Word Blur

Literary court hound

When I lived in San Francisco, I attended part of Janet Malcolm’s trial re: In the Freud Archives, just as an interested audience member. Cause I’m crazy like that! I’d love now to be at Laura Alpert/JT Leroy’s trial at the hands of the disgruntled film company Antidote (who bought the rights to Sarah and want their money back because the author doesn't exist).

Swedish humor

Did you hear the one about the monk, the book, and the tech support?  Seriously funny stuff.

Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover

A recommendation for The Victorian Governess comes to me courtesy of my new favorite book blog.  It seems especially worthy of attention following a fantastically imaginative and unfaithful Jane Eyre adaptation.  Just what sort of behavior can we realistically expect of our nineteenth-century literary heroines?

Your heart on your sleeve...

...your book on your chest.  I'd like to see the entire world run this way.

Sentences and so on

When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a paper bemoaning what I saw as the over-analysis of literature. It was the late 1980’s, so there really was a fair amount of over-analysis to bemoan.  I asked why we couldn’t appreciate the story and the craft on a more basic level, than proceeded to quote extensively from all the assigned reading and lots of related things I had been reading on my own, and talk about why I liked them. My teacher was impressed by the paper, because he was more of a writer than an English professor at the end of the day. Everyone else in the class (we read these things out loud for some reason) was probably appalled by the crude authority with which I overstated my case and the lack of any coherent thesis. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them starts from a similar place, except it’s, you know, like, really, really good. I had heard/read a few interviews with Prose about this book and frankly I thought she sounded like a bit of a pill, with her call to read all the great works and so on, but now I’m a few chapters in and totally under her spell. The fact that she cites Jane Bowles as one of the writers she returns to again and again for instruction scored huge points with me. I love that she has a whole chapter on beautiful sentences and what it means to write them. It’s immensely gratifying to read her examples and when one thinks about the task of writing as the construction of such entities, it’s actually less daunting and more purely pleasurable.  In fact I'm considering diagramming sentences as a hobby.

Book Hustler

I just discovered BiblioOdyssey, which collects lush digital images from rare books and manuscripts.  It's pornography for book fetishists.  Thanks to Fearless Future for the heads up.

Library Thing

I like it here.

Obsessive Reading

My last really good bout of obsessive reading came when I had a severe back injury that left me more or less bed-ridden for a period of a few months.  I didn't read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, though.  I read (almost) all the works of Miss Read, pretty much identical stories about a teacher in a one-room school house in the British countryside.  I say they were identical, but every once in awhile a family of long-haired hippies moves to the village and causes trouble.  Still, these slight deviations aside, it was heaven.  I guess some people just have higher aspirations than I do.

Now I don't read at all anymore.  If I have free time, I just watch Veronica Mars on DVD.  Because I'm shallow.

Pulitzer Prize story: courtesy of bookslut

Selene Colburn's Secret

I have this weird thing that I like to do, that I've been honing and perfecting for about a decade.  I like to eat alone in family-style restaurants, while reading a book that seems (on the surface, at least) incongrous to that setting.  It's something about reveling in privacy, secrets, the enclosure of a good narrative, and a whole theory of Sad Foods that I'll save for some other time.  In my more extreme past, when this practice was still under development, I once found myself in a Denny's reading Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.  A lot of things have changed for me since then: I'm not quite so willing to experience such colossally bad food out of a missplaced committment to irony and I rarely read anything on which I can spend more than five minutes per page.  The basic premise is the same though.  So, it's with great pleasure that I report that over the weekend I managed to simultaneously consume the first few chapters of Lady Audley's Secret and a hot turkey sandwich, while occasionally listening in on the employment woes of the cousin of the Greek owner of my local restaurant.  There is nothing more tragi-romantic than the combination of Victorian sensation fiction and mashed potatoes.

Back in the Land of the Living

So I'm back from a week in Las Vegas, where I mostly read magazines, travel guides, and conference papers, and went without internet access.  The actual books I did manage to read were about dead people -- continuing on my John Dickson Carr-a-thon, which I think may actually be starting to wear a little thin.  I no longer vomit and hardly ever even feel like vomiting.  So things are looking up.  Especially with the whole not being in Vegas anymore aspect of things.  In the absence of having much that's interesting to say at present about what I've been reading, I will direct you instead to The Book You're Not Reading, a very witty blog by a guy who reads a lot of the same things I love -- gothic Victorian mysteries (Wilkie Collins and otherwise), Anthony Trollope, lesser-known works of the Brontes, etc.  This has become one of my daily reads.