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.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003)

How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003) is a very good book by Thomas C. Foster. I had never understood how English professors identified meanings in literature. The best I could do was memorize everything they said and repeat it for tests and papers. It was as if a secret master made up all the meanings and the purpose of the English profession was to disseminate them to the masses through memorization. Well this book, written so anybody can understand it, even me, an engineer, changed all that and explains how you, too, can actually analyze literature for yourself.

Since I took English for non-majors, my professors must have skimmed over analysis and focused instead on conclusions needed for papers and exams. That's very much like math for non-majors actually. Math professors skim over theory and teach the procedures needed for homework and exams. In contrast, math for majors teaches students to figure out the procedures for themselves. Had I taken English for majors, I suppose I'd have learned how to do my own analysis and reach my own conclusions.

The book ends with the perfect test case. It's an excellent short story by Katherine Mansfield that demonstrates many elements of literature and gives the reader a chance to try out his/her new analysis skills. I gave myself a B+, but I'm planning to improve that.

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

Literature: Experience by Proxy

40 years ago I was in high school. I thought I was so clever. I thought I was like electricity--always taking the easiest path.

I never read my English assignments and never paid attention in class except on the review day before a test. Then I memorized everything for 24 hours and passed all my tests. I thought I was so clever because everybody else worked so hard while I just goofed off--but they learned something and I didn't learn anything! What a waste of 4 years--not to mention the years of ignorance that followed!!!

Eventually I moved next to a library after a job transfer and discovered the value of literature. I started reading the books I was supposed to have read and realized I could have benefited from their lessons had I learned them years ago.

Now I have teenagers of my own, and as when my parents lectured me, I lecture them and it goes in one ear and out the other. People can hear a lecture or watch a movie, but most people won't really learn something until they actually experience it. With literature you can practically experience something just by reading--and learn from it. It's the commitment you make and the active participation your mind makes when you read a novel that's as close to experiencing the real thing as possible without actually doing it.

You don't really participate in a lecture or a movie or even in non-fiction for that matter. You might learn some facts, but you won't have a learning experience about life. You're just a passive observer. With literature, however, the subject is human and your mind is participating in the plot and the theme as if you are there, experiencing it yourself, and learning from that experience.

To me, learning by proxy experience is the greatest value of literature. It's a lot easier to learn about life that way than to try to figure it out on your own by trial and error. I wish I understood that 40 years ago!