(no subject)

[proximoception]

What to read next year?

I don't want to try to beat 75. I'd probably have to turn to Dr. Seuss to. And the number goal, combined with an internet-atrophied attention span, meant I read very few even mid-length books this year, most of which were collections of shorter pieces.

One thing I'll do the same will be rereading a lot: well over half of this year's books were rereads. I've just reached a point where that's become a much more reliable source of great experiences; I guess I'm reaping the reward for the wider reading I did when younger. I'm sure a point comes when you can burn out on rereading too, but I'm not near it.

Or maybe I just needed comfort this year? And last year, now I think of it, with all the Borges and Calvino. Maybe that need will pass with what inspired it.

As a compromise between reading new and reading old, I think I might try tackling consecutively a few authors I usually read around in: Emerson, especially, maybe going through his journals in order, and the relevant collections of poems and essays as I get up to when he's writing them; Dickinson's letters likewise, reading each year of her poems in the Franklin edition concurrently with that letter year; ditto Kafka, though maybe just with his diaries and stories, since most of his letters don't do much for me.

I imagine I've read all Dickinson's poems by now, but perhaps I missed a few. I used to read her for hours on end on plagiarist.com, despite owning the various print editions, because of the 'random' button they had there. She was something like twenty percent of their whole database, so you only had to click through a few non-her poems, usually by Robert Service, to get back to Dickinson. I liked there being just one poem highlighted on the page, giving everything she wrote a special attention. But I want to annotate her. I'm trying to annotate now, and she's one of the few writers where I do feel like making lines and circles and drawings on her poems.

For rereading, I need to revisit Lawrence and see what I make of him now. Women in Love at least. The Magic Mountain I keep thinking about, and Emperor and Galilean. I didn't get around to much Shelley in the summer. A complete run through is in order. As is seeing what Volokhonsky and Pevear make of Tolstoy, Lydia Davis of Proust.

Of the new things read this year, most of the best were Chekhov stories. There's a number of his I still haven't read.

I'm not sure I can hold off from Little, Big until the anniversary edition's out.

Reading Shakespeare makes it hard to read non-Shakespeare. I might do a few more of his aloud these next couple weeks: Antony, Love's Labour's, Comedy, Winter's Tale, Othello, Troilus, Midsummer. Haven't read some of those in ages.

It's time for Resurrection, the book I've been saving since 2000. Maybe I'll start the new year with it, or use it to end 2010 if I've hit 75 by c. Christmas?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Hadji Murad, did you ever mention? Short. Great.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Wasn't one of my favorites, oddly. Maybe I was too young.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Also, do you ever mention Isaac Babel? Isaac Babel is amazing.

And The Master and Margerita?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

With Babel I missed most of the cavalry stories. He is amazing.

The Bulgakov sounded suggestive for my thesis before it changed, and my wife loves it. Yes, maybe that one.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Read Your Face Tomorrow.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Word.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Dammit, why'd you have to remind me of the existence of Robert Service? Freakin' local poets, man.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Service, London, Chaplin, Palin. Service London Chaplin Palin. ServiceLondonChaplinPalin. Svlchpnsvlchpnsvlchpnsvlchpn.

[parrotlover.livejournal.com]

Little, Big!!

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yes parrotlover, Little, Big.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Love the idea of the Dickinson project. Her letters are almost unbearably gorgeous.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Her Selected Letters are one of my go-to books, as are the old Anchor edition for her school-age letters, but I never tackled the whole sequence. But I inherited a three-volume Johnson set that once belonged to my grandmother's second husband, whose pencil annotations are everywhere but light enough to be ignorable. He died still working at a theory of his that Dickinson had an affair with her brother Austin, or was molested by him - one of those. He was a playwright. Maybe there's something about playwrightinghood that needs to find sex once a small group of people has been put on a mental stage, like the family in the letters. Not unlike what biographers do with the Emily doll and the Austin's wife doll? But who knows, maybe the full letters bear one or more of these ideas out.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! Yes, I have to say I naturally resistant to biographical readings of this nature. (A mulish tic. I feel the same way about biopics too, so perhaps it isn't limited to literary history.) Still, it might be fascinating to read with the idea in mind as a kind of conceit. & of course it is difficult to resist the trio of Master Letters, which lead one into all kinds of speculation as a matter of course. ( I am partial to the idea that the Master is a composite figure, which seems so much more interesting than the theories about Bowles or Wentworth Higginson or God any of the other oft-proposed candidates. There was a time in my life I was thinking an awful lot about American epistolary poetry, which leads back to Dickinson no matter which way you turn.) I've made a pledge to read much more of other peoples' correspondence in the coming year. Feel free to let me know if you've got suggestions--especially for collections of literary letters...

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

His being a composite figure would fit Dickinson's strange collapsing in so many poems of Death/Nature/Artistic Sublimity as a powerful male presence whose courtings she alternately sought and avoided. And her poems that seem at first about virginity loss work just as well as descriptions of poetic election, it seems to me?

I'm not much of a letter reader. I'm sure you're already onto the ones I can read with pleasure: Dickinson, Byron, Bishop, Swinburne, sometimes Keats and Crane. Shelley, though I've never heard of anyone else much liking his. Woolf and Kafka seem better in their diaries.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Chandler? He's a far better writer in his letters than his books, I think, although that alone's not much defense. His writing, in his letters, on film and how it was changing, how it was condensing, how the shorthands were appearing and settling, is worthwhile. He's right, but he's wrestling with it, and it's great to get both of those at once - especially since that's not what his fiction's like, at all.