13 posts tagged “books books books”

What passes for "seminar paper planning and research" around here is occasionally risible, but I had the best of intentions when I began, and only hours later did I end up fishing around for details about Harold Bloom's 2002 Catalonia International Prize.  I note with great chagrin that the prize of 80,000 euros was then valued at $75,000— I mean, chagrin on Bloom's behalf, of course, for not getting it 5 years later.

[Also, I am craving, craving blueberry pie.  But that is of no importance.]

Ahem.  Another article (pdf) mentions that Bloom includes half a dozen Catalan authors in his reading list appendix to The Western Canon.  Who knew there was an appendix?  Who knows why we have a copy of The Western Canon in the house?  To the bookshelf I go.  The appendix amounts to 39 pages or so, comprising a "Western canon" that only really completely excludes East Asia, for incomprehensible reasons— the Hindu sacred texts are there; Mahmud Darwish, Ngugi, Chinua Achebe, Narayan and Naipaul and Rushdie and CLR James, the Qu'ran, the Thousand and One Nights, a ton of Latin American and Caribbean literature, but not a jot from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Tibet, or their diasporas... baffling.  I guess it is all Too Far East.  (I was actually going to say here that reading the list was a disorienting experience, in perfect innocence, but the pun is stronger than I am.)

But in any case: quibbling about what should or shouldn't be on the list— Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? and not Grossman's Life and Fate?!: voilá, Harold Bloom has killed culture— misses an important point, which is that anyone who actually tried to read all these books would go insane.  This is not a canon with an individual reader in mind; it's more like a vote for the books that should be in the library at all.  I know it's a cliché, but unread books aren't good for much, and these days I'm happy to hear that anyone not actually in a literature program wants to read even three of the Western Classix.  If they can read ten— great!  Greeeat!  Literacy!  And how long is this cliché going to hold?  It certainly shows no sign of dying out.  There are ways to make the library a more appealing place, and to draw more people into it, but if I have to choose between reading and library planning, I'll choose reading— although it is beginning to seem less elitist or imperialist or choose-your-adjective and more simply, eccentrically, quietistic.  I would like to know how many people have been inspired by Azar Nafisi to read Lolita.  I can't imagine there are many.

The six Catalan authors, incidentally, are Carles Ribá, J.V. Foix, Pere Gimferrer (all Selected Poems), Joan Perucho (Natural History), Merce Rodoreda (The Time of the Doves), and Salvador Espriu (La Pell de Brau: Poems).  No Tirant lo Blanc or Ramón Llull, I'm afraid.  Of these, I can only vouch for Espriu in Spanish translation: it is godhead; it made me tear up in class.  And, um, yes, um, it made me want to learn Catalan, a little bit.  I'm not sure what made me want the pie, which I am still visualizing, however: eidetic pie?  Pie-dos?  Alas, there are no blueberries in this cave.

I should have brought my camera to the massive UC Press sidewalk sale, to show you how a town like this responds to a clearance on academic titles.  But it was early, I hadn't had my coffee, and I was chiefly concerned with my own acquisitions.

Perk

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It's eclectic, as always.  Emphasis on art and film reveals my growing worries about the importance of visual media in literary studies; the book at the bottom, Germany in Transit, was the best score.  My housemate contented himself with three titles.  He was in the minority.  The staff was handing out boxes to grad students who mumbled things about poverty and staggered away with their chimeras.

So during the first of my two campus visits, I went to a Q&A with current grad students in the program.  The questions eventually slowed to a trickle.  Suddenly I thought of a good one, and raised my hand.  Yes?  "Do you guys have enough time to read?" I asked.  It sowed general confusion.  Did I mean, time to do the class reading?  I shook my head.  Or, like, reading novels for pleasure?  Light reading?  I shook my head again, and gave up.

What I meant was this: suppose you are assigned a short essay by a late 20th-century theorist who refers extensively to, say, Brecht's Kleine Organon für das Theater, and you have no idea where he or she is coming from, so you go in search of the Brecht and discover that it is indeed klein and you can polish it off in an evening.  Now, having read the Brecht, you think you understand a little more and it may be time to tackle Benjamin's essay, "What is Epic Theater?", which seemed gnomic and mysterious the last time you read it.  Do you have time to do that reading?  That is, do you have time to learn more than you're required to by others— because no professor can ever give you the complete story, unless it's a semester course on Hermann Hesse or something you do not want— and to learn enough to answer your own questions?  Do you have time to read as much as you need?

My answer for this program, so far, is no.  There is no time whatsoever to do outside reading.  There is a little time to do the course reading.  There is a tiny bit of time beyond that to eat dark chocolate chipotle almonds, and about 13.5 minutes left over for the blog each week.  I think I'm over this week's limit here already.

Ahem. Giant University of California Press online crackhouse book sale until October 31.  (Note: no philosophy section -- sorry, waggish.)  A note for the family, though: this interesting-looking collection has a contribution from one Joyce Flueckiger, who lived down the street from me when I was a kid and gave me some lovely golden fabric from India for all-purpose costume use— it lasted for years.  She was very friendly and cool, I recall, although the details are fuzzy.  She also had a grey-and-white cat named Telos.  I liked Telos.  It took me quite a while to realize that his name was a real word— in fact I'm sure the mystery of it outlived him.  But hooray for the small world of homo academicus!

Also, books!

The TLS reviews the newly-released original manuscript of On the Road, a book I have never read and expect never to read — but I must now say that if I had to read it, I'd much rather have the "original scroll."  Is this kind of thing really still happening? — I mean, can you really still suppress the unbowdlerized version of a widely-read novel for 50 years?

The most striking feature is that the scroll uses the real names of characters who were lightly disguised in On the Road.  The real-life Neal Cassady returns to usurp the legendary Dean Moriarty, as if by right.  Where On the Road begins, "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness . . .", the scroll opens, "I first met met [sic] Neal not long after my father died . . . I had just gotten over a serious illness". On the Road's Carlo Marx is the scroll's Allen Ginsberg; Dean's three wives, Marylou, Camille and Inez, feature in the scroll under their real names, Carolyn Robinson, Luanne Henderson and Diane Hansen, whom Neal married in New York while still husband to Carolyn (the legality of his marriage to Luanne is likewise questionable, since she was underage at the time). . . . On the Road is a non-fiction novel, predating In Cold Blood by nine years. [. . .]  [Malcolm] Cowley had worked hard to persuade an increasingly disorganized Kerouac that Viking could not publish a "novel" in which living people were depicted stealing, committing adultery and indulging in illegal sexual acts.

So the buggery is excised, names are changed, fig leaves are applied where needed and, as the reviewer puts it: "It might have been paternal feeling towards his young author that led Cowley to excise many mentions of women as 'whores'.  Now they are back, and the rampant misogyny of the early Beat Generation is as plain as can be."  What sense would a book, "improvised" over three weeks, that contains all these elements make without them?  What strange confusion it must have sown in the minds of young readers.  Nothing can make your skin crawl like a shoddy cover-up.  But on the other hand, it's easy to underestimate the strength of taboos, or their auras, even when they're utterly absurd: the absurdity is the last thing you encounter when you break them, like hope creeping out of Pandora's box.

Still: sounds like a marvelously ugly, hateful all-American text.  Tasty, like Rocky Mountain oysters dipped in ketchup.  I never made it past Kesey and Ferlinghetti as a teenager: I don't think Kerouac or Cassady ever seemed much like kindred spirits; they seemed more antsy than zany.  On the road with a bunch of semi-closeted misogynists?  Sounds pretty boring to me.  I think I'll read popular science books and Camus instead.

Application for Grant for Books Unnecessary for my Research
P.P. Nuttalli (http://simultan.vox.com)

I am applying for a monetary grant for the purchase of books unnecessary for my research in German- and Spanish-language literature and literary criticism.  As a graduate student at [a California] University, I receive limited support from my department for my living expenses and teaching duties, which leaves me with an even more limited budget for books necessary for my scholarly work, some of which are difficult to find in libraries to begin with; my budget can hardly be stretched to encompass the many books which are fairly undeniably not necessary for my scholarship, but which I want to read anyway.  Your organization has a history of supporting the unnecessary expenses of young scholars, which would not be covered under a more conventional funding arrangement.

Which books are necessary for my research?
I work primarily on literature of the 20th century from Spain and the Southern Cone, Austria, Germany, and other German-speaking areas, including many expatriate and/or stateless writers, but I am also interested in earlier works in these languages.  I also study philosophy and a fairly limited set of theoretical schools.  Anything falling under these rubrics, including titles about comparative literature in general, is potentially useful for my studies.

Which books are unnecessary for my research?
Everything else, basically: books on other literary traditions; books in French, Italian, minor European languages, dead European languages, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, or languages I can't identify but which look cool; books on the natural sciences, the history of the natural sciences, current trends in the natural sciences, advanced equations for quantum field theory; field guides to birds, trees, rocks and minerals, or any other ecological phenomena in areas to which I am too poor to travel, up to and including a large full-color guide to woodpeckers and flickers full of photographs of same; cultural studies, comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, art history, musicology; economic history, cultural history, military history; Islam in global context; Tang dynasty China; 20th-century sub-Saharan Africa; Japanese imperial/colonial history and its aftermath in the Pacific Rim; New-Agey books on how to quit buying so many books; Franco Moretti's 5-volume study of the novel, Il romanzo, untranslated from the Italian; all those books by Leonora Carrington; all those books in French by Philippe Jaccottet; anything I believe would be interesting because I've never really thought about it before.

Is a partial bibliography included with this application?
Please see attached pages 4-24.

Are other sources of funding for unnecessary books available to me?
In the past, I have subsidized my ancillary, unnecessary reading by selling old books and CDs for store credit, reducing my grocery budget, going into debt, and making big puppy-dog eyes at family members who don't regularly see me.  I may be able to rely on these sources in the future, but none of them is particularly reliable or sustainable.

Please say a few words about the advantages of purchasing books over lower-cost alternatives like library borrowing.
While I certainly have access to some of the best libraries on the west coast, I have found through experience that library books are insufficiently shiny, new and appealing to provoke full-scale, obsessive, unnecessary-reading lockdown episodes of the kind that have been most unproductive for my research.  I have also been known to incur fines and to hurt myself at the end of the semester carrying all those books back to the library.  My attached bibliography should reflect the extent to which I intend to use my library card.  However, I also bear in mind that books unnecessary to my research may be necessary for the research of, potentially, 40 or 50 actual other people with legitimate scholarly interests and deadlines and so forth, who also use the library.

If applying for support for language learning aids: have I considered the FLAS grant program?
Oh Jesus no.  They'd expect results.

What results do I anticipate from the unnecessary reading?
The main result is that I'll stay sane in graduate school.  If all else fails, I can start an Interdisciplinary Institute for Less Commonly Combined Disciplines, such as Literature and Statistics, Macroeconomics and Avian Ethology, Creative Writing and Computational Neuroscience, or Materials Science and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics.  You may hear from me again.

Institutional Affiliation: _____________________
I plead the 5th.

For no particular reason, I decided to take a break from the China project and read two recent novels by, respectively, James Salter and Shirley Hazzard.  Hazzard is Australian by birth and cosmopolitan by practice, so I don't know if she counts as an "American" writer, despite the NYC address and the National Book Award; I would otherwise introduce them as two American novels about the years after World War II and the uneasy transition from war to peace.

The Great Fire: A Novel

Cassada

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I rarely read contemporary fiction in English (except for Coetzee, whom I practically worship), and sometimes I feel like a real asshole for avoiding it, yet also expecting some audience for my own fiction to appear someday.  I figured Cassada would at least hold my interest and not be too cheesy, and I was right on both counts: Salter is a very good, if not perfect, stylist, and there were only a few missteps into Hemingway territory, plus some sterling tragic scenes.  The narrative is as eerily, hermetically sealed-off from history and context as the Air Force bases and fighter planes of its milieu, but that mirroring is used to good effect: it would be easy to pad the book out with oracular passages on history and the Fate of Mankind, but resisting that temptation is admirable.  I admire it, even if I don't know if I can emulate it.

The Great Fire is a love story, like Hazzard's (superior) earlier novel, The Transit of Venus, but set in the Pacific— Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand— after WWII.  The protagonist, Leith, is a war hero, son of a well-known British author, who has witnessed a great deal in China and Japan about which we are told almost nothing, and a great deal with various women in Europe about which we are told everything.  Fatally, four or five of the main characters speak in voices indistinguishable from the narrator's— in one case, a sickly 20-year-old boy mimics the narrator's world-weary, endlessly judgmental tone, as here:

"Ben, was there ever a time when you felt close to your father?"
Benedict put the crumpled frame of his fingers together.  "You see, my illness came on me early, but not enough to be convincing.  My father thought, wanted to think, that I was malingering.  There was threatening and shouting, and dragging; and on my part writhing, resisting, and screaming.  He was set on my becoming a champion swimmer, took me to Balmoral Baths at sunrise, all seasons, and plunged me in.  Derelict wooden piles slimed with green and cruelly barnacled.  Fear, humiliation, agony in an ear.  I shrieked, he shouted, once or twice it came to blows.  Neighbours complained.  Finally, mastoid trouble was discovered; there was an operation, also awful.  By then, something was irrefutably wrong with me, and he couldn't bear our joint failure— my failure and his; we were saddled with it, one way or another."
"Your part was involuntary, given the circumstances."
"His too, given his nature."
"No.  We owe ourselves more disbelief than that."
"The Australian male is not good at self-doubt.  Someone else must always be to blame.  Otherwise, Aldred, a nation on its knees."

Episode n: Saving the Bus Fare

1. I walk to the bus stop with a backpack full of library books.  No bus.  Nice day; I'll walk to campus.  I pocket the $1.75 and start walking.
2. I walk past an Indonesian restaurant.  Oseng-Oseng Tempeh!  I quietly do the Oseng-Oseng Tempeh dance, in my heart, and make secret heart-plans to eat some soon.
3. I walk past Eastwind Books of Berkeley, and pause to look at the sale cart.  It is at this point that I make a really fatal discovery: I always assumed this place sold only goofy "wisdom of the East" paraphernalia, incense, silky sweatshop clothes, etc., but it turns out to be chock full of East Asian and Asian-American literature, history books, language texts, etc.
2. I leave Eastwind Books with copies of Dialogues in Paradise and Commons, having put in an order for Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories.  I am too ashamed— and even a bit frightened— to look at the extensive clearance shelves.

Dialogues in Paradise

Commons (New California Poetry, 5)

Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories (New Directions Paperbook)

The "academia" tag is as large as the "berlin" tag these days, I see.  That's abominable.

I'm falling asleep.  Got up to say good-bye to P. when he left for the airport, thought I reset the alarm, fell slowly asleep again, woke up twelve-or-so minutes before I had to leave to catch my train.  I blinked helplessly at the ceiling for three minutes, then hauled myself up, brushed my teeth & hair, threw some clothes on and had just enough time to stop at the "Raw Energy" smoothie window and buy two raw-fruit-and-nut bars for breakfast and lunch: 160 calories, 150 calories, enough to get you through a morning raw.  I finished reading this book on the train:

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (boundary 2 b

To be honest, I totally bought this one for the cover.  I have also bought strange classics monographs for their covers.   I understand other women do this with shoes.  I think if someone offered me a pair of reasonably comfortable shoes with Xu Bing's artwork on them in a red-and-chiaroscuro pattern, in fact, I'd be delighted.  Fake Chinese script!  Fake leather!   No lie!  I also have a writer/aesthete's sneering disdain for cultural studies, in my (many) intemperate moments, so this wasn't exactly an intuitive choice.  Oh, and...  I don't study Chinese literature... but more on that below.  I circled around this book for a month or so at Moe's, anyway, and finally it became clear that no one was going to buy it but me.  For Good Or Ill.

I've been feeling homesick for Madison for the last few days, in ways I can't explain.  We're accustomed to this idea that outside forces shape us, that identity is a history of transactions with the world, and we recall mostly those transactions and collisions: but we remember not only things, but our own history of being as well; we remember our identities, as it were.  It's not describable places or situations I recall, or even odors or colors, but a self in the world.  And that world now has changed— I'm in a different environment— so the gestalt, figured in memory and consciousness, changes too.  I remembered being myself, as though it were distant, as though something harmless but ineluctable had intervened to translate me from one spot to another.  A pane of glass; a glass-bottomed boat.

You may laugh.  Moving around in the U.S. is nothing; moving from one hippy college town to another is no great shakes.  Not like moving from Tanzania to Canada, or Siberia to Spain.

But observe the form of these sentences.  That is not as much as this.  This is not to be underestimated.  Focusing on this risks marginalizing that, that there, and that other thing, all of which cry out for attention.  We need a robust theory.  We cannot have a robust theory, so we must practice an operational wariness.  We need to talk to one another.  We need to talk.  We can't talk just now.  I can't talk about this.  I don't know why it's hard.  I should just be able to speak.  This dislocation is nothing.  I can walk on it.  This isn't a good place to talk.  The rents are going up.  I smell burning leaves here; I smell an open sewer there (smells like Thailand!, she said, twelve years ago); I am on a train, the train-talk, the secret language of trains, the fact that I experience an earthquake as the conversion of house into swiftly-stopping train—