Some several things

[lunabee34]

1. Does anybody want my copy of How to Keep House While Drowning? Free to a good home. Claimed.

2. Josh's cousin's wife worked for NPR in various roles for many years starting with This American Life, so they know many people in the NPR family. His cousin, a photographer, has been close friends with Kai Ryssdal for many years and has photographed their family over that time; he's currently out in CA photographing his kid's bar or bat mitzvah, didn't catch which. We got a video text from cousin and Kai this weekend saying hi and thanking us for being NPR fans. That was a nice brush with celebrity.

3.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I first read this in about ninth grade, and I remember liking it, but on reread, I can't imagine why.

There are some moments of beautiful prose, but everything else is such a slog: nobody gets a name until the book's almost done (everybody's an epithet like "the youth" or "the tall soldier") and the protagonist is so immature and aggravating.

What keeps this from being a mere two stars, though, are a few things related to this edition being a Norton Critical Edition. First, Donald Pizer's critical essay charting the trajectory of Crane scholarship is a close cousin of Gertrude Stein's treatment of herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He apparently attempts to evaluate every single everything written about Crane ever (which seems a bizarre choice to me in writing this sort of essay), which leads him to describe the work of others in the following terms: simplistic view, awkward, mechanical, forced readings, unconvincing, flatly and tediously applied, jaundiced

and the coup de grace

"Karlen's essay must surely be one of the most superficial and uninformed discussions of Crane ever published in a major literary quarterly" (130)

all while including his own work in discussions of the most salient and convincing readings of Crane.

I also enjoyed Frank Norris's parody, "The Green Stone of Unrest," and one of the earlier pieces of literary criticism included in the appendices, Charles C. Walcutt's "Stephen Crane: Naturalist." Walcutt's thesis (with which I wholeheartedly agree can be summed up as, "Henry Fleming is a ding ding who doesn't learn a damn thing and remains a ding ding from start to finish." Amy Kaplan's essay is the best piece of criticism in the appendices, and I also enjoyed James Cox's essay.

Off it goes to the giveaway pile.



View all my reviews

Comments

[kore]

Aww thank you so much! I had to read that book for school....decades ago now, lolsob, and remember absolutely diddly-squat about it, so I'm curious.

[lunabee34]

You're welcome!

[kore]

I wanted to say, I just got this today (possibly yesterday as I don't check the mail that often -- but we're On Alert for the mail-in ballots now), thank you so much!

....I looked at it and boy I do not remember this at all. I remember my dad talking about it to me, I think (he was a Crane fan but preferred his poetry) and I know I read it for school at least once. Two things struck me, 1) it is quite mannered and 2) this is where Hemingway got like 80% of his schtick.

[lunabee34]

You're welcome. I'm glad it made it there safely.

I didn't remember much about it from my first re-read either; I hope you end up liking it more than I did. LOL