The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity

1.  bibliographing nicole, host of last year’s historic, blog-shattering Clarel readalong has thrown down a metaphorical gauntlet, demanding a Challenge!

2.  Roberto Bolaño obsessives have circulated lists of his favorite books, for example this list, where Bolaño expresses his affection for “Anything Ubu by Jarry,” which may well have been a translator’s misunderstanding.  Bolaño might be referring to an actual book, Tout Ubu, a French omnibus of Ubu.

3.  This step is extremely important, but I have forgotten what it is.  I will consult my notes, which are unfortunately poorly organized, and insert the missing information later.

4. The result:

All are invited to consult their consciences and read Anything Ubu, or carried away by their newly awakened and insatiable appetite, Everything Ubu.

What is Ubu?  The first great character of the 20th century.  The destruction of literature.  The beginning of Modernism.  A travesty.  A nightmare.  A moderately amusing jape.  Two authentic portraits of Papa Ubu have been ensconced at the head of Wuthering Expectations.  A sample, Act 4, Scene 5 of Ubu Cocu, complete:

The same, MEMNON showing his head.

MEMNON’S HEAD:  It’s not functioning at all, it’s broken down.  What a dirty business, like your braining machine.  I’m not afraid of that.  It all proves my point – there’s nothing like a sewage barrel.  In falling in and popping out again you’ve done more than half the work for me.

PA UBU:  By my green candle, I’ll gouge your eyes out – barrel, pumpkin, refuse of humanity! (He shove him back, then shuts himself in the lavatory recess with The Palcontents.)

“It all proves my point” – that is my new motto.  Expect me to deploy it in your comments soon.  Cyril Connolly is the “translator” here.  Many translations and adaptation of the Ubu plays exist.  The plays are:

Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, or whatever you want to call it.  Written and performed, actually performed in an actual Paris theater, by human actors, in 1896.

Ubu Cocu, or Ubu Cuckolded.  Published in 1943.  Jarry was long dead.

Ubu Enchaîné, or Ubu Enslaved, published in 1900, I think.  Who cares.

In some sense, this is the proper order of the plays, and a proper reader would want to start with Ubu Roi.  The proper reader would also end with Ubu Roi, probably before he gets to the bottom of the first page, and “sense” is really the wrong word to use in the context of Ubu, so forget all of that.

These three plays make up The Ubu Cycle but are not the end of Ubu.  I have only alluded to the fact that these plays have an author, Alfred Jarry, who is visible, in Picasso’s portrait, peeping over the Challenged! button up above.  Jarry’s writings outside of the plays are suffused with Ubu, soaked in Ubu, dripping with Ubu.  Jarry, in what for the sake of argument I will call “real life,” actually became Ubu.  For legal and ethical reasons, I urge participants in the Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity not to actually become Ubu.

Nicole and I invite one and all to defile their blogs by sampling Anything Ubu.  We think we will begin the disembraining (or, to use an antiquated technical term, “discussion”) in the last week of June.  Bolañistos and Bolañistas are nuts not to join in.  Other readers – see you in July!  Or August – the Ubu stink may be gone by then.

Why on earth do I think it's a good idea to host a challenge?

When I started Wuthering Expectations, I participated in a single challenge, subject: Russian literature. Read four Russian books, you bet. Lermontov, Gogol, early Dostoevsky. This challenge was actually mentioned in Newsweek.  The challenge as such, aside from reading the books, which I would have read anyway, was entirely unsatisfying.

A couple of dozen people read entirely different, unrelated books, and had nothing to say to each other.  Nothing resembling a conversation developed, and how could it?  I got, and get, so much more out of anything posted at Lizok's Bookshelf.  And I hated writing for the Challenge weblog.  I had no idea for whom I was writing.  Every so-called "review" was a constricted botch.

So I turned against challenges a bit.  My reading is plenty organized as it is.  But over the last year I have paid more attention and have changed my mind.  Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge, soon to enter it's fourth year, was instrumental.  As of this writing, 227 books have been read in the past year for the challenge, many of which would not have been read without prodding.  The enthusiatic, insightful response of Mel U at A Reading Life has been especially impressive.  He has developed his own conversation with modern Japanese literature, and he lets me listen in.

So simply pointing the way does have some value, even though the review format is deadly and readers will have a hard time really engaging with each other.  I wholeheartedly endorse the Clover, Bee, and Reverie, challenge which wants to encourage the reading of poetry (read 2+ poetry books during the year).  I'm not participating, though - I read 30 books of poetry last year, write about poetry often, and do not exactly need the encouragement.  I don't see how any discussion can develop, either, but the pointing and nudging has its own value.

So what if everyone reads the same book?  The Woolf in Winter readalong (Mrs. Dalloway all linked together here) seems to be working well, although it's interesting to see the delicacy with with commenters treat each other.  Better than the other extreme, that's fer sher.  Rebecca Reid's Classics Circuit, in which readers concentrate on authors or movements rather than single books (Gaskell, Collins, now Wharton), has gotten a good response, too.  I'm going to participate in the Harlem Renaissance edition next month, with a post about Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Women (1899), although, I pray I'll come up with something better than a review for an unknown audience.

Maybe readalongs are the way to go.  But one wants people to be free in their reading - we want many readers and many books in the conversation.  How do we square the circle?  I've come up with a possible solution, one that is just slightly nuts.  Tomorrow, I officially launch the Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Reading Challenge and Caber Toss.  You may not, you are thinking to yourself, give a tinker's dam about Scottish literature.  Me neither!  Nevertheles, peruse the rules, and wish me luck.  We'll see.

Should a reading challenge be challenging?

I want to plug a reading challenge that I have joined, the admirable Our Mutual Read.  Four (or more) books published during (or on the subject of ) 1837  to 1901.  So Victorian, chronologically, although non-English (non-Victorian) books are fair game.

Now, if there's any sort of reading I would like to encourage right now, it's books published between 1837 and 1901.  Good books, at least.  I plan to read 80 to 100 of them next year.  There is no "challenge" to this Challenge.  Nothing but overlap.  I signed up, really, just to be able to keep an eye on what other people are reading.  And to be a friendly book blogger, and to encourage people to read Robert Louis Stevenson or some other Scottish writer.

I love the idea of the Reading Challenges.  Serious readers know how to organize their reading.  The best Challenges help people learn to organize.  But I already know how to do that.  When I get back from Morocco, I will spend a week on the Wuthering Expectations Scottish Literature Challenge, during which I will probably go on and on and on about Reading Challenges and why I like them and why I don't.  Or I'll be wise enough to suppress all of that.

In the meantime, however you do it, read some good books.

The Wuthering Expectations Year in Prospect

I'm not going to plan a year of books. I'm not, I'm not.

Still, I can make some predictions for Wuthering Expectations 2009.

The novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the novels of Herman Melville, almost all new to me. More Dickens, always more Dickens, including, following up on my Carlyle reading, Hard Times. And Elizabeth Gaskell, who I have not read. And more George Eliot.

A single comment by The Little Professor - nay, a single word - inspired a keen desire to read John Galt (who?)*, so I see a Galt roundup in the future.

Lots more mid-century Germans: Heinrich Heine, Eduard Mörike, Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, maybe even more Adalbert Stifter.

I can imagine a reader saying "The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick? More Stifter? So wadda ya got for 2010? A root canal?"

For some variety, I want to spend some time with 19th century Yiddish writers, something like this project of obooki's. Maybe this will be along the lines of what I did for Senegal.

There are some clever book challenges out there in bookblog world, but I don't need any help organizing my reading. I need help disorganzing it.

Next week: Christmas.

* I will never get tired of this joke.

The challenge of challenges

I'm wondering how to write about Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time for the Russian Reading Challenge. It's harder than I had expected. Here, my audience is, who am I kidding, myself, although a few friendly folk stop by now and then. Who is the audience at the Russian challenge? What do they want to know?

The challenges are funny things. They're mostly, I guess, motivators. A lot of the Russian readers are going after War and Peace, and the challenge can help prod them along. For others, the most useful function may be providing lists. I'm thinking of the African challenge, or the recent Japanese challenge. Don't know what to read, or where to look? Look here.

I am reluctant to join too many challenges. Even quite logical ones - here's a 19th Century Women Writers challenge. Perfect for Wuthering Expectations, at least for the Wuthering part. As is the challenge to read long books. The Classical Bookworm wants us to read about natural history. She's right, we should, and in fact I just finished a literally wonderful book about the deep sea, The Deep, edited by Claire Nouvian. That fellow over on the left is an actual, existing animal, a dumbo octopus.

I'll be checking in to all of these challenges over the next year, to see what people read, and to see how they write for each other. To see what sort of conversations develop. I don't see how any sort of discussion can get going if everyone is reading different books, but who knows. It will all be new to me.