespeare, not only because we're supposed to value him, but if one is going to hallucinate, she may as well do it in Peter Brook style. The best-performed Shakespeare is true soul food.
• The Collected Jane Austen, including her letters.
• The Bible with at least six parallel English translations.

Now, if we could put aside a trunk for further shipment, it would be desirable to include five or so of Anthony Trollope's best, including Barchester Towers; the happiness-generating books of Byron Katie, most recently I Need Your Love -- Is That True?; A Dance to the Music of Time; the collected Shirley Hazzard, especially The Transit of Venus, minus The Great Fire; David B. Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite; Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution; Edward Lewis Wallant's The Tenants of Moonbloom, also (Richard) now a NYRB Classic; the works of the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, e.g., The Dance of Culture; and the 5-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.

Fortunately, memories of performances of plays by Tom Stoppard (most recently young amateurs at Concordia College), David Ives, and BBC's The Taming of the Shrew directed by Jonathan Miller, will go wherever the wind blows us, requiring no more space than an infinitesimal cranial synapse.

So, now,
7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

Tony Woodlief, of Sand in the Gears. Though the open book of his family life is quite good enough, our guess is that he has a fine intermittent life of the mind based on an underpinning of literary thought from before he was so busy a parent and administrator.

Grant McCracken at the Intersection of anthropology and economics. The way his mind works is a railroad on which we'd like to buy a ticket.

And in this multi-media world, if they'd like to jointly feature other artistic media with some connection to literature, as here, who are we to complain?

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

I'd read any and all of those books with pleasure, and have read a few: vol. 1 of the Powell set (replaced for now by Patrick O'Brian in my affections); Karamazov; Trollope; Austen; Waugh. Pym, Hazzard, Jarrell, and Wallant I've sniffed cautiously around but am expecting to grow into someday. Your nonfiction selections sound, as I expected, intriguing, full of rich, deep matter. Thanks for expanding my reading list! Good thing that huge new Half Price Books just opened.