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Post by callipygias on May 15, 2011 22:37:14 GMT -5
So many American writers are "of their age" or (even profoundly) regional in ways that make it hard for them to be considered international or to speak across time periods. Faulkner, for all his greatness, is ultimately a Southern writer. Melville, for all his hugeness of spirit, is profoundly early American. She won't be an obvious great like Shakespeare or Dickens or Goethe until after we're long gone. Yet I'd say that, in readers' minds, Dickens is more tied to a specific place and time than Faulkner, Melville, and O'Connor. His place is of interest, though, and will continue to be for a long time. Maybe some of that interest is even attributable to Dickens himself. The same could be said of Faulkner. If there is a more haunted, fascinating, evocative place in literature than Faulkner's war-harrowed South I can't wait to find it. I'd agree that Dickens' survival is even more assured than both Faulkner and O'Connor though, but I think the two related reasons for that are his accessibility and his translatability. O'Connor has to be one up on Faulkner on the translate part, too; it must be daunting for translators to tackle some of Faulkner's stories. Melville doesn't seem tied to much of anything specific, to me. He's so thematic. With The Confidence-Man he was barely even tied to a language.
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Post by mummifiedstalin on May 15, 2011 22:53:13 GMT -5
All good points. I was grasping for "great" writers, full-on canon dudes, off the top of my head. Dickens was a poor choice for what I was trying to say.
And I didn't mean to demean Faulkner or any other writer or say they wouldn't be read. And every writer of course has a place and time they come from: Plato is Athenian when Athens was at its height. Dante is pure late-medieval Italian. And on and on. But I do think that there are some "classics" that we read THROUGH their history (Faulkner) and some we read regardless of, in spite of, even again their history (Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare). The latter ones can strike us immediately without any mediation through their point in history, even if putting them back in their context makes them even more powerful. (Hell, most of my education has been doing that with Shakespeare.) O'Connor will, in my mind, be in the second group. Like Atari said, there are some writers who are great through the gut. O'Connor is a visceral experience. (I think Augustine is, too, actually, for some similar reasons to O'Connor. Of all the medieval writers I've read, he's the only one who seemed to talk right to me in ways that others, with whom I'm much more likely to actually agree, don't.)
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Post by callipygias on May 16, 2011 21:20:45 GMT -5
#8 The Swimmer(1964)John Cheever[/center][/color] I had never read a word of Cheever's until preparing for this list. I just assumed his stories all started, "Tennis, anyone?" and pretty much kept saying things like that. Everyone wore white and lived in Alcoholia, I don't know. Like if you read them aloud you'd unconsciously slip into a Kennedy accent. At one point, after seeing wonderful reviews of his story The Enormous Radio and being underwhelmed by it, I decided to skip over Cheever entirely. Thank goodness I changed my mind. Not that, "Tennis, anyone?" isn't what it's all about, that's pretty much his setting, but what I never realized was that what he was doing was skewering the hell out of it. Though for me most of Cheever's stories aren't exactly the kind that thrill right away, certain of them are the kind that are big on... not exactly delayed reaction, more like amplifying returns. Especially #33, The Five Forty-Eight, which I enjoyed pretty well right off the bat, but really began to love over the course of a few months. The Swimmer is an exception -- it had me at hello. Not exactly at hello, I guess, but after a couple pages I began to get the idea I was reading something very special. In fact, part of what makes The Swimmer so special, I think, is that exact thing: that it starts out normal enough--with affluent suburbanite Ned Melly deciding to swim home from an affluent suburbanite neighbor's affluent suburbanite party--but then it's revealed, little by little, that what is happening is anything but normal. This was the LAST thing I expected to find in a Cheever story: warped time, warped space, hallucinogenic desperation? What's happeNING? this can't BEEE. If you like surrealism in your story and ambiguity in its meaning, try The Swimmer, won't you? I did! The end effect was that it turned my initial presumption about Cheever on its ear. Others of his stories started that, but this one finalized it. John Cheever
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Post by callipygias on May 18, 2011 1:23:09 GMT -5
#7 The Luck of Roaring Camp(1868)Bret Harte[/center][/color] If great literature gots to inspire great thinkin's I'm not sure I have a case here. On the other hand, if beautiful prose applied sardonically through a tongue-in-cheek omniscient narrator to classic Americana campfahr tellin's with just enough humor and wistfulness behind the sentimentality to make it go down smooth is wrong, I don't want to be right. Seems kind of odd having this entertaining romp all the way up in the top ten, but it is a favorites list, so it belongs here. It's like having It's a Wonderful Life between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Citizen Kane on a favorite movies list. Doesn't seem as strange when I think of it like that. I love Harte's way with words. He's right up near the likes of Poe, Bierce, Melville, and a few others, as someone who could make almost anything readable, just through his style. Does 19th century Americanized Victorian English have its own name? It should, I think. I'll call it Barbara Eden for now. It's unique enough to merit its own name. I can't say exactly why I think that, though. I want to claim irreverence or humor sets it apart, but who's more irreverent than Lewis Carroll, and who is funnier than Dickens? (I'm not a huge fan of the Dickens, but there are spots in his writings that are among the funniest things I've ever read, and just like with Harte [who WAS a huge fan of the Dickens], the humor flows directly from the prose.) Anyway, Harte introducing Barbara Eden to the short story of the pioneering American West is simply a happy little confluence for world literature. His ease and facility with Barbara Eden, his willingness to employ Barbara Eden in all her glorious pomp and verbosity upon the relatively savage setting of the gold rush, made for a perfect combination. Kate Chopin called The Luck of Roaring Camp, "the first resounding note in the development of an indigenous Western literature," and said, "It reached across the continent and startled the academists on the Atlantic Coast.... They opened their eyes and ears at the sound and awoke to the fact that there might some day be a literary West." While I'm quoting, Twain said, "Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers... the place properly belongs to Bret Harte." And since movie analogies keep coming up, Bret Harte IS Preston Sturges. Each of their names are (and will probably continue to be) tenuously remembered through time; both are mostly known for brief periods within an overall career when they created every one of their lasting works; both of them will probably always be (by most who remember them) praised for the artistic merit and entertainment value of their great works, and (by some) dismissed for their inability or unwillingness to make beret-wearing college dropouts in dark rooms pull deeply on a clove and mutter tragically. Though only two of his stories showed up in my top 50, a bunch of them made the top 100. As far as repeated entries go he's up there with O'Connor, Bierce, Lovecraft, Matheson, and a few others. Bret Harte
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Post by callipygias on May 30, 2011 0:24:32 GMT -5
#6 MS. Found in a Bottle(1833)Edgar Allan Poe[/center][/color] I'm not sure how many of Poe's stories would've made my top fifty if I hadn't limited him to one spot -- somewhere around ten, I think. Aside from some of his more famous stories, some that probably would have made it are The Gold Bug, King Pest, The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, and A Descent into the Maelstrom. Definitely necessary to limit him to one spot. I especially love his sea stories, his ever-present genius shines a little brighter yet having the extra elements of the sea and of sailing--the language of sailing--and of discovery. Of those, Manuscript Found in a Bottle is my favorite. Joseph Conrad said MS. Found in a Bottle is "About as fine as anything of that kind can be--so authentic in detail that it might have been told by a sailor of sombre and poetical genius in the invention of the fantastic." It opens with the narrator a passenger aboard a beautiful tall ship of about four hundred tons. Many days into the ship's southward journey a strange cloud appears on the horizon. It spreads, flat, appearing as a long line of beach; the moon changes appearance and the sea becomes transparent. ...and about midnight I went up on deck.--As I placed my foot on the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern. All hands are lost in the typhoon except the narrator and another passenger called the Swede; they expect to die shortly, but the shattered ship somehow speeds southward, "at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind." Things just get stranger. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon--emitting no decisive light.... ...It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power.
Another terrible storm comes.
At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross--at times be- came dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken. ...Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four thousand tons. It gets stranger still, but this is already too long. I wonder if there is an all around better-loved American author than Poe. I don't think I've ever heard a negative word about him--about his writing, I mean--and it seems like everyone has a favorite Poe story or poem, even people otherwise uninterested in literature. True that most people, when it comes to his stories at least, usually discuss plot or moral ( The Tell-Tale Heart, for example), which, however interesting, are FAR from what makes Poe one of the greatest of American writers, but it is also a testament to his across-the-board popularity: he satisfies something in just about every type of reader. Even children love Poe (uh, as with #9, no pun intended). Poe's is the first literature I ever bought, though I was so young I thought all I was buying was a book of ghost stories. It was also the first book I ever specifically wanted in hardcover. Intricate, precise vocabulary, complex syntax demanding close attention, astonishing imagery and... soundagery? are rarely presented with such perfect rhythm and phrasing outside Shakespeare. Edgar Allan Poe
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Post by callipygias on Jun 1, 2011 15:52:53 GMT -5
#5 A Martian Odyssey(1934)Stanley Weinbaum[/center][/color] If there is a true departure on my list, here it is. A Martian Odyssey might be the only story here that, to me, doesn't qualify as "prose." Yet here it is all the way up at #5, more than ten spots ahead of the highest-ranked Faulkner, sixteen spots ahead of Hemingway, ahead of Greenleaf, ahead of POE, even!! I've read it twice more since making the list, half expecting I'd want to move it into the teens or twenties, but only ended up moving it from #6 to #5. It's such a wonderful story. I love Tweel. If there's a list of "Greatest Sci-Fi Characters" out there I hope he's on it. Or she. And while maybe I don't consider Weinbaum's style prose, exactly, it is easy and smooth, and fits perfectly here in a story that feels like a cross between a Twilight Zone, an old sci-fi B movie, and, appropriately, The Odyssey. Dick Jarvis, Astronaut. Part of man's first landing on Mars. Dick heads out in an auxiliary rocketship to film the Martian landscape... and crashes. His odyssey is the 800-mile hike back to his team in the spaceship Ares. Shortly after starting he hears a terrible racket, "like a flock of crows eating a bunch of canaries--whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel! ...at least, Tweel is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering." Captain: What was he doing? Dick Jarvis: He was being eaten! Dick Jarvis, American astronaut, saves Tweel, a friendship is formed. The story is narrated by Dick Jarvis to his astromates, by the way. He describes Tweel to them: The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four-fingered things--hands, you'd have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head--and that beak. It stood an inch or two taller than I. ...Legs about as thick as golf sticks. Tweel is recognized as one of, if not the, first character to answer John W. Campbell's challenge, "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." Weinbaum extended that concept to his other Martian creatures, and to the landscape itself, and that's the true reason for the greatness of A Martian Odyssey. Though, an extra dimension I like about it is what Dick does at the end, or what he reveals he did. To my modern, tender sensibilities it's reprehensible, but I wonder if that's what Weinbaum had in mind, or if it was supposed to be seen as sly and heroic, as the sci-fi and pulp of the day would probably support. What do you think? Stanley Weinbaum
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Post by callipygias on Jun 5, 2011 21:30:44 GMT -5
#4 Chickamauga(1889)Ambrose Bierce[/center][/color] Back to the jaw droppers. From the start Chickamauga has the feel of a fairy tale. One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. That feeling continues throughout (but gets darker and darker). The child, as all his progenitors were, is born to war. For this child's spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest--victories in battles whose critical moments were centuries, whose victors' camps were cities of hewn stone. This magnificent child, terrified by a bunny rabbit in his path, runs crying through the woods and becomes lost. It's apparent that the boy's grand lineage of (and simple-minded proclivity for) war is no different than it is for the rest of his race. Here's a decent summary I found online. It has SPOILERS, but I don't know how much that matters with a thing like Chickamauga. "...during the time of the Civil War, a child strays away from his home and into the woods. The child becomes lost, tires himself out, and falls asleep on the ground. Several hours later he wakes up and notices what he thinks are animals crawling through the woods. They are wounded soldiers fleeing from battle. Earlier, these soldiers had passed by the child while he slept. Now the battle is over and the soldiers are moving back over the same ground. The child, without knowing the seriousness of the situation, makes a game of it and marches in front of the soldiers, pretending to be their leader. It is night by this time and, crossing a stream, he sees a fire raging. He goes to the fire and makes a game of this also, throwing sticks into the fire. Suddenly, he discovers that the fire is his own home burning, and comes upon his mother, lying on the ground, horribly murdered. So many subjects are provoked by Chickamauga: the heroic ideal of war vs. the ugly truth; right along with that is loss of innocence (powerful ending when the boy discovers his mother's body); Nature vs. man: there are several instances when the narrator presents nature as taking an active hand against man in retribution for his wars, even laughing at his comeuppance; Bierce's talent (combining the throw-your-hands-up-at-the-inevitability-and-hopelessness-of-the-human-condition satire of Vonnegut, the war and soldier awe of Crane, the respect and talent for describing natural things of Steinbeck and McCarthy, and the "intricate vocabulary" of Poe) is always a rife subject, but never moreso than with Chickamauga. Something I didn't pick up on till reading about Chickamauga was what Bierce's imagery of the mother's condition signified, "...lay the body of the dead woman--white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged...." His imagery is among the very best, but I missed the implication of what the child's mother might have endured before dying. Here's a link to a very short piece Bierce wrote about his experiences at the legendary Battle of Chickamauga. It makes the story even more interesting. Monument commemorating the 34,000 Americans killed during the two days of Chickamauga. It was a battle for Chattanooga's railway hub. An enormous victory for the South, it was also incredibly costly and short-lived. Under Grant the Union took Chattanooga just two months later in a battle that reportedly cost another 13,000 lives. Ambrose Bierce
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jun 7, 2011 5:36:12 GMT -5
I’ve been enjoying the thread, and reading a few stories I wasn't familiar with. I tried A Martian Odyssey, it was good, though I’m not much of a sci-fi guy. The brick-laying creature was freaky. After that I tried “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” by the same author and actually enjoyed it a little more. It sports a line that I fell in love with. It’s when the characters are heading off to bed and Galatea says…
"Dear shadow," she said softly, "I hope your dreams are music."
I thought that was beautiful.
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Post by callipygias on Jun 7, 2011 11:47:45 GMT -5
"Dear shadow," she said softly, "I hope your dreams are music." Wow, good line on its own, but GREAT line in context (now that I've read the story). I'd never heard of Weinbaum until starting this list, and now this awesome series of his collected works is a go-to for fun, engaging, sometimes thought-provoking, and apparently now sometimes bittersweet entertainment. Pygmalion's Spectacles happens to be the last story in the last book, so it may have been a long time till I got to it.
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Post by callipygias on Jun 12, 2011 21:09:20 GMT -5
#3 A Country Doctor(1919)Franz Kaf('n)k(razy)a(ss)[/center][/color] Holy crap. I considered stopping there, just -- Holy crap. Of all the stories here this is far and away the most difficult to post about. If Gogol was from an alien planet, Kafka was Pan there. Two stories on the list hit harder than the rest after the first reading, this one and the one at #2, and they hit differently. The one coming up at #2 caused a, "How could anybody create something so unbelievably great in so many ways?" feeling, while this one was more profoundly basic, "How could anyone create... this?" After many readings I'm still just as dumbfounded. It isn't like I'm unfamiliar with the type of story this is... or, the type of story this should be: I love the surreal and the absurd, heavy symbolism is great (except when taught) when it's well done, you add in feverish intensity and I'm a happy king! But really, there are no stories like this. The fact that I'm basically using the same words to describe A Country Doctor that I use for others stories seems wrong; it's either from inadequate vocabulary or because the right words for A Country Doctor don't exist yet. Kafka, along with many other greats (Dostoevsky, Melville, O'Connor, Faulkner, to name just a few from the list), makes me wish I had a deeper and more specific knowledge of the Bible. It would be a little more satisfying to draw the comparison of the patient's wound with the wound Jacob received wrestling the Angel myself, rather than read about it elsewhere. On the other hand I guess it's nice to have the work done for me. As for the story itself, for starters, it's about a doctor, a groom, a Rose, a blossom, a patient, a rape, cowardice, pigs, horses, demons, doubling, opposition, diminishing, doubt, fate, destiny, fear, innefectuality, science, nature, God, faith, and biting. And it's about six-and-a-half pages long. Once you read it you'll probably always remember it, and if you live to be a hundred you'll never run out of things to wonder at and ways to wonder at them. Another similarity between this and the story at number two is that they both leave me feeling grateful. Pretty cornball, but it happens. Grateful that the thing exists, and privileged that I'm able and allowed to read them. That's probably always there to one degree or another when we encounter great things (or people), but only the very best make me realize it consciously. I can't travel the globe at leisure to view great paintings and gardens and architecture, but for a little piece of a single day's pay I can own and experience the greatest things ever produced (produced by men, at least), its literature and its music. Things that produce that kind of appreciation are more valuable than gold-dipped Payday bars and chocolate milk. Pan Kafka
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Post by callipygias on Jun 19, 2011 17:40:17 GMT -5
#2 The Life You Save May Be Your Own(1955)Flannery O'Connor[/center][/color] A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. Flannery O'Connor If reading was music I imagine O'Connor on stage at the end of a show in a sold-out stadium with a hundred-thousand fans chanting, "THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!! THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!!" until she did it. Like Freebird. ( Another accidental pun.) Of all the short stories I've read this is the one I'd cite if I was trying to describe the nearly limitless potential of the form; it's unreal what all she could get into eleven pages. She'll present the power and majesty of stars and mountains, God's grace and man's fall, in a single sentence, and without an evident change in tone she'll clean everything up with a celestial-sent turnip. And whether you see it as God's wrath or God's love, it's one HELL of a turnip. With someone trying to say--and able to say--so much about something so important to her, and able to say it in such a truthful, natural, brutally artistic way, I cannot understand where she found the confidence to allow herself her sense of humor in a story like this; her black humor and her tongue-in-cheek humor, yes, but the turnip really surprised me. It'd be like spotting a little tattoo of Jesus on Adam's ankle in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. As always (moreso, probably) I was struggling with how to say what I wanted to, so, fortunately for me I found the following, which says exactly what I would have liked... to... have. Said! From The Dark Side of the Cross, by Patrick Galloway: To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty. In reality, her writing is filled with meaning and symbolism, hidden in plain sight beneath a seamless narrative style that breathes not a word of agenda, of dogma, or of personal belief. In this way, her writing is intrinsically esoteric, in that it contains knowledge that is hidden to all but those who have been instructed as to how and where to look for it, i.e. the initiated. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her. Nevertheless, she achieves what few Christian writers have ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both. She won't be an obvious great like Shakespeare or Dickens or Goethe until after we're long gone. Company doesn't get any better than that. Flannery O'Connor "THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!! THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN!!
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Post by callipygias on Jun 19, 2011 23:29:10 GMT -5
Flannery Fashion!
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Post by callipygias on Jun 22, 2011 19:15:29 GMT -5
#1 The Open Boat(1897)Stephen Crane[/center][/color] (Not only is this story based on actual events, but those events happened to Crane himself.) On New Year's Day, 1897, Crane was heading to Cuba when the ship he was aboard, the SS Commodore, began to sink. The Open Boat is his somewhat fictional account of the approximately thirty hours he spent afloat with a few fellow survivors who escaped the Commodore. SS Commodore Something many of my favorite writers share is the ability to analogize and to hyperbolize on a massive scale without losing credibility and without sounding false. Crane is remarkable in that respect. Throw a dart at a page, if the sentence it hits isn't outstanding, chances are that the sentence before or after it will be. There aren't so many writers I'd say that about: Shakespeare, Poe, Sterne, and Burton are the only others who come immediately to mind. The Open Boat is a great example of Crane's ability to manage dramatic prose and relentless rhythm with a quiet, restrained tone. It fits the sea as well as it does war. The Open Boat didn't have the initial cannonball impact of numbers two and three, it was more of a reverberator. Like a giant, softly hit tuning fork that intensifies instead of diminishes over time. Its active themes (adventure, survival) take second place to its passive ones of solitude and, especially, brotherhood. That apparently contradictory combination of solitude and brotherhood holds the key to what put The Open Boat at the head of the list. Along with everything else it is, to me it is mostly an allegory of the solitude of a man (the correspondent/Crane) even as he becomes part of a group equaling something greater than himself, and his impressions of those around him, one of whom is, in this case, maybe the most understated character I've ever read: Billie the oiler. Crane's respect for the Captain is obvious, but there's an undertone almost of worship regarding Billie the oiler. Adoration, at least. It's very buried and it's done without the slightest attempt to angelify him, but even the Captain submits to the oiler's adept, experienced, humble opinion when it differs from his own or when he's unsure. This excerpt is about as blatant as Crane gets. The oiler plied the oars until his head drooped forward, and the overpowering sleep blinded him. And he rowed yet afterward. Another thing I love about The Open Boat--most all Crane's writings, in fact--is his portrayal of nature-almost-personified, and the emptiness of the Godless man's relation to that nature when it matters. As his shipmates sleep, the correspondent rows, feeling he is the only man afloat on the ocean. He wants to curse nature but can't, so he curses there are no bricks to throw and no temples at which to throw them. He feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself." A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. I get the feeling Dostoevsky would have loved The Open Boat. When the best in men is brought out by a cold universe, you get The Open Boat. Because of that, the end is as poignant as any I've read. Stephen Crane's Own Story (approx. 9 pages) is Crane's factual (but no less beautifully told) report on the circumstances leading up to the events of The Open Boat. It has one of my favorite similes ever. It's when the old engineer is ordered by the Captain to jump into the soaring ocean and grip a life-raft in a certain way: "... and he obeyed as promptly and as docilely as a scholar in riding school." The whole little non-fiction piece is beautiful in general: Now the whistle of the Commodore had been turned loose, and if there ever was a voice of despair and death it was in the voice of this whistle. ... It was as if its throat was already choked by the water, and this cry on the sea at night, with a wind blowing the spray over the ship, and the waves roaring over the bow, and swirling white upon the decks, was to each of us probably a song of man's end. ...and then the first mate threw his hands over his head and plunged into the sea. He had no life belt, and for my part, even when he did this horrible thing, I somehow felt that I could see in the expression of his hands, and in the very toss of his head, as he leaped thus to his death, that it was rage, rage, rage unspeakable that was in his heart at the time. Stephen Crane And the truly tragic:
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Post by mummifiedstalin on Jul 17, 2011 7:31:18 GMT -5
I have to admit I wasn't expecting that one. I'll have to reread it. I'll also have to read Bierce. I've only read a few stories, and that was a long time ago.
But this was an awesome read. Lots of really interesting work.
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