Kafka's creativity - everything written down bit by bit is inferior

Kafka wrote little paradoxical parables, and he wrote longer stories built on big, blatant symbols, and he wrote numerous scenes in those stories about interpretation.  He resists interpretation, but he also demands it.  The impulse to allegorize has the drawback of making any story, especially the longer ones, about anything.  The Castle is God; start there and start shoving the various pieces into place.

I was surprised, on this long visit with Kafka, how much writing there was in his stories, how many of them were directly about writing in some way.  His diaries make it clear enough that the stories are often about his own writing, his own creativity.  This is my totalizing allegorical contribution to the interpretation of Kafka.

I think there is only one late story, “Eleven Sons,” which Kafka actually declared to be about his writing.  “The eleven sons are quite simply eleven stories I am working on this very moment” (The Complete Stories, pp. 474-5).  Normal practice for Kafka.  From his diaries, January 18, 1915:

Headache, slept badly.  Incapable of sustained, concentrated work.  Also have been in the open air too little.  In spite of that began a new story; I was afraid I should spoil the old ones.  Four or five stories now stand on their hindlegs in front of me like the horses in front of Schumann, the circus ringmaster, at the beginning of the performance.

Kafka struggled to enter a state of uninterrupted concentration in which he could write for hours on end.  This rarely happened, but when it did he felt creatively satisfied.  It is at these moments that he gets a glimpse of the world beyond the veil.

Again I realized that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at once in the course of the larger part (or even the whole) of one night is inferior, and that the circumstances of my life condemn me to this inferiority.  (Dec. 8, 1914)

The struggles of the protagonists of The Trial and The Castle have some resemblance to Kafka’s creative agony.  The character in The Trial even spends the middle of the novel thinking about but not writing the “memorial” that will save him; of course it is never written.  In The Castle, it is his “plea.”  See “In the Penal Colony,” where writing is literally torture – the metaphor made literal.

Much of the last writing of Kafka’s life was directly about creativity – “The Hunger Artist,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.”  Curiously, they are all from the point of view of animals, giving the Hunger Artist, in his circus cage, honorary animal status.  He is the greatest faster in the history of the art, but never allowed to do anything really great, meaning to fast until he disappears, at least not until no one cares.  The burrowing animal has built his masterpiece – Kafka is showing us The Castle from the inside – but it is never perfect, always threatened, and the snuffling artist’s life is full of fear and second-guessing.  Then, finally, “Josephine,” almost too sad to quote.

Kafka was preoccupied, at the end of his life, with the purpose of what he was doing.  He did not seem to doubt it, exactly, but wanted to understand it.  Soon enough he, like Josephine the singer, “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.”

I will now go register this post with German Literature Month, now in its eighth year, which is something.

Eight years of sickness, idleness, and ignorance - happy birthday to Wuthering Expectations!

The “eight years of my adolescence comprise a period of sickness, idleness, and ignorance” writes Vittorio Alfieri in his Memoirs (1806).  A few days ago Wuthering Expectations turned eight!  Health, activity, and knowledge may be on their way.

I feel that I have not had a single good idea in the past two years, but I have read a couple hundred good books which makes up for a lot.  Every two years, inspired by the title of a great Sonny Rollins album, I remind myself of what I have been doing.  This Is What I Do, Part 4.

The most popular, and also unpopular, thing I wrote was my best bad idea: a review of a review of a novel I have not read.  Although completely sympathetic with Francine Prose, on her side aesthetically, I could see that her review of The Goldfinch had serious problems of argumentation and evidence.  So the post was like a self-corrective.  It attracted terrific comments.  Always read the comments.

The basic aesthetic approach of Wuthering Expectations is best seen in a series on John Ruskin’s Modern Painters from two years ago and a series on Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education that began last week.  And in between, a week on W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country.  I’m only linking to the first posts.  You can move forward from them, day by day, until either you or I are sick of the topic.

Other series that were fun to write:  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (those posts had especially good titles), Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian. Big significant books.

Not that smaller books are less fun.  H. G. Wells’s The First Men on the Moon, Herman Bang’s Tina, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (well, this one is big).  A ramble through some shorter and longer early works of Henry James.

I can’t complain about all of the readalong opportunities of the past two years.  Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Nicanor Parra’s Poems and Anti-poems, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, all great books to share with other readers.  Worst yet best of all was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, read by more people than I possibly would have guessed not just at that time but subsequently – I still see ripples from the readalong on other book blogs.  Maybe that was my best bad idea.  Many thanks to everyone who invited me along or joined in.

I splash around with Algernon Swinburne.  Authors I have read and not read.  Who is this Dino Campana character?  Who is this John Davidson character?  Who is this Sidney Lanier character?  Book bloggers have more freedom to just ask that question.  No professional need to pretend to expertise we do not have.

I say farewell to D. G. Myers.

How can I thank all of the book bloggers I read, or who stop by Wuthering Expectations to read, skim, comment, collaborate, or correct?  My writing is better as a result, my “thinking,” and especially my reading, which is where the blog begins, every day.  Thank you!

Dostoevsky's creative method

Fyodor Dostoevksy has surprised me again.  I find myself enjoying two of his books in a row, actively enjoying them, and not just for their eccentricities.  Perhaps, after much effort, I have become a better reader of Dostoevsky, more sympathetic to his purpose.

No, I fear that my effort has gone for nothing, and that by chance Dostoevsky has become more sympathetic to my purposes.  Thus he wrote The Gambler (1866) and Part I of The Idiot (1868-9) as comedies, or they are, compared to some of his other works, more obviously comedies.  After the intense and profound labors of Notes from the Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866) Dostoevsky needed a light-hearted laugh.

That is not at all what happened.  Dostoevsky was writing The Gambler and Crime and Punishment simultaneously, racing against an impossible deadline in a thumbscrew contract.  Amazingly, with the help of “one of Russia’s first stenographers, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina,” Dostoevsky beat the clock and found his signature method of composition.  He soon married Snitkina, one of the behind the scenes heroines of literature.

The quotation is from the introduction, written by William Mills Todd III, to the Penguin Classics edition of The Idiot, tr. David McDuff, p. xix.  Dostoevsky’s method, as described by Todd explains so much about the author’s art, such as it is.  Dostoevsky

would work late into the might over his notebooks, jotting down ideas.  Then he would dictate passages to [Snitkina], and she would transcribe them and promptly return them neatly copied for editing.

He dictated while pacing, always pacing.  “From this time on, the rhythm of the Dostoevskian sentence may be defined as a walking movement, where the breath of the spoken word is marked in the written style.”  This is Todd quoting Jacques Catteau, from his 1989 study Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation.  I have doubts that much of the sentence-level rhythm can make it into English, but some larger structural features are visibly the result of the method.

Two things amaze me.  First, after spending late hours making notes, Dostoevksy would scrap it all while dictating.  In other words, Dostoevsky’s fiction is mostly improvised.  This is as close to a typical jazz method as I can remember.  Dostoevsky was like the musician who practices for eight hours during the day than plays completely different music at the club for two sets.  The performance was recorded, by heroic Anna Grigoryevna, but still ephemeral in the sense that it was almost immediately dispatched to the publisher for serialization.  Mistakes were permanent.  So the writer created works where they did not matter.

So the second stunner is that Dostoevsky was capable of improvising eight hundred page novels of the complexity of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.  No wonder large chunks of his novels are clumsy, fragmented, repetitive, or incoherent, that core ideas and characters are so unstable.  Would I want John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins to play the same way every night?  Dostoevsky, what a showman.

How few writers, even of the highest caliber, could do such a thing.  How few would want to, they would say, and at heart I agree, but here we have one measure of Dostoevsky’s genius.  I guess in this way I have become more sympathetic to Dostoevsky – blow, Fyodor, blow!  And if he has an off night, eh, Bird* had off nights.

I will turn to The Gambler tomorrow and transcribe a solo or two.

*  I am such a fan of jazz that I refer to Charlie Parker by his nickname, as if I knew him, but I did not. 

Now W(uthering)E(xpectations) Are Six

Or, In Praise of Folly.

Every two years I assemble a Selected Wuthering Expectations.  Best, favorite, representative?  I am not sure that I know.  This is what I do, Part 3.

2011 to 2012, that was Portuguese literature.  Eça de Queirós, Machado de Assis, Pessoa.  The week on The Maias; the 60 masterpieces of world literature of Machado; a monkey with a parasol on an elephant.  Be sure to read Pessoa before you die.

A contrary cuss, I am suspicious of enjoyment, and the word “classic,” but enthusiastic about griffins.  The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Writing Plan.

Aphorisms.  Science fiction.  Leafcutter ants.  Musical cheese.

2013 was the year – or the six or seven months – of Austrian literature.  My run of pieces on Adalbert Stifter’s great, tedious novel Indian Summer was the most ambitious writing I have done.  Three weeks of posts on the book and related ideas, beginning and ending with Thomas Bernhard, and dragging in Kundera, Goethe, Broch, Murnane, Hofmannsthal, and more, and all while engaging in a careful reading of the book itself, not simply piling other books on top of it, as tempting as that might be.  Where else could I write such a thing?

Anyone who has developed a sudden if unlikely interest in Austria’s greatest apocalypticist: Karl Kraus week begins right here.

Acting in Uncle Vanya.  Joseph Epstein on Henry James.  Robert Browning is difficult.  My recent and ongoing enthusiasm for Kipling begins here somewhere.  How to read a Victorian novel.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I value the serial nature of the book blog.  Mediocre first posts lead to inspired comments and improved ideas.  After a week of writing – 2,500 to 3,000 words – I finally begin to get somewhere.  At exactly that point, I stupidly jump to something new.  These were fun to write and get better as they go (links to the beginning of the series, of course):

Nobody cares about Little Dorrit – she is so tiny; Hugo’s heist novel The Toilers of the Sea; Collins’s visibly deformed The Woman in White; James’s poorish story Washington Square; Zola’s poorly understood The Kill; Jewett’s domestic picaresque The Country of the Pointed Firs; Trollope’s well-fertilized Orley Farm; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.  One more link here, to the last post on that novel, about Flaubert's meaninglessness, a hidden key to Wuthering Expectations.

What fun  to read with others.  The big group read of The Savage Detectives was especially productive.  Comb through that week for links to better posts by other book bloggers.

I did a week on W. G. Sebald, beginning with the time I briefly met him.  That is an interesting example.  I had not planned to write on Sebald for a week, not for more than one day, actually, but idea followed idea.

The week on ghost stories was a kind of structured improvisation.  After the first day, readers far more knowledgeable than I am suggested stories that I immediately read, allowing me to instantly concoct all kinds of nonsensical theories.  Haunted beds, 75% of the stories involved haunted beds.  Odd.

It is common enough now to read discussions of how book blogging has changed in the last couple of years.  The big change at Wuthering Expectations is that since my last anniversary I have read two hundred more books and written (or copied) 270,000 more words.

Thanks so much to all of my readers, collaborators, commenters, co-readers.  Thanks to anyone fool enough to write or read a book blog.

Gardening, cannon-braiding, editing, "magnificence and rats," advice from R. W. Emerson and James Wood

Anybody do any gardening this weekend?  I thought not!  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in The Conduct of Life:

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity.  One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.  (“Wealth”)

It is possible that Emerson is simply a prankster, and that some of his sentences are the equivalent of that time Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green.  He just wants to see me sputter.  Or he is having some other kind of fun:

What would painter do, or what would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells?  And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

That is from the puzzlingly titled “Considerations by the Way.”  There is no denying that the last line is a good’un, and it would be well worth writing an entire diffusive essay just to use it.

Now this, from the same essay, is untrue in a different way, one useful to book bloggers:

Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,—all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt;—begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step.  ’Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order.

And literary criticism, in either its amateur or professional form, is much easier than braiding cannons.  It has fewer steps.  Read, think, write.  The pros re-write, or are at least re-written, as Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books describes in this recent interview:

Aside from Barbara [Epstein], Lizzie [Hardwick] was the major influence.  I would send her reviews and she would say, “Oh, yes, this piece is very good. It just needs a little work.”  And then she would send it back half as long, with paragraph after paragraph cut or compressed.  She had no patience at all for what you would call tired language.

I have a great deal of use and therefore patience for tired language.  It is especially valuable when I am tired or in a hurry or lazy.  I am sometimes tempted to submit a piece somewhere for this single reason, that professional editing would be educational, that it would improve my writing.  Wake it up a little.

Otherwise, I have been unable to see an advantage of more formal publication.  This is James Wood, from a recent interview with Jonathan McAloon (longer version here):

Now my advice would be, try to write longer pieces wherever you can.  One thing that’s changed since I was freelancing is there’s space online to do that kind of thing.  You don’t get paid for it, largely, but there’s the chance to do something at length.

It is possible that Open Letters Monthly, say, would jump at a chance to publish a 9,000 word article on Adalbert Stifter and Austrian literary culture. Sorry, I need to double-check – three weeks = 15 days x 600 words a day.  Yes, so I wrote close to 10,000 words in a fifteen part series on that subject, likely the best thing I am going to write all year.

My great early book blogging insight, my correction to Wood, was that there is no reason to publish the longer piece as a single unit, that I can work with the understandable impatience of the online reader, and that there are in fact enormous benefits from letting readers see the cannon-braiding in progress.  Book blog readers are so knowledgeable and helpful.  They challenge my worst ideas and introduce me to new ones.  Taken as a whole, my pieces rarely end up where I had planned, partly due to the assistance I receive.  I am edited in public; the corrections appear the next day, or year.  This editing does not reduce my word count, and my bad ideas are not politely expunged, but rather remain visible as one of the many steps towards boiled granite.  But it works, in its own way it works.

Boiled granite is useful somehow, yes?  That is why Emerson mentioned it?

The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2012, in a certain narrow sense

The best books I read in 2012 were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).  Although I made use of the books I did not actually write about them.  This is a recurring pattern, my avoidance of the Best Book of the Year.  I will hash this out with my therapist and in the meantime write about an overlapping subject:  the Books I Most Enjoyed Writing about in 2012.

1.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert; The Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo; The Kill, Émile Zola.  I was actually worried that Madame Bovary would not be so much fun because of its familiarity, but I was wrong.  All I had to do was plunge my hands into the muck of the text to dig up all sorts of unusual specimens, spiny or slimy, generally good whether grilled or fried.

The writers are half-lunatics and their novels are packed with unpleasantness, but writing about books in this tradition is like a holiday for me.  Whenever I was having trouble with some other writer, which was all the time this year, I would think “Get another Zola novel, that’ll be fun.”  I always resisted, though.  Basically, if you see me reading Zola it will likely be as a desperate curative to a loss of blogging confidence.

2.  But then again trouble is fun, too.  Robert Browning is often intensely difficult, sometimes to the point of obscurity.  Reading him, writing about him, is a vigorous, thrilling struggle.

The challenge with Fernando Pessoa is not always the individual poem, some of which, like those of the shepherd heteronym Alberto Caeiro, are deliberately if deceptively simple, but the system, the enormous imaginative contraption of poets and poems and non-poems Pessoa constructed.  My metaphor is wrong, since much of the fun of Pessoa is that the reader constructs his own system out of all of the amazing parts Pessoa created.

3.  This was a good year for writing about short fiction:  Robert Walser, Giovanni Verga, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Schnitzler, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, the masterpieces of world literature of Machado de Assis.  Part of the fun, I suppose, is that it so quickly becomes possible to hop around among texts, so even lesser – heck, often trivial – work like the early Twain I read suggests a lot of ideas.  Given major work like the best Kipling or Verga or Machado and the possibilities overwhelm.

4.  Charles Dickens could fit in with the French writers in that I knew how to attack Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.  The latter seemed like the better novel; the former was more fun to write about.  I do not know why.

Knowledge of the writer is not the key, but comfort with a set of techniques.  So though I barely know the work of Henry James it was easy to see how to attack Washington Square and "The Aspern Papers" with some well-worn tools.

5.  Writing about Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was made vastly more entertaining because of all of the other people writing about it at the same time.  I hope that Little Women in January is half as fun.  I am still working on it, but I have an angle.

Thanks to everyone who helped me write, whether through a comment here or a half-remembered but inspirational post from three years ago at your own place.

And happy holidays to everyone!   Soon I will be on Christmas break until early January.

If only you can be the fanatic of your subject

If I were to continue writing about No Name, this would be a post about the enjoyably surprising characters.  Feel free to imagine that post, or to compose your own parody of it.  I have become distracted:

We can easily come up to the average culture & performance; not easily go beyond it.  I often think of the poor caterpillar, who, when he gets to the end of a straw or a twig in his climbing, throws his head uneasily about in all directions; he is sure he has legs & muscle & head enough to go further indefinitely – but what to do? he is at the end of his twig.  (Journal of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jan. ?, 1861*)

I, too, often think of that caterpillar.  Why, it is like me!  In post after post, sentence after sentence, I feel I have reached the end of the twig.  Writing has been unusually laborious lately.  The strain shows, I assume, although I do what I can to hide it.

I am not sure if I am reading Emerson’s journals as a tonic or too precipitate a crisis.  The same thing happened the last time I was reading them, in that case in the form of a little book about Emerson and writing written by Robert D. Richardson.  That book put the fear in me, I tell ya.  "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."  That sounds like it could be hard on a fellow.

Amidst all the recent chatter about blogging and the death of literary criticism, I quietly, perhaps with some frustration, ignored the fifth anniversary of Wuthering Expectations.  I was busy writing.  It took some time for me to even acknowledge that Wuthering Expectations is writing, and nothing but.  Other people have their own purposes with their blogs; mine is to write.  Why books, why literature?  New writers are advised to write what they know.  Literature seems to be what I know.**  Emerson again (“we” is Emerson; “you” is also Emerson):

This is what we mean when we say your subject is absolutely indifferent.  You need not write the History of the World, nor the Fall of man, nor King Arthur, nor Iliad, nor Christianity; but write of hay, or of cattleshows, or trade sales, or of a ship, or of Ellen, or Alcott, or of a couple of school-boys, if only you can be the fanatic of your subject, & find a fibre reaching from it to the core of your heart, so that all your affection & all your thought can freely play.  (May? 1859)

Maybe I should start a hay-blog.  No, I simply do not care enough about hay.  I am a fanatic on the subject of literature.  I am writing all of this like I have a choice!

*  From Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte, p. 490.  The second quotation is on p. 485.

**  Or what I want to know.  The helpful patience with which people read what often amount to nothing more than introductory notes, and the useful guidance they provide in comments, often astounds me.  But they are fellow fanatics of their subjects.

A year of good .... reading AHEAD - revisiting my New Year's resolutions

Happy 2012!  Blogging vacations stave in my writing.  Last year, to cooper the writing barrel,* I uncharacteristically resorted to New Year’s resolutions.  What would happen if I revisited them?

1. “I vow not to write bad prose this year.”  What was I thinking.  See two resolutions down for the grisly results.  I remind myself that resolutions are aspirational.  I did what I could.  This resolution is promoted to 2012.

2.  “I’ll read Middlemarch.”  And I did.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles advances to the #1 pre-20th century British literature most-famous-book-I-ain’t-read slot.  For some reason, this does not irritate me as much as not knowing Middlemarch; nor does my lack of significant Zola, or the Henry James perplex.  The resolution served its purpose and is retired.

3.  “Finish fewer books.”  Meaning not what I wrote but:  abandon more books without finishing them.  Accomplished, although a disadvantage of the practice is that I have trouble remembering exactly which books I abandoned.  My memory palace is built for completed books, it seems.  Promote this one, too.  Abandon even more books.  Abandon even better books.

4.  “Write about music more.”  Jane Austen’s songbook.  A passion based on Hans Christian Andersen.  Massenet’s Thaïs.  I actually wrote, and deleted, an entire additional piece about Thaïs, tracing the musical motifs, which was valuable to write and deadly to read.

I wonder why more people do not write posts like these.  The key, for someone like me with only basic technical knowledge, is to write about music that has a text.  The connections between opera and literature are particularly rich.  Opera is just theater.

So more of this, more, more!  Something about Richard Wagner, maybe, or Charles Ives, The Concord Sonata, say.  What else would be fun?

5.  “Write shorter posts.”  Another triumph!  This is turning into one of those humblebrags.  I have been aiming at 500 words and staying under 600 when I want.  Going over when I want, too, but that has been rare.

The great advantage of writing a serial is that I can advance the beginning of an idea and receive feedback, spurs, corrections, and taunts, often from comments, always from myself, which may well improve the next day’s writing.  One decent idea at a time, that’s enough writing for a sitting.

Last year’s resolutions post was exactly 500 words long (that is just a regular old brag).

Tomorrow: plans.

The Federal Art Project poster atop the post is borrowed from the Library of Congress.  It depicts, with uncanny precision, the way I bring books home from my own library during the long winter.

*  This metaphor is terrible.  The attempt to use a more original, vivid verb in place of “hurt” is not by itself so bad, but once I had used it I felt the need to continue the conceit, because I had now conjured the smashed barrel, and, well, the wreckage you can see for yourself.  And thus, I demonstrate what vacations do to my writing.

The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Writing Plan

Writing, blog writing, my own writing, is a difficult subject, almost a book blog taboo.  You tread lightly just to say you dislike a book I like; how much more difficult to politely suggest that my argument is trivial and my writing is bad, which it often is.  We cannot all be Anecdotal Evidence or Pykk.

So I continue the slow work of identifying and stripping out the fluff, filler, and gibberish that I see, retrospectively, everywhere in the writing at Wuthering Expectations, while at the same time pursuing ideas to something closer to an end point, rather than abandoning ideas as soon as I identify them.  Blog writing lends itself to – probably should be – loose, but a writer should still be able to follow a thought.

With a mix of planning and luck, last winter I pointed myself in a direction that felt like “forward.”  The key text was Flaubert’s blood-soaked Salammbô, not one of the year’s best books, perhaps even a bad book, but one that was enormously fun to write about.  I loathe the word “read” as a noun, the ill-defined “good read” cliché, but I assume that people who use the term are trying to get at some aspect of the experience of reading a book that is independent of the qualities of the book itself.  If I include writing about Salammbô as part of the experience of reading it, the book was a blast.  A good write.  Oh, ugh, ouch!

Flaubert was surrounded by a cluster of French books – Maupassant’s stories, Hugo’s Les Misérables and William Shakespeare, Gide’s Immoralist, Charles Péguy and Anatole France, culminating in the madness of Alfred Jarry.  A side trip led to A Tale of Two Cities and early British science fiction - H. G. Wells, Richard Jefferies and Samuel Butler.  Most of the books I mentioned are second tier, at best, but  they made satisfyingly impressive noises when smashed together.

However well written these pieces might have been, I had a good time writing them.   Les Misérables was an interesting case.  Because of its bulk, I had worried that it would be difficult to write about coherently, but in fact Hugo’s wealth of stuff made the writing all too easy.  I just planted some flags as I read, picking out especially rich spots to which I could return.  Sewers and barricades; short, punchy sentences; long, twisty sentences.  What more do I need from an author for a week of posts than one great sentence?  Hugo gave me thousands of them.  And then, generous soul that he was, he gave me thousands more not-so-great sentences, and to add to the piquancy of existence, a handful of stinkers.

What more am I trying to do but write one great sentence?  It is like a dang grail quest: perilous, endless, ridiculous.

My title is a parody of the post I wrote this time last year, like this post written just before my vacation.  I’ll be back on January 3, maybe.  Merry Christmas!  Thanks for all of the help this year.

The guilty occupation of a life - or, Wuthering Expectations is four years old

An abuse of imagination lies “in turning what was intended for the mere refreshment of the heart into its daily food, and changing the innocent pastimes of an hour into the guilty occupation of a life.”  So argues John Ruskin in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), Chapter IV, paragraph 6.

Tomorrow I will have been writing Wuthering Expectations for four years!  Quite something, ain’t it?

Two years ago I assembled a guide for readers chancing upon Wuthering Expectations for the first time.  It is time for an update.  This is what I do, part two.

I write, and think, in series.  For example: Laura Ingalls Wilder week, where I covered Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. How I remembered the books; Wilder, Edmund Burke, and the Prairie Sublime; no seriously the Sublime; Wilderian irony; young Laura discovers the Augustinian conception of time.

Although I have more than one trick, Wuthering Expectations is generally highly aestheticized.  I read Little House on the Prairie not as a naïve autobiography or as nostalgic kitsch, but as a work of literary art, which is what it is.

For another sample of my approach, see (Anti-)Sympathetic Character Week.  I am against sympathetic characters; the unsympathetic character is a useful device; writers are tricky devils; the sympathetic character is a useful device; I am in favor of sympathetic characters.

I do not write so many book reviews as such, nor do I think of myself as an advocate for particular books or authors.  An exception was the great John Galt; I spent two weeks working through his books.  Try The Provost and The Entail.  The Galt reading somehow led to the first reading challenge in book blog history that was actually challenging, the Scottish Literature Challenge.  No one will bother to sort through this, but it’s all right here.

Victor Hugo takes his grandchildren to the zoo.  Arthur Rimbaud and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote similar poems.  Karamazov in California.  Collaborative James Hogg.  Nick Carraway is a great writer.  Russian books are short.  Annie Dillard reads like I do.  The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Reading Plan.

Moby-Dick week was great fun (spoiler alert: the whale dies in the end).  Anything Ubu was a sight to see.  My single most complex week went:  Sartor Resartus, then more Carlyle, then Melville’s Clarel, then Clarel again, and then Melville plus William Carlos Williams.  Every one of those posts was a collaboration with another book blogger.  They led me on quite a dance, even if I was the only one who could see the pirouettes and paradiddles.

Should I even bring up the mummified cats?  I spent a week investigating the subject of mummified cats.

What do you think the most visited post, by far, in the history of Wuthering Expectations might be?  Did you guess the recipe for skillet green bean casserole?   That should tell us all something.

Some of these links go to what I think are the best posts of the last two years; others go to writing and subjects that are more representative.  By “best,” I mean the same thing I always do – best written.  Wuthering Expectations is writing.