#21 - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

After this one, I am hitting the pause button. After 21 books, 5 of which were in the past two weeks, and the last 6 of which are about Americana, I am taking a breather. Not going on hiatus, or any other more indefinite time span, but a break. The Snooze button, if you will. After going on a reading spree followed by a writing spree like that, I am not going to go after the next work, The Divine Comedy, without at least somewhat of a recuperated mindset. These reviews have been shorter, partly because it's been 2 weeks since I've read the earlier ones, and partly because there wasn't all that much to say. There were some neat parts of books like Scarlet Letter and Our Town, sure, but in the end, nothing stood out. They didn't have the author or edition intrigue that books like Ulysses and On The Road had, and some of them just weren't that phenomenal. I will get back to everything soon, and I certainly hope to complete a pile more vlog entries, but as for reading and reviewing, if I complete two more for the summer, I will be contented.

Now, for the final book of my camp and my Americana readings, we return to Mark Twain and his other classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer was the first to Huck Finn as the sequel, and the characters are shared between the two. However, both look at different themes and view things in different lights. Huck Finn was a legitimate adventure story, travelling through states and finding gunmen and all sorts of real escapades. Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, was a boy having fun in his town. While there were hijinks, they were on a smaller scale. The criminals became hooligans instead of cold-blooded killers (although Injun Joe comes close), and the whole thing read like a Hardy Boys novel instead of a adventure story. But in that Tom Sawyer brought a different flair. It was light, and fun, and playful. His pranks, like the whitewashed fence, are some of the best-remembered in American lore. The entire book presents itself as an ode to the joys of being young, the American Dream for kids - to be free and free-spirited.

Mark Twain inserted his politics into both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. In Huck Finn, he deals with racism and prejudice, using Jim as the focal point. In Tom Sawyer, he throws in arguments for a bunch of different ideals. One of those was the idea that "People want what they cannot have", which is the moral of the whitewashing scene. He also deals with the idea of young love, in what was one of the most consistently amusing subplots of the novel. Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer see each other once at Sunday school, and once when Tom is walking by her house, and those instances alone result in Tom falling madly in love with her (and incidentally forgetting about his PRIOR fiancee and love in the process). This followed by their engagement, first kiss and fights (in that order) are equal parts hilarious and painfully true. As a summertime read, Tom Sawyer was wonderfully light and frothy. To sit in a hammock with bare feet in the grass reading it felt so right that I couldn't help but smile. However, the childishness of it made it rank below Huck Finn in my estimation, but as an excellent book, it still receives:

8/10

#20 - Our Town

Lights to orange, play intro music. After the excellence that was On The Road, I expected Our Town to be a bit of fluff in comparison. Not so. Our Town is by Thornton Wilder, whose other work includes Merchant of Yonkers, which he readapted into The Matchmaker, which was then further adapted into Hello, Dolly! and was a happy, sunshiny musical. Our Town is known for being the second-most performed play in schools after Romeo and Juliet, and so I assumed it would be a simple, straightforward work. The plot of the play certainly contributed to that - the life and times of the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, in particular the marriage of Emily Webb and George Gibbs - but the result was something much more powerful. The play goes from Daily Life, describing the town's usual goings-on, to Love and Marriage, which shows the wedding day of George and Emily, and finally to Death and Eternity, which shows Emily's funeral and her experience in the afterlife.

The last play I read was Streetcar Named Desire, and I said that it felt too commercial, that it didn't seem like art. Our Town is an artistic play, a truly meaningful work. It gives a strong existentialist argument, saying that humans don't and can't appreciate the things they have in life until after death. The character of the Stage Manager was beautifully written, allowing him to cross in between the story and the audience seamlessly, even throwing a wink in to drive the point home. The Stage Manager also helps to make the other interesting part of Our Town work - the technical notes on it are the most intricate I've seen in a play. Every pantomime, every bit of blocking and every change of lighting is painstakingly noted. Wilder had such a vision in mind when he wrote the work, and he went out of his way to make sure that it wouldn't be betrayed by foreign hands. The back of the script had over 20 pages of notes on how to set up the lighting grid, which props must be supplied and which ones must be pantomimed, and even director's notes on how scenes should be run and what emotion characters are supposed to strive for. The result is something that truly makes daily life into something powerful and meaningful.

8/10

#19 - On The Road

Oldfield Option #2! After breezing through the previous two books in as many days, I got to On The Road, the pinnacle of Beat literature. The Beat Generation was a counter-culture movement that preceded the Hippies of the 60s. They were disillusioned after World War II, and the core group of writers - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs - roamed America in search of revelation, hitchhiking and partying everywhere on the way. They were the literary equivalent of the more experimental jazz of the era, bringing in less structured styles and more personal work than seen before in writing. The Big Three of Beat literature are Ginsberg's Howl, Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and finally, On The Road by Jack Kerouac. My edition of On The Road was the 50th anniversary "Original Scroll" released by Viking Press, and so many people who have read the book before might have different names or different memories of some scenes. The Original Scroll was the first draft of the book, which was written in a three-week burst of energy on 6 long pieces of printer paper, resulting in a typed scroll that was hundreds of feet long. This version has more of the sexuality, more of the memoirs, and a rougher feel than the finished product that was released 6 years after the first draft was created. While I loved having the actual names of the people that Jack was referring to, I could definitely tell that there was work left to be done on some sections. Comparing sections like the "mad to live" passage show just how much tweaking went into Kerouac's "natural flow".

The Beats are also considered as the first hipsters - although they usually used the term to refer to white middle-class people who tried to emulate the lifestyles of the black jazz musicians they adored. Because of this, many of the literary critics who focus on the Beats today are, in fact, painfully hipster, this time in the contemporary sense. In the beginning of my edition of On The Road there were a series of essays written by Beat Generation scholars. They discussed the history of the writing, Kerouac's feelings towards minorities, his relationship with Neal Cassady, and the structure of the text in the broader scope of literary history. These essays were unneccessarily jargon-filled, smacked of sentimentality and generally made me angry at this entire portion of academia. An excerpt: "Critics have rightly problematized the primitivist racial sentimentality expressed in this passage, which romanticizes the suffering of people of color during this period and risks obfuscating their actual lived experiences." I'm sorry, but "problematized"? This entire sentence could be rewritten with 40% fewer words, 60% more clarity and 85% less douchinositizing. "Interiority" and "Sensorial" were both used, and the aforementionablizored "problematize" was used by three of the "scholars" that were chosen by the publisher to help readers to understand the work. If this is understanding, I want more gibberish.

On The Road was written entirely in stream-of-consciousness, a style I am enjoying more and more as I read more. The final version contained paragraph and chapter breaks in it to help the reader understand, but in the scroll, the entire work was in one continuous paragraph, where Kerouac continues spouting out whatever comes to mind. The result is storytelling in its purest form. Instead of following constructs and patterns of conversation, Kerouac just writes down whatever he feels is important to tell about it right then - flashbacks happen without being announced, sudden distractions are described in detail. The effect grows on you the longer you read in one sitting. The longer you read a stream-of-consciousness work, the more involved you get with the author's story, and the stronger the connection you have with the text. I finished the last 100 pages or so in one sitting, and just like with Ulysses' Penelope chapter, I sat afterwards and simply felt my head buzz. The ending of the scroll edition was a lot more abrupt than the polished copy - after spending pages on each trip to Denver, I expected more than the last 15 or so to be dedicated to the whole of the Mexico expedition. But regardless, the work as a whole managed to draw me in entirely, and make me almost want to go out and start hitchhiking - not to go somewhere, but just to go see what I can find. Luckily, I'm too lazy, and people don't pick up hitchhikers anymore. But I can now understand just why so many people become fanatical about the Beat Generation - whatever they did, they were doing it damn well. That's why On The Road will become my third:

10/10

#18 - Streetcar Named Desire

Continuing this July reading blitz we come to A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. This is the second Williams worth I've partaken in. A couple of years ago I watched a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Kanata Theatre, my local community stage. In both I was struck by one thing above all else. Williams pours such energy into every one of his characters. Their movements are frantic, their dialogue is fast paced. Everyone is up and jumping and rushing and their sheer passion for everything is one of the most dominant things you will take away from it, whether you watch it or read it. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we deal with Brick, a former football star who is just past his prime and verging on alcoholism. In Streetcar Named Desire, however, we deal with Blanche DuBois, a former Southern Belle who is...just past her prime and verging on alcoholism. Both deal with nervous breakdowns, undertones of sexuality both hetero- and homo-sexual, and some powerful themes. In Cat, it is suicide, whereas in Streetcar, it is rape. In Streetcar's climactic scene, the increasingly-crazed Blanche is confronted by the crude Stanley for her falsehoods. This leads to Stanley raping Blanche - though I'm not sure how the two are connected. This rape goes by without a word from Stanley's wife and Blanche's sister Stella, who instead corroborates with Stanley to send Blanche to an asylum - I don't argue that that's where she belonged - as opposed to, I don't know, getting mad at him for it.

Tennessee Williams is lauded as one of the best playwrights of the 20th century - his Big Three of Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar, and The Glass Menagerie are one of the greatest sets in American theatre - but I had a bitter taste in my mouth throughout this reading. Maybe it was the edition I had - the re-release from the 1982 TV movie starring Ann-Margret and Treat Williams - or its being placed after Scarlet Letter, a serious text, but it seemed as if it were much too commercial to be considered artistic. Williams did try to include imagery and symbolism, but it always felt heavy-handed. Blanche DuBois, "White of the Woods", being dressed in white and being a symbol of purity, and dressing in more colours as she goes more and more off-kilter. Their family home Belle Reve, or "Beautiful Dream". Perhaps I've just been reading too much literature lately, but it feels like it should take more than a bit of French naming to make something meaningful and deep. In the end, rape plots be-damned, the play read as a fairly quick and light work, and while I did love it as a story, I just wasn't impressed with it as being on the top 100 works of literature. It wasn't art, but it was a damn cool show.

7/10

#17 - The Scarlet Letter

Ignomy. Ignonimoose? Ignoninomy. Ignominy! Hawthorne loved this word more than the Puritans loved public displays of shame. It was used so much that I feel as though the letter should have been a big red "I" instead of the "A"-dultress the book actually refers to. The Scarlet Letter is either one of the best or one of the worst romances ever written, depending on your definition. This is a romance without sex, without humour or happiness or any of the things associated with romcoms today - not even a sassy gay friend! The two go from somber to stricken, and readers are even deprived of and account of or even a not to the act that consummated their forbidden love. In its place is some of the most powerful emotional writing I've seen. The passion, suffering (real suffering, and not angst) and sadness perpetuated through everything from trees to brooks to items of clothing were compelling enough to force you to care for the two of them.

The Scarlet Letter begins with a short story-cum-introduction, The Custom House. As well as introducing us to the story of Hester Prynne, it gives the reader a taste of Hawthorne's desciptivist style. The story consists of multipage sketches of each of his coworkers and the buildings they inhabit. But read collectively, it explains his view about how true artists cannot work in mundane surroundings - a distinctly author-to-author story. These sketches were so unflattering that the city of Salem demanded Hawthorne retract the story of his hometown. He refused. Scarlet Letter might be on minds recently because of a LOOSE adaptation, Easy A. The reason that they could take so many liberties in modernizing the plot is because the book works on two levels. First there is the Puritanical religious element, with God putting out signs and Hell and sin weighing on everyone's minds. But there is also the social element, with the public's rebukes and varied reactions often being more chilling than the religious fire and brimstone. The double standards in terms of treatment of women, the use of shame as the greatest punishment all still ring true today - especially in our high schools. Finally on an unconnected note, Pearl, the daughter of sin. is one of the coolest child characters ever.

This, as well as the next four books, were all read over the last two weeks of July whilst I was at Red Pine Camp. Collectively, they were a very interesting spread of American writing, going from the Puritans to the Beats. Out of the five, however, Scarlet landed at the bottom for me, scoring a:

6/10

#16 - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

America has found its place on my list. The next 6 books are entirely comprised of some of American classics, book-ended (you see what I did there?) by the two twin pillars of the American childhood, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Strangely enough, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but it ranked higher on the list, so I'm breaking all the rules today. In each of these books, the other is featured as a supporting character, joining them on adventures. In Tom Sawyer, Huck is portrayed as a boy who simply follows, a willing sidekick to Tom Sawyer. In Huckleberry Finn, however, Tom is shifted into a caricature of his former self, playing up the adventure-seeking side of him and making Huck seem a much more level-headed character. That being said, there was hardly any way for a reader to notice that this was a sequel, unless they were otherwise told. Everything was introduced and wrapped up as its own story, and the arcs were very well-handled.

The trick with American classics is that they seem to have trouble dealing with their past lives. Huckleberry Finn is both lauded as a picturesque imagining of the joys of childhood (running away from home on a raft and falling in with various crooks and violent characters notwithstanding) and reviled for containing racist overtones. The latter voice seems to stem mainly from the southern States, many of whom ban the book from schools and libraries. Their main argument stems from their use of the word "nigger". A nigger here, a nigger there, oh look at that pumpkin-heded nigger, niggerniggerdenigger n-i-double guh-err. The book is filled with them, over 200 mentions at least, by both black and white characters alike. There are also mentions of dirty A-rabs, but oddly enough, the South hasn't complained about that yet. The problem is, it's not racist. Huck sits there and struggles with the idea that he is helping a "runaway nigger" escape, deciding that he will tell the first man he sees and give him up. The moment he does, he begins to feel a heavy feeling, which he then tries to pray to God to get rid of. When he can't find the words to pray, he eventually decides that he'll go to Hell if he must, he is going to help his friend. While the book never explicitly advocates abolitionism, as Twain was still living in an era where that was a sensitive subject, the text seems like it was written almost to mock the characters who believed in slavery, doing it to expose the flaws in the thinking.

Aside from that, the book was damn funny. Aside from the brief forays into nautical pontificating, it went from one madcap adventure to the next. Here again, the racist angle was played for laughs. Jim and Huck discuss everything from the French language to the story of Solomon, with Jim's common sense crashing against Huck's Sunday school teachings. But the real laughs were saved for the pair of con men, the King and the Dauphin. A couple of swindlers bonded together by chance, they travel with Huck and Jim for a while, pulling stunt after stunt along the way. Just as every character in the book though, they get the ending they deserve. On the whole the Adventures managed to cast everything in a warm light, from murderous family feuds to alcoholism (which, admittedly, is played for laughs consistently). Some people argue that this book is a parable for childhood innocence against the world (by people, I mean the back of my edition of the book). But I say that any message that is taken out of it is purely invented. Just as Twain says in the opening, persons trying to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted, persons trying to find a moral in it will be banished, and persons trying to find a plot in it will be shot. And really, what could be more American than that?

9/10

#15 - The Canterbury Tales

Literature and storytelling are intertwined. The format may be different, but the meaning is the same. The Iliad was originally an epic poem to be recited, not read off of a page. Oedipus Rex is a play, or rather a trilogy of plays to be performed for an audience. The oldest of the books on the list, ones like Beowulf, are oral tradition stories that have been spoken for centuries before finally being committed to paper. This is being brought to mind as I finish the Canterbury Tales, a story about storytelling, as I contemplate making the move to oral storytelling as opposed to the written word. I am speaking, of course, of vlogging. In the next weeks I will be trying to create video versions of these first 16 posts, and then creating both a written and video version for each subsequent one. They will be painfully similar, if not identical to each other. Every time I've written these I've debated whether or not I wanted to keep the blog private - simply a storage place for my opinions - or something to be shared. With vlogs being posted on Youtube (on my account NortonFord), the choice will no longer lie with me. If they are to be seen, they shall be. I take solace in the fact that the vast majority of Youtube videos rest in piece, being seen only by people who mistype their search queries. On the other hand, I'm excited to get to return to and reflect on my past reads, and to get to do a bit of talking along with it.

With that said, let us turn to today's fare - The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. The edition I have before me is the Bantam Classic, the same series that produced my copy of Jane Eyre. Here again I stumble upon ink blots (sadly no good Rorschach ones) and awful type. Here too I hit one of the most painful concessions I have made thus far - this edition contained only 9 of the 24 of the 120 stories that the Canterbury Tales were to hold. If that seemed nonsensical to some, please bear with me. The Canterbury Tales says in its preamble that the pilgrims (one of which being Chaucer himself) were each to tell 4 stories - 2 on the way to Canterbury and 2 on the way back. At his death Chaucer had only completed 24 (not even one for every pilgrim), with a couple of those not being entirely cleaned up or tied together. These 24 are not found to be in any true order, as the fragments of manuscripts that have been found have provided only some semblance of order, such as the Knight being followed by the Miller. Of these 24, some are more important than others in a critical light. The 9 that are in my edition (Prologue, Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath, Merchant, Franklin, Pardoner, Prioress, Nun's Preist) are arguably the best selection of them. With that in mind, I begrudgingly stuck to the 9 in my book, rather than reading the other 15 online or going out and buying another copy.

One of the biggest arguments I had for doing so was that the actual content was not the reason that the Canterbury Tales was so remarkable. The Tales are notable because of the time, place, and fashion in which they were written. Written in the decades before 1400, Chaucer - who was fluent in German, Italian, French, Latin, and Greek - decided that the Tales were going to be written in Middle English, the language of the commoners. In so doing, he created what stands today as one of the purest and best examples of the language we have today. It shows the differences in syntax, vocabulary, and grammar, even being credited for the creation of some words in our modern vernacular (laxative, jingle, fart and vomit for starters). The edition I had, despite its faults, had one fantastic feature - unlike other versions with either the original Middle English with footnotes or the Modern English, it had a double-page format with the Middle English on the left and the equivalent Modern English on the right. This allowed for me to read in Middle English as much as I liked, with the Modern English there as a confirmation, update and safe haven in times of mental suffering.

The content, while not the reason for reading, was certainly still amusing. My selection of Tales didn't include most of the corrupt-Church stories (with the very notable exception of the Pardoner, whose actual job was being the Church corrupter), instead focusing on the other main thread - marriage and why it is awful. The stories included love triangles, cheating and misbehaving wives, and unrequited courtly love. Sometimes they were played straight, and sometimes they were parodied, but the message was fairly consistent that love and marriages were difficult to get right and awful if you got them wrong. Divorce, it must be noted, was not mentioned even indirectly. It was either death or cheating, and it was a difficult decision for some of the parties involved. Let it be said here and now that any significant other of mine has my permission to cheat if it will spare them death. Honest, I won't be mad, not even a little.

Now, gode men, I praye yow to be glad. Thus endeth here my tale.

7/10

#14 - Paradise Lost

This self-imposed assault on my free time has now passed its first anniversary. With 13 books finished in the first year, that should have me completing my original list of 91 books (including the spaces reserved for Oldfield Options) in approximately April 2017. This will of course be slowed by school reading lists, employment, social interactions and otherwise real life. It will also be slowed by books like Paradise Lost, by the second blind author on my list, John Milton. Following Ulysses, it resulted in a 5 month span of only two books consumed. This is because, like Ulysses, it was designed to stimulate conversation and analysis.

In this case, the assault is on religion, Christianity specifically. It is in the style of the Greek and Roman epics like Homer's Iliad, with free verse poetry in a 12-book arc. But instead of detailing the story of a quest or a war, it tells the story of the fall of mankind. The story is this: Satan was God's right-hand man, feels betrayed when God creates his Son and declares him higher than all others, goes rogue and gathers one third of the angels to try and usurp God (never a wise plan), and is then kicked out "This is HEAVEN!" style into Chaos, where they fall for nine days through nothing until they land in Hell. Then Satan and his fallen angels-cum-devils get up, dust themselves off, and decide what to do. One says that they should get right back to fighting, one says that Hell isn't so bad and they could make it nice, and finally Beelzebub steps in and says that he has heard tell of God creating a new realm and a new race to replace the fallen angels, mankind. Satan then puts forward the idea that he can go in and trick mankind into turning to evil, thus sabotaging God's creation and getting petty revenge. They agree, and Satan runs up to Paradise, sneaks in, and on his second attempt gets first Eve, then Adam to bite the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, making all Hell break loose in the most literal fashion imaginable, leading to the fall of mankind from God's good graces. Adam and Eve repent, and the Son lays down himself as a sacrifice, allowing for the deal that if Adam and Eve's children (re: all of us) behave PERFECTLY, they can rejoin Heaven upon their death.

Creation stories are some of the most controversial parts of religions, because the neverending question remains "Why?". Milton was a very religious person, holding very firm beliefs in the time of Galileo, the Reformation, and one of the Church's most corrupt periods. However, the remarkable part of Paradise Lost is his attempt to make it as ambivalent as possible. Every point of view and question is brought up, and for the most part, none of them are fully answered. The idea was to create the discussion and bring forth the questions that he felt needed to be asked. Even Satan is portrayed as a sort of anti-hero (some argue the first anti-hero found in literature), with the heroic references in the first three chapters mirroring those of Paris and Achilles in the Iliad. Paradise Lost was also intriguing in its use of dynamic characters - Satan descends into greater and greater agony, Adam and Eve fall and regain their belief - in a story that was originally only a one-dimensional warning. This leads them to be matching the questions of the reader at each step - Adam says "who asked you to create me?" just as I thought of that same argument. The reason that Paradise Lost continues to stand as a readable, critically reviewable text is because it stands as a work that can be argued from all sides equally well. With few exceptions, Milton steps back and allows for his own views to be portrayed equal to those fighting against it (one of those exceptions being chauvinism, with Eve being the unintelligent, selfish, less-pure in comparison to Adam).

Paradise Lost is a necessary text whether religious or atheist. If not to read it, to at least understand it and understand its arguments. The quality of the debate it creates is second to none, and for essay writing and complexity it is both too easy and a fantastic challenge. It was a slog, and a brutal one at that. Those first few lines began to feel like a death sentence every time I opened the book. Just like the Iliad, the free verse format allows for authors to get distracted by their own pretty writing. But once I dug in and really felt the text, this was an experience that gave me lots of food for thought.

7/10