October Wrapup

October was the week of the 1949 Club and the Nobel Prize announcement. (Anne Carson!) Those two things significantly colored my reading.

Mysteries

Dorothy Lee Sayers/Clouds of Witness

Dorothy Lee Sayers/Lord Peter Views the Body

 

I continue to enjoy my read-through of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Clouds of Witness is a novel, and Lord Peter Views the Body are stories. I liked the novel better, but that may just be me. 

 

Ed McBain/Killer's Choice

Ed McBain/The Mugger 

 

Both fairly early 87th Precinct mysteries. Pretty fun. And when you need a book that fits in a pocket...

 

Ellery Queen/The Tragedy of Y

 

More here.

 

Fiction

 

Alvaro Enrigue/You Dreamed of Empires 

 

Enrigue is a contemporary Mexican novelist (b. 1969); this is (I believe) still his most recent novel (2022, 2024 in English). It's Cortes and Moctezuma in Mexico City in 1519. I'm not really certain what I think--it takes a rather surreal turn at the end--but I'll try another novel by him at some point.

 

Alejo Carpentier/The Kingdom of This World

 

A 1949 Club book discussed here. I thought this was pretty great. 

 

Abbe Prévost/Manon Lescaut

 

A fairly famous French novel of 1731, made into an opera three times at least. He's roughly contemporary with Defoe, and he's nowhere near as good? At least that's what I thought. I read this now because it was a clue in Clouds of Witness. 😉

 

Poetry

 

Douglas Dunn/Elegies

 

Dunn died last month and I posted a poem from his book of elegies for the death of his first wife. 

 

Christopher Fry/The Lady's Not For Burning

T. S. Eliot/The Cocktail Party

 

English verse drama in 1949. I was going to do something with for the Club, but didn't. I was kind of disappointed in both. The Cocktail Party starts out so well, a drawing room comedy, before we discover that the lives of our characters are controlled by well-meaning cabal of all-powerful psychologist-like figures. Weird. The Lady's Not For Burning is a comedy, set in witch-burning times. Maybe it would be funnier on stage?

 

Ogden Nash/Versus

 

A reread, also from 1949.  It's full of fun stuff.

 

Anne Carson

 

Carson/Autobiography of Red

Carson/H of H Playbook

Carson/Wrong Norma

Carson/Eros the Bittersweet

I was already a fan, but that she won the Nobel prize sent me off to read/reread several of her books. I've read one other this month and I've got a couple of others I want to reread. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel; H of H Playbook, verse drama; Wrong Norma, prose poems (I suppose); and Eros the Bittersweet, literary criticism. Though genre may not be that helpful a concept with Anne Carson.

 

Non-Fiction

 

W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

 

My spin book, which I finished early in the month. Interesting, not his best, but well worth reading. I'm still working on a post.

 

Quinn Slobodian/Hayek's Bastards

 

The intellectual afterlife of Friedrich Hayek. Slobodian is not a fan. Right-wing economics, Milton Friedman being the best-known figure. The Mount Pelerin Society.

 

Ashley Kahn/Days of Miracle and Wonder

 

About Paul Simon's Graceland album, how it was put together, and the controversy it caused. There was a cultural boycott of South Africa on at the time: did working with black South African musicians, even if they didn't perform in South Africa, violate the boycott? I think the album's great, and so does Kahn, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. A 2026 release.

 

The books still around the house:

 

 

Have you read, are you considering Anne Carson? Does the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement affect your reading in general?

 

Let us start our nation over again, Vachel Lindsay

from Roosevelt

(written for the Illinois State Teachers' Association, printed as a broadside, and read, and distributed the same day: April 4, 1924)  

Who elected these pole-cats rulers of men?

Let us start a gay nation over again!

Let us start a circus as honest as Barnum's,

With three clean rings, and plenty to see,

Athletes, not snakes, on the trapeze tree.

 

Let us start our nation over again,

In the names of legitimate rulers of men,

In the names of the greatest, and the famous dead:--

Yes, the name of the glittering cinnamon bear,

Never so wicked or sore in the head,

But he fed the children honey and bread.

He taught them the names of the great and the dead,

From the Irish sagas, to Carson and Boone.

 

He loved the villages, Deadwood, Medora,

Tuskeegee and Tuscarora,

Mexicali and Farmington,

Calexico and Bennington,

Arlington and Lexington,

Oyster Bay, Mount Vernon.

 

He loved the cities Denver, Manhattan,

And the wide, great spaces

From the Amazon to Saskatoon--

He loved the heroes, Columbus, Whitman, Lincoln--

He loved the heroes! He loved George Washington!--

Who was honest as youth and white as the moon.

 

--Vachel Lindsay

 

I was looking for something suitable for my mood (I've read nothing but news sites these last two days) and hoped that Lindsay would provide. He did. 

 

Roosevelt, that 'glittering cinnamon bear', is Teddy, who died in 1919. Lindsay says in a note to the poem, he'd read about the 'behavior of two middle western governors' and this poem was the result. I couldn't figure out who the governors were or what exactly they'd done, though...

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet born in Springfield, Illinois, who died there as well, though he managed to walk across a huge chunk of America in the interim. He's featured on the blog a couple of times before. As a child of Illinois, I've known about him forever. This is about a quarter of the poem from near the end.

 

Political poetry is hard. Too often the political issues prove passing, but nevertheless the poetry is sacrificed to them. Not all of Lindsay's poetry is political, but a lot of it is, and he succeeds pretty often.

 

Let us start our nation over again. 

 

 

Miracles slip past us, Anne Carson

 

Lines

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.

Paperclips

in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks

longingly

of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.

Out

the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,

love

of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling

faster

now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I

want

to tell her--sign of God's pity. She won't keep me

she says, she

won't run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The

paperclips

are immortally aligned. God's pity! How long

will

it feel like burning, said the child trying to be

kind.

 

-Anne Carson

 

This is from Carson's book of 2005, Decreation, in a section titled 'Stops', which includes several poems about her aging mother. The poem first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

I've been on a bit of an Anne Carson bender lately, mostly rereading, but not entirely.