Tag: literature

The Absolute at Large; A recommendation and promotion

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taal-pod-5

This book is awesome.

It is one of a few works by Karel Čapek that is in the public domain and has a translation (which you can read here) that is under a creative commons license. Karel Čapek was a Czech science fiction writer from the early 20th century. Today he’s most well known as the originator of the word “robot”—which he introduced in his 1920 play R.U.R. The Absolute at Large was his first novel, after he’d written some plays and short stories. It’s a novel that begins in a very familiar, classic sort of way—a businessman sees an advertisement for an invention, realizes the inventor is an old friend, and goes to pay him a visit. It turns out that this invention (called a “carburator”) is a furnace that consumes matter entirely. It destroys it on an atomic level, releasing massive amounts of energy, and leaving nothing behind—at least, nothing physical. This is where the story turns away from typical hard sci-fi, and goes ahead toward something fantastic.

The inventor, Rudolph Marek, says that he has been reading about pantheism—the idea that god is in everything. This theory explains why when people go near the carburator, they feel a sense of awe—of holiness—all around them. By destroying matter completely, the carburator not only releases energy, it releases God—or, the Absolute.

The book continues to follow Marek and G.H. Bondy, the businessman, as Bondy purchases the invention and gets his company to start mass-producing them. As carburators are installed throughout the world, more and more instances of miracles occur, and the people near the carburators grow more and more spiritually fanatic. Groups of worshippers and cult leaders spring up all around these carburators, and eventually the Earth throws itself into a world war much more fractured, vicious, and global than the first one.

The fact that the Absolute manifests itself in every aspect of society means that Čapek’s satire has free reign. The absurd fanaticism inspired by the Absolute is a way to look at actual fanaticisms with a critical eye—communism, capitalism, and nationalism being chief among them. The book is short, but it is epically satirical.

This book is awesome, and I am recording an audiobook of it. I’ll release episodes every Sunday and Tuesday, on youtube and on podomatic.

UPDATE: And on iTunes here.

I’ve already posted the first three chapters, and you can listen to those in the video below.

And while you’re waiting for more episodes, here’s a playlist of the music I plan on using, to get you in the mood. This is going to be fun.

That’d Make a Great Play

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I think you can turn any idea into a play, and any idea into a piece of prose. However, there are some ideas that just suit one form or the other better, and since I enjoy writing both, I never try to make an idea that’s best for a short story into a play, or visa versa. I can’t really say what makes an idea excellent material for prose, because there’s so much flexibility in style and scope with prose fiction—however, plays are much more limited. So it really is special when I have an idea for a story, or find inspiration in some piece of news, and think, Man, that’d make a great play. So, when I’m considering how to develop an idea, these are the biggest characteristics that make me think it’d be a good candidate for a work of theatre.

Restricted Setting

This is probably the most obvious one. Because theaters have limited budgets, and limited stage space, most plays take place in one or a few locations. Of course there are exceptions, like every Shakespeare play, but most plays feature just one or two settings. This is something that sets prose and plays apart. There is a clear limitation on the story which is communicated to the audience. The characters can’t get around one another—they can’t solve their problems somewhere else. Everything is going to have to go down on stage, and that creates tension. Even if a prose story is all set in one place, there’s no feeling of suspense over the knowledge that it’s going to be finished in that space—because it isn’t necessarily going to be finished in that space. There are no inherent limits to the form, so the characters can go anywhere they want to, and it takes more work for the author to establish restrictions. With plays, the restrictions are instantly clear.Read More »

What I’ve Been Reading, March 2016

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Some theatre, some sci-fi, some sci-fi theatre. That’s what I’ve been reading.

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl – The title pretty much explains the book. It’s a collection of one hundred partial essays, almost all of them about theatre. The immediate question that this raises is: why read a book that isn’t complete? And, if you’re looking to learn something, or be informed, or be totally and utterly convinced of something, this is not the book for you. But if you want to be stimulated and provoked, this book is terrific.

First of all, Sarah Ruhl has a fascinating mind. Almost every essay probes into some question or insight that I never would’ve come up with. And, because the essays don’t have to come to some grand point, and very often end with questions, I was left to further explore the topic on my own. The book reads very quickly, and I probably could’ve blown through it in one sitting if I didn’t keep stopping to think, and argue with myself about the ideas she raised in her essays. My only caveat is that I don’t know how interesting the book would be to someone who does not have some experience with theatre—as an audience member, as a performer, or even just as someone who reads plays. My advice for such a person would be: go experience some facet of theatre, and then read Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays. It’s fantastic.

If you’re still unconvinced, you can go to her website and read a randomly selected essay (or two, or five.)Read More »

My Understanding of Don Quixote

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NOTE: I read the Tom Lathrop English translation of this book. The translation is very readable, and full of interesting footnotes to give context. Quotes in this post come from the Ormsby translation, because I don’t have my edition handy.

I’ll start this post by talking about a different  book—The Odyssey.

I was assigned to read this book in a class in middle school and one in high school, and never finished it either time. Every other reading assignment in high school I completed, but not The Odyssey. Part of it was that I was in eighth and ninth grade when it was assigned. Another part was that the book is terrible if read just as a book. The characters are flat, the story is convoluted and repeatedly drags itself out in cheap, illogical ways, and though the writing can be striking at times, it’s translated from a poem written in ancient Greek over two thousand years ago, so I imagine a lot of the poetry is lost. It’s only interesting as it relates to all of western literature following it, which a ninth grader, even one who’s a precocious writer, has no grasp of.

Don Quixote is not as inaccessible as The Odyssey, but it is still a flawed work. The most important thing it contains which The Odyssey doesn’t is relatable characters. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are realistic, and even have distinct voices. While some of the other characters blur together, and all speak in the same formal style as don Quixote, Sancho Panza and don Quixote are enough to engage a reader on a basic level, with no need for historical context. In addition to this, Don Quixote has the advantage of humor, something that transcends the dry, formal writing style and meandering plot.

If I read this book as just a book, I would say that I enjoyed the episodic style except where the plot completely derailed into repetitive romance stories that had nothing to do with the main characters, and that the book was bloated, but contained an interesting through-line. I’d criticize the almost complete lack of visual descriptions. I would say I adored the main two characters but that there were many secondary characters who seemed redundant, and could’ve been merged into one character. I would say that the handling of Sancho’s character arc was smooth and natural, while don Quixote’s was a bit more jerky and sudden. I’d critique the ending as fitting though too abrupt. Overall I’d like the book, though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t a big reader.

But I didn’t do that. I read the book knowing it is considered the first modern novel, knowing that everything I’ve read and written has been influenced by this book. I read it knowing that Cervantes wrote the book at the height of the Spanish Empire, and the height of its excess. I read it knowing that it was parody of chivalric romances, the popular genre of the day. I read it knowing it was blazing it’s own path through uncharted literary territory. With that in mind, I loved the book.

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What I’ve Been Reading, January 2016

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Here I go again, with a Victorian novel, a sci-fi novella, and a dramatic play.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens – The last book I read for my Dickens class, and the last book that Dickens completed. The plot is hard to pin down. The “mutual friend” described in the title is definitely a big part of it, but he’s not the only part, or even the biggest part. There’s the typical Dickens ensemble of characters that ranges from villains to saints and paupers to aristocrats, but they’re not all connected by a common plot. They are connected through themes, the big ones being death and wealth. The mutual friend is the heir to a fortune, and he fakes his own death to live a humbler life—which really ties the two big themes directly together. More than that, it’s difficult to say. I imagine each reader gets a different impression of what the most noteworthy aspect of this book is, and there’s a lot to choose from.

If you like Dickens though, you’ll love this book. The writing is complex and entertaining, and the characters and their relationships are a constant source of fascination. It’s a recombination of many of Dickens’ tried and true motifs, characters, and plots, but a perfection of them that kept me engaged enough to read through the last two hundred pages in a day.

“The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” by Aliette de Bodard – This novella, which I read in the October/November issue of Asimov’s, is set in Bodard’s Xuya universe—a world where China discovered the Americas first, and Southeast Asian cultures goes on to be much more influential. In this novella, it is the space age, and the Dai Viet Empire is facing threats from the Nam Federation. To counter these threats they desperately need to find the Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a space station to which the rebellious princess and heiress fled thirty years ago, and which disappeared without a trace.

The novella is similar to Our Mutual Friend in the way all the characters are tied together by themes, if not plot. That’s not entirely true, because the characters converge much more tightly in “Citadel” than they do in Our Mutual Friend, but that convergence isn’t really crucial or meaningful, it’s just useful for keeping things focused in a short novel. The recurring struggle of these characters is retrieving something that’s lost. The empress wants to reunite with her daughter, who she last saw when she was trying to attack the citadel. An engineer attempts to build a portal into the citadel so she can see her mother again, who was onboard the citadel when it disappeared. The younger princess feels disconnected from her daughter, who was turned into a mindship to be used by the empire.

Though the story opens strong with a fantastically large and interesting world, the characters, and their relationships and struggles, are what ended up engaging me the most. For them, “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” is worth reading. Currently it’s only available in the issue of Asimov’s in which it was published, but I’m guessing it will be published by itself some time down the line.

Oleanna by David Mamet – Oleanna is a short, two-person play by David Mamet. The characters are a college professor and a student of his. The first act is dominated by the professor spouting long philosophical lines about the failures of higher education, under the pretense of helping his student understand the class. The second act flips things around, as the audience discovers that the student has used sexual harassment claims to threaten the tenure of her teacher.

The play is fascinating. It changed my mind many times throughout reading it, but not because of ambiguity or a withholding of information—just because the characters and the questions raised are so challenging, and so well-explored. It even has a sound, decisive conclusion without crowning a victor, without establishing a right and a wrong. It’s a play that I’m definitely going to re-read, and watch the first chance I get. The only problem is that both the characters seem to be empty, sterile Mamet puppets, mere vehicles for the clashing ideas without much other content (the professor has a house, a wife, and kids, but that’s about all we get. I’m not even sure what the class was really about, or what degree the student wanted to get.) There were times when the lack of personality made me feel distant, and less engaged. I don’t know that the play would be improved with the inclusion of more character development though. Part of why it’s effective is how bare-bones it is. Plus, I didn’t see two flesh and blood actors performing it, so maybe it’s a problem exclusive to the written form of the play.

Regardless of that minor quibble, I highly recommend reading or watching Oleanna.

EDIT: Ennh, or not. At the time I read this I didn’t see it as an attack on political correctness and a denunciation of assault allegations, as one work in a long line of bullshit campus plays and novels. I mainly read it as an exploration of student-teacher power dynamics existing in a vacuum, and I dunno, if you can read it like that maybe you can enjoy it. But I think it pretty clearly was not written in a vacuum, and it’s just another fuckin campus play. As I said in the above review, I actually empathized with the student, which the text is like, not trying to get the audience to do? I’ve never reread or watched Oleanna, and I don’t intend to.

So, that’s what I’ve been reading. I also read Foundation’s Edge and Don Quixote. I thought Foundation’s Edge was alright, but I didn’t talk about it here because I wouldn’t recommend it. The only reason that I’m mentioning it at all is that I mentioned it last post, and I want to clarify that I’m not going to write about it in one of these. You know, in case you’ve just been on god damn tenterhooks since my last What I’ve Been Reading post. Don Quixote I’ll probably write about in a separate review, because there’s a lot to write about.

I have no idea what I’ll review next. Probably it’ll be words.

Did the Author Really Mean That?

Francis BassLeave a comment

Today in my Dickens class, though in a roundabout way, the question was asked.

Did Dickens intentionally use all of the rhetorical devices that we analyze throughout his writing? (The actual question was how long it took Dickens to write his books, assuming that the more time he spent the more likely it was that his subtext was intentional.) This is a question I’ve heard in classes throughout my education—Did the author really mean that? Is it really possible that the author consciously layered in so much meta-textual meaning, or are we looking too hard? The paradox that jumps out at me most is the fact that a person can spend more time analyzing a sentence than the time it took to write the sentence—how do we reckon that?Read More »