Profiles in Literature: on hiatus

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmenians!  I regretfully have to announce a few-month hiatus on the series, at least until the summer.  Unfortunately the real world has a way of infringing on my valuable internet time, and with a dissertation defense looming at the end of the semester I can’t really justify the weekly half-day spent putting these diaries together.  

But a hiatus is not a GBCW, and I fully expect the return to the series as soon as this particular hurdle is cleared.  In the meantime, follow me below for a few quick announcements, future writers to be explored, and requests…

Again, I really hate to cut the series off for now, but I’d also like to graduate and get a job and put food on the table.  And given my small but dedicated readership, I don’t expect this labor of love to pull in any revenue anytime soon.  I hope you’ll be patient with me in the meantime.

I’ll still hang around to post the occasional essay (keep an eye out for my review of E. E. Cummings’ Eimi, his travelogue from Soviet Russia): it’s just the weekly block of prep time that I can no longer afford to schedule regularly while I weep under the daily lashings of my advisers.

What can we expect come summer?  Here are a few authors I’ll be ready to discuss:

Chinua Achebe – his Things Fall Apart is a perennial favorite with readers, but I really want to discuss Anthills of the Savannah, a strange mix of satire and suspense aimed at the heart of modern African politics.  

Isaac Babel – Jewish writer from Odessa who wrote powerful, violent, colorful short stories before his execution by a paranoid Soviet state.  Babel paradoxically matched the unpredictable chaos of his narrative with a cool, precise, and very efficient prose.

James Baldwin – passionate and multifarious, Baldwin’s novels translated American race relations into compelling drama without losing the complex psychology of the people involved; his nonfiction essays are among the best America has produced.  

Beowulf – well, I already did Gilgamesh, so there’s no avoiding the grand-daddy of Old English literature.  The recent translation by Seamus Heaney gives us non-readers of Old English a vibrant new text to work with, and a cornucopia of valuable information in the introduction.

Mikhail Bulgakov – once a footnote in literary history, Bulgakov became a legend after the posthumous publication of his wicked masterpiece The Master and Margarita.  We’ll discuss the sly interaction of fantasy and politics in this and other works from the Russian master.

Anton Chekhov – both the most influential dramatist and the most influential short story writer of the past 200 years.  Not too shabby!  Chekhov was the kind of ironic understatement, and viewed life with a complexity that helped break literature out of its own literariness.  

John Christopher – among the least-known writers I’ll cover, Christopher was a moderately well-respected British sci-fi writer who found a second surge of popularity when he began writing sci-fi for young adults in the mid 60s.  As an adult I still love the psychological sophistication of his teen lit.

Edwidge Danticat – I don’t yet know much about Danticat, a Haitian-American author and National Book Award nominee, but I’ve picked up a few of her books on a strong recommendation.  And this is another reason for the hiatus: I need time to catch up on reading!  

Stanislaw Lem – the great philosopher of science fiction, Polish author Lem imbued the genre with an intense introspection: what does it mean to be human in a universe not designed for humanity?  His Solaris made it to film twice, though neither captured the powerful  depth of Lem’s novel.

Fernando Pessoa – poet, critic, and essayist, the Portuguese author Pessoa turned the notion of the Author inside-out by creating a whole set of fictional authors out of himself, giving each one a history, a creative output, and a distinct artistic style.  Harold Bloom called him the “most representative poet of the 20th century” – we’ll see if you agree.

Annie Proulx – contemporary American author best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News and a little short story called “Brokeback Mountain” (that for some reason rankled some talking heads on the Right).  

Alexander Pushkin – I can’t say much about Pushkin without dribbling into incoherent praise for the best writer since Shakespeare, so suffice to say that I’m not looking forward to condensing his enormous and very varied output into a single essay!

Murasaki Shikubu – author of the classic epic/novel The Tale of Genji, Murasaki was writing in 11th century Japan while European culture was still wearing diapers.  Genji paints a sweeping portrait of court culture that’s still enormously popular today.

John Steinbeck – very appropriate for this joint: Steinbeck is the go-to man for good political literature, combining a passionate sense of social justice with strong characters and a sweeping view of history.  I’m especially a fan of East of Eden, which filters a multi-generational story of the West through a sometimes-serious, sometimes-ironic Biblical lens.

Tom Stoppard – playwright most known for his nimble wit and meta approach to theatre.  We’ll touch on his enormously popular Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but I expect to devote more time to his real masterpiece, Arcadia, a play that unforgettably combines history, thermodynamics, and heartbreak.

Thucydides – not fiction?  No problem!  Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War remains arguably THE great history of warfare, despite a methodology that wouldn’t pass muster with modern historians.  Through reconstructed speeches and debates, Thucydides pries away the layers of politics, ideology, money, and personality that led to the tragic internecine Greek war.

John Kennedy Toole – Author of only two novels, Toole skyrocketed to fame only after his suicide, leaving behind the seminal novel about life in New Orleans.  Andrei Codrescu argues that Toole’s comedy is really putting the ugliest side of New Orleans under a grotesque magnifying glass, which is a great jumping-off point for discussion.

E.B. White – my favorite English-language essayist, White’s virtuosity with the language was as crisp and pleasant as a Mozart sonata.    We’ll talk about his work with The New Yorker, and hopefully reevaluate the notion that he was a stodgy old pedant (the kind of criticism made by people who haven’t read Elements of Style carefully enough!)

That’s plenty for now, and more than enough to keep me busy once the summer hits.

Which brings me to you:

You’ll notice that my list is pretty heavy on the men, and pretty heavy on the West.  I’d like to think that I’m a pretty broad reader, but no one can read everything, and I have significant gaps.  I’d also like to think I can start filling in those gaps while continuing the series, but since a good part of what I do involves rereading, there’s just not enough time in the day to cover all my bases with equal dexterity.

So when the series reboots during the summer, I’d like to recruit a few of you: those of you who have read more women authors, or who have read more non-Western authors, or who’ve otherwise got some experience in one of my many reading gaps, please raise your hands!  I’m going to tap you for future installments, and I sincerely hope you take me up on the offer.  Part of the reason I started this series in the first place was to introduce people to authors they haven’t read, so I need your help to cover areas that I haven’t read myself.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you who’ve help make this a worthwhile series so far, and I’ll see you ’round.

Wish me luck.