I recently read Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, a graphic story about "Jason Lint." Ware's style is amazing. It starts off in Jason's baby eyes very blocky, with big halftone dots, then gradually becomes more realistic and flowing as he grows up, though there's always a squared-off quality to his drawing. Lint is not a likeable character but the way Ware tells his story is.
One big problem, though, is that the repro is just too small. Even with my +1 reading glasses, some of the writing was teeny tiny. This is a problem I've had before with Drawn + Quarterly Press, who I love for publishing great comic artists like Ware and Lynda Barry, but who I want to shake for making them too small to read!
I also read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. It's a highly praised Pulitzer Prize-winner, about how Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things was rediscovered by Poggio in the 15th century. The poem sums up ideas like atomism and atheism that seem very modern today, and were fresh air to a culture still caught up in orthodoxy and inquisition.
After reading the book I know much more about Poggio, the state of Renaissance book-collecting, the history of libraries, how manuscripts were copied, along with Renaissance politics and especially Epicurean philosophy. But of course the world didn't become modern in one swerve or with one book, so it's irritating that Greenblatt sets the expectation he'll be able to make that argument.
As for the poem itself, he sums it up, but it was frustrating to keep hearing how elegant and gorgeous it was with maybe one little example to go by. He says several times that it was the poem's literary qualities that excited the book collectors as much or more than its content--so why not discuss those qualities in depth? That might be hard to do for a poem in classical Latin, but then one wonders, why keep bringing it up.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
It's very much the less talented sister's version of Jane Eyre, stripped down as a simple governess romance. Agnes, a put-upon governess, falls in love with Mr. Weston, a curate, and must wait patiently until he declares himself--that's pretty much the whole story. For me the real tension in the novel isn't romantic, it's spiritual. How will Agnes learn to bear her life? Like Anne herself, with patience and submission.
Governessing involved hard work, or social isolation, and a job where you're supposed to raise children while having no authority over them. Her helplessness pains her the most, and I thought this was interesting, when it comes to animals. She hates the mean-spirited cruelty of her charges, like the boy who enjoys taking nestlings and ripping them apart alive, and finds her highest courage in standing up for innocent creatures. She's one herself, of course, as encoded in her name--Agnes means "lamb."
Agnes isn't always likeable, as when she frets over the eternal souls of the children she watches, because they act like children. A six-year-old girl loves being told she's pretty, "which I had instructed her to regard as dust in the balance compared with the cultivation of her mind and manners." It's not hard to see why these children might not like their governess and make a point of teasing her. She has class issues--she resents having to call an 11-year-old Master Bloomfield--but doesn't even notice that she herself calls an elderly cottager Nancy, not Mrs. Brown.
Reading this novel reminds me what a powerful achievement Jane Eyre was--that Charlotte Brontë could make Jane so much her own person and an actor in her own life. It also reminds me, though, what a fantasy of governessing Thornfield Hall is, with just one child to teach and a biddable one at that, and consideration made within the household for Jane's comfort and convenience. Not so in this novel. At one point Agnes is a guest, kind of, in a former ward's house, stuck in her room, not knowing when to come to dinner because there's no clock in her room and she "was not rich enough to possess a watch." That kind of detail makes Agnes Grey an interesting, and more realistic, read.
Governessing involved hard work, or social isolation, and a job where you're supposed to raise children while having no authority over them. Her helplessness pains her the most, and I thought this was interesting, when it comes to animals. She hates the mean-spirited cruelty of her charges, like the boy who enjoys taking nestlings and ripping them apart alive, and finds her highest courage in standing up for innocent creatures. She's one herself, of course, as encoded in her name--Agnes means "lamb."
Agnes isn't always likeable, as when she frets over the eternal souls of the children she watches, because they act like children. A six-year-old girl loves being told she's pretty, "which I had instructed her to regard as dust in the balance compared with the cultivation of her mind and manners." It's not hard to see why these children might not like their governess and make a point of teasing her. She has class issues--she resents having to call an 11-year-old Master Bloomfield--but doesn't even notice that she herself calls an elderly cottager Nancy, not Mrs. Brown.
Reading this novel reminds me what a powerful achievement Jane Eyre was--that Charlotte Brontë could make Jane so much her own person and an actor in her own life. It also reminds me, though, what a fantasy of governessing Thornfield Hall is, with just one child to teach and a biddable one at that, and consideration made within the household for Jane's comfort and convenience. Not so in this novel. At one point Agnes is a guest, kind of, in a former ward's house, stuck in her room, not knowing when to come to dinner because there's no clock in her room and she "was not rich enough to possess a watch." That kind of detail makes Agnes Grey an interesting, and more realistic, read.
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