Category Archives for: Books

Anthony Trollope’s Bittersweet Gem

26 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The Warden by Anthony Trollope was on a shelf in a used bookstore, years back when I was living in another country and not expecting to find such a thing. It was the only used bookstore I knew that had a small section for English books. I had been curious about Trollope, but I had all this other stuff to read and decided not to get it then. I might have thought about Trollope from time to time since then; he was one of those authors I felt I was going to read one day.

Then, I got into a shopping binge a few years back. I would go through cycles of themes and purchase everything I could that I felt was related to that theme. It started with art books. My collection of art books at the time was pathetic, and I was trying to remedy that. I did remedy it and went on to other things. I kid you not that every type of literature that could occur to me went through a reassessment, and I found that I had to own some of it, regardless if I had read it before or planned on reading it soon. I found The Warden online and bought it and two other Trollope books and stored them somewhere when the shipment came in. These were books filed away for future use.

I hardly ever thought about Trollope again, you see, because it was like owning something and concluding that you had taken care of that problem, even if you had never interacted with that thing that you were owning. Trollope came up again recently, and I had almost forgotten the original story that had splashed a spot of color on him as an author, giving him the one characteristic that I had happened to know of him.

I think every author of note has a one- or two-sentence biographical summary that places that person in their own light. With Trollope, it was the fact that he followed a daily regimen of writing so punctilious, he was almost a machine about it. He had a full-time job outside of writing and was only writing a set amount of time per day. When the time came to stop so that he could go to his place of employment, he would put down his pen, even if he were in mid-sentence.

Reading him now, after pocketing the first few chapters of The Warden into my realm of experience, I started to quickly conclude that he was indeed a 19th Century author, and I knew that I was expecting this. No surprise really. The story was set up with a thorough introduction in the first chapter of the setting for our little story, followed by a complete introduction of the main character and his relatives, acquaintances, and their relationships. The situation of a certain several hundred-year old will was then explained with some detail, because as we would soon learn, it was going to affect the state of affairs for our main character in his countryside concern.

If we were to look at it with contemporary eyes, this is the sort of opening that would prevent the casual reader from reading any further. But again, I was already expecting something like that. And as I predicted, the story develops in earnest afterward.

By the fifth chapter or so, I was under the impression that certain parts of this book needed some cleaning up, and it reminded me of that one characteristic about Trollope, the writer, that made me wonder if it weren’t for this characteristic that we were getting longer portions of narrative than were necessary. Trollope’s particularities were showing through, as I was observing it. His method of starting his writing at a certain time of the morning and then ceasing the very minute he was to get on with his actual employment seems like that type of quirk that might pique the interest of a public today, but it did nothing of the kind during his time. When his writing process was released to the world, he was criticized as the type of artist that does not work from inspiration. He was viewed as an automaton. How could the author of works feel any love for them if he was going to subject them to such a strict mode of operation?

In the light of his actual job with the postal department, he couldn’t have done it any other way. How could he have ever accomplished the career he had in writing otherwise? If working in the schedule of an automaton were the only way he could get his work done, the so be it. As an employee with a full-time responsibility, he had to do it that way if he was going to accomplish anything in writing!

But I was starting to see that following a tight schedule, and consequently following an impetus in your writing (only ever going forward) might have its drawbacks. If he picked up his pen at five in the morning and put it down in the middle of a progressing thought at 6:30, it tells me that he was writing all previous thoughts on the matter of his book without sudden reflection or change of mind. I have no doubt he edited his work afterward, but if he could have written without so much timed impetus, he might have paused a little more and maybe done away with some of the longer meanderings. I was not standing over his shoulder witnessing any of his scribbling adventures, and yet you can still feel that punctiliousness hanging over the written words that not even a dozen or a score of revisions could reshape.

So far, everything I have accused Trollope of comes from feelings and from knowing one or two things about him. It is another way of saying it comes from prejudice. If the prose in his book seems stiff to a latter-day ear, it is because of the times that he lived in more so than his characteristics as a person. But after I went past the halfway point of the book, I discovered that he was actually shaping his novel into a very precise narrative that had a series of actions that brought us to an inevitable conclusion. In fact, each action was a chapter. One chapter focuses on one thing. Contrary to my initial assumption, there is no added fat here. Regardless of how his narrative voice sounds to a 21st Century ear, each chapter in the book has a purpose. The chapter titles give a hint as to what that purpose is. Even if the writing is a little more verbose than I like it, the form of the book is elegant. When I recognized that, I found myself responding to this elegance as I was reading, and every time I put the book down, I reflected on this quality in his work, taking it in as one would any worthwhile work of art.

The chapters had titles that previewed the event of the chapter. There was no surprise as things were happening, but when the warden resigns, which is delineated as such in a later chapter titled, “The Warden Resigns,” I was reading this chapter wondering if the letter of resignation he wrote was ever going to make it to the bishop to finalize the matter. It was my way of forecasting changes to fate, giving the warden a chance to not resign on the technicality of a letter ever making it to its destination, even if the title gave away the results of actions, all along. And when I finished that chapter, I still thought there was a chance that the warden would keep his position.

That elegance formed ideas in my mind, inviting me to go back to the earlier parts of the book and finding the machinery behind the story, how everything in the plot was set in motion due to the inquiries of a close friend of the warden. Because of these inquiries, John Bold begins an investigation that questions if such a large portion of the monies distributed by the will should be going to fund the warden’s income.

After his inquiry is presented, which involved lawyers on both sides and every character in the book being affected by the machinery started by this, the impetus was unstoppable. Even when John Bold drew back the lawsuit, he couldn’t have erased the nasty newspaper articles written about his friend, the warden. And there was still the question of who was going to pay the fees for all these lawyers.

When the warden wishes to resign because he does not feel comfortable taking the money from the trustees of the will, he is impeded by his closest relations. Finally, the warden takes a trip to London and meets the Attorney General of England, and even the highest-appointed attorney in the land cannot answer his question: does the money that has been coming to warden from the will these past twelve years rightfully belongs to him or not? The attorney general admits that old wills such as the one linked to his hospital cannot make provisions for the changing times, and they were difficult to make progressive. It was telling the warden that there were no easy answers, and it was telling the readers that there were no real bad guys.

Of course, the warden’s son-in-law archdeacon was a type of antagonist to the warden, even if he were looking after the warden’s best interests, but doing so by bullying him into taking the actions the archdeacon felt were proper. But in such real life matters, the archdeacon really couldn’t be blamed. And Bold was only doing what he thought was right, even if it put a severe strain on his friendship with the warden. It was Bold’s initial action that made every action thereafter come to life, and through every step, through every chapter, there were motions to counter this impetus, but they either had no effect or just enough effect to give a contradictory result. And yet the book never reads as an exercise in frustration. It is more of a real look at a particular system of society tinged with a bit of sadness for the warden and the people closest to him, including John Bold himself.

All of my thoughts so far came from an unfinished reading of the book. I was not far from the end when I put them down to express these observations.

And now that I’ve finished it, I can look back at what I have said about it and see where I went wrong. Actually, I was right in thinking that everything came to pass because of that one action that John Bold commits close to the beginning of the book. And yet, I was wrong that the letter of resignation did not exactly amount to the resignation itself. When next we hear about it, the bishop has already accepted the resignation, and the wheels of change (for the life of the former warden) had been kicked into motion.

There is a Christian lesson at the end of it. The twelve men that were supporting the lawsuit against Mr. Harding (the warden) had assumed that since he was leaving, they would be getting a much larger sum in their yearly incomes. The view of the book was that these old men who did not have that many years left to live were getting rid of a friendship for the interest of money. Not only would they not be getting the money that allegedly belonged to them, they were no longer going to receive Mr. Harding’s small weekly allotment he was giving them when he was the warden. And they were now sad knowing that whoever took his place could not possibly be as kind as their former friend.

George Orwell held The Warden as a great achievement by Trollope, but he felt that though the archdeacon (Dr. Grantly) was to be held as the proper antagonist, that Trollope himself perhaps felt better about him than John Bold, who some could look at as a busybody, poking his nose into things that had nothing to do with him, all under the banner of righteousness.

I found that remark by Orwell when I was looking up this novel for something else that had drawn my attention. In one of the middle chapters, we learn of a novelist in the story who champions the poor and makes the well-placed and the rich look like the wicked leeches of society. Trollope takes up about a page or two to lambast this person, and I felt that he was targeting a real person. Immediately, I thought about Charles Dickens, and that is why I had to look it up. And I was right. Trollope’s sketch of Dickens was rendered with a very sharp file, and I thought that this was the conservative answer to someone who was looking for reform. Perhaps to our eyes, Dickens won that war a long time ago, since to the modern mind, we deplore the working conditions that used to be common in the factories and mines of old. I don’t know what Orwell’s opinion was about it (though I guess he sides with Dickens too). The Warden might be a critique of those Dickensian parts, and you can take whatever side you think is right.

But The Warden gave me a small gift as well. It is one of those moments in a book when something happens that you can’t stop thinking about. It is an unforgettable image of the warden performing for an audience of one. This warden, who so loved music and lived his life in the service of music, would sometimes play his cello in his imagination when it was not around to actually play. He would put his hands behind his back or under a table and draw the bow across the strings as if he were really playing while in conversation with someone that had no idea what he was doing. When he meets the all-important Attorney General of England to find out if he were entitled to the will’s money or not, the attorney general explains to him, after admitting that there is no answer to his question for such an old will, that the warden should no longer question the money because it was his to take by law. And he added that if he didn’t take the income, on what could he possibly live? Without the income, the warden would have to fall back on very limited means. And the warden, who had been playing his cello behind his back while he was coming up with his retort to the attorney general, brings it out and plays this imaginary instrument in front of this personage as he is explaining to him that he could no longer take the money and would need to resign, because his conscience could not allow it any other way, no matter how difficult it would make his life thereafter. The attorney general, who had had a long day as is typical for someone in that position, was struck dumb and wondered if the warden were losing his mind. But the warden himself was aware of what he was doing, and he recognized that this was his shining moment, playing his big performance that he was not going to regret no matter what life would have in store because of his decision.

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Collections of Poetry and What is Lost

12 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Different ways of doing things, and each way gives a certain presentation. That was why I craved the original books. For Auden, it was the four books I had read from a college library. Those were the ones I wanted. But when I looked them up, the prices were too high for the battered conditions the old books had. They were four earlier books, and I wanted to relive them. Things like The Shield of Achilles and Nones. And The Double Man. I forgot the fourth. I looked around a little more. I settled on one of two other options. I could either get the Collected Poems of Auden or the Selected Poems of Auden. To the untrained ear, they sound the same. And just a couple of years before, both terms would have meant the same thing to me. I now knew that “collected” meant every available poem by Auden. That collection was being offered in several volumes. So my four books would be there, yes, but so would every book by Auden I was not yet ready for. I looked into the other option, which was just one volume of what one editor deemed Auden’s best work. “Selected” implied the best (even though it was reluctant to say it) — according to whomever’s standard. I knew this would fall way short of the mark, but I settled for it because it did represent parts of these four books, along with some other stuff.

Neither option works. I hope one day poetry publishers understand that. The individual volumes of poetry are discrete works that need to be made into their discrete volumes. Books fall out of print. Some books come back into print. But for poetry, this rarely happens. As soon as a poet is dead or along in years, they put together these massive volumes that collect everything.

For Strand, it was just one book, and I thought at the time it was the best option. Originally, I was interested in one poetry book of his that was all in prose. But his entire career came along with this new edition. When I started reading it, it occurred to me — the notion that the life’s work of a poet was all held in this one not very large book. Like a brick that gets one shot to get thrown through a window. That would make waves. Its mark.

I went through Strand’s whole career like that, in that one brick, and it made me wonder if I were doing it wrong. You needed to breathe between the books. It was actually the kind of book you left close-by, handy, so that you can read a little everyday. Next time, that’s how I’ll do it.

I gather the economics is not there to publish one poet’s entire career of books as originally published. It saves to put it all in one book. And that way, the lovers of this work would have all the work available, and what is more important, it would still be in print.

But a collection lumps everything together. It does not usually honor the original typesetting of the individual books, and this could force textual inconveniences. The worst part about a collection is that the books of poetry that once existed on its own without being in close proximity with other works are no longer separate units to be encountered in that way. They share a spine and a reading momentum. They have stopped roaming the world on adventures and are now a part of a home where the family dynamics do not always equate harmony.

And the pages have no care for the distribution of the poems. Everything is done for the sake of space because so much is squeezed into one book. If the original books started every poem at the top of the page, a collection will not follow that because it follows a different set of ethical grounds.

I swore I’d never buy another collection of poetry works again. For Ashbery, I bought the one poetry book I had read about. I couldn’t find a decent copy of Three Poems, but even a battered copy would be better than a collection. I bought the battered copy. Read it and read it. My fingers had to handle it more gingerly than I normally hold books, because the pages were about to start slipping out of the binding. I needed to read the book more, but I didn’t enjoy the physical conditions. I decided to get the first volume of a two-volume set of his collected works. I was reluctant. But there was no other option. Taking a look at it when I obtained it, paging through it, I felt more disappointed than with the Strand collected works. It was generic-looking. The pages were almost onion skin. It was a thousand pages. Reading it, I found, was like reading the Bible. But I’ve been reading it. And reading it is the best part. I kept reading it, and the physical limitations of the book did not add to the experience, but they slipped into the background. The generic-looking tome was what I expected everyday at the same time of the day when I pulled it for more lines of his work.

I am not a fan of the format, but this is all I have. I’m thankful it is here. Reading it and reading it still. The collected format is running a through line across every work of his, and this is inevitable in any reading of such a book. The thin paper and sober demeanor of its covers are now subsumed into my experience. After buying this first volume, I swore I would not buy another collection. Well, when I’m ready, I’m going to need to buy the second volume. And that will be the last one.

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Experiments in Other Dimensions 3

11 April 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Italo Calvino, the writer, was now becoming clear to me. He was forming games around a number of laws he inscribed in the reality of a book. That was his way, apparently.

And it made me think of me. I was this type of writer once upon a time. That is why he was interesting me so much now. I was an adept of Calvino’s systems many years before I had ever heard of Calvino. Perhaps launching off the ideas philosophy had granted me when I was avidly studying to be an artist (which is a set of ludicrous rules if I ever heard of one). I went about recording tenets and running experiments.

I was living abroad when these systems of rules were first coming to me in my own writing. This hunger for the sordid experiment in my work might have originated by the many wonders another country can offer the open-eyed foreigner. I continued years after this, delving deeper into ever more specific rules, and I knew that these further deepening tenets had fewer and fewer possibilities for anyone to understand and furthermore, enjoy. I wonder if I had never returned home, would I not have become my own brand of Italo Calvino. It sounds senseless to say such a thing, but the stubborn path that I made for myself was an Italo Calvino quest. I was not writing for anyone but myself, and though many people read Calvino, I am positive that he wrote for just one person.

It was testing writing against a wall of patterns — a grid of bricks, for instance. Any pattern would do. As children we ask ourselves what if everyone in the world were not real or what if the buildings became vehicles that floated into space or what if the world started spinning in the other direction? As a writer, I wanted to subject my readers to the same philosophical nonsense. With enough years and travails, I abandoned the search for stupidity in logic, but it still lingers, somehow invested in my work though I don’t know where this gold dust now lingers in my system.

One day, I discovered Borges. He was someone I had always meant to read but never did. Until that moment when I did. And it was a far nobler, wiser, and more astute version of my younger self looking right back at me. It seems he had asked the same questions not just as a kid, but with more importance, as an adult. I was staring at visions his stories raised in me and recognizing powerful versions of elementary questions, about eternity wrapped in a room or the making of a book copied verbatim from another book and it still being a different book. These were the ideas something like philosophy gave us, but Borges delivered it to us within the trappings of high art.

When I reached Calvino, it slowly occurred to me that here was a student of Borges going into his own directions, catering words to thought that built itself off rules. They weren’t the same, but I have grouped them as a pair I need to further study.

But I am not concerned with that brand of infinity and its rules anymore, and especially now that I know that better minds have already crystalized portions of that reality. And yet there is still room, I think, for more. Even though I am no longer an acolyte of philosophical specks ad infinitum, I can now see my next step. There it is going back to what led me to Calvino, which made me go further back to Borges, in a sense, and that is poetry, which allows just one poem to model rules and exact results off of experiments on those rules. A single poem can hold the rules by which it is expected to be read, the thing it is saying within those rules, and sometimes something else.

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Experiments in Other Dimensions 2

04 April 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The next two books I read of Italo Calvino’s were Mr. Palomar and The Castle of Crossed Destinies. He mentions both of these books in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is not a book of fiction or poetry but one on craft, laid out as lectures he was going to give at a prestigious American university but which alas, never came to be —he died right before taking the trip from Italy to the United States, his lectures remaining unfinished (five memos instead of six, as the title promises).

The actual event of his demise seemed like another juxtaposition incongruously placed alongside with all of the literary concepts he instilled in his books, and if his books each revolved around a conceptual experiment, Calvino’s sudden death even forced a misnomer on the Six Memos. And it was because of what was mentioned in the Six Memos that I was intrigued by Mr. Palomar and The Castle of Crossed Destinies.

In the former book, we have the ill-fated attempt of describing phenomena to the very last detail. Calvino admits in his lectures that this book tries hard to make words shape an object or circumstance as if it were right there in front of us. The question I was asking myself is how many words would you need to completely describe this chair I am sitting on or the window next to me, which opens up to a wide world of infinite detail? Where would one stop?

A more practical question would be how could something like this be interesting to a reader? As I was in the middle of reading Mr. Palomar, I felt that the title character, who is the intellect that is going through these long bouts of description is not just a tool with which to place all these descriptions together. He is also a character. You don’t get anything about him from dialogue or actions that supposedly show character in a novel. Actually, I would never call this book a novel, though I am sure that is how the publishing company sold it to the public. Even though it is not a novel by my definition, it seems to allude to a narrative arc. The book is divided into three parts: Mr. Palomar’s Vacation, Mr. Palomar in the City, and The Silences of Mr. Palomar. In the last one, we seem to go into the interior spaces of the brain, spirit, what-have-you.

As might have been guessed, Mr. Palomar is an inquisitive fellow, always probing phenomena. You go through a set of rules for each chapter that lines up the thoughts in what seems to be a certain order. As I was reading, I harkened back to every philosophy book I had ever read. This commendably does (without succeeding, mind you) what no philosophy book could ever do. In fact, this is how all philosophy books should be written. He blends the facts with that flow of style that I was now starting to recognize as Calvino’s.

(In mentioning his style, I am aware that this was translated from the Italian. But I have always felt that if the translator did the job well, that tone and technique a writer creates will still be there, even if the details of a certain language are disintegrated in the process.)

When you read enough of Mr. Palomar, you find that there is a pattern. Each of the three parts has three subsections, and each subsection has three chapters. That makes twenty-seven chapters. The book is symmetrical, and as I was reading along, I was starting to wonder if there were a reason for this. When you get to the end, you find the notes to this book which explain the logic of these numbers. In this book, Calvino was playing a game wherein anything that fell in the first subsection derived from one sphere of human interest, the second fell into another, and the third fell into another. Once again, we had rules set across this book that made me feel that Calvino’s writing was based on premises from which he journeyed to find interesting endings.

This was instantly clear in the second of this group of books, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Mention of working with the Tarot in his Six Memos was enough to make me seek this book. The narrator finds himself in a castle that is acting like a tavern. Perhaps because of exhaustion, the travelers in this place of rest, sharing food and table space cannot actually utter a word. When anyone in this establishment needs for someone to pass the salt, that person gestures for it. A deck of Tarot cards is produced, and one of the travelers begins to tell a story using the pictures on the cards instead of words. The first card is the Knight of Clubs, and the man on the card has a resemblance to the current tell-taller as if he were saying, “This is me.”

He tells the story by laying out the cards in rows, and the narrator of the actual book is making guesses as to what they really narrate. “It seems that he did this,” or “it is obvious that the woman in the next card is the one he loved.” It is never clear if the guesses are actually the intended story of each silent storyteller.

When one person finishes a story, someone else starts their story by placing cards on the table next to the cards already on the table. So, depending on how the spreads cross each other, the cards used by a previous tale-teller might make an appearance in a later story, and what is interesting is that the meaning of the card might remain the same, and if it does, there are slight changes in it. But the card from this perspective of another narrator might mean something completely different.

The stories themselves are ridiculous fairy tales that involve outlandish situations, including monstrosities and magic. The text is accompanied with illustrations of Tarot cards, and if you pay close attention, you notice that they are presented in fragments of a few cards here and a few cards there, mostly on the margins of the page, and in the same configurations the narrator describes in the story. So, if you trace the placement of the cards in the text, the illustrations follow along. This is an important visual aid, because by the end of the first half of the book, you will find all the cards mentioned in one large tapestry, as it had been mapped out in the story.

The conceptual glue to all of this is that the story of one person crosses in this tapestry into the story of someone else, sometimes contradicting the former narrative. Conclusions are unburied in order for the present narrator to destroy them. And you find that the situation that they find themselves in in this castle-tavern where no one can speak is somehow explained in their disparate stories, and that they all know each other from these circumstances, even though they are acting as if they didn’t.

At the end of the first half, the hostess shuffles the cards, and everything starts anew. Only, when you start the second half of the book, it is as if the travelers stuck in this strange microcosm of hotel and fellow strangers, where no one has the power of speech, are actually in some nightmare or cruel dimension that has sapped everyone of their memory. A new deck of cards is supplied, but curiously, these cards are from a different version of the Tarot (the Marseilles deck), and because of this the digressing details in the cards shape the new stories in different ways.

I was gripped by the ideas behind the narrative being put on a grid of cards that took you somewhere else if you turned right at a card rather than going straight up a column or left in the other direction. But I found that I was reading the words as sounding boards to other ideas that this work manifested in my mind. I was not initially getting the details of the story because after I understood what was happening, I felt they needed too much concentration to understand the relationships. By the second half, I picked up the actual events in the stories with better understanding but had no idea how they tied to the first half, if at all.

I kept going without looking back. And do you know why? Because I was going to buy these two books too, and I was going to have a wonderful opportunity to revisit this insanity now that I had understood the landscape as it was partitioned from the outset by Calvino’s preset laws.

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Experiments in Other Dimensions 1

28 March 2021 by Rey Armenteros

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler rolls right off the tongue. A compelling title if ever I read one, it is a delightful placement of words I like to recall, playing it again and again in my mental voice box.

The title belongs to a book. This one book contains the beginnings of ten hypothetical books. It only offers these ten starts, meandering around these textual premises without promising anything more. Was there more to it than just ten beginnings? I was curious to find out. If the thing readers most look forward to is the first pages of a book because it is that first moment that pulls you into the rest of the work, this book provided ten of these opportunities.

I had discovered Italo Calvino in a prose poetry book that held some of his Invisible Cities. I read those six or eight poems over and over and developed an idea of what kind of poet Calvino must be. They were long, baroque, almost morbid descriptions of fantasy cities that must have nevertheless existed on an actual dimensional plane outside of what most of us were even aware of.

I had to own the book, and so one day, I did exactly that, and with it, I bought a companion piece titled Cosmicomics, whose blurb description enticed me by its weird and intellectual light. This other book by Calvino was a series of short stories (or more prose poems, perhaps?). Each piece purportedly started with a physical law from which it branched out. It sounded like science distorted by dream play. I fell in love with the idea, mostly because it was something I would have liked to work on myself. From the potentials of these works, Calvino was delving into fantasy, yes, but he was not going about it without being armed with the highest tools of philosophical thought.

The two books came in, but I had other things to read at the moment, and so they went into the secret place I hold my favorite poetry. And there they waited, until one day, I was looking around for books I’d like to read next, thought about these Calvino books, and rather than reading the ones I had already bought, I was curious about the ones I didn’t own. At the library, I checked out two other Calvino books that were in my wishlist as followups to the first two. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was one of these books.

It was a “you” book which was a hard thing to pull off, since stories in the second person were inevitably tiresome. It started with you buying the Italo Calvino book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and how you brought the book home to read. That was the first chapter. The second chapter begins the actual book you bought at the bookstore. We are at a train station where the main figure (for lack of being a character since we are not quite sure yet if he is or not) is standing around as if waiting. And it goes on from there.

As promised in the back of the book, the story stops at the end of that chapter. In the next one, we find out that the book that you were reading had a printing error. You want to take it back to the bookstore to get an intact copy if not your money back. But you find out that apparently all copies of the book had this error. This adventure leads you to meet a woman who was also reading the same book and also complaining about the same thing. You exchange numbers in the hopes of discovering what happens in the rest of the book, if one of you happens to get your hands on a good copy before the other. Your real intentions are to get to know this woman (which hints at the problem of an implied male character, even though it is a second-person perspective.)

The next chapter starts at the beginning of another book, and that gets dropped by the fifth chapter when you find out some other problem that this second book has. And so it goes. Every book has a beginning followed by an interlude that explains the new problem but that also furthers a greater story that traverses the beginnings of these ten books. It is the quest of these readers for the books they were not allowed to finish for various and sundry reasons, and it has a proper ending, though you could argue that the ending might have had nothing to do with the ten book beginnings. And regardless, the smaller narratives colored the main narrative with their different tones and conflicts.

A book like this gets annoying, and I will not deny that by the middle of it, Calvino was stretching my patience beyond what was comfortable. If this were not the same person that had written those six Invisible Cities that I so loved, I might have abandoned it.

But there was one other thing that kept me there to read on. It was Calvino’s knack for immersive style, that freewheeling manner he had with words that seemed to run right off the page, into your lap, and then all over you without granting you any mode of escape. I was enthralled not by what was happening but by how he strung sentences together that felt like they had always belonged there, as neighbors, right next to each other, a continuing cadence of ideas and images that ran on toward an ineluctable ending. And the ending came, and the damn thing still peeved because of the content, but it was one of those rare works of art, and I decided that I needed it in my life. By the time I started reading the second book I had taken out of the library, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I bought both books without giving it another thought.

I still owned two books I had yet to read. What was my next move? Instead of reading the previous two books, as would have only been natural, I took out two more books from the library with the secret intentions of buying them if they also matched my growing expectations of Italo Calvino.

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Dynamic Light and Shade

12 March 2016 by Rey Armenteros

Burne Hogarth’s series of art instruction books continues with this volume that centers on shading. It is over150 pages populated by many black and white illustrations and minimal text. Most of the drawings are by Hogarth himself. Is it a worthy art instruction book?

Hogarth begins with the idea of silhouettes and how even in their flat and limited capacity, you can imply spaces and relationships between objects. He follows that chapter with edge light, which is when you take a silhouette and penetrate its flatness with hints of highlights around the edges of forms.

In the third chapter, he delineates the nature of light and shadow in five types of general situations. The first one follows when an object is hit by a single light source. Then, he brings up the characteristics of dual light sources (one strong, direct light source and an indirect light source on the other side of the object). Next, he goes into diffused lighting, which is when the light sources are not distinct, such as during an overcast day. He has a category on nothing more than moonlight. And the last one is sculptural light, which is not a lighting situation that happens in nature but more of an art technique where you shade forms in order to heighten the form rather than to form realistic lighting.

He continues with other lighting situations that each get a chapter. Similar to the idea of sculptural light, spatial light and expressive light are less about depicting a natural occurrence and more about using light to manipulate the viewer’s focus or raise some higher emotion, respectively. Environmental light are the weather and seasonal conditions that can come into play, and textural light focuses on the surface texture of objects. Transparent light illustrates a few strategies when drawing objects that have transparency. Fragmentation light underscores those situations wherein light breaks up, such as light on choppy waters. And radiant light is light that is in some way aimed at the viewer.

When I teach shading, I go about it differently, but I find some sense in his categories. At first, I was reluctant to accept a distinction for the very specific moonlight, but as I read what he had to say about it, I felt that he was presenting a situation that conflated two other categories, the single light source (the moon) with a diffused light (since the moon is not a direct light source but a reflective one that can render dim contrast).

Each category is detailed in a chapter, and each chapter gives variations for the student to understand some of the possibilities within each category. One of the biggest problems with the book is that there is no formal text. Each chapter starts with a paragraph and the rest of the words are confined to captions. In other words, he is doing very little instruction but providing many examples. He never goes into explaining how one might go about doing this, and I suppose for a beginner, it would be frustrating. Actually, I would not recommend this to anyone who is closer to the side of novice drawer; this is better put to use with someone who already knows some things about shading.

As a textbook, it could have some use, since the instructor could fill in for all the gaps in the book. It could be used as a sampler of things to look for. You could even use it to copy (as an exercise) Hogarth’s drawings. Nevertheless, it is so steeped in his comic book style, that anyone not interested in such heroic drawing will not get a lot of value from it.

Curiously, it works best as an art book that showcases the art of Burne Hogarth. His stylized drawings are reminiscent of his work on the Tarzan newspaper strip, but they are rich with intricacies that make you want to keep the book for that value alone.

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Hogarth’s Dynamic Anatomy

28 December 2015 by Rey Armenteros

As an art instructor, I need to be aware of the various art books on the market. Though I have known about Hogarth’s line of books since my days in college, I never felt the need to ever pick them up, and my reasons always settled on the fact that the instruction we readers were getting was not how to draw, but how to draw like Burne Hogarth. Throughout his line of “Dynamic” books, he usually uses his drawings for examples, and his strong style dripped off these books, undermining any attempt at a universal approach to drawing.

However, I finally bought two books a couple of years ago, and it was for the strangest reasons anyone could have. It was during a Gil Kane kick that I had, and the more I looked at Kane’s work, the more I realized that his structured anatomy had parallels in the Burne Hogarth school of approach. So, I wanted to also look into Hogarth, and instead of buying his more popular comic strip work on Tarzan, I decided to buy his how-to books solely for the reason of admiring the stylization of his work.

In one more twist to this story, I ended up using his book, Dynamic Anatomy, as a means to study structure and found that all of my early assumptions about the book were true but were also not true. It is not an ideal anatomy book, and what may push a contemporary audience further back is his stilted prose. (Burne Hogarth, for those that don’t know, was one of the co-founders of School of Visual Arts, and this striving to carry an “educated” tone is overdone here.)

I don’t know what decisive verdict I could give this book. It has good and bad points that seem to work off each other. Overall, it’s good if you seek to draw in this manner and to follow this very particular structure, but it’s bad for almost anything else, even if ultimately I did have some use for it.

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