Filed under: Books | Tags: english literature, grotesque, ohio, paris metro, rereading, sherwood anderson, winesburg
This is my third time reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
The book has always evoked a strong reaction on my part, each time a different emotion.
When assigned this book in English class my junior year of high school, I do not believe I knew what I was getting into. I remember hating the book. I did not enjoy any bit of it. It is hard now in retrospect to understand or quite remember the exact feelings of my former self, a Sarah who clearly missed something, everything, in this book. If I were to hypothesize now (and who is it that says memory is always affected by remembering, there is no objective remembering?) I would imagine that my high school self was angry with Anderson for writing such depressing vignettes. Funny though, I know that myself of a year later was moved by the darkness of The Dubliners and White Teeth. Against her credit, that girl felt aversely towards To the Lighthouse, and in response simply quoted Janis Joplin, “It’s all the same fucking day, man.”
So I hated it at 16. At 20 it was assigned for my sophomore History and Literature tutorial. We were meant to read it and as our first writing assignment write about one of the sections. In this reading, I remember being very excited by the book! I was really jazzed up about it! Look! He has really peered into the windows of American Main Street. He has captured the depth of small town citizens, the pain, the longing, the greed, the ever elusive love. I read with ferocity and I was happy that I was reading it. I questioned myself of years before, and I think I respected the book all the more because it had proven itself to me.
Today, in Paris, I mostly read Winesburg while riding the metro- surrounded by strangers. The second vignette “Hands,” is about a man who is chased out of town because his hands, whose movement was “like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird,” were always caressing the heads of his young male students. It left me horribly sad- the kind of ache that can only come from learning of or encountering of others’ persecution. It is almost cruel the way in which Anderson can tell such tight tales of torture and weakness. Their brevity is often jarring. I finish a tale and my quick investment, interest in the characters of the small Midwestern town feels almost foolish as the page break reminds me that it is fiction.
So reading it on the metro I become convinced that every person I sit in front of is like the characters in Winseburg. Theirs is a tragic and brief story of human desire and failure. This man with the flat eyes and jaundiced skin is a grotesque. We are all grotesques.
Filed under: Music | Tags: bookstore, burlesque, Jerome foundation, music, paris, piano, ragtime, shakespeare and company
Here’s the link to my first DAP reporting in Paris. Click to read the whole story. This singer/songwriter was amazing! Hope you check out the blog and her music.
The DAP – Reportage – On the Scene: Sabrina Chap at Shakespeare and Company.
