July 2013 Reads

It is hard to gauge the amount of reading that took place in July by a simple listing a books.  One "book" for example could reasonably be listed as 37 (if divided by the original volume number) or over 100 (if going simply by original release), but I follow a principle of singular (e-)binding when numbering the books I read, so I ended up reading over 10,000 iPad-sized e-pages in July of a 15,209 e-page work that counted as only one volume on the list below.  Taking into account the font size (small) and screen, the word count would be slightly over 6,000,000.  Considering that the average book I read is slightly over 100,000 words, that would be the equivalent to around 60 books (and with 2/3 read in July, that would be roughly 40 traditionally-sized books).

All of this is a short way to say that I only completed 15 (e)print volumes in July despite having read more in terms of page count than any month so far this year.  Here are those 15 works:

182  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poesías de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Spanish; poetry; very good)

183  Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes (French; this is the above-mentioned 15,209 e-page e-book that I read that included the contents of a previously-published 37 volume collection of his plays, poetry, prose, essays, and correspondence.  Individually, few were earth-shattering, but considered as a whole, it is impressive to a degree that very, very few writers in any genre will ever hope to accomplish)

184  Herta Müller, The Passport (re-read; very good)

185  Angélica Gorodischer, Menta (Spanish; re-read; collection; excellent)

186  László Krasnahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside (re-read; outstanding)

187  Benjamin Percy, Red Moon (Percy was one of the writers I selected for further consideration for the later-defunct Best American Fantasy 4.  This novel on werewolves was one of the few that utilize this subject matter that engaged me.  There were a few weak spots, but overall it was a very good read.)

188  Rodolfo Martínez, Fieramente Humano (Spanish; very good)

189  Mike Allen, Sleeping, Burning Life (this and the following two were novellas included in the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter package I sponsored.  Very good)

190  Mike Allen, She Who Runs (novella; very good)

191  Mike Allen, Stolen Souls (novella; very good)

192  A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh (re-read; still love this as an adult)

193  Giacomo Leopardi, Canti (Italian; poetry; outstanding)

194 José María Arguedas, Los ríos profundos (Spanish; re-read; excellent)

195  Mariela González, Lágrimas de luz:  postmodernidad y estilo en la ciencia ficción española (Spanish; non-fiction; more on this later, but this Premio Ignotus-nominated study of SF in relation to Spain and Spanish literature makes for an interesting contrast to most Anglo-American-centric SF studies)

196  Evangeline Walton, She Walks in Darkness (soon-to-be-released "trunk novel" that is a gothic tale set in 20th century Italy around the Etruscan tombs.  Solid effort.)


Year-to-Date:

Total:  196/366 goal (behind pace by 14 books, largely due to how I counted the Voltaire e-book)

Women writers:  69/196 (35%, above 33% goal for year; 5 for July)

Foreign language:  64/100 (slightly above pace at slightly more than 9/month; 7 for July)

Spanish:  31/50 (1 above pace; 5 for July)

Toying with the idea of interro-viewing online reviewers/bloggers

Ever and anon I will stumble across a reviewer/blogger interviewing another (in the distant past, I myself was interviewed on a couple of occasions) and I have found myself thinking, "well, this is interesting to an extent, but why aren't there any tough questions being asked that would make the interviewee squirm a bit?"  There is nothing wrong of course with a friendly get-to-know Q&A session, but sometimes it could be a bit too chummy I suppose and leave some readers feeling as though nothing really substantial was said.

So here's what I am considering doing:  if there are reviewers/bloggers (I leave aside authors for several reasons, so please, no solicitations from those who want me to read their works) who would be game for this, I'll conduct a multiple-round email interview in which I would begin by reading their blogs and then probing their thoughts on a variety of issues.  I won't be a Morton Downey, Jr.-type of interviewer but I also won't be an Oprah either.  Judiciously-placed challenging questions can reveal more about the interviewee/reviewer's qualities than simple "tell us about why you chose to start a blog" questions can by themselves.

If any are interested, leave a response with blog link and email address in the comments or contact me on Twitter (info on the right side of screen) and I'll try to conduct a few in the coming days and weeks (I work two jobs, so it might be late night CDT or weekends for most of my correspondence).  Oh, and there'll be a few less serious questions mixed in lest any worry about my ferocity.  The squirrels on the other hand...

Fractured prismic recollections

Woke up with a pressure headache early this morning, after sleeping only five hours (and before that, only 2.5 hours over nearly 36 hours).  Began a re-read of William S. Burroughs' My Education:  A Book of Dreams.  Reading led to strange recollections:

Memories of the dry August of 1983 (less than an inch of rain), spending an hour or two a day out in the nearly 100° temperature taking water from a faucet and taking the dusty dirt of the driveway and mixing it into a fine mud in which I would cover my GI Joe figurines, watching them dry and crack, desperately trying to figure out how to have a perfect coat that would have no cracks in them.

Frustrated, or perhaps just bored, I would scoop up more of the extremely dry dirt and toss it up, just to see a floating dust cloud.  Wanted more and larger clouds, but only so much could be done with my hands, plastic cups, or anything else I could place the dirt in for throwing.  Hours each month spent in such activities, trying to create some sort of novelty with which I could be amused.

Recollections of watching a candle flame for several minutes at a time.  Time dilating, stretching out toward infinity and yet compressed into a singular moment that lasted indefinitely.  The wavering, flickering flame, the intense heat about 3-4 inches above the flame.  Setting paper at that height, seeing it slowly brown and threaten to burst into flame.  Sticking fingers into the pooling molten wax, embracing the brief pain and the exquisite pleasure of the cooling wax creating impressions of my fingerprints, tugging at my skin, drawing it up as it cooled, until the mold had to be broken and the process repeated again.  Experiments with taking quartz or pennies and dropping them in, wanting to see if an amber-like clarity could be achieved if the wax were "clear" instead of dyed red or blue.  It didn't ever get old until I got old.

Snatches of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" float through my mind.  "I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," and I recall the drifters, wanderers, and vagabonds of my college days.  I envied them their inability to stay rooted to any place or ideal.  The thought of ruts terrify me even now.  I don't believe in escapism but instead in the escape of destructive change.  Recalled dreams of colors representing change and emotion, no words spoken, no images moving, but instead flashing patterns of colors shifting and twisting and transmogrifying thoughts into something insubstantial yet no less "real" than the tactile pressure of fingers on keys. 

There's some quasi-mystical about this.  Time's dissolution and the warping of perspective until thoughts themselves collapse into an anti-liturgy of senses that refuse to collapse into discernible patterns.  Words here begin to lose their associations, falling finally back on phoneme recognition and then even consciousness has to flee away from the concrete and toward such a total abstraction that even feelings do not suffice to convey meanings that have unmoored themselves from the unsatisfactory tyranny of structured life.

In re-reading Burroughs, these come flooding back to me, forcing me to recall what I had suppressed, yet now I feel some eagerness to (re)claim this anarchy of sensation, to develop something more pleasing than the activities of my youth, something that might sustain the creation of a new narrative to take the place of the crumbling world around me.  Yet dreams transform upon self-consciousness; the conscience denies us full access to the maelstrom of sensations that boil and churn within us.  And even still, we reach out to shape it, to mold it, to cast it into a suitable form that then can be digested.  Such consumptions are not devoutly to be wished, however.  Time flies, reason falters.  What is left is perhaps the essence of ecstasy and mysticism.

Lists related to the announcement of the Booker Prize longlist

Now that the Booker Prize longlist has been released (I've only read Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being), there has already been some discussion regarding this list.  Here are some lists that could cover what someone might have derived from researching the longlist:

Lists of women on the longlist

Lists of nationalities within the Commonwealth

Lists of elderly people

Lists of new writers

Lists of those writers in the midst of a mid-life crisis

Lists of those who recently gave birth

Lists of those who wear scarves for their publicity photos

Lists of those who have snubbed "genre"

Lists of those who talk about writing a "genre" story

Lists of those who cite an online The Guardian article as their basis of judging the Booker longlist

Lists of the bald or balding

Lists of the hirsute

Lists of those whose recent familial loss spurred their writing

Lists of those whose drug habits fueled their creative energies

Lists of  Oxbridge graduates

Lists of monarchist writers

Lists of republican writers

Lists of cat owners

Lists of dog owners

Lists of the morbidly obese

Lists of the anorexic

Lists of those writers who overcome great odds, like being born into a bourgeois family

Lists of those writers most likely to have a hungover now after learning that their book was selected for consideration

Lists that summarize other lists

Lists that have nothing at all to do with the individual writers and everything to do with real and imagined enemies

Lists that speculate on which writers are secret Squirrelists


Hopefully these summaries of hypothetical (and real) lists might place the Booker Prize longlist in some perspective.  Pardon me while I try to purge my mind of any thought of lists, rankings, and sundry associations.

Shakespearian musings from a third of a lifetime (13 years) ago

I was scrolling through some old, old writings that I composed primarily for the amusement of myself and my best friend from college when I came across this piece from ~2000 where I riffed off of Hamlet.  It is not a serious piece, but perhaps it'll reveal a different mindset, as this was written before I moved to Florida, before I changed careers, before a lot of other sobering life events.  Sometimes, silliness should be celebrated, so here goes:

To be or not to be, that is a silly question, 
since you have to be before you can not be. 
Who cares if it is nobler in the mind to suffer 
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
because they still hurt (sticks and stones may 
break my bones...).  If you do decide to take 
arms, that will leave many people without their 
upper limbs. And why would you take their arms 
to a sea of troubles and by opposing (what, 
BTW, are you opposing?) end them.  Isn't this a 
waste of arms.  To die, to sleep, no 
more...what kind of nonsense is this?  Of 
course if you die, you don't sleep anymore, 
since that is what live people do.  Besides, 
how can any sleep end heartache and a thousand 
natural shocks that flesh is heir to?  Pretty 
damn impossible for a few hours of nap time to 
me...And why in hell is that a consummation 
devoutly to be wished?  I like sleep as much as 
most people, but really it is overrated...Then 
Bill gets freaky and tries to get jiggy withit. 
"To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to 
dream.  Ay, there's the rub, for in that sleep 
of death what dreams may come, when we have 
shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us 
pause."  Damn right it must give us pause to 
ponder this crap.  When I dream, I most 
definitively am not thinking about mortal coils 
(whatever those damn things might be...) and no 
dream is going to shuffle me off anywhere 
anytime soon...And how in hell does all of 
Bill's blather led to the respect that makes 
calamity of so long life.  Bill's mind is a 
terrible thing to waste.  I think he needs to 
take a chill pill, as the next paranoiac passage 
indicates:  "For who would bear the whips and 
scorns of time (is time a sadist here?), th' 
oppressor's wrong (bitter man), the proud man's 
contumely (a proud man's what?!?!?!?), the 
pangs of despised love (guess Bill hasn't been 
getting any for a while...), the law's delay 
(while I might feel your pain here, stop your 
bitching...)the insolence of office (absolute 
power [not vodka] corrupts absolutely...), and 
the spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy 
takes, when he himself might his quietus make 
(to put it bluntly) with a bare bodkin (getting 
violent on your ass...)?"  Seems like Bill 
needs some therapy, pronto.  It gets worse: 
"Who would fardels (fardels, is that a type of 
flatulence?) bear, to grunt and sweat (like pigs 
in heat???) under a weary life (I suppose it 
would get boring after a while...), but that 
the dread of something after death (the 
afterlife, maybe?), the undiscovered country 
(Los Angeles) from whose bourn (bourn??? to 
whom was he/she bourn?) no traveler returns 
(guess that passageway is a wee bit too small), 
puzzles the will (some people just don't get 
it, do they?), and makes us rather bear those 
ills we have (I'm disease-free, thank you very 
much...) than fly (why not walk) to others that 
we know not of?"  Sick bastard isn't he. 
However, Bill saves the best (or worst) for 
last:  "Thus conscience makes cowards of us all 
(speak for yourself, you pansy, have at 
you!!!); and thus the native hue of resolution 
(600 x 400?) is sicklied o'er (with a computer 
virus of death, maybe?) with the pale cast of 
thought (I always thought that my thoughts were 
vibrant, since I used color-safe Cheer...), and 
enterprises (rent-a-car or the space ship) of 
great pitch (90 mph) and moment with this 
regard their currents turn awry (what direction 
is awry in?) and lose the name of action 
(action, Jackson, satisfaction, can't get no 
satisfaction...)"  Thus Bill's soliloquy makes 
my bowels weak with tepid commentary on the 
human condition.  For the clueless, this has 
been my de-re-construction of Hamlet's speech 
in Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet. 
Thank you and drive through.

P.S. This was a satirical parody.  No 
Shakespearean actors or actresses were harmed 
in the writing of this bit.

Sometimes I think I read too much

Sometimes I find myself thinking too much about things read, things experienced or devised by others.  Sometimes I think that I talk too much and listen too little, experiencing little for myself.  Sometimes I think it might be for the best if I were to throw everything overboard and begin anew, with little detritus to be in the way of experiencing new things, in new ways, for myself.

Sometimes I just want to leave...

"The question of whether suicide helps man or not"

Currently reading (and sometimes thumbing through passages) the just-released English translation of 19th century Italian poet/writer Giacomo Leopardi's epic Zibaldone, a notebook of jotted-down thoughts and short essays and other assorted hodge-podges of thought.  Here is a lengthy quote taken from manuscript pages 2549-2552, which deals with suffering.  Here is the first part:

The question of whether suicide helps man or not (which is what knowing if it is reasonable or not, and can be chosen or not, comes down to) can be reduced to these simple terms.  Which of the two is better, suffering or not suffering?  As for pleasure, it is certain, [2550] immutable, and eternal that man in any condition of ife, even if he is happy according to the common definition, cannot feel it, since, as I have shown elsewhere [–>Z 532-35, 646-50], pleasure is always future, never present.  And just as, consequently, each man can be physically certain of never feeling any pleasure in his life, so, too, each can be certain of not spending a day without suffering, and the majority of men can be certain of not spending a day without suffering, and the majority of men can be certain of not spending a day without many serious sufferings, and some of not spending one without long-lasting and extremely serious sufferings (these are the so-called unhappy:  poor, incurably ill, etc. etc.).  Now I ask again, which is better, suffering or not suffering.  Certainly enjoyment, and maybe also enjoyment and suffering, would be better than simply not suffering (since nature and self-love propel us and carry us so strongly toward enjoyment that enjoyment and suffering is more pleasant than not being and not suffering, and, by not being, being unable to enjoy), but since enjoyment is impossible for man, it remains necessarily and naturally [2551] excluded from the whole question.  And we conclude that since not suffering is more helpful to man than suffering, and since he cannot live without suffering, it is mathematically true and certain that absolute not being is more beneficial and more fitting to man than being.  And that being is, precisely, harmful to man.   And therefore anyone who lives (if you take away religion) lives because of a pure formal error of calculation:  I mean the calculation of utility.  An error multiplied as many times as there are instants in our life, in each of which we prefer living to not living.  And we prefer it in fact no less than in intention, in desire, and in the mind's more or less deliberate, more or less tacit and implicit discourse.  An effect of self-love, deceived as in many other bad choices that it makes by thinking of them from the point of view of good, and the greatest good that is proper to it in those [2552] circumstances.

– Quoted from p. 1069 of the Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino translation of Zibaldone  

I am going to have to think on this some while before providing my thoughts (plus I should note that Leopardi continues for another book page on this topic; this is a preface of sorts), but I think this quote should underscore why Leopardi's Zibaldone (just only now being translated in full into English) is an important work even in the early 21st century, nearly two centuries after the author's early death.