When I read a book I don’t like, I’m reminded of the old adage: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But just because I When I read a book I don’t like, I’m reminded of the old adage: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But just because I don’t like a book doesn’t mean I don’t have anything nice to say about it.
As I debated whether or not to devote more time to Flowers for Algernon by writing a review of it, I was reminded of the years in the late 80s when I taught basic skills in a vocational program for learning disabled young adults. It was part of a research study conducted by the Center for Advanced Study in Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
In addition to daily lessons with me, the students had group therapy with a counselor and worked as interns at La Guardia Community College. One of my non-academic duties was to interview the students’ internship supervisors.
After all these years I still remember some of my students, especially a petite and timid young lady who had little chance of future employment. Her supervisor had tried his very best to teach her to stuff envelopes, but no matter how many times they did it together, she could not do it on her own.
Naturally I decided to try to teach her myself. I knew she was retaining little in my reading, writing, and arithmetic classes, but I thought surely I could teach her to stuff envelopes. My failure was humbling. I could not do it. I was as helpless as she was. She could not learn it. And I could not make her learn it.
Like the other students, she was a high school graduate. These young people had been pushed through the system. I soon learned that I would be dealing with more than a skills deficit. The educational system had failed them and there were emotional as well as academic consequences. High school left them feeling neglected and patronized.
I didn’t much like Flowers for Algernon. I found it to be an overly didactic Freudian melodrama. But that’s a purely literary criticism. I was not going to review it, but then I remembered those young people. I remembered how hard they worked. I remembered how frustrating it was for them when they had difficulty with a task that came easily to most others.
Daniel Keyes populates his novel with caricatures, it is true, but these caricatures depict the different ways people behave toward the mentally disabled: In their discomfort with what they do not understand, they react with impatience, mockery, and sometimes even hostility.
If readers come away from Flowers for Algernon with a greater respect for their mentally disabled brothers and sisters, then it deserves its popularity, for a book that can do that is a book that has value.
Merged review:
When I read a book I don’t like, I’m reminded of the old adage: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. But just because I don’t like a book doesn’t mean I don’t have anything nice to say about it.
As I debated whether or not to devote more time to Flowers for Algernon by writing a review of it, I was reminded of the years in the late 80s when I taught basic skills in a vocational program for learning disabled young adults. It was part of a research study conducted by the Center for Advanced Study in Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
In addition to daily lessons with me, the students had group therapy with a counselor and worked as interns at La Guardia Community College. One of my non-academic duties was to interview the students’ internship supervisors.
After all these years I still remember some of my students, especially a petite and timid young lady who had little chance of future employment. Her supervisor had tried his very best to teach her to stuff envelopes, but no matter how many times they did it together, she could not do it on her own.
Naturally I decided to try to teach her myself. I knew she was retaining little in my reading, writing, and arithmetic classes, but I thought surely I could teach her to stuff envelopes. My failure was humbling. I could not do it. I was as helpless as she was. She could not learn it. And I could not make her learn it.
Like the other students, she was a high school graduate. These young people had been pushed through the system. I soon learned that I would be dealing with more than a skills deficit. The educational system had failed them and there were emotional as well as academic consequences. High school left them feeling neglected and patronized.
I didn’t much like Flowers for Algernon. I found it to be an overly didactic Freudian melodrama. But that’s a purely literary criticism. I was not going to review it, but then I remembered those young people. I remembered how hard they worked. I remembered how frustrating it was for them when they had difficulty with a task that came easily to most others.
Daniel Keyes populates his novel with caricatures, it is true, but these caricatures depict the different ways people behave toward the mentally disabled: In their discomfort with what they do not understand, they react with impatience, mockery, and sometimes even hostility.
If readers come away from Flowers for Algernon with a greater respect for their mentally disabled brothers and sisters, then it deserves its popularity, for a book that can do that is a book that has value....more
How self-indulgent is Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence?
As a devotee of the art of the sentence, I found in this book the pleasure that comes frHow self-indulgent is Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence?
As a devotee of the art of the sentence, I found in this book the pleasure that comes from two people discovering that they love the same thing. Fish presents a sentence and that sentence opens up its richness to me and makes me want to analyze it six ways to Sunday. But this is Fish’s show, not mine. So I watch, exclaiming yes, yes yes, and sometimes singing along – because it’s always more fun when you sing along.
I enjoyed chapters one through seven more than chapters eight through ten. Fish divides his book into “how to write a sentence” and “how to read a sentence.” But this division feels like an afterthought. I rather suspect Fish ran out of steam after chapter seven and forced the remaining chapters. Or that he had two different books he wanted to write about sentences and he just stuck them together. Most of his examples in chapter eight (on first sentences) are taken from fiction. Some are from movies. All of the examples in chapter nine (on last sentences) are from fiction. This is in contrast to the primarily nonfiction examples in chapters one through seven.
As a book read purely for my enjoyment, this is only a slight criticism. But what about as a book read for education? The book’s full title is How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. For students of English composition, I believe chapters one through seven are instructive. Students interested in a book on how to read fiction would be better served by David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction....more
Back in the 20th century, before the world of online booksellers, I learned of a publisher that had a huge catalog of $1 classics. Dover Publications.Back in the 20th century, before the world of online booksellers, I learned of a publisher that had a huge catalog of $1 classics. Dover Publications. At that time they were located in Mineola, so I asked Ted to drive me there. He had no interest in books, but he was happy to take me for a drive.
The store was not really what you would call a store. It was a tiny room lined with books. And I was like a kid in a candy store selecting my dollar classics like penny candies. I left there with a bag full of books and on the ride home I started reading The Land of Little Rain.
My relationship with Mary Austin did not end there. The Land of Little Rain piqued my interest in the desert and I went on to read other desert books that I liked even more than Austin’s. Meanwhile I set aside her novel Cactus Thorn halfway through. It put me off starting some of the longer (though thankfully nonfiction) books like The Flock and The Land of Journey's Ending.
But I have an appreciation of Austin that abides. She showed me the beauty of the desert, its flora and fauna, its people, its ambiance, its way of life. She introduced me to the literature of the desert. Would I have read John C. Van Dyke, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Edward Abbey had I not been turned on to the desert by Austin? Probably not.
Perhaps this is why her books have kept their place on my bookshelves and in my heart all these years....more
It just so happens that I was listening to Exile on Main Street when I started reading White Light. How cool is that? My favorite Stones song is on thIt just so happens that I was listening to Exile on Main Street when I started reading White Light. How cool is that? My favorite Stones song is on that album. “I Just Want to See His Face.” I could listen to it on a loop for hours. Pack a bowl. Play some tunes. Read about a mathematician’s Dantean journey through the astral realm. I never thought math could be so much fun....more
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.”
In “The Moon and the Yew Tree” Sylvia Plath presents, not a vision of the picturesque English churchyard outside her bedroom window, but a mental landscape with more melancholy, more solemnity, more Gothic gloom than any representation of physical reality could ever have.
It is a scene of austere resignation to destiny. Nothing mitigates the blackness. Terror is kept at bay only by a fatalistic acceptance of the merciless moon’s indifference to human suffering. Plath looks out of her window and knows she is home. “I live here,” she says without emotion.
But Plath would have it otherwise if she could. She would like to believe in tenderness.
“The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness— The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.”
Before “Lady Lazarus,” before “Edge,” there was “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” I like to read the three poems as a group. Together they tell a story of despair, anger, and bitter defiance.
Written less than sixteen months before her death, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” establishes a mood, an ambiance, that fades into the background with “Lady Lazarus” and then returns to the fore in the last lines of “Edge.” Plath has not yet adopted the bravado of “Lady Lazarus” here, but it is easy to see the progression from the deliberate matter-of-fact voice in this cold dark poem to the proud death-defying persona of the later poem.
“I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—”
Then there is the moon imagery and the aura of inevitability. “I simply cannot see where there is to get to.” The line, uttered with deadpan acumen, foreshadows the decree of finality in “Edge,” her final poem. “Her bare/Feet seem to be saying:/We have come so far, it is over.” The bare feet that prophesy this end are the feet of the girl who walks through the moonlit landscape like God.
Plath’s emphasis is everywhere on rebirth: the moon, Lazarus, the phoenix. Do you want to know what it feels like to come back from the dead? Do you really want to know? The challenge is offered and it must not be accepted lightly, for it is a dark vision.
It is easy for casual observers to dismiss her, to take refuge in ignorance and to feign contempt so that they can deny their own demons. Who would walk through Plath’s landscape with its cold blue light, its black trees, its bats, owls, and headstones, who would gaze at the yew tree and follow its line, up, up to the remote unfeeling moon, must be made of harder stuff than the common run of men and women are made of.
Plath stares her observers down. She smirks in the faces of her detractors. And she boasts in a loud clear voice, a voice clear as a bell—or a bell jar. Plath is no penitent. Her confession is revelation, not repentance.
“Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.”
She is never contrite. On the contrary, her attitude toward suicide is cavalier. “Lady Lazarus” is a haughty poem. She tells it like it is, sugar-coating nothing. She refuses to restrain her rage or soften her voice. Let those who would scorn her, scorn her, but first let them shudder at the violence of her imagery. Let them wince and recoil as she looks them dead in the eyes and says: “They had to call and call/And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”
Plath makes no apologies.
“What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies.”
It is the vulgar spectators, their flaccid mouths agape, their vacuous eyes agog, that so offend. Plath does not cast her gaze earthward and dig her toe around in the dirt, stammering out the obligatory and obsequious phrases that appease the peanut-crunching crowd. She does not hide her face from the gibbering mob, from those whose mockery conceals their own fear, whose insults spring from the senseless cruelty of their puerile and unenlightened minds.
Reading “Lady Lazarus,” I hear Plath’s saucy voice above the bleating of the herd. If they want to look, let them look. Let them look and gape and drool.
“It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out.”
The trick is not to mind the voyeurs, to welcome them, to put on a good show. Instead of tenderness there is always brute amusement. She does not keep her secret nestled to her bosom, protected and sheltered, for the audience would have it out and, not content to take a brief and humble look and then pass on, each man, woman, and child would feel compelled to gawk and jeer and perhaps poke at it with a stick.
Better to put it on display herself, hang a sign, charge admission. Better to hold her head high and thrust out her chest, work the crowd, be barker and freak in one, expose her scars to all and sundry. And why stop there? Let them come a little closer and smell the smell of death that still clings to her garments. It is good to remember that it is they who are terrified.
“There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy.”
She will exhume the past, but before she does she would like to talk price. There is a charge, after all. It is betrayal that hurts the most, not the scrutiny of the multitude. Looking out into the audience, there is only a sea of interchangeable faces. They are of no consequence. It is the betrayal of a loved and trusted one that crushes. To believe in one, to have faith in one—just one, is to risk all.
“I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern”
I think there is a sordid fascination people have with other people’s suicides. Plath knew this when she wrote “Lady Lazarus.” In order to probe ever deeper into the private world of the suicidal mind they affect concern. Candor is not for these frauds. Melodrama, sensationalism, the shocking lurid details are enough for the curious. It is all they really want anyway. True candor, the guided tour and backstage pass are for the select few, the one, possibly for none at all.
Plath’s poetry is triumphant. It is her victory over death and over the scavengers who feed upon it. And it is an invitation to all of us to face the past with courage and dignity and even a little bit of arrogance....more
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