i'll surely go to hell, but first we must drink together

i went to a play this evening. a two-man show in an intimate setting, right here in my own little town. it was an adaptation of dostoevsky's short novel (it's not exactly a novella and not fully a novel) the eternal husband. the two actors were very good and although it was actually a dostoevsky i didn't know, but it had all of the elements of dostoevsky at his finest. that special politeness and humility with which half-mad characters speak to one another. glimmers of raskolnikov, the underground man, saintly but mildly insane and surely consumptive but beautiful women. clever lines, "go to hell." "i'll surely go to hell, but first we must drink together." and the undercurrents, oh my the undercurrents.

it struck me that we have no undercurrents today - everyone's letting it all hang out, spilling everything, without subtlety, not letting anything at all bubble below the surface. i think we need more undercurrents. and by that i don't mean hidden agendas (there are surely enough of those, tho' often they aren't that well-hidden); i mean real, raging emotions, boiling just below the surface. now we just get all of that out of our systems passive aggressively on facebook. and i'm beginning to think it's not good for us.

there was a point during the first act where i welled up with tears, thinking of my favorite professor from iowa who died a couple of years ago. i felt a longing to discuss what i'd seen with him that just about bowled my over. and a sorrow that that was no longer possible since he's gone. i would so love to have talked over the performance with him. he would have known how to positively direct all of the emotions and small glimpses of my own madness it brought forth in me.

my advice - get out there and see some live theatre. there's nothing like it.

on reading crap novels. and then not.

i have a problem. it seems pretty insurmountable. i've lived with it for years and i doubt i'll ever overcome it. once i start a novel, i am compelled to finish it, no matter how crappy it is. recent cases in point: iain banks' dead air. jennifer egan's a visit from the good squad. anything by hanne vibeke holst (i've recently read dronningeofret and kongemordet (HVH has her finger on the pulse of danish politics, but as a writer is somewhere between dan brown and steig larsson - in other words - mediocre at best).

it's actually rather strange, since what i studied for rather longer than most was literature. so what is it about a crappy novel that makes me unable to stop reading it when i discover it's crap?  why is it that a conscious awareness that life is too short doesn't even make me stop. in fact, i'll stay up late, frantically reading, rushing towards the finish. just to get it over with. why, oh why do i do this when there are so many good books in the world that warrant my attention?

when i think about authors that have truly captured my attention and deserved to be read to the end and then read again with a kind of manic attention, only two come to mind. only two authors have written stories and created worlds so compelling that i felt quite literally sucked into them...a part of the book and the universe it described. books i looked up from and was surprised to find myself in my own home (or on a plane or in a hotel room or in the car or the bathtub). worlds so deep that i felt i lost a little bit of myself there. and i mourned quietly when i was finished with the book and found that i wasn't inhabiting that world at all, except in the pieces of it i indelibly carry with me, because it was so well-written.

so why is it that when books don't do that, don't even come close to that, i still can't put them aside?

maybe it's because it's so seldom it happens.

there's only one dostoevsky and only one murakami. the rest don't even come close.

reading russian literature

occasionally i get an email, asking me what russian literature i would recommend. i love those moments because not only does my almost-Ph.D. come in handy, they sort of wake up a sleeping, dormant part of my soul. and it always makes me wonder why i stopped feeding my soul with that particular kind of marvelous writing. but mostly, it takes me back in a very good way - back to the time when i was so consumed by devouring the russian masters - especially dostoevsky - that i once read 120 pages of the brothers karamazov (from the very book on top) while driving on I-80 west of Des Moines. and yes, i was the driver.

and tho' i want to immediately tell everyone that their life will not be complete until they've read the brothers karamazov, i do realize that that thick tome of religion, rationalism, nihilism, madness and patricide may not be for everyone. i tend to recommend starting with dostoevsky's notes from underground to see if his manic style appeals to you, before embarking on the biggies like brothers k or crime & punishment.

the one book i recommend every time is bulgakov's master & margarita - its brand of russian magical realism is well, magical. it's a book i return to again and again and always find something new - colorful characters, a good story, simply an energy that carries you along. i also tend to recommend nabokov - humbert humbert may be a real creep, but the writing is virtuoso and everyone should experience that.

i'm not a big fan of tolstoy, as he's a bit righteous and preachy for me, but i do love his short work - the sebastopol sketches. i also like gogol's short works - the nose and the overcoat. i tend to recommend that people read some of those first, before tackling a baggy monster like war & peace or anna karenina (and do read anna k if you're only going to read one tolstoy) or dead souls.

it always makes me a bit sad that i don't find myself recommending any women writers. the only one that really springs to mind is anna akhmatova and she was a poet. there are more contemporary women writers - tatiana tolstaya and ludmilla petrushevskaya, but honestly, their works are nowhere near the top of my list.

i feel that literature, like nothing else, has the capacity to illuminate a culture and its history. russian literature especially opens some window, not only into the russian soul, but the very soul of humanity. so if you haven't read any, do get started. and start with master & margarita.

where is dostoevsky when you need him?

this morning, while i was getting ready, i flipped on CNN. it's what i do when i'm in a hotel. this morning, it was all chilean mine rescue, all the time. i watched the third guy coming up out of the hole and being released from his little cage, which is dubbed the fenix, i guess to signify rebirth. and it was a birth of sorts, as he came up the long canal into the light of the world again, to the waiting arms of his wife. and it was a touching moment.

but the endless analysis and gushing and hype by the newscasters was simply too much. they showed a psychological "expert," who, sounding no more authoritative than a random person on the street, exclaimed in completely general terms, about how psychologically difficult it would be for them. the CNN reporter simply exclaimed along with her, not asking any deeper questions to elicit a more meaty expert response. but perhaps she knew she didn't have an expert on her hands at all. what i fear is that she didn't know that. she simply thought it was her role to play sentimental drama queen together with this woman on camera, as they breathlessly watched footage of the first three miners hugging their families. it's a pity, as i think the psychological aspects of this experience on the miners must be fascinating.

the job behind this rescue is a big one and it is an amazing story. i was a little surprised that the strongest were brought up first. i'd have thought they'd bring up the ones most in need of medical attention, but maybe it made for better television that the first men stepped out, smiling and looking surprisingly robust in their trendy sunglasses (for eye protection since they'd been away from the light for 2 long months and undoubtedly donated by oakley or ray ban or some such company).

i wonder if, thanks to the instant transmission of information and the way that news is covered completely while it's happening, rather than waiting for it to happen, we have lost our ability to know what the story actually is. if we're developing the story on the fly, as it's happening, there's nothing reflective it and no opportunity to draw deeper meaning, or get at the essence of the story.

dostoevsky developed the brothers karamazov on the fly. he published it under great duress and financial pressure, as well as time pressure, in weekly installments, plotting it as he frantically wrote. but sadly, it seems that there are few dostoevskys out there today, and so we watch stories unfold on television...

goodbye harry

an old and wise professor and friend has died and so words feel a bit elusive at the moment. he meant a lot to me and was so influential to the person i've become. i'm really sorry i didn't get a chance to say goodbye to him - we tried to on our recent visit to the US, but he was too ill that day for visitors. all we could do was leave a note and some chocolate. i am privileged to have had him as a mentor and friend and he will be sorely missed.  i'm already rereading the brothers karamazov in his memory. it feels like an important thing to do, since he opened my eyes to the richness of dostoevsky and especially that book. his life was long and rich and full and he was a truly good and inspiring person. one can't really ask more than to be remembered like that. good-bye harry.

WWDD--what would dostoevsky do?

i have dostoevsky on the brain. that can be a dangerous thing to do because having dostoevsky on the brain often makes one manic and slightly febrile. it makes one think outrageous thoughts and do outrageous things. like brutally murder one's landlady. but i don't have a landlady, so no worries on that front. it will no doubt be confined to manically careening from one activity to another around the house today.

i think i got dostoevsky in my head when i reshelved my books last weekend. during college, i had dostoevsky in my head quite a lot. because i majored in russian literature (as one does when one grows up in a small town in south dakota and attends a big ten school in the midwest). there was a point in time when someone would refer to a particular scene in the brothers karamazov and i could turn to the page it was on within seconds. me and the brothers k were totally on intimate terms and i never could decide which brother i loved best--ivan for his cool logical mind, alexei for his goodness or mitya for his mad, slightly febrile careening around--he was probably my favorite, if i'm honest, tho' i previously wrote on this blog that ivan was my favorite. reading that book, i would completely enter the state of mind that was depicted there. it was marvelous and not many authors do that to me. just dostoevsky and murakami and john irving in a widow for one year.

but, what has me thinking about dostoevsky is also the way in which he wrote the brothers k. on tight deadlines, in serial form. publishing it practically as he wrote each chapter (without the aid of spell-check and word and blogger). weaving a complex plot as he went along, but each installment being published in a newspaper, so no revising or going back and adding some new plot element. he was under pressure, eternally in need of money and that manic state of mind he must have himself been in shines through and pulls you in.

imagine what dostoevsky would have done in the blogosphere...