Border's Liquidation Sale

It's sad to see Borders going out of business. The good thing is I've gotten all these books...

• Hemingway's In Our Time
• James Joyce's Dubliners
• Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Jack London's Tales of the North
• Allison Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
• Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, Tales of the Jazz Age, and Flappers and Philosophers
  
• Sophocles' Theban Plays
• James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans
• Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories and Haunting of Hill House
• Boccaccio's Decameron
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• Steinbeck's Cannery Row
• Mark Twain's Diaries of Adam and Eve
  
• The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker
  
• The Middle Ages, and
• Professional Blogging for Dummies

These should keep me busy for a while--not to mention all the free Kindle classics I've downloaded from Amazon!

The Hotel Child by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1931)

"The Hotel Child" (1931) is one of my favorite Fitzgerald short stories.

In this story, a young, wealthy, but naive American girl, Fifi Schwartz, is living among sophisticated, yet moneyless Europeans. One European, Count Borowki, is dazzling her with his title and pressuring her to marry him, obviously just for her money. (Doesn't Borowki remind you of borrow, like he might need money?) This is a "vampiric" relationship as discussed by Thomas C. Foster. An older, sophisticated, yet outworn individual is selfishly exploiting a younger, energetic, yet naive individual, for personal gain with no regard to whatever harm he may cause.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is one literal example of vampirism, but Henry James' Daisy Miller (1878) is another, more figurative, example, and "The Hotel Child" is somewhere in between. These are intertextual variations of the same story.

Vampirism actually exists everywhere today in many forms: abusive relationships, political and industrial exploitation, drug dealing, confidence scams, dictatorships--any case where someone is exploiting someone else, unfairly taking their money, resources, or labor; destroying their property, air, health, or quality of life...

"The Hotel Child" at least has an optimistic ending. Fifi figures out the scam before it's too late.

Some day this story may be retold with a young naive Asian and an old outworn American. Wouldn't that be ironic? The story of human experience continues...

Reference:
"The Hotel Child". Short Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Steve Thomas. eBooks@Adelaide. 2009. web 2011.
Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Harper. 2003.

The Knight's Tale by Chaucer (ca. 1390)

I just read Geoffrey Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390). The obvious themes are 1) love will drive man to violate law and order and 2) man's destiny is controlled by fate.

The first, regarding love and, by extension, emotions in general, is still very true today. Not only will people act irrationally when head-over-heels in love, but passion, greed, jealousy, and hunger are the root causes of probably most crimes.

On a cultural note, I thought it was peculiar that it was only the men's emotions that mattered. The lady had no say and had to marry whoever won the competition.

The second theme, regarding fate and destiny, doesn't seem as relevant today, but maybe it's more relevant than we realize. We believe with planning we can control our destiny. Actually it's more like what I call driving on snow--you're not in complete control and there's always a chance that things will go wrong, but with care and attention you usually get to where you're going--or close enough. Life is like that.

For me though the most amazing feature of the "Knight's Tale" is the marvelous quality of the style and verse. I was more in awe of the verse than I was of the story itself, the action, emotions, or lifestyle it so vividly portrays. The verse is absolutely amazing. It doesn't follow a rigid structure nor does every line rhyme, but it's somehow beautiful--too beautiful for words. I read a modern English translation of course (by Burton Raffel, 2008), but the forward claims he tried to retain the original style and meaning, so I believe I read the real thing. Chaucer in Modern English.

It's a masterpiece. You have to read it for yourself.

References:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. ca. 1390. Trans. Burton Raffel. Modern Library. 2008.
Shmoop Editorial Team. The Canterbury Tales: The Knight's Tale. Shmoop University, Inc.. 2008.
GradeSaver. "The Canterbury Tales Study Guide & Literature Essays". GradeSaver. 1999-2011.

Components of Literary Analysis

I especially like the way Thomas C. Foster breaks down literary analysis into components in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003). As an engineer, I think of it as divide and conquer: divide a problem into smaller problems and conquer each individually until a conclusion is reached. The main components Foster addresses are quests, intertextuality, patterns, symbols, and irony.

Intertextuality is perhaps the most interesting component. He explains every story is connected to every other story, past, present, and presumably future. New ideas build upon old ideas and new stories build upon old stories. Intertextuality is the connectedness among stories. New text adds, updates, and modernizes prior text. It's not copying or plagiarism, because ultimately there's only one story. This one story is the story of human experience. Everything in human experience is connected to everything else in human experience, and every story is a retelling of one part or another of this one story.

I can't help but think of an analogy to science. Man has forever been trying to understand the universe. New discoveries are made that build upon old discoveries and little by little we are figuring it out. Everything in the universe is related to everything else, but different scientists focus on different parts: physics, biology, math, etc., but ultimately there's only one universe.

Reference: Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Harper. 2003.