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I’m preparing this post in advance, so I suppose I run some risk of missing a late entry to the Unstructured Clarel Readalong, but let’s be real… It’s the end of September, and that means it’s time for a wrap-up post for the Unstructured Clarel Readalong! My first contribution was an overview of [...] Well, it looks like publicly announcing that I would be lightening up on blogging for a few weeks really helped me not write anything at all, so perhaps publicly announcing what I plan to get up to after the rest of my break will help me get a good start after my vacation. I [...] I expect blogging to be somewhat light for the next several weeks. Now that I’ve finished wrestling with Melville—for now, for now—and am reading at whim I won’t have quite as much to say. Plus, I’ll be busy with a few other things. For one, I’ll be getting ready, both at home and at [...] Richard Yates, Tao Lin’s latest novel, has been described as better and more mature than his last, Shoplifting from American Apparel. More mature, that could well be, but it’s also more claustrophobic. Where Shoplifting followed Sam—its Lin-like narrator—around among a relatively large group of friends and acquaintances, Richard Yates rarely leaves the confines of [...] I wanted to post today about Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, much-recommended to and finally read by me. But damn. What a hell of a story. Next week I should be going to a Fallada-related event, so perhaps I will have more to say then, but for now, just two brief notes. First, [...] I’m not sure if I agree with the claim in Judith Shulevitz’s very good and very smart review of Freedom in Slate that Patty Berglund is one of Jonathan Franzen’s two best characters, along with Alfred Lambert of The Corrections, but I do think she is well within the top five and deceptively interesting. [...] In some ways, the content of Freedom came as a surprise to me. I knew, between The Discomfort Zone and magazine interviews, that Jonathan Franzen was big into bird watching. I also knew that he was not so into TVs, consumerism, and all that jazz, from the same interviews, his novels, and the essays [...] Well, I’ve come to the end! Let me state the usual for a project recap: I did not do as much as I wanted, and I still have lots more I want to read! (Even more Melville: I did not read every single poem or short story, and hardly any of his letters.) But…I [...] For a novella so heavy on the psychology, it should perhaps not be surprising that the narrator of Billy Budd spends a lot of time describing people’s eyes. The whole aspect of the three main characters and several of the minor ones is described in minute detail. This is another instance of Melville’s focus [...] After Clarel, Herman Melville published only two books of poetry, both privately, before his death in 1891, but he also worked on a piece of prose that would be found among his papers and remain unpublished until 1924, during his revival. Billy Budd was begun around 1886 and recalls much about Melville’s earlier work. [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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