memento mori

yes! here’s some unashamedly socialist reading, i.e. novels about class struggle and collective action and meaningful revolution and the merciless horrors of capitalism and oppression and inequality: 

peter abrahams, mine boy and this island now

robert tressel, the ragged-trousered philanthropists

david peace, gb84

mcarthur & long, no mean city

christina garcia, the aguero sisters

ngūgī wa thiong’o, petals of blood and weep not, child

sembene ousmane, god’s bits of wood 

toni morrison, tar baby 

lewis jones, cwmardy & we live

tom wolfe, bonfire of the vanities

john steinbeck, grapes of wrath

pat barker, union street

marge piercy, woman on the edge of time

george orwell, homage to catalonia (alright, not a novel)

marjane satrapi, persepolis

emile zola, germinal 

jack london, the iron heel

ian watson, slow birds

octavia e. butler, parable of the sower & parable of the talents

gioconda belli, the inhabited woman

terry bisson, fire on the mountain

novels about philosophy more generally:

(an anon asked me for books with the atmosphere of a gregorian chant; most are philosophical in some way.)

jostein gaarder, sophie’s world; also the solitaire mystery

terry pratchett, small gods (but really, all discworld novels)

lewis carroll, alice’s adventures in wonderland (esp. the annotated edition)

iris murdoch, the book and the brotherhood and the black prince and under the net

philip k. dick, do androids dream of electric sheep and ubik and the three stigmata of palmer eldritch and valis

fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet

naguib mahfouz, the cairo trilogy, especially sugar street

samuel beckett, watt; molloy, malone dies, the unnameable 

hofstadter & dennett, the mind’s i (a collection of writings on consciousness; includes fiction)

john williams, stoner

roberto calasso, ka

jorge luis borges, labyrinths

milan kundera, the unbearable lightness of being

harry mulisch, the discovery of heaven

john barth, the end of the road

I. luxuria.  the light has been coming in for an hour, a pale heat across your shoulders. his face is gentle but your skin remembers his cardinal mouth and his teeth. when he wakes, his fingers will murmur at your nape and down your soft-strung spine, and he’ll say, with the grin of the living, more?

II. gula.  there are parties with champagne that tastes as light as laughing; and too much bread and coffee on mornings after; sticky sugared slices of apple pie in a corner cafe; pad thai in hot brown paper, shared while your soul grows fat with love; and the clattering feasts of many brought under one roof: when the evening draws down and the night presses at our windows, we come, we sit, we eat.

III. invidia. the water on the window draws cuneiform glyphs, and you are making coffee and listening to her sing, low and sweet as rain. in a while he will come in, wet and rowdy, and touch her with hands you have failed to hate, and break the pane of this quiet thing—but not yet, not yet.

IV. acedia.  you sleep and sleep, and wake with grey head and bones. the day is lead and sickened, and there are shadows on the surface of things. you falter between the hours. it’s a haunt you’ve seen in other faces, before the bearer stows it away, and the words clutter on your tongue—you too?

V. avaritia.  —not yet enough of a sunset after rain and saffron-lit pavements, a hundred evening voices, warm hand tugging your hand, a violin played underground for coins, a train-car and the ghosts that faces wear, all the dark and patient streets to your house, a quarter-moon and silvering air, a scarf unwound red in a hallway, perfume faded on wrists, and your fingers in black hair. you don’t know if you’re hollow or heavy with longing. you have always been hungry. 

VI. ira.  after he hurts her, you take her to the hospital. you take her ten roads home. you bring her books and sweet-williams. you wait. on the sixth day she calls: not enough evidence. her voice is colourless. on the ninth day you see him in a courtyard—you are shouting, and startled to find his blood on your hand. when she asks you about it her mouth lifts, briefly.

The Bible is difficult to talk about as a work, because it’s so vast and diverse, stitched together from poetry, philosophy, prophecy, mythology, allegory, history, genealogy, and biography. And when I think about the Bible as literature, I’m mostly referring to the King James Version (KJV), which is a beautiful and strange work compiled over seven years by forty-seven scholars and holy men, and probably the single most influential book in the English language. 

(All we know of its creation is that there were endless disputes, “many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition”; imagine shouting and pounding on tables and clergymen in ruffs and gowns storming out.) A book written by committee should be terrible and compromised, but it isn’t—it’s full of drama and majesty: “In the beginning God created the Heaven, and the Earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters…”

The translators avoided common idiom, because they knew it would quickly sound dated—the antiquated language is deliberate, as are the repetitions and heavy pauses. I love its strangeness: the odd punctuation, unexpected pronouns (“Our Father, which art in heaven”), the verbs that end in “-eth” (“in the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut downe, and withereth”), the archaisms (“yea, verily” went out of fashion fifty years before it was published; “you” was being used in the singular but the writers chose to use “thee/thou”), and gratuitous use of polysyllabic Latinate words (“iniquity”, “tribulation”, “countenance”).  

Many of its idioms endure in the marrow of our common language: sour grapes and fight the good fight and through a glass darkly and how are the mighty fallen and no peace for the wicked and the salt of the earth and filthy lucre and vanity of vanities and vengeance is mine and a thief in the night. It makes uncanny ways in your mind like Shakespeare does—and, incidentally, much of it is iambic pentameter (“the flood was forty days upon the earth”). It baffles our concepts of origin and authorship; it has so many textures and voices. The Book of Job is beautiful, vast: “Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” The Psalms speak simply, and unfold in incantatory rhythm, e.g. Psalm 139, best known as “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me”. The Song of Solomon is joyful and wild and erotic—“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine”—and also very strange (“thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins”). 

Well—because the human mind abhors a vacuum: it sees a blank canvas, and rushes to fill it.

Humans are oceanic: below the surface of you there are crowding shoals of impulse and thought, obscure until drawn up to where the nets of your perception can sift them. You experience yourself as vast. The stories you tell of yourself are partial, inadequate—because the enormity of all that you are is too much to be reckoned, a deep and unvoiced otherness you could drown in. 

And we project that confrontation onto the cosmos, as stories. Space is the blank canvas that invites and confounds us because it’s vast beyond compassing: gulfs of swallowing dark, strewn with bright and silent and awful giants. Our stories about space are nets cast into an ocean, candles shone upon the abyssal. We gather the wild reefs of stars into the serene carvings of constellations, we give a name to every astral body, we build maps and models and metaphors. We detect a comet’s subaudible magnetic oscillations and say that it is singing. Often the stories we tell reveal more about us than the objects they describe.

In many stories venturing into space is a journey inward, into the unmapped territories of human souls. In our stories, space is never only empty: it’s transcendence, potential, intention, indifference, infinity, terror, wonder, loss, divinity, and all that we can’t perceive but believe to exist. It’s the unbridgeable distances between us, and our doomed but fullhearted endeavours to reach each other, mind to mind. And stories which paint structures and images upon space are also stories about art and the act of creation and giving order to chaos—and about our own improbable coming-into-being. 

We can’t experience space in its nakedness and vastness—it’s cold and airless and inhospitable, the exposure would be overwhelming, annihilating. We need structures and metal inches to protect us from the abyss. So stories are like the spaceships we send up: they represent our ambition and curiosity and striving, our efforts to make space knowable, bearable; they also force us to recognise how fragile those efforts are, how dwarfed they are by what they try to describe.   

i tried for five there was an honest effort to choose only five and it lasted about eight seconds

seamus heaney, “north” (x)

marina tsvetaeva, “poems for moscow” (x)

w.h. auden, “musee des beaux arts” (x)

derek walcott, “midsummer, tobago” (x)

lewis carroll, “the walrus and the carpenter” (x)

james wright, “a blessing” (x)

alexander pushkin, “the prophet” (x)

dante alighieri, inferno

nadine sabra meyer, “invocation: a fragment” (x)

william blake, “jerusalem: the emanation of great albion” (x)

sappho, “fragment 94”

paul celan, “death-fugue” (x)

philip larkin, “bridge for the living” (x)

kim addonizio, “for you” (x)

arthur rimbaud, “barbarian” (x)

w.b. yeats, “the second coming” (x)

kay ryan, “stardust” (x)

wilfred owen, “dulce et decorum est”

geoffrey hill, “tenebrae” (x)

h.d., eideolon (book iii section vii (x))

pablo neruda, “sonnet xxxiv” (x)

emily dickinson, “i dwell in possibility” (x)

jacob shores-argeüllo, “paradise”

anon, sir gawain and the green knight

kathleen sheeder bonanno, “death barged in” (x)

john donne, “holy sonnet xiv” (x)

elizabeth bishop, “at the fish-houses” (x)

rainer maria rilke, “the boy” (x) and “lament” (x)

mahmoud darwish, “your night is of lilac” (x)

gregory orr, “trauma (storm)” (x)

frank o’hara, “having a coke with you” (x)

john milton, paradise lost (books v & ix)

anne carson, “the autobiography of red”

naomi shihab nye, “burning the old year” (x)

christopher marlowe, hero and leander

sylvia plath, “three women: a poem for three voices” (x)

anna akhmatova, “voronezh” (x)

ted hughes, “bride and groom lie hidden for three days” (x)

anon, beowulf

dylan thomas, “fern hill” (x)

margaret atwood, “sumacs” (x)

kiki petosino, “genuflect”

t.j. jarrett, “how to speak to the dead” (x)

louise glück, “landscape” (x)

jorge luis borges, “poem of the gifts” (x)

e.e. cummings, “i will wade out” (x)

sean ó coileáin, “the ruins of timoleague abbey” (x)

oh god so many things

The canon: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Hannibal Rising.

Mythology: Hesiod, Theogony; Ovid, Metamorphoses; the Bible [e.g. Genesis 3, Deut. 28, John 6, 1 Kings 14, Ecclesiastes 1, Book of Job, Revelation]; Satan [x]; the Devil in Christianity [x]; Catchism of the Catholic Church: The Fall [x]; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno & La Vita Nuova; cannibalism [x], the wendigo [x x], Michael Kinnucan, “Incest, cannibalism, and the gods”. 

Philosophy & psychology: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Kurzban & Leary, “Evolutionary Origins of Stigmatization“ [probable inspiration for Hannibal’s "social exclusion” paper]; Kristen Guest [ed.], Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity; Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film;Alexandre Dumas, Grande Dictionnaire de Cuisine.

Criminology: Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths; Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Douglad & Olshake, Mind Hunter and Journey Into Darkness; J.C. Oleson, “The Criminological Theories of Hannibal Lecter” [one; two; three]; Bettina Gregory, “The honey in the lion’s mouth”; Holmes & Holmes, Contemporary Perspectives on Serial Murder.

Serial killers: Hannibal Lecter; Ted Bundy, Ed Kempner, Eddie Gein; the Yorkshire Ripper, The Monster of Florence, Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, Albert Fish, Jason Ricketts, Dykes Askew Simmons, Dorangel Vargas.

Literature: William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Europe a Prophecy & Songs of Innocence and Experience; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov; Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood & A Good Man is Hard to Find; Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter; Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men, Child of God & Blood Meridian, Roberto Bolaño, 2666; William Faulkner, Sanctuary.

Thomas Harris: Wikipedia; Jason Cowley, “Creator of a monstrous hit”; David Sexton, The Strange World of Thomas Harris [excerpt]

london is so big and strange and ancient and horrifying and wonderful, this list could have been ten times as long. 

markets: portobello, borough [obvious], old spitalfield, greenwich, leadenhall, brick lane, netil market [london fields], brixton village. 

amazing food: e pellici, bethnal green. tayyabs, whitechapel. book club, shoreditch. beigel bake, brick lane. mahogany bar, wilton’s music hall. fish central, king square estate [oh god best fish & chips in london]. mr. felafel, shepherd’s bush market [palestinian felafel to die for]. cafe in the crypt, st. martin in the fields [incredible atmosphere]. prospect of whitby, wapping [ancient pub on the river]. pie in the sky, bromley-by-bow. 

books: collinge & clark [second hand books; this is where black books was filmed]. word on the water [a book-barge, usually in paddington]. southbank book market. foyle’s on tottenham court road. forbidden planet, shaftesbury avenue. persephone books. london review. ripping yarns, highgate. 56A, crampton st. [great anarchist bookshop & archive]. 

landmarks: floating gardens. john keats’s house. highgate cemetery [karl marx, douglas adams, christina rossetti, george eliot, et al]. doughty street [disappearing georgian london]. speakers’ corner. cross bones graveyard [paupers’ burial ground]. burlington arcade. freemason’s hall, holborn. the actor’s church. brixton windmill. canal paths. hackney marshes. aldwych, the abandoned tube station. art in the park. battersea power station [apocalyptic icon]. prince charles cinema [quentin tarantino’s favourite cinema]. rivoli ballroom [gorgeous 1950s music hall]. southwark cathedral [ancient & beautiful; shakespeare came here]. brompton cemetery. kyoto gardens. southbank graffiti tunnel [leake street]. old bailey.

museums: tate modern [matisse!]. v&a [always something great here]. science museum. design museum. museum of childhood. charles dickens museum. british library [exhibition i’ve had earmarked for months, “comics unmasked: art & anarchy in the uk”].

everything is shakespearean or greek or fairytale or arthurian or jungian.

everything.

and the cake is a lie.

there is no “matrix” for literary analysis. there are countless ideological and methodological lenses through which to view a literary text. often competing and conflicting and diverging. one is no more “right” or “true” than another. trying to perceive them all simultaneously would probably cause your brain to melt. 

& reducing literature to a series of narrative typologies and structures is a terribly impoverished & clinical view of art, particularly linguistic art. english studies already went through that phase—it’s called formalism, nobody really does it any longer because it’s so blind to the material and biographical and cultural and ideological contexts of literature. it’s horribly reductionist.

i mean, saying that james joyce’s ulysses and derek walcott’s omeros are both “homeric” is perhaps the least interesting thing you could say about these two wildly different and astonishingly ambitious and beautiful texts. 

1. Oedipus: incest, patricide, and the Theban king who sought knowledge at any cost and was utterly undone by the truth of himself, stabbing out his eyes to never see his shame.

2. Icarus: it’s a tale of hubris and overreaching our mortal grasp, yes, but it’s also about the height of human imagining, the desire for the impossible, the searing instant of youth and joy and striving and wonder, the glorious flight that comes before a terrible fall.

3. Medea: fearsome martial-speaking witch-queen who will be soft and meek until she makes every part of herself a sword.

4. Prometheus: the trickster who deceived Zeus and saved humankind, and proof that no good deed goes unpunished (he also warned Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha that Zeus planned a great flood to sweep mankind away, so that they might be spared and repopulate the earth) 

5.  Ariadne and Dionysus: the girl who helped Theseus to bring down her father’s regime only to be betrayed by him, and was so wild and furious and unbounded that the god of madness and ecstasy fell for her on the shore of Naxos

6. Penthesilea, daughter of the god of war, and queen of the Amazons, who fought for King Priam in the Trojan War and slaughtered so many men that the armies were awed by her. she was finally killed by Achilles—when he lifted her helmet he fell in love with her, and buried her with his own hands. 

7. Eros & Psyche: traces of Beauty and the Beast—the girl so beautiful men worshipped her instead of Aphrodite, made love to Eros but was never allowed to see his face (while her two wicked sisters tried to steal him). she endured three near-impossible trials, even descending to the underworld to entreat Persephone, and was finally married to him 

8. Agamemnon & Clytaemnestra: Agamemnon is a bastard in every text ever, and his great hubris before the House of Atreus is the last and most damning act of a guilty man who will die ingloriously, stabbed in the bath by his proud vengeful charismatic queen, and never see it coming. 

9. Elektra and Orestes: the children of the above, joined in love and ferocious desire to avenge their father. after years apart, they recognise each other at their father’s tomb, and plot their course: he is the sword, and she is the will—in Euripides they slay their mother together by stabbing a sword down her throat.

in the iliad helen speaks the last lament for hector. the only man in troy who showed her kindness is slain—and now, helen says, πάντες δέ με πεφρίκασιν, all men shudder at me. she doesn’t speak in the iliiad again.

homer isn’t cruel to helen; her story is cruel enough. in the conjectured era of the trojan war, women are mothers by twelve, grandmothers by twenty-four, and buried by thirty. the lineage of mycenaean families passes through daughters: royal women are kingmakers, and command a little power, but they are bartered like jewels (the iliad speaks again and again of helen and all her wealth). helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, golden with kharis, the seductive grace that arouses desire. she is coveted by men beyond all reason. after she is seized by paris and compelled by aphrodite to love him against her will—in other writings of the myth, she loves him freely—she is never out of danger.

the helen of the iliad is clever and powerful and capricious and kind and melancholy: full of fury toward paris and aphrodite, longing for sparta and its women, fear for her own life. she condemns herself before others can. in book vi, as war blazes and roars below them, helen tells hector, on us the gods have set an evil destiny: that we should be a singer’s theme for generations to come—as if she knows that, in the centuries after, men will rarely write of paris’ vanity and hubris and lust, his violation of the sacred guest-pact, his refusal to relent and avoid war with the achaeans. instead they’ll write and paint the beautiful, perfidious, ruinous woman whose hands are red with the blood of men, and call her not queen of sparta but helen of troy: a forced marriage to the city that desired and hated her. she is an eidolon made of want and rapture and dread and resentment.

homer doesn’t condemn helen—and in the odyssey she’s seen reconciled with menelaus. she’s worshipped in sparta as a symbol of sexual power for centuries, until the end of roman rule: pausanias writes that pilgrims come to see the remains of her birth-egg, hung from the roof of a temple in the spartan acropolis; spartan girls dance and sing songs praising one another’s beauty and strength as part of rites of passage, leading them from parthenos to nýmphē, virgin to bride. cults of helen appear across greece, italy, turkey—as far as palestine—celebrating her shining beauty; they sacrifice to her as if she were a goddess. much of this is quickly forgotten. 

every age finds new words to hate helen, but they are old ways of hating: deceiver and scandal and insatiate whore. she is euripides’ bitchwhore and hesiod’s kalon kakon (“beautiful evil”) and clement of alexandria’s adulterous beauty and whore and shakespeare’s strumpet and proctor’s trull and flurt of whoredom and schiller’s pricktease and levin’s adulterous witch. her lusts damned a golden world to die, they say. pandora’s box lies between a woman’s thighs. helen is a symbol of how men’s desire for women becomes the evidence by which women are condemned, abused, reviled.  

edward thomas, “lights out”: i must enter, and leave, alone, / i know not how.

gabriele d’annunzio, “the rain in the pinewood”: rain falls on your black eyelashes / so that you seem to weep / but from pleasure

evie shockley, “where you are planted”: we settle into still pools of humidity, moss- / dark, beneath live oaks

amy gerstler, “bon courage”: a forest appears / to a young girl one morning as she combs / the dreams out of   her hair. 

richard levine, “in a blue wood”: the faceless couple in van gogh’s blue wood, is walking / where there is no path

siegfried sassoon, “dream-forest”: where sunshine flecks the green, / through towering woods my way / goes winding all the day.

robert frost, “stopping by woods on a snowy evening”: and miles to go before I sleep, / and miles to go before I sleep.

mary oliver, “sleeping in the forest” and “black oaks”: and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage / of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

john keats, “ode to psyche”: far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees / fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep

r.s. thomas, “forest dwellers”: who called them forth to walk / in the green light, their thoughts / on darkness? 

léonie adams, “recollection of the wood”: toward that caress of the boughs a summer’s night / illimitable in fragrance and in sound.

gabriela mistral, “pine forest”: the night watches over its creatures, / except for the pine trees that never change.

kenneth rexroth, “falling leaves and early snow”: between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, / glimmering with floating snow.

william carlos williams, “epitaph”

h.d., “the helmsman”: we forgot—we worshipped, / we parted green from green

cole swensen, “five landscapes”: the trees are half air. they fissure the sky;

pablo neruda, “lost in the forest”: wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig / sang under my tongue