Reading Long Books

My summer’s reading included the twelve parts of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which takes its narrator from his school days in the 1920s, through his college years, marriage and early career, through his service in WWII, and to his literary success in the postwar years up to the late 60s. Powell is not much of a stylist (Even James Hall, who recognized how important an author Powell was going to be when only half of A Dance had been published, admits, “When I first read Powell, I thought a successful novel could not be written in sentences like these.”), but his novel claims interest because of his huge cast of characters, the way they keep entering and leaving the immediate life of the narrator (this is the dance of the title), and the way they all contribute to his ever-evolving view of the world.

When I retired, I found myself able—and eager—to devote the time to some longer works that they deserved. During the first year I spent several enjoyable months with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an experience I wrote about in the Harvard Review (“A Retiree Reads Proust and Montaigne,” No 23, 2008). There’s nothing quite like the experience of living with an author over the course of a long novel, and it has the advantage of putting off that question about what to read next, which I will talk about in a future entry.

From Tucson

I was not in town the Saturday when Gabrielle Giffords and the others were shot. My wife Katharine and I arrived two days later and met our sons, flying in from two different directions for a week of golf and warming sun at the desert house. On Tuesday we ate at one of our favorite restaurants, Wildflower, across the street from the shopping center where the shootings took place. The funerals began on Tuesday and continued through the week. John Roll, the federal judge and Christina Green, the nine-year-old were buried out of the same Catholic church on successive days. At the end of the week there was a memorial service for Gabriel Zimmerman. And each day came a bit more encouraging news from the hospital: another one of the injured discharged or another sign of progress in Giffords’s status.

By the end of the week the TV commentators were repeating their mantra that the shootings were “not politically motivated.” “What could that mean,” asked my older son Matt, “when the person Jared Loughner targeted was a Democratic congresswoman who’d voted for health care reform and had progressive ideas about immigration reform?” And meanwhile, in the face of a lot of criticism, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik held firm to his conviction that a toxic political atmosphere had affected the unstable mind of the shooter. When asked whether he had any proof that the shooter was so affected, he pretty much said the same thing that Matt had.

On Saturday Katharine and my younger son Dan and I attended a gun show held, as they often are, at the Pima County Fairgrounds. Dan was there to try to trade a folding knife for a smaller pocket model. Katharine and I were there out of curiosity.

Gun shows have, of course, many handguns and rifles for sale, as well as ammunition, magazines—including the extended 33-round clip Jared Loughner used with his Glock 9mm handgun, telescopic sights and other optics such as range finders and binoculars, stun guns and pepper spray, shell casings and bullets for those who reload their own ammunition, government-issue ammo boxes, belts, holsters—including the sorts of holsters used for carrying concealed handguns, purses with pockets for concealed handguns, flak vests (the vendor had large signs posted reading “Body Armor Will Soon Be Banned!”), and all sorts of tools. Many people who had not paid for booth or table space were also selling or trading guns, and some had signs pinned to their backs or around their necks describing their wares. Of course no background checks are done for sales in this gun show environment.

Outside the exhibition hall in the refreshments area we listened in on several conversations that seemed markedly defensive to me, not to mention that the participants were preaching to the choir. The gist of one speaker’s harangue to his friend, who was nodding in agreement, was that if there had been people in Gifford’s “Congress on the Corner” crowd who had guns (Arizona gives permits for carrying concealed weapons to anyone who takes an eight-hour safety course and passes a background check), fewer people would have died. One may be forgiven some skepticism about the efficacy of untrained gunplay in a crowd, however well-intentioned. In fact, a shopper coming out of Safeway was armed, but the shooter had already been tackled and disarmed when he arrived on the scene. Apparently this armed bystander was ready to shoot a man he saw with a gun until he was convinced that it was the shooter’s gun that had been taken away from him.

The other conversation at the show concerned the extended magazine Loughner used in the shooting. These magazines were outlawed as a part of the Assault Weapons Ban that Congress allowed to expire several years ago. “What good would banning a larger magazine do?” a man near me asked his friend. “Don’t people realize the guy would just have used two guns? And no one who already has these clips is going to give them up. I wouldn’t. And I just bought four more inside.”

Sisters

Michael Cohen, Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).

Looking at nineteenth-century British paintings and novels, Sisters argues that the rescue of one sister by another, the subject of a surprising number of works, is a metaphor for the moral rehabilitation of one woman by others in defiance of damning stereotypical constructions of women in general.

Engaging English Art

Michael Cohen, Engaging English Art: Entering the Work in Two Centuries of English Painting and Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1987).

Engaging English Art is about strategies common to poetry and painting for engaging readers and observers. Engagement is a word Cohen uses to identify the reader’s or observer’s experience of entering the work of art and being captured intellectually, emotionally, or morally by its subject. His examples come from English painting and poetry from about 1680 to 1880, because Cohen believes that engagement had preferred critical status as an artistic goal in England during this period, until the advent of aestheticism.

The Poem in Question

Michael Cohen and Robert Bourdette, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

Students first embarking on a study of poetry are often understandably baffled. What seems as if it ought to be a natural process of comprehension and enjoyment becomes one of intimidating difficulties. For such readers, The Poem in Question provides a practical method of inquiry for getting answers about the meaning of a poem. This approach to poetry begins by encouraging students to focus and refine their own questions about a poem by following them with the questions Who? When? Where? What? How? And Why?—questions that work as well for the reader of poetry as for the reporter, historian, or scientist.

Hamlet in My Mind's Eye

Michael Cohen, Hamlet in My Mind's Eye (University of Georgia Press, 1989).

Winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association book award.

Hamlet, Cohen suggests, is always in rehearsal for the reader. While the actor must give a character one voice, the reader can keep a number of interpretations of character in mind while moving through the play. The multiple readings in this book open the play up to reveal this manifold complexity, demonstrating how Hamlet may be read and performed in the mind’s eye—always its first and last theater.

Murder Most Fair

Michael Cohen, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses, 2000).

“Murder Most Fair is a valuable addition to critical debates on mystery fiction and on literary history itself…an informed, intellectually astute contribution to an exciting area of literary studies.” --Susan Rowland, The Modern Language Review 97:4 (2002), 928-9

“At a time when the trend of much academic criticism (of mystery fiction as well as all other literature) has been to de-center the text and to call into question the nature (or even the existence) of aesthetic value, Cohen’s work is likely to prompt lively discussion and disagreement. But it is, I believe, the freshest examination of mystery fiction to appear in some time, and it should be regarded as a major addition to the body of work in the field.” --John Teel, South Atlantic Review 66:2 (2001), 202-204.