Tag: Literature

The tonic chord of the last line — that’s our topic.  The tonal and thematic closure of a literary episode found with the right string of words.  The well-struck final sentence of a well-structured novel or essay or even film brings a session of the reader’s consiousness to a close.  Within a definable portion of one’s finite existence, the last line marks the cessation of a who and a when and a what that was spent with a piece of writing.  

Meaning does not stop with the final line, of course; that’s not my claim.  The life of a lived work does not stop when we close the cover for the first time.  A piece of writing is alive after it is read, learned by heart, sometimes, though it need not be learned by heart to live, and then it is alive in us until our death, if it meant a lot to us.  We may return to the work even if we never see it again.

Rather, when I say that the final line, if right, brings an end, what I mean is that an aesthetically, even ethically comprehensible finitude has been created in the space of life.  A mortality in miniature, a totem is there in the soul where before there was none; an object round on all sides (or jagged if that is the author’s purpose) to be studied, kept in one’s spiritual pocket, remembered, cherished, or perhaps disquietedly revered.  A thing with meaning.

Greetings, literature loving Dharmosets (or whatever)!  Earlier this week, the venerable Moonbat wove a history of ancient Mesopotamia, of Sumeria and Akkadia and Babylonia, of kings and tyrants.  Today it is my daunting challenge to supplement his essay with a close reading of Gilgamesh, the semi-fictional account of a Sumerian king on a mad quest for immortality.

If you haven’t read Moonbat’s excellent introduction to the history of ancient Sumeria – drop what you’re doing and read it now!  Then you’ll be ready to wrestle with the ancient man-god-king before he drags us to the edge of the world in search of eternal life.  Along the way we’ll meet goddesses and giants, scorpion-beasts and feral men, and we’ll learn about life before the Great Flood…

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmenians!  Last week we let ourselves be absorbed into the beautiful incomprehensibility of Job, and nearly every commenter had a different take on that crotchety Old Testament god.  This week we’ll zip ahead thousands of years to a writer who’s still churning out novels today – how’s that for a flash forward?

Here’s a situation to consider: it’s the middle of the night in an abandoned temple in the middle of metropolitan Japan, and Colonel Sanders (yes, that Colonel Sanders) is telling you that the fate of the world relies on your flipping over a rock.  There’s nothing underneath the rock, and nothing seems to happen when you move it, but the man from the chicken bucket seems awfully insistent.  What do you do?

Welcome to the wonderful, weird, and occasionally horrifying world of Japan’s most (internationally) popular novelist.

Inspired by last night’s frequent zombie-related comments in this essay, combined with my lack of a literature diary for this week (I had a very good fill-in on dailykos), I decided to post an actual essay on zombies.

If that seems too fluffy a topic, it shouldn’t be: genre fiction is very serious stuff among academics, because it sometimes has greater insight about contemporary social and political issues than mainstream art (for a variety of reasons, but that’s a whole nother topic).  Where genre fiction has its hardest time is with middlebrow critics: no horror films have won an Oscar for best picture, for example.

With that in mind, I want to turn back to what I’ll unapologetically call the greatest of all horror films – maybe not the scariest, maybe not the best-acted, but certainly the richest and most thought-provoking: a low-budget 1978 gorefest called Dawn of the Dead.  If nothing else, the film is an excellent snapshot of mainstream American culture on the cusp of a particular type of collapse (the 1980s), and a brilliant combination of social critique, dire prediction, and philosophical density.  It’s also funny as hell and set the high (low?) water mark on what was considered an acceptable display of violence and gore.  But let’s start with some background:

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmiacs! (or whatever you’re called)  Last week we danced with the Dame of Amherst and found that she had a few crafty tricks up her embroidered sleeve.  This week we’ll continue with our theme of mind-twisting literature, but we’ll first relocate to a slightly warmer climate:

The setting is Buenos Aires, the time is the 20th century.  A blind seer is guiding us around the labyrinthine National Library, spinning yarns on everything from gauchos to Gargantua.  But how much of it is true, and how much of it is a devilish game?  Have we been wandering around a library with no exit?…

Follow me below through the twisted paths of Argentina’s most famous fabulist.

Greetings, literature-loving Dharmists! (do we have a group name yet?)  This is a crosspost of my dailykos series, profiling famous and not-so-famous names in literary history.  Last week we spent time in West Africa with the former president of Senegal, who also happened to be a cultural theorist and excellent poet.  Our subject this week was also involved with politics, although on a much more modest scale: he was friend and informal adviser to Czechoslovakia’s first elected president, Tomáš Masaryk. 

Since the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina two years ago this week, one of this author’s novels has become uncomfortable to read, because he had once imagined in agonizing detail the destruction of the Gulf Coast due to humanity’s meddling with nature.  Join me below for an extended discussion with a true visionary, and one of the foremost liberal humanists of the 20th century.