The need for sympathy

When I posted my thoughts on The Awakening I had a feeling that a lot of people would not agree with my rather lukewarm feelings, and it was interesting to read other people's views. Amateur Reader posed a good question though - how important is it to sympathise with a main character to enjoy a book?
I found myself wondering about this after I replied - I responded that without empathy for a character in a book like The Awakening which is, in essence, about one person's feelings and experience, it makes the reading experience hollow.
First though, there is a need to think about the words. Sympathy and empathy are not quite the same things, although I may at times use them as synonyms. Sympathy is the ability to share someone else's feelings, empathy is the ability to understand them and relate them to your own. So I didn't really answer Amateur Reader's question; in truth I don't think it is important to necessarily sympathise with a character, but I do think it is important to at least be able to empathise.
And I just couldn't empathise with Edna in The Awakening. It felt like I was viewing her from a distance most of the time, this capricious selfish woman was incomprehensible to me. But, because of the structure of the book framed so tightly around one person, it felt that the distance was not great enough, a bit like being trapped in a lift with someone you don't like or comprehend.
I found myself, while thinking about this point, comparing Edna in The Awakening with Anna Karenina which I am also reading. The plot concerning the two women is extremely similar, Anna goes through almost exactly what Edna goes through, and yet I am not so dissatisfied with this book. This may just be the writing, and creation of the character, I do like Anna better than I liked Edna, but I would say in terms of empathy I probably experience about the same level. So why am I not giving up on the book, surely 800-odd pages is too much to feel like that?
And I think that 800 pages is precisely the reason. Anna Karenina is not about Anna; she is one of the main characters, rather than the main character. This book includes a number of strong characters with differing emotions and feelings. There is such a range that dislike or lack of comprehension of one character will not make the experience a disappointment. For instance, I would say I have sympathy with some characters (e.g. Dolly), empathy with others (e.g. Levin) and some I have neither but like (Oblonsky) and some I have neither and don't like (Vronsky). I would probably equate my feelings for Vronsky with those for Edna, but because the book is wider in its range than The Awakening and establishes a community of characters, taking you into their thoughts and feelings, allowing comparison and providing context for them, it is not stifling. That space is important. I am not stuck in a lift with Vronsky, I am in a town where I bump into him at times, but this doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the book.
Thinking back over the books I have read recently, a novel such as A Rebours by J K Huysmans, which is one character's thoughts and feelings almost to the exclusion of even having any other characters, was enjoyable because I both sympathised and empathised with the main character (although I didn't like him - which I define simply as would you want to spend time with the character if they were real?). I can imagine that this book may be quite dull and incomprehensible to anyone who does not have at least some empathy for the character.
So after this meandering I think I come to the same point. If a book encloses you with one person so tightly that there is no escape from them, I think generally some liking, sympathy or at the very least empathy is necessary or it will be a detached and unengaging experience. However, liking, sympathy and empathy for a particular character all become less important in books which expand away from that single viewpoint.
Except… I've just read through what I've written here and the thought struck me: 'what about Lolita?' Absolutely no sympathy, no empathy and no liking, yet in the mind of one character throughout. That's a difficult one, and makes me wonder if perhaps the quality of the writing can override this need sometimes? I'd be interested to know what others think.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

'It would have been a difficult matter for Mr. Pontellier to define to his own satisfaction or any one else's wherein his wife failed in her duty toward their children. It was something which he felt rather than perceived, and he never voiced the feeling without subsequent regret and ample atonement.
...
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The motherwomen seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. '

[Spoiler alert:I can't write about this small book without alluding to major plot points, you have been warned.]

It was the title of this book that made me include it as a substitution book in the My Year of Reading Dangerously challenge; I had visions of descriptions of a Lady Chatterley-style sexual awakening that I didn't have the stomach for. And the blurb on this book does explicitly compare the impact of this book with Lady C.
The 'awakening' of the title is not just a sexual one, though; that is a part of it but a part where a delicate veil is drawn (it happens 'off-page', as it were). Personally I found this much more to my taste than the rather gruesome descriptions that Lawrence puts his readers through.
The awakening of the main character is a sensual one, in the widest sense. All her senses come to life during the summer on the Grand Isle where she stays with other well-to-do French Creole families from New Orleans.
Edna Pontellier comes from Kentucky but is married to a Creole, and part of the story is about her difference to the society in which she mixes. Married with two children, she does not know what love is until she falls for Robert Lebrun, and this goes in tandem with her senses awakening, for instance with noticing the natural beauty in her surroundings, or sobbing at a well-played piano sonata. She is waking up from a life of mental torpor and becomes not only a sensual woman alive to the world but an artist.
In parts the book is beautifully written, with an occasional unexpected use of language which I presume is colloquial. The descriptions in the first section of the book on the island really convey the image of languid summer days, and these parts were a joy to read.
However, one thing I disliked about the writing was that Chopin constantly introduced new descriptions of characters who have been in the book from the start. At page 80 of a book only a little over 100 pages long I don't need yet another physical description of the main character. It seemed as though the author was worried that the image that the reader had in their head might not match her own picture of her heroine; it felt controlling, as though she was unwilling to trust in the intelligence of her readers.
I can see why this book could have deeply affected a lot of women. Edna's strike for independence was admirable, she refuses to efface herself and put herself behind her husband and children, shaking off cares about social mores as she makes her own way. She demands to be free and the book traces her journey to be truly free from the roles of wife and mother that society has imposed upon her, neither of which roles she fulfills very well as the book makes clear. She breaks out and chooses her own destiny up to the point when she finds that she cannot push against society any further.
It is clear that it is not just her awakened passion for Robert that causes this change; during the same summer she developed a deep friendship with a woman, Adele Ratignolle, and this relationship is just as important in Edna's journey to freedom. It is this friendship which breaks down the reserve that Edna had always had as an outsider in the Creole community and that appears to trigger the release of the other feelings that she had never before allowed herself to experience. It is not that Adele is a role model, on the contrary she is one of the mother-women referred to in the quotation above, but the establishment of this intimacy appears to allow Edna to begin to recognise her own feelings.
This was a very different time for women, and the independence that we take for granted today was not a possibility for a lot of women at the end of the nineteenth century, and that is what makes this book so important; I can recognise this, but on a personal level I did not find the main character likeable.
I felt much more sympathy for Lady Chatterley, trapped in a loveless marriage with a man becoming more and more unpleasant, forced to live in a part of the country she dislikes. In contrast, Edna seems to have drifted pointlessly and selfishly through her life up to the point of the book. She appears completely self-absorbed and unimaginative. She patronisingly feels sorry for her friend when she observes her domestic happiness, assuming that Adele has not woken up to life as she has. At points when Edna was overcome with the ennui of her existence, I wanted to give her a good shaking.
When she broke away from her married life she became a little more sympathetic to my eyes but even then she drifted into a relationship with an unsuitable man, one whom she recognised was not genuine in his protestations of his feelings, and seemed unable to give her life any more direction. She takes the tack of independence not so much because she knows it is right, as because the wind seems to blow her there; I think this is what I found irritating about her, she was capricious and completely led by whim rather than making a determined stand against the stultification of her life.
I suspect this is one of those books that I should have read when I was a teenager, while at the brink of life and all it could bring. It is a book that demands that feeling that everything is out there for the taking if you can only get to it.

I must be cursed

This afternoon I planned to do some planting but put it off until I finished The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry and on finishing it I can confidently say that it is one of the best books I have ever read. A proper review will be forthcoming when it's settled into my brain properly, but this is my instant assessment.
After I finished the book I pulled on my wellies and gardening gloves and got myself settled on my kneeling pad, happily weeding the dug-over patch of the garden and thinking about poetry. Then I began to plant some lettuces.
I had only planted four out of twelve when the heavens opened. Not just a shower you understand, I was prepared to keep gardening in that, but a full blown thunderstorm.
I carried on regardless to finish the row but by then it was too much and I had to run inside, forced to watch the puddles form on the ground and my poor newly settled little lettuces become spattered with mud, just like last year.
I think I must, in some mystical way, control the weather. If we do have the incredibly hot summer that friends and family members are confidently predicting then parts of the country that have been hit the hardest might want to consider paying me to set up a little vegetable patch. As soon as I start gardening, the rain is sure to follow.
It was frustrating, but nevertheless it is pleasant to be inside listening to the restful sound of the rain. It is the sort of rain which comes straight down and makes the air feel wonderfully clear.
And I can use this unused gardening time to advantage and go and curl up with a book instead - after a shower to wash away the mud of course.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

After Coraline I was anxious to read this collection of short stories for adults by Neil Gaiman (this review has been a long time coming), and this is most definitely a collection for adults. I found it a little up and down; some stories were sublime, some were so-so. I suspect most people, apart from the most ardent Gaiman fans, would think the same, but which stories would be classed in which category would vary from person to person, as it is an extremely varied and very inventive collection.
The first story in the collection, A Study in Emerald, is a good introduction; it allows you to get your bearings and work out the sort of territory you are entering for the relatively uninitiated into Gaiman's work, such as me. It is available to read for free on Neil Gaiman's site here, and I can recommend it - with a couple of provisos if you are to enjoy it fully.
Firstly you should be familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories, not too difficult as most people are, and secondly you should be familiar with H P Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos - without the second I imagine it must be a quite mystifying story. Basically the world of Sherlock Holmes and the world of H P Lovecraft have collided and once you get your head round that the story makes perfect sense. It wasn't too difficult and once I let my rational side go off and amuse itself somewhere else for a bit, I was fine.
It was the stories which do this, that create a world that is a perverted grotesque image of our own, that I enjoyed the most. My favourite was Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire (what a fantastic title!) about a writer struggling to write the truth about his reality; I won't go into too many details but the reality he is living in is not quite as ours, and the reversal of expectations was very entertaining.
I enjoyed the stories about the Smith character and Mr Alice; they appeared in two stories in the collection, the second also including a character called Shadow who, my brother informs me, is in American Gods. Smith is a very creepy character, a genuinely likeable psychopath. The matter of fact way he announces his Humbert Humbert-like sexual preferences and is surprised at the reaction he receives was particularly chilling.
I think the stories that made the least impact on me were the ones that were the most realistic: the story of a playhouse which children dare themselves to enter for instance or Feeders and Eaters, which is grotesque, and the part about the cat is particularly nasty (but for shock value still nothing on the kitten's head crushed by the stone in Bram Stoker's The Squaw, I'm afraid I have to disagree with a previous comment) but I found the settings a bit dowdy, with a kitchen-sink drama feel to them that I never get on with particularly.
All in all though, slight criticisms aside, the collection is very good and well worth reading; I enjoyed it very much and am fully a Gaiman convert. Now I would like to read some of his novels.

Blind poetry tasting

I think I'm pretty secure in the fact that I read the things I read, poetry and prose, because I enjoy them and not because they are works that you 'should' read. I would hate to become that sort of person, who spouts the names of authors to impress other people rather than because I have a genuine pleasure in reading their works.
It is always nice to have this reaffirmed, though, as it was yesterday. I was idly opening the Penguin Book of English verse at random and reading the odd poem. This book is arranged chronologically, rather than in chunks of single poets, a method I really like. The other day there was a discussion in my office about the Mona Lisa and someone was saying what a disappointment it was; this is not a surprising view, it is such a familiar image that when some people are stood before the smalllish painting I think they often feel let down, as they expected something more dramatic. When I went to see the painting in the Louvre, though, I didn't race to it but walked through the galleries looking at the paintings arranged chronologically and saw the paintings that came before the Mona Lisa. When we eventually arrived at Da Vinci's painting I found it a quite breathtaking leap forward compared to other works of the time, and really appreciated the genius behind it.
This poetry book should have the same effect. Instead of treating poets in isolation or giving the impression that a poet produced all their work silmultaneously rather than developing over decades you can see the works in their contemporary context, appreciate the development of poetry and see where there have been leaps forward, however familiar the work.
Anyway, I idly opened the page and read a little poem. I had no idea who it was by, but was struck by its simplicity and beauty. I really enjoyed reading it and wondered who it could be by. I then turned back through a few pages to find the creator.
It was written by William Blake, a poet whom I would list among my favourites (although, as this shows, not due to a comprehensive knowledge of his work!). This is comforting, as it shows that I do not necessarily appreciate a poem just because it is by a poet whom one should appreciate, one of the greats. I really do enjoy his work for its own sake. Although I failed the real purpose of a blind tasting, as I couldn't name the particular vineyard behind the glass of wine, I at least have the comfort of knowing that I am not affected by the label when deciding what I enjoy. I will be doing more dipping into this book for blind tasting over the next few weeks; I am more likely to find gems than if I look through the index I feel.
On Wuthering Expectations there has been an interesting discussion recently about the difference between appreciationism and deeper criticism. This is an appreciationist post - here is the poem in question from Songs of Experience. I loved it and may think more deeply about it at some point in the future but am too tired to now I'm afraid, so I am just going to share it as something beautiful.

A POISON TREE

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fear.

Night and morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles.

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine.

And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole.

When the night had veiled the pole;

In the morning, glad, I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

More metric excitement

Is it wrong to be so excited about poetry? I can't help but feel it is. There are going to be a lot of posts like this as I work my way through Stephen Fry's book The Ode Less Travelled, and I'm still only in the first section on Metre. There's Rhyme, Form, and Diction and Poetics Today still to come, I'm afraid. Usually I like to read a book, let it settle for a bit and then write about it but I am so enthralled by this that it is spilling out of me.
This morning on the train as I opened it and realised the section I had got to the evening before I felt the excitement bubble up inside me like a child who has been given a present - the metre of Anglo-Saxon poetry! There, aren't you just as excited at the thought?
Okay, I'll admit I think I probably need help. However, it really is interesting; Anglo-Saxon poetry has a completely different structure to more classical forms used by, for example, Shakespeare. The metre is not based on feet but on alliteration, it is accentual-alliterative verse. A line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is split by a caesura (break, pause) into two half-lines or hemistichs (another good thing about Stephen Fry's book is that he ensures that he explains how to pronounce all the technical terms he introduces, so not only can you write confidently about them but you can talk about them too, and bore your nearest and dearest as I am; this is pronounced hemmy-stick). Each hemistich will contain two stressed syllables - and any number of unstressed (or minorly stressed) others.
Then comes the really exciting bit, the alliteration. The first three stresses are alliterative but the fourth isn't. Fry quotes Michael Alexander's description of this as: Bang, bang, bang, crash!
Of course, one of the main things I have learned is that, as in most things, the rules of poetry are quite flexible, so sometimes the fourth syllable will be alliterative too but not usually.
Here is an example from the William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman, not actually Anglo-Saxon but written during a medieval revival (called the Alliterative Revival) of the form:

'And Clement the Coblere cauhte hym by the myddel

And for to lyfte hym aloft leyde hym on his knees.

Ac Gloton was a greet cherl and greved in the luftynge

And cowed up a caudel in Clementis lappe;'

I don't know why I find this form of poetry so appealing, I find it very natural and comfortable to read (the form, that is, not necessarily the language). Maybe it is my Anglo-Saxon heritage coming through.

A couple of purchases to report; inspired by Fry's book yesterday I went in search of Vladimir Nabokov's Notes on Prosody which is referred to. I only half-heartedly expected it to be in the bookshops and of course it wasn't. Still, while looking in the Literary Criticism section I found a volume of Selected Essays by Gore Vidal which I could not resist and then, when checking the fiction section in case someone had accidentally put Notes on Prosody there with the endless copies of Lolita, I found a novel by Nabokov which was also too much for my weak will to resist: Pale Fire. This looks a fascinating book and continues the poetry theme; the conceit is that it is a set of notes by an academic editor on a poem by a famous poet and friend who died suddenly. The blurb suggests that the notes tell more about the editor than the poem, and it looks an intriguing and different read.
Today I have picked up The Penguin Book of English Verse, a hefty collection ranging from the 1300s (the quotation above is from it) to the 1990s as I realised that, although I have a large number of poetry collections, they are pretty exclusively from the Romantic to the Modernist periods and thought I should branch out a bit.

Tales from the Hanging Court by Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker

I have a great interest in the history of the legal system in England and how it developed and Tales from the Hanging Court, which looks at crime and punishment in the eighteenth century as illustrated by the Old Bailey Proceedings, covers one of the most interesting times.
This century is the one where formalities were introduced, such as the presence of counsel for the defence and prosecution or the introduction of the Bow Street Runners as the beginnings of a formal police force.
At the start of the century a cry of 'Stop Thief!' or 'Murder!' meant that every law-abiding citizen in the area was honour bound to drop what they were doing and run to help. In an age where we often hear of horrific crimes happening while passers-by do not dare interfere there is a charm to this, but it was also quite anarchic and often violent as the wrong people might be man-handled and the right people could sometimes talk their way out of capture.
There were also rewards for returning stolen property and capturing criminals which led to the development of the profession of 'thief-takers'; at times this role would be doubled with that of a criminal, where goods would be stolen to order then returned for the reward money, and occasionally one of the thieves would be handed over for the reward (presumably if they had been troublesome to their criminal master). It is examples like these that encouraged the implementation of an official force, the Bow Street Runners, by the Fieldings (Henry the writer and his blind brother John) who were London magistrates.
There are a number of misconceptions prevalent about this age, which this book addresses. The main one is that anyone would be hanged for a crime, no matter how trivial. It is true that the 'Bloody Code', the list of offences for which you could be hanged, developed during this century. However, there was often a reluctance to hang miscreants. There is an idea that you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century which is untrue. To be hanged for theft you had to steal goods that were worth 40 shillings or more in value. Often the prosecutor, which in the early part of the century was the victim as prosections were privately brought, would be persuaded to underestimate the value of the stolen goods to save the life of the thief.
Punishment developed during the century too. Hanging was a constant, but as other punishments were devised it became used for more serious cases. Transportation was one punishment that was used in its place, frequently to America until later in the century when the Americans began to object to receiving England's criminals. Then transportation was moved to Africa for a while, and the prospect of this caused great fear among the condemned as the long sea journey was generally believed to be a lingering death sentence. One case described in detail was of a group of women who had been sentenced to transportation who refused to go and held out to be hanged instead seeing it as a quicker death. The court spent many hours persuading them to be transported (the court succeeded in the end and then a number of the women escaped from the ship).
Hanging itself was quite a gruesome event. Until the innovation of the sharp drop it was a case of slow strangulation and if the prisoner had pleased the crowd they would often pull on their legs to speed up the process. This was unfortunate for one highwayman, who had so pleased the crowd that they pulled on his legs to give him a quick death, ruining the plans he had put in place for his rescue. 'Dying game' was the way to please the crowd, which meant not showing too much fear and making a good final speech. Executions were not private affairs until near the nineteenth century.
There were other punishments such as the pillory which could be a death sentence if the crowd hated you enough, and threw mud with stones or dead cats at you. Or it could be a chance for the crowd to show their appreciation, as they did for Daniel Defoe who was pelted with nothing more harmful than flowers when he was in the pillory for seditious libel.
As the century wore on there was a move away from allowing the public to have such a say in the punishment or otherwise of convicts; it became a more regulated process. This was the century of revolution, with the French Revolution that caused great uneasiness in England and the American War of Independence. The Gordon Riots of 1780, which are discussed in great detail in the book, graphically illustrated the danger of allowing the crowds to feel that they were able to force decisions on policy. This century saw a clamp down and removal of the responsibility of ordinary people into the hands of officials, as a rudimentary police force developed, specialist lawyers began presenting and defending cases and executions became less of a public event.
The trials discussed in the book often illustrate the way in which society functioned. As ever, wealth and position would mean you had more chance of leniency. Once case described in detail was that of Joseph Baretti, an Italian scholar who was harrassed on the street by some rough people after a prostitue had pushed her hand in his trousers and grabbed him (a common way of touting for business in the 1700s) and he had panicked and ended up stabbing one of the men who had become involved. The case looked bad for him; as a foreigner he was viewed with suspicion and although it was natural to carry a knife in Italy, in England this was viewed as a low-life's weapon which made his claim to be a gentleman suspect. Luckily for him, Baretti had a lot of influential and powerful friends, a number of whom acted as character witnesses for him, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson. He was acquitted.
One particularly grotesque character was a cut-purse who was accused of stealing from a woman and swore at and fought her pursuers violently, at one point pulling open her blouse and squirting breast milk in the face of one of her accusers. She was hanged.
It is interesting to read of events that are comparable to what happens still; people are still people after all, and eighteenth century Londoners had a lot in common with today's public. An example was the moral panic that broke out as the first recorded serial sex offender struck, the Monster who stalked women and stabbed them through their skirts, reminiscent of the panic over Jack the Ripper a century or so later and the sort of media panics that occur today after sensational crimes.
The eighteenth century saw the move from mob rule to formal legal mechanisms: from thieves being caught and prosecuted by individuals to the rise of the Bow Street Runner and the lawyer, from punishments as a public event to private hangings and the growth of imprisonment. This book gives a fascinating view of the changes in society during this century as the world we know now was beginning to develop; it was a very enjoyable and interesting read.

The Joy of Metre or, a complaint about my schooling

I am enjoying Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled so much, I really can't recommend it highly enough if you would like to learn about the technical side of poetry. It is written in an intelligent, unpatronising way (he refers to other works on prosody throughout and even dares to disagree with Nabokov at one point) but thankfully he does not assume any previous knowledge; every term is clearly explained. Fry no more expects you to automatically know what metre is than what an acephelous anapaest is [it is a foot of three syllables, two unstressed then one stressed, with the first unstressed or weak syllable docked. This is effectively an iamb (a foot of two syllables- unstressed, stressed) but because it begins a line in a verse written in anapaestic metre it can be thought of as an acephalous (or headless) anapaest rather than a substituted iamb - see how much I'm learning?]
There is more to this than learning a few new terms though, I am realising how much meaning this unlocks in poetry. As the terms are introduced and explained, Stephen Fry quotes from numerous poets from Chaucer onwards, and discusses how many of these poets used these techniques deliberately. He mentions how Keats was obsessed with studying scansion, as was Wilfred Owen. These poets were 'kissed by the muse' as Stephen Fry puts it, certainly, as they created but they also worked at it.
This leads me to my complaint, which I touched on the other day. I have always felt my schooling in English was lacking; primarily this was because, as a school child in the 1970s and '80s, I was not taught any formal English grammar. It just was not done. I'm sure there was some pedagogical reason for it but I have to say, whatever the reason was, it was wrong.
Now, I am not saying that as a child I would have welcomed studying grammar, indeed I'm sure I would have hated it, but the foundation it would have given me for the future would have been invaluable. I have had to work out the rules of grammar for myself as an adult to ensure that I can write competently, a very necessary activity in my work. But the area that I really feel the lack of this part of my education is that area that the English are famed for being bad at, learning other languages. I largely blame my lack of knowledge of grammar for my lack of skill with other languages.
I do try; wherever we go I attempt to learn a bit of the language, I think it is only polite, but I find it incredibly difficult. And the more I try to learn other languages the more I realise that they rely on strict grammatical rules and if I can grasp those the job is half done; it is then just a case of a bit of vocabulary. But I have no strong grasp of the grammatical rules of my own language with which to compare those of the new language. I remember the despair of my GCSE Latin teacher who would talk to us in grammatical terms to be faced with a set of uncomprehending faces.
'Weren't you ever taught this?' she cried once. 'No, never,' we all replied.
The same goes for poetry. It may not have had as large an effect on my life as the lack of formal training in grammar, but the principle is the same. There seemed to be an aversion to teaching us the technicalities of language, the difficult stuff that we might struggle with a bit, but without it we were deprived of so much.
I now realise that while studying Wilfred Owen for my A-Level, although I enjoyed his work and loved to read it, if I had understood what he was doing with the metre, the techniques he was using to ensure that the emphasis went just where he wanted it, I would have understood so much more about the poem and the themes and images he was exploring. And my essays would have been so much easier to write! For instance, if I had understood and been able to articulate how he forces the emphasis onto the words 'blood' and 'froth' in Dulce et Decorum est, well, the essay would have written itself.
My husband plays the guitar and he has often said to me that when you understand the technicalities of music you listen to it in a new way. You can appreciate a good tune as before, but you also see deeper layers; you understand where the musician or composer has been very clever and is using a technique to ensure an emotion is created in the listener. It is the same with poetry; I am seeing so much more in the poems now and appreciating the work that went into them.
I am becoming obsessed with metre, as Keats was, but am resisting the temptation to pull out all my books of poetry and begin looking at the scansion. I am resisting it beause I know there is still so much more to learn and I want to fully understand as many techniques as possible first.

Beware the Cat by WIlliam Baldwin

I picked up this curiosity (published by the Huntington Library Press, ISBN: 0-87328-154-3) in the bookshop of the British Library. It is subtitled 'The first English novel', with an introduction to explain why and also lay out some of the historical context for the work.
The scholars who have prepared this book for publication (William A Ringler Jr and Michael Flachmann) trace the works that precede this to firmly and convincingly stake Beware the Cat's claim as the first real novel in English:

'Until William Baldwin's Beware The Cat, written in the first half of 1553, we can find no original work of English fiction of more than short-story length in which we see consistent character portaryal and a sequence of events that form a coherent plot.'

Having read it, it certainly does have these characteristics of a novel and has a modern feel, despite the slightly archaic language.
The story itself is easy to read and is amusing; it is about a group of men discussing whether animals have feelings and can communicate. A story is told of how cats communicated with each other after Grimalkin the cat was slain and how Grimalkin's death occurred, but then one of the men, Master Streamer who is called a divine but is portrayed as a buffoon, tells of how he decided to try and understand the cats that made a row under his window yowling at each other every night.
There is a detailed explanation of the alchemical process that he follows to enable him to understand the cats' speech, quite disgusting and very funny in parts, such as when the huntsmen who give him the body of a fox and hare then soundly beat him because he offends their superstition about not naming the game they hunt.

'If they say it bringeth ill luck in the game, then are they unlucky, idolatrical, miscreant infidels and have no true belief in God's providence. I beshrew their superstitious hearts, for my buttocks did bear the burden of their misbelief.'

He then listens in to the conversation of the cats who are listening to one purge herself by telling of her life for the crime of refusing a male cat who wished to have his way with her (against the law in the cat society). This cat tells of the people she lived with, especially one 'gentlewoman' who seemed to be a procuress for the young men in the area, but is still a very religious Catholic despite being quite unscrupulous and dishonest.
There is a theme of anti-Catholicism in the piece; it was written early in Bloody Mary's reign by a fervent Protestant who not only managed to escape retribution during her reign but even wrote to the Master of the Revels offering his plays for performance before the Queen (unsuccessfully). In this book Baldwin has several digs at masses, priests and the doctrine of transubstantiation.
The cat tells of how she caused trouble for the various owners, letting out their secrets which she knew because the owners never bothered to hide them from the cats. And this is the moral- your cat will listen to you so beware, especially in case someone learns how to understand them and hears all your secrets as Streamer did and also, more seriously, not only your cat but God will know all your secrets, so you should not live a dishonest life.
The author has little headings in the margins throughout, which are often wry observations on what Streamer is saying, such as 'Here the poetical fury came upon him' as he gives them a long list of the noises he heard after taking his achemical preparations in bad rhyming couplets. Also Master Streamer talks as an authority but is often quite mistaken in his views, such as when he discusses how the tides control the moon and not vice versa, as is more usually thought. Although crude in places, as much humour was in the sixteenth century, this is also an intelligent piece that can appeal to readers on a number of levels.
I enjoyed this for the glimpses of ordinary people's lives in the sixteenth century that are in the story and as an example of Tudor humour, but I also enjoyed it just as an entertaining read. The language is not so far removed from modern English that it is difficult. It is only a short book, but very interesting and well worth looking at.

A Modest Poetry Challenge: An Ezra Pound Poem

Firstly thanks to Kate for organising this month-long Modest Poetry Challenge. It may not be National Poetry Month in the UK, but it is in this house, and my love of poetry has been reawakened. Although I have still occasionally read poetry over the past few years, I don't think I've thought as much about it since I was at school and it has been very enjoyable.
As I mentioned I've been using OpenLearn to do a short course on poetry and this by Ezra Pound is one of the poems that is used as an example on the course where it is not discussed in any great detail other than to show the power a short poem can have. For me it is quite a perfect and beautiful poem. (It also reminded me how much I used to love Ezra Pound's writing, and I was saddened to see the other day that, according to Sheffield's main bookstore, his poetry is no longer worth giving shelf-space to.)

Fan-Piece, for her imperial lord

O fan of white silk,

clear as frost on the grass-blade,

You also are laid aside.

Small but beautiful, what struck me most about this poem is that its power hinges on one word, the 'also' in the last line. If you remove that word you have just a vignette, albeit with an image in the second line that is clear and beautiful; it is a picture of a moment, but nothing more.
Put back the word 'also' and you have a poem that resonates with the quiet sadness and regret of love spurned, the pain of no longer being in favour but 'laid aside' (by, as the title suggests, her imperial lord) for someone else. The image of the second line, the cold of the frost that the fan is compared to, increases this emotion; the cold frost that the fan is compared to can be related to the cold feeling of loss and abandonment of the woman.
I was really struck by the beauty of this little poem, only three lines but very moving and powerful.

Rediscovering an old love

I've really been enjoying doing the OpenLearn What is Poetry course. As I worked on it I suddenly remembered that I used to love writing poetry some twenty years ago, and wasn't that bad at it either. So why did I stop?
Today, to further my quest to understand poetry better, I bought Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled and in the first two lines he supplied the reason:

'I have a dark and dreadful secret, I write poetry.
This is an embarrassing confession for an adult to make.'

And he's right, I stopped writing poetry because it felt vaguely embarrassing and adolescent. It's not what grown-ups do. Now the poet within me, kept in a dark and well-locked cupboard for many years, has been unleashed and I have begun again, but don't panic! I won't be inflicting my attempts on you here on this blog.
I worship the ground Stephen Fry walks on but when I heard him talk about this book on Jonathan Ross's show I found even the idea of a book exhorting you to write poetry embarrassing, and thought it would be one I would never buy. I was completely wrong about it; this is a book about the technical side of poetry, the things we should all have been taught at school but most probably won't have been. I am so glad I overcame my embarrassment and will devour it over the next few days.
The book, although I'm only about ten pages in, is excellent. In the foreword he talks about, firstly, how people see nothing wrong with amateur painters, or musicians, or cooks etc. but somehow it is wrong to write for your own pleasure (writing for yourself was something Anne Lamott talked about and one of the things I liked best about Bird by Bird).
Secondly he talks about how there is an assumption that you just know how to write poetry and don't need to learn the techniques, which is silly and, again, would be ridiculous for painters, musicians, cooks etc. I remember English lessons at school where we were taught about poetry; there really did seem to be an assumption that we had an innate knowledge of how to construct a poem, as no one ever actually taught us how to do it. Obviously everyone knows what iambic pentameter is! How stupid of me not to know! (And I was one of the few students who actually read the stuff for pleasure).
This book qualifies as one of my favourite things (finding that a book I thought I'd hate is wonderful) that I have just listed on a post at AndiLit who wrote about the things she loves, and asked commenters to add their own favourite things. It is refreshing to be encouraged to focus on the positive in life every now and again.
These were the rest of mine:

• My cat
• My husband (the order of these two is interchangable; I just heard a hairball being coughed up so should probably reverse them)
  
• Pink blossom on the trees in the churchyard I walk through every day - it's not quite there yet but will be very soon
  
• Beautiful music
• Learning new things
  
• Reading book blogs
• and finding comments here.
  

(Andi's having a book giveaway too, if you comment on her post with your favourite things by the 12th.)

Plutarch's Cicero

I was reading about Cicero the other day and the piece quoted Plutarch's Life a couple of times, which reminded me of my ongoing project to read the Lives and inspired me to see what Plutarch thought of this man.
The general impression one is left with is that Cicero was enormously intelligent but arrogant, with a big mouth that got him into trouble. He was a statesman and philosopher but it appears that he was almost more famous for his biting quips, a classical Oscar Wilde, such as when the rich Roman Crassus denied ever having said that members of his family never lived beyond sixty and asked why he would have said such a thing, Cicero replied: It was to gain the people's favour, you knew how glad they would be to hear it. The victims of his wit did not always appreciate being the butt of his satire and he made some powerful enemies.
Cicero was not a particularly brave man, which was unfortunate as he lived in turbulent times, surviving through several uprisings in Rome led by unsavoury characters such as Catiline, and the famous confrontation between Caesar and Pompey in which he eventually picked the wrong side. He was reprimanded for this by Cato, not for supporting Pompey as Cato was already in Pompey's camp, but for sacrificing his impartial position by which he could have done some good. Luckily for him, either through generosity or policy, Caesar was forgiving.
When a young man, the Oracle at Delphi told Cicero to follow his own genius, not the opinion of the people, but he soon ignored it and spent most of his life ambitiously politicking. He was a famed orator and would invariably win if he supported someone's cause in a legal battle. Unfortunately again his fatal flaw would show here, as he was quite unbearably arrogant about his talents.
From the point of view of two millenia later it appears that the most sucessful parts of Cicero's life were the points when he had been forced out of politics and pursued philosophical pursuits instead, writing a number of great works, but this was not enough for Cicero. From this Life the intellect of Cicero is hard to appreciate; he comes across as snivelling and arrogant in turns, and is quite unsympathetic. I feel I need to read his works now to appreciate just why Cicero was so lauded and how he gained such a popular following in Rome.
Cicero was a defender of the Republic, not by force but by his speeches in the Senate and his writing; he greatly feared what was happening to Rome as strong ambitious men vied for power, and it was this and the criticisms that he wrote that led to his ultimate downfall. He did not take part in Caesar's assasination, despite being a friend of Brutus as the conspirators feared his want of courage, but afterwards aligned himself with Octavian, helped him gain power but was then thrown aside. When Octavian, Antony and Lepidus met to decide the fate of various people in Rome, Octavian strongly defended Cicero for two days while Antony and Lepidus wanted him to be executed; Cicero had written harsh criticisms of Antony and they hated each other. On the third day Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, gave in and Cicero was murdered. The soldier who killed him cut off his hands to take and display in Rome, the hands that had dared to write criticisms of Antony.

OpenLearn

I managed to get across the stage alright for my graduation yesterday with my hurt ankle for my two seconds of glory, but more importantly I learned of a fascinating new initiative from the Open University during the Vice Chancellor's speech that others might also be interested in.
OpenLearn is a resource being developed by the OU where they put learning resources up on their website. I checked it out as soon as we got home and expected it to be just a random set of resources available for browsing, but it is much better than that. They have put up a series of mini-courses that anyone can access for free. So if you have an interest in something and want to learn about it in a structured way but don't want to commit to a full course you can undertake these courses.
They are learning for its own sake, there are no qualifications to be gained, but to be honest this is just what I want. I am missing the learning from my degree and was toying with the idea of another course, but the time and money commitment needed are off-putting at the moment. These small courses are perfect to satisfy the learning bug. They would also be good as a taster for anyone unsure if the OU is for them and thinking of signing up.
The courses are at different levels, from Introductory to Masters, and I am sure more will be added over time. I have signed up for an introductory one of twelve hours (which you do as and when you want) with Kate's poetry challenge in mind, What is Poetry? There are many more that look very interesting and I'm sure more will be added to my learning list. I think I might even try some introductory level science ones. You can access them without registering or signing up, it is very easy, but registering gives you access to some additional facilities.
I am looking forward to studying this but have gone straight into student mode and am procrastinating rather than studying, having taken about six internet tests in a row (among other things I've found out I'm a sociopath (personality defect test), and Sofia Coppolla would direct the film of my life -although presumably not if I ever let loose the sociopath).
In other news, if you have missed the Serial Comma blog over the past few months, Rob's back! He's blogging at The Fiction Desk Blog now, so pop along there for some very interesting posts on writing and books.

If only I had the money...

Just a quick post. Tomorrow J and I are attending our graduation for our Open University law degrees (we studied them together); I, being the most clumsy person in the world, twisted my ankle quite badly yesterday. Don't ask me how I did it, I was sober (it was seven o'clock in the morning) wearing walking boots not heels, and walking along a flat piece of pavement. I didn't even fall over, just stumbled a bit but managed to completely turn my ankle at the same time.
The swelling has gone down since yesterday evening when it looked like someone had inserted an egg under the skin of my ankle but it is still a bit painful to walk on. I think I am paying now for wearing platform shoes in the early nineties and going clubbing in them, resulting in many turned ankles that seemed to have no effect at the time. With this, and having a trapped nerve or something in my neck this morning that is still sore, I am feeling about fifty years older than I am and will look most elegant shuffling and limping across the stage tomorrow to collect my degree. Wonderful.
I really posted to link to this story on the BBC site, rather than whinge; more dreams of what I could buy if I was filthy rich, but unfortunately I'm not. It would be very nice to be able to type up my blog on Charles Dickens' desk! Although I wonder if it would be inspiring or intimidating? Probably the latter.

New Books

A couple of new books have found their way into my house, mostly directly leading on from other reading. Firstly I have, as I mentioned the other day, a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, that I am resisting the lure of at the present. Elaine warned in a comment that it will take over my life when I start to read it, which I think I guessed. I am going to hold off for as long as I can as there are other things that I need to do that have been neglected for books recently, like getting the seed potatoes chitting and trying to remove the last of the bramble before it begins to grow again. Winter is over already, it doesn't get dark till past seven o'clock at night, and I am not prepared.
A book which has been a cause of this garden neglect was Abarat by Clive Barker which I picked up at the weekend and couldn't put down. You may remember that I originally bought this due to an intriguing, although quite negative, review by Cath and I can see why she thought what she did about the book. It is a fascinating and magical world but it ends abruptly and quite unsatisfactorily; it is the first part of a quartet, but irritatingly is not a self-contained part and only a small portion of the world Barker has created is travelled through in the book, the rest is just hinted at. In marketing terms, though, it worked on me; I needed to know more about Candy Quackenbush and what happens to her in the Abarat, so yesterday I bought the second part, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War.
My concern is that this part will end similarly abruptly and still leave me hungry for more, as the third part has not been published according to Amazon and I don't know if the final part has even been written. I just hope Clive Barker takes good care of himself, puts his seat belt on and looks both ways before crossing the road, until he gets that final part completed.
The books are not perfect; the main thing that has struck me about the second part is that one character who died in the first is suddenly alive again with no explanation, but I am so enjoying being in this bizarre, at times beautiful and at times grotesque, world that I can overlook some continuity errors. These are books written for young adults so there is an absence of skinned people, which I think I am glad about, but there are still some dark and nasty moments, very much to my taste.
The final book that has come into the house in recent days was sent to me by Canongate Books as part of the Librarything Early Reviewers Programme. I was extremely jealous when this programme started, as the publishers working with Librarything were exclusively from US and Canada but it has since expanded and a couple of UK publishers have joined in over the past couple of months. I have put my name down for a few books, although I am being choosy about which - there's no point in being sent a book that I think I won't like; after all, with my tbr pile it's not as if I'm short of something to read.
I was lucky enough to receive one of the March selection, Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sánchez Piñol. It looks like it could be very good, the blurb says 'With echoes of "Heart of Darkness and King Solomon's Mines", "Pandora in the Congo" is a fast-paced adventure story and an exploration of the transformative power of the imagination.' Hopefully it will live up to this.
These new books have detracted a little from the continued reading of Anna Karenina. I raced through the first half, really enjoying it, but then needed a breather from marital unhappiness and the plight of the Russian farmer. I'll get back to it as soon as I emerge from the Abarat.