Winter Plans

Last night I ran my kids out for a tasty treat.  Apparently my ten-year-old is having a bit of a growth spurt or is part hobbit - he needed second dinner.  We were shocked and surprised to see the car was covered with snow.  By the time we returned, the grass was white.  We got very excited about the potential for a two-hour delay in the morning.  There's nothing better than an extra two hours of sleep when you normally wake up at 5:30.  Unfortunately, it melted overnight, and my alarm went off too early as usual.

Besides the excitement of the unexpected snow and the sugar high from the tasty treat, something else happened to me, something that's been simmering for a while.  When it's cold outside and spring is no where near, I become strangely attracted to and want to snuggle up with ... medieval literature.  That's right.  Beowulf, Chaucer, and that anonymous guy that wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight turn me on.  (Hopefully my husband is reading this and comes home armed with some Old English poems...not likely.)

Before I began my current adventure/obsession with writing fiction, I had began executing my plan to go to graduate school and do the thing I always wanted to do besides writing novels:  teaching writing and literature at a college, any college, especially a basic community college.  What could be better than helping people write better and appreciate literature?  For me, not much. 

I was enrolled in classes, had purchased books, and was ready to go to class when doctor two (of four) and physical therapist one (of three) informed me I wouldn't actually be able to walk any time soon.  I cried for a day or two, disenrolled, started working on the novel I just finished editing, and finished the first version of a middle reader I had been working on since my initial injury. 

Graduate school was out of the question, but now it isn't.  The only real obstacle (besides the current flare up of nerve pain in my foot) is that I have been out of college for twenty years.  The older I get, the more babies I have, the fewer hours I sleep, the more fuzzy my memory of Shakespeare and Milton becomes. 

I'm not giving up on writing, I just want more, something else to occupy my mind while my kids are at school.  Beginning tomorrow, I plan to write only one chapter a day, every day.  That gives me extra time that I can fill with doing laundry and dishes or something better...like reading Chaucer. 

This winter I plan to snuggle up with dead poets and get lost in stories I read when I was a lot younger.  I expect my perspective has changed a lot over the years, so maybe it will be like reading them for the first time.  

Since my memory is really bad, I set up a blog to write my notes on authors and individual pieces as I go.  If you are interested, my new blog is Escape into Literature.  If you aren't, it won't hurt my feelings at all if you avoid it.  I expect zero followers since I know lovers of medieval literature are not abundant.  I intend to post only when I finish reading an individual piece, hopefully at least twice a week.

I hope you all find something (or someone) equally wonderful to snuggle up with this winter.

P is for Poe and Price

When my husband read my N is for Nevermore post, he agreed that there's something amazing about Poe combined with Vincent Price.  "We should buy all the Poe movies!" he suggested.  I totally agree.  Today is my homage to Vincent Price in Edgar Allen Poe movies.

I remember watching hours of Vincent Price and Poe with my dad.  My favorite was The Pit and the Pendulum.  I also loved The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death.  Classics really.  I assume they are super-cheesey now compared to modern horror films.  But I still love them.

My daughter had to do a 9th grade essay and chose The Cask of Amontillado.  She did a little research and read that Poe only worried about characterization to the extent that it furthered the plot.  The murderer in this story, whose name I don't remember but hopefully will look up before I publish this, had characteristics of a psychopath.  There was nothing extraneous about his characterization - Poe only revealed a character traits that explained why he was capable of burying someone alive - and not a stranger, but someone he knew.

The film clips are too long to post here, but this is the reason why Vincent Price was perfect for any Poe story - the sinister laugh....

N is for Nevermore

I have been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and Gothic literature since I first read The Raven as a child.  I think if I tried hard enough I could recite it, although I haven't read it in more than 20 years.  Here's the first stanza: 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

I got really excited when I found the words to the poem and read them again for this post.  It's so cool to me that he wrote this sinister stuff and got so perfectly into the heads of people going at least a little crazy in 1845.

I loved Poe so much as a teen that I recited and gave a way-too-long literary criticism on The Conqueror Worm in 10th grade Honors English, a poem I'm sure few of you have ever heard of.  I thought it was cool because it was so dark and strange with images I thought no one else could ever imagine.  No one, including the teacher, was anywhere as excited about it as me.

Below is one of the more interesting stanzas:

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

I probably need to blame my dad for my love of Poe.  We watched each and every movie adaptation of Poe stories more than once.  I can't wait for P day - P is definitely for Poe and Vincent Price....

F is for Faulkner and Fitzgerald

William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among my favorite authors. 

I read The Great Gatsby as a teen and countless times since.  The thing about this book is it is an easy, smooth read.  You can see the characters even though they live in another time.  I think I read this book when I was twelve.  It made me love literature.

I love William Faulkner's short stories, "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" in particular.  I think it's cool how he created a small town where generations of characters are interdependent and intertwined.  Reading Faulkner absolutely takes more work than Fitzgerald, but it is so worth it. 

If you like a more challenging read or are a writer working on point-of-view techniques, I would absolutely recommend As I Lay Dying.  The chapters are told from a different character's perspective, which is a little hard to get used to at first, but is totally brilliant.  The plot is this:  the mom is dying and asks the family to take her body to her hometown to bury her after she dies.  At one point, they drop her corpse off a bridge.  Ooops.  This is exactly what my family would do.  I'm not sure if it's meant as a comedy, but I really enjoyed it as if it were.

Finished a Book!

In all of the relaxation I insisted on for my family over the New Year's day weekend, I finished the first book on my Half-Read Book List, The Hobbit.  I was amazed to read on the back cover that it was published initially in the 1930's.  I thought the story was fantastic and love the way Tolkien walks you through the story, painting clear images to make you feel like you are there and developing characters that are fantastic but somehow very real.  At the end, some characters died, which surprised me since I obviously never read it to the end after several starts.  I imagined the dwarves that died would continue into The Lord of the Rings, and after seeing the movies was really saddened when they died - it sounds crazy to say, but they were definitely my favorite dwarves - I wanted them to be present in the next stories.

Finishing reading a novel has not been an easy thing for me since I had my first child fourteen years ago.  Before I became a mommy and since I was twelve, I read at least a novel a week.  I loved the classics even when I was twelve, spending a summer reading only Steinbeck and Salinger.  Since I had my first child, children's books read out loud to my kids and an occasional short story were about all I could finish, and after a few years were all that I even attempted.

Before my last child was born, I started reading again since my older kids were independent enough to give me time to myself and for myself.  Being a mother of an infant or toddler does not leave time for reading for me - it's rare if I can finish one chapter at a time.  That's not the way I like to read.  If I can't finish one chapter without interruption, there's no chance of finishing the whole book.  To complete my book list, however, I will need to be satisfied with reading two paragraphs at a time and picking up at the next, which is the only way I got through The Hobbit.  I have a magnetic book mark that I place at the start of the paragraph - otherwise, I would read the same page over and over again and eventually give up.

My husband, however, has somehow managed to read several novels all the way through in the last few months - one this weekend.  I don't know when he's doing it, but am certain he must be the best speed reader in all the world.  I seriously cannot comprehend when he finds time to read.

When I told my husband I was on the last chapter of The Hobbit last night, he was as happy as I was.   He enthusiastically suggested that I read one of the "Culture novels" by Iain Banks, the one he mysteriously read over the weekend front to back while I wasn't looking.  I declined and am sticking to my list.  The next book is Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I remember it being a fast read in college and when I started it last spring.  Maybe I can finish it by the end of the month.