faux de fa fa Sunday, Aug 31 2008 

Reading jfre6204 8:03 pm

 I must quote from this article of French malaise this year… due to summer being over, prices going up, and apparently… boo hoo on you hoo… too many books and translations being published at once. Too many books and no time to read (what a horrible, horrible problem to have)!!

“It cannot only be because of the avalanche of new books – la rentree litteraire – facing anyone who wants to be au courant. (For some reason, French publishers do not produce new books for people going on vacation, but only for people coming back to work, when they presumably have less time to read).

This autumn, according to the newspaper Liberation, 676 new books will be published, 466  of them written in French, the rest long-awaited translations. According to Francois Reynaert in Le Nouvel Observateur, ‘The name alone is leaden – in the expression “rentree litteraire,” one hears especially ‘rentree.’ It smells of the back of the classroom and old eraser.

One novel, “Zone,” by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.

Well, I hope the French people survive this overload of published tomes. I don’t know how I would be able to handle it!

 

Long Time No Write Saturday, Aug 30 2008 

Reading jfre6204 3:26 am

This is a baby elephant.

I have not written in a long long while, because I have not been normal lately. Meaning I don’t have my morning library routine of reading and writing and sharing and sitting. I have moved and it hasn’t turned out the way I wanted yet. I am starting school in less than a week and all should become normal again then. I have been reading, however, and am still reading–so don’t worry too much! I have finished The Master Butcher’s Singing Club by Louise Erdrich. I like to read Erdrich when I don’t want to think too hard, not to say that it isn’t great, just not too complex for the ole’ noggin.

I am reading right now Franz Kafka’s The Castle. I want to finish reading it before I read the introduction and find out what it’s supposed to mean. It has been mentioned a lot in other things I have read. I think Ozick and Kundera–so it’s recognizable. Soon I will begin with my school reading which should be interesting and I will keep you posted on that front.

In New York City, Becky and I found a wonderful little used book store on 18th street. I go to school on 14th… so I’ll shoot up there a lot I bet. It’s called Skyline Books and Records. Awesome.

 

I want a Cashmere Goat! Monday, Aug 11 2008 

Reading jfre6204 12:44 am

 

MeTaDaTa–or Presenting my delicious ) Sunday, Aug 10 2008 

Reading jfre6204 2:18 am

Piet Mondrian. (Dutch, 1872-1944). Tableau no. 2 / Composition no. V. 1914. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 33 5/8″ (54.8 x 85.3 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection

(On view @ the MOMA!–field trip, field trip, field trip!)

I have 63 bookmarks on delicious. Saved over the past month and meant to assist in organzing my thoughts and interests. Hasn’t done me much good hanging about on my delicious page….so I will present some of them here in link format, along with my thoughts. Hours and hours of reading.

P.S. I want a macbook and an i-touch. I need a job and a loan and the courage to spend 1000 on something. ( I really do need it for school…. where I will be studying metadata, compiling and organizing metadata. Thus, I need a computer to haul around in my purse. And an i-touch to help me get around the labyrinthine NYC streets. Imagine me lost in the rain!)) And I need to listen to music on the subway. P.S. This paragraph was a blatant digression and I will now do what I came here to do:

Not only is ‘The Invention of Morel’ by Adolfo Bioy Casares a NYRB classic, in cute little book form, but the author was one of Bolano’s influences. His is Latin American (a sub-set I want to explore more and more) and it was given this review @ conversational reading…

“Some books are so incredibly easy to write reviews of. Books like Morel unleash thousand-word torrents of commentary in my mind, and the hardest part is whittling down what I want to say to what will fit in the space of a review. Morel makes things even easier because it comes with the most obvious hook in the world: Adolfo Bioy Casares is (scandalously) little-known here even though he has about the strongest Borges connection possible in literature.

I think I’ve mentioned Morel before on this blog, but this bears repeating: read this book. Please, read this book. It’s one of the great detective fictions of the 20th century, and, despite its short 100 pages, you will be interpreting this book all night long. And you will probably read it again, if not to figure out what the hell is going on then at least to vainly attempt to recreate the experience of reading it for the first time.”

Fuerzabruta–if I ever get around to seeing shows in NYC

This book comes out in Winter and I am interested in reading it slowly….’Slow Reading’ by John Miedema.

“Slow Reading” brings attention to emerging ideas in technology and culture. The traditional technologies of print and the book have persisted as part of our information ecology because of the need for slow reading and deep comprehension. The theme of locality in the Slow Movement provides insight into the importance of physical location in our relationship with information. Most of all, “Slow Reading” represents a rediscovery of the pleasure of reading for its own sake.”

Way interesting site for the future library school student in me, also the author if the book mentioned above…

50 Literary translations, in bold I have read… linked in the blogroll….

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

13. Walter Benjamin – Illuminations (Harry Zohn, 1970)

14. Paul Celan – Poems (Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, 1972)

15. Bertolt Brecht – Poems (John Willett, Ralph Manheim, Erich Fried, et al 1976)

16. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, 1977)

17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – Montaillou (Barbara Bray, 1978)

18. Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (William Weaver, 1981)

19. Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (Richard Howard, 1981)

20. Christa Wolf – A Model Childhood (Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt, 1982)

21. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (William Weaver, 1983)

22. Mario Vargas Llosa – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Helen R. Lane, 1983)

23. Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Michael Henry Heim, 1984)

24. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (Barbara Bray, 1985)

25. Josef Skvorecky – The Engineer of Human Souls (Paul Wilson, 1985)

26. Per Olov Enquist – The March of the Musicians (Joan Tate, 1985)

27. Patrick Süskind – Perfume (John E. Woods, 1986)

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bodin, 1986)

29. Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual (David Bellos, 1987)

30. Thomas Bernhard – Cutting Timber (Ewald Osers, 1988)

31. Czeslaw Milosz – Poems (Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, 1988)

32. José Saramago – Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Giovanni Pontiero, 1992)

33. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (Terence Kilmartin, 1992)

34. Roberto Calasso – The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Tim Parks, 1993)

35. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, Angela Botros Samaan, 1991-3)

36. Laura Esquivel – Like Water for Chocolate (Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, 1993)

37. Bao Ninh – The Sorrow of War (Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao, 1994)

38. Victor Klemperer – I Shall Bear Witness (Martin Chalmers, 1998)

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999)

40. Josef Brodsky – Collected Poems (Anthony Hecht et al, 2000)

41. Xingjian Gao – Soul Mountain (Mabel Lee, 2001)

42. Tahar Ben Jelloun – This Blinding Absence of Light (Linda Coverdale, 2002)

43. W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, 2002)

44. Orhan Pamuk – Snow (Maureen Freely, 2004)

45. Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange, 2004)

46. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses (Ann Born, 2005)

47. Irène Némirovsky – Suite Française (Sandra Smith, 2006)

48. Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate (Robert Chandler, 2006)

49. Alaa Al Aswany – The Yacoubian Building (Humphrey Davies, 2007)

50. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007)

Read what goes along with this picture

Very interesting, but I’m thinking of combining 3 things for my library: This color system, plus a catalog number, plus a bookplate (which I’ll show you soon)… Not sure yet…. can’t make a commitment, don’t have all my books here, etc.

“With a refined treatment, the contents of the library gain the value and respect they deserve.”

‘Walking with an Essayist’–nice….

Identitytheory.com needs to be added to the blogroll….

Kafka, kafka, kafka all the time kafka…

Be creeped out by Mike Tyson’s abandoned home…. inexplicable freakiness

I want to own all of these beautiful books from Open City Books…

Read the comic about paul the ghost “you’re doing things wrong” at picturesforsadchildren.com

This is a good book review site I found http://unliteratereview.com/

I am now obsessed with Robert Bolano so I must read this: Why Bolano Matters

I am choosing between these bookplates and these bookplates. Help me choose!!!

I want to see this movie, is it on Netflix? The Hollywood Librarian

Never judge a book by its cover? I will and I’m proud of it. The Book Design Review will interest you too!

Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy deserves more of my attention: read this!

A graph to explain Bolano’s novels? Of course, I’m interested! A naive introduction here…

Add to this articles on Pamuk and Murakami… right up my alley.

The Great Bolano

An interesting site to add to the blogroll http://publishinginsider.typepad.com/

A Different Stripe… beautiful NYRB classics… I want them all! Do you have 1500 dollars I can borrow??

What I need to create my own library… to be combined with other methods… one day.

Hamlet… the facebook feed edition… McSweeney’s humor!

‘My Year As‘ amazon list….interesting in some of these.

Need to find a shorter word? Here you go

I think this is the coolest thing I’ve found all day and the only way I will order books online from now on.

Oh my gosh there is more but I’m tired of doing this right now. More Later!

 

Waiting Thoughts Thursday, Aug 7 2008 

Reading jfre6204 7:54 pm

I am still reading The Savage Detectives and I have some random thoughts about it. The best parts of this book, in my opinion, are first of all: those sections narrated by the women and second: the parts in Europe (Barcelona). I have been reading reviews where people are confused about the long middle section and they claim that there is no order or purpose to the order. I disagree and think that Juan Garcia is always in the group, somewhere, just never mentioned. I also think that the sections move off of the year 1976 and the conversations between the old man and the young poets. I think that Ulises is the main focus and that Belano (the author) is the omniscient and mysterious character that may or may not be Ulises ‘other’. If the bounce off year is 1976, then the bounce off place is Mexico City. I read in one blog that Mexico City is ‘the place’ that only Latin American authors can truly comprehend. I reallly love this book, and I’m sorry if  none of this made any sense.

I have the thought that I want to re-read all of the Madeline L’Engle books. I am wary to re-read because I have 10,000 other titles on my mind. I want to read another Rupert Thomson. I never did talk about ‘The Book of Revelation’ on my blog… but it was the most perfect ending of a book I have ever read (I’m weird about endings–usually I read the last paragraph while I’m in the middle of the book) I did that with Thomson’s book, but it didn’t make sense (obviously) until I made it there and then I closed the book and said ‘Wow’ that was the most perfect ending to this book. You’ll understand if you read it, which you should. Anyway, the other Thomson book is called ‘The Divided Kingdom’. I found this title today: The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States by: Rebeccca Suter. The next book I will probably start is Winter’s Tale by Mark Halprin. or Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.

Another thought: Cataloging Imaginary Libraries. I got this thought from another blog. Titles that authors have made up and put in their books, but that don’t exist.

lalalalalalalallalalallaalalaa, this is me waiting to hear back about a job. Been in the apartment for 3 days straight. going nutso.

love, jessica

 

Will I Have a Job Today???? Friday, Aug 1 2008 

Reading jfre6204 6:22 pm

I have no idea. Hopefully, they will call within the next 6 hours. I am not moving from this spot until they do, so I hope they do. I will be so happy if they call. I’m going to try not to think about what will happen if I don’t get this job. So, I’ll just assume that I’m going to get it. I need to get my mind off of the waiting. I’m going to watch youtube: Flight of the Conchords. So funny… ha ha ha.

This is the best video on youtube I’ve ever seen:check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U

I love it. I’ll update as soon as they decide to call me. I’m still waiting….