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The Anxiety of Wednesday
Oct. 16th, 2019 05:58 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
I completley forgot to say anything about Farewell Companions last week, which is an injustice. because reading Farewell Companions felt like a luxurious vacation in my head. It takes place in Dublin before and during World War II, and is a little like a quieter, slower and gentler Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, only one of the young men actually becomes a priest and sits in ambiguity and loneliness among the ghosts of himself and his friends and his old self. But that only happens at the very end. Most of it is low-key dreaming and striving and the war changing everything, and hikes in the mountains, and breathtakingly boring clerical work - you get the feeling that if Tim's job had been a little less soul-crushing, he might have stuck it out another few years and gotten married instead of taking up with the seminary. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, it's a good book and an unexpectedly good pairing with the wonderful TV comedy Derry Girls, which takes place in a different city and a different time but shares some history and a rhythm of speech or two and a pack of casual observations about Catholic school that I will never not be a sucker for as long as I live.
Book History Vol. 12: 2009 is a collection of essays on book history, and might be subtitled "Books Do Furnish A Room" - it has several articles on books as furniture, the broader meaning of the word "furniture" in the early modern period, and the rise of the uniform author set in book publishing (with a sideline on Henry James' mania for post-publication revision). There was also an essay called "Toward a History of Children as Readers," which included a discussion of library surveys from the 1920s and 30s.
What I'm Reading Now
YOU ARE NOT STENDHAL. This provocatively-titled book thinks it can tell me who I'm not. HOW DO YOU KNOW, BOOK? In fact, the book is right and I am not Stendhal. You can tell because Stendhal wrote an entire giddy book in 52 days and I took 10 years just to fail to write a boring one. There are many other differences if you look closely. The poetry here is not my favorite kind of poetry, but sometimes it nudges you and goes, "hey?" Here is one poem that made brief contact with my ribs:
( 'The Stories' by Daniel Hughes )
I'm also reading The Good Soldier Svejk, a Czech comic novel from the early 1920s that is the grandfather of all sad war satires, though it's not really sad in the same way that Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five or maybe even Monstrous Regiment are sad; it's more like a cartoon from the days when cartoons were more likely to be about put-upon stray cats and hapless hoboes getting pronged in the rear than about the power of friendship and the imagination. The common thread is absurdity. Svejk keeps getting arrested for being too patriotic at the wrong moments (the authorities think he's being ironic) and when he finally links up with a regiment, he misses the train through an honest overconsumption of beer and has to walk (the wrong way) to the front, where he is mistaken first for a deserter, then for a spy. Will he ever see the action he claims to crave? Possibly not, but he will drink a lot of beer, tell rambling stories, and wheel more than one drunk chaplain home from the officer's mess in a wheelbarrow while Austro-Hungarian officials wheeze and puff with fury under their silly murderhats. It's pretty good. I probably don't need to tell you that I am enjoying it more than its sweaty grand-nephew Gravity's Rainbow, though Gravity's Rainbow has gotten slightly better over the past dozen pages.
A Question For Readers
How do you feel about authors who make significant revisions to their own work after it's published? Would you rather they didn't? Does it depend entirely on the case? I felt a little shocked by Henry James, but wasn't sure why it bothered me. I'm not shocked by myself when I fix mistakes in two-year-old Dreamwidth posts, so what's the issue? Maybe because I'm imagining buying a new edition of a book I loved, only to discover that in the meantime the author had stuffed every paragraph chock full of ironies and adjectives like a clove orange and where did my book go?. Have you ever had this experience?
(I had this experience when a new translation of The Little Prince came out. That was a translation change rather than one made by the author, and it wasn't a crazy clove orange situation, but everything was slightly wrong and the bells didn't ring like they did in my mind).
What I Plan to Read Next
I promised myself that as soon as I finish Gravity's Rainbow, I can get William Dean Howell's book My Literary Passions out from the library. This book has been described by osprey archer as exactly the kind of thing I want to read all the time: a guy who loves books loving them extravagantly in public.
I completley forgot to say anything about Farewell Companions last week, which is an injustice. because reading Farewell Companions felt like a luxurious vacation in my head. It takes place in Dublin before and during World War II, and is a little like a quieter, slower and gentler Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, only one of the young men actually becomes a priest and sits in ambiguity and loneliness among the ghosts of himself and his friends and his old self. But that only happens at the very end. Most of it is low-key dreaming and striving and the war changing everything, and hikes in the mountains, and breathtakingly boring clerical work - you get the feeling that if Tim's job had been a little less soul-crushing, he might have stuck it out another few years and gotten married instead of taking up with the seminary. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, it's a good book and an unexpectedly good pairing with the wonderful TV comedy Derry Girls, which takes place in a different city and a different time but shares some history and a rhythm of speech or two and a pack of casual observations about Catholic school that I will never not be a sucker for as long as I live.
Book History Vol. 12: 2009 is a collection of essays on book history, and might be subtitled "Books Do Furnish A Room" - it has several articles on books as furniture, the broader meaning of the word "furniture" in the early modern period, and the rise of the uniform author set in book publishing (with a sideline on Henry James' mania for post-publication revision). There was also an essay called "Toward a History of Children as Readers," which included a discussion of library surveys from the 1920s and 30s.
One popular "genre" that emerged in multiple open-ended surveys was that of sad books. A librarian commented on this "fondness of girls for mournful stories" [. . .] One girl described her proclivity for stories "about sorrowful ladies who die for love," with some qualifications: "I don't like them if they just die,. . .but I love them when they slay themselves with daggers and swords!"
What I'm Reading Now
YOU ARE NOT STENDHAL. This provocatively-titled book thinks it can tell me who I'm not. HOW DO YOU KNOW, BOOK? In fact, the book is right and I am not Stendhal. You can tell because Stendhal wrote an entire giddy book in 52 days and I took 10 years just to fail to write a boring one. There are many other differences if you look closely. The poetry here is not my favorite kind of poetry, but sometimes it nudges you and goes, "hey?" Here is one poem that made brief contact with my ribs:
( 'The Stories' by Daniel Hughes )
I'm also reading The Good Soldier Svejk, a Czech comic novel from the early 1920s that is the grandfather of all sad war satires, though it's not really sad in the same way that Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five or maybe even Monstrous Regiment are sad; it's more like a cartoon from the days when cartoons were more likely to be about put-upon stray cats and hapless hoboes getting pronged in the rear than about the power of friendship and the imagination. The common thread is absurdity. Svejk keeps getting arrested for being too patriotic at the wrong moments (the authorities think he's being ironic) and when he finally links up with a regiment, he misses the train through an honest overconsumption of beer and has to walk (the wrong way) to the front, where he is mistaken first for a deserter, then for a spy. Will he ever see the action he claims to crave? Possibly not, but he will drink a lot of beer, tell rambling stories, and wheel more than one drunk chaplain home from the officer's mess in a wheelbarrow while Austro-Hungarian officials wheeze and puff with fury under their silly murderhats. It's pretty good. I probably don't need to tell you that I am enjoying it more than its sweaty grand-nephew Gravity's Rainbow, though Gravity's Rainbow has gotten slightly better over the past dozen pages.
A Question For Readers
How do you feel about authors who make significant revisions to their own work after it's published? Would you rather they didn't? Does it depend entirely on the case? I felt a little shocked by Henry James, but wasn't sure why it bothered me. I'm not shocked by myself when I fix mistakes in two-year-old Dreamwidth posts, so what's the issue? Maybe because I'm imagining buying a new edition of a book I loved, only to discover that in the meantime the author had stuffed every paragraph chock full of ironies and adjectives like a clove orange and where did my book go?. Have you ever had this experience?
(I had this experience when a new translation of The Little Prince came out. That was a translation change rather than one made by the author, and it wasn't a crazy clove orange situation, but everything was slightly wrong and the bells didn't ring like they did in my mind).
What I Plan to Read Next
I promised myself that as soon as I finish Gravity's Rainbow, I can get William Dean Howell's book My Literary Passions out from the library. This book has been described by osprey archer as exactly the kind of thing I want to read all the time: a guy who loves books loving them extravagantly in public.
