Worm in the Bud Wednesday
Jun. 15th, 2016 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bArchived from Livejournal
What I've Finished Reading
Nothing this week! How did that happen? A massive pearl of fatigue, anxiety, and procrastination, spun industriously around a tiny grain of actual work.
What I'm Reading Now
Possession is such a treat! I'm just about to start Chapter 14, forosprey_archer's reference. It's all the surprisingly suspenseful fact-finding fun of The Daughter of Time, only more leisurely and expansive, and about fictional characters rather than the historical Richard III, so there can be a fact of the matter eventually if Byatt feels like it. Plus Byatt's digs at 80s/90s academia and feminist criticism are a little more enjoyable to me personally than Alan Grant's gleeful disgust about not enough people getting killed at Tonypandy. Roland and Maud find a cache of letters from the intense, previously undiscovered correspondence between poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte (all the names are great) and are now combing through related documents, trying to find out what happened between them and
And now
I'm enjoying watching the significance of the title creep slowly into focus, like a distant figure in the fog. I don't know what it is yet, but you can feel it moving toward you anyway, and eventually all will be revealed.
Apparently Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time was influenced by Proust. I like Proust! The first book, A Question of Upbringing is ok so far. The influence isn't as obvious as I expected. I don't think I would have noticed it at all if it hadn't been pointed out to me ahead of time -- there's a kind of boat-ramp beginning where the narrator sees a thing and is reminded of another thing, and then there's the vivid encounter with a hapless contemporary (Widmerpool, famous at school for trying too hard and for once having worn a mildly outlandish overcoat), but beyond that the memories of Powell's narrator "Jenkins" are much more orderly and signposted than Little M.'s: bricks and topiaries of time, rather than kudzu and groundwater.
And I got drawn into Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet while hunting for quotes, in one of these procrastination scrambles. It's the "factless autobiography" of an assistant bookkeeper bearing a non-coincidental resemblance to Pessoa himself (who is sort of the Portuguese Franz Kafka and sort of not). It's full of lines like, “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful,” and "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life." If that sort of thing makes your heart sing along as if to a song by Morrissey, then maybe The Book of Disquiet is for you.
What I Plan to Read Next
Exactly the same as before!
What I've Finished Reading
Nothing this week! How did that happen? A massive pearl of fatigue, anxiety, and procrastination, spun industriously around a tiny grain of actual work.
What I'm Reading Now
Possession is such a treat! I'm just about to start Chapter 14, for
osprey_archer's reference. It's all the surprisingly suspenseful fact-finding fun of The Daughter of Time, only more leisurely and expansive, and about fictional characters rather than the historical Richard III, so there can be a fact of the matter eventually if Byatt feels like it. Plus Byatt's digs at 80s/90s academia and feminist criticism are a little more enjoyable to me personally than Alan Grant's gleeful disgust about not enough people getting killed at Tonypandy. Roland and Maud find a cache of letters from the intense, previously undiscovered correspondence between poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte (all the names are great) and are now combing through related documents, trying to find out what happened between them and osprey_archer this might be a spoiler for you
. Byatt's Victorians are as surprising as real Victorians. whether it has anything to do with the suicide of LaMotte's companion (probably yes)
And now
Mild but possibly important spoiler!
Is something terrible going to happen to Roland's girlfriend Val, by the same alchemy of coincidence? The text is hinting at it, but I hope not. I am petulantly sorry for Val and feel angry every time she comes into the frame. I hope she runs off with that mildly stupid rich guy who seems to like her. She can feel superfluous on a yacht! suddenly Maud has had Christabel LaMotte's significant mermaid brooch pinned to her turban all along, as though their search made it real somehow, like the duplicate objects of Tlön -- little beads of desire hardening in the air like amber. Or maybe it's just a coincidence?
I'm enjoying watching the significance of the title creep slowly into focus, like a distant figure in the fog. I don't know what it is yet, but you can feel it moving toward you anyway, and eventually all will be revealed.
Apparently Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time was influenced by Proust. I like Proust! The first book, A Question of Upbringing is ok so far. The influence isn't as obvious as I expected. I don't think I would have noticed it at all if it hadn't been pointed out to me ahead of time -- there's a kind of boat-ramp beginning where the narrator sees a thing and is reminded of another thing, and then there's the vivid encounter with a hapless contemporary (Widmerpool, famous at school for trying too hard and for once having worn a mildly outlandish overcoat), but beyond that the memories of Powell's narrator "Jenkins" are much more orderly and signposted than Little M.'s: bricks and topiaries of time, rather than kudzu and groundwater.
And I got drawn into Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet while hunting for quotes, in one of these procrastination scrambles. It's the "factless autobiography" of an assistant bookkeeper bearing a non-coincidental resemblance to Pessoa himself (who is sort of the Portuguese Franz Kafka and sort of not). It's full of lines like, “There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful,” and "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life." If that sort of thing makes your heart sing along as if to a song by Morrissey, then maybe The Book of Disquiet is for you.
What I Plan to Read Next
Exactly the same as before!
