One and Twenty

Think I said I would write a blog entry today, so here it is...

Anyway, what did I do this week? I read a book on the Thames river and everything associated with it. Bridges over the Thames. Churches on the Thames. Place names on the Thames. Traveling on the Thames. Stuff like that. The book was pretty good, at least if you're interested in the Thames river, and you probably aren't. The idea of the book sure is neat, though.

Another thing: I'm reading Henry James's complete stories, 1864-1874. These were stories he wrote when he was in his 20s, so they probably aren't as good as his later works, which are unread by me. James is an author I'm having trouble coming to terms with. The book is part of the Library of America series, and James was indeed born in NYC. However, he spent much of his life outside the US - he probably spent more time in Europe than in the US, at least as an adult. The end of his life coincided with WWI, and he was so angry at US noninvolvement in the Great War that he became a British subject shortly before his death in 1916. 

So that forms something of a background to his work, which as I understand often consists of encounters between America and Europe: clash of civilizations and all that. This volume I'm reading was written before he settled in Europe so the encounter theme is less present. What is present? You can probably infer that James was well off (he was). Accordingly, the characters in his stories tend to be well off. And I think that's my biggest problem with the stories. No one seems to DO anything. Sometimes the characters are mentioned as working in a couple of sentences, but work is at quite a distant remove in all the stories I've read so far. The stories generally concern upper class people in very formal situations, often involving romance (usually gone wrong). James was definitely a Victorian writer, and that detracts from the realism of his stories. His most successful stories, in fact, are the ones that aren't at all realistic, that involve supernatural elements: curses on families, stuff like that. 

Good stories don't have to be realistic, of course. And despite the whole Victorian avoidance of sex and bad behavior stuff, I think there is genuine emotion in James's stories. And the stories are fairly varied. Each one is different. 

Also worth mentioning the term "stories" - by that I mean James's short stories. Short story here means anything that's not a novel: the stories in this volume can be 20 pages or 100 or anything in between. 

I had a 21st birthday for some reason today. Got a new laptop, a new cellphone. I'll get started using them soon enough. I got Lincoln Chafee's Against the Tide, which will no doubt warrant an entry of its own.