Heinrich Heine, 1820:
2004 Reading by Ernie Seckinger
Das war ein Vorspiel mur; dort wo manBücher verbrennt, verbrennt manauch am Ende Menschen.
It is but a prelude; where books are burnt, humans will be burnt in the end.
( A panel I read in the museum at Dachau)
January
**** Atonement by Ian McEwan. This for me is reading a new book! Published by Nan A. Talese under her imprint at Doubleday in 2001. I needed to read more fiction, so I dove in. More English manor house stories--this one begins in the late 1930s. My interest level built slowly and culminated at the last line of the book--a contemporary epilogue making me thankful that I had read it. I think to say anything more gives away too much. I will only openly discuss it with someone who has read. And oh yes, very fine use of language.
*** Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers/ An audiobook on CD from the Daphne Public Library. One of those titles I grabbed as a last resort for a trip. I thought I could at least stand the travel aspects of the tale. I was pleasantly surprised. It's read by the author which lends honest emotion to the narrator's inflections. He is a serious investor with significant problems with the current administration's fiscal policy (To be fair he also has problems with most past policies also). The travelogue is fascinating. I was amazed to learn that he was originally from Demopolis, Alabama, a town I have often visited.
*** The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan. I mean, every now and then I have to read a book by an archeologist! Since graduate school (in archeology), I have been intrigued by the Little Ice Age. You will read different dates for the period from different writers but 1315 to 1900 would cover the years most agree were generally colder in the northern hemisphere. While I am certainly aware, as is Fagan, that climate change is a subtle catalyst and not a determiner of cultural change, stresses brought on by such climate oscillations have an effect. Some of the anecdotes here would be interesting to most. In the coldest cycle of the Little Ice Age, from 1680-1730 Inuits (Eskimo in pre PC days) were seen on the water near Aberdeen, Scotland!
By an interesting route of logic and fact, Fagan lays a part of the cause of today's global warming at the feet of the Little Ice Age. Changing climate leading to English agricultural enclosures-->the near elimination of lands held in common --> the drive for migration of the growing population of the poor --> their arrival in North America, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand --> the resultant massive land clearance having a significant effect on carbon dioxide levels.
He goes on to discuss the interplay of the Little Ice Age and the French Revolution and the potato famine. What I would now like to see is a similar publically oriented volume that deals with the archeological data in prehistoric and historic phases of the Little Ice Age in the present United States. His treatment focuses mostly on Europe. One avenue of research should be the relationship between this climatic period and the demise of the Mississippian culture in the southeastern United States. Many blame this on the DeSoto expedition but I would suggest the year 1375 marked its zenith.
*** The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Farrar, Straus and Girous 2003. Wonderful writing which is reason enough to read. The story is--as in most novels--man gets woman. I found the narrative etheral with at least one loose end whose narrative line I was unsure of the reason for its existence, that of the friend Peter Exley. While some reviews have called this a masterpiece, I have to stay with three stars.
Other January reading including a good bit in Capper and Wright on Transcendentalism, a good bit of Middlemarch by George Eliot, several cassettes of Kate Remembered by Scott Berg, a dip every now and then into Gary Wills's Gettysburg. I picked up again my back issue of Atlantic Monthly to read Brinkley's treatment of John Kerry. Wish I'd had more time to read.
February
***** Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. Edited by Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright. A Christmas gift from Eric W. Seckinger. At the risk of repeating myself, how can such space as this encompass such a work! While it is indeed a compliation and not a consistent work by one or a group of scholars using a limited number of narrative threads, this book must, for the time being, stand as the text for the study of Transcendentalism and for the update of Myerson's 1984 bibliography of Transcendentalism. I began this tome on December 27 and finished on February 18, with some diversionary reading in between those dates. My copious notes helped me to fill in the blanks in my mind on the history and philosophical depth of Transcendentalism. It has become a permanent addition to my Transcendentalism library.
**** Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction--and Get it Published. Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. W.W. Norton. 2002. From the Daphne Public Library. Certainly the best and clearest book I've read on the subject of a book proposal and writing sample written by someone once an agent and now an editor.
**** Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg. 2003. Putnam Berkley Audio, read by Tony Goldwyn. Unabridged, 10 hours. Recorded Books, LLC. As a general rule I am not a big celebrity fan. Then there are movie stars. Even the term irks me. So many of them are shallow, ego driven elitist rich people. Katharine Hepburn does not fit in that category for me. Berg's sympathetic but honest--I hesitate to say biography since there is so much memoir here also, memoir of his and Hepburn's friendship over the last 20 years. Berg has at least four books out there--this one and his Maxwell Perkins biography are high on my list of favorites.
**** The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. 2003. MacAdam/Cage. San Francisco. Sven Birkerts said meaning for him in a novel was not the plot or the set of characters but how he felt when reading it. This novel--a Christmas gift from Jessica Fairley at the office party--has its meaning in that context for me. It is a novel of time travel, of Chicago, of the Newberry Library, of love--I felt good reading it. One should not make the mistake of considering this a science fiction novel. It is a piece of literary fiction, well-written, fast-flowing. In short, a good read.
*** High County by Nevada Barr. G.P. Putnam and Sons. NY. 2004. From the Daphne Public Library where Barr's book are on automatic order. My question about the book put me first in line on the reserve list. It was like the 10th grade all over again--then I went to a new high school--Mark Smith High School in Macon, Georgia--and worked in a school library full of nothing but new books!
As in most Anna Pigeon mysteries I found myself having to at times suspend belief. But that's OK; this book is a fine read: good story, great visuals and scenery, and good writing. I give it 3 stars and anxiously await next February.
*** The Woman and the Ape by Peter Hoeg. A kind of Danish magical realism with evolution thrown in for good measure.
**** Abel's Island by William Steig. FSG 1976. A XMAS gift from my son Chris in memory of our joint reading of this story in his childhood. This is a "wherever you are, there you are" kind of story; a story of love; a story of self-reliance; a story of realism, all wonderful but rare themes in young people's literature. This mouse Abel will be around equally long as the book version of Stuart Little, if not longer.
March
*** So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson. Putnam 2003. Reading this book was an odd experience all around. First, I bought it--a hardback complete with dustjacket from Quality Paperback Book Club. I really don't like book club editions, but here I am. I love books on books but this one struck me different than say David Denby's Great Books though in someways they are quite similar, both being personal memoirs of their reading experience. Perhaps my lack of excited connection with this book is because it's written by a woman, replete with many womanly moments. Perhaps it's because so many of the books she mentions I've never heard of. But if I was not connecting, why did I continue? I must retreat a bit and say I did connect, just not in the way I thought I would and excatly what that was I really don't know either. I read every page and all the appendices, so it was certainly not a painful or boring experience. I come away positive and thankful that she, like I, did not like Cold Mountain. Up to this point, I thought I was the only one! Learning that made this all worthwhile!***** Exploring Solitude and Freedom by Thomas Merton. Volume Six of the Journals of Thomas Merton. 1966-1967, published 1997. "The work of writing can be for me, or very close to, the simple job of being: by creative reflection and awareness to help life itself live in me, to give its esse an existence, or to find place, rather, in esse by action, intelligence and love. For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, or to confess, or to appeal. This testimony of love remains necessary. Not to reassure myself that I am ('I write therefore I am'), but simply to pay my debt to life, to the world, to other men. To speakout with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts, and the announcement of punishments. Bad because it implies a lack of love, good insofar as there may yet have been some love in it. The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness." --April 14, 1966
***** The Hero and the Blues by Albert Murray. From the Daphne Public Library . Three essays on art: the social function of the story teller; the dynamics of heroic action; the Blues and the fable in the flesh. Murray is here incomparable Murray. These essays hold their own in comparison to all literary critics, including Harold Bloom. "No truly serious or truly dedicated writer can afford to enlist in any movement except on his own terms." This volume should be Volume 1 of Vintage Murray.
**** The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 293, No. 3, April 2004. I'm not much of a magazine reader. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call me a flipper--I flip through the pages. Circumstance of a recent trip coupled with all my current reading projects consisting of wrighty tomes led me to just take this issue and the nearly finished just discussed book of essays by Murray.
This issue opened me up because I found I did not fully agree with it--perhaps a stupid statement but as I said I'm not much of a magazine reader. Some I did. But my agreement or not is (1) not important to you, (2) in a real sense not revelant. What is important is to read writings by public intellectuals and others that speak to our here and now. "Clearer than the Truth" by Benjamin Schwarz reminds us that duplicity is no respector of political party. "Second Coming" is Joshua Green's portrayal of what we already know but few were able to articulate, that Ralph Reed is, before all, a political operative. Jeffrey Rosen takes similar but a more indepth approach to John Ashcroft. The lead off and cover article is by Michael J. Sandel--"The Case Against Perfection," certainly the most thoughtful and question-producing piece I've read on the newly developing (or at least wished for) democratic eugenics. And much more.*** D.B. Johnson--Henry Climbs a Mountain. 2003. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. The proof is in the pudding, they say. I--as a 54 year old--did not particularly appreciate this adaptation of Henry's night in jail. I felt the reason he was there was treated too lightly. That he escaped the sensation of being imprisoned by meditating his way onto a forested mountain I did like. Then by chance, I had a 3 year old on my lap. He was quite an active child and had earlier said he did not want to read a book. Well, he was fascinated with Henry the bear, the other animals, and the artwork proving a good book can be appreciated on many levels.
**** Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway by Jeffrey K. Stine. University of Akron Press. 1993. Reading this book was a passage through my own memory since I was on the Corps of Engineers team that built the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. I was interviewed by the author in my role as an archaeologist on the project. This book though does not include the chapter on the project's cultural resources management. That was published separately in the Public Historian. I will not say anything in this review that I am privy to due to my official position. I will say Stine writes convincingly about project goals and the means to achieve them in an ever increasingly hostle opposition to this project.
April
**** Thunder and Lightening by Natalie Goldberg Natalie Goldberg means much to me. In my reading of her guides to the writer within throughout the 1990s and now the twenty aughts, that large and loud voice within me at least makes a timid squeak--if nowhere else but my journal and my webpage. I won't call this dabbling; I'll call it a beginning.***** Charles Darwin, Volume II: The Origin and After--The Years of Fame, The Power of Place by Janet Browne. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Wow! Biography is seldom better than this. Given my own educational and professional background, I have a certain understanding of Darwin's life and theories but this gives the details wonderfully. I read this to prepare for a reading of the first edition of On the Origin of Species as a part of understanding the milieu of Thoreau and others in the mid-19th century. I learned more than I thought I would, seeing Darwin's reluctance to listen to his inner voice. Volume I is definitely on my list.
***** Walden Pond: A History by W. Barksdale Maynard. Oxford University Press, 2004 Seldom does a work come along that restates, refines, newly introduces a subject as this fine history of Walden Pond does. It is at once a story of the pond, its geologic and philosophical past and its iconic present. Most wonderful. Purchase your copy through the Thoreau Society and provide a bit of support to its continuing presence as the mecca of American Transcendentalism and the birthplace of the American environmental movement. One hundred years after Sanborn sought solace in Walden Woods in the aftermath of the McKinley assasination, double the expected visitors arrived after September 11th.
**** The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography by Henry Steele Commager, 1967. We simply do not have public intellectuals today of the Commager sort. Too many agendas now cloud the field. Could someone please step up to the plate! Three essays from this book were the focus of my reading. The Dilemma of Theodore Parker, Theodore Parker, Intellectual Gourmand, The Significance of The Dial. Theodore Parker was perhaps the most learned man in America in his day (1810-1860). Depending on one's historical perspective, he is remembered for his articulation of Transcendentalism or as a member of the Secret Six supporting John Brown. He inspired Lincoln to think of the people. His view of history is similar to mine and about as far from Newt Gringrich as it is possible to be:
The historian is to describe the industrial condition of the people--the state of agriculture, commerce, and the arts, both the useful and the beautiful; to inform us of the means of internal communication, of the intercourse with other nations--military, commercial military, or religious. He must tell of the social state of the people, the relation of the cultivator to the soil, the relation of class to class...It is well to know what songs the peasant sung; what prayers he prayed; what food he ate; what tools he wrought with; what tax he paid; how he stood connected with the soil; how he was brought to war, and what weapons armed him for the fight.A forth essay I read, Civil War Cartography, explores how the Topographical Engineers (later absorbed into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) was not well-positioned at the start of the Civil War.
May
***** Middlemarch by George Eliot I finished this book on the first of the month having begun it in Union Station, St. Louis during a lull in a professional meeting this January. Most wonderful language and a great story. It took Marian Evans's skill to maintain the high caliber of literature; a lesser writer would have produced a soap opera (she is similarly successful in many of her stories). I particularly enjoyed the definition of sanity herein offerred: "call things by the same names as other people call them." In my view Transcendentalist themes are embedded in Middlemarch. She was a contemporary of the Transcendentalists, met Emerson, and favorable reviewed Thoreau.Some time ago I watched the BBC production of Middlemarh on PBS. My expectations were so high I decided to tape the 6 hour mini-series. Of course, Alabama Public Television's poor technical quality foiled that plan. Nevertheless, my expectations were more than fulfilled. I vowed at its end to complete my coverage of Marian Evan's work with this weighty tome. That began in January and ended this Mayday. My first excursion on that day was to the Daphne Public Library where a few weeks ago I noticed this same BBC production on tape. Marvelous! How wonderful when a great book and a film production based on it complement each other. The production dates from 1994, is available from BBC Video, and stars Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke Casaubon.
*** Emerson on the Scholar by Merton M. Sealts Jr. From Frog Creek Books, Charleston, WV. More on rating this book: Readability 3 stars, content 4, provocation 5. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman emphasized man's infinite potential while his Puritan forebearers, Hawthorne, and Melville emphasized the finite limitations of humanity. This seems to me to be the content of the current debate between the left and the right; perhaps it will never be resolved; perhaps it should never be resolved. When Emerson looked at the scholar's role in public affairs, I look back to several slave-holding ancestors and wonder what my personal perspective would have been then. How could I have escaped the mental prison of perceived economic necessity and Southern mores? I know not. But the only reality of it all is to look at the actual ancestors--there were me and I was them. That was then and this is now; what does the scholar do today in the context of public affairs? What do I do?
*** Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard. An unabridged audiobook from Harper Audio performed by Robert Forster. From the Daphne Public Library. Glad that I found a new Elmore Leonard, I inserted the disc into my car's system. Ah, I heard that snappy dialogue again. This was a good listen but I found myself wondering why that was so. Two stupid hit men, a personal assistant far too 'cool' for his own safety, a call girl, a lingerie model, and a Detroit dectective. Oh well, sometimes you shouldn't think--just sit back and enjoy!
**** Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal by Sharon Cameron in this small but weighty package Cameron concentrates on the Journal from 1850 to 1852. Those entries represent Thoreau's record as he came to view the Journal as a work in its own right. Frankly for me as a self-guided peripatetic along the path of literature, I found the book a bit dense. But putting some effort into listening to what she had to say, I feel rewarded with a deeper understanding and appreciation of the Journal than my one reading of those many words alone could have produced.
She begins her consideration of the Journal by decrying the lack of a reader's edition. One is faced with either thematic and relatively short excepts (I've read the Signet excerpts and Stapleton's excerpts from a writer's perspective) or the entire two million word package.
The selection of quotations creates the case ostensibly being supported. Crucial questions of interpretation there depend on how the Journal text is to be excerpted. For example, will one talk about passages separated by a twenty-year gap as if they had sustained a continuity of thought? Alternately, if one chooses to focus on a shorter period of time, on what basis will one decide that just these years are important? (...) For any given entry, how will one decide where to begin and end a quotation, or on what aspect of a quotation to concentrate?
Now, one could write on and on based on this quote, and perhaps that is what she does in this book. I thought of a couple of things: those aphoristic quotes from Thoreau and Emerson that one often finds on calendars and posters, and the frenzied jumping about in passages of the Bible some preachers use to make a point that contextually may not be there, like making Rome of Revelations somehow turn into the Soviet Union.
She alludes to this and continues to say excerption from a journal is particularly distorting due to the form's "lack of narrative coherence." Thoreau also aggressively attempts to disorganize the categories we use to conceive of natural phenomena.
She views Walden and the Journal as autonomous writings, that they make competitive claims, and that they establish competitive alliances. She thinks Thoreau thought the Journal the primary work. If so, then what does it mean for a writer's primary work to be intended private? She believes Thoreau believed his work would have a posthumous audience. To her, his wooden box wherein he housed his notebooks reflected the same wish for literary posterity as did Emily Dickinson's sewn packets.
Another way to put this is to argue that Thoreau is not randomly regarding nature day after day; rather he is collecting evidence ("field notes") for an ultimate totality (a "history of these fields") which at any given moment evades him. Despite the fact that these piecemeal observations are to be part of a whole, how each field note is to be delimited or focused is impossible to determine since no human perspective could predicate the criteria for such an assessment. Thoreau is therefore a man collecting evidence for a case he is not in a position to make because he is not in a position to know. The hope is that if he sustains the endeavor, he will have composed the whole picture that, at any given moment, he is unable to see. The "discipline" of the record depends upon sustaining a project in which the description of natural occurrence cannot, by definition, be "memorable," for though these phenomena are to be noted, why they are to be noted evades comprehension.As an added twist, Cameron is also a practioner of Buddhist meditation literature.
***** Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan This, the first book of the Giants Trilogy (now grown to twice that number), is one of my comfort zone books. This read at least my third time through. Tis not particularly favorable to archeology, but I actually heard such a story of destruction of evidence that did not fit preconceived notions.
*** Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson An Audible.com download, apparently at the 'telephone' level of quality. Bizarre, just bizarre, yet it held my interest.
** The Magic Christian by Terry Southern Random House. 1960. Just odd. An award-winning book for humorous writing. Through the several scenes, I got the sense all this was leading up to something, which it was not.
***** Eats, shoots & leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. Gothan Books. 2003. Now this is humorous writing with a purpose! I concur with the rave reviews about this funny and useful book.
**** It's Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers by Sue Walker. The Conecuh Series, New South Books, Montgomery. I began this poem the day I heard Sue Walker talk at Bienville Books about Carson McCullers. I pay attention to Sue Walker, having been in a writing workshop under her, and I am a deep appreciator of her fine literary journal Negative Capability. I have also always paid attention to Carson McCullers. OK, so that much background raised this work onto my radar screen. How did the reading of it connect with me? One might expect allusions to McCuller's life, her work, and to Walker's life. All this is here. I found myself thankful that I was reminded of things I'd not read since 1970 in Daisy Vickers's English 102 at Young Harris College. But in a deeper sense to me, this poem stands as one example of a conversation with those past be they writers or even ancestors that have influenced the writer. Saying that, I suppose it is now my turn to take up the pen, rather than the phone, and have a conversation.
June
*** Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff. I finished this book upon a return from New York. The bit I read before leaving did inform my trip: I thought to look up as I passed Alexander Hamilton's grave at Trinity Church and thought a good bit about what it must mean to live in that great city. On another note, Hanff was the quintessential reader's writer. her 84 Charing Cross Road is... well, gospel. She should not have left us, but her wonderful works live on. Do not ignore them. Any of them.**** Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 by Anne C. Rose. Her introduction sets the tone and meaning of this book:
They were determined social reformers who lived at the outset of the urban industrial revolution, without question the decisive moment of transition of modern times, and their aspirations speak eloquently of human resilience in the face of tremendous social and moral dislocation.**** Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates Vintage Contemparies with a new introduction by Richard Ford, 2000. Original 1961. So, this book was second to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer for the National Book Award. This one is, IMHO, better. Just a fine book set in those mysterious 1950s. I was there for all but 3 months of the 1950s, but fortunately quite young. How did anybody make it through that decade!
**** The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose. Scribner. 1977. I've had this on my list since its publication and frankly have a hard time accepting that time as 7 years ago. Then, I had just gotten through the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past . My attempt to continue floundered. Reading the early pages of this book comforted me since I found I was not alone. The book also has reawakened my motiviation toward Proust; when that time comes I will begin again at the first page of my 3 volume trade paperback set.
Rose is as much, if not more so, a character in this book as is Proust. I found the blend of Updikean honest writer, woman, erudite New Yorker, and super-yuppie (my term) interesting and I must say broadening in the sense of dissolution of categories I use to compartmentalize people. I was forced to confront the question of why I do that. The only good answer is to stop.
I agree with her preference for the traditional translation of the title as Remembrance of Things Past , derived from Voltaire's translation of Shakespeare's sonnet as used by Proust.
This was all good; I was enjoying myself in this read. Then I almost literally screamed when she revealed her husband as the son of Jean Brunhoff, the creator of Babar! Her husband continues the story. Babar is about the first fictional character I remember. For some reason, he resonated with my childhood mind so strongly I have never forgotten him. He probably gave my mind its free association of pleasant feelings with elephants, Africa, and France. Because this book transcends mere memoir in spurring me on to think and question my attitudes, I give it four stars.
**** Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone by Martin Dugard. Read by Simon Jones. An unfortunately abridged Random House audio production. I wonder if the people of Tanzania tire of hearing about Stanley and Livingstone? I do not. I come by this interest honestly since throughout my life, my great grandfather's copy of Stanley's In Darkest Africa has been shelved within my sight.
** Resistance by Barry Lopez. Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. From the Strand Bookstore. I do hope Lopez, a writer I greatly admire, derived some peace by writing these vignettes, for they show him to have been too angry for anyone's own good. But perhaps his anger is good for us to consider, to think about why, and to act. (To dispense here with subtedly, this means vote Democratic on November 2nd; Ralph, it does matter who wins.)
**** Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen. Random House audio read by the author. What is it about columnists that make us want to read them? Why do we--I--care what a woman who lives in New York City thinks or says? You know, I'm really not sure. She writes of reading, motherhood, politics (I mixed these up with a few from her regular Newsweek backpage) and terrorism. One would think I had heard all I wanted to hear on that last subject. What makes anyone want to read what I have written? Perhaps the better questions are those she and I refer to instead of this light banter you now read.
July
*** The Moviegoer by Walker Percy My second time through this book. It, like its contempary Revolutionary Road, is about despair. The opening quote really says it all:...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. --Kierkegaard.** The Iliad by Homer. Is the whole of western literature founded on the squabblings of these dangerous yet child-like men and their equally petty gods? To say the Iliad was violent would be an understatement of the highest order. Battle scenes are replete with anatomical details of death by sword and spear. Reading those descritpions is for me more real, more difficult, that seeing it on the screen would be. On the screen, the image passes; one can even look away. Here, the black print runs red against the white page. The Iliad is about overcoming life through death; will human intersocietal discourse ever mature to an ethos of bringing life through lifting others? This reminded me of the Neocons who cannot see a point to life without proseltysm of their belief system of Judeo-Christian based capitalist democracy. Instead of the begats of the nearly contemporary Genesis, the Iliad has lists of who killed whom.
I often found it difficult to continue this read--this killing, this killing for glory. Counting coup seems more noble yet some tribes of these shores likewise glorified in killing. The modicum of anthropology left from my graduate training attempts to place all this in a cultural context, but the harsh reality is that it is a human context. To look at the last glorification of killing we need only look as long ago as yesterday in Baghdad. And I have not seen today's news.
**** Assembling California by John McPheee. This has been on my list since its 1993 publication. My long wait was amply rewarded with a nice read. His goal is to see how science is getting on with the theory of plate techtonics. Fascinating stuff.
*** The Transcendental Murder: A Homer Kelly Mystery by Jane Langton. 1964. A fun caper set in mid-20th century Concord, Mass., rife with as many eccentric characters as in the time of the Transcendentalists.
* George Eliot: The Emergent Self by Ruby V. Redinger. 1975. Knopf. I could not continue this book since it seems to be little more than a distillation of the hagiographical work Eliot's short-term husband John W. Cross put together from her papers. This after Redinger went to great lengths to show that work's fatal difficulties. This brings up a major point in personal papers. Eliot worked almost tirelessly to destroy her papers in a campaign of privacy over legacy, self vs. knowledge. Even Lewes's letters to her were buried with her. Thomas Merton and others also destroyed similar papers. To have them and destroy them is no better than the present day 'communication' via telephone and email which often leaves little of a record. A sad fate for the future of literary criticism and biography.
August
***** The Journals of Thomas Merton: Run to the Mountain, Volume 1, 1939-1941. Merton's allure for me is not within the realm of rational explanation. He was of certain like-mindedness but also often overwhelming pendantically Catholic, to be expected for a monk. His sense of solitude, thought, and writing though fascinate me. This volume contains the ealiest known fragments and entries. As with Eliot, he did not preserve them as I would have wished: "That is the best way to read these journals. Read the leaves and tear them out and throw them away." Horrors! In this volume he is in Greenwich Village, Cuba, and Columbia University awaiting the decision about his entry into the Trappist Order. The volume ends on December 5, 1941. It contains serious reviews of literature, much devotional writing, but you turn the page and there is a great contemporary review, including the newsreels of the premeeire of Gone With the Wind! Even with the missing pages, a great read for those who love journals. I place them no lower on my shelf than Henry David Thoreau's.***** Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. A New Translation by Edith Grossman. Introduction by Harold Bloom. Ecco. 2003. There should be no doubt that Don Quixote is a major classic of world literature. Those critics, whose work I know, place him alongside Shakespeare. It would even appear that the Bard based his now lost play Cardenio on scenes from Don Quixote, a book contemporary to his times. This edition caught my eye because of Bloom's Introduction. I am drawn to his brand of literary criticism where the first and most important measure of the success of a work is its ability to deliver aesthetic pleasure. My attraction was heightened by a new translation. The troubling aspects of this translation are shared by many translations. At the risk of being confusing, it is the same issue that makes it more readable. Grossman putting early 17th century idiom into the appropriate modern equivalent expresses more of what Don Quixote or Sancho Panza is trying to say than a literal translation. (Have you ever tried to explain all the American baseball-based idioms to a German!) Evenso, there are many explanatory footnotes. Had this technique of translation not been employed, the number of footnotes would have been unwieldy.
I have long been a fan of the classics. As a Lanier Jr. High School student, I found Dickens more interesting than my homework assignments. I began ticking off titles from a recommended reading list admittedly partly for the accomplishment but also for the aesthetic pleasure (though the latter phrase was most likely not yet in my cognitive vocabulary).
The work itself drew me in. I had once read Part I. (Do we have to mention wearing out a Classic Comics edition in the mid 1960s?). It is a great story. It is a mythical recreation of the past as much as Gone With the Wind and War in Peace are. I found it odd, funny, and at times poignant. Yet, after this reading of the whole work, I remain unsure of my feelings about this classic work. Bloom makes an effort to have us see Quixote as Hamlet and Sancho as Falstaff. Frankly, I found the hype a bit overdone. It is a worthy tome though, replete with a character we can hopefully emphatize with but certainly can sympathize with as he rides through his delusions. He utters a great line or two (one prescient of Thoreau "the man who wishes to be simple cannot be a simpleton."), but I found myself often aghast at the fun others had at his expense, Panza's creative thoughts on how to attain a life of leisure at the expense of his hoped-for but never-to-be African subjects troubled me. Perhaps most difficult of all, I have little personal interest in the age of chivarly or in Spain.
At the end of my read, I was happy I'd done it, happy I had bought my own copy, and happy that I am recommending all participate in this and next year's celebration of its 400th anniversary. Read On!
*** Flannery O'Connor by Dorothy Walters. Twayne Publishers. Boston. 1973. Several years ago I read all of her works. I found the exercise well worthwhile. Though her scenery is in the background, it is there and it is familiar to me--the Georgia Piedmont. I have done archeological survey in the Piedmont throughout my professional career. In those surveys, I traversed an overgrown cultural landscape once populated by her characters. Others have called the South a "Christ-haunted landscape." I call the Georiga and Alabama Piedmont a Flannery O'Connor haunted landscape.
What I've had trouble understanding is how her Catholocism found its way into her stories. What biographical knowledge I have of her tells me her work was popular with Catholic clergy and laity. She was in demand for speaking engagements at Catholic venues. I've read her take on the issue in Mystery and Manners, but found it lacking in specifics. Dorothy Walters's book is not lacking. Reading this book made me realize I was looking too hard for subtle allusions when O'Connor in fact was expousing unabashed, uncompromised Catholic dogma. Perhaps this says enough:
She believed in things God-centered, rejected a relativistic ethic, scorned the cult of progress, and accepted the validity of original sin. She "supports the invisible realm against the world of things, the unseen essence as against the objective manifestation."*** Baghdad Without a Map by Tony Horwitz. 1991. This book ends with the first Gulf War. That is not to say it is out of date, but what it does is show a world I doubt can be successfully visited in the near term by anyone of Eurpoean descent, particularly one with a Jewish surname. His travels over much of the Middle East offers insight still valuable. Frankly the winding down of Islamic civilization, the vituperative anti-Americanism (coupled with the desire to visit Disneyland) and anti-Israeli rhetoric can be unbelievably ridiculous to our ears--at least I think it was before September 11th.
Here too is another chapter in a long story of Arab slaving, as earlier told by Burton, Stanley, and Livingston. Speaking of upper Sudan, Horwitz says:
Last spring an Arab tribe had arrived in the village armed with machine guns they'd been given by the government. They burned the Dinka grain stores and took most of their cattle.So it would appear the current difficulties in Dafur have antecendents in the Sudan that go back minimally a decade. The struggle between black and Arabs continue. Do people here still consider Arabs on the African continent a part of the pan-Africa movement?**** The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning. A Cliff Janeway Novel. Scribner. 2004. From the Bay Minette, Alabama Public Library through the Baldwin County Library Cooperative . The online catalog searches holdings at every library in this large county. You put a hold on the book and it is delivered to your home library when available. You can also use your library card at any library in the county. They are: Daphne, Fairhope, Bay Minette, Loxley, Robertsdale, Foley, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach.
How many years have I awaited this volume after reading and listening to the audio version of The Bookman's Wake and Booked to Die? How long did it take me to read it? Less than a day--Dunning cannot write them fast enough! Think of it: books, love, travel, mayhem. What more could you ask for in a great read!
*** or should I say
The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown Doubleday. 2003. A nice get-well gift from a nice co-worker. Amazingly, my copy is the 50th printing! I had resisted reading this book since its publication and had even returned the audio version unheard to the library. Yet my Twin Cities friend kept insisting I should read. My recent surgery gave her the excuse she was looking for and I have the book. I immediately began it and found it to be a fast-paced, interesting read. Sometimes we need to just sit back and enjoy the ride. I did.
***** Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann I cannot say much about this great epic without giving too much away. One simply has to read this realistic novel for its reflection of life and for its language. I regret not being able to read it in German but to let the fault of my childhood lack of multiple tongue acquisition stand in the way of acquiring this story--The Magic Mountain, Goethe, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Cancer Ward--is unthinkable.
Buddenbrooks is 103 years old. There is much of the old here, but for me, the language was fresh and easily assimilated.
***The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester A fine story about the multi-decade creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester is a fine writer whose every book deserves our reading. I hear he is at work on a book about the 1906 San Fransciso earthquake, sure to be published in a timely fashion as that event's centennial approaches.
**** Hermann and Dorothea by Goethe I have read that while this is set in the French Revolution, Goethe got the story from the 1731 Salzburgher exodus. I am a product of that diaspora, that ethnic cleansing. The Governor of Salzburg has apologized. We await word from the Bishop.
*** The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell I know what he means by the tipping point--how something becomes a trend. This is a modern, sociological (and perhaps a bit pop psychological) examination of trends from their first visible expression, wide adoption, and tailing off of popularity. Archeologists often study this in past societies using seriation in an attempt to measure diffusion (and often chronology). Gladwell, a writer and not a social scientist, looks at studies and surveys of sales and attitudes. The weak point is of course how to engineer a tipping point to positively affect teenage smoking or to change public support of Alabama's shameful tax structure (long file) .
September
*** Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray A 1999 Milkweed Editions book. Life in a South Georgia junkyard. Beyond the good memoir of childhood as the daughter of a fundamentalist junkyard man, the book presents the past of the longleaf pine forest and its present near extinct status. The memoir and the general environmental South Georgia context I quite enjoyed since I too grew up there and I am an appreciator of environmental values. She even provides alternatives to the wanton destruction that has diminished this forest to 1% of its former self. For all but the last few pages she does this in a tone of positive understanding, realizating that the past is the past, but at the end of the narrative shifts to a confused polemic. On the one hand she honors the life she and her family led, then condemning all that has gone before and is still happening to the remnants of this forest. I found myself wondering if she will remain focused on her goal or fall into an Earth First-like attack mode. (As I wrote this harsh line, I felt a bit disingenuious since I too am a strong defender of the environment. It's just that I no longer think pedantry and pomposity achieves much in the way of result.)
October
*** Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading by Nancy M. Malone. Riverhead Books. 2003. I must face it; I'm a sucker for books on books. This slim volume gives me hope--a nun reading without any test other than the quality of the literature. I like her notion of 2 kinds of readers: pilgrims and monks. I, like her, find that I am a monk, needing a 'monastery' in which to read while pilgrims can effectively concentrate at an airport gate. The systemic distraction she describes affects me greatly and in airports in mostly caused by the CNN Airport Channel. She goes on to say that it "exists in and is encouraged by the very structures of contemporary postmodern life." A very nice read with reading recommendations.** The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. No doubt this book deserves more than 2 stars, but her role as a leader in the home-schooling movement, a movement that disturbs me, reduced its value to me. Add to that her conservative religious perspective that she does not acknowledge in this volume, and my concern grows. Not that there is anything wrong with whatever perspective one may have, but I think that when you are presenting something like another route to a classical education, honesty about your perspective is quite necessary. Frankly, many elements of a 'classical education' seem to be inimical to at least my perspective on what a 'Christian education' consists of these days. As in most books though, she does present some good points. Most of the book is an annotated reading list.
**** Joyce's Ulysses by James A. W. Heffernan. A series of 24 lectures about Ulysses on audiotape put out by The Teaching Company and checked out of the Daphne Public Library on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. While my first reading of Ulysses a short while ago was rewarding, receiving the wisdom and knowledge of one who has read many times and studied the work made it far more clear to me. I think with the new insights I received from Heffernan, another reading of Ulysses cannot be far off. (But for Finnegans Wake, I may need a brain transplant!) I hesitate to insert a negative statement here since I found the series so rewarding, but the introductory music and the closing applause after each lecture I found disconcerting.
***** James Joyce by Richard Ellmann. New and Revised Edition. Oxford University Press. 1959, 1982. A gift from my kind co-workers of the Inland Environment Section, Environment and Resources Branch, Planning and Environmental Division, Mobile District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I read this for most of September while dodging hurricanes (for most of October as well) interrupted by travel and that pesky day job. Ellmann's biography of Joyce and his biography of Wilde are considered by most as exemplary of the craft of biography. Through the briefest mentions in the footnotes and in information on Ellmann (1918-1987), we find that he was long occupied with the life of Joyce, even speaking at his reinterment in Zurich. A reader of this book can of course find much ado about Joyce's books but it must be characterized more as a biography of the man, not his works. The level of detail, the amazing documentation through footnotes, and the sheer readibility of this book caused emotion to strike me as I turned the last page; the end of a reading journey that begin in early September. Truly a fine reading experience that led to copious notes of my own, which I will mercifully spare you.
***** The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter. Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. Pasted on the front free fly of this book is a newspaper account of the death of Richard Hofstadter on 24 October 1970, aged 54, of leukemia. After reading several of his works, my assessment of Hofstadter was that he fell into the category of free-thinking liberalism. Elsewhere I have read that he was conservative. Perhaps he was simply put, an intellectual independent. My favorite quote from this book is "A democratic society ... can more safely be overcritical than overindulgent in its attitude toward public leadership." Something, we, or at least the current administration, seems to not believe. One thing I did not know, he calls John C. Calhoun the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking. He (along with Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson) had a keen sense of social structure and class forces before Marx.
Another potent thought was Hofstadter's statement that to the mind of the Old South, emancipation meant, beyond the replacement of slave labor by hired, but also the loss of white supremacy thus the end of civilization itself. [Then just what are those who fly the Confederate flag captioned "Heritage" really saying?]
Another timely thought written nearly 60 years ago: In his view, the Founding Fathers' principle was that "no class is safe unless government is so arranged that each class has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics...If corporations can buy legistatures, equality of suffrage is useless and the republican principle is dead." Hmmm, what might that mean today?! While reading that chapter, my mind kept re-minding me of what has not changed. We still have a society poorly educated, one who is willing to cast the vote of their 'masters,' leaders who espouse exaggerations never understanding the resultant bondage that leadership fostered. Alabama is a good example (thought doubtless such can be found elsewhere). Here a system has been in place for a hundred years that places a gross proportion of supporting the state on the lower rungs of society, through high sales taxes and significant income taxes at relatively low salary and wage levels, while maintaining miniscule requirements on large land tracts involved in agriculture and timber. The oligarchy that fosters this is so powerful that even when a prayer meeting holding Evangical governor offers an alternative, it is labeled by this cabal a tax increase for the masses.Not a gambler, I will go for a sure thing--the % of those making under $50,000 who read the proposal and its backup material would (to be be kind) be less than 5%.
In Alabama, there just is no base level of education and free, independent thought capable of working out these issues. It would also appear that the current voting generation has convient amnesia about the switch from a one party Democratic state to a primarily Republican one. Historic fact shows the shift to be in negative reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. The same leaders rail against replacing the 1901 Constitution, whose primary purpose was Negro disenfranchisement, with one of the modern era based on a political philsophy reflecting the true spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. An amendment on the current ballot is designed to remove racist language from the document. Isn't this a bit like painting a house of ill-repute white? That, nor this Amendment, changes what's inside.
But I digress. Hofstadter's goal was to analyze men (written before PC language) of action as leaders of popular thought, not to continue the role of pietistic biographers. The men he considers in this volume are: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Wendell Phillips, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt. I thank Mr. John B. Dickey, the previous owner of my copy, for his 1961 margin notes.
*** The Deadwood Beetle by Mylene Dressler. Bluehen Books, 2001. Literary fiction served me well this weekend. This book was just the right size for an evening's and the next morning's reading. This is a book, like all good books, that can be read on many levels. I read it to have a nice read. Today that was quite enough for me and it served that purpose well. It should have been longer!
November
** Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis. Since early October I have tried to complete this book a couple of times. For me, it has no force so I have thrown in the towel. Hofstadter was a far better treatment of similar focus and will, I believe, hold up longer.*** The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Satre. Translated by Eric Sutton. Original 1947. The first volume of the trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberte (The Roads to Freedom). I must admit enjoying this book even though most scenes and characters were completely foreign to me, no pun intended. Well, perhaps that is reason enough to read something! What I found most enjoyable was the fine writing.
*** My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey. Recorded Book Audio on CD. Performed by Susan Lyons. 2003, 9.75 hours. Once before I'd checked this out of the library but just could not get started. In desparation for titles, I tried again and after a half hour or so finally go into the story. A good way to spend 9.75 hours on the road.
** Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent. Something about the early reviews of this book insured that I would one day read it. My feelings once I have are different. It is, as they say, well-written literary fiction. It is set in a time and place of interest to me--pre-Civil War New England. But at its heart, it is a Western novel. In its structure, it could almost be the last example of the captured by Indians and escaped woman narratives, so popular in the 19th century. It also tries to be a treatment, midly psychological, of the 4 characters, shifting its focus as the narrative develops to the crashing crescendo of the denouement. In this, as in so much fiction, I find a wildly imagined story, one that purportes to be a possible reality of the past unwritten for reasons of propriety. But I just don't believe it--the story. Fiction, literary or otherwise, forgets the pervasive role of the quotidian in life.
***** Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance by Lawrence Buell. Buell's stated purpose was to survey literary art and criticism of the American Transcendentalists and contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between style and vision in all nonfiction literature. In at least the former goal, he is successful and elevates his book to a classic of literary criticism. Beyond 'just' literary criticism, this is one of the few entries in the heavily populated market of books on Transcendentalism that spends any time attempting its definition; a difficult proposition at best. He spends some time establishing its context and transmittal coming down to a succinct and I think useful limiting definiton of who is and who is not a Transcendentalist: one who has "a state of mind originating in a specific matrix--the reaction against rationalism within Unitarian thought" whose thought then influences others. He comes up with nine layers of the Transcendentalist onion. They are:
His most important points, in my opinion are in his closing remarks:Harbingers
William Ellery Channing, James Marsh, Sampson Reed.Primary
Bronson Alcott, Cyrus Bartol, Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, W.H. Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Cranch, John S. Dwight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, George and Sophia Ripley, Henry David Thoreau, and Jones Very.The Next Circle
Ministers: Charles T. Brooks, Convers Francis, William H. Furness, William B. Greene, Sylvester Judd, Samuel Osgood, Samuel Robbins, Caleb Stetson, and Thomas Stone.
Laymen: Caroline Dall, Charles Lane, the young James Russell Lowell, Charles K. Newcomb, Caroline and Ellen Sturgis, Anna and Samuel Ward, and Charles S. Wheeler.Third Generation
Moncure Conway, O.B. Frothingham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, Franklin B. Sanborn, David Wasson.The Eminent Periphery
George Bancroft, Lydia Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Isaac Hecker, Caleb Sprague Henry, and Walt Whitman.Brook Farm Members
Fruitlands Members
Emily Dickinson in her own category
[T]he Transcendentalist conception of self...lead to some important poetic discoveries, which through Whitman's example have had a permanent impact on literary history. First, it provided a way of talking about the unity-in-diversity of American society. Second, ... it made possible the introduction of stream-of-consciousness techniques into western poetry. The psychological basis of this technique is precisely the Transcendentalist idea of self, stripped of its metaphysical basis: the idea that identity consists of one's perceptions of the universe moment by moment."December
(Zero *) Villages by John Updike 2004. Random House audiobook read by Edward Herrman. Unabridged. As a long Updike devotee, I never thought the day would come when I agreed with my mother's sentiment of Updike--though her opinion is general and mine specific to the book. Surely no reader exists who is unaware that sex is a major current of Updike's lives in his work. But in all the others, ...I certainly will not use a trite express like "have some redeeming value"--but that is so. This does not. Frankly--and harshly--I view it as another installment of royalties at the First National Bank. Period. I just hope no one on the Nobel comittee reads this. Doing so would diminish his chances of an otherwise long overdue Nobel Prize for Literature.**** Studies in the American Renaissance 1995 Edited by Joel Myerson University Presses of Virginia, Charlottesville. Several nice papers in this issue of the hardbound journal that Myerson edited for some time. Those I read in this issue were: Fruitlands: A Postscript by Jacqueline E.M. Lathan; Books Recieved--Melville and Melville Studies in Japan by Kenzabuso Ohashi reviewed; James Freeman Clarke's Journal Accounts of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Lectures by Alan Brasher; That 'Grand Model of Humanity': William Henry Furness and the Problem of the Historical Jesus, by Elizabeth Hurth; Concord in 1882: The Journal of Florence Whiting Brown by Joel Myerson; Thoreau's Lectures Before Walden: An Annotated Calendar by Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag. Wonderful stuff.
*** Conscioussness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto "Lost Journal" (1840-1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary by Perry Miller. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1958. This book is in two sections, the first being Miller's 130 page introductory essay, the the text of the "Lost Journal." My reading of those journal entries was in the Princeton Edition which has the subject text integrated into the whole so I read here only the introduction. Miller says in several ways how the Journal became the work for Thoreau, his creation of a mythology out of the village Apollo, Henry Thoreau.
We interrupt this test to being you news from TV! BookTV, that is. During December, C-SPAN2's BookTV ran twice a discussion of Literary Blogs and Their Influence, recorded on December 3 at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe in NYC. Present were the webmasters of MobyLives.com, MaudNewton.com, Beatrice.com, MoorishGirl.com, BookNinja.com, and Complete-Review.com. Nice discussions on literary blogs, books, and writing. Perhaps a little of life stirred in. This program resonated with me since I suppose in some way (hopefully one that matters) this is a literary blog. I don't write here everyday which marks me different than those listed above, but I everyday do read and think about what I will say here.
*** Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard. A Books on Tape, Inc. audiobook on CD. Read by Alexander Adams. 2000. The same crackling dialogue is present in this Elmore Leonard as is the often irrevent humor. This one adds a bit of serious historical note, the genocide in Rwanda. Certainly we call this popular and not literary fiction but I wonder about its status in 50 years. Leonard is just right, good stories, dialogue, and right on idioms. Perhaps then he will be viewed as representative material of the nineties and the aughts by the time the fifties roll around again! (I almost added another star!)
** The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien. Mentioned by Garrison Keeler in a Writers' Almanac of a week or two ago. I'm always on the hunt for literary fiction so I took the bait. I find it exceedingly difficult to write about this book. Perhaps I should read the entire Country Girls Trilogy. I don't think so.
***** Walking by Henry David Thoreau. Another read of this essay. Here he squarely places humans as a part of Nature and goes on to offer one of his most well-known aphorisms: In wildness is the preservation of the world.
I'm ending the year well into Samuel Pepys's Diary.
Created February 1, 2004 Updated December 27, 2004
Last edits (hopefully) March 7, 2005