Sentences I See as Beautiful: Why?

When I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and Q and S, seem to present themselves again before me as they used to do.

(from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)

This sentence is chock full of exactitude and feeling. The character, David Copperfield, is having an emotion about having learned the alphabet as a child, and we feel that wonder and affection along with him.

The first phrase: "When I look upon the fat black letters in the primer" – the word upon I think adds tenderness, and a prose rhythm that the word at would not--for example, "When I look at the fat black letters"--at would rhyme with fat, ruining it. The word at would flatten the phrase, the rhyme would trivialize it; upon adds depth and largeness. The P in upon is echoed in the word primer, adding relation. The fat black letters have humor and great affection—we can vividly imagine those large, easy to decipher letters.

I love Dickens’ choice of words in the next two phrases: "the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and Q and S". The first has you feel the inside self of a child first becoming aware of the visual aspect of the alphabet. The shapes do not yet mean anything: they are simply shapes. They are strange; they are also fresh, new, exciting—he knows they will, eventually, have great meaning.

Then, "the easy good nature of O and Q and S" is so affectionate towards these letters. I love how Dickens describes these inanimate shapes as having good nature.

The last phrase of the sentence continues the animation of the inanimate as the letters actively want something: to be seen again with wonder--"seem to present themselves again before me as they used to do." It makes the letters seem so loving: they want him to be freshly affected by their depth and meaning.

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem.

(from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy)

I care for the opposites of simplicity and richness, humility and pride in this sentence. Simple repetition of W and R is in was raining and when Rahel. It makes raining and Rahel--which can be seen as standing for the world and self--feel related, friendly.

Humility is in the fact that the rain comes before the person. If Roy had written, “When Rahel came back to Ayemenem, it was raining.” --the sentence would lose its graceful, proud pulse; and it would assert the person before the larger thing: the weather, representing the world.

I think it’s important that the sentence ends with the word Ayemenem--a sensual place name with alternating open vowels and lip consonant M’s surrounding an inside consonant N. It sounds strange and intimate at once, and the sentence ends with mystery. The sentence has a rhythm I like very much.

The consonants C, B and K in came back contrast with the flowing R’s in raining and Rahel. She could have written, “It was raining when Rahel arrived in Ayemenem.” That loses the contrasting sounds, as well as the richly suggestive idea of coming back to a place. We already wonder: Why did she leave in the first place? Why is she coming back now?

Tom was only thirteen and had no decided views in grammar and arithmetic, regarding them for the most part as open questions, but he was particularly clear and positive on one point--namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it; but, then, he never did deserve it.

(from Mill on the Floss by George Eliot)

The opposites of good and evil, innocence and wickedness are in this sentence in such a deep, funny way. In one sentence, we understand the essence of Tom’s character.

The first part of the sentence: Tom was only thirteen-- sets us up to have some warm feelings for a growing boy; he’s only thirteen. We are prepared to cut him some slack due to his age--generally associated with having left childhood but not having entered adulthood, an in-between, confusing time.

We learn that he’s not too interested in his studies: "and had no decided views in grammar and arithmetic,"--still, we aren’t terribly alarmed; it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for a boy of his age to be more interested in things other than grammar and arithmetic. Further, the way he sees grammar and arithmetic--"regarding them for the most part as open questions", is hopeful. Maybe he will be more serious as he matures. We’re still rooting for him.

Then comes the twist: "but he was particularly clear and positive on one point." That is surprising--different from his prior nonchalance. And the point is: "namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it."

Tom, who seemed innocuous, all of sudden becomes a crusader. We don’t know if it’s on behalf of good or his own ego; however, we aren’t left in suspense for long. George Eliot simply gives his point of view, letting us decide for ourselves what we think of it: "why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it; but, then, he never did deserve it."

We see that he feels superior to everyone, tries to act as though he’s not, and is capable of making pious statements while probably being a bully.

Yet we never completely lose the sense of tenderness we felt towards him at the beginning of the sentence. He is a whole person--both good and evil. We feel this because of George Eliot’s style: the order in which she tells the details, the straightforward justification, from Tom’s point of view, of why he punishes people: "he would welcome punishment himself if he deserved it. However, he never did deserve it"--which is funny. It’s evil, but it’s so human to think we are better than everyone else, and fool ourselves about our motives.

George Eliot didn’t write, “It’s very bad of Tom to be so superior and mean.”--she simply let us see it for what it is. I think she can present evil more truly, even humorously, because she believes that truth and goodness are stronger.

The gypsies are leaving.

(from Chocolat by Joanne Harris)

I’m affected by the opposites of simplicity and richness, logic and emotion in this sentence. The sentence is precise and unadorned; however, the repetitive rhythm, abruptly cut off by the period, gives it a sense of momentousness. It is factual, and redolent with possible emotion.

A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in the throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

(from Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser)

In this sentence, Dreiser begins to present a person, Carrie Meeber, who has glimmers of character traits we cannot admire; at the same time, we feel she is a self, a substantial person with thoughts, hopes, and fears--a person not unlike ourselves.

The sentence has the opposites of feeling and fact, everydayness and surprise. We know that she is leaving home, traveling by train (I like the words cars clacked--it sounds like the wheels going on the tracks).

We begin to know Carrie by seeing her reactions to things in the world—important things in a person’s life: her mother, her father, the town in which she grew up. We hear a list of her emotions, and the list rushes by, the way the landscape rushes by as you look out the window of a train. There is her gush of tears over her mother’s kiss; a touch in the throat as she sees the flour mill where her father works; and a pathetic sigh seeing the familiar sights of her hometown.

Then Dreiser writes that all these things are simply threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home. Through that phrase, we infer some coldness in her character, or that perhaps her life has been unlikable to her. As the story unfolds, we find that both of these surmises are true.

We do not feel that Carrie is only cold. Yet we see that her feelings are curtailed, transitory—her tears gush, but don’t continue; she gets just a touch in her throat--not an overmastering emotion; a pathetic sigh does not reflect passionate feeling for a place. We see her as young and unknowing, but sense that she has bigger fish to fry.

I like the metaphor of her being held lightly by threads which are irretrievably broken—we see clearly that she has decided to seek her happiness and fulfillment elsewhere.

I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

(from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain)

What Huck is saying is very painful. At the same time, this has a lovely sound.

The word lonesome has a sound of sadness that goes deep. The word lonely is painful, but it doesn’t have that same drawn-out sound ending with the closed M that lonesome does, giving a sense of a self within. The O and S sounds in so lonesome are yearning.

The last six words: "I most wished I was dead"—have a beautiful rhythm. If Twain had written, “I almost wished I were dead”--that would have ruined it (and wouldn’t sound like Huck.) The O sound in most echoes the O’s in so lonesome. The W’s and SH and S in wished and was are airy, day-dreamy; the word dead feels just the opposite: heavy, weighty, real. The sentence as a whole has both lightness and heaviness.

Never had he called me more frequently to his presence; never been kinder to me when there--and, alas! never had I loved him so well.

(from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte)

The structure of this sentence, with its recurring use of the word never in three different phrases, is beautiful. Never is such an utter word, adding intensity to the emotion she describes; it sounds yearningly assertive, then falls back: ne / ver. It seems to represent both her love and great trepidation: "Never had he called me more frequently to his presence; never been kinder to me when there"--

Then, "and--alas!" stops the sentence in its tracks—the way, in the midst of a happy time, one’s mind can suddenly remember something painful. Meanwhile, the same word, never, begins the last phrase, too: "…and—alas! never had I loved him so well."

Her heartbreak is contained within this one beautifully constructed sentence: she loves him, but circumstances force her not to be with him. The word well has two meanings: it can mean much, or quantity; it also means goodness, or quality. Her emotion about this man is large; it is also good. That adds even more to her, and our, emotion.

She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad.

(from Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers)

I like this sentence because of the truthful description of why this girl hates herself: we feel an authentic 12-year-old self-to-herself. The sentence has a jerky kind of stop and start, ungainliness, like a person not knowing what to do with herself.

First, "She hated herself"—the comma stops us for a breath, and then runs on tauntingly: "and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen." The words loafer and big no-good have humor and a flavor of the South, the 1940’s. Summer kitchen is good: it gives us an immediate sense of time, place, temperature, humidity, even smell.

We cannot help but like her for feeling self-critically that the worst thing a person can be is aimless, without a blazing purpose to make her good, kind, clean, generous, happy. She is just the opposite: dirty, greedy, mean and sad.

McCullers puts and in-between each adjective: dirty and greedy and mean and sad--with no commas. The droning quality of the list of words is like the feeling of being a no-good loafer. However, her list also includes active evil: she is greedy, mean. It shows what Aesthetic Realism explains: If you hate yourself, you will hate the world, and vice versa. You will grab and dismiss, treat people unjustly, undervalue what is around you; and it will make you sad and self-despising.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss

So there I was, riding the subway to work at 8:45 in the morning, and halfway between West 4th Street and 14th Street, I'm laughing out loud while reading a book about grammar! Who would have ever guessed! What a combination: a serious love of grammar and a sense of humor. Author Lynn Truss has both.

I was lucky enough to be present in an Aesthetic Realism class where Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman, discussed this book, and I've just now gotten around to reading it. Ms. Reiss also wrote about it in a commentary to the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (from which I've quoted in earlier entries on this blog.)

If you want to read a definitive article about this book, click here: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/tro/tro1616.html

The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

Reading The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken -- I fell in love with her writing. She's telling the story through the eyes of a librarian. A passage that affected me:

I had a college friend whose parents had an apartment near Central Park. I visited them once a year. They took me to dark wooden restaurants, to museums and concerts. The colors of everything from the red flannel hash to the faded brownstones were beautiful, and I was filled with the sort of longing a particularly handsome man in a black and white movie can induce, a longing so intense and fruitless that it feels like nostalgia.

What I did not take into account was that it was spring and my friend's family was rich. Enough fine weather and money and a few memorable meals make any place desirable. As soon as I realized that, New York lost much of its charm for me.

So I resolved to look at the city differently this time. I would be a simple, easily dazzled tourist. I planned to crave hot dogs and roasted chestnuts from the street. I wanted to visit the zoo in Central Park. In short, I was traveling with a nineteen-year-old boy, and I intended to tour the city indulging nineteen-year-old taste.

This passage has wonder, gloominess, hopefulness and humor. I think that's a very unusual and strangely pleasing combination of emotions.

The Serious Kiss by Mary Hogan

As promised to my 12-year-old daughter, and to you, dear readers of this blog, whoever you are, I read The Serious Kiss by Mary Hogan, which, if you haven't been following the other entries here, is a book in the "young adult" category highly recommended to me by two readers of that ilk.

So here are some of my thoughts about The Serious Kiss, a title that gave me a serious pang when I saw my daughter reading it.

First of all, let's talk for a minute about the fact that the editor/publisher (I suppose the author could have asked for it, but I really doubt it) chose to have on the cover a photograph of a Chihuahua (--that would be the main character's family pet, Juan Dog) with a big red lipstick kiss imprint on his cheek. Now, number one: Juan Dog is not the main character in the book, though his "yip yip" does punctuate a lot of the dialogue. Number two: the photograph makes his head looks bigger than his body, and, combined with the lipstick kiss on his cheek, one gets a comedic impression. This book is not comedic.

At its best, The Serious Kiss has a quiet kind of humor. The humor arises out of situations containing characters--and I'm talking mainly about the parents--that are so awful, so mixed up, so repulsive and pathetic, that you thank God there is occasionally some vestige of humor in relation to them. Generally speaking, the family life of the protagonist, 14-year-old Libby, is painful--at times terrifying. It's about alcoholism, and bankruptcy, and weight problems and fury within a family. So this cover is just wrong. Maybe it sells books, but it was a bad choice. You can't tell a book by its cover? True, but in my opinion there should be an attempt to have on the outside something that represents the feeling of the book on the inside, especially when it's written for this age group. I don't know why I say "especially" this age group-- everyone wants sincerety.

All right, enough about the cover: on to the story, and the writing.

I think the reason my daughter and her friend like this book is illuminated by this question of Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism:

Is this true: no matter how much of a case one has against the world, its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness--one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

In the story, Libby is up against a very great deal of unkindness, disorder, ugliness, and what she could--and does--use to feel the world is meaningless. The upshot of the story is that she comes to like things she never thought she would, be friends with new and different kinds of people. She also becomes deeper about the inside-selves of her family members. And that's a very good thing.

The plot of The Serious Kiss is described by the School Library Journal as follows:

"Fourteen-year-old Libby Madrigal's biggest fear is becoming her parents; her father drinks too much, and her mother is an obese fast-food junkie, and they fight constantly. Bringing friends home is nearly impossible. Still, Libby tries to focus on her freshman-year goal: to have a serious kiss. This becomes more difficult when her father loses his job and the family moves to Barstow, CA, to live with Libby's grandmother, who the teen thought had passed away years ago. Living in a retirement trailer-park community in the middle of the desert is bad enough; to make matters worse, the kids at Libby's new school are cruel. Just as she thinks her life is over, her grandmother gives her some good advice that she heeds, and she begins to see the world in a whole new light."

How a person sees the world is something Aesthetic Realism has been discussing and explaining for many, many years. Whether Libby begins to see the world in a whole new light is debatable, because, honestly, that takes education. You need principles on which to base a change that large--and Aesthetic Realism provides them. Meanwhile, I don't want to minimize the good changes in Libby.

Libby's grandmother ("Nana") is the pivotal character in the story--the one who ultimately makes Libby change for the better. I was moved to tears in a section towards the end where Nana encourages people, including everyone in Libby's family, to express their gratitude during a sort of wacky Chinese food Thanksgiving dinner she has organized for the senior citizens in her trailer park.

Libby's grandmother tells her to stop trying to control everything so much, and to "let life's flow carry you along in the current." And the author has a good time with the idea of "going with the flow" as one opposite without its other opposite, discipline, or order. For example:

"You're going to school?" Mom asked.
"I doubt it." At Nana's breakfast table, I was devouring Cajun sausages and poached eggs.
"Let me rephrase that," Mom said. "You're going to school."
I looked up from my plate. "How can I let life flow in the confines of high school?"
Mom's face knotted itself into a mixture of exasperation and bewilderment. She said, "All I know is, you're going to flow your duff right onto that bus today. And you have twenty minutes to get ready."
Life told me I ought to listen to my mother or else.

Now to my criticism of the book, or an attempt at it, anyway.

My objections have to do with how the opposites of the disgusting and the likable, and pleasure and pain, are not together well in the story. I felt disgusted and kind of sick throughout the first half, and it wasn't until the very end that things suddenly picked up. It was jarring.

I thought Libby's parents were portrayed as ugly caricatures. One could argue that the story is told through the eyes of this 14-year-old girl, and the author is showing that that's how Libby sees her parents at this point in her life--as horrible people. And they do some horrible things that nobody could like, that's for sure.

But why is it that in a story like Jane Eyre, for instance, told in the first person through the eyes of a young girl--just as The Serious Kiss is--Jane describes despicable family members (her Aunt Reid is one of the terrors in all of literature), and yet you have a larger emotion about reality through her description?

Here's a passage from Jane Eyre after Mrs. Reid has locked Jane in a room all night for supposedly hitting her son. Jane screams and the maids come to see what's wrong with her. Mrs. Reid shows up, and says:

"Abbott and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left in the red room till I came to her myself."

"Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma'am," pleaded Bessie.

"Let her go," was the only answer. "Loose Bessie's hand, child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then."

"Oh Aunt, have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it--let me be punished some other way! I shall be killed if--"

"Silence! This violence is all most repulsive," and so, no doubt, she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes: she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.

Even as her Aunt is presented through the dialogue as clearly despicable, Jane, as narrator, (and she's younger than 14 here -- probably about 8 or 9) is able to see that Mrs. Reid really thinks that Jane is a bad person, and that's the reason for her acting the way she does. There is a vein of kindness in the description, even as we know very clearly that Jane is rightly repulsed by her--Mrs. Reid is an unjust person. It's that ability of Jane to see through the eyes of Mrs. Reid--"I was a precocious actress in her eyes"--that causes you to feel there's something understandable here. And the fact that Jane can see this makes you love Jane, and you have a warm emotion about reality through her.

Now here's a passage from The Serious Kiss where we're introduced to Libby's mother:

"Now, Elizabeth," Mom pounded my door one last time. I groaned. "I gotta go, Nadine," I said into the phone. "E-mail me later?" "Yeah. Later."

I hung up, fluffed my flattened hair, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Rif slithered in behind me smelling of burned hair gel.

"It's Libby, Mom," I said, rolling my eyes.

"Whatever," she said, rolling her eyes right back at me. Mom shoved a stray strand of her cottony overbleached hair back into the cat fight she calls a hairstyle. She tugged on her too-tight orange skirt, applied a new layer of magenta lipstick over the faded old one, removed black eyeliner goop from the corners of her green eyes, and tottered around the kitchen on spiked heels way too high for a woman of her age and heft. I'm not talking stare-at-you-in-the-mall quantities of fat, but my mother definitely hasn't seen her feet, or how sausage-like they look shoved into those strappy high heels, for quite a while. It's hard to believe I came out of this person. My hair is long and brown and shiny. My eyes are blue. I've never worn any makeup, unless you consider Vaseline lip gloss.

Libby's description of her mother is a cartoon character, not a real person. And then, after describing how repulsive her mother is, she tells us how superior she is: she can't believe she came out of this person, and she's so much prettier, and she's natural, not fake like her mother.

This is ordinary and life-like contempt, and there's not a feeling that there's anything wrong with it--no misgivings on Libby's part, and it's not in keeping with her earlier description of herself as "a knotted mass of anxiety, a walking cold sweat."

It's true that people can be inferior one minute, and superior the next, but in literature, you want those opposites to be presented in a way that makes you feel the world has more meaning, more coherence, more form--not for the author just to say, "See how selfish, inconsistent and narrow teenagers can be?" and then go on as though that's just fine and dandy, even admirable. Should the readers feel, "Wow, what a pig of a mother!" and chuckle away? Is that really what will have them see their own mothers better, including mothers who are far from perfect, which is every mother?

Clearly, the author wants Libby eventually to stop being so self-centered, and for her to see her parents better, because by the end of the book there are passages showing she is seeing new meaning in both them and the world outside herself. And a very important detail is that the boy from whom she was hoping to get that all-important serious kiss ends up being a means of her seeing more meaning in things, including the desert earth of Barstow, California, and other cultures.

Alcoholism is a subject that affects many young persons and their families, and I don't want to lessen in any way the fact that Mary Hogan is trying to say, "Look, this is how it can be in a family where a father is alcoholic--it's rough; and this is how it can change." That is a useful purpose in writing a book, and if perhaps she was using experiences from her own life, she was trying to give form to something very personally painful. Wanting to make art out of one's pain is an admirable desire. I hope that her writing gets to a deeper truthfulness and courage in her future books.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch; or, The Case of the Missing Semicolon

I'm undecided about whether I like this novel or not. I hate being undecided; it's so uncomfortable. I'd much rather have a strong opinion backed up with clear examples. However, I've seen that being honestly undecided is vastly preferable to making a premature, inaccurate decision just so I can feel comfortable. Hopefully, the longer I try to describe what I feel about White Oleander, the clearer I'll get.

My paperback copy is a fairly hefty 446 pages, but it didn't seem long because the story is enthralling. I found myself reading it late at night, and on every subway and bus trip that I could, until I finished it. It's written in the first person, through the eyes of a young girl, Astrid, who goes from age 12 to about 21 in the course of the book. Her mother, Ingrid, commits a murder and is put in prison. Without any other relatives to live with (that fact was never wholly explained, I don't think), she begins to live in a series of foster homes. Each place she goes, she meets both good and evil, and she begins to recognize those two opposites in herself as well, vividly.

Astrid is desperately confused and angry, but through the art of drawing she tries to see the form, the structure in things around her, and it keeps her sane. Aesthetic Realism explains that art is the greatest opponent to contempt. It stands for our deep desire to like the world through knowing it. In an issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, editor Ellen Reiss writes:

How our minds fare, how our lives fare, depends on whether we are honestly using ourselves to care for what's not ourselves, the world....Trying to like the world is the most critical procedure of the human self. It is the desire to see things and people truly, and value them truly.

As Astrid draws, she's trying to care for what is not herself.

Throughout the story, Astrid learns about other people's lives, about sex, and money, and men, and so much more. She's in a raging battle about whether to be kind, to have more feeling for things and people, to see meaning in things, or to grow harder, more scornful and hopeless. Her mother, Ingrid, is a study in evil and how contempt can show itself--she is a so-called "poet" who has no tolerance for anything but "beauty," and who wants to possess her daughter utterly.

The tone of White Oleander is dark, foreboding; there's a sense of chaos lurking under smooth surfaces, and then real horrors happen in spurts. It's a tough read. At one point, I had to put it down and recuperate before reading more. The setting--Los Angeles, and its environs--mingles hauntingly with the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and in that way, it brings to mind Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. In White Oleander, instead of the moors, it's the hot Santa Ana winds, the smell of forest fires, descriptions of specific neighborhoods, the wind through palm trees, and the oleander bush with its pretty yet poisonous flowers.

Having grown up in a suburb of Los Angeles, these sights and smells and sounds were familiar to me. Unfortunately, my first reaction was: "How could anyone see that part of the country as interesting enough to set a whole novel there?"

Whoa! That really illustrates the old adage "familiarity breeds contempt." I'm glad to tell you, I quickly saw the error of my ways there! I respect Janet Fitch for looking at things in California so intensely, and wanting to describe them. It made me ashamed of myself for being so dismissing of the place in which I grew up. I learned things about California, and thought about it freshly through this book. It made me want to look at what's around me with new eyes, and for that I'm very grateful.

The way Janet Fitch uses words I sometimes like, and sometimes don't. Sometimes the imagery has that electric zing of something seen or felt honestly. At other times it seems contrived--for instance, "But the sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath." Or: "To me this rock [music] was just more faceless sex in a man's world, up against a concrete wall behind bathrooms. Give me a Satie tone poem like light on a Monet haystack, or Brazilian Astrud like a Matisse line. Let me lie down in a half-shuttered room in the south of France with Matisse and the soft flutter of heavy-feathered white doves, their mild calls."

Now here is a sentence I like where the simile is pleasing, and has humor:

I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper.

That's a very un-Emily Bronte sentence. It's something to think of all the objects writers can get into their sentences that didn't exist in the 19th century-- like Tropic Tan suntan oil and cupcake papers. Maybe there were cupcake papers in the 19th century. Somehow I can't picture the Brontes having any at Haworth Parsonage. In any case, to have a character "happy as a cupcake in frilled paper" in this dark, often frightening story, was a nice surprise.

Now I'm going to complain about grammar even as I'm in process of learning about it myself. The way Ms. Fitch uses commas drives me batty. Since when can independent clauses be separated by commas all the way through a book? I would have forgiven it one or two times, but on practically every page? Whatever happened to good old semicolons, or coordinating conjunctions? I would have loved to see a dash, or even a colon once in a while. Why did her editors let her do this? I felt like I was getting the message from her as author: "I want to write this way, so I will. I know it's not grammatically correct, but I feel like doing it, okay? It's my book, so deal with it!" Or, to put it her way, "I will write sans semicolons, I like to do that."

The most likely reason for the lack of semicolons is that she purposefully wanted her sentences to have a stream of consciousness quality. We're supposed to feel like we're hearing the unedited thoughts of a teenage girl. At this very moment, I must quote something else that Ellen Reiss wrote about semicolons and grammar in another issue of The Right Of because it's so relevant and useful here. She wrote about Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation:

Lynne Truss asks about punctuation, "Why is it so disregarded?" And she says, "The obvious culprit is the recent history of education practice" (p. 13). But the biggest culprit is the thing in the human self which Mr. Siegel identified as the cause of all injustice: contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." What Ms. Truss and others don't see is that justice to the structure of sentences is part of the large matter of justice as such. We can be uninterested in the function of semi-colons for the same reason that we can be uninterested in algebra; or the history of art; or the feelings of a human being.

And Ms. Reiss describes how people critical of inaccurate grammar (what Lynne Truss calls being a "stickler") can feel, not superior, but related--and I'm listening up here:

A person who insists on accurate punctuation would not see herself as a stickler--would feel she was after something large and kind--if she felt the following, for example: As I'm interested in how the semicolon shows that clauses are at once individual and related, I'm using it to be interested in accuracy about possession or ownership as such--how have I wanted to possess things and people?; how and by whom should the world itself be owned? Aesthetic Realism makes such seeing, such feeling, possible.

I find it thrilling to see that grammar says something about life, about ourselves. This is how we should all learn about grammar from the time we're elementary-schoolers.

The very subject Ms. Reiss writes about in relation to semicolons, possession, and the opposites she describes in punctuation as such, individual and relation, are, I believe, what this book is deeply about. Ingrid's desire to possess Astrid is the cause of the main conflict in the story. Astrid is trying to break free from her mother's influence, and find out how to be an individual through the various relations to the world she has, and meets.

The question I keep coming back to is: Did this book essentially encourage me to like the world more, or less? I still don't know. The ending was unsatisfying, and left me feeling that the author was unsure about the meaning of her story.

This book affected me a great deal, and I'm going to keep thinking about it.

"Young adult" fiction

I try to keep up, to a small degree, with what is called "young adult” fiction or, shortened, "YA." It's overwhelming. There's an ocean of YA books out there; it's become a genre unto itself. I didn't even know this genre existed until about a year or so ago when a teacher in a course I was taking said I should write Young Adult fiction because my writing seemed to fit into that category. (Is that a good thing? Still finding out....!)

One of the reasons I value studying the philosophy Aesthetic Realism is that it shows the questions of people at different ages aren't drastically unalike. In truth, they're more the same. At our cores, we're all trying to like the world and people, and we all have a desire to have contempt for the world and people. These two drives can show themselves differently, perhaps, at certain ages, but they are the universal opposites in our selves, present every moment of our lives. Knowing this has benefited me in many ways, including as a parent.

Meanwhile, this brings me to the question: Is it useful to have a specific category of books for Young Adults? Shouldn't authors try to write well, and let whoever wants to read their books, read them? On the other hand, what’s so bad about there being a Young Adult section in the bookstore or library? It narrows down the choices more quickly, and supposedly contains books that hold a particular interest for that age group.

I’ve noticed bookstores' YA sections leave out many classic favorites like Little Women and Black Beauty—you have to go to the children’s classics section to get those. And what self-respecting 13-year-old is going to browse for books in the children’s section? So in that way, this categorizing of books is very limiting. Libraries do a much better job than bookstores in terms of their selections for young adults. That’s probably because librarians actually read the books and have a desire to have a good effect on the readers; their purpose isn't to make money off of them.

In any case, since I live with a person who now technically falls into this "young adult" division, I try to read what she likes, and what I hear other 11-15 year olds being enthusiastic about. Recently I read The Giver by Lois Lowry, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, All-American Girl by Meg Cabot; I also re-read the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

On the waiting list is The Serious Kiss by Mary Hogan, which has on its bright yellow cover a moist-eyed Chihuahua with a big red lipstick imprint kiss on his/her face ("Mom, you have to read this!") The title--and the Chihuahua--give me pause. (Mom-self: "Where did you get this book, and what's it about!?") But I'm assured it's really, really good and very appropriate, and just read it, okay? Okay... I'll keep you posted.

Going on with my recent YA reading experiences...

I forgot I was reading "YA" fiction during To Kill a Mockingbird and The Outsiders because they are engrossing, well-written stories with living, memorable characters. They're both about big ethical matters, and they make for large emotions. My colleague and friend, high school English teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate, Leila Rosen, has written importantly about To Kill a Mockingbird, and in particular, the character of Scout; you can read what she wrote here.

I care very much for The Outsiders. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, it is written in the first person; in this case, the narrator is PonyBoy, age 14. The book has vivid characters, and a compelling story: it’s about contempt and respect so much, as it chronicles the fight between the "Soc's" (pronounced "Sosh's" as in "social") and the "Greasers." It was written by a young woman while in high school, and I respect very much her desire to become the main characters in this book--who happen to be the opposite sex--and for her ability to write a gripping narrative and believable dialogue.

I could be wrong, but I have a notion these two books--To Kill a Mockingbird and The Outsiders--are more enduring favorites of young adults than many others specifically written for this genre. "Regular" adults (for lack of a better word because I don't want to say "old adults") care for them very much, too.

I was always aware that I was reading a YA book during All-American Girl and The Giver. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them.

The Giver (assigned reading in the sixth grade Language Arts class) is very taking, and I liked it. It's written in the third person. The publisher describes the plot this way: “Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.”

The Giver is about tremendously important opposites: individuality and relation; pleasure and pain; coldness and warmth in ourselves—and what it means to be truly happy and expressed. It is ordinary and bizarre in a way that keeps you turning the pages. Ultimately, however, the action of the plot becomes more important than the characters. And it's a very imaginative and fascinating plot, but I think because the characters aren't deep enough, it wasn't wholly satisfying. I respect Lois Lowry’s tight yet vivid writing. The book even tries to convey a message (gasp! fiction writers are supposed to eschew messages--fie on messages! just write the story and let the message take care of itself!) -- that being, You should consider whether having the freedom to make choices and have passionate feelings is good for you, or not.

All-American Girl is a comedic novel written in the first person, somewhat like journal entries, with a barely believable—alright, not believable, just fun to imagine--plot. A 14-year-old girl saves the President from getting assassinated and then gets appointed teen ambassador to the U.N. and gains the love of the President’s handsome son, and realizes she's been idolizing a fake "artistic soul" in another young man, her older sister's boyfriend. In it, author Meg Cabot tries to mirror various contemporary teenage ways of talking and doing things. Her ongoing descriptions of the food preferences of a young adult were hilariously true to life as I’ve lived it with a younger version of her main character, Samantha.

Maybe in 100 years, a book like this will be seen as something of a reference guide to how teenagers talked and behaved in the 2000’s. However, though entertaining and clever in a good way at times, it’s clever in a not-good way too many times, and wears thin. (I’m not saying I can do any better—ah, how easy it is to criticize others!)

I respected her grappling in the story about what art is--in this case, drawing: what does it mean to see something? And I did learn a lot about current topics of interest to teenagers that I wouldn’t have been aware of without reading it. The continuity of all the situations seen through the eyes of this one particular girl was quite good, and there was some attempt at authenticity. It made me laugh out loud in parts. Still, I wanted it to mean more—to be less cliché and more critical (though it was mildly critical of politics, the press, and various superficial values). Okay, I admit it: I wanted it to have a clearer message! I’m not putting it on my recommended reading list for adults—young, or regular.

Read this inspiring article about reading and "young adults": Teaching Language Arts through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method by writer, teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate Avi Gvili.

What is it about that book?

Marjorie Morningstar to me is what a novel I want to write should be like. It's got characters I believe in--the main character wants to be an actress (hmmm...major clue as to why I relate so much to the story). A plot that's everyday and extraordinary. Highs and lows. Hilarious and tragic--makes me laugh, makes me cry, keeps me turning those pages. And it lasts a long, long time. My paperback copy has a delicious 565 pages.

The main character, Marjorie, grows up and by the end of the book, you've lived through a lot of her lifetime with her. You've been there for the ride. And it feels good--it feels right. It feels familiar--you know this person, you've known her a long time. She and her fellow characters have become deep friends. Though mainly set in the 1930's through the 1950's in New York City, this book feels wonderfully right now every time I read it. Some would disagree--I know some people feel it presents a very un-liberated view of women, particularly with regards to sex. Well, that may be. Sex is undoubtedly talked about more openly now than it was in the 1930's-50's.

(In a surprising twist to the complaint that Marjorie Morningstar presents an outdated version of women's questions, in another book I've been reading, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas, she writes that "A graduate of Hunter College cited Marjorie Morningstar as one...text [that played a key role in convincing some college girls to shed their virginity.] 'I suspect Herman Wouk would be somewhat upset if he realized how many nice middle-class Jewish girls lost their virginity because of him... Silly as it sounds, I know for sure at least three girls who gave up the good fight just to prove they weren't Marjories.'")

However, I think the reason this book stays very much alive is because it's about universal human emotions. And the questions about sex, and how men and women see each other, and ambition, conceit, pride, vanity, the desire for love, the desire to be expressed--these topics burningly persist, no matter which decade you grow up in. This book is ultimately about wanting to like the world, and also wanting to have contempt for the world--the basic fight in the human self, which Aesthetic Realism makes clear.

The fight between wanting to like the world, and wanting to have contempt for it, is shown convincingly in Marjorie, but also in her mother, her father, her uncle, Noel Airman, Marsha Zelenko, and many more characters. That's why it still holds up as a good read in 2005.

More thoughts on Carson McCullers

I think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the work of a person who wanted to go deeper into the selves of others, and was trying to be unafraid and courageous and large. I loved the characters and didn't want the book to end. I especially loved the parts about Doctor Copeland but I relate in different ways to each main character. Bubber/George is a very interesting character--something of a precursor to John Henry in The Member of the Wedding, just as Mick is a precursor of Frankie Addams.

And Portia is like Berenice a little bit--although I'm affected by the clear portraits of both of them. Carson McCullers obviously had a deep love for black persons. She saw them as good and bad, honorable and dishonorable, kind and mixed up. She didn't gloss the opposites in them and you come out caring deeply for them. The same is true for her white characters. She gave herself in a big-time way to getting inside the feelings of other people. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that wanting honestly to see what other people feel is the beginning of all kindness; it's an art way of seeing that we can have in our everyday lives. And there's a strong sense of the art purpose being on behalf of ethics in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

To read more about the relation of art and ethics, here is a link to a thrilling issue of the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

I think Carson McCullers has been undervalued. She should be seen as one of our great American writers. From what I've seen, she gets categorized as a "Southern writer," along with persons such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner--illustrious company, to be sure. But I feel it's a mistake to categorize writers. They should be valued individually for what they are trying to say and how they say it.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers is one of my favorite novelists. I particularly love The Member of the Wedding. However, the first book she wrote, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I also care for very much, and I’ve studied it in relation to Aesthetic Realism principles--which always makes one value something even more.

Set during the 1930’s in a small Georgia mill town, four main characters individually tell their innermost thoughts to a deaf mute named John Singer, who reads their lips. He’s the one person who seems to pay attention to what they feel, but none of them pay attention to what he really feels. The book is about the fact that we can yearn for attention, demand that our thoughts to be known, while completely missing the fact that other people are also yearning to be known. Then something can happen that causes us to feel, “My God! I didn’t know this person! I was so wrapped up in myself that I didn’t pay attention to what he was going through!”

“We are in the world, sleeping or waking, to look at it, to be attentive to it all the time,” Mr. Siegel said in his definitive lecture Mind and Attention. And he continued:

"The purpose of attention is to see a thing as it is, wholly as it is, cheerfully as it is, courageously as it is, and not let what it is be interfered with by some [thing in] ourselves. "

That thing, I’ve learned, is contempt, the desire to get a “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not ourselves.” Contempt says nothing is worthy of our attention, or we should be the one object of attention; it’s the largest impediment to seeing “a thing as it is, wholly as it is, cheerfully as it is, courageously as it is.”

One of the characters that talk to Mr. Singer is Mick Kelly, age 13; she is a study in the drama of giving and getting attention. Mick’s family is large and poor; her parents run a boardinghouse where John Singer lives. A tomboyish girl with a passionate interest in music, Mick is spending the summer taking care of Bubber, her 7-year-old brother (whose real name is George,) and pulling the baby, Ralph, around in a wagon--wandering around town by day, listening to music on the radio at night, visiting with Mr. Singer, talking about her plans.

Mick has two distinct notions of what it means to take care of herself. One part of her has a large hope to respect reality through music. McCullers writes:

“Something she could hum in two minutes meant a whole week’s work before it was down in the notebook—after she had figured up the scale and the time and every note. She had to concentrate hard and sing it many times.”

But though she pays attention to music and loves it very much, she wants to think of nothing else—she shuts out the rest of the world. One day while babysitting her brothers, she leaves them under a tree and climbs onto the roof of a new home under construction, daydreaming there about Mozart and melodies, until the baby begins to cry. Not wanting to leave her own thoughts, she hollers down to Bubber, “See what Ralph wants and give it to him.”

This is a common mistake about attention: we can be very focused on a praiseworthy subject, but we can use it to be unfair to other things. I’ve learned from Aesthetic Realism that we need to ask, “Am I using my attention to this thing to be welcoming of reality’s surprising nooks and crannies, its other requests of me? Or am I making an exclusive world unto myself focusing on this one thing, and getting angry whenever someone or something asks more of me?” Because life has a way of being very unpredictable, if we’re not hoping to be fair to things as such--come what may--we’ll be constantly angry, frustrated, overwhelmed.

Carson McCullers gave respectful attention to big matters when she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The novel contains other vivid characters with dialogue and storylines showing clearly her stand against racism and its horrifying effects, and what she saw as the rottenness at the basis of profit economics. I respect her very much for trying to give artistic form in this novel to injustices she witnessed growing up in Georgia.

Read from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known "Mind and Attention" by Eli Siegel

Why I Love to Read

My blog is about the happiness it is to use one’s mind energetically and thoughtfully to see people and things the way a novelist sees--something the philosophy I study--Aesthetic Realism, founded by the American poet and critic, Eli Siegel--makes possible for every person. Aesthetic Realism shows every person’s deepest, most insistent desire is to like the whole world, not just aspects of it; we want to see meaning in everything, to respect things and people as much as we can. Reading is a vital means of liking the world honestly through having greater emotions and thoughts about it.

Aesthetic Realism explains too what stops us from seeing meaning in things--it's contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” For instance, when we sum things up and say, "That's all I need to know about that," we're having contempt--and it's anti-reading, anti-art in general, and anti-life. Knowing this makes a difference in the choices a person is able to make--it certainly made a difference in my life. Here's a link to the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City so you can find out more about Aesthetic Realism.

Here's something Eli Siegel wrote about books that I think is true. This is from his book Children's Guide to Parents and Other Matters:

“Every time you read a book, someone else’s feelings meet yours, and mix with yours. You are always being affected by other people’s feelings; but books are the big way of bringing to a person the feelings he might never have otherwise…Books can show that life can make sense, while it makes you wonder, and think, and hope, and see what is right under your feet.”

The technical aspects of writing--grammar and composition--are also a means of respecting the world more, and I'm studying them now.

I love George Eliot's writing. I recently read Silas Marner, which, from one point of view, is very simple and short compared to Adam Bede (one of my all-time favorite books), or Middlemarch. However, the story she tells in Silas Marner is so compelling and strange that you can't stop reading it--it's gripping and very moving. It made me laugh and cry, both--especially at the end. This book really brought feelings to me that I never would have had otherwise, as Mr. Siegel describes.

First, about Eliot's writing--her sentence structures tend to be more complex than simple. For example, this is the first sentence of Silas Marner:

"In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. "

I'm thrilled by George Eliot's use of inverted sentence structure here, and also the periodic sentence. She packs an enormous amount of information into this one sentence. We get a sense of the time in which the story will take place; the people of the time, the great ladies and how they dressed, and the brawny country-folk; we get the beginning of a picture of the countryside; and an introduction to the main character, Silas Marner--even a description of what he looks like, pallid and undersized.

The most important information, the central character's personality and problem--Silas Marner's lonely, bitter separateness from the rest of humanity--are defined in the last words of the sentence: "remnants of a disinherited race." Wow! As I analyze this first sentence of the book, I am even more amazed by and respectful of George Eliot's writing than I was when I first began writing this.