January

***** During January (and a good bit of December) I read in The Diary of Samuel Pepys . Still only on his second year (1662). Amazing material here.

***** The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie. An interwoven biography of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day. Their common thread, of course, is their Catholicism, in which each was devout. It is far to easy to dismiss religiosity, particularly given the cynical cloak it now wears in the political arena, but these four were not limited by their religion; they were liberated by it. A most interesting and useful book for those with any interest in any of the four, Catholicism, spirituality, twentieth century literature, New York City history, the process of writing, and a host of other topics.

** The Hunted by Elmore Leonard. A Recorded Books unabridged book on CD performed by Mark Hammer. Book 1977, Recording 1999. I guess the powers that be are recording every Elmore Leonard they can get their hands on. Fine by me! The first disc or two failed to capture my interest so I almost stopped. I mean--a thriller set in Israel with characters from Detroit! But I finally caught up to the story. At first the narrator using a different voice--dramatically so--for each character was annoying, but that is when I didn't like the story. At the end, this device helped to create a movie in my head.

***** I'm also working through the library's copy of an unabridged recording of Ulysses by James Joyce. Now through 7 of the 21 discs, I have to say this book was written to be heard! Musical it is. I am particularly enjoying the ruminations of Bloom. They work so much better aloud (for me) than in print.

**** The Ballad of Little River by Paul Hemphill. 2000, Free Press. Such a depressing book--while many in the area say it is exaggerated, this sad story is closer to the truth of 'Redneck Life' than Jeff Foxworthy's humor. Depressing as it is, I had to read this book. I live in the same county, though it is a large one. Little River is in a different world than Daphne. I've been there, even eaten at the Dixie Landing Cafe. It is true that a combination of boredom, peer pressure, and alcohol can result in actions that are unwise, and not just among teens. When you add heat from the smoldering coals of racism, the flare-up can be particularly...well, sick is the word that comes to mind. And oh, by the way, the KuKluxKlan was declared a terrorist organization by the government in about 1909. Yet now their rallies--as few as they maybe--are held under the protection of the First Amendment. Yet Arab Americans who donate to a charity for the Middle East are summarily imprisoned by that great defender of the Constitution, John Ashcroft (will Gonazales torture them?!). I just don't get either racism or ethnocentrism.

February

** City Primeval by Elmore Leonard. An unabridged performance by Frank Muller on Recorded Books CD. Book 1980, Recording 1993. Yet another Elmore Leonard. This one fine up to the ending which I felt was contrived and quite unlikely.

**** Thomas Carlyle by Fred Kaplan. Kaplan is no doubt an accomplished biographer. This book reveals that talent. However, I am not sure I wanted to know the extent to which Carlyle was a 'Nervous Nelly," nor am I sure I wanted to be reminded of that on nearly every page. Now I must read more of Carlyle and find an intellectual biography that concerns itself more with his works than his (from the evidence presented here, intolerable) personality.

**** An Introduction to the Study of American Literature by Brander Matthews. 1896. The pages on Thoreau kindly given me by my friend Bob Patterson. Actually a nice, short introduction to Thoreau. I found that while it less than 10 pages is therefore certainly not comprehensive, it is not out of date at all. One line is quite interesting since it launched my friend on his annual reading of Walden, now approaching his 30th adventure:

Walden has been called one of the few books of American authorship which it is worth while for an American to read regularly every year.

Magazines. I have never been much of a magazine reader. However, due to a flush of airline miles on a couple of airlines I try to avoid, I subscribed to several of moderate interest to me to add to the one I already receive. I have found the experience rewarding. This reading has been in The Atlantic Monthly, Wired, Scientific American, Writers' Digest.

***** Letters to a Spiritual Seeker by Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. W.W. Norton & Company. 2004. From the Daphne Public Library . Dean, a long-time Thoreau scholar, provides a gift to us years before the Thoreau correspondence will be published by the Princeton University Press. In his introduction Dean says that to Thoreau "[r]eligion is never spoken because the deepest truths of human experience cannot be communicated directly from person to person. Some fatal loss occurs." In these letters, Thoreau seeks to guide Harrison G. O. Blake to discover meaning for himself.

Having read most of these letters before in a different compilation, I nevertheless learned a great deal from Dean's volume. These letters are specifically directed at what we must by definition call religion and in that sense, gives great insight into Thoreau's thought, feelings, and beliefs on the subject. For me, one of the most significant points Thoreau made was "[T]he last of Nature is but the first of God," meaning to me that he did not find God in Nature, but that Nature was a part of the pilgrimage of life toward God. If you have felt some of Thoreau's writings to be pedantic or sermonizing, here "Life Without Principle" is properly credited as a sermon on the text of Mark 8:36!

On more secular matters, Thoreau here recounts his meeting of and impressions of Whitman. Even after he applies demerits for Whitman's sensuality, he said of him "the greatest democrat the world has seen. He is awefully good. He is a great fellow." I think Henry would have been horrified to know that his copy of Leaves of Grass recently sold for $100,000!

Here too is recounted Thoreau's meeting and supporting of John Brown. Here too is the seed of the American environmental movement: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" A fine book that with its fine introduction and comprehensive footnotes will remain a crucial Thoreau resource even after the complete correspondence is published.

For March, I will continue in Pepys's Diary and the unabridged audio version of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (on CD from the Orange Beach Public Library through the Baldwin County Library Service).

**** The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The seat of the literary mystery seems to have moved to Spain! This wonderful read follows, in my mind anyway, Club Dumas as a most worthy way to spend some time. This book also is a bildsroman, a political thriller, and of course, a love story. In the manner of Siskel and Ebert, one must sometime rate a book as to whether it, like a movie that has been hyped, delivers on its promises. The Shadow of the Wind far exceeds the positive note I read before seeking out the book. I even drove to the Gulf Shores Library rather than risking the county delivery system, fearing it might get checked out before I could get to it. In my excitement to pick up this book, I even momentarily forgot the Spanish naming patterns and went looking in the Zs. I guess those 5 courses in Spanish are now quite lost. Too bad because I would love to read the original.

March

**** Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity by David Hurst Thomas. Basic Books. 2000. This book went to press in October 1999 but remains current since the Kennewick issue remains murky, at best. This book illustrates an old problem, that of what is the right thing to do, think, and say. There are those who would say truth transcends time, place, and culture, yet invariably, what one generation considers right becomes a generation or two later so wrong as to be near evil. Thomas ably demonstrates this in his narrative that documents relationships with the larger society and the government from an early missionary approach to American Indians, to one of scientific detachment, to his call for humanistic archaeology (not, I might add, yet adopted by the entire profession). Perhaps the problem is what the definition of is , truth, that is, is. The bottom line seems to be akin to the way someone described John Collier's tenure at the Bureau of Indian Affairs: "good intentions and ironic results, of a simple vision crashing into a complex reality."

***** Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. Unabridged audio CD from the Daphne Public Library. I hear there is a bit of controversy about this book. Is there not about anything and everything concerning the Bard's life? Greenblatt spent an hour on Booknotes convincing me to partake of this wonderful look at the cultural and historic context in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

*** Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers: Thoreau by Elbert Hubbard. Volume XV, No. 6, December 1904. The Roycrofters, East Aurora, NY. I may have read this before, but if so, that just means my pleasure has been doubled! No great work of biography, this short work is nevertheless fun. Two items in this work made it well worth one of my morning reading sessions.

In every century a few men have lived who know the value of plain living and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have passed them the hemlock.

The story my father often told of Henry in jail being visited by Emerson: "Henry, why are you here?" The response, "Waldo, why are you not here?"

March found me on the road quite a bit so the reading suffered. I try deep reading on airplanes, but the darned thing keeps hitting air pockets! Good scenery also overtakes my concentration. This month I traveled to Columbus, Ohio and saw the snowy landscape below, Washington National Airport with DC for a great view upon landing, and Salt Lake City with overwhelming views on the journey and just before landing.

April

*** The Poet of Tolstoy Park by Sonny Brewer. Ballatine Books. Hot off the press! Sonny Brewer, local to the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, a writers' Mecca, has done well. His Over the Transom Bookstore is a local treasure, his Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe now has two volumes, and the story of Henry Stuart has finally been told beyond local lore. Indeed, the good here is the rescue of Henry James Stuart and the little concrete igloo in Montrose, Alabama, from oblivion. I find myself now wanting to know more about the Eastern Shore's Thoreau.

** When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin. Unabridged audiobook read by the author. Recorded Books. Carlin's treatment of PC language, interspersed throughout the book with a long treatment early, is very good, perhaps even important. Much of the rest of the book is a clear call for help, professional help.

***** One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini. Harper Collins. 2004. A Christmas gift from my sons, Eric Seckinger and Chris Seckinger via BN.com.

Reading literary biography can be a dangerous activity, especially if you come to it with the writer's works under your belt. You can never be sure, until you are immersed in the book, if the biography focuses on every bit of minutiae, probably negative, about that life--as in the Carlyle bio noted in February of this year above, or if it is a true (in my definition) literary biography which puts the work (which is, after all, what led us to the biography) in context with the writer's life. Parini's book succeeds on that note to a nearly perfect degree. Considerable detail about Faulkner's less than angelic life lie before the reader on these pages, but you also find that the next morning, he is back at his typewriter and you know on what he is working.

Now to Faulkner himself: I am just old enough to remember the kind of South he memorialized in Yoknapatawpha County. Mine was not Oxford, Mississippi but Soperton, Metter, and Savannah, Georgia. My life was not town and country as his works were, but town and city. Still, in the mid 1950s the occasional old black man with a wagon pulled by mules could be seen slowly clomping through what traffic then existed in Soperton. I remember friendly chats with African Americans but with a broader eye, my father tells me of unspeakable acts of inequality and bad law he witnessed. That these thoughts and scenes never leave me, hopefully serving some little purpose of positive change, put me in mind of the book's opening quote from Faulkner:

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

With Faulkner's great body of work taken more as a unified whole (with a few exceptions), the past of Yoknapatawpha County, inextricable tied to a deep, rich sense of place, is permanently held in living form within those pages. Parini says you cannot read Faulkner, only reread him. That I hope to do. A sequence of reading could be fashioned from the book, but I find myself wishing Parini had actually included a table offering his suggestion of the order of reading.

May

***** Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. Unabridged audiobook on tape, 13.75 hours. At least my second voyage through. I began this to just re-read The Bear but as the tapes were poorly indexed, continued through the entire work. Hammer's voice and performance seems the voice of an old Southern man. That part is good. I found several mispronunciations odd, wondering about the Recorded Books director. "Lead" pronounced like the element rather than to lead men, "raping" as knocking rather than the sexual crime.
Go Down, Moses is another, and fine, example of Faulkner's rewriting of earlier short stories into a novel form. The book is an epic of Yoknapatwpha County, at least that part of it lived by Boon Hoggenbeck, Ike McCaslin, and others. Included is 'The Bear,' the finest hunting story ever written. It is the finest because it is about far more than killing. Growth of a child into a man, communion of the last Indian with Nature, are among the threads.
The book uses a fossil of the Old South, a language based on differences, a racial language. Often it jars the modern ear--and sensibility--but current notions of political correctness should not suppress the book but be used to examine the world which most of us hope is dead and buried.
I say dead and buried but my travels through the small town South suggests strong vestiges of the language--and the culture behind it--remains. If I were an anthropologist or a sociologist looking for those vestiges, I would start in Alabama's Black Belt and southwest Georgia. There the school systems are resegregated, blacks in public schools, whites in private, mostly 'Christian' academies. Sad, but it proves respectively that history and culture are hard to live down and hard to change. Now, just what does "Heritage, not Hate" behind a Confederate flag really mean?

*** The Sign of the Book by John Dunning. I'm happy Janeway is back: I enjoyed this read. Yet, in a stack of books, one has to be the best and one has to bring up the rear. Among Dunning's Cliff Janeway novels, The Sign of the Book is the latter.

June

***** Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee. Reading biography always make me think of myself. Not in any sort of hubristic sense, but in the sense of just what is it I am doing here. Good to be introspective every now and then. A rare American experience these days. Woolf has for some time held a sort of fascination for me. I've read a good part of her works but need to again to go beyond the surface slice of life many of them contain. Based on this biography, Nicole Kidman's portrayal in The Hours was right on. The Hours was, by the way, her working title for Mrs. Dalloway. "It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." A wonderful Emersonian thought. Lee puts the famous quote:

There is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

as presenting the fundamental impulse of her work as therapeutic. I see it differently, as an acknowledgement of the Transcendentalist idea that each of us is, while remaining an individual in the strongest sense, a part of the common mind, as she would put it or the Over-Soul as Emerson did, even if she is thinking not in religious terms as he did.
Her suicide as caused by war strain was a misquote by the coroner. It was due to her fear of an irrecoverable mental breakdown.
This is what literary biography should be.

**** Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey. An unabridged audio-CD read by Simon Vance. Every now and then, I do a search looking for literary fiction. This showed up recently as I looked over the bookpage in USA Today in one of those free hotel copies so it was off to Ebay and a score. Very nice. Very nice, indeed. The sum of a life. Pouncey has created something I think we would all be proud to have done.

**** Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. A Christmas gift from Sherry Kimsey. Before starting, I must say that I have been an extreme Dylan fan since about 1968. I went through many re-evaluations that year: Vietnam, music, the meaning of college. I began the year unable to tolerate Dylan. Part of that was my deep south Georgia upbringing. Even a 4-year stint in Macon didn't shake my sense of a small-town upbringing since about the only truly exciting thing I found in Macon was the Lanier Jr High School library. That fall I entered Young Harris College in company with Ricky Varnell, my cousin, fresh from the Air Force, a wider view, and a stack of Dylan albums. By Christmas break I was hooked. As I began a short-lived student preaching career, I found myself using Dylan as a source as much as any other writer concerned with the state of the world.

But to this book. Having made vain attempts to delve into his earlier prose, I was unsure what would happen here. I was quite pleasantly surprised! Within this autobiography are flashes of true insight into himself, the country in the early and mid-1960s, and the New York folk music scene. It is really a fine read with much history embedded, some mildly humorous like his first between sets hangout companion Tiny Tim. Definitely one of my favorite lines was his description of an Ivy-Leaguer at Columbia Records, "He looked like he'd never been stoned a day in his life." Funny. But the important part of the book comes from insights like, "Folk songs were the way I explored the universe...I knew the inner substance of the thing...With me, it was about putting the song across." Or, on the Civil War, "America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected...The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write." I await Volume Two.

***** Margaret and Her Friends by Caroline H. Dall. Roberts Brothers. Boston 1897 printing of an 1895 original. Subtitle: or Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller upon the Mythology of the Greeks and its Expression in Art. Held at the House of Rev. George Ripley, Bedford Place, Boston, Beginning March 1, 1841. Reported by Caroline W. Healey. We now call subtitle abstracts! Among the attendees listed are household names of American Transcendentalism: George Ripley Sophia Dana Ripley, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Frederick Henry Hedge (who in 1836 was the host of the Transcendentalist Club), James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Caroline Sturgis (later Tappan), Jones Very, Elisabeth Hoar, A. Bronson Alcott, Sophia Peabody (Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne), Charles Stearns Wheeler. I was surprised at the number of men; I had thought Fuller's conversations were for women if not only, mostly but only 52.2% were women. A great line from Fuller: "Man had gained more than he lost by his fall." This book finished the 19 December 2004 to 13 June 2005 volume of my Commonplace Book.

A note about my reading time, early morning. Reading moments after awakening leaves me alone with the book. Other thoughts lie still, awaiting a part of the day when full brain synaptic explosions bounce attention from one thought to another. Immediately post-sleep reading channels reflected light and textual patterns straight to my brain with no dams, no training dikes, no impediments. When the book displays an entryway into the soul of the writer, I don't even hear the clock chime its quarter hour notes.

* Ex-Libris by Ross King 1998. I made a valiant effort to 'get into' this book, achieving page 150. But alas, it seemed to me the setup was still underway--for a 392 page book what could the dénouement be with such a setup?! Even with the hooks of books, bookselling, and its 1660s setting (I am simultaneously reading Pepys's Diary from that time), I could go no further.

I've made it through the first 7 discs of Ulysses twice now. Too many interruptions. Perhaps this should be done like the story, over the course of about a day in a stream of consciousness! Or perhaps this would be a good one for an iPod that I could feel more comfortable wearing than my cumbersome CD-player webbed belted pouch affair.

July

***** The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall 2005. An intellectual, literary, and sociological biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody. I thought it odd there is no picture of the 3 together in the book. Perhaps one does not exist. Individual pictures can be found on the Unitarian History website. The 3 sisters, Elizabeth Palmer, Mary, and Sophia, lived during the time when a second revolution occurred in New England. This 'interior revolution' transformed "the United States from a parochial theocracy into a modern, secular democracy." Theological debates remained the hot issues of the time:

Was Christ a divine being, part of a holy Trinity, set on earth to enact a drama of atonement for the sins of mankind? Or was he human, a teacher whose moral example could be followed by anyone who chose to do so? The essential nature of humanity was a issue.

William Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's mentor, was responsible for articulating many of these issues along with the ills of slavery. He also recognized the importance and power of including private experiences into public life, a concept central to the Transcendentalist Movement to come.

I know the contributions of women, and even their ability to contribute, was suppressed. And I am one to say was with hope that such suppression no longer continues. Reading this book reveals the depth of that suppression in the past. For example, had her editor Andrews Norton (later famous in the Transcendentalist--conservative Unitarian debates) not suppressed it, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody would have been the first American to use the term Transcendentalism in print.

On a personal note, I must recount that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a friend of Caroline Whiting, to become Caroline Lee Hentz the author of Ernest Linwood, my great grandmother's favorite book. .

Though Elizabeth Palmer Peabody never married, her sister Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary Horace Mann. There is much of interest in this book on the connections among the Transcendentalists, an interest of mine. Marshall never even gets to the story of Horace Mann Jr's trip West with Henry David Thoreau. On that note, I will say I hope a second volume is in the works. It is time we leave behind the snideness of Lowell and James and come to understand the contributions the Transcendentalists made to American thought and culture--then we will see they still live through us.

**** Elmore Leonard's The Hot Kid. Audiobook on CD. 7 discs, 8.25 hours. Narrated by Arliss Howard. Set in the 1930s around US Deputy Marshall Carl Webster. Very cool. Were I writing the screenplay, I'd use at least 4 scenes from the book. The initial rustler incident, when Jack Belmont goes seriously against his father, the roadhouse KuKluxKlan attack, and the last scene. I'd want the movie to be at least 120 minutes. For what it promised and what it delivered, I'd have to go 4 stars. OK, Mr. Leonard. Time for another one! Keep up the good work!

***** The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Read by Allen Ginsberg. Unfortunately abridged. The more I read of Kerouac, the more I see his literary greatness. This book is the exuberance of life. And this hike described! Gary Snyder elsewhere gives his version of the hike now entering American mythology (See my August 2002 opinion of that work) .

Perusing the shelves of Paul's Bookstore, a great used book just outside the gates of the University of Wisconsin in Madison a day or so before I finished this tape, I asked if they had a copy of the book. The clerk laughed saying it's so popular that as soon as a copy hits the store it is gone!

*** The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Eco. Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock. Harcourt, Inc. 2004. Original title: La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana. Quite a nice piece of literary fiction. I may read this again one day. Best quote "in order to be able to move forward we behave as if everything we see is real."

**** A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. I first read this in March of 1996 but made no comment beyond that fact. She could indeed be elitist: a room of one's own and £500 a year to be an effective writer! When that was real money. I agree a room of one's own is important, but more important to me is a time of one's own. I would not a hermit be just as Thoreau was not. Yet he took time to himself. Even during the Pond experience, he visited town nearly everyday and often had dinner with his mother, but I digress. Just as I was amazed at the story of the suppression of women in the Peabody bio above, Woolf's Room shows it continued into the Twentieth Century. May all forms of suppression and discrimination end so each person can fulfill their potential: Men, Women, Black, White, Yellow, Red, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and the ever-present Other. Live and Let Live is not relativism; it is belief in one's fellow human being.

August

***** Pepys's Diary (1663). Reading this has led me to a recent biography on Pepys, but more on that in a later month. 1663 an interesting year. One thoughtful passage was that I've heard it said that there were no Jews in England in Shakespeare's time. Less than 50 years after the Bard's death, Pepys visits the Jewish Synagogue in London on October 14, 1663.

*** Saturday by Ian McEwan: Another example of my continuing experimentation with contemporary literary fiction. Like life, threads not followed. Nice for an audiobook. That the action all occurs in the course of one day--Saturday--is as far as any comparison to Joyce goes.

***** Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. Edited and with an Introduction by Douglas Brinkley. Viking Trade pb. This copy from Quality Paperback Book Club (www.qpb.com)2004. This book lies between cashing in on Kerouac's popularity and fostering that 'movement.' In a word, anyone who appreciates Kerouac, the alternative post-war years, or Beat, must have and read this volume. Beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the read, I encountered a few things I did not know:

The most shocking was Kerouac's life-long Catholic mysticism. He even called himself an anachronistic Catholic. The popular press has made him into a hipster, a Buddhist, and sadly an alcoholic. Hip is here; Buddhism is here; the binge drinking also here. But here too is :

I don't like the feeling of "knowing it all," knowing what I want, how to get it, all dear, and not "glaring in" like Carlyle's reality, but just clear and glistening. I've got to learn to walk back to the shadows of truth.

Perhaps Transcendentalism frightens him with its self-reliance because his Catholicism pulls him back to a guided faith. In the end, he comes to grips with self, giving his version of living deliberately:

I'm going to decide the thing myself, even if I have to burn in the attempt.

The Beats have a reputation of utter spontaneity, like the bebop jazz they loved. Yet in these entries we see Kerouac thinking about writing, about making a living writing, about being separate enough from the hipsters to objectively record the movement, and most out of the folk character that has evolved in the public mind: rewriting. At length. Kerouac reveals that most important to a writer, his influences:

What is my tradition? In form, Melville of Confidence Man & parts of Moby Dick; the later Joyce; monologue poetry & plays of Eliot. In substance: all that the eye needs, from Skeleton to Fie, from Blake to Fum. Substance is always there, it's the Bowl of History that changes, & man must wind his garments about him.

His frenetic pace most evident in On the Road he explains as "It's not the words that count, but the rush of what is said."

His philosophy-call it what you will-surfaces often:

And no more sins and guilt, no more need for sins, no more guilt for not being guilty! Nothing but all things, frankly understood at last, rising from sexual energy outward to all human communications and situations. Nothing but the world, its light, and people in it. (not out of it, as now.)

This taste of Kerouac's journals has indeed whetted my appetite for more. As Brinkley says in his introduction, this was not meant to be a free text rendering of all Kerouac wrote in his journals. It is though, and will remain, a marvelous introduction to those journals. I now await the full version and end on a Kerouac note:

My aim is to find good. I shall not find it in such a world, for which I was not made I believe I shall find good in the other world.

*****Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom . Riverhead Books. 2003. In this small volume, a postlude to his Hamlet chapter in Shakespeare , Bloom delves deeper into Hamlet--dare I say the man rather than the character or the play--than my limited critical reading in that area suggests exists elsewhere in the libraries of Shakespearean literary criticism. These 154 pages convey much new to me about Shakespeare, the play, and Hamlet himself. I choose in this review to concentrate on a theme running through Bloom's analysis and of special interest to me: Transcendentalism , or perhaps more formally and more to Bloom's characterization: Romantic self-consciousness.

Tracing an idea through history should perhaps be called chasing since, in this case at least, the concept of transcendentalism can be traced to a foundation from Plato, especially in the Neoplatonists on to Kant, Goethe, a number of French philosophers, transmitted to the United States by Emerson and other American Transcendentalist reading Marsh's interpretation of Coleridge's interpretation of German idealism and of Carlyle. Bloom here takes a step back searching for a more significant origin of "Romantic self-consciousness." He begins that discussion by citing another's thesis that Luther (80 years before Shakespeare wrote this version of Hamlet) first articulated self-inwardness. Bloom though places that beginning squarely on Hamlet.

Perhaps even more than pure atheism, this concept has troubled the organized church. Even down to August of 2005, Pope Benedict XVI warned the young not to engage in "do it yourself religion." Hamlet seems to be the first readily accessible character to do, as Bloom says, "pick... up anything useful to him that was available in his era."

What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. II.ii.303-307

By having Hamlet listen to his own voice rather than the voice of the god, Bloom has him expanding his own consciousness to a level where "Hamlet is the truth." With this beginning, Bloom escorts us on a journey examining Hamlet's transcendentalism but unlike the somewhat warm and fuzzy misreadings current about Emerson's or Thoreau's versions:

Hamlet discovers that his life has become a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity. This truth, intolerable to any of us, helps turn Hamlet into an angel of destruction.

Bloom strongly disputes the popular notion that Hamlet contemplates suicide in several soliloquies, including the most well known one. Rather he finds that Hamlet seeks annihilation:

To know that you are a fallen divinity is a difference that makes a difference: annihilation becomes a welcome alternative.

Yet Hamlet's residual idealism tempers the bleakness of his quest for annihilation.

Bloom pushes this transcendentalism to what many would call blasphemy: "there is a God within him, and he speaks: 'And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?'" Pushing even further, he denotes Hamlet as a third newness after David and Jesus, but in Hamlet's case, a newness secularized and destructive.

Bloom's Buddhist-sounding endgame for Hamlet "the obliteration of consciousness is an absolute felicity" is not my Transcendentalist endgame. But how do we keep from sinking into deadly nihilism while seeking a full transcendental engagement? Ah, there's the rub!

***** A.R. Ammons: The Selected Poems 1951-1977. Two poems in particular reveal the influence Transcendentalism had on Ammons: "Still" and "Corsons Inlet." Each places the poet (and the reader?) outside of himself and into a larger Nature. These 2 poems put into words the sense that there is no high or low in value; all is Nature. In its ever changing form, as expressed here, I'm led to another literary quote not often tied to Transcendentalism: "For after all, tomorrow is another day." From his "Dunes," "Firm ground is not available ground." This for me means make your own way, certainly a Transcendentalist thought.

*** Skeleton Man by Tony Hillerman. Recorded Books read by George Guidall. 2004. 6.5 hours. Another nice Hillerman about Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn and the landscape of the Southwest, this time the Grand Canyon. This library copy a bit frustrating though. Its scratches produced several skips that very nearly torpedoed by listening to the end.

At the end of August, I found myself reading Samuel Pepys: The Unequaled Self by Claire Tomalin by flashlight during Hurricane Katrina. The Daphne area of the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay saw its city piers into Mobile Bay destroyed but mostly trashy yards above the bay water's surge zone. Main Street power was back on by 8 PM that night. Of course, our hearts and minds and help go out to those south and west less fortunate. Though I did not personally witness it, I heard second hand that refugees were moved from a shelter in Daphne because the upper middle class whites complained about the nature of the people walking through the neighborhood from that shelter. If that is so, I am deeply ashamed of my town.

September

September dawned with cleanup of Hurricane Katrina debris. While in my Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay yard only leaves and a couple of large limbs fell, every mile west and south of me saw damage rise exponentially to biblical portions in Bayou La Batre, Pascougla, Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland, Pass Christian, Slidell, and New Orleans. Probably the only item of literature to convey this kind of natural terror is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Where Watching God. Perhaps someone will give their recovery a boost and write of the last spate of storms in a way to share their deep sense of home, place, terror, and recovery.

It turns out that it was indeed the case that a shelter in Daphne was closed due to neighborhood complaints. I could not be more ashamed. However, and a big however, almost immediately, other citizens of Daphne rallied and opened another shelter at the relatively new civic center. Many of the evacuees said this was the best shelter they had seen.

I and perhaps many other Gulf Coast residents were unable to watch 4th anniversary commerations of 9/11. The reliving of that combined with the images of New Orleans, coastal Mississippi, and SW Alabama Katrina damage just too much to bear.

***** Samuel Pepys: The Unequaled Self by Clair Tomalin. Knopf, 2003. Pepys was a man of his time who kept a diary. That is good enough for me to read. But he was so much more. A worthy biography of the Restoration Era. Just the account of his bladder stone surgery in the late 1650s is worth the read!

*** Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America by Kathleen Rooney. 2005. All this brouhaha about Oprah's Book Club is just unbelievable. I mean what is wrong with someone setting their own agenda on their own show asking if anyone would like to read a book she found interesting or even meaningful in a self-help sort of way?! Rooney supports Oprah's effort but in a hope to sound objective in the 212-page long journalistic treatment, she calls her question "how did this book make you feel?" simplistic. I could, and Harold Bloom did, launch a career on the relative merits of aesthetic pleasure vs. the kind of deconstruction and analysis that goes on in academic treatments whose major effect in my view is to lose track of the story! Even a (once again to my mind) sophisticated literary, if not critic, reviewer Sven Birketts said much the same thing when he said speaking of reading a novel, "I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details." The outcome of all this spilled ink is, I hope, that more people are...what's that word?... Reading!

**** Longitude by Dava Sobel. 1995. A perfect book to read on the plane when you want something highly readable but also significant. In finding the means to precisely calculate longitude, John Harrison improved the mechanism of the clock from a curiosity for the rich to a precision time-measuring instrument. I could read a long series of tightly crafted books like this on other significant turns in the history of technology and ideas.

** The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmasckik. When I acquired this book from the Quality Paperbook Book Club, I thought it had something to do with birds, always a fun subject for me. I took the book on a recent trip, thinking it perfect for an airplane read. The reality is I finished it only because it was the book I had with me to read on the plane. It is about 3 people in particular that one year chase the record for the number of bird species seen in the U.S. The birds themselves are definitely minor characters in the book. It is a frantic 250 page-long magazine article about obsessed men. Oh joy.

October

*** Neo-Classical and Romantic Literature. Part Five of Authors of the Western Literary Tradition by Arnold Weinstein, Michael Sugrue, and Victor Brombert. The Teaching Company. The Superstar Teachers Series. Audiotape from the Daphne Public Library. This tape includes lectures on Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau's Confessions, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and his Faust. These lectures are at the college level and as such would be better attended to while seated with pen and paper rather than in the car. But enjoyable nonetheless.

**** The Archivist by Martha Cooley So much of literary fiction is either slice of life or unrealistic. This is toward the latter, but how would we know whether such a tale is true or not? Very fine. I learned more about T.S. Eliot while reading this page turner of a novel than I ever did in an English class.

**** The Ghostway by Tony Hillerman Unabridged Narration by George Guidall. Recorded Books. I can never get enough of Tony Hillerman. This is at least the 2nd time through this tape from the Daphne Public Library and I think I have also read the book. My interest never dies and last month's visit to the Navajo Reservation heightened it further. To feed that need, I watched the 2 PBS American Mystery productions of Hillerman's works: Coyote Waits and Skinwalkers. Very fine.

But I have to go further than the pure entertainment value I suggest above. While that value is at the highest level, Hillerman takes us further. He takes us to a heightened mental state where we can see that the way we (I am speaking here of the subset of Americans he and I share, white, European Americans) see the world the way we see it but that others see it differently in a way that is as valid as ours. And perhaps richer.

With all the travel this month, I got only half way through the first volume of Boyle's biography of Goethe. Great detail that is wonderful to read. In his early appreciation of and going out into Nature, I see another devotee of Nature to come along two generations later: Henry David Thoreau.

November

*** Hendrix: A Biography by Chris Welch Flash Books, NYC 1973. I will admit the eBay listing made me think this was a standard book. Even though it is more magazine in style and cobbled together in typography, I found it offered insight into one of the 1960s greatest musical legends. The author goes on to some extent to seem objective and critical but I must most strongly disagree with one such observation:

"he could beat a path to destruction and cynicism as displayed on his dismemberment of 'The Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock."

I remember feeling uncomfortable when I first heard that rendention in 1970. I couldn't quite come to an understanding of what he was doing and just what my feelings were. Recently, however, I watched that performance on the remastered video. My sense of being an American--the pride and the disappointment--came flooding into me just as I think it did for him. He played to the greatness America should be, with a great sense of its shortcomings. In response to a question asking if his goal was to become rich and famous, Jimi responded, "Maybe I'll live in a tent, overhanging a mountain stream."

Just as I finished this, I noticed a new bio of Jimi Hendrix was out. It seems others share my sense of his importance.

* The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert. Viking trade pb 2002. I formed an impression in my mind that this book about Eustace Conway was about a modern day Thoreau living in Appalachia. It seems the author thinks that, however this reader saw an emotionally disturbed man, still suffering from the emotional abuse wrought by his father, turning that pain onto his so called apprentices. No one should compare this troubled man to any Transcendentalist, particularly Thoreau.

*** The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol 2005. Subtitled The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. He uses a great Thomas Merton quote to make a point: "We owe a definite homage to the reality around us and we are obligated, at certain times, to say what things are and to give them their right names." What he means, of course, is the re-segregation of American schools. Still, I was disappointed by this book probably through no fault of his. His experience is in urban, particularly New York, schools. What shocks me is the re-segregation of rural and small town Southern schools. I've seen it in Camilla, Georgia and in Sumter County, Alabama. This widespread phenomenon begins with the establishment of "Christian" academies. When a sufficient percentage of white parents send their children to those academies, county support for the public school system, still I might add under their political control, disappears. It is a shame and no one is talking about it, that I hear. The cabals that run Alabama and keep the populace down may explain a bit of the problem here. What is Georgia's excuse?

** March by Geraldine Brooks Unabridged audiobook by BBC Audiobooks America read by Richard Easton. I am probably being unfair giving this book only 2 stars. In the field of current fiction, it ranks high. I just think the field of current fiction does not rank high. Also, I have a high standard when discussing a Transcendentalist for after all, the main character here is ostensively Mr. March from Little Women who was then and is even moreso here based on Bronson Alcott. I might be more positive if I had ever read the forementioned classic by Alcott's daughter Louisa May Alcott. After all, a 19th century set of her novels has been on myself as a family inheritance since 1972. This is a purchased copy but rather than keep it, I will donate it to the Daphne Public Library . Check it out and let me know what you think.

**** The Magus by John Fowles The Modern Library. 1998 edition, original 1965. Escape from my office seemed the only remedy to my sense of being overwhelmed. I would find a bite for lunch and the walk would clear my head. As is often my want, I stepped into a used bookstore in downtown Mobile, Bienville Books (the only one there after the demise of The Haunted Bookshop). In chatting with the bookmonger Russ Adams, I suggested literary fiction as a frequent target. He suggested several before he hit on one I'd not read, The Magus by John Fowles. I remembered his French Lieutenant's Woman as one of my all-time favorites so I took the plunge. It was only after I'd been reading it for a day or two that I discovered Fowles's recent death.

As I've said in other reviews of literary fiction, quite often I don't know where I'm being led. In the case of The Magus that was just fine by me. The writing here is most wonderful (he revised the book for this edition) and the story interesting if odd and a bit on the implausable side. But, do we not read literary fiction to see beyond our own limited horizon?

***** Goethe, The Poet and the Ages. Volume 1: The Poetry of Desire 1749-1790 by Nicholas Boyle. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 1991. Purchased a couple of years ago at the DeFoor Center in Atlanta. To write a meaningful review of this volume is a difficult task. The book is densely written and long. I began it on 19 September and finished it on 27 November, not counting the days of travel. I did not take this heavy tome with me on flights. By now you probably have the notion that I think this is the definitive biography of Goethe. I certainly think this volume is; I will get to Volume 2 later. This bio is a perfect match of works and personality with the added dimension of placing the subject in the historical context of his time. Boyle does them all well and may even go too far in the works category. You could probably teach Goethe's Werke from this text.

Too few Americans know enough about Goethe so I'll include some of the basics here: Born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt (Ironically the year my Seckingers left Germany). Died 22 March 1832 in Weimar (excatly 118 years before my birth). His Faust is to German speakers what Hamlet is to English ones. I (and Harold Bloom) see Goethe as contributing to the reputation and longevity of Shakespeare. He read him in the original English.

My interest in Goethe comes primarily from his intellectual role in the continuation of Transcendentalism from Kant, inspiring Coleridge, Emerson, and Thoreau. In this first volume, he has one strain that is definitely not transcendental, that of trusting only what his senses tell him via reason. That is Locke not Kant. At least he acknowldeges that the object power that will instruct and console him is the power of Nature.

*** The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown by Edward J. Renehan Jr. 1995. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns are here described as the secret cabal funding John Brown. Just outside this immediate circle lay Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau. As shocking as it sounds to our ears, these respected leaders knew violence may be afoot, though probably not the exact plan (though Douglass may have known). This group begs reconsideration of the issue of one man's terrorist and another's Freedom Fighter. I'm told John Brown is taught as a hero in Kansas schools--I learned in Georgia schools that he was an insane terrorist. While the six maintained secrecy and for the most part went into hiding after Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, Thoreau told Higginson that civil disobedience "required staying in place,...a certain willingness to suffer the consequence."

December

** The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism by Clarence L. F. Gohdes. Duke University Press. 1931. This book a reworked dissertation under R.L. Rusk at Columbia University. I struggled mightly to get this book but should have saved my money for Myerson's book on The Dial. I found Gohdes's work to be overly descriptive and where analysis was presented, it was rife with negative personal opinions. He works hard to disparage Thoreau both as a Transcendentalist and a writer. Those he does include among Transcendentalists are: Dr. Channing, Emerson, Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Parker, Ripley, Convers Francis, W.H. Channing, F. H. Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, W. H. Furness, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, Elizabeth Peabody, and reluctanly adds Margaret Fuller. His second generation includes T. W. Higginson, Samuel Johnson, John Weiss, David A. Wasson, Samuel Longfellow, O.B. Frothingham, C. A. Bartol, and Moncure Conway. The periodicals he discusses are: The Western Messenger 1835-1841, The Boston Quarterly Review 1838-1842, The Dial 1840-1844, The Present 1843-1844, The Harbinger 1845-1849 (which Poe called "the most reputable organ of the Crazyites"), The Spirit of the Age 1849-1850, AEsthetic Papers 1849, The Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1847-1850 (which he views as the ancestor of The Atlantic Monthly which is still being published), The Dial (Cincinnati) 1860, The Radical 1865-1872, and The Index 1870-1886.

An aside about the nature of Transcendentalism's Nature While it has occurred to me before in a diffuse way, this morning I was struck with a long overdue clarity, understanding what the nature of the Nature of the Transcendentalists was all about. We get sidetracked by the immense efforts thoreau and before him Goethe put to sometimes systematic and sometimes not study and observation of nature. Perhaps they did not look as deep into their personal metaphysics to understand that their Nature was not the nature of biology but of Gilpin, the Hudson River School, their sense of wonder beholding a vista of sublime beauty. Not here is Darwins nature of eat or be eaten. While we all bemoan Thoreau's early death, I wonder what he would have done with his new, too late, knowledge of Darwin's Origin of Species had he lived a longer life.

***** The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac Unabridged audiobook read by Tom Parker. Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc. Earlier listening to an abridged version read by Allen Ginsberg left me in the usual state of the abridged experience--what did I miss? In the case of the Dharma Bums much. The full work has a presence, an evidence of the writer's art far exceeding the not full. Why, I ask, deny oneself the experience of this marvelous tale?!

**** Christopher Pearse Cranch and his Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism by F. DeWolfe Miller. A concise biography of one of the Transcendentalists (also a painter of the Hudson River School) and a presentation of his drawings portraying the people and ideas of the movement.

***** Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. My at least third time through. Perahps I am taking inspiration from my late friend Bob Patterson and his annual reading of Walden. This is a marvelous work and an historic one. Nature served as the initial spark for the band of brothers and sisters we know as the American Transcendentalists. There were other, earlier works that influenced the Transcendentalists, but this was the spark that lit the fire. It seems to me that every sentence in this book is a thesis. Several could and I am sure have been texts for sermons: "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Meaning, in my virw, that revelation is not restricted to the biblical era but continues unabated today, if you are receptive. I find Nature to be timely, even in 2005: "We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other." A nice quote: "Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not."

*****1664 in Samuel Pepys's Diary For this year, Pepys continues to tally his wealth (standing now at £1,015), work hard doing the King's business, saving the King money and improving the quality of products bought for the Navy while not above accepting tribute from contractors, keeping his journal, visiting his mistress and thinking about, well most women: "So to my office writing letters, and then home and to bed, weary of the pleasure I have had to-day, and ashamed to think of it."

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There are only 5 stars:  * Could have avoided.  ** OK. *** Very fine. **** I predict a lasting piece of literature. ***** A world classic

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Created January 1, 2005

Updated January 14, 2006

Header quotes from http://richmond.k12.va.us/readamillion/readingquotes.htm, accessed 16 February 2005)

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