Well, this Sunday brings an end to a lovely summer vacation as well as a lovely week blogging about Clarel along with the intrepid Amateur Reader. He may have joked about blog sweeps weeks, but this was actually a nice little week for me, not least thanks to a mention on the Quarterly Conversation by Levi Stahl. So perhaps doing crazy things on the blog is good after all–like your parents telling you to just be yourself, haha. (Hey, Rebecca, does that count as bookrageous? LOL)

So what can possibly follow such excitement? Well, though you may not believe it was unplanned, I just finished up a very blog-appropriate, semi-literary, or at least literary-historical, trip, and this week bibliographing nicole will be unveiled doing various Melville-related (and other) things. With fun facts! (Well, fun for me at least, and thus certainly fun for all of you. Right?)

And then, Billy Budd and, if you can believe it, the end of the Melville project. Wow! What on earth can follow that up?

Well it’s a bit late for Sunday Salon, and I haven’t actually been reading today—the second day of a long-awaited vacation—but I did pick up Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone to read on the rest of the trip, and wanted to warn you all that…
…
Tomorrow begins Clarel week!

My part of the Unstructured Clarel Readalong will run all week. Fingers crossed for its reception.

This Sunday finds me closing in on the end of the Melville project—well, sort of. It feels like it at least. Well under way with Clarel, I have only that and Billy Budd before the end. To repeat my previous list:

• 1846: Typee
• 1847: Omoo
• 1849: Mardi; Redburn
• 1850: White-Jacket
• 1851: Moby-Dick
• 1852: Pierre
• 1855: Israel Potter
• 1856: The Piazza Tales
• 1857: The Confidence-Man
• 1876: Clarel
• 1886 (begun): Billy Budd

Of course, I still have to write about The Confidence-Man, and that’s not exactly going to be easy. That’s what’s coming at you this week, with perhaps a bit of Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War thrown in for good measure on the way to Clarel.

But what’s making this final stretch a bit stressful is that I’ll be on vacation in a bit, so I’ll be trying to take care of everything before I head off. We’ll see if that works out. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until September for my bit of the unstructured read—horrors, I know!

The Confidence-Man is a new favorite for me, by the way, and one I’ll have to read again, for sure. Hershel Parker’s essay in the Norton Critical Edition riffs off a famous London review of Moby-Dick to define the “Melvillean”:

The true Melvillean loves metaphysical mulligatawny. He, or she, likes satirical curry hot in the mouth, savors the ginger of blasphemy in diabolical ragouts, relishes punning with ideas perhaps more than punning with words. The Melvillean validates Saint Paul’s “mystery of inquity” in freaks of intimation and makes a well-thumbed textbook of Saint Augustine on Original Sin, the firmest article of faith being that human nature, like the divine nature, is “past finding out.” In un-epic moods, the Melvillean likes The Confidence-Man almost as much as Moby-Dick.

Well, color me Melvillean, folks, although I guess I have to brush up on my Augustine. Or not. (The number of books that come up reading about Melville is enough to keep me going through about a dozen other projects.)

In other news, I’ve done a(nother) blog redesign. I quite like it myself but do let me know if anything behaves strangely.

Israel Potter may make for a light week in the Melville world, but I thought it would be fun to have an even lighter Friday. Inspired by Flavorwire’s list of literature’s 10 best-dressed characters (and the even-more-awesome literary panty party at The Book Lady’s Blog), I decided to make a list of my own. Best-dressed is hardly the appropriate thing to call it. Let’s say it’s based on general stylishness, and on my having the book on my shelves. And as it turns out, my taste is a bit racy.

Blanche Ingram, Jane Eyre

Miss Ingram “was not good; she was not original,” but she was hot. “[M]oulded like a Dian,” Blanche seats herself “with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude,” and declares that she will “suffer no competitor near the throne” of her awesomeness. Surprisingly, she’s game enough to dress up for charades, “in oriental fashion: a crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist; an embroidered handkerchief knotted about her temples; her beautifully-moulded arms bare, one of them up-raised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head.” Jane thinks she looks like “some Israelitish princess.” Also kind of like a bitch.

Alex, A Clockwork Orange

How any list could leave off the horrorshow stylings of A Clockwork Orange after they’ve been so well immortalized in film is beyond me, but here’s a glimpse at Alex and his three droogs, Pete, Georgie, and Dim:

The four of us were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crutch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), George had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is), Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisy jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (‘pletchoes’ we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.

My sisters, which of you would not be all over that Pete, with his hand-shaped codpiece?

Carmen Sternwood, The Big Sleep

Philip Marlowe has a long list of hotties in front of him, but Carmen Sternwood is as good a place to start as any. Appearing in the first pages of Marlowe’s first novel-length adventure,

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me.

Chandler gets to show off his beautiful sartorial description here as elsewhere, and his sense of women’s fashion trends. Later Carmen will trade those slacks for…pretty much nothing, as Marlowe does his best to save her from her crazy self.

Freya Nielsen, Freya of the Seven Isles

Freya of the Seven Isles may be a minor work in the bigger picture of literature, but “Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) was the kind of girl one remembers.” The narrator tells us that “[t]he oval of her face was perfect,” but there’s so much more:

She could—Jasper told me once with a touchingly imbecile exultation—sit on her hair. I dare say, I dare say. It was not for me to behold these wonders; I was content to admire the neat and becoming way she used to do it up so as not to conceal the good shape of her head. …

She dressed generally in a white frock, with a skirt of walking length, showing her neat, laced, brown boots. If there was any colour about her costume it was just a bit of blue perhaps.

Fresh as a dewdrop but not so evanescent, Freya may be simple and neat but she is also wonderful and strong, a “Lady of the Isles.”

Lizaveta Grigoryevna, The Tales of Belkin

Pushkin gives us the full ridiculousness of high Russian style when Lizaveta decides, after disguising herself as a milkmaid earlier in the story, to dress up:

Liza, his dark-complexioned Liza, was powdered to the ears and wearing more kohl than Miss Jackson herself; false ringlets, much lighter than her own hair, were fluffed up like Louis XIV’s wig; sleeves à l’imbécile stuck out like Madame de Pompadour’s farthingales; her waist was pulled in tight like the letter x, and all of her mother’s diamonds that had not yet been pawned were shining on her finers, neck and ears.

That bit about a waist pulled in like the letter x is genius, by the way. Love you, Pushkin.

Madonna, “Sexing the Pheasant”

A (fictionalized) real-life fashion icon graces the first story in Lydia Millet’s collection Love in Infant Monkeys, and she is style-obsessed. Constantly making sure she uses just the right kind of Britishisms in just the right way, Madge also needs, as always, to look the part she’s playing:

The “bespoke” clothes were good, the whole “compleat” attitude. (Good thinking.) These knee breeches, for instance, were the sh-t. She bent over and stared at them. Flattering. She was “chuffed.” (Self! So good!) And guns, let’s face it: There was no better prop in the world. A woman with a gun was kind of a man in girls’ clothes, a transvestite with an external dildo. But guns had more finesse. A gun was basically a huge iron dildo designed by someone French and classy.

Never did I actually want to be anything like Madonna until reading that passage. Not that that’s actually Madonna, of course. But, hell yeah!

Louise, “Artists and Models”

One of the stars of this Anaïs Nin story is a tubercular nymphomaniac with a pretty awesome look, in her own very special way of course:

She had a chalk-white face, burning black eyes deeply sunk in her face, with eyelids painted green. She had a voluptuous figure, which she covered very sleekly in black satin. Her waist was small in proportion to the rest of her body. Around her waist she wore a huge Greek silver belt, about six inches wide, studded with stones.

The sculptor telling Louise’s story goes on to compare her belt to a chastity belt, but it’s hardly that. This is Nin after all.

Catherine, The Garden of Eden

Flavorwire were fans of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, but newly married Catherine Bourne has a much more interesting style to my mind. Honeymooning in the south of France, she decides to get as tanned as humanly possible, bleach her hair as light as humanly possible, and then cut it as short as a schoolboy’s. These are her daytime activities; at night she is busy creating some topsy-turvy marital relations. She wears a white sharkskin suit to accentuate her dark skin and striped fisherman’s shirts to the beach. Espadrilles, linen, tailored slacks, rustic skirts. Lovely, lovely—and what’s more stylish than Hemingway’s prose?

Ada, Ada, or Ardor

Who could be more perfectly stylish than literature’s most perfect woman (have it your way; I think she is)? Not always what you would call attentive to clothing, Ada often leaves herself, shall we say, exposed to Van’s gaze, as when “[h]er flimsy, loose frock happened to be so deeply cut out behind that whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head…Van…could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body.” It’s her unselfconsciousness that makes this so perfect, just as when, “high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping,” she slips into a tangle with Van. “She was wearing his wristwatch and a cotton frock.” And no underpants.

Honorable Mentions

I don’t want this list to imply that I disagree with many of Flavorwire’s choices. I don’t, although I think it a bit thick that they chose Psmith over Bertie if they were going to do a Wodehouse. Another honorable mention goes to Becky Sharp, a favorite of a super-stylish friend but rather on my “hated characters” list. I couldn’t bring myself to flip through such a fat book for a good description, either.

Oh, ya, sorry guys, no fancy-pants pictures for you. This is about the writing, ain’t it? Not how good Isabelle Huppert looks in a corset.

With July almost over, I wanted to mention a very unimportant occurrence that passed by this month while I was busy talking about Melville—this blog’s two-year anniversary. Thanks to all my readers, old and new, regular and less so, for stopping by and making the project worth continuing. I hope you’ll keep finding it worthwhile as well, though sometimes I feel my choices almost calculated to drive you away! (For an example of such, see tomorrow’s post.)

Last week was Moby-Dick week, a week of devotions to a pretty seriously weird book. And while it wasn’t as weird as Mardi, most people weren’t ready for it when it was published in 1851. What else was going on around the same time?

In 1850, Melville himself published White-Jacket, a greater commercial success than Moby-Dick. It’s definitely more accessible, but to a faithful reader of Melville, not that far off. That same year Dickens was publishing David Copperfield, Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, and Turgenev A Month in the Country. Wordsworth, Balzac, and Bastiat died; Stevenson and de Maupassant were born.

In 1851, Hawthorne came out with The House of the Seven Gables, and Mrs. Gaskell published Cranford (serially). Kate Chopin was born, while Mary Shelley and James Fenimore Cooper died.

The next year, Hawthorne was hard at work yet again, with The Blithedale Romance and The Snow-Image, and other twice-told tales. Tolstoy gave us Childhood and Turgenev A Sportsman’s Sketches. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, and Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et camées. Marx published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Gogol died. And more Melville again; this time, Pierre.

Rarely do I pause like this to see what’s happening in more than just the immediate vicinity of my chosen reading, and I wonder if it’s another exercise in seeking meaning where there may be none, or very little. Of course, one problem is my own ignorance: of all the titles listed here, I’ve only read one in addition to the novels by Melville (though I’ve read other works by most of the authors mentioned). I’ll have to wait for Amateur Weeder’s apology for literary history, I suppose, as I continue to stumble my way through.

In the meantime, I can put at least my work through Melville in context:

• 1846: Typee
• 1847: Omoo
• 1849: Mardi; Redburn
• 1850: White-Jacket
• 1851: Moby-Dick
• 1852: Pierre
• 1855: Israel Potter
• 1856: The Piazza Tales
• 1857: The Confidence-Man
• 1876: Clarel
• 1886 (begun): Billy Budd

That’s six down, six to go, and I’m already under way with Pierre, and The Piazza Tales will be a re-read. Summer seems to be going by faster than I’d expected, somehow, but I’d really like to finish up this project by the end of it—so I can move on to the next one, of course!

This Sunday has bigger concerns than books, I’m afraid: the World Cup final! Plenty of time for reading around it, I suppose, but that will certainly be the highlight of my day. Unless the Dutch lose, that is. (Kidding, kidding.)

On a book-related note, before it’s too late (as in, before today’s match), do check out this quite fun offer from Archipelago books of titles from countries participating in the tournament. What better excuse to up your international reading quotient?

I’m headed off on a business trip tomorrow, so unfortunately I’ll be quite busy for much of the week, but I hope my dear readers will be busy too—with my Moby-Dick week! If I’m slow in responding to comments, it’s because of how much I’m enjoying myself in all-day meetings and business-related dinners. At least I should be able to make some time for reading on the plane—assuming I don’t have to work then too!

In some ways I’m a little disappointed with my re-start of the Melville project. First, I had hoped to unveil a bit of very exciting (to me only) guest posting, but that didn’t work out. But more importantly, I don’t like to feel so sluggish, and Moby-Dick can overwhelm a blogger. People have written books on this stuff, after all—lots of them. But it was finally time for me to stop worrying and love the incompleteness. This week is about sharing my joy, and little more. I know a lot of you already feel that joy, but for anyone who doesn’t, I hope it infects you:

Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

And into the very milk and sperm of one of my purest reading joys.

I mentioned on Sunday that I had had a particularly good find while book shopping. First, it looked like someone had unloaded a few Ford Madox Ford books at Powell’s, which I proceeded to snap up. But the real excitement was over And the Whale Is Ours: Creative Writing of American Whalemen.

(Do I even need to explain why?)

Pamela Miller has compiled creative writing from 42 American men who worked in the whale fishery during its heyday, mostly officers or future officers.

As much as possible, the selections are drawn from original material written on board ship by whalemen who did not intend to publish immediately, if at all, rather than those who wrote highly descriptive narratives of dramatic whale chases and foreign ports for hometown newspapers. These are the obscure journal keepers who consciously attempted literary expression for their own pleasure, or that of their friends and families.

Cool enough for you? How about this, “Joseph Hersey’s illustrated poem about a fresh meal of sea-hog”:

Or perhaps your taste runs more to William H. Macy’s poem on “love founded on ten minutes acquaintance in the bush”:

Who is’t that thou seekest in yon wood so green
Where so seldom is aught but the birds to be seen
Who is’t that thou seekest in yonder deep shade
Tis my heart’s dearest treasure my fair Island maid

I’ve only dipped in and out so far but I’m finding it fascinating. I’m looking forward to really sitting down with it after I finish up with some other creative writing by an American whaleman.

Kevin of Interpolations asked a great question over at Time’s Flow Stemmed, which led to a follow-up post on which authors might make a future version of the most-read list but who don’t yet have five books under their belt.

I’ve been thinking some about this and it’s a tough question. A few of the writers where I only made it to four books do have a fifth book I haven’t read yet (e.g., David Mitchell, Jonathan Franzen). Those will definitely make it onto the list in the near-distant future, but don’t strictly fall into this category. Who does? It’s actually a bit hard for me to think of contemporary authors I read who are so contemporary that they haven’t yet made it to the five-novel mark. Narrowing that down to people I would definitely read more of is even harder; typically I fall in semi-love with a contemporary novelist and then get over it really, really fast.

So who might make it?

• I seem to have a bit of a thing, at least lately, for Tao Lin. Counting only novels and story collections I don’t think he’s got five books out yet, but it’s also the sort of thing I could easily see myself giving up reading before making the cut.
• Yoko Ogawa certainly has more than five novels written, but only three of her books have been released thus far in English and I could definitely see myself continuing to read them as they are released.
• Joseph O’Neill has four books out, of which I’ve only read one, but I did love Netherland. I can hardly promise he’ll make the list considering my half-assedness thus far, but it seems like a fair possibility.
• Interestingly, the surest bet so far seems like Russ Roberts, who writes what I guess you could call genre fiction, but of a whole different stripe from what that might otherwise call to mind. But I won’t lie; I’m totally a sucker for an econ novel.
• Marilynne Robinson seems like another fair possibility, though I have only read Gilead, which I sort of hated. Housekeeping is definitely on the list of things to do, but her latest book has put me off in a serious way (not that I’ve read it).
• Why not add Matthew Sharpe to the list? I liked Jamestown, as I recall. He’s written a bunch of other stuff, it looks like, but not five novels. Again, I haven’t read it all, or even more than one. More on that below.
• I want to also add James Wood to the list, but then I want to say, “Who am I kidding?” But actually that one is probably sort of realistic.

Going through this process has seemed to reveal a lot more meaning to me than the previous one. Namely, I really do not read that much contemporary literature, and what I do read is largely focused on writers who are established enough to have more than five books already. Going through the lists of my reading for the past several years, I note many writers who would have made the cut had I made this list at the same—one example is Jonathan Safran Foer—but whose books I never plan on reading again. I also tend to sort of take small stabs at people (e.g., Matthew Sharpe) and then kind of forget about them.

I do think that, irrationally, I place a lesser value in general on contemporary novels. But that’s on average. And it’s in fact not irrational considering the sheer volume of what is published. And of course anyone who reads this blog would know how comparatively little contemporary literature I read. I read lots of other book blogs highly focused on new releases (and of course the larger book reviewing world is extremely focused on new releases) and sometimes feel a bit freaked out that I am so not a part of that at all, almost. The “new releases” I do read tend to be reprints from NYRB and the like. It does make me feel like I am neglecting, I don’t know, “the outside world,” but in terms of my reading life that is a relatively recent development. I still try to make space for things I truly anticipate will be of value, but there are obvious difficulties in making that determination.

Still, yet again, the whole thing is a long-term project.

I don’t have much of a book-related update to post, as I’ve really been making a holiday of the holiday weekend. So while I’m slightly “behind” (my mental schedule) with Moby-Dick, it’s still very much coming and I’m still very much looking forward to it.

But in the meantime I’m looking forward to delicious brunch with my visiting bff. And we had an awesome book shopping trip yesterday—my first time taking her on the Hyde Park run of Seminary Co-op, 57th St. Books, and Powell’s. And I think I found something pretty awesome in fact. More tomorrow!