Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A hankering for Sutcliff came upon me, and I discovered to my delight that the library has a Sutcliff book I hadn’t read before. (Well, it also has a few of her retellings - Beowulf etc. - but I haven’t liked her retellings as much as her original fiction.) Heather, Oak, and Olive is a collection of three short stories and scratched my itch famously.

I particularly liked the last story, in which an Athenian and a Spartan become fast friends at the Olympic Games - despite the fact that, when the truce of the games is over, their countries will go right back to being at war. It’s very Sutcliffian: the friendship-at-first-sight and their tight bond, and also the fact that this friendship, while real, can’t overcome the gap between them. “Far more likely, if they ever saw each other again, it would be over the tops of their shields,” the hero Amyntas thinks, and his Spartan friend, answering that unspoken thought, says in farewell, “The Gods be with you, Amyntas, and grant that we never meet again.”

I also read Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, which doesn’t reach quite the level of rhapsodic specificity that I prefer from my food memoirs, but did remind me that I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth David’s work (Adam Gopnik also mentions David’s books in The Table Comes First), so I’ve put one on hold at the library.

And I read another Aunt Dimity book, because why not?

What I’m Reading Now

“The romanticizing of the artist, of course, has a flip side, a culture that often demeans, ridicules, or dismisses them, and artists soon learn that a strong ego is necessary if they are to practice their art. They learn that they must invent themselves, and in boldly appropriating for their art the raw material of their own lives, they are well served by a level of self-assurance and self-confidence that others find daunting, and often misread as self-satisfaction, or the annoying self-aggrandizement of the artist manque. I suspect this was part of my trouble at the Institute that fall. When I spoke as an artist, I was being heard as an artiste, a throwback to what Louise Bogan once termed ‘the disease of Shelleyism.’”

Kathleen Norris makes this observation in The Cloister Walk, and I suspect that it is 100% accurate, although not in the way that she intends it to be: she absolutely does come across as a self-satisfied artiste, convinced of her superiority vis-a-vis the academics who are her colleagues at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.

Or no. If she were convinced, her superiority might be less irritating. But she seems to be overcompensating for the fact that she feels, as she admits, “ill at ease in the academic environment”: she feels stupid, and is trying to offload that feeling onto the academics by scoffing that they have mere credentials while she has a calling. The result is a self-aggrandizing condescension that practically oozes out of the page.

If it oozed out in her dinnertime conversation at the Institute, too, how could her colleagues not loathe her? If you want people to like you, don’t treat them like you think they’re stupid little left-brained worker ants who could never rise to the beautiful and delicate butterfly heights that you attain as a ~poet~.

I’ve also finally made some progress in A Skinful of Shadows! But this post is already getting a bit ludicrous so I will report back on that later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve read most of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main works, but still hope to find her book Simon someday. It may very well be available as an ebook, but… I want to read it on paper. It’s good to have a quest, I suppose!

I’m also getting quite impatient for this year’s Newbery winner to be announced. Come on, ALA! Hook me up!

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, yeah re: colleagues loathing her. People who try to win your sympathy by saying, "But those guys over there--such troglodytes, amirite? Not like us. Not like us at all." Ugh!

[osprey_archer]

She's not even talking about those guys over there! Her colleagues themselves are the troglodytes, who have stayed on the well-trodden cushy academic path rather than strike out boldly on The Road Less Traveled By as freelancers, like Norris did. In comparison to the freelance life academia may be more stable (if you can find a job in the first place!), but no one could call the humanities a cushy gig these days - and I don't think it was in the 1990s, either, when Norris wrote this book.

[isis]

I loved "The Truce of the Games", which I read in a different collection. And I also haven't read Simon!

[osprey_archer]

If I ever get my hands on a copy of Simon, I may have to organize some kind of Simon mailing chain so we can all read it.

[evelyn_b]

Aw, you're probably right about Norris, though I found her defensive inferiority complex thing sympathetic (even as her sometimes boneheaded romanticizing of monastic life made me furious). I've got a lot of baseline sympathy for the non-academic poet, so maybe it's a blind spot.

Of course everyone should respect everyone else and not go in for bogus us-v-them nonsense - poetry people are thin enough on the ground. But I'm sure it gets tiring to have everyone assume things about your MFA and your students and whatnot.

(I don't have the book so can't check the whole passage to see if I agree with your specific reading or not)

I've never had a hankering for Sutcliff, though sometimes I get the feeling that I should.

[osprey_archer]

I'm probably being a bit unfair to Norris; I suspect that there was some sort of vicious cycle going on, where she said something that rubbed one of the academics the wrong way, and the academic got snooty, which activated Norris's inferiority complex so then she got snooty, and after that it just spiraled ever downward and Norris was the only one who wrote a book about it so who knows what the academic was thinking.

Probably the academic was a would-be poet with an inferiority complex toward ~real poets~. If only they could have bonded about their inferiority complexes rather than harping at each other.

I feel that hankerings for Sutcliff only really happen once one has read a certain amount of Sutcliff (have you read any Sutcliff? DO YOU WANT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SUTCLIFF?), at which point there is a Sutcliff corner in your brain that occasionally flickers to life, whispering, "You want to read about loyalty and mizzling rain, don't you?"

[evelyn_b]

If you wanted to develop a perpetual motion machine out of the inferiority complex-reactive snootiness cycle, I suspect a poetry conference would be a good place to start.

(have you read any Sutcliff? DO YOU WANT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SUTCLIFF?)

Not yet, and yes, but I'm going to be a little specific: are there any books in which the loyalty is f/f?

[osprey_archer]

No. :(

The closest is probably Bonnie Dundee, which has an important pair of loyal female friends, but they're secondary characters. It's one of my favorite Sutcliff novels so I would have recommended it to you in any case - but it is hard to get a hold of in the States, unfortunately.

There are also a few books that have a female main character, but the main loyalty relationship in those is m/f (and ends up having a romantic component) - but on the whole Sutcliff does not write a whole lot about women.

[kore]

Probably the academic was a would-be poet with an inferiority complex toward ~real poets~. If only they could have bonded about their inferiority complexes rather than harping at each other.

Now THAT sounds like a romcom.

at which point there is a Sutcliff corner in your brain that occasionally flickers to life, whispering, "You want to read about loyalty and mizzling rain, don't you?"

And injuries! She writes really well about injuries and recovery. Maybe because she was chronically ill too (I just got her autobio, haven't read it yet).

[sovay]

Heather, Oak, and Olive is a collection of three short stories and scratched my itch famously.

I don't think I've even heard of that one! I'll have to find it Thanks for the heads-up.

she feels stupid, and is trying to offload that feeling onto the academics by scoffing that they have mere credentials while she has a calling.

That sounds very difficult to spend an entire book with.

[osprey_archer]

I think the stories are online somewhere - I used to have a link to it but it looks like I've lost it.

[kore]

It’s very Sutcliffian: the friendship-at-first-sight and their tight bond, and also the fact that this friendship, while real, can’t overcome the gap between them. “Far more likely, if they ever saw each other again, it would be over the tops of their shields,” the hero Amyntas thinks, and his Spartan friend, answering that unspoken thought, says in farewell, “The Gods be with you, Amyntas, and grant that we never meet again.”

Well, AUGH.

I have that Norris book (several books of hers) but haven't read it.

[osprey_archer]

It's an incredible amount of Sutcliff pushed into a small space. The friendship! The unspoken understanding between them! The angst!

[littlerhymes]

There's always at least one more Sutcliff that I never knew existed... That sounds delightful.

I was just about to say Simon is an ebook! Oh well. (I haven't read that one either tho.)

[osprey_archer]

She wrote SO MANY BOOKS, my God. I've sort of made my peace with the fact that I won't read them all, but for some reason I've fixated on Simon as The One That Got Away.