Among the many terrible things I have done in my life are writing the blog that was bibliographing and also stopping writing it and finally letting it completely disappear through absurd negligence, but it wasn’t finally after all because then ((almost) finally) I realized I could find it again and resurrect it, at least in part, in some form, and now among the terrible things I have done is (finally?) also republishing at least some of it. There is absolutely no point to any of this. But the archive is accumulating and will continue to do so.
This has meant reading some of these old posts, and something struck me about the last…many of them, which is that they were not, something, they were not about good enough books? That’s not right. They were not, perhaps, appreciationist enough, or at all. I do not feel compelled to bring such posts back. But more importantly I wonder if they were the reason I had to stop writing. I’m not sure that’s the case or that that makes sense. They felt hollow and joyless, or maybe even emotionless. But I know the real reason I had to stop writing was the voice in my head that just kept saying, over and over, as it has been since I started republishing yesterday, “Schweigen.” (Perhaps notably, the actual last post, on Ema, the Captive, did not feel like this, and will be republished.)
I don’t know what this space will end up as, if anything. On verra.
There are some things I have read since I’ve been gone, including some good things. Toward the end of bibliographing, I was re-reading Your Face Tomorrow; I’ve re-read it twice more since then, along with first readings of a few other Marías novels that were characteristically excellent. Another late bibliographing post was on Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island; I recently read The Making of Incarnation, also typical of the author. I have re-read Under the Volcano several more times. I have re-read a lot of Conrad, in some cases a few times. I have read some of Septology, to be 57% modisch. A, da, I re-read Ada. I read Mating (Norman Rush), which was really something. I read Salka Valka. I read a slim little Helen DeWitt I liked, and “Tiny Alice,” a couple times. Right now I am reading The Rider, by Tim Krabbé, which is about cycling, and which I am loving. Sometimes I think I may just re-read Your Face Tomorrow and Lord Jim and Under the Volcano forever and nothing else, but then I think no, you’d have to add more Conrad than just that, and certainly Ada and probably other Nabokov, and what are you playing at leaving out all of Melville, even Benito Cereno, which, I am now recalling, I have also re-read semi-recently. But then here I am now reading this Krabbé which could not be making me happier.
This is more than enough for now; I have work to do on the archive.
Leave a Reply