Literature

…but I can’t stop buying the things. I’m like a crack addict or a hoarder when it comes to books (well, maybe not a hoarder). Literally, it can take months, even a few years, before I get to some of the books I buy.

In the past, I’ve always juggled multiple books at once. Typically, I’d have a couple things I was reading for a class, and at least one other for leisure on top of that, usually with the leisure reading taking priority, of course. Add to that graphic novels, which, fortunately, I can knock out quick enough that they don’t add to the backlog too much. Now, there’s no reason for me to do that, but for whatever reason I’m still juggling.

Mishima Yukio has quickly become one of my favourite authors. The hardest part of writing a post about him, though, is probably deciding just what to focus on, as he was tremendously prolific. In his 20-year career, he averaged at least one full novel a year, one full play a year, several short plays and short stories, as well as some essays and poems. I suppose the best place to start would be Sun and Steel, where he explains the philosophy and aesthetic that underlies his novels.

So, I didn’t flunk out of any classes on the first day, but I did encounter another unprecedented situation.

In my American Modernism class, my professor told us that if we have the time we ought to read The Sound and the Fury now, even though it’s not due until later, so that we will have time to re-read it. Figuring that Faulkner’s novel must be quite the beast to warrant such advice, I took the time to read it once through.

As promised, Serious Business.

In order to improve my memory, impress chicks, and maybe even learn something, I’ve begun memorizing poetry. During the summer, I committed the entirety of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” to memory, in addition to several other poems over the past seven months or so. Namely, Edgar Allen Poe’s “El Dorado,” Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert,” Ezra Pound’s “A Pact” and “In a Station of the Metro,” and Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” Right now I’m working on Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

One thing that I’ve learned in the last year is the power of brevity.

Now, I’ve known this, to some extent, ever since I read The Elements of Style back when I first got interested in writing in middle school, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that I realized just how condensed a written work can be. I refer you to Ezra Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro.”

Here’s a poem that consists only of two lines and a title. Not only that, but the two lines aren’t even a proper sentence - there’s no predicate. One can say, literally, that nothing happens in this poem. Personally, I was somewhat puzzled by this poem when I first encountered it, and remained so until last year when I had to write an essay on a work of my choice, and chose this poem.