A Postscript to Snarky

I must admit, I rather enjoyed writing that bit of nonsense. Once you open yourself up to the realm of the unimaginable phantasmagoria, it's really quite fun.

Reminded of Virginia Woolf, "It's really quite fun being mad. You have wonderful ideas, much more interesting then when you're sane."

Lewis Carroll as we know him, never existed. It's a pen name. It's Dodgson, his real name. There's a fascination with this "Lewis Carroll" figure, speculations on his sexuality and rumors of his dark, tormented personal life, kept hidden even from the most dedicated researchers. What was in those "missing pages" of his diaries? But we've gotten it all wrong. We shouldn't be obsessing over "Lewis Carroll" but instead we should be obsessing over Charles Dodgson.

The works of "Lewis Carroll" and Rev. Charles Dodgson are one and it is unfair to ignore the works of one while praising the other. The two are even intertwined--the routine spectical of mathamatics pops up in both Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark. There should be as much scholarly dedication to Dodgson's "serious" works (including Curiousa Mathematica, Euclid and His Modern Rivals and Symbolic Logic) as there has been to the fantastical Jabberwocky.

JPC

Stephanie Barron betrays Virginia Woolf

Having just finished this morning the novel "The White Garden" by Stephanie Barron, I can now understand why my mother never finished reading through Barron's Jane Austin Mystery series. The books, while somewhat lighthearted and enjoyable at times, lack all academic background, paint over the obvious, center around duller than dull and dumber than dumb characters and contain only occasional moments of insight into anything other than Ms. Barron's own dwindling imagination.

The portrait of Virginia Woolf (and her lover, Vita Sackville-West) is a cardboard cut out from "The Hours", running around like a paranoid little bird from one person to the next, demanding to be saved while attempting her own distruction. The character of Margaux, however, is the most interesting of all the characters--as a parody of a shrill feminist scholar, she actually does make a few things clear and helps the story along alright, but other than that, she's worthless, as is the rest of the lot who appear in the book. She stands for one of the many (incorrect) versions of Woolf's personal life floating about academia.

Modern writers, attempting to delve into the mind of a woman writer whose whole buisness was that of delving into the mind and it's failings, fail in their efforts because they only paint Virginia Woolf with one brush--she was always the mad woman in a long, heavy coat, chain smoking and talking to herself, never anything else. She did go through periods of bliss, you know. Vita was a wonderful influence in her life, as was Leonard. The three of them were very happy for some time, not that you would know it from Ms. Barron.

However, I'll probably keep a copy of the book, just for my collection of Woolfinalia.

JPC.

Orlando

Reading Orlando for an upcoming book discussion. My copy is littered with sticky-notes and tags, underlinings and notations in the wide margins (thank god that it's almost a facsimile of the original edition). I'm the only one (I think ) who's read the book before, or any book by Virginia Woolf. So I've been researching again.

The problem of Virginia Woolf as biographer, and this has been made a point by several critics, is that her stream-of-consciousness style of writing does not meld easily with the art of biography. The result is that in attempting to sound biographical, in attempting to sound like the academic, she comes off as a parody, at best, of the academic history.

I can see this leading to arguments.

Orlando is her strongest biography, even though it is a novel. And I think the reason it's so strong as a biography is because it is a novel. Flush suffers from the limitations of being told through the point of view of a dog. Roger Fry suffers from the fact that it was her only strict biography (the life of her good friend and fellow Bloomsbury group critic, Roger Fry, now mostly forgotten). "The rules of biography do not sit well with Mrs. Woolf" I remember someone having written in a review of the final tome. In attempting to cross fictional techniques with a person's history, she tragically cannot stop herself from embelishing the tale with the things which make her writing her writing.

And is this such a bad thing? Who's to say. It's not my place. I'm only a reader/reviewer.

JPC

A Message for Helen DeWitt

Hello, Ms. DeWitt,

I'm very sorry to hear of your troubles with publishers. I'm having trouble with publications too. It would appear, too, that almost every author is having trouble with publishers right now (except that bloody James Patterson with his "book-every-eight-minutes" schedule". I'm writing because your debut novel, "The Last Samurai" was one of the most interesting books I've come across in years. Finally! A book which doesn't offer easy cuts and simple solutions--something which was never made for the Nora Roberts crowd. And yet entirely readable; completely worth any effort you need to expand upon the book.

Have you considered going to an independent press? Or maybe seeing if you can get in contact with Grove (publishers of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs among others) or New Directions (Roberto Bolano, Tennessee Williams, Anne Carson [who, it seems to me, shares your affinity for all things complex, though more linguisticly than statisticly]) or even Milkweed editions (David Rhodes, Susan Straight)?

Or why not take the Virginia Woolf route and publish through your own press? Or pull a Stephen King and publish a serial via the internet, with a 'suggested donation' price (though that didn't work for him in the long-run). Or try Lulu.com and sell through the internet, with no restrictions on your work. Maybe a great patron will come along and finance you. I'd do it but I'm strapped for cash myself.

But whatever you do, please know that your fans (including myself) will support you. We love your books. This is why I write.

Adoring fan, much love, hope things will get better, etc.,

JPC

Simone Weil

Is there anyone out in cyberspace who reads Simone Weil? If so, please answer me this. Is her life a story to be admired or to be feared? Was her death from self-starvation preventable or was it going to happen no matter what? And, by the way, which is your favorite work of her's?

I was introduced to Simone Weil via the short biography of her produced by Francine du Plessix Grey, which came out of Penguin's "Brief Lives" series (along with the somewhat amusing and informative introduction to Marcel Proust by Edmund White and an intriguing look at Virginia Woolf via her lover's son, Nigel Nicholson.) I connected with the tale of a woman who was all too aware of the suffering of others. The question was, "did that awareness kill her?"

It takes a lot to pay attention to suffering. It is difficult to see suffering without politicizing or misunderstanding it. One must care about suffering, however one must worry over two things: Why is there suffering? and Who (or what) is causing the suffering? That is the starting point from which every effort must begin.

Simone Weil made me want to be a better person, though she also almost destroyed me. To read her and fully understand her, you become burdoned with guilt--you realize so much of what you're doing is wrong. But this is what makes her such a great writer. She moves you in a way mystics usually cannot.

JPC