bibliographing

Despite its long presence in my sidebar, I only just started reading A Hero of Our Time last night, and I should really just clear my mind of all expectations about any book I haven’t read yet because they seem to be wrong more often than not lately. Anyway, I freaking love it. Love. So, this will be a quiet Sunday full of more Russians. Which means I will, as planned, get through some more Russians before starting the newly planned readalong of The Brothers Karamazov chez Dolce Bellezza.

Not much to add beyond that except to announce the winner of my The Waves giveaway. Congratulations to mel u of The Rereading Life. Mel has some good reading plans and I hope The Waves will be an excellent way to combat the “twinkies and red bull” of mediocrity. (Oh, and count me in for that Parade’s End readalong you’re thinking about!) So, send me your mailing address at nicole [at] bibliographing [dot] com and I’ll send some Virginia Woolf your way!

What could be better than a three-day weekend? A three-day weekend entirely devoted to books, of course, and mine is not—not quite. February might not be spring but cabin fever has gotten the better of me and I oscillate between hours spent paralyzed in my “reading chair” with Russians and Roberto Bolaño and frenzies of cleaning, purging, and reorganizing. I fantasize in equal parts about Orlando’s swirling sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debauchery and his wonderful, magical, enormous house, and about how if I owned my own home I’d be able to install a real, fully customized closet organization system (perhaps even a walk-in!)—not to mention, of course, built-in bookshelves (we are starting to overflow).

This morning I’ve gotten some of that energy out by going for a run, the first after a sad period of hibernation, and it’s left me feeling more energized for my reading. I’m hoping to finish up my Russian mini-project this week. I’m looking forward to the last of Woolf in Winter, The Waves, and I’m also looking forward to getting back to some Melville. The CP has indicated he just might read along, and if not for Moby-Dick then for The Confidence Man. I can hardly stand the excitement!

We’ll see. For now, an Emily Dickinson valentine:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

From Dylan Suher’s review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence at The Front Table:

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, has three epigraphs. His last major work of fiction, Snow, has four epigraphs. His novel My Name Is Red also has three epigraphs. Pamuk’s love of epigraphs is significant; they are emblematic of Pamuk’s curiously humanist brand of postmodernism. Pamuk’s novels are, at their core, composed of tiny fragments of significance: short episodes, two page chapters, key actions, key phrases, even key words, each with tiny gleams of meaning that stand alone but are amplified when those fragments come in contact and resonate with each other. These fragments are collected by Pamuk and stitched together in his distinctive voice. All of Pamuk’s novels are museums; not only museums of epigraphs, but of stories told through the collection of wondrous things.

I’ve never read Pamuk, but this reminds me of Melville: both the tiny fragments of significance and also the interest in front matter. I wonder if that translates to actually finding the reading experiences similar.

It’s February, and I already feel a bit less like I’m hibernating. After reading The Tales of Belkin I immediately felt the urge to go on with more Russian literature, an area I’m light on for no good reason. Seems like a good mini-theme for part of February, no? I’ve also finished up The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, which I think I’ll write a bit more about, and A Hero of Our Time and Poor Folk are on my little side table o’ books. I’m thinking about going for some Tolstoy as well; I have an edition of The Kreutzer Sonata and other stories as well as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (and other stories). I’d like to read War and Peace this year but not now, not yet.

I’ve had to take a bit of a break though for Woolf in Winter. Orlando is coming up for discussion this coming Friday. I just sat down with the first fifty pages and am loving it. I was getting a bit nervous earlier in the week as Anthony at Times Flow Stemmed reported a need to discontinue his Orlando read after the more-intense Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, but thus far at least I am charmed. I have some thoughts about that, but I’ll wait until Friday when I’ve actually read the book to say more.

My other break from the Russians was Bed by Tao Lin. After my unexpected enjoyment of Shoplifting from American Apparel, and further encouraged by his contributions to We Are the Friction, I decided to pick up a this book of short stories. They were a bit uneven, and it definitely seems that his newer work is better—not so much more mature as more itself—but were very good in places.

And some links I didn’t post yesterday:

• Week 2 of the 2666 group read leads to a post on a lovely Borges poem. (Las obras de Roberto Bolaño)

• verbivore introduces us to some new small presses. (Incurable Logophilia)
• “When I eat English muffins, I butter both halves and spread jam on one and eat the one with jam and butter first and the one with just butter second. I know that’s probably not how you eat them, but for me the second half acts as a sort of palate cleanser. So sit your ass down.” I eat them exactly the same way. (McSweeney’s)
• “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.” (London Review of Books)

I read a lot of blogs and other “things” on the internets, but as it turns out most of that reading is not book-related. Lately, because I have so much spare time (right), I’ve been trying to visit more of the litweb, and maybe to be a tiny bit more involved. To that end, I may be posting some Saturday Links installments of things that strike me in my travels. Don’t be upset if it’s not all fresh.

• “And the most conservative American novelist of all time, then, would have to be Nabokov.” (A Commonplace Blog)

• “A huge part of the grand hope in the Apple ‘magical’ (how many times did this come up in the Apple presentation? Like a million? And since when is technology magical? What kind of paradoxical shit is that?) is that suddenly, thanks to the vision of Steve Jobs and the genius of Apple designers, an audience will be created that suddenly craves books. This is some god-like shit going down.” (Three Percent)
• “Sturdily middle-class, troubled but not too deeply, suburban but urban as well, waspily making the rounds of the cocktail parties—when people talk about the typical New Yorker story, they may in fact be indulging a fantasy about the typical New Yorker reader.” (Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes)
• “Some of the most intriguing book lists” selected by the Seminary Coop. I want “Ordinariness: an introduction.” And all of them. (The Front Table)
• “When a book goes wrong, what matters is aesthetics.” (Incurable Logophilia)
• “Who knows what the rules are in The City of Dreadful Night.” (Wuthering Expectations)
• Plus lots more To the Lighthouse goodness. (Evening All Afternoon)

Via Three Percent comes a disgraceful tale of translation and tenure ($). A sample:

Mark Anderson, who is on leave from the Germanic-languages department at Columbia University, has experienced the vicissitudes that beset academic translators. In graduate school, he did a translation of poetry by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Princeton University Press published the book, which won a prize from the American Academy of Poets.

After Mr. Anderson, a Kafka scholar, got a job as an assistant professor at Columbia, he recalls in an e-mail message, “I was offered the chance to translate Kafka’s The Trial and was about to submit a sample when my chair got word of it and advised me, rightly, I think, not to do this until I finished my book and got tenure. Which I did.” He published a translation of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser­ while still untenured—but under a pseudonym (“Jack Dawson,” which according to Mr. Anderson is a pun on Kafka’s Czech name and means “son of Kafka”). “We had a celebratory lunch after I got tenure at Columbia, and I told the story and got a good laugh,” Mr. Anderson says. “But it’s a real issue, and I think my chair gave me excellent advice.”

Excellent advice, perhaps, if you still want to be part of such a twisted institution. As Chad W. Post of Three Percent puts it:

It seems that the main problem is in getting people to accept the idea of translation as scholarship. Which is weird to anyone actually involved in the production or promotion of literature in translation. (And by “weird” I mean “fucking incomprehensible.”) But I’ve heard from a number of people about how hard it is to justify this activity in a system that favors the production of slender monographs that are read by a couple hundred scholars.

Now, I don’t lament for its own sake the fact that we don’t see more literature in translation published in the Anglo world, and I don’t like to read much translated literature—because I recognize the enormous difficulty inherent in doing a good job, and the fact that it really, really is (or should be) scholarship. And it’s hard to trust someone to intermediate a book for you like that. But the idea that there’s even a question between the value of translating major writers versus writing the nth journal article or monograph that will only be accessible to other people inside the incestuous network that makes such an out-of-whack value judgment to begin with is absurd.

Today is a much-needed day at home after a busy Saturday, though I wish I could say “doing nothing at home.” It’s still pretty busy, but after a big suburban adventure yesterday it feels relaxing to just say in even if I do have tons of writing and organizing and cleaning and who knows what else to do.

I was scolded a bit this week about the need for a household book purge and serious acquisition moratorium, because I might have to move again someday and someone isn’t going to haul tons of books around for me. Of course, I kindly explained that I had just sent off more than a dozen things via BookMooch but had big reading plans for the year and no, it would absolutely not be appropriate to borrow everything from the library (which said someone should well know by now anyway).

So when the consumption partner wasn’t looking, I found myself a secret pile of books at Powell’s.

I mean, how could I resist The Confessions of Noa Weber when I’d just read how great it was? And House of Mist will be so good for the South American reading I have planned. And the shells and corals, excerpts from the full collection of 17th century doctor and hoarder of natural specimens, are just awesome.

This little pile came after, ahem, another earlier in the week, when I decided to jump in and get everything for my next Newberry Library seminar (not starting for a few weeks).

All these lovely books, and yet I’ve hardly touched a thing over the past week. January has been a slow month, but I need to pick up the pace, get more organized, and generally get out of winter sleep mode. Wish me luck!

Am I really writing a post about challenges? That’s never happened before. I’m not exactly a joiner and don’t really believe in challenges (see here for why), but here I am doing a few all the same.

The first round of the 2666 challenge is kicking off on Monday, January 25, with the first 51 pages of the novel. The reading schedule looks pretty doable without dragging things out impossibly. Also, I have the interesting distinction of “deaths tracker”; that is, along with a partner, I’ll be keeping an annotated list of all the deaths in the book. The group is tracking several other things as well and I’m quite into the idea.

Woolf in Winter is continuing, with To the Lighthouse scheduled for a discussion hosted by Emily on Friday, January 29. I thought Mrs. Dalloway went pretty well in terms of discussion; the posts from last week are collected here.

And finally, the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge and Clishmaclaver is kicking off over at Wuthering Expectations. It’s wild and crazy and a whole new kind of challenge. Some great pre-19th century suggestions were posted yesterday. I’m having such a hard time settling on something, but I suppose I have all year to decide.

So back when it was actually the beginning of the year, I neither had time to deal with some kind of “what am I going to do?” post nor thought I wanted to do one. After all, it’s not like I’m going to actually stay committed (four de-humiliations mentioned; none addressed!). But then I was reading all these good posts and thinking about “reading deliberately” (which I actually do do anyway, that’s not what this is about), and thinking about the blogs I read and don’t read and whether and how that should change, and, and, and…

So it leads to my usual problem, which is paralysis in the face of too much to do. And what is it that I’d like to do? Well, aside from the usual dream of “starting at the beginning” and reading…everything…chronologically, I’m interested in a few projects:

• What I have been calling the “American project”—this would include things like Washington Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and of course the Melville project is in some ways a subproject of this (though not entirely)

• The Melville project—I’ve already made some excellent progress with this and it is a sure thing
• Classics—talking ancient Greek and Latin here; a lot of “the usual,” which I have pretty much as a rule not read but which I’ve found I really, really like when I do
• German Romantics—I’d like to spend some more time with these guys after the class I took last fall
• South American fiction—I have read almost nothing from this part of the world. I mentioned wanting to read Bolaño, and Clarice Lispector has also been vaguely on my list for a while now. I’d sort of like to do a one-from-each-country type thing (verbivore has been having a lot of fun doing just that, I believe).
• A few other author-based projects—Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and Philip Roth, in particular
• More short stories!
• Eastern European fiction
• A Fitzgerald/Hemingway thing involved with my reading of Scott Donaldson’s book about the two of them
• Scottish literature—more John Galt, Tobias Smollett, Muriel Spark, Hume, Smith, plus about a million other people and of course the forthcoming Scottish literature challenge
• Oh yeah, plus all the other stuff I have sitting around the house unread!

So the list is kind of…ambitious…and doesn’t even get into the issue of “filling in the blanks” that I sorely need to deal with. But if y’all have any suggestions about stuff in these categories I shouldn’t miss…

It’s freezing cold here this Sunday, and I’m trying to use it as a bit of an opportunity to unfreeze my blogging habits and finally get some posts together about Melville. Yay! I know you all can’t wait to hear more about my journey through his work. Although I am taking a bit of a break from it now between White-Jacket and Moby-Dick.

I’ve also been up to a few other things. I finished up reading We Are the Friction, an exciting book for a print junkie consisting of short stories responding to illustrations and illustrations responding to short stories. Very cool.

I’ve also read my first ever Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, in anticipation of Woolf in Winter, which is beginning on January 15. I’d sort of purposely stayed away from Woolf in the past, for the usual reasons: my impression of her work based on hearing about it was not so hot, and not so close to my impression afterward. So yes, I liked Mrs. Dalloway, though I didn’t looove it.

I’ve been doing a lot of mulling over what I’m going to be reading in the coming year, but unfortunately I’m a bit too rushed at this exact moment to write about it, though I think I need help and/or moral support. I might do a post on that later this week. But one thing I’ve been thinking about that I can note briefly is doing a read-along of 2666. I feel sure I will like it; that is to say, I feel sure I will like Roberto Bolaño. But I’ve never read him before and don’t know if this is what I should start with, although it seems like a pretty good opportunity to actually read it and get more out of it than I would otherwise. But should I try to squeeze something else in first?