Demography
I read 38 books--25 written in English, 13 written in French, German, Russian, Turkish, Italian, or Chinese. 15 from the nineteenth century, 12 in the twentieth, 9 in the twenty first, 2 from the eighteenth. 5 by women, which I think is 4 more than I read last year. 12 published by Penguin. 12 non-fiction.
Qualitative Analysis
Two moments in Pictures from Italy that are worth mentioning: 1. Dickens climbing a live volcano at night and scorching his hair looking over the edge, then sliding down the mountain in the snow. 2. Dickens getting up early in the morning and waiting seven hours or so to watch a public execution. Curiously, Fred Kaplan's biography of Dickens, which talks about Dickens and capital punishment, doesn't mention this episode. I finished that biography a few days ago. The biography did mention something about Dickens' visit to Italy that Dickens doesn't mention: Dickens mesmerizing one of his friend's wives at all hours of the day and night to control her seizures. Dickens' wife was not very happy about these visits.
Ultimately, Pictures from Italy wasn't as interesting a travel memoir as a book written within fifteen years of it, the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. This was written by a Jamaican woman who ran businesses and clinics in Central America and in Crimea during the Crimean War. All in all, I would have rather visited her establishment than the hospital of Florence Nightingale, who wouldn't let Seacole work for her. The third Victorian memoir this year was Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which I read with my brother. We met several times to talk about it, but never got around to formally talking about the last 100 pages, probably because they were the least interesting.
Eugenie Grandet is a great little novel by Balzac, but when I think of it, I usually think of Frederic Jameson's introduction. He talks about the dad, Grandet, and nostalgia for misers. In other words, nostalgia for a time in which the rich could simply accumulate and keep wealth, rather than a time in which being rich means circulating and investing capital. On that note, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism had a lot of great 10-page chapters on different topics. The best chapter detailed why it's a mistake to run companies for the benefit of shareholders, since shareholders have the least risk. They can easily enter and exit the situation. Companies, instead, should be run for their employees, who have the most to lose if a company fails.
I read three novels by Zola, and I'd be surprised if I didn't read at least another three this year. All three take on different aspects of Paris during the Second Empire: department stores, in The Ladies Paradise; slums in L'Assomoir; property speculation and urban development in The Kill. I only realized, reading about the rise of the department store, how weird many ubiquitous commercial practices are, and for how long huge stores have price gouged to kill off smaller family businesses. I've also found some comfort in a line from the end of L'Assomoir, which is basically that you don't need to have grand ambitions to still fall short of them. I have two more of his that I haven't read--Nana and Germinal--but we'll see which one of his books I get to next.
I read a few books with bad endings, like the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I can live with bad endings, what I had more trouble with was the characterization. All of Chabon's characters are well-round, complex, have histories, quirks, strengths, weaknesses--and that's just the problem. The characterization feels too good. In other words, the narration falls flat for me because of the characterization, since the narration is missing some type of psychological realism. Nights at the Circus was another book that was great up until its final few pages: a conventional ending tacked on to an unconventional book.
After reading Swann's Way, it's hard not to see Proust everywhere, like in Forster's Howards's End, Casanova, Stendhal's Love or in Rousseau's Confessions, which I'm currently reading. My copy of this book (Love) was very dusty, which is probably why it took me over a year to read (it's not very long.) The quality of the aphorisms and essays varied wildly, but it will probably always have a soft spot in my heart, since I used part of it as an epigraph for the second part of the short story I published this year ("Tax Season.") The first epigraph came from a short story, "Falk," by Conrad in Typhoon.
After three years, I finished Phenomenology of Spirit. It's still up in the air whether it was a good idea for me to read this without guidance, since there's very little I could say about it as a whole, and it's easy to misunderstand. In any case, I had to articulate something about it last quarter when I presented, and will have the chance to study it in class this quarter. I also can't say much about Zizek's Plague of Fantasies, but odd parts come back to me at odd times, most often when he talks about desire, and how desire is constituted. For Zizek, there's nothing liberating about that type of self-knowledge. That's the direction I've been headed for a long time.
For the first time in six or so years, I didn't read a book by Murakami. I also didn't finish the third volume of 1001 Nights, no doubt because I discovered the curse that anyone who finishes reading it will die. For picaresque narrative I read Soul Mountain. It's hard, because the book is composed of brief episodes, to say much about it, except that a reporter gets his testicles ripped off when he poses for a photo with a panda.
I read the Making of Modern Medicine because there was a chapter on a nineteenth century cholera epidemic in Montreal, and I was about to visit Montreal. You can imagine how eager all of my friends were to glean my new knowledge on our trip. I also read, or started, Dead Souls, the Plague of Fantasies, Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist on this trip. For better or worse, I neglected to accompany my friends to a spa located on a boat to read Nietzsche and Gogol.
The List
Eugenie Grandet - Honore de Balzac
Shoplifting from American Apparel - Tao Lin
Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter
23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism - Ha-Joon Chang
A Sicilian Romance - Ann Radcliffe
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
The Ladies Paradise - Emile Zola
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
The Making of Modern Medicine - Michael Bliss
Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel
Typhoon and Other Tales - Joseph Conrad
Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
Dust of Dreams - Steven Erikson
Dead Souls - Gogol
Freya of the Seven Isles - Joseph Conrad
The Demon of Writing - Ben Kafka
Felix Holt - George Eliot
The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk
Apologia Pro Vita Sua - John Henry Newman
Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens
The Plague of Fantasies - Slavoj Zizek
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
The Duel - Casanova
Swann's Way - Marcel Proust
Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
Professor Moriarty - Kim Newman
The Duel - Joseph Conrad
Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands - Mary Seacole
History of Sexuality vol. 1 - Michel Foucault
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gold by the Inch - Lawrence Chua
The Kill - Emile Zola
Howard's End - EM Forster
Love - Stendhal
Engels - Terell Carver
L'Assomoir - Emile Zola
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Monday, May 27, 2013
Proust
When I was working my first job, in a warehouse, I had to wake up while it was still dark out to get to work on time. Generally, this was around 4 30. One morning I woke up and ate breakfast and, only after finishing my cereal, realized it was only 2 30. What else could I think of when I read this passage in Swann's Way?
Nearly midnight. This is the hour when the invalid who has been obliged to go off on a journey and has had to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, wakened by an attack, is cheered to see a ray of light under the door. How fortunate, it's already morning! In a moment the servants will be up, he will be able to ring, someone will come help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. In fact he thought he heard footsteps; the steps approach, then recede. And the ray of light that was under his door has disappeared. It is midnight; they have just turned off the gas; the last servant has gone and he will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
the list, 2012
Stats
36 books. Original languages: English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Arabic. 1 book by a woman. 11 written in the 21st century, 13.5 in the 19th, 7.5 in the 20th, 2 in the 16th, and 1 in the 18th. Then there was the Arabian Nights. Fiction, 25; non-fiction, 11. 14 were published by Penguin; 6 by Vintage. If I had more motivation, I would do more analysis of publisher, but maybe next year! 18 were by authors whose books I'd never read before.
Non-Stats
Most disappointing reads of the year: The Sea (should have been a short story), The Confidence Man (should have been a play), Moll Flanders (thought it would be more picaresque), Wuthering Heights (should have been as creepy throughout as in the first 40 pages), House of Seven Gables (mostly description, with plot thrown in every 20 or 30 pages.) Jameson and Harvey's books on Marx were not as interesting as I wanted them to be.
Then there were good books with bad endings: The City and the City, Darwinia.
Which makes it sound like it was a bad year for reading--which it wasn't. Just about everything else I read was excellent in one way or another.
The second half of my year was dominated, at least psychologically, by Infinite Jest. I'm glad I read it, but I would recommend it to almost no one. Need more time to process this one.
Debt, by Graeber, was a great way to start my year. On it's own merits, it was worth reading. In the context of our national arguments about debt, it was also worth reading. Also worth it for how it set the stage for my reading the rest of the year--sensitivity and attention to the many different attitudes towards debt in various works of fiction and non-fiction, and from different time periods (Collins, Balzac, Diaz, Cellini, Norris, Dostoevsky, Arabian Nights, notably.)
Cellini's Autobiography and Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain were fun to read together in the same year, for different aspects of the same century. Cellini, mostly because he's hilarious, and because he talks about several different popes, not in terms of their theology or religious authority, but in terms of how they kept trying to cheat him out of his wages. Diaz helped temper the image of Cortes and several hundred conquistadors taking over all of Mexico when, at least according to Diaz, they had help from thousands of natives who were bitter about Mexican rule (and also received reinforcements of hundreds more soldiers, at some point in the campaign.) And Diaz was obsessed with Aztec cannibalism.
McTeague reinforced my feelings about realism: great eye for detail, especially physical detail, marred mostly by such blatant moralism and ideology.
The Terror was the most visceral novel I've read in years. It was the height of summer, but I still felt like I was freezing to death anytime I picked it up.
I read three books by Dostoevsky (two novels, two novellas), and wish I'd read more. One was Crime and Punishment, which I'd read 5 or so years ago. This time around, I was mostly intrigued by the topic of confession, mostly because I'm more and more skeptical about the value we place on disclosure and confession. Most of us can bear our friends's secrets, what we can't handle is knowing they're keeping some secret from us. Reading Demons--and, actually, all of Dostoevsky--I'm intrigued by the emotions he can get away with. He gets away with a full range of emotions in a way that I don't think any other novelist does. It's melodramatic, but I still feel happy, despairing, and paranoid right along with his characters. In film, the closest comparison I can get to, in terms of emotional range, is Lynch. (An easy go-to for me, since I watched 5-6 of his movies in the last year.)
After reading an interview with Richard Beck in the Other Journal, I ordered his book, Unclean. One of the best that I read all year. It's a mixture of theology and psychology, especially looking at the relationship between disgust and morality (and the fallout of that relationship). He also looks at the contrary moral traditions in the bible, the purity tradition (personal cleanliness) and the prophetic tradition (mercy and justice.) It's worth at least reading the interview.
More later, possibly. I didn't even touch Foucault, Nietzsche, or Marx, among others, even though those books were incredible. And by that, I mean credible.
The List, Mostly in the Order Finished
Dispatches for the New York Tribune - Karl Marx
Debt - David Graeber
The City and the City - China Mieville
Toll the Hounds - Steven Erikson
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
Youth / The End of the Tether - Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
The Sea - John Banville
Speaking of Jesus - Carl Medearis
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Unclean - Richard Beck
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Spring Torrents - Ivan Turgenev
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Conquest of New Spain - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
Representing Capital - Frederic Jameson
The History of Sexuality, vol 1 - Michel Foucault
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Terror - Dan Simmons
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Old Man Goriot - Honore de Balzac
The Black Minutes - Martin Solares
Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Homicide - David Simon
Darwinia - Robert Charles Wilson
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Autobiography - Benvenuto Cellini
An Introduction to Capital - David Harvey
The Double / The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Arabian Nights, vol 2
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
36 books. Original languages: English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Arabic. 1 book by a woman. 11 written in the 21st century, 13.5 in the 19th, 7.5 in the 20th, 2 in the 16th, and 1 in the 18th. Then there was the Arabian Nights. Fiction, 25; non-fiction, 11. 14 were published by Penguin; 6 by Vintage. If I had more motivation, I would do more analysis of publisher, but maybe next year! 18 were by authors whose books I'd never read before.
Non-Stats
Most disappointing reads of the year: The Sea (should have been a short story), The Confidence Man (should have been a play), Moll Flanders (thought it would be more picaresque), Wuthering Heights (should have been as creepy throughout as in the first 40 pages), House of Seven Gables (mostly description, with plot thrown in every 20 or 30 pages.) Jameson and Harvey's books on Marx were not as interesting as I wanted them to be.
Then there were good books with bad endings: The City and the City, Darwinia.
Which makes it sound like it was a bad year for reading--which it wasn't. Just about everything else I read was excellent in one way or another.
The second half of my year was dominated, at least psychologically, by Infinite Jest. I'm glad I read it, but I would recommend it to almost no one. Need more time to process this one.
Debt, by Graeber, was a great way to start my year. On it's own merits, it was worth reading. In the context of our national arguments about debt, it was also worth reading. Also worth it for how it set the stage for my reading the rest of the year--sensitivity and attention to the many different attitudes towards debt in various works of fiction and non-fiction, and from different time periods (Collins, Balzac, Diaz, Cellini, Norris, Dostoevsky, Arabian Nights, notably.)
Cellini's Autobiography and Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain were fun to read together in the same year, for different aspects of the same century. Cellini, mostly because he's hilarious, and because he talks about several different popes, not in terms of their theology or religious authority, but in terms of how they kept trying to cheat him out of his wages. Diaz helped temper the image of Cortes and several hundred conquistadors taking over all of Mexico when, at least according to Diaz, they had help from thousands of natives who were bitter about Mexican rule (and also received reinforcements of hundreds more soldiers, at some point in the campaign.) And Diaz was obsessed with Aztec cannibalism.
McTeague reinforced my feelings about realism: great eye for detail, especially physical detail, marred mostly by such blatant moralism and ideology.
The Terror was the most visceral novel I've read in years. It was the height of summer, but I still felt like I was freezing to death anytime I picked it up.
I read three books by Dostoevsky (two novels, two novellas), and wish I'd read more. One was Crime and Punishment, which I'd read 5 or so years ago. This time around, I was mostly intrigued by the topic of confession, mostly because I'm more and more skeptical about the value we place on disclosure and confession. Most of us can bear our friends's secrets, what we can't handle is knowing they're keeping some secret from us. Reading Demons--and, actually, all of Dostoevsky--I'm intrigued by the emotions he can get away with. He gets away with a full range of emotions in a way that I don't think any other novelist does. It's melodramatic, but I still feel happy, despairing, and paranoid right along with his characters. In film, the closest comparison I can get to, in terms of emotional range, is Lynch. (An easy go-to for me, since I watched 5-6 of his movies in the last year.)
After reading an interview with Richard Beck in the Other Journal, I ordered his book, Unclean. One of the best that I read all year. It's a mixture of theology and psychology, especially looking at the relationship between disgust and morality (and the fallout of that relationship). He also looks at the contrary moral traditions in the bible, the purity tradition (personal cleanliness) and the prophetic tradition (mercy and justice.) It's worth at least reading the interview.
More later, possibly. I didn't even touch Foucault, Nietzsche, or Marx, among others, even though those books were incredible. And by that, I mean credible.
The List, Mostly in the Order Finished
Dispatches for the New York Tribune - Karl Marx
Debt - David Graeber
The City and the City - China Mieville
Toll the Hounds - Steven Erikson
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
Youth / The End of the Tether - Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
The Sea - John Banville
Speaking of Jesus - Carl Medearis
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Unclean - Richard Beck
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Spring Torrents - Ivan Turgenev
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Conquest of New Spain - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
Representing Capital - Frederic Jameson
The History of Sexuality, vol 1 - Michel Foucault
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Terror - Dan Simmons
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Old Man Goriot - Honore de Balzac
The Black Minutes - Martin Solares
Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Homicide - David Simon
Darwinia - Robert Charles Wilson
The Final Solution - Michael Chabon
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Autobiography - Benvenuto Cellini
An Introduction to Capital - David Harvey
The Double / The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Arabian Nights, vol 2
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
comments
Selected comments I got on short stories I wrote in college:
"I do wonder why [the main character] thinks of death so often, but maybe that's not something that needs to be explained in this story for this character."
"Anyways, I didn't quite understand the narrator's fascination with death."
"Is the narrator a 'maniac'?"
"I slightly wondered what gender the narrator was."
"Well, I think this is more advanced storytelling than I'm able to usefully assess, but here it goes....I'm sorry I wasn't smart enough to be much good in helping you with your story."
"Why doesn't he just wait for the parade to find the woman? Rather than looking for her in the neighborhoods (a bit creepy). I guess these sorts of things could really work to your advantage to reveal something about his character (obsessive compulsive?)"
"Also, I needed more information about the character and more explanation to warrant his obsession with finding him and the bizarre methods he used"
"The scene of him following the woman is great, and subtly hilarious. I enjoyed it. It's very apparent that he has no idea how creepy he is, especially with the surgical masks."
"I know people just like this."
"The imagining of fungus spreading across the city seemed to come out of nowhere."
"Who is the woman and what is the significance of the panda earrings? How much of this really happens?"
"I have to admit that I really don't get this story other than the fact that the narrator is unhinged....I can't even say where the heart of this story lies because it confuses me so much."
"I like this story. I don't understand it, but I like it."
"I'm not even entirely sure of the narrator's gender. Names would also be nice."
"And why do something so irrational and obviously futile as walking around block by block of a map and hoping that something appears, eliminating areas on foolish assumptions?"
"Manipulate me."
"This guy has a very nervous energy to him....did he just have an intense case of O.C.D. or was there something more serious going on."
"The little details and moments really bring the blood and pulse into the story, like the woman pushing a wheelbarrow of cabbages."
"He's certainly an odd duck"
"I do wonder why [the main character] thinks of death so often, but maybe that's not something that needs to be explained in this story for this character."
"Anyways, I didn't quite understand the narrator's fascination with death."
"Is the narrator a 'maniac'?"
"I slightly wondered what gender the narrator was."
"Well, I think this is more advanced storytelling than I'm able to usefully assess, but here it goes....I'm sorry I wasn't smart enough to be much good in helping you with your story."
"Why doesn't he just wait for the parade to find the woman? Rather than looking for her in the neighborhoods (a bit creepy). I guess these sorts of things could really work to your advantage to reveal something about his character (obsessive compulsive?)"
"Also, I needed more information about the character and more explanation to warrant his obsession with finding him and the bizarre methods he used"
"The scene of him following the woman is great, and subtly hilarious. I enjoyed it. It's very apparent that he has no idea how creepy he is, especially with the surgical masks."
"I know people just like this."
"The imagining of fungus spreading across the city seemed to come out of nowhere."
"Who is the woman and what is the significance of the panda earrings? How much of this really happens?"
"I have to admit that I really don't get this story other than the fact that the narrator is unhinged....I can't even say where the heart of this story lies because it confuses me so much."
"I like this story. I don't understand it, but I like it."
"I'm not even entirely sure of the narrator's gender. Names would also be nice."
"And why do something so irrational and obviously futile as walking around block by block of a map and hoping that something appears, eliminating areas on foolish assumptions?"
"Manipulate me."
"This guy has a very nervous energy to him....did he just have an intense case of O.C.D. or was there something more serious going on."
"The little details and moments really bring the blood and pulse into the story, like the woman pushing a wheelbarrow of cabbages."
"He's certainly an odd duck"
Monday, August 20, 2012
submlimated lessons
While re-reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo recently, I realized I'd sublimated a few of his guidelines after my initial reading 3 years ago.
Here's an important means of judging the quality of my own arguments: would I respect someone for changing their minds based on my arguments? If not, I haven't reached the heart of the matter.
The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one's entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms--opponents who are equal...Equality before the enemy--first precondition for an honest duel....First: I attack only causes that are victorious--on occasion, I wait till they are victorious. Second: I attack causes only when there are no allies to be found, when I am standing alone--when I am compromising myself aloneI can't say I've thought of this explicitly over the last few years, but my intuition has more or less followed what is set out there. Anyone can criticize the weak spot, or identify the "fatal flaw" of an argument or system of thought. That's fine. But since when have fatal flaws actually proved to be fatal?
Here's an important means of judging the quality of my own arguments: would I respect someone for changing their minds based on my arguments? If not, I haven't reached the heart of the matter.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
my secret life
A moving passage from Moll Flanders, a book that has not moved me: "Madam, you are a stranger to me, but it is very unfortunate that you should be let into the secret of the worst action of my life." I often wonder about this, but the reverse. Not about whether my friends will ever know my worst actions, but whether they'll ever know my best ones.
Strangers are intriguing because of the possibilities for committing extreme good or extreme evil that will never be attached to you. Casual generosity and cruelty. The possibilities for confession are endless, and most interactions with strangers are moments of confession. And as far as I'm concerned, doing good can be as big of a burden on the conscience as doing evil.
Everything is easier when repetition isn't expected.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
waste management, 16th c.
From Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain: "And I must also mention, with all apologies, that they sold many canoe-loads of human excrement, which they kept in the creeks near the market. This was for the manufacture of salt and the curing of skins, which they say cannot be done without it. I know that many gentlemen will laugh at this, but I assure them it is true. I may add that on all the roads they have shelters made of reeds or straw or grass so that they can retire when they wish to do so, and purge their bowels unseen by passers-by, and also in order that their excrement shall not be lost."
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