Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life. Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

Yes, I have that Yes song in my head all the time. All the time. What does that mean??? Anyway, I finished a book (wow, that almost never happens these days). Its because I spend all day watching The Wire, which I wouldn’t do if Dominic West wasn’t so damn good looking. Heir to the Glimmering World is one of Cynthia Ozick’s fictions, very readable. Her writing comes more alive when you read it out load. Otherwise, there were some loose ends, tied up quickly ends, and predictable ends. The intrigue is to some extent kept under wraps, and I don’t know if that was purposeful. I would have liked to have had an inside look, a hint, a tip. I’d recommend it as a quick read and an introduction to Ozick as an essayist. I don’t know if I would pick up her other fiction though.

Question: what is the specific job of the Interlibrary Loan Office. You’d think that they receive a request. File it. Receive an answer from another library. Follow up on it. Receive the item. Deliver the item requested. I would fairly give this process 3 weeks to be completed. Unless the item is rare, hard to find, etc. I waited over 4 weeks for the last Proust book. Finally received it and was told that it had been delivered and returned twice before I actually received a notice about it. My question is: what else could possibly be happening in the Interlibrary Loan office besides this straightforward task of loaning between libraries. You’d think it would be their main objective and that the item wouldn’t be tossed back and forth between libraries like a hot potato. I don’t know, its very mysterious. It could very well be that they are swamped with other types of work/problems/tasks/etc. and my request for a loan was put on the back-burner for a few weeks. Maybe they should change the name of the department. Or maybe its just this library–the land of calling in sick/vacation/personal days.

Anyhoo–I have received the last Proust–Finding Time Again and will attempt to finish it in 1 week. If not, I’ll have to track down a copy in NYC when I get there. If I get there.

Love,

Jessica

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Hiatus–Disrupted! Friday, Jun 6 2008

This is where I was for the past 3 days… Tybee Island. The trip was great–except for the drive home. I drove through the worst weather imaginable and it was terrifying and I hate inclement weather, especially in the land of God’s wrath… East Central Georgia. I finished one book while at the beach: Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann. Interesting to say the least. I mean, if Cambodian hookers interest you at all. Yet, even with the off color subject matter I still enjoy his writing. I am also reading Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World, which is way cool. And started William H. Gass’ The Tunnel, which I am probably not going to continue reading… he has described this 600+ page book as a “lump of darkness.” I am enjoying another poetry book by Zagajewski and have a new favorite poem, would you like to read it? It is called “Lullaby”

“No sleep, not tonight. The window blazes.

Over the city, fireworks soar and explode.

No sleep: too much has gone on.

Rows of books stand vigil above you.

You’ll brood on what’s happened

and what hasn’t. No sleep, not tonight.

You inflamed eyelids will rebel,

your fiery eyes sting,

your heart swell with remembrance.

No sleep. The encyclopedias will open

and poets, dressed carefully,

bundled for winter, will stroll out one by one.

Memory will open, with a sudden hiss

like a parachute’s. Memory will open,

you won’t sleep,

rocked slowly through clouds,

an easy target in the firework’s glow.

No sleep: so much has gone on,

so much been revealed.

You know each drop of blood

could compose its own scarlet Iliad,

each dawn author

a dark diary. No sleep,

under the thick blanket of roofs, attics,

and chimneys casting out handfuls of ash.

Pale nights row noiselessly into the sky,

their oars silk stockings delicately rustling.

You’ll go out to the park, and tree limbs

will amiably thump your shoulder, making

sure, confirming your fidelity. No sleep.

You’ll race through the uninhabited park,

a shadow facing more shadows.

You’ll think of someone who’s no more

and of someone else living so fully

that her life at its edges changes

to love. Light, more light

gathers in the room. No sleep, not tonight.”

I like that poem. I’m glad I survived to share it with you.

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drowning in bookish waters Friday, May 16 2008

This picture is taken from a website of an artist that does a book sorting art project that is very cool. www.ninakatchadourian.com

is the link. Since my last posting I have finished Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. I can’t understand why the book exasperated me so much. Part of it was the presence of so many typographical errors, you’d think that the editor felt the same way as me and couldn’t even be bothered to fix what was wrong, much less cut it down. I think it would have worked great as a standard 230 page novel. The stuff about the rapture and the following of the scientists turned me off, the whole thing was absurd and just exasperating. That being said, I am recommending to myself to read the rest of what Lydia Millet wrote… I don’t know why. I really enjoyed How the Dead Dream, so I’ll keep going and give her another chance. I have also given up for the moment on Cynthia Ozick’s Art and Ardor. It is very difficult and about a lot of subjects that I can’t really relate to. Her other book was more mainstream and more enjoyable. I rarely give up in mid book…but I think in this situation it is the best idea.

I’m reading Werewolves in their Youth and the Miranda July. And re-reading Ignorance by Milan Kundera. I just feel like I’m not doing reading justice right now. I don’t know what could pick me up out of this slump. I’m enjoying what I am reading, but I’m not ultra inspired at the moment.

I think I’m going to go out on a limb and read Hunter S. Thompson or Ursula le Guin. Something radically different. I’m giving every book  I read a rating in my book journal. Lydia Millet got 2 and a half stars (yes, Star Search helped me come up with these qualifications) and Model World got 3 and a half stars.

I’ll keep you updated.

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A Room of One’s Own Friday, May 2 2008

Newsflash. I haven’t been posting because I’ve been reading too much! After the library asked for my books back because I am graduating, I had to go beg them to extend my borrowing privileges! I got a raise, Andrew is in NJ calling me from Geraldo’s home phone. My bowling pin burn is coming off. And: I am graduating!

On to the books: I really feel that I’m not doing this whole reviewing what I’ve read thing justice. Right now I am reading:

1) The Captive and the Fugitive by Marcel Proust–Almost done. This is the most disjointed book so far. There was a brief scene in Madame Vedurin’s house, where Monsieur de Charlus caused a stink over something and the rest of the book has been Marcel weeping, postulating, prostrating, and lamenting over Albertine. It’s very beautiful–don’t get me wrong. But it is not as graceful as Swann’s yearnings over Odette. I miss Swann. Let’s just say that I’ll be delighted when I am finished and will be able to take a look at the thing as a whole. Believe me, if it was too much or too awfully boring I would have quit by now. There’s something in it that keeps me going and it’s hard to explain. The language is enough to carry the sometimes nonexistent plot. I don’t even usually need a plot–books these days rarely have a plot. I just need something to keep me in the scene, something to make sure I don’t wander off. Elstir, Francoise, and Jupien and those kinds of characters are what keep me in the book. Marcel likes to lay around in bed and worry.

2) Art and Ardor by Cynthia Ozick–another book of essays. So far I have read a lot about Virginia Woolf and thus the portrait above. I am reading now about E.M. Forster’s secret homosexual novel. Bloomsbury is now interesting to me and I really want to read more Woolf before too long.

3) Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by: Lydia Millet–the three men who starred in the Manhattan Project have been brought back to life in the 21st century and are mooching off a married librarian in New Mexico. She believes in their plights and their hearts and her push over husband may not make it. I really like the way this is written and am savoring it slowly.

4) Master and Margarita by: Mikhail Bulgakov–Getting stranger and stranger. Margarita has shown up and she is horrible! I can only imagine that the way this novel ends can only be in the most unimaginable horror ever. It’s almost unbelievable. I love it.

5) The Virgin in the Flames by Chris Abani–just started it so I don’t have any idea how I’ll like this. So far, it’s interesting. Very contemporary.

6) Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti–yes, I’m still reading this because only one chapter at a time can be handled. This is not to say that I don’t like it, it’s just hard to swallow in large chunks.

I will try to finish one of these this weekend, so I can start something equally as wonderful and share it with you!

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don’t surround yourself with yourself Monday, Apr 28 2008

I must say: I was very successful with reading this weekend. I finished Drown by Junot Diaz and The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick. Both were very cool. I am done with college!!! Congratulations you! Going back to books: Junot Diaz is the man. I can’t wait until he writes more stuff. These are short stories, along the same lines as Brief, Wondrous but more autobiographical and coming of age. The stories connect loosely and are irreverent and sometimes electric. There is a lot going on about family relationships, love relationships, immigration, etc. The Din in the Head, by Cynthia Ozick was very awesome as well. This is a collection of essays written on a variety of topics. The ones I most enjoyed were about Helen Keller, Robert Atler, and John Updike. The way she writes is very inviting, even if you aren’t familiar with the subject matter. I will read everything else by her. I am also wanting to read all of Jane Austen soon, and I probably will. In the meantime, here is a passage from Proust, which I am diligently still reading…

“Two hypotheses that arise again in relation to all important questions, the questions of the reality of Art, of Reality itself, of the Eternity of the soul: we have to choose between them; and in the case of Vinteuil’s music, one was faced with the choice at every moment, in a variety of forms. For example, this music seemed to me something more true than all known books. Sometimes I thought that the reason was that the things we feel in life are not experienced in the form of ideas, and so their translation into literature, an intellectual process, may give an account of them, explain them, analyse them, but cannot recreate them as music does, its sounds seeming to take on the inflections of our being, to reproduce that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us the specific ecstasy that we feel from time to time and which, when we say ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful sunshine!’, is not conveyed at all to our neighbor, in whom the same sun and the same weather set off quite different vibrations.”

My next three library picks are Joy Williams, Gabriel Josipovici, and Nora Jablonski. Happy trails!

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This is TBR overload… Friday, Apr 25 2008

I have started Cynthia Ozick’s The Din in the Head, a collection of essays that are really interesting and thus have added more to my to be read list then I can handle. After finding this article…on The Millions Blog I have decided to use this process: I have put on LibraryThing all those books I want to read soon. So far, there are only 48! I will number each book and then randomly generate a number and then read that book! Soon, I will be through the list and be a super reader! Proust is going swimmingly and now I will quote from the Ozick which is spectacular

“I do not know who Patti Smith was; there was much afoot that I did not know as I sat in my room with its yellow wallpaper reading Henry James and volumes of Jewish history and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet here I was, all at once, steeped in discord and chaos: oh, the novel, the novel! Authority was demanding that I cease to trust its familiar form, that its familiar form was broken forever, and that to continue to hope for it in the old way was to be exiled to the writer’s ultima Thule; only the marginal and the mediocre and the weak would fail to recognize this. Authority had wiped me out. And where was I, after all, and what was I, while Authority and its enviable sharers and minions were exulting in the great red-hot Downtown? In my room with the yellow wallpaper, writing, in defeat, a superannuated, superseded, and moribund novel that was already fouled by the stench of its predictable death throes.”

“Contemplating the unpredictable trajectory of Tolstoy’s life puts one in mind of those quizzical Max Beerbohm caricatures, wherein an old writer confronts–with perplexity, if not with contempt–his young self. So here is Tolstoy at seventy-two, dressed like a muzhik in belted peasant tunic and rough peasant boots, with the long hoary priestly beard of a vagabond pilgrim, traveling third class on a wooden bench in a fetid train carriage crowded with the ragged poor. In the name of the equality of souls he has turned himself into a cobbler; in the name of the pristine Jesus he is estranged from the rites and beliefs of Russian Orthodoxy; in the name of Christian purity he has abandoned wife and family. He is ascetic, celibate, pacifist. To the multitude of his followers and disciples (Gandhi among them), he is a living saint.”

I will try to update my TBR list accordingly. Have a happy Friday!

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