The Dead - James Joyce

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead"

In observation of the Christmas season this week I will take a brief break from my Ray Bradbury series to discuss what I find to be a very poingiant if somewhat ironic Christmas tale.

When most think of literature around Christmas thoughts tend to jump immediately to either Dr. Seuss or Charles Dickens and while I love my Grinch and Scrooge I find myself year after year drawn instead to the final tale in James Joyce's book The Dubliners. While I plan to blog about this book in its entirety at some point I do think I must first preface my experience of "The Dead."

Sometime in Autumn of 2004 while studying abroad in London some friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to Dublin. Naturally our first destination was the Guinness Brewery and after some wandering back and forth across the Liffey, stopping whenever we saw landmarks from Ulysses imbedded in the sidewalk and keeping as warm as possible we arrived at the brewery gates. After taking the brewery tour we boarded an elevator which took us to a circular room overlooking the entirety of Dublin. We were handed our complimentary pint and walked over to one window to raise our glasses to Arthur Guinness. When I looked up I saw that the glass had frosted letters on it which read: "The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres." Looking past the letters I could see a stone spire peeping up amidst the houses and trees of darkening Dublin and though snow was not yet resting upon it my spine chilled nonetheless.

I am sure that this experience is what first brought me to "The Dead" around Christmastime. But is its appropriateness within human experience that continues to draw me back. If you think about it, stories like The Grinch and A Christmas Carol tend to emphasize the redemption of fallen mankind through the poigniant change of attitude in each tale's protagonist; a theme which is undoubtedly repeated in almost every modern holiday film in which Christmas as a concept must be 'saved' again and again.

"The Dead" offers a very different story. Purposefully placed at the end of The Dubliners "The Dead" emphasizes an ultimate acceptance of the Wintertime of life. Winter is not a time of rebirth and renewal but a time when leaves fall dead upon the ground and trees remain bare and lifeless until the new year allows the cycle to begin again. But this is not an ending to be mourned, it is a simple fact of life that follows poigniantly after all other points have been made, accounts have been settled, and all inconsistencies in life must be accepted for what they are since our time left is too short to pine away. Gretta mourns the death of Michael Furey not because she wishes him alive but because he was a chapter in her life that has unalterably closed. Gabriel, in a way, represents the difficulty which we have in accepting the winding down of the clock.

Don't call me Scrooge just yet. I'm by no means all gloom and doom around Christmas; very much the opposite. But perhaps it is significant to remind ourselves of the evanescence of life before we forget it completely upon the breaking of Spring.

For your viewing pleasure: a photogram of G. Matthew Varner metaphorically 

violating the shoulder blades of James Joyce but thinking about Jackson Pollock

On a more technical note: this volume was purchased at Trinity College in Dublin on the same trip I spoke about above. It was part of a set of small books that my friend Matt (pictured above) refers to as my Leprechuan Joyce set. It contains the complete works of James Joyce but I will leave further discussion on these for another day (hopefully someday I will actually get around to reading Finnegan's Wake without hemorhaging my brain). I will say that I'm not really clear on the publisher of this particular volume and I have noticed a number of typological errors throughout this volume. But you can't beat the story that goes along with it.
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Joyce, James. "The Dead." The Dubliners. Dublin: Trinity College Press? date?

A Graveyard for Lunatics - Ray Bradbury

 "...when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glades cemetery ust across the way, which was the city of the dead"

I find it somewhat interesting that I managed to walk into Bradbury's mystery trilogy completely unawares. I talked last week about picking up Death is a Lonely Business before even knowing what I would be reading. A Graveyard For Lunatics showed up at my favorite bookstore on super-sale a few years ago (I will be sure to blog about Point Loma Books at some point). And I am currently reading, thanks to a $0.01 price on Amazon, Let's All Kill Constance.

A Graveyard For Lunatics follows a similar vein that Bradbury began in Death is a Lonely Business. The main characters are the unnamed writer/narrator, detective Elmo Crumley, and the faded movie star Constance Rattagan. The story surrounds a series of odd deaths plaguing a past-its-prime movie studio in Bradbury's faded-glory vision of 1950's Hollywood. The novel has a number of fascinating shadowy characters that populate the mystery aspects of the novel as well as build on Bradbury's modernized vision of the Phantom of the Opera tale (a sidenote: I HIGHLY recommend Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. The original novel is quite exciting and not nearly as cheeseball as the Andrew Lloyd Webber envisioning, unfortunately I don't have it in my collection...yet).

As a mystery the novel might disappoint hardboiled readers but Bradbury has never really been a genre man. This is perhaps one of the interesting things about this book as it relates to the Bradbury canon. The poor guy has a tragic tendency to get lumped in with Science fiction authors yet this is really not what he is all about. As I was explaining to a colleague of mine earlier this week: Asimov is science fiction; he loves robots and rockets and explaining how they might work. Bradbury presents us with a rocket and simply asks us to believe that it could fly; he is much more interested in how the people around said rocket are able to cope with its existence. The same goes for Bradbury's dabbling in the realm of mystery. Neither Death is a Lonely Business nor A Graveyard for Lunatics are Doylian unravelings of seemingly arbitrary clues by geniuses of detection. Bradbury presents a mystery and then trys to figure out how his characters react to it.

Since we've already established the nature of his three main characters in A Graveyard for Lunatics Bradbury sees what they can really do. Constance rushes around like a hare-brained Hera, Crumley strains his brain to sniff out the terror of tinseltown, and our narrator attempts to keep himself from sinking too far into the macabre fiction of Hollywood's heyday to solve the case. At least this is how I remember it (its been a while).
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Bradbury, Ray. A Graveyard for Lunatics. New York: Knopff, 1990.

The Catalogue

So I know I don't have this week's blog up yet (I promise it will be done soon) but thought I might share something that my readers might find interesting and engaging: the complete Library Catalogue! Follow the link below to see everything that I've got:

The Eastin Catalogue

I thought this might help begin to make the blog somewhat interactive. So far I've just been making my way throught the collection alphabetically. But I imagine that when I come to Bradbury (which I have) or especially Tolkien, the blogs might get a bit tedious. So I've decided to continue more as my whims happen to take me than in a particular order; that being said I would love if my readers (all two of you) might want to contribute to what exactly said whims will be. If something on the list strikes you as interesting I will blog it! If not, well I'll just have to find out how to make it all interesting.

Either way, enjoy the list and stay tuned for A Graveyard for Lunatics!

Death is a Lonely Business - Ray Bradbury

"Venice California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad."

You may remember a certain book I spoke of in that ever-so-long ago last blog. To refresh your memory: I had attended a Ray Bradbury book signing on the suggestion of a friend of mine before I had ever read one of his books. As a result the first Bradbury novel I ever read bears his real signature on its title page, which somehow made the experience all the more interesting.

What also made it interesting was the familiarity with which I could recognize the setting. Death is a Lonely Business, as is obvious from the above quote, is set in Venice Beach, a town that Bradbury knew quite well and which he paints with a kind of barren notstalgia that brings to life an even less glamorous but still romantic past of a now ultra-funky neighborhood.

The novel itself is a detective story yet it is by no means hard-boiled. In fact the murder that initiates Bradbury's narrative is less gruesome than it is puzzling and less violent than it is mysterious. This novel is the first to introduce some of Bradbury's most eccentric but interesting characters that show up twice more to form a sort of disjointed trilogy of an unashamedly dusty vision of Los Angeles's golden-days as they have solidified in the mind of the author (the other novels are A Graveyard for Lunatics, which will be the subject of my next post, and Let's All Kill Constance, which I have yet to add to the collection).

The two most active characters in the narrative are the unlikely duo of an unnamed writer (the narrator and no doubt a pseudo-biographical avatar of the author) and the detective Elmo Crumley. My memories of Crumley lack the kind of lost-innocence, unshaven, and jaded depiction that we are used to in our noir-stories. Instead Crumley is a man of everyday ideals who must use his brain as well as the help of his writer-friend to find the reasons that a man has been found dead in the submerged circus-lion cage of a Venice canal.

Though she does not play as important a role in solving the mystery Bradbury's most fascinating character by far is Constance Rattagan. Constance is a retired movie star who lives alone in a huge house by the beach and enjoys swimming naked, drives a huge convertible, and unabashedly keeps her old films on continuous reel in her parlor so she can revel in her glory days. Constance has always represented an interesting balance to me. Anyone familiar with Bradbury knows that he constantly explores the concept of nostalgia. To most people an overbearing sense. But Bradbury paints Constance differently. She takes absolute pride in her age and owns up to the fact that her glamorous youth can never be reclaimed. But that doesn't stop her from taking pride in the actress that she once was. Quite frankly I have no recollection of how she fit into the plot of Death is a Lonely Business but her characterization left a heavy impression on me and is most of the reason I hope to seek out Let's All Kill Constance as soon as I have time to read it.
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Bradbury, Ray. Death is a Lonely Business. New York: Avon Books, 1999.