Why am I feeling down today? It must be: 1) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died; 2) everything outside is slowly being coated in ice; 3) I'm slowly being coated in ice.
Hm. I sent the MS out to a first novel contest, and I spent time reading today and not writing anything. Zip. Nada. (This blog doesn't count.) I usually read three novels at a time and switch between them depending upon my wildly erratic mood changes. Lately, I've been working on The Good Apprentice again. It's, uh, good.
The first time I ever read Murdoch was about six years ago; it was a short story I adored, called "Something Special." It is beautiful, sensitive, and brutal. At the time, I was still working on my Ph.D. in American literature; whenever I would read anything other than an American work or some bit of philosophy or theory, I felt as if I were cheating. (Graduate school has so many disadvantages. The only major difference between graduate school and hell seems to be that, when you piss people off, they never think to say, "Go to Graduate School!")
Anyway, now that my time is my own, I'm reading whatever I damn well want to read. Today, feeling an icy morbidity, I grabbed TGA and lied down on the sofa near the living room windows, bathing in the blue glow of filtered winter light.
So I finally got past the 250-page mark, and things have gotten bizarre and mythic. It's become involving, and there's still more than half the book left to enjoy. Ahhh. The two Murdoch novels I've read thus far, A Fairly Honorable Defeat and this one, don't have much in the way of energia. I mean, they don't exactly make one feel he is getting somewhere while reading. This is not a flaw for some reason. When I write, I try to unfold character and movement in a manner that might guide a reader's attention onward. Murdoch's characters burn in place. It isn't that nothing happens to them, it is just that one senses the characters' own discoveries about themselves are the most important thing. Plot should always be subsumed under character and language, in my opinion, but Murdoch's characters are an extreme case.
What the novels do have are cerebral people committing adultery, flirting with incest, failing to love one another, failing to be good people, or purposefully being bad people—and thinking about it. And it is good. So good.
3 comments:
Basically, it's like if Giles x 10 died. Schlesinger wore tweed before it became a stereotype.
Oh, and blogs totally count as writing because they're part of the public sphere--you are liable to reach more people than in a Poetics-y small press, I think, so I wouldn't feel blogging is wasted time.
Hi, GC. Lucky you with the ice. Lucky, lucky you. (Really--it's just wrong to see the plants a-bloomin this time of year.) And glad to see you writing about the scrotum business. It has been quite the topic of conversation around here.
I'm off to London for a blast of cold air, study, rain, study, museums, and a tiny bit more rain. I'll post again soon and say a bloggety hi from here or from,
with love,
betsytacy
p.s. so good talking to t. the other day.
Oh no, not wasted time--I get to chat with friends, among other good things. (Have a fine time in London, betsytacy--I'm jealous as hell!)
I just meant I do not counting writing here as productive, novel-writing type writing. That is, what is for me, "work writing." Blogs do, totally, count as writing.
Giles x 10 -- definitely; no one is around to watch over the liberal Scooby gang now.
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