(no subject)

54. The Catcher in the Rye
55. Cold Mountain (Han-shan)
56. Till I End My Song
57. Tale of the Unknown Island
58. Borges at 80
59. Poems from Giacomo Leopardi, Heath-Stubbs
60. Conversation Hearts

I wasn't trying to cheat with the Saramago, my wife just asked me to read it to her since she'd somehow missed it. With the Crowley I probably was trying to cheat, but it turns out it's a good little book.

To make 75, which I really want to (shut up, my life sucks), I'll have to read a book almost every two days. Watch me just read the paperback edition of Twain's "War Prayer" fifteen times on New Year's Eve.

I think I've been enjoying Achewood, which I'd never taken a serious look at, more than any of those seven. It starts out unpromisingly, but by the mid-2000s it's as good as c. 1950 Pogo. And one of the many things the two have in common is that rise from unpromisingness, that Shakespeare-style arc from doing crowd-oriented work for pay in some new, little-respected branch of art to finding you can please very much to finding you can please while standing on your head to finding in your art you can stand any which way while others stand just one to finding out how strange a thing it is to stand at all. Not that he'll go further like Shakespeare, he'll lapse like Kelly if he hasn't already - I have a few months of 2010 to go. But it's been wonderful to see.

Guess I'll again pick up some of the books I read some significant portion of but then abandoned this last year or so, including but not limited to Chekhov's Complete Short Novels, The Idiot, The Poems of Li Po, Eugene Onegin, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Wise Blood, The Turn of the Screw, Pierre, Moby-Dick, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, Pride and Prejudice, The Trial, The Scarlet Letter, Vanishing Point, The Great Gatsby, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Amerika, Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Shelley's Poems, Whitman's Selected Poems, Dickinson's Selected Poems, Walden, Three Tales, Four Freedoms, In Other Words, The Cave, The Selfish Gene, Tender Is the Night, Invisible Man, Adventures of Master F.J., The Temple, Ralegh's Poems, Marlowe's Poems, [Bloom's] Romantic Poetry (two volumes), Best Poems of the English Language, In Our Time, Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice, The Box Man, Purgatorio, The Lost Steps, Eros the Bittersweet, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Shakespeare's Narrative Poems, Crumb's Kafka, Brod's Kafka, Astrophel and Stella, Amoretti, On Love, Lucien Leuwen, Saramago's Blog, Lermontov's Poems, ABBA ABBA, Preambles, Kafka's Parables, The Name of the World, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Numbers in the Dark, Cosmicomics, T Zero, Difficult Loves, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (second time this year), Jesus' Son (second time too), Savage Detectives, Hamburger's Buchner, An Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires, Nine Stories, Dialogues with Leuco, Hard Labor, Galassi's Canti, Chekhov's Later Stories, St. Peter's Day, First Love, Holmes' Footsteps, Chekhov's Letters, Byron's Letters and Prose (various volumes), His [Byron's] Very Self and Voice, Keats' Letters, Kafka's Diaries, Emerson's Journals, Emerson's Essays, Trelawney's Recollections. [Also Breaking the Spell, Verses and Versions and Davenport's Hunter Gracchus.]

About 75 of those. Madness.

(no subject)

Invisible houses are lives.

Attackers of utopia say it can never be that way, that it's there in the very word. There is no place where we can stay safe and happy.

But there must be a place where we can stay safest, happiest, logically, though not necessarily a way to identify it. And probably not one place, what with boredom, what with love of the new, what with strokes of ill fortune, but a movement among places. A way. The home we seek - because how can you not seek where you're happiest and safest? - must not be bound by walls. It can't be described as a building, quite. But presumably it will involve places where we sleep, eat, shelter, work. Our dream home will include houses. Being what we are it would have to.

Hence the (unintended?) resonance of "in my house are many mansions" I imagine. We'd need a few, surely. Or at least a shack and a beach and a bar and the house of another.

We have modes of life that drift away then back. Hence the resonance (intended) of "love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement" - one of our many.

But there are things that are like a house: like that day when young when you looked out at the rain and understood, registered why you were in with the chairs and rugs and dryness. Like that time you went into her house or into his and found that you were welcome there. A house is where needs are met, where life becomes what life can be where they're finally met. A thing for you, not on you or past you.

And I hardly need to mention the other kind. The invisible house where a house, a way you once walked, is no longer there. Hence you can no longer see it. It is there in the sentence 'A house is no longer there.' The invisible house is there in these words, scraps and signs.

It's not quite a metaphor, either, the way a road can be just a metaphor (not always - sometimes a road is a wallless, a ceilingless hallway).

There's something about where you are, where you were that truly is physical. Hence I would never call these houses intangible. Your memories never fall through the floor, however they decay. Therefore they have one. Your memories are chambered.

As are your expectations, made of memories. Nobody wants the world, and nobody ever had it. We had houses. We want houses. The present house is the intangible one, the one where the feel can change, where it's hard to feel what it feels like or where it quite ends.

Calvino's cities, Carson's towns, Hawthorne's towns and forests - these are nearby, of course. Maybe cities and forests are where you go to find or escape from a house. Melville's boats and islands? I don't want to emphasize the boundaries here.

And the other other invisible house, the chapel or tower? What if we're in someone else's house, is I guess the idea. Someone who lives and intends and is not us. The Ring Girl's barn or chainsaw massacrer's abattoir - or sudden castle where something's expected of us. Here we are at something else's expectation. Or trapped in someone else's planned-out life.

"What would be neat is if there were a hatch." Where will our home be? Where is our tomb?