May Wrapup

Poetry Department

Richard Howard/No Traveller

From 1989, one of Howard's best collections. It opens with a wonderful sequence of imagined letters, set in 1953. Two young gay men, frenemies, are in Paris and they're both writing to somebody Roderick, back home in the U.S. Ivo is gossipy and tart; his great moment is when he sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and and Wallis Simpson. Richard is more serious; he spies the poet Wallace Stevens, and insinuates himself as Stevens' guide to Paris.  

        "To hear her talk, as she does,

about her escape from France,

you would suppose she had swum the Channel,

with her maid between her teeth!"

 

From one of Ivo's letters, this is supposed to be Wallis Simpson talking about Lady Diana Cooper. Meow!

 

Just now typing this, it occurred to me that we have Wallis and Wallace. Deliberate? Oh, probably. It's all made up--Wallace Stevens apparently never got to Paris--but so very convincing. And so very fun.

 

7 Greeks (tr. by Guy Davenport)

 

The seven are Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, and Herondas. Numbers 5 and 6 are philosophers; the others are poets. I think Davenport is a great translator, and his introduction was superb. I do have doubts about translating scraps where all that survives is one word per line. (The same applies to Anne Carson's translation of Sappho.) That's what we've got, but it feels a bit like a romantic preferring the ruins of Tintern Abbey to an actual building.

 

Here's an Archilochos poem in Davenport's translation that made it on to the blog before.

 

Karl Shapiro/Trial of a Poet

 

This is Shapiro's book of 1947. He'd been a clerk in the Army, serving in the Pacific for most of the war; his Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry written from New Guinea, V-Letter and Other Poems, showed up on the blog earlier. This is still quite engaged with his war experience. Like a lot of American poets of that time his poetry is moving from formal to a more free verse; this is interestingly transitional.

 

And one of the poems, one that he uses for the title of the middle section, is 'The Progress of Faust':
 

He was born in Deutschland, as you would expect,

And graduated in magic from Cracow

in Fifteen Five.

 

Which brings us to:

 

 

 

Poetry Department (Faust Subdivision)

 

After reading a bunch of Goethe last summer, and traveling to Germany last fall, I'd been thinking about rereading Faust, which I've read before but not in forever. I read Part I in Kaufmann's translation and Part II in Philip Wayne's. Kaufmann only translated the first part; he says the second part isn't as good. Is that true? Well, it is true that in Philip Wayne's translation the second part isn't as good, but I remain uncertain about the German. Wayne is certainly the inferior English poet.

 

Goethe's house in Weimar from its garden

 

Christopher Marlowe/Doctor Faustus

 

But better than either as an English poet, of course, is Marlowe. I do think that Shakespeare is better at shaking a scene, but when it comes to bombasting out blank verse, Kit strikes me as fully the equal of William. One interesting bit from all the Faust/Goethe reading I've done is that Goethe (and most Germans of that era) first knew the Faust story from puppet shows, and that German puppet shows were based on Marlowe's version carried back over into Germany.

 

Literary Criticism

 

Erich Heller/The Artist's Journey Into the Interior and Other Essays

 

I was reading something about music the previous month--Peter Kalkavage's Music and the Idea of a World--and Kalkavage said one of the best books about Thomas Mann was Erich Heller's Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. My library doesn't have a circulating copy of that, but they did have this. Pretty fascinating stuff. Good on Thomas Mann (as was the Kalkavage) and also on Goethe.

Cooking

 

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi/The King Cookbook

 

King is a restaurant in New York City.  I have to admit to not having cooked anything out of the book yet, but I scanned several pages before I returned it to the library... The recipe for Tunisian Chicken looks very tasty. One of the desserts is likelier to be first, though: our local farmer's market had local strawberries for the first time today, and their recipe for Eton Mess looked particularly yummy.

 

Mystery Department

 

Ovidia Yu/Aunty Lee's Delights

 

The first (2013) of a series of mysteries set in Singapore involving Aunty Lee. She's a recent widow who runs a tea shop, and has a murder on her hands to solve. Enjoyable characters, though I knew who the murderer was practically from the start. And while I would agree with Yu's politics I'm sure, they seemed a little dogmatic in a mystery novel. Still, I'm likely enough to carry on with the series.

 

At one point Aunty Lee says, explaining why she knows somebody convenient to solving the mystery, Singapore is a small town and everybody knows everybody. Pooh, I thought: I've been to Singapore; it's not that small a town. But then when I told a friend who's from Singapore I'd read the novel, she said, oh, yes, my brother went to high school with her, and that she had been a stagehand for one of Yu's plays.

 

Literary Novels

 

Four novels from Canadian publisher Biblioasis made it into this post.  The real find of those I felt was Alice Chadwick's Dark Like Under.

 

Richard Hell/Godlike

 

This takes the romance of French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and translates it to 1970s New York City. I somehow missed it when it first came out in 2005, but it's recently been reissued by New York Review Books. I listened to a lot of Television and Voidoids back in the day.

 

Richard Hell came to Toronto's Appel Salon at the downtown library. It was a pretty good author event. Surprisingly for a seminal punk musician who took Hell for his stage name, he was a pretty genial guy. Unsurprisingly he's a bit hard of hearing. He said after his first novel had been taken as nothing more than thinly disguised biography, he decided to write about homosexual French poets for his second novel; then nobody would think this one autobiographical. Ha. He still gets told, I didn't know you were gay. (He's not.) But it is quite believable, and some of the drug-taking may have autobiographic elements, though he's supposed to have straightened up since.

 

Sent me off to read some Verlaine poetry. 

 

Comics

 

Quino/Mafalda

 

An Argentine comic strip about a little girl and her friends. The whole run (1964-1973) is being issued in an English translation by Frank Wynne in five volumes. This was the first and it came out last year; the second later will appear later this year. Quino only ended it because he felt it safer to flee the country. They're pretty great.

 

All in all a pretty good month's worth of reading. 

 

For the Commonplace Book 

 

"He [Caspar David Friedrich] was probably the first European painter to whom it happened that a picture of his was hung upside down." 

-- Erich Heller

 

"I don't see why/people can't look things up, I always do." 

-- Richard Howard's 'Love Which Alters" (voicing Proust)

 

"And yet he himself did not seem to think as a matter of free choice, but rather yielded philosophy as a cow yields milk--in helpless bondage to a dispensation of Nature." 

-- Erich Heller (of Hegel)

 

Mephistopheles: "I am the spirit that negates."

Mephistopheles: "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."

--Faust, Part I, l. 1338, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: I am too old to be content to play

Too young to be without desire

 

Faust: Ich bin zu alt, um nur zu spielen

Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein

-Faust, Part 1, l. 1546-7, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: A petty case of paltry legacies

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. i, l. 27

 

(I feel like somebody needs to write a mystery novel with that as the title.) 

 

Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. iii, l. 75

 

One wrong will not balance against another: to be honorable and just is our only defense agains men without honor or justice.

-Diogenes 39, English by Guy Davenport

(Why does this one seem especially relevant?)

Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race you break into a burst of speed.

-Diogenes 124, English by Guy Davenport

 

The books still around the house

 

How was your month of reading?

Charlie Chan (plus a November wrapup)

Not Pictured: Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan

As threatened in my NonFicNovember post, I did carry on. When I first read the Charlie Chan mysteries about 25 years ago, I read them out of order as I happened to find the books. This time I read them in order. Not essential, but it does add something. Each one refers back to the events of the previous novel or even further back.

The first one has less of Charlie, but he was the most popular character, and fans wanted more of him in the books. Biggers supplied. There's not that much Hawaii, though, which I hadn't really thought about--only two and about a half of the books are set there. In the second, The Chinese Parrot of 1926, Charlie Chan has agreed to carry some pearls to the mainland for a friend; there's murder done in the valley near Bakersfield. In Behind That Curtain (1928) he's gotten as far as San Francisco on his way home when he's lured into another mystery. It's the former head of Scotland Yard who's murdered in this. Finally he's back home, when the movie star Shelagh Fane comes to Honolulu only to get murdered in The Black Camel (1929). A tour group is circling the world in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and a first murder occurs in London--"murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one"--there's four dead (including another Scotland Yard man) by the time the tour group arrives in Honolulu. Charlie boards the ship with the tour group as it departs and has solved it by the time they reach San Francisco.

Biggers did live in California at the time, and only got to Hawaii a couple of times before his early death. 

I just finished today the last one The Keeper of the Keys (1932), which is set in Truckee, California, on Lake Tahoe. Just across the border from Reno, Nevada, land of quickie divorces, which is an important plot element.

I'm not sure how much read the Charlie Chan mysteries are these days. There's plenty of casual racism (alas!) in Golden Age mysteries, anti-Semitism, anti-Black, etc., but it's an astonishingly a-historical reading to think these books are anti-Chinese. Prejudice exists in them; Chan confronts it when he sees it. Biggers was by his lights trying to improve the situation. In Keeper of the Keys, a number of Anglos are ready to dedicate a statue for benefits of Chinese immigration to California. Major Yammerton suspects and I would agree that the anti-Charlie Chan feeling is due more to the movies than the books, but Huang thought even the movies were defensible (and clearly liked them himself). Are they? I haven't see a Charlie Chan movie since I was eight and they came on after the Saturday morning cartoons. But thanks to the Major, I'm now aware they can be found at YouTube.

Novellas in November

I read two: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires and Machado de Assis' The Alienist. Blogged about them here. 

Pynchon

I reread Gravity's Rainbow and have subsequently finished rereading Vineland. Shadow Ticket is on the stack. Pynchon post coming soon? Well there is the Doorstoppers in December challenge going on:

Literary Criticism

I read Robert Boyers' memoir Maestros and Monsters about his relationship with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Boyers is the founding editor of the little magazine Salmagundi and knew both Sontag and Steiner for years in that context. It's a defense of literary criticism for a readerly, but non-specialist audience (me) as well as being amusingly gossipy about both of them, who could be quite difficult in person. I've read or reread most of Sontag pretty recently. It made me want to go read those Steiner books I haven't read.

MARM 

I also reread Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin for Buried in Print's Margaret Atwood Reading Month, though I didn't finish it until this month (so it didn't make the picture). It would be another doorstopper, though...

That was my month of reading. Did you take part in any of the November challenges? For December, in addition to any doorstoppers, there's also Dean Street Decmber, which I hope to read something for.

June Wrapup

All of my reading in June in one swell foop...

The Mystery Department

Harini Nagendra/Murder Under a Red Moon

Kaveri Murthy's second case. Set in Bangalore, India in the 1920s, I liked the first last summer. Kaveri enjoyed her successful detectivizing in that case; she was a bored housewife, but now she's going to have an agency. Her husband's OK with it, her mother-in-law less sure. But she's got a friend on the police force, some Bangalore Street Irregulars, and friends and acquaintances know she's good at it. This starts as embezzlement, but ends in murder. Perhaps not too mysterious, but charming and enjoyable. 

The third and most recent is on order at my library. 

Craig Johnson/The Cold Dish

A couple of years ago four boys gang-raped an indigenous girl; they were convicted, but their sentences were shockingly light. Then the leader of the boys is shot dead. Wyoming Sheriff Longmire takes into account it could be just a hunting accident, but suspects somebody's out for revenge. When a second boy is shot, he knows.

I know Lark likes the series and somewhere else I saw it compared to Tony Hillerman's, strong recommendations, so I tried it. This is the first. The interactions between the characters were fun, and while I was worried the plot would be a little too grisly for my taste, it was OK on that front. However, it was 400 pages and I did keep feeling it could be a hundred pages shorter and better for it. (Dame Agatha can do it in 250, if not 200.) Still I enjoyed this one & I'll carry on.

The Poetry Department

Matthew Arnold/Selected Poems

I didn't know Matthew Arnold's poetry very well--really only 'Dover Beach', I guess--and I thought maybe I didn't like it very well. But after rereading a bunch of Anthony Hecht last month (and his response to 'Dover Beach') I thought I'd try some Arnold. He's better than I thought... 😉 Except that his poems are mostly too long, I might even put some on a poetry post. Anyway, I'll be reading him more closely.

Richard Howard/Inner Voices

Him, I knew I liked. Inner Voices is a selection of his poetry from 1963-2003, so covering most of his career, but not all: he died in 2022. Howard was gay; in an era when confessional poetry was king, his early poetry was pleasantly out-of-step, voicing Edith Wharton or John Ruskin. His book Untitled Subjects won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1969; it's a series of monologues by Victorian-era commoners, funny and touching.

By the late 70s though he's mined that vein and I felt there was a falling off. Then come the 80s and it's become both possible, but also maybe required, to acknowledge one's homosexuality. There are AIDS poems; it was a tough period. But it added a new weight to his poetry, without taking away his humour.

Two books by Ana Blandiana

Ana Blandiana (a pseudonym) is a Romanian poet born in 1942. She won this year's Princess of Asturias Prize in Literature. I quoted from a couple of her books with some more thoughts here.

Big Ole Literary Novels

Thackeray/Henry Esmond

Henry Esmond is born abroad under dodgy circumstances to parents who may be dead. He's shuffled home to be raised a bit neglectfully by an aunt and uncle and falls in love with their daughter, his flirty first cousin. Eventually he goes off to fight in the wars of his time.

Henry's home country is England. The war of his time is the War of Spanish Succession. (Marlborough, Malplaquet, all that. 1701-1714.) Also going on is the question of English succession. Will it be the Catholic Stuarts or some other Protestant dynasty that inherits the English throne? Henry is involved in both struggles.

Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own, that 'the critics often say that Esmond is Thackeray's most perfect novel.' I doubt the critics would say that now, and Woolf had her doubts--this is when she tries to get into a specialist library and is turned away because she's a woman. Still the Thackeray is a pretty good read, even if the flirty Beatrix Esmond is a bit Becky Sharp (of Vanity Fair) in less vibrant colours.

I read it now because last month I finished Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian. Change Henry Esmond to Carlo Altoviti in the first paragraph and you've got the plot of Confessions. Carlo's cousin is called Pisana, and his wars are Napoleon in Italy and then the early wars of the Risorgimento. (Garibaldi, the defense of the Roman Republic. 1793-1848 or so.) Henry Esmond came out in 1852, just a couple of years before Nievo was writing, and he thought, now there's a plot I can plunder. (Nievo also stole manfully from Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, mostly for his thinking about the nature of Italian patriotism.) It also was a pretty good read, even if it was twice the length of the already longish Henry Esmond. La Pisana was a more psychologically believable flirt than Beatrix Esmond, I thought. The final twist is our young soldier-hero's obsessive romance was maybe less weird in Nievo. (Though pretty weird in both.) 

I did have to keep Wikipedia open for both novels for explanations of historical background. The first full translation into English of the Nievo, by Lucy Riall, came out in 2014.

And how about that dapper Italian on the cover? He's neither Nievo, nor supposed to be Carlo Altoviti. But who cares?

Jean d'Ormesson/The Glory of the Empire

This was a delightfully odd one. D'Ormesson's novel came out in 1971. It was his sixth, and the earlier ones apparently hadn't done much. This won prizes and got d'Ormesson elected to the Academie Française in short order. It was translated into English in 1974--superbly--by Barbara Bray. I read it in a New York Review Books reissue.

The Empire grows from two feuding cities who finally unite and conquer the known world. There are three famous emperors--Arsaphes, Basil, Alexis--though with periods of chaos between them; the third creates a golden age of culture and eventually peace that will not last. So far it could be any of various world-building fantasy novels, and, in fact, Tolkien gets a nod--we're told at one point he's the author of a history of a minor war on the Empire's eastern edge.

And that's a small example. The founding cities code as Sparta and Athens (one militaristic, one cultural) but are set geographically (if they're anywhere) on the west coast of Turkey. The Empire exists in our world and it impacts our world's poets, novelists, historians, and that's where d'Ormesson really goes to town. Corneille's last play, a failure, was the story of Arsaphes and his love; d'Ormesson quotes (creates) lines from the play, writing them in the alexandrines of the 1600s. (Bray amusingly translates them into heroic couplets, purportedly by Dryden, and does it well.) When Bergotte dies in Proust, it's not that Vermeer:

 

he's remembering; it's a Piero della Francesca painting of Alexis and his mother. D'Ormesson 'quotes' the passage in Proust. (I.e., makes it up.) Historians from Burckhardt to Bloch discuss episodes in the Empire. Sexual theorists from Freud to Foucault consider the consequences. Edmund Gibbon's The Rise of the Empire features in the bibliography. Renan doesn't write a Vie de Jesus, but a Vie de Alexis. No word on whether that book, too, is sometimes considered a precursor to Nazi thought. We're told Alexis is the only pagan who has ever been decreed a saint; we're given--in Italian!--the lines from Dante's Paradiso where he appears. The last source mentioned in that bibliography is Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, but the only Hadrian in The Glory of the Empire is Pope Hadrian VIIth. Is that then an allusion to the Baron Corvo novel? Maybe!

One long collection of egghead-y easter eggs mixed in with a couple of doomed love affairs and some battle scenes might just drive you nuts, and I certainly didn't read this in one sitting. As you might guess, Borges is a clear precursor (and shows up several times). But if you're the sort of person who thought the only thing wrong with 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' was that it wasn't long enough, you'll love this.

A few sensible-sounding (?) quotes:

'History is never about anything but the folly of men.' [p.152]

'People are not interested in the past any more. And yet it was the past that made us.' [p.200]

'History fabricates its own sources.' [Supposedly this is Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Maybe it even is.] [p.257]

'...novelists given to the lamentable genre of historical fiction bear a heavy responsibility...' [p.273]

Obviously all deeply ironic coming from such a book.

When Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to the French Academy in 1980, there was considerable opposition. Jean d'Ormesson was her primary advocate.

Cooking

When I get cookbooks or food-related books from the library I often just skim them. These two got read cover to cover.

Hazebroek & Elenbaas/Hot Coals

I got a fancy kamado-style grill for my birthday a while back, which I am still learning how to use. (My old Weber kettle was rusting away...) This was heavy on history, theory, and practice, which is great as far as I'm concerned and why it got read cover-to-cover, unlike the other two kamado cookbooks, which are being browsed.

Dolinsky/The Ultimate Chicago Pizza Guide

A mix of recipes and descriptions of Chicago pizza places as of the end of the pandemic. The list of pizza places was a trip down memory lane; the recipes made me want to mix up my pizza-making game. (I do both flat and deep dish pretty often.)

He can be a bit repetitive, but he's got a punchy way with metaphors that suggests he was reading sportswriters from the 30s: 'a nice even browning, like a retiree in Boca'  or 'the top layer is as thin as the Trib's business section' that keeps one reading.

He introduces the concept PIGUE (pizza I grew up eating), suggesting that people in general become uncritical about their childhood favourite. He says a lot of people feel this way about Barnaby's in the northern suburbs of Chicago--a pizza I'd totally forgotten about until reading this book. (And apparently I ate at a satellite branch, not the mother ship.)  But my PIGUE is My Pi pizza, a deep dish pizza, but not especially deep. And I am certainly unable to think about it critically. I had thought the last of its two branches had closed in the late 80s, but it turns the son of the former owner has refounded it, and Dolinsky thinks it's good. That next trip to Chicago...

And speaking of Chicago:

David Mamet in Chicago

I read/reread three plays by David Mamet set in Chicago. Sexual Perversity in Chicago has two guys and two girls. One guy and one girl are cynical about love; the cynical guy, Bernie, in particular is an obnoxious fabulist. The non-cynical pair fall in love--for a while. The play premiered in Chicago in 1974. I'm not sure about this play: on the page at least the love story didn't feel very convincing. It was the basis for the movie About Last Night, which I haven't seen but now want to. I expect it to be watered down, though.

Then I read Duck Variations. Fourteen short scenes where two old guys meet on a park bench and talk about ducks. No plot, but it was great. Mamet says in the stage notes it could be any park bench looking out at a lake, but no, it's Chicago: they discuss the pump houses at one point. Toronto doesn't have pump houses out in the lake where they get water, and I imagine most other lakeside cities just have hoses under the lake that you can't see. First there was Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, then there was Fourteen Ways of Talking about Ducks. Take that, Wallace Stevens.

Then I finished by rereading American Buffalo, my favorite of Mamet's plays that I know. (I've seen Glengarry Glen Ross twice--the movie once and on stage once. Maybe it could be done differently, but there was too much scenery-chewing in both. Death of a Fuckin' Salesman, indeed. That's often considered his best, but not for me.) In this a junk shop owner has a buffalo head nickel and sells it to a collector. But maybe he sold it for too little? He decides he's going to steal it back. How that goes. This takes place on the north side of Chicago--somehow I think of it as in my neighborhood, though it's probably south of where I grew up. We're told the collector lives on Lake Shore Drive--which would make him rich. A pretty great play, I think.

The books still around the house:

I've been reading plenty, but not blogging much. Oh, well. My blogging mojo has gone missing. (Department of Missing Mojo? Hello? Have you seen...) Maybe this omnibus post will get me over the hump.

Next month? It's Paris in July. Maybe when I reread Giovanni's Room this time, I'll actually blog about it? We'll see. I'm also thinking more Chicago books, particularly covering the late 70s and early 80s. Sara Paretsky, Michelle Obama, maybe something I haven't read before, though I'm not sure what just now. [Suggestions welcome!] What are your plans?

Happy Canada Day! To Canadians and those thinking about moving to Canada depending on election outcomes in your jurisdiction. The fireworks are starting as I'm finishing this.

August wrapup (and summer reading)

My August reading (and looking at that #20booksofsummer list, ha, ha...)

Like most blogger memes, monthly summaries turns out to be another I'm pretty sporadic about doing.

The Mystery Department

Which was Philo Vance by S. S. Van Dine this month. I recently discovered that the whole series is available at Project Gutenberg Australia. Are they legal in Canada? I dunno. But I downloaded the ones I hadn't read and then read three of them.

Philo Vance may be an idle aesthete, but he's effective in tracking down murderers.

"If you will refer to the municipal statistics of the City of New York, you will find that the number of unsolved major crimes during the four years that John F.-X. Markham was district attorney, was far smaller than under any of his predecessors' administrations." [Benson Murder Case, Introductory]

Philo Vance was the reason why. 

The Benson Murder Case (#1 in the series, 1926)

Alvin Benson was a Wall Street broker and man about town; he was shot one night at home in the forehead. Harassed actresses and jealous boyfriends make up a good collection of suspects, but as the police go through one suspect after another, Vance keeps insisting the psychology is wrong. Until it isn't.

The Scarab Murder Case (#5 in the series, 1930)

Benjamin Kyle is a philanthropist financing an expedition to excavate in Egypt. Early one morning his head is crushed by the statue of an Egyptian god and the dead hand is clutching an ancient scarab. The curse of the old gods for looting pyramids? Or a more terrestrial murderer? Howard Carter & King Tut's tomb weren't so far in the past at this point. Vance is once again mostly tasked with keeping the police from arresting the wrong person, but in this case the actual murderer is doing his best to frame somebody else, anybody else. 

The Dragon Murder Case (#7 in the series, 1933)

In an old estate on the north end of Manhattan, there's a swimming pool formed from a river. (Think Tryon Hall, now Fort Tryon Park.) Sanford Montague dives into the pool and never comes up. A few days later his body is found a couple of miles away. Murder? Or accident with a clumsy attempt to hide the outcome? Or is it the dragon of Lenape legend? 

The solution depends on the latest in technology in 1933, which was also true of 1927's The Canary Murder Case, probably my favorite in the series and an excellent locked-room murder.

However. "Philo Vance/needs a kick in the pants," wrote Ogden Nash, and it's kind of true. I enjoy the series and it's historically important, but. Willard Wright, for whom S. S. Van Dine was a pseudonym, was also an art critic while under one of his other hats, and there's far more art history than any of the mysteries require. There may be some use to discussions of Egypt's 17th dynasty in The Scarab Murder Case, but mostly you have to just like the long digressions for their own sake. I don't entirely mind them myself. But what's pretty continuously hard to take is Wright's inability to write dialog that sounds like anything an actual human being might speak.

I knew early Ellery Queen was quite influenced by Philo Vance, but what struck me in these was how much Rex Stout was paying attention, too. And it's not just that there's a butler who cooks!

In the Time of Nero

My Classics Club spin book was Henryk Sienkiewicz' Quo Vadis. That sent me off to Petronius' Satyricon and Tacitus' Annals. Thoughts were written up here.

The Poetry Department

Richard Crashaw/Selected Poems

Crashaw (1613-1649) was the son of a Puritan sympathizer, but he became a high-church Anglican and eventually a Catholic. Not a politically astute move for an Englishman in those years, Crashaw fled to France and then died in the Papal States. 

Crashaw considered George Herbert his poetic master, which shows good taste as far as I'm concerned. Very much a metaphysical, with elaborate conceits: one poem voices the tears that Mary Magdalene cried. A couple of impressive long poems devoted to Teresa of Avila.

The edition I read was selected by Michael Cayley for Fyfield Books (Carcanet Press) in 1972. He wrote a useful introduction.

H. D./Sea Garden

H. D./Hymen

These early volumes of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) are available at Project Gutenberg. I've got a couple other volumes of hers in hand. I like her handling of classical allusions, but I'm not going to say much at the moment.

G. K. Chesterton/Wine, Women, and Song

Ahem. Not very politically correct, and not just in the ways suggested by the title. (The en passant anti-Semitism was pretty hard to swallow.) Still, he's a skilled versifier and there was some amusing stuff in it:

You will find me drinking rum

Like a sailor in a slum

You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian

You will find me drinking gin

In the lowest kind of inn

Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

Available from Project Gutenberg. 

Richard Howard/RH 🖤   HJ

New York Review Poets volume. It draws from Howard's career as a poet of fifty years. (He's also a translator, of E. M. Cioran among others.) HJ is Henry James, and a number of the poems selected concern James in some way. I find Richard Howard very good, but I'm not sure this is the selection of his poems I would have made. Quoted from it here.

Women in Translation Month

Two by Amélie Nothomb (Thirst, Tokyo Fiancée). Thoughts here.

Dorthe Nors/Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

It's possible I'll still say more about this, but I haven't yet.

Sonja Hansen lives in Copenhagen and is the translator of (imaginary) Swedish thriller writer Gösta Svensson. She's 40 or so and wants to get a driver's license so she's a little freer to go where she wants, but she suffers from positional vertigo--if she swings her head too fast, she gets dizzy and disoriented. She thinks about doing yoga, gets massages, feels like a country mouse (she's from rural Jutland) in the big city of Copenhagen. Not much happens, but that's kind of the point.

The novel was shortlisted for the Booker International in 2017, but lost to David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into a Bar. That was also the year of Mathias Énard's Compass.

Some Other International Fiction

Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz/The Yellow Sofa

A novella by the 19th Century Portuguese realist. The merchant Godofredo da Conceiçao Alves discovers the younger partner in his firm is having an affair with his wife. What to do? A duel is just one of several possibilities. 

I thought this was very good. It's the first of his I've read, but I've now got several more from the library.

Stanislaw Lem/Fiasco

An expedition from Earth to a distant star system sets out with the idea of making contact with an alien civilization. No humans have ever been in contact with any aliens before--this is a story of first contact. The title gives away the outcome, but how it fails and why are the questions of the novel.

It would be Lem's hundredth birthday this year, leading to overviews. Lem is almost always a science-fiction writer, but he ranges from scientifically hard to fabular, from serious to uproariously funny. I liked this, though I didn't think it was his best--it took a little while to really get going. It's on the serious, more technologically-minded end of his spectrum.

Sholem Aleichem/In The Storm

Quite good, I thought. More here.

So that's a month's worth of reading for me. As for that 20 Books of Summer, as you might guess from this one month's reading, I read twenty books. But as for that list, umm...eleven, plus two I had suggested I might read. Ah, well...

The August books that are still around the house

Senhor Dorsey decided I wasn't using his service properly--probably by not using it enough--so there's a new Twitter account follow button...

March Wrapup

My reading month in March:

Koren Shadmi's Graphical Biographies

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television

I saw this reviewed in the New York Review of Books--yes, yes, I'm running behind--and ordered it from the library. I was never particularly a fan of The Twilight Zone--too black and white for me at the age I would have watched the show in reruns--but I liked the graphical style of the clips in the review and the book looked interesting. It was. In fact, really quite good--it got me interested and I might try to see some Twilight Zone episodes. It recapitulates Serling's life story in a narrative frame you might find in a Twilight Zone plot.

Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D (text by David Kushner)

Looking up Shadmi in my library's catalog, I also came across this. I was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons and so I got this one, too. Though it's Gary Gygax in the title, don't worry: Dave Arneson gets equal time. It was enjoyable, and even though it spoke to me more, I do think it was a less successful work than The Twilight Zone volume. The text is written as if by a dungeon master, or even more, as if it were from that early computer game Colossal Cave/Adventure. (That game's author Will Crowther gets a couple of pages.) "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike." "You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

The Mystery Department

Michael Innes' Hare Sitting Up

An Inspector Appleby story from 1959. Take identical twin brothers, one a schoolmaster, the other a biowarfare scientist, add a rural lord half(?)-crazed with bird-watching, throw in a blackmailer and a pretty girl with a Ph.D., and you've got a story. It's mostly Innes in his silly mode, which I actually prefer, though Innes does want to say one or two serious things about the morality of WMDs. Not his best by any means, but fun.

Julie Campbell's The Gatehouse Mystery

Trixie and Honey find a diamond in the old gate house on the Wheeler property. Are they going to turn it into the proper authorities? Of course not!

This book has the first appearance of Trixie's older brothers, Brian--and Mart, the snarky one with a propensity toward Brobdingnagian vocables. Always my favorite character. I'm sure I don't know why.

The next in the series is waiting at the library for me to pick it up.

Chester Himes' Blind Man With A Pistol

The last of the Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones mysteries Himes completed, from 1969. This is a very ambitious book, bursting the bounds of Himes' already capacious sense of what a mystery can be. All in 191 pages. Several plots; several time frames. Pretty great & at some risk of sending me down a Himes rabbit hole--I've ordered up the recent biography of Himes from the library. But if you're interested in Himes as a mystery writer, you should probably start with something earlier in the series.

"'There ain't going to be any facts,' Grave Digger informed Anderson."

#BrianMooreAt100

Cathy at 746Books has organized a year long read of Brian Moore's books in honor of what would have been his hundredth birthday. 

Brian Moore's The Color of Blood

Political tensions in an unnamed East European country just before the fall of the Iron Curtain. I thought it was very good. More here.

Brian Moore's Fergus

That I enjoyed The Color of Blood so much led me on to read Fergus. Not as good, I said, though still good.

This month's Brian Moore is the great, but grim, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Will I reread it? Maybe, but I haven't yet.

The Poetry Section

George Bradley's Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

This collection came out with Knopf in 1991. A living American poet (b. 1953). The first volume of his I've read--though a couple of these poems appeared in The New Republic in the 80s, so it's possible I read those before. I thought it was very good. Expect something to appear in a poem post in the future. Bradley's poem 'The Lives of the Chinese Poets' begins 'About suffering they were reticent,...' O my Auden! 

Georgi Gospodinov

Natural Novel, And Other Stories, The Physics of Sorrow

Contemporary Bulgarian novelist, poet, story writer. That's most of what of his is available in English. I think he's pretty good. More thoughts here, mostly on The Physics of Sorrow.

Hilary Mantel's Cromwell

Wolf Hall

I reread this for Brona's readalong, but I'm *still* organizing my thoughts on this one. Not very organized thoughts, eh? I should have finished rereading Bring Up The Bodies to be on schedule, but I haven't...

Shakespeare's Henry VIII

That sent me off to this. Not necessarily one of the better plays, but there are some great speeches--Buckingham's (Act II, Sc 1) on his sentence of death:

The law I bear no malice for my death
'T has done upon the premises but justice
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians

or Wolsey's farewell to greatness.

Andre Alexis

Contemporary Canadian writer. He's four books into a series of five he's termed a quincunx. I read the first, Pastoral (2014). I thought it was very good. A newly minted priest takes up a parish in a small town near Sarnia, Ontario. The second one in the series--Fifteen Dogs--is the celebrated one; it won the Giller, one of Canada's two major novel prizes, as well as various other prizes. I might have more to say when I finish the sequence, at least as it stands now. I have the others on hand.

Euripides

Rex Warner (no relation?--though that first name could so easily slip into...) translated three Euripidean plays with strong female characters in the 40s & 50s: Medea, Hippolytus, Helen. I was interested in the Helen, but then I carried on. Medea, Phaedra, & Helen are all women who do bad or tricksy things and suffer at the hands of men. These are quite often read now as feminist or proto-feminist; would an Athenian of the time have thought so? Mmm. Certainly as Aristophanes presents it (Women at the Thesmophoria) Euripides wasn't popular with the ladies...but then, that's Aristophanes.

No longer the standard translations, but I thought they were quite good. I especially liked Warner's handling of the choruses. He's an interesting novelist (The Aerodrome) and poet, but best known now, I'm guessing, as the translator of Thucydides.

The books that were still around the house (at least when I took the picture):

I wrote most of this post a while ago. It was long past time to either delete it or publish it. Yet another month of much, but muddled, reading--I sometimes get embarrassed by the desultoriness of my reading. Oh, well. Any of these strike thoughts in you?

February Wrapup

Hmm. Am I going to be a person who now writes monthly wrapup posts? I doubt it, but I'm trying it on for size.

Drugs

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind

About recent research into, and experimentation with, psychedelics. A friend's been recommending this for a while. (Who has acted on it.) It was also, through the weird channels in which my brain works, related to a project I was reading on. When I got it from the library, I wasn't actually sure I would read it, but then the first chapter was full of people I knew, and so I was hooked. I worked, as a computer programmer, for the pharmacology department at the University of Chicago in the mid to late 80s. All those people were no longer researching psychedelics by then, for reasons expounded by Pollan, but they had been.

Pollan strikes me as a pretty good writer of non-fiction, and while LSD and mushrooms aren't really my thing, I'm now inclined to read The Omnivore's Dilemma. Eating meat, while maybe feeling you shouldn't, is my thing, and now I'm curious to see what Pollan has to say.

Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

Unsurprisingly this is an important book in Pollan. It didn't do much for me when I first read it thirty years ago, and it still didn't. I have loved Brave New World on each of several readings, and I keep thinking that some other Huxley book will mean as much. None has yet. I was surprised how much art criticism was in this; that probably all went over my head the first time.

Venice

Cees Nooteboom's Venice

Visiting Venice. Important living Dutch writer and this was really very good. More here.

Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice

That sent me off to Donna Leon. The first Commissario Brunetti story. The mystery was so-so, but the characters and setting are fun. I might also read/reread some Michael Dibdins at some point.

Interlude

Megha Majdumar's A Burning

I really ought to have written about this one at length, but it arrived from the library after a long wait and I wasn't going to be able to renew it. Molotov cocktails are thrown into a commuter train in India, and what happens to various characters peripherally associated with this terror attack. Her debut novel, there's been some buzz, and I definitely enjoyed it. I read somewhere that it has done better in North America than in India. That makes sense to me. Her politics are well-intentioned, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that an Indian found them shallow while a North American thought them insightful. It's the voice that interested me. It's possible the same criticism could be made (felt shallow there, but impressive here) but I was impressed. I'd read another of hers.

Susanna M. Smith (#ReadIndies)

Susanna M. Smith's How The Blessed Live

It was #ReadIndies month hosted by Kaggsy and I really should have blogged about these on time. I already had the idea of digging into a couple of small Canadian publishers and had these when I saw her announcement. How The Blessed Live is about two fraternal twins and their father. The daughter goes to Vancouver and hangs out with artists; the son goes to Montreal to university. The mother died at their birth, and the father lives in lamentation on an island in Lake Ontario. Isis and Osiris are mentioned. There may have been brother/sister incest.

I mention that mostly because I tend to dislike it in a novel and still I liked this novel. Brother/sister incest goes back to Egypt, to Greece; anything after about Malory starts to feel derivative. I was willing to forgive it here, so that means it must have been pretty well done. A fairly poetic style. This came out with Coach House books in 2002. If I'd written that Coach House books post (this one came from the public library, but I have several other of their books here already) I would also have mentioned how I love, love, love the paper stock they use.

Susanna M. Smith's The Fairy Tale Museum

This book (her second and only other book I believe) came out with Invisible Publishing in 2018, the press I was more interested in (and knew less about) when I ordered them up from the library. A collection of stories on similar somewhat magical themes: a fairy tale museum. (Truth in advertising.) I liked this even better. She retells various fairy tales with a twist and in different contexts. Think, I suppose, Angela Carter.

More stuff related only in my own mind to Propertius

Shakespeare's Henry V

I started it looking for that speech about tennis balls and mockery--and found I had misremembered the line I was looking for. That speech is in Act I and I could have stopped there, but it is Henry V. The second act is weird, but otherwise such a great play. I carried on. We few, we happy few. We are the makers of manners.

Robert Herrick's Poems

Herrick has a more obvious connection to Propertius, maybe not just in my mind. ("Come, I will drink a tun/To my Propertius.") My edition is not complete, a compact thing from Blackie and Son that I probably bought in the U.K. years ago. But it does have a good couple hundred of his (mostly short) poems. Reading it this time, though I was supposed to be thinking about Propertius, the pandemic kept coming to mind:

Stay then at home, and do not go,
Or fly abroad, and seek for woe.

I ask you: could I help it? And, Ted Cruz, were you listening?

Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne

Another book I should have blogged about. Novella length. Pretty great. A character much like Tabucchi himself travels to India, both for academic reasons, but also to hunt up an old friend who may be in trouble. We learn about the back story with the friend; we learn about the writing of books. Does he find the friend? Well. Tabucchi was a professor of Portuguese and the story ends in Goa. It's not the equal of his Sostiene Pereira, but then, so very few things are.

Trixie Belden

Julie Campbell's The Secret of the Mansion

I found this in a Little Free Library a few months ago, and thought, wow, I could recapture my childhood. It hung around my reading chair for those few months and then, one night, when nothing else was working, I reread it. I was surprised how well it held up.

I had not yet read Little Women when I read these as a child--I only read that as an adult--and I was surprised at how much this owes to Little Women. Julie Campbell likes the poor little rich kid next door motif so much she uses it twice. It's Honey Wheeler in this one; Diana Lynch is only mentioned in the second book and joins the gang still later. Oh, the chores! And is that Moms? Or Marmee?

Just who is it living in the old Frayne mansion next door? And is there treasure hidden in there? Sleepyside-on-Hudson...not so sleepy any more!

Julie Campbell's The Red Trailer Mystery

I enjoyed that one so much, I ordered up the next several from the library. The Red Trailer Mystery is practically one novel with the The Secret of the Mansion. Jim Frayne disappears at the end of the first; Trixie and Honey and the ever-competent Miss Trask hunt him down--in order to tell him he's inherited a million bucks--in the second. And find some trailer thieves. And help a poor family, who aren't yet dying of tuberculosis, but could be.

More of these to come!

Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus

Let us continue the I-should-have-blogged-about theme. Maybe I even did so, though pretty danged obliquely.

Two Australian orphan sisters, Grace and Caroline, move to England. Their lives. Grace, the sweeter and blonder one, marries the son of an astronomer. Caro leads a life with more detours. This is a novel one needs to read several times before saying anything, but it is a novel one wants to read several times, so maybe that's OK.

Gloom

E. M. Cioran's On The Heights of Despair

Cioran's first book, (1934, tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, 1992) originally written in Romanian.

Ha. My heading is probably not entirely fair. Oh, wait, of course it is. I mean, look at the title. "On the heights of despair," the introduction suggests, was a stock phrase from Romanian suicide notices of the time. 

Cioran is an essayist/aphorist in the Nietzschean/Schopenhauerian pessimist tradition.

By no means his best. It felt a little windy. While it's his themes, his later writing in French forced him to pare down. (I suppose. Or maybe he just learned to.) This is also more clearly derivative. Nietzsche is never very far from Cioran, but this reeks of it. Though, correspondingly, there is more appreciation of the Dionysiac in this, it's not all gloom and doom, more than in later Cioran. Nevertheless Cioran strikes me as standing more on his own feet afterwards. It wasn't bad--if you like Cioran--but The Trouble With Being Born remains my favorite. If favorite is quite the right word to use...

That's a month's worth of reading. Actually, for me, probably more than a month's worth under normal circumstances, but what else can you do these days? I'm also in the middle of rereading Wolf Hall and The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Well, when I say middle, that's appropriate enough to Wolf Hall, somewhat less so to Nickleby.

The books that are still around the house

How was your February reading?