Dune: House Atreides

It’s not part of the series that begins with the masterwork Dune by Frank Herbert; it’s the first in a prequel trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. If you haven’t read Dune–and possibly the next two (but not the fourth) in the six-book original series–then don’t pick up Dune: House Atreides until you do.

This novel is set perhaps thirty years before the events of Dune, and it is pleasing to read the history of characters you love, like Leto Atreides and Duncan Idaho and Stilgar, and even the characters you love to hate, like Hasimir Fenring and Vladmir Harkonnen and his horrible nephew Rabban. The new characters as well–those from Ix and especially Pardot Kynes–decidedly belong in the Dune universe. It can never be said of Herbert and Anderson that they aren’t faithful to the original.

One thing about this prequel, or perhaps more about the style of the prequel, is that it is just generally easier to understand. My own appreciation of Dune certainly did not blossom until the second reading; but of Dune: House Atreides I can say I fully understood it the first time and feel no need to reread it. If you like to read very difficult texts, you will value the son’s work a little less than the father’s…but I can guarantee you will never despair of comprehension while reading it. Every short chapter is full of enough action and delicious backstory to satisfy many a fan.

Characters, A.
Action, A+.
Faithfulness to original, A.
Subtlety, B-.

College Play-by-Play

Fall 2004

Honors English, college algebra, concepts in fitness, Old Testament, Intro to Philosophy, and German 1. I get up for algebra at 8:00 every morning. I share a room for the first time in my life. I lie about the steps on my pedometer, which doesn’t work anyway. Since I don’t know any better, I read a thousand-page book on philosophy from Plato to Locke.

Spring 2005

Writer’s Seminar, Honors English 2, Walk/Jog, Intro to Psychology, New Testament, Speech, German 2. I read Homer and love it. My A in psychology is actually at risk. I share a room for the first time in my life with a person I don’t really like. Ich spreche ein wenig Deutsch.

Interlude: Summer 2005

I travel to Urumqi, China, and fail to teach English to middle-schoolers for four weeks.

Fall 2005

First Semester Civ, Brit Lit I, Colloquium: Lewis, German 3. I experience civ, a six-hour joint literature and history class. I read the Pearl poet and Alexander Pope. I read Mere Christianity, again. I watch some German movies and actually understand them. I experience again a room of one’s own.

Spring 2006

Writer’s Seminar. Second Semester Civ, Brit Lit II, Chaucer, Fine Arts, Colloquium: Fine Arts. I move to the back row of civ. I read Matthew Arnold and Chinua Achebe, again. I struggle through Middle English. I feel like I’m starting to get this whole college thing.

Fall 2006

Advanced Composition, Drama, American Lit I, Frost and Stevens, Intro to Sociology, Colloquium: King Arthur. I laugh my way through Advanced Comp and Sociology. I find myself surprised to enjoy reading some stageplays, for which class I write one of my favorite papers. I drag myself through travel narratives and contemporary poetry. I present papers at the Sigma Tau Delta Conference in Pittsburgh. In a whirl of stress, I write over three hundred pages this semester.

Interlude: January 2007

Natural Science, Literature for Young Adults. Safe now in the little red house on Pulaski Street, I knock out six hours in one of the easiest J-terms ever, since we are snowed in and class is always canceled.

Spring 2007

Comparative Civ, Shakespeare, American Lit II, Biblical Ethics, Colloquium: Viennese Aesthetic, Contracted Study. I read everything for Shakespeare except Troilus and Creseyde/Cressida. I enjoy reading contemporary fiction. I am under the laughably mistaken impression that I will be writing the first part of a novel for my thesis.

Fall 2007

Poetry, Wharton and Fitzgerald, OSLEP class with Marilynne Robinson, Independent Study, Colloquium: [I’ve Forgotten]. I see Marilynne Robinson for perhaps six hours. I learn about the slicks. I continue to hold most poetry in contempt. I change my thesis to “The Education of a Heroine,” and write most of it. I stress about graduate school and my future. I feel like I’m starting to get this whole college thing.

Spring 2008

Art History, Independent Study, Fiction, Intro to Linguistics, Critical Perspectives. I can now converse about Bakhtin and Derrida. I really, really work for my A in Linguistics. I finish writing my thesis and present it. I write a decent short story. I get rejected from seven graduate schools. I get engaged. Eventually, I graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in English with college honors, summa cum laude.

I’m exhausted. Now I know why.

Old English

And thus the bookstore anecdotes continue to accumulate.

At first when I heard the customer asking for The Prince by “Mack–?” I was happy to be able to show him the copies we had (a Borders version and a Signet classics version). He asked, of course, about the difference between the two, and I told him that aside from the price and size of the books, they should be mostly the same. The difference came when you factored in the work of the translators, who might have different skills or purposes for the undertaking. [Out of personal interest, I checked the translators’ names, thinking that if one had been done by William Weaver, the translator of The Name of the Rose and If on a winter’s night a traveler, I would recommend that one. But Weaver only does contemporary fiction, I think.]

However, in response to this abundance of information about translation, the customer said, “Yeah, so we can understand the Old English, right?”

I hesitated, I really did. “Actually, Machiavelli wrote in Italian.” You ethnocentric ignoramus. Do you really think that Machiavelli sounds like an American name?

This is like the person who came into the store asking for “Hamlet in English.” Hamlet happened to be written in modern English, thank you, but I showed the customer a copy of Hamlet with a ‘translated’ facing page in contemporary prose and kept my mouth shut.

This is like the person who wanted Julius Caesar. Marvelous! I think to myself. A person who loves both history and literature. But when she opened up the book, she pointed to the notes at the bottom. “My English teacher said we should get one with these…” She searched for the word.

“Footnotes?” I offered. “Glosses?”

“A built-in dictionary.”

I despair.

Nothing Much

Despite being woken during the 7:00 hour to the vigorous and vociferous argument of the neighbors, I managed to have a nice enough morning, working my way through another fifth of Dune: House Atreides.  I also had a very pleasant lunch, including a St. Benedict Street cookie, warmed and decorated.  All this fueled by the glow that yesterday I wrote a thousand words, underscored by the fear that I’ll never be able to do it again.

Thus the procrastinatory post.

I promised posterity a review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and haven’t delivered it yet.  I’ll work on it, maybe now, because it was a good book and deserves a positive review.

Did a little job-hunting online today.  Am afraid that only large, boring companies post available job positions online.  Called a bookstore, a library, and a testing center.  No answer, no answer, busy.

It’s hard to write when there’s nothing to write about, but there’s always something to write about.  How my two housemates’ rooms are filling up with moving boxes, tension building and building until the sudden empty depletion, dark quiet rooms full of the droning of the ceiling fan and the cycle of the hot water heater and the busy street half a block away.  And then there was one, and then there were none.  (See also, Agatha Christie.)

Goodnight the bookcase and the chair, goodnight the desk, goodnight the pens and papers and can openers and rugs.  Goodnight the sharing of the bathroom, goodnight the closing of the doors.  Goodnight the movie-watching and the conversations with tea.  Now I lay thee down to sleep.  Here is your requiem now on this mild sunny afternoon, so I can make myself not be sad when you are really gone.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Josef (Joe) Kavalier, an artistic Czech Jew trained by a real escape artist, comes to New York in the 1930s to make a fortune and save his family from hostile Europe. His cousin, Sam Klayman (Clay), introduces Joe to the comic book, and together the two young men–Clay the ideas man and Kavalier the artist–invent a superhero named The Escapist, who is, of course, a parallel for both men’s lives, relationships, careers.

Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is at once an encyclopedic history of the comic book, a map of 1930s, 40s, and 50s New York City, and a very great novel which asks questions about what it means to be an American and what it means to belong to a family. Filled with Nazis, radio shows, art and literature, Antarctica, daring escapes, heartbreaking miscommunications, a Golem, and a femme fatale, Kavalier and Clay’s adventures are indeed amazing. Not once in six hundred pages did the plot flag.

The first sentence, to tantalize you:

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.”

Though I came to the novel simply because I saw it had won the Pulitzer Prize (in 2001–between Interpreter of Maladies and Empire Falls, a prestigious slot to fill), I am now interested in the rest of Chabon’s work. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I own but haven’t read; he’s written two or three short story collections, as well as his most recent novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, about what would have happened if Alaska, not the modern nation of Israel, became the homeland for Jews. None of these have I read, but someday I will read all of them. [It always pleases me to feel as though I’ve discovered a new author.]

Do I recommend this book? Yes. To everyone? Everyone who wants to read a good book.

© Kelly / May 2008

JuNoWriMo

If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo, go here.

I believe this June I will be participating in a home-grown NaNoWriMo, a sort of Ju(ne)NoWriMo that I’ve inherited from Chera. And I believe instead of a nearly unattainable 1,667 words a day, I’m going to push myself for 2,000, to fill up all the silent, empty weekday evenings. Sixty thousand words in a month. I know I can do it, since I’ve done it before.

And it isn’t as if I don’t have writing secrets up my sleeve. Taking a literary criticism class has done more for my writing than I would have thought: I’m going to be writing a fantasy novel following all thirty-one of Vladmir Propp’s narrative functions of a fairytale. A Russian Formalist-turned-mythological critic, Propp analyzed more than a hundred Russian fairytales and came up with thirty-one plot points which always occur in the same order (though some might be left out). It will be fairly exciting for me to work from an outline already invented for me, only to supply the particulars. Happily, I have no idea what said particulars will be, which is decidedly in the spirit of –NoWriMo. Working on a novel will help me keep my sanity through the month, I think.

Also, finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay this evening. Took me a while to get through it, since the adventures were, indeed, as encyclopedic as they were amazing; I’ll think on them in my sleep and post a review (a real review this time, not a blurb) tomorrow sometime.

List of Propp’s ‘narratemes,’ for the particularly interested.

The Simple Things

Yesterday: I listened to a new mix CD while driving to the mall, where I spent rather a lot of money on clothes. (As I quipped later, I grabbed things off the racks, threw them on, and bought them. It was wonderful.) After this, I played with Anastasia, and ate a delicious manicotti dinner cooked by my very talented chef of a fiancé, who then took me to a bookstore where I ordered a book (The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin) that I had been wanting for a while. Then he treated me to some ice cream–I had a cup of ‘banana pudding’ with graham cracker in it.

Today: After a leisurely morning of reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, I expect to pack up my books and computer and notebooks and go with Chera to Panera Bread, where I will order my favorite meal (You Pick Two, bacon turkey bravo sandwich with no tomato, tomato soup, a baguette, and an iced tea). We will discuss books and writing and stuff in general, and then read and write and gaze into space, hopefully for the duration of the afternoon. We may break down and shop for groceries afterwards, at least, we will if we want to eat. But it will be together, and that’s all right. And in the evening we will watch a minimum of one episode of Firefly.

Needless to say, it’s been good to be out of school.