A good dose of nerdiness

Prepare yourself for some nerdiness...

Virginia Woolf quote: Reading as a Disease
Orlando (spoof biography of Vita Sackville-West, longtime lover and bisexual)

“The taste for books was an early one.  As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading.  They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose.  They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.  To put it in a nutshell… he was a nobleman afflicted with the love of literature.  Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will.  But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, cloud the eye as it sough its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love.  It was the fatal nature of the disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift—plate, linen, houses men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion—had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist.  The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma.  So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.”

How wonderful and true... a person really is naked when reading.  In the next year of excessive (to my taste) physical modesty, reading will have to be my sole form of nakedness, in addition to writing.  I’ve been writing all day (since I got off the phone with Laura, Leah, and Mike), and have switched to computer since my hand is so badly cramped. 

The aforementioned Virginia Woolf is marvelous and joyful; she’s definitely delighting in the imaginative exercise of writing it, as am I in the process of reading it.  She manages to condense 300 years of history, two genders (and accompanying behaviors), and multiple countries, cultures, and societies, into one individual.  Or is it even true, even possible, that one individual is limited to one period of time, one gender, one culture...?  At any rate, it’s an interesting exploration of gender roles in different times, which ends up not mattering, since gender roles had not changed tremendously until very recent times.  I wonder how closely related her novel is to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, from which she took the name Orlando... Has anyone read it?  I haven’t checked the USM library yet, but I’m going to take a wild guess that they don’t have the English translation  an obscure Italian story from the Middle Ages...;)

I’m also just starting a book of essays called “Imagining America,” and thus far have read the author’s dissections of famous British writers’ descriptions of America (specifically Niagara in the first chapter), as they encountered it in the 18th and 19th centuries.  (Interestingly, the later authors, such as WH Auden, Isherwood, and dammit-I-forget-his-name, don’t seem to care to even visit the Falls, let alone speculate on their role in the world and in the author’s imagination.)  The primary response by most of those writers includes a re-assignation of Niagara’s definition to either the realm of Nature, Art, Technology, Bureaucracy, and Wretched American Boors and Their Stupid Bullying Bigness, and I don’t quite understand why they can’t just let Niagara be Niagara?  Why does Niagra have to be held up as an example of either botched art, or evidence of a great creator, or the most perfect synthesis of lines in Nature...?  Alternatively, Niagara is forced into the submissive role of audience by the maniacally attention-grubbing actress Sarah Bernhardt, and held up as the location of some wonderfully efficient bureaucratical processes (Anthony Trollope) or the mere building site for all sorts of technological innovations (HG Wells)...!?!?  The author also makes the idiotic claim that this multitude of visions of Niagara really testifies to “America’s capacity for self-transformation.”   

I can understand and agree with his following assertions that ‘objects in America aren’t determined by history or enmeshed in associations, so each observer sees them as for the first time.’  However, I don’t see that America is actually undergoing any transformation between the visits of Anthony trollope and Sarah Bernhardt and HG Wells, but that each author’s ideas differ from one time to the next and one person to the next.     

Although, perhaps it is the idea that ‘imagining the object means cancelling it out,’ which I certainly understand.  Perhaps America (loosely, Niagara) takes on a transformative nature when faced with imaginative forces who have brought their preconceived perceptions with them?  But is it really possible to approach any phenomenon without expectations... or with expectations (for beauty) but without expectations for cultural cohesiveness with one’s own ideas...?  Further, are the writers forcing themselves on Niagara or is Niagara simply accepting their intentions to re-imagine it?

Can any sight, when seen for the first time, really be seen as a blank slate?  As I travel through Malaysia, should I even pretend that I am accepting the culture unequivally, or should I assume that I am mentally translating it to my own mental brainwave... or, alternatively, why shouldn’t I just re-conceive things in whatever way best supplements my own imaginings/thoughts/theories/etc...?