The Complete Novels - Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

I will begin by being honest...I have yet to finish a Jane Austen novel in its entirety. While this may seem an heretical statement to be made by a student of English literature I assert that it is the story of the book itself which is more exciting than its contents.

During my undergraduate education I had spent a semester in the UK which in retrospect was the absolute best thing I did during my college education (barring dating my then future wife, of course). Mid-semester our group took a weeklong trip through the English countryside. Our first stop had been the city of Bath in which Austen had spent a great deal of time (according to our guides). This coupled with the fact that we had seen Bride and Prejudice (a Bollywood retelling of Austen's second novel) begun to develop in me a small interest in this enigmatic (to me) author.

On a later day in our journey, after seeing the sun rise on the mysterious Stonehenge and channeling Earth energies at nearby Avebury Henge, we stopped for lunch and a rest in the rural burg of Lacock. I am fairly certain that since 1600 the only thing that has changed in the streets of this small town since is the addition of automobiles and the only change in its bookstore is the dusty cash register used to ring up the ten pounds it cost to purchase the handsome little volume I had excitedly snatched up upon entering.

Thinking it best to start at the beginning I spent the rest of the train time during our mid-semester sojourn wading unsuccessfully through the bourgeois slush that is Sense and Sensibility. Despite the assurance by my colleagues that Pride and Prejudice was a far superior novel the first work left me with the one major question that has plagued all subsequent attempts to engage Jane Austen: why do I care?

Maybe I should blame the separation in time periods but as a reader Austen's novels left me questioning what exactly it was about the husband-selction practices of upper middle class Victorian women that made for a rewarding reading experience. The answer was: not much.

 

*The illustrations, sadly, tend to reflect the same social distance that makes me dislike the novel (although notice the England train ticket I used as a bookmark, fun!)

I have since made an attempt at finishing Pride and Prejudice and must admit that the characters in this novel were significantly more engaging and multi-dimensional than those in the previous novel, yet time constraints prevented me from reaching the end and memories of a subject matter and societal perspective that I simply cannot connext with have dissolved my motivation to pick up where I had left off.

I am sure that one day I may again pick up the book again and take a stab at Northanger Abbey for I hear it offers a few jabs at the genre of the gothic novel but until then it may remain more of a reminder of good times in the English countryside than the charm of Mr. Darcy.
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Austen, Jane. The Complete Novels. London, Crown Publishers Inc., 1981.

Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy - Gustave Dore

As I mentioned last week, Gustave Dore's art played a major role in my fascination with Dante's Inferno when I first read it as a high school sophomore. Our text books included just a few of his key engravings to accentuate the poem, namely the dark, grotesque, yet fascinating image of Satan stuck in a lake of ice and eternally chewing on the world's three most heinous sinners.

When I received that copy of the Divine Comedy from my grandfather (I believe it would have been Christmas of 1999) he had thrown in a book of The Dore Illustrations for Date's Divine Comedy allowing me to study his dark but detailed style.

*Satan in the Lake of Ice

Dore was French an artist in the mid 19th Century who specialized in wood and steel engraving, an artistic form that involved etching an image in negative onto a piece of wood or steel and using that engraving to basically stamp the art onto print media. This was similar to some techniques used by William Blake just a generation before but with a drastically different level of detail. Dore's engravings not only demonstrate a precise understanding of the human form, but also a level of perfection that achieves in a visual form the closest approximation of the emotions prevalent in the literature from which he drew his inspiration.

*The Empyrean

Much later I discovered that Dore did not limit himself to Dante but in fact created a multitude of art series based on every classic literary work he could get his hands on. Everything from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to Milton's Paradise Lost, to Cervantes' Don Quixote was accentuated by Dore's art. A look at the collections of his art demonstrates, at least to me, not only his commitment to telling the entire story of any work he chose to translate to visual art but also the thoroughness with which he read and understood the works that he illustrated.

*From Don Quixote

Though my pictures here may not be of the highest quality, any close look at Dore's work reveals just how intricate each engraving had to be. His images tend to be rather epic in scope (which is somewhat obvious from his choice of stories, but I suppose 'go big or go home' was his philosophy) and heavy in detail. As a print medium Dore was able to work only with contrasting dark and light areas of color (the printing press had no 'grey' setting) yet both the dark and light areas of his engravings take on an expressive texture almost like an intricate topography map that omits any and all dead space. The result is a lively image where all four corners have been touched and made to live by the artist despite the apparent limitations of his medium.

*from Paradise Lost

In addition to the The Dore Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy I have sought out Dore's art whenever possible and thanks to Barnes and Noble's oversized, economical, and altogether fun printings I have also attained versions of Paradise Lost and Don Quixote Illustrated by Dore (as seen above). But I will leave talking about them for another day.
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Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Illus. Gustave Dore. London: CRW Publishing Ltd., 2007.


Dore, Gustave. The Dore Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Illus. Gustave Dore. London: Arcturus Publishing Ltd., 2005.

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
-The Inferno: Canto I,1-2 

 


























My first introduction to Dante was in Mrs. Brotman's Honors World Literature course my sophomore year of high school. Despite the otherwise mediocre selections available in that class (Chaim Potok's The Chosen...the name Brotman explains itself) this particular work of poetry fascinated me. Part of this was no doubt due to our textbook's inclusion of some of Gustave Dore's illustrations of the work (which I will discuss in the following blog). But a great deal of my fascination with the work was this ethereal and alchemical exploration of the world beyond. At some point that year I had expressed my excitement to my grandfather who responded by presenting me with this volume (beautifully decorated and with ragged-edged pages, very antique) as well as a book of the complete Gustave Dore illustrations from the Divine Comedy (which I will be discussing in my next blog). This book is of particular importance as I can say that it is the first book of my collection. I had many books already on my shelves but it was this particular tome that piqued my appetite to fill my walls with more of its kind.

For anyone not familiar with the work, Dante's first person narrative begins with his allegorical straying from righteous living into a forest signifying his sin. He is rescued by the poet Virgil (The Aeneid) who takes Dante on a journey through the circles of hell (The Inferno), through purgatory (Purgatorio), and dropping him off at the first circle of heaven (Paradiso) where the divine Beatrice guides him the rest of the way toward the Empyrean, or the ultimate vision of God the creator.
Dante's work is based in Medieval Catholic tradition but with a political twist. In addition to a spiritual kunstleroman Dante offers a scathing commentary on contemporary figures, often placing local potliticians in the circles of hell that he deems fit for their apparent sins.
  I think the most fascinating aspect of Dante's vision is in his sense of perfect justice. Having grown up Protestant a great deal of the punishments applied for certain sins was foreign and interesting. Though the fury of the harpies, the creaking oars of Charon, and the grotesque mastication of the most heinous sinners of antiquity (Brutus, Cassius, and Judas) by Lucifer himself provide sufficient spectacle for any reader the deeper I dug into the Inferno the more interesting the punishments became.
I remember reading of the story of Paolo and Francesca whom Dante encounters eternally circling in the wind above one of Hell's jagged precipices. This punishment was earned for their participation in an adulturous affair (oddly enough, inspired by stories of Lancelot and Guinevere, ARTHURIAN TIE IN, YAY). Surely a poet who could dream up such a specific punishment for every mortal offense has a great deal to say about the tragectory of human existence.

What is interesting is that Dante, much like Milton, is probably the source of a great number of dogmatic beliefs that were handed down, not from scripture, but from the imaginations of poets. I believe this undoubtedly attests to the social power of poetry; a power that modern education and mechanistic social values attempt to ignore.
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Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry Francis Cary. Garden City, New York: International Collectors Library, 1946.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide - Douglas Adams

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has already supplanted the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom...[I]t scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First it is slightly cheaper; and second it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover," (6)

I was first introduced to Douglas Adams' five book trilogy (yes he calls it that) through its format as a radio drama. As the author describes in his introduction to the books, the stories of Arthur Dent and his interstellar group of friends, aquaintances, and ravenous Bugblatter beasts had been incarnated as a series of novels, radio dramas, and a film almost simultaneously to each other creating a massive set of inconsistencies and alternate avenues which udoubtedly delighted the satiric fancies of the glib author.

The story is absurd enough: Arthur Dent, after an attempt to save his own house from being knocked down to make way for a bypass is abruptly carried into space by a friend, who is actually an alien, who is aware that the earth itself, in a moment of irony, is being destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. Hilarity and interstellar travel ensues in a manner that is anything but linear yet still exemplifies Adams' ironic English humor. The novels contained in this book; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life the Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless, do a great deal to explore the absurdity of human life and convictions. Ray Bradbury has always believed that science-fiction, while it explores the concepts of new lifeforms and new civilizations actually reveals a great deal about the human experience. No less can be said of Adams' novels with the added edge of biting humor.

One of the most exemplary moments of these novels occurs in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. In this passage Arthur Dent and his girlfriend friend Fenchurch have sought out a man considered by most on Earth to be crazy. This man calls the outside of his home along with the land beyond it as The Asylum and has designed the house's interior in such a way that it resembles the outside of a house, and its exterior contains elements of a home interior. The man, known as Wonko the Sane, explains his reasons for sequestering himself in his home, "outside" of the place inhabited by so may psychopaths as deriving from a set of instructions he saw on a box of toothpicks. This box read: "hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion." Wonko's analysis of this is, "That any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a aset of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which [he] could live and stay sane," 585-6.

It does not take long for us to examine our own culture to see that instructions for toothpicks is no isolated incident. On a plane flight recently, the package of peanuts I was given as a snack, though clearly labeled as 'Salted, Roasted, Peanuts' included the warning: "Package contains nuts" as well as the instructions: "Open package, eat nuts." I would like to pause for a moment to let this one sink in...
That should do it. As much as I would like to rant about how ridiculous this is or how frivolous lawsuits are ruining our world, I'm sure this example speaks for itself...loudly.

In writing his novels Douglas Adams was acutely aware that our culture had indeed lost its head, yet thankfully his approach, in true Monty Pythonesque fashion (a programme he wrote for in the 70's) to identify and laugh at its absurdity rather than turning his house inside out and removing himself from it. I feel that a sense of humor may, in some ways, help to reverse the growing straight-faced absurdity that appears to be becoming a part of everyday life.
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Adams, Douglas. "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide." New York: Portland House, 1997.

Inagural blog

Welcome to the inaugural entry for The Eastin Collection. Despite the fact that no one will probably be reading I would like to extend my welcome to the odd assortment of dust bunnies and lost socks that will probably be this entry's only readers.
I intend for this blog to be a sort of literary journal that happens to have an audience in mind. I think for someone of my age I have a particularly large, ecclectic, and altogether fascinating collection of books which I would love to share musings with anyone who might listen. In addition to having these books I am obsessive enough to have organized them in Dewey much to the eye-rolling of my wife, a sociologist with little need for fictional diversion (but she's still a peach anyway).
Each weekly blog entry (feel free to hold me to this schedule) will progress in order from the top shelf to the bottom in an attempt to develop a commentary and hopefully a discussion on each and every book I have accumulated. I reserve the right to take breaks from this venture to muse upon whatever current events, holidays, obituarys, or any other tangents of a literary nature but the central pinion of this endeavor will be, undoubtedly, The Collection.

My glorious bookshelf (bursting at the seams):

I expect that such a monicker might seem a trifle presumptuous and if that is the case...I find it best to roll with it. I don't claim to own the full literary canon or have filled my shelves with fascinating rarities or to even have a lot of books in comparison to some of my colleagues. I simply love books; I love that they sit patiently on their shelves, showing a thin sliver of what contents they hold and that those contents have the ability to transport one into another time or place or mind or manner of existing before they are closed and returned to stand at attention among their brethren.

Unless of course they dribble out onto the floor:

I believe that I have always had a fascination with libraries. As a child movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Pagemaster only increased the romantic image I had of the power of a collection of books and though I don't quite need a rolling ladder to reach each tome in my collection I imagine/hope that someday I will. I believe that the sustained effect of this grandiose image I have of book collections is what makes this topic worth discussing for me and I hope I can share that with my readers.
So I invite you, my linty friends, on a journey of intellectual comiseration and likely a great deal of absurdity as I rediscover the dusty tomes that populate my shelves.