After the Apocalpyse, Discoveries

Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed column this week tackles a topic I took on myself recently: the culling of books. It caused me to reflect on living with a substantially reduced library, since I am now post-cull, and am actually only living at the moment with a small group of the books I saved, since the majority are still in storage back in New Hampshire.

While I enjoy not feeling quite so entombed by tomes as I used to be, again and again I've wanted to grab a book I know I have, only to discover it's not here. It's a strange sensation, the sensation of seeing something in peripheral vision that disappears when you turn your head, the sensation of seeking ghosts.

Not that having fewer choices of what to read has stopped me from reading too many books at once. As of this moment, I am in the midst of reading Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard, The Virtu by Sarah Monette, Beyond This Horizon by Robert Heinlein, Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham, Sides by Peter Straub, and I'm probably going to start In a Town Called Mundomuerto by Randall Silvas very soon, because I just decided to abandon Mary Modern by Camille DeAngelis (didn't hold my interest, alas, amidst the competition). Not to mention various magazine (just got new issues of F&SF[Alexander Jablokov and Ted Chiang in one issue!], Interzone [ever more gorgeous, and this issue full of Michael Moorcock!] Harper's [Alice Munro!]...) So I'm hardly starving for things to read. And I did bring substantial collections of my old favorites -- Shakespeare, Chekhov, Woolf, Faulkner, Beckett -- though somehow I managed to leave all the Kafka behind, which is just causing terrible angst, and the only poetry I brought with me were two books by Jennifer Moxley, which are wondeful, but not enough, and...

Well, anyway...

Really, the whole point of this seemingly pointless post was to say that in culling my books I discovered some I'd forgotten I had, and that was a great joy. I brought one of them with me, and have been reading it with immense pleasure: Far from the Madding Gerund, a collection of posts from one of my favorite blogs, Language Log. I remember being quite curious about the book when it first arrived, because I wondered how a book of blog posts would work, but then it got buried in the piles and I honestly forgot I had it.

At first, I found reading it a bit awkward. The biggest problem is one of hyperlinks. The blogosphere thrives on hyperlinks, of course, and though this causes some people concern, for me it's one of the attractions of blogs, because I like to be able to have the option of either follow the directions links lead to or not. With a book built from a blog, the editors and publishers have to figure some way to handle the links, and the folks who put Far from the Madding Gerund together decided to indicate links in the text with a lighter font and with a URL and a little bit of info about the link set as marginalia. It's as elegant a solution as I suppose there is, but it's pretty awkward. I got used to it as I read along, though, and the content of the book is, I find, so compelling that a bit of awkwardness doesn't detract.

I wondered, too, why anybody might want the book when all of these posts are, as far as I know, still available via the Language Log archives. But there's a difference between reading online and reading a book, at least for me -- really, I behave differently. I read a bunch of posts at Language Log the other day, but skimmed around between them, following links, jaunting about. When I sat down with Far from the Madding Gerund tonight, I skipped around, but not nearly as much as I did with the actual site. I read five and even ten pages in order at a time. I also felt a somewhat different attitude toward what I read -- reading the posts as a book, I reflected on them more, read them more slowly, reread parts, thought about things I might share with my students or with friends. I do all that with the blog itself, too, but less frequently. There was something about the book as a book that caused me to consider -- in a subtle way -- its content more carefully than I consider the blog's content, because my mind still treats books and websites differently. It's hard to describe the experience without implying that one way of reading is better than the other, but I honestly don't think of them as better or worse. I'm glad to have the book, because it organizes its information differently than the blog, and so I have discovered things in it I haven't discovered online. Blogs with archives as vast and substantive as those of LL benefit from a kind of "greatest hits" book, and the careful editing of this book has grouped posts together in such a way as to highlight connections that might otherwise not be obvious.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more