How good is writing like this?

	Painter or Illustrator: Lynch, James Henry (d. 1868)    (Work signed) Writer: Abot, Eugene Michel Joseph (1836-1894) This leaflet is part of a series: Balzac, Pere Goriot, Sc life by., Calmann-Levy, Quantin, 1885 (Cash / No 0 / 10) Dating:  1885 Source text: Balzac, Le Pere Goriot (1834)

Painter or Illustrator:
Lynch, James Henry (d. 1868)    (Work signed)

Writer: Abot, Eugene Michel Joseph (1836-1894)

This leaflet is part of a series:
Balzac, Pere Goriot, Sc life by., Calmann-Levy, Quantin, 1885
(Cash / No 0 / 10)

Dating:  1885

Source text:
Balzac, Le Pere Goriot (1834)

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory handle in the tips of his thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed to conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken limbs; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken man; there was a notable breach of continuity between the dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a throat like a turkey gobbler's; altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What had he been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that disposes of misery and things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are prompted to remark that, "After all, we cannot do without them."

From Farther Goriot by Honore de Balzac
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Reading for dummies (like me)

I am procrastinating; avoiding the work that I really ought to do.  I can't be bothered because (five weeks into my new job) I'd sooner leave it than get stuck in.  I have formed an escape committee with Mrs Spiers.

Anyway, I took to thinking about how ill-read I feel.  I'm not illiterate.  I know that much.  But I was struck, not so very long ago, with how few books I had read from The Guardian list of the top 100 books of all time.  (It turns out, apparently, that the list was merely re-printed by The Guardian, from the original constructed by The Norwegian Book Clubs, of all the improbable points of origin one might think of.)  Over 50 of the texts can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, here.

Last year, again while procrastinating, I was likewise struck by how few novels on a list compiled by Time Magazine I had read.  It was described as the ALL-TIME list of the world's best 100 novels.  To be deemed eligible for consideration a novel had to have been written between Time's first publication in 1923 and 2010.

I combined the two lists, which contain 187 texts.  There are 9 texts on both lists.  I've read 32 of the texts (including 4 of the 9).  That's a paltry 17 per cent.  Time to get reading.

I've started with Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac, written in 1835.  In the first chapter I came upon the term "car of Juggernaut".  That struck me as a modern term for an early 19th Century author, which shows you how much I know.  Jagganatha, the Hindu deity translated as Lord of the World, is worshiped in temples that date from as far back as the 12th Century (in Puri, Orissa; North East India).  The picture is one of the Madrass car of Jagganatha.

Harriet Jacobs

I finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl today.  It's a remarkable text; an almost unbelievable tale (although its truth shines through ... and for any deniers or sceptics out there .... has been independently verified).  The full text can be read here.  How could we do these things to one another?

What a woman.  How much we owe her.

From the Harriet Jacobs web site:

"I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations." 

After nearly seven years hiding in a tiny garret above her grandmother’s home, Harriet Ann Jacobs took a step other slaves dared to dream in 1842; she secretly boarded a boat in Edenton, N.C., bound for Philadelphia, New York and, eventually, freedom. The young slave woman’s flight, and the events leading up to it, are documented in heart-wrenching detail in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, self-published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

A significant personal history by an African American woman, Harriet Jacobs’ story is as remarkable as the writer who tells it. During a time when it was unusual for slaves to read and write, self-publishing a first-hand account of slavery’s atrocities was extraordinary. That it was written by a woman, unprecedented.

From the Harriet Jacobs Wikipedia site:

Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 - March 7, 1897) was an American writer, who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym "Linda Brent", was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured.
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Discretion is the better part of valour

My skin is a bit delicate.  Less than two weeks out from our flight to Scotland I've stayed off it most of the day.  I borrowed Spike's Kobo e.reader (a Christmas gift from her parents) and started to read Anna Karinina.  My jury is out on both (the Kobo and the Tolstoy).

Rupert Bunny

Excellent show at the Art Gallery of NSW.  I hadn't realised how gifted an artist he was.  Seeing so many works in the same space made me look again, more closely.  It's impossibe not to be impressed.  He's not just some post Pre-Raphaelite (if that makes sense).  There was more to his work than that. 

Pride And Prejudice

I worked all day on the second essay for my university preparation course. I chose the question about Jane Austen's best-loved work.

"Good judgement is at the heart of this romantic comedy. Superior judgements, ethical judgements, hasty judgements, unbending judgements and really bad judgements are all examined. Why is good judgement so significant in the world of Pride And Prejudice? Is it merely a source of good comedy?"

Two and a half thousand words later (including quotes) I reached this conclusion:

"The proper deployment or misapplication of judgement in Pride And Prejudice, then, are not merely devices used to great effect in a romantic comedy of social manners. The crucial role good judgement plays in determining the success in the world of the novel is critical to understanding its intentions.

Elizabeth alerts the reader to those intentions when she observes, while dancing with Mr Darcy at the Netherfield ball:

It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion to be secure of judging properly at first.

Jane Austen suggests that only by virtue of experience, reflection and self-knowledge can any of her characters come to understand, as her principals do, that Elizabeth's overt-confident criticism of propud Mr Darcy is prejudiced by a lack of self-knowledge, which ultimately only good judgement can bring."

I am a novice.
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Reading Jane Austen

I have an essay due next Monday on questions of judgement in Pride And Prejudice so I re-read an engrossing article by Tony Tanner in Jane Austen, edited by Harold Bloom. Among other helpful observations, Tony Tanner writes:

For Jane Austen's book is, most importantly, about prejudging and rejudging. It is a drama of recognition - re-cognition, that act by which the mind can look again at a thing and if necessary make revisions and amendments until it sees the thing as it really is. As such it is thematically related to the dramas of recognition which constitute the great traditions of Western tragedy - Oedipus Rex, King Lear, Phedre - albeit the drama has now shifted to the comic mode, as is fitting in a book which is not about the finality of the individual death but the ongoingness of social life.

That link is strong and obvious once you see it but one does need a perceptive analyst like Tony Tanner to show you the way to a clearer reading of a text that's been part of your reading life for more than thirty years.
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Wuthering Heights

My English literature class took on Wuthering Heights this evening. I read it for the first time over the weekend. I was surprised to discover that it was my first reading. I had been sure that I'd read the novel years ago; at school or in my first (failed) stint as an English literature undergraduate more than thirty years ago at Stirling University. But it seems I'm wrong. The further into the story I delved the less and less familiar the text seemed. By about the end of chapter three I realised I had never read the work before. How can a man like me, who professes to know and like literature, reach fifty-two years of age and not have read Emily Bronte's finest?

It is a splendid work. The anti-matter version of Pride And Prejudice. It is real and surreal, good and evil, dream and nightmare, natural and supernatural, alive and dead. It's imperfectly crafted and immature in many places but what should one expect of a novel written by an author who died aged thirty? It's one of a kind, of course. But what a one: a turning point in literary history to which every horror movie ever made owes an enormous debt.

Kate, of course: barking but irresistible.

Monet in the park

We had a lazy start to Sunday then visited the Art Gallery of NSW to have a look at the Monet exhibition. The gallery was heaving with large numbers of people from just about all walks of life and all ages drawn to some 'great' works of art. There were indeed some lovely paintings by Monet and other impressionists: haystacks (of course) and the facade of the cathedral; images of water lilies and a Japanese bridge in the garden at Giverney (not Givenchy as I wrote in an article years ago!).

After a very late lunch in the mobbed gallery cafe we strolled through the Botanic gardens where, next to the statue of a boy removing a thorn from his foot, we assembled a forty-piece Monet jigsaw puzzle, taking more time than either of us thought we might take. Spike read to me from John Boyd's The Pollenators Of Eden - a piece of very 1970's science fiction ... but fun.
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Cavalleria rusticana / Pagliaci

Saturday night at the Sydney Opera House for 'Cav & Pag' as I believe they are known. Lovely music and some fine singing. The total effect, however, seemed somehow less than the sum of its parts. Don't know why.
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The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens