Spoken Words

Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath 

by Elise Paschen

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?


This is a wonderful collection of poetry with the added attraction of spoken verse. Each poet reads their own poetry as recorded on three CDs. The poets included range from the early nineteenth century with Tennyson, Browning, and Whitman to the late twentieth with Ginsberg, Sexton, and Plath. 

Some of my favorite poems are included from poets like Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The introductions and commentary by some of our finest poets complement the verses making them all the more valuable and perhaps just a bit more understandable. The above poem, by Robert Hayden, is just one example of the great poetry included in this volume.

Quantity with Quality

The Ten Long Novels

The following list contains the ten longest novels that I have read over my lifetime.  Starting in the Nineteen-sixties and continuing to this day I have read an average of about seventy books per year.  This has included books of many sizes but the ten longest books I have read range from 981 to 2,281 pages in length.  Some of these I have read multiple times, including Proust, Mann, Tolstoy, Rand , and Dickens.  There were another half dozen books that just missed the list ranging from 825 to 980 pages.  I have excluded "genre" novels thus you will not find The Lord of the Rings or The Foundation Trilogy.

There are two qualities that all of these novels have in common in addition to length:  They are all very good (even great) books and I enjoyed reading all of them (or I would not have finished them).  Among these novels there are additional aspects worth mentioning:  Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy has the distinction of being the longest novel that is not partitioned into separate volumes.  I believe that is a distinction that it still holds.  Robert Musil's novel has an additional 600 hundred pages of unfinished material that are not included in the three published volumes.  Writing the novel literally killed him.
I am not sure if length is an important measure of the worth of a novel, but I would recommend all of these and hope that you do not hold their length against them.


In Search of Lost Time by  Marcel Proust (two volumes, 1913-1927),  2281 pp.

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann (four volumes, 1933-1943), 1492 pp.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (1993), 1474 pp.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869), 1386 pp.

The Cairo Trilogy  by Naguib Mahfouz (three volumes, 1957),  1313 pp.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862), 1194 pp.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957), 1168 pp.


The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (three volumes, 1951),  1130 pp.

Snopes by William Faulkner (three volumes, 1931-1957), 1065 pp.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853),  989 pp.



(Novels that came close, but did not make the top ten included From the Terrace,  Don Quixote, Middlemarch, David Copperfield, An American Tragedy, Tom Jones, and The Way We Live Now.)

In Memory of a Literary Man

John Bayley



John Bayley died on 12 January 2015.  He was eighty-nine years old and from 1974 to 1992, was Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and was a Fellow of St. Catherine's College. He was also a novelist and wrote literary criticism for several newspapers. He edited Henry James' The Wings of the Dove and a two-volume selection of James' short stories.  

He had been married to the writer Dame Iris Murdoch from 1956 until her death in 1999.  About a decade ago I read Elegy for Iris, one of  John Bayley's three memoirs of his life with Iris Murdoch,  and was moved by this beautiful but sad story. His love for her led him to create a luminous memoir of her brilliant life and their love for each other. He poignantly describes the dimming of her brilliance due to Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a story about the ephemeral beauty of youth and the sobering reality of what it means to grow old; filled with touching moments that seem almost too personal but are beautiful anyway. Most of the memoir is devoted to happier days but in some sense the final weeks and days of her life, while sad, are treated with an even greater beauty and serenity. For those who have enjoyed the novels of Iris Murdoch this is a wonderful testament to her life and career. It is a literary romance of years together.




It was many decades earlier, however, that as a reader I first read the criticism of John Bayley.   Too many years ago when I was  a college student I read the stories of Leo Tolstoy in a collection that Bayley edited and introduced.  It was this connection with Tolstoy that I renewed in the early eighties as I once again read an introduction Bayley had written, this time for The Portable Tolstoy collection from Viking Penguin.

Most recently I have enjoyed dipping into his very "personal anthology" of literary passages entitled simply Hand Luggage.  This appropriate title is a book of literary prose extracts and poetry samplings that he culled from his years of reading.  It impressed me as a sort of "commonplace" book of a type that I have had increasing enjoyment among my readings.  I share his use of books as hand luggage whenever I am traveling around town or to further destinations.

Throughout all the years since I first encountered John Bayley's writing I was continually impressed with his superb writing ability;  it was something that he had shared with his partner,  yet unlike Iris he remained primarily a critic of fiction and literature.  He made an impact on my reading life that I will not forget just as he became a light for readers everywhere with both his writing style and love of literature.

"Almost the best pleasure of anthologies is to find things mislaid from the past, as well as some new thing whose stay in the mind may turn out to be a ephemeral as it is agreeable."  - John Bayley


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Music Lessons

Poetics of Music 
in the Form of Six Lessons 
by Igor Stravinsky

"Art in the true sense is a way of fashioning works according to certain methods acquired either by apprenticeship or by inventiveness.  A methods are the straight and predetermined channels that insure the rightness of our operation." (p 25)


In his preface to this collection of lectures Darius Milhaud says, "Poetics of music is like a searchlight turned by Stravinsky on his own work on one hand, and on music in general on the other." This comment provides an excellent introduction to this short book. Given as part of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, these compact essays provide an insight into the mind of one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century.
Half the book is concerned with music in general,focusing on the phenomenon of music, its composition, the various types of music and aspects of musical style. His argument regarding critics who ignore his own music is interesting as he looks back at earlier composers like Bach and Beethoven who suffered from similar disregard before being crowned as great masters.
Further commentary includes a more specific look at Russian music in particular and a discussion of the interpretation of music. These lectures by a great Russian master whose own style evolved significantly over his lifetime make great reading for all who love music.

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Fun with Verse

How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry 
by E.O. Parrott

"Wake from out my midnight ramble.

Life is just a massive gambol."

-  Bill Greenwell (after Dylan Thomas)

This wonderful book is both an anthology of poetry and an introduction to poetic forms. Apparently it is one of a series of similar literary compilations, all edited by Mr. Parrot. He spent many years as a teacher of English and General Studies, and reminds me of the character Hector in Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys, because of his eclectic taste as demonstrated in this book (and presumably his other collections).

Useful as a reference through the inclusion of all known poetic forms and not a few unknown (to me), it is a review for those, like myself, that are rusty on the details of the form of poetry if not the substance. While rhyming and meter and stanzas are encountered there are sections of poetic fancies, light verse, terse verse and more.  The forms are demonstrated in all manner of ways, one being the parody like that in the epigraph above that mocks the famous "Fern Hill" of Dylan Thomas.  
The chapters begin with a selection of poems whose subject is poetry itself, with verses like:

"Poetry the pleasure
Madness and treasure."
and:
"So remember: the poetic Muse
It is a sure-fire cure for the blues;
A verse a day
Keeps the hearse away."

This should provide brief evidence that poetry can be fun for all who love words or at least wonder about them. The delight is in learning about the form and being of poetry while experiencing rhymes from a gathering of contemporary poets who provide exceptionally entertaining evidence of the magic of verse.  Often with tongue-in-cheek he gathers poems and poetic bits of verse with both demonstration and entertainment in mind. The result is a book of poetry presented in its most entertaining form. For that and for the inspirational value to encourage me to expand my poetry horizons I am grateful.

If you like the classics or Proust you may find the following "Distichs" delightful:

"A tea-soaked madeleine consumed by Proust,
Mon Dieu! What recollections that unloosed."

"She launched a thousand ships, no less, from little craft to whalers;
You'd say that Helen must have got on very well with sailors."
- Stanley Sharpless


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The Quest to Understand

A Dancing Star: 
Inspirations to Guide and Heal
by Eileen Campbell

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust


In Also Sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche said: "I say to you: 'One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.'" In this collection Eileen Campbell has gathered quotations from both East and West to speak to people whose lives are constantly subject to change, and frequently chaotic as a result. She relies on the premise that our problems are not unique; likely to be part of the human condition. The result is that there are times we need inspiration. For most readers there are old favorites, but also different quotes not found in traditional sources. The result is an anthology that bears fruit from repeated visits and meditation on the direction that is suggested by study of each quote. This small book has room for an informative list of recommended reading which makes it even more valuable.


Here are some of my favorites:
"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand." -Baruch Spinoza
"The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being." -Immanuel Kant
"Knowing other is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power." - Lao-Tzu

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Blood of the Fathers

“With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.”  ― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses



Go Down, Moses 
by William Faulkner


Go Down, Moses marks the end of William Faulkner's period of greatest creativity. In this novel built out of interconnected stories he addresses themes that connect with and overlap those in other of his works of this period, particularly The Hamlet. The idea of time - past, present and future - is connected throughout the novel by blood; the bloodlines of the family. Faulkner's book of stories is named for the last one in the book.  There are only seven of which one, "The Fire and the Heart", extends to novella length. Previously published in popular magazines, like Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly these stories are more accessible than some of Faulkner's more intense novels.

"to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy's present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening," (p. 165)

The blood of the fathers, their 'curse', becomes one of the themes in the first three stories: "Was", "The Fire and the Hearth", and "Pantaloon in Black".

"Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." (p. 107)

The relations between the races and the nature of the family in these stories are also important for Faulkner. The hearth suggests connections with the Anglo-Irish culture from which the McCaslins originated. After all the McCaslin's heritage is one of tension and guilt bred into them like DNA in their genes. The initiation of the young into this culture is presented in "The Old People" when Ike becomes a man, and is repeated in "The Bear" (this last story has resonance all the way back to The Odyssey of Homer in which Odysseus undergoes a not dissimilar experience). There is also the theme of man versus nature through the contrast of the natural man with the social man of civilization. I also sensed a resonance with the Rousseau-like view of the world in the emphasis on getting away from civilization in The Bear. This can also be read in the tradition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, we see in Go Down, Moses Faulkner's mythic world of Yoknapatawpha County that we first met in Sartoris as it once more presents its people, their land, and their ghosts. How they relate to our world today is up to the reader to decide.

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A Story of Walls and More

Great Short Works of 

Herman Melville 

by Herman Melville

"I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of." (p 39)




In the spring of 1853 after the failure of his novel Pierre: Or the Ambiguities and the rejection of his most recent manuscript, The Isle of the Cross (now lost), Herman Melville submitted three stories to Harper's. This was the beginning of period that would see the publication of such great stories as "Bartley, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", "The Piazza", and others. It would culminate with his great unfinished novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. All of Melville's tales including Billy Budd are included in this collection from Harper's Perennial Library.

By the end of 1853 Melville submits his first story that can be considered not only great but even amazing; this is Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. The story amazes in many ways and on many levels. One theme is a world of walls as the narrator, an "unambitious" lawyer who prefers the peace of his office to the bustle of the courtroom with judge and jury. He describes himself as "an eminently safe man", certainly someone who his clients can trust. The world of his office, located on Wall Street, is one of walls within, separating the scriveners from the lawyer, and walls without since the view from the few windows is limited by the proximity of the walls of the building next door.
Into his apparently prosperous business enters Bartleby, a scrivener or clerk, who is hired to handle some additional copying work. Bartleby, as we soon learn, would "prefer not" to do any task other than copying and before too long he seems to slowly stop doing any work. He is a "forlorn" and sickly character from the beginning (reminiscent of the copyist "Nemo", a minor character in Dickens' Bleak House). And his presence gradually requires the narrator to attempt, unsuccessfully, to provoke him so that he might respond in kind. Their worlds clash and in another deeper sense a spiritual realm is entered. The result is a crisis of faith for the lawyer, he thought to himself: "I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach." (p 56)
Death seems to surround Bartleby from the moment he walks in the door and into the narrator's life. He's described incessantly as "cadaverous," and this corpse-like disposition is reflected not only in his pallid appearance, but in his eerily calm manner. There is a chilling vision of Bartleby as a corpse in his winding sheet, which evokes both sympathy and fear in himself and in his readers, and even when Bartleby is alive (technically), he has a certain undead quality about him. Also significant is what the narrator calls Bartleby's "dead wall reveries," in which Bartleby stares at the "dead," blank brick wall outside his office window for hours on end. This presence of the living dead in the office is a really disturbing one – there's something incredibly creepy about Bartleby's perpetually incomprehensible inaction.
A question that does not arise is the position of women in the story.  Since there are literally no women in the 19th century world of commerce that we see here (and this is true of much Victorian fiction that is not based on the world of commerce--the example of  Stevenson or Wilde immediately comes to mind), any question of heterosexuality is simply a non-issue. As with most Melville texts, an argument could be made for the presence of some very, very faint homosexual undertones – however, in this story, it's not really much to base an argument on. While some might claim that the narrator's interest in Bartleby is really some kind of deeply hidden desire for Bartleby, I suggest that this is much more a story about the nature of humanity – what makes Bartleby fascinating is simply the incomprehensibility of his character.

The story introduces Bartleby by citing his "advent" and this is not the only allusion to Christ.  So we may interpret Bartleby as a "Christ-like" messenger, but what is his message? The variety of themes in the story takes on an objective pathos and parabolic overtones that are almost Dostoievskian in complexity.  The story ends with a sort of epilogue that succeeds only in muddying the message further. What makes the story so magnificent is all of the many different possibilities present in it. Just as the narrator has his faith shaken and his perceptions changed by Bartleby, the reader finds his imagination roiled by the possibilities -- the ending merely lays out a choice for the reader. You decide what it all means.

Great Short Works of Herman Melville.  Harper Perennial books, 1969.

On the Road

I visited the Columbia College Center for Book & Paper Arts yesterday with my friend Kyle Tschaen. After a light repast at Ceres restaurant with our friend Randy Koch, Kyle and I walked over to the Center to view Jack Kerouac’s iconic manuscript scroll of On the Road.
It is the centerpiece of a college-wide initiative at Columbia investigating the disparate group of poets, artists, filmmakers and musicians known as the Beat Generation. The first draft of On the Road was produced by Jack Kerouac in a three-week writing marathon. He created a 120-foot-long continuous scroll of semi-translucent paper by pasting and taping together separate 12-foot-long strips so he could feed the it through the typewriter without interruption. In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, the exhibition offers visitors a rare opportunity to see the original draft, containing Kerouac’s own edits in pencil, and using the real names of those depicted in the published novel including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. In addition there is a unique exhibit of book covers entitled "On the Road Around the World", displaying 66 international book covers from different editions of On the Road from the Collection of Horst Spandler. With the addition of a biographical video of interviews and commentary on Kerouac's life this is an amazing exhibit of modern American culture from the mid-twentieth century.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Viking Press, New York. 1957.

Flannery O'Connor


The writing style of Flannery O'Connor awakens the reader with its felicity. The author's imagination takes over from there and with Flannery the reader is in for a wild ride.
I have the collection, Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor , in my library. Wise Blood, her first novel and the first work in this collection, is a gothic take on the world of southern itinerant preachers. Hazel Motes' Church without Christ is a bleakly humorous approach to the whole god/man situation and the psychology portrayal of Motes is worth studying through a rereading of this short work. I cannot remember another work that challenges the modernists view and raises questions in so many different ways. The sad lives of Leonora and Hazel come together in a haunting way following episodes in which Hazel, again and again is treated almost sadistically both by others and himself. The collections of short fiction underscore the ability of O'Connor to surprise and challenge the reader. I find myself returning to her work from time to time just to make sure that my previous readings were not a dream.