Encounters with Rousseau and Borges in Geneva

I was recently on vacation, in Lyon and Burgundy, a food-and-wine vacation, of little literary interest.  Well, try the Memoirs of Phillippe de Commines for some firsthand Burgundy history.  The Duchy, not the wine, I mean.

Aside from that, we ended up, briefly, in Geneva, where we visited the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the upstairs of which is now, how to describe it, a narrated, illustrated encyclopedia entry.  How fun does that sound.  Not worth visiting except as a pilgrimage, and an excuse to think about this complex, and, to me, confusing figure.  So, put that way, worth visiting, absolutely.

A bit down the street, this tribute to Jorge Luis Borges:

“Of all the cities in the world,
of all the intimate homelands
that a man searches for (to deserve)
in the course of his travels,
Geneva seems to me
the most propitious
to happiness.”  (translation mine, obviously; third line a puzzler)

Geneva has no place at all in my idea of Borges, but my idea is wrong.  He went to John Calvin High School, for pity’s sake.  That is a true Genevan credential.

Bookish travel notes from an unbookish vacation

New in Krimis:  Or new to me.  Animal mysteries.  Zoo mysteries.  These categories might overlap.  After the success of Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi (2005), in which a flock of sheep solve a murder, a wave of animal detectives was inevitable, but I was not expecting a novel in which the sleuths are a pair of meerkats, a book I held in my hands in a Viennese bookstore.  If you had an idea for a mystery starring a raccoon or a flock of crows but thought, no, the whole thing is much too stupid, I say squelch your doubts and write the dang thing before someone beats you to it.  Cash in.

Similarly, we came across a Krimi in which the detective was Theodor Storm, who in fact did help solve crimes in his role as a judge in Husum, although the novel is set long before that, and before he wrote his great uncanny novellas, when Storm was a young Romantic poet.  Who investigated murders.  What a bad idea.  But now my own notion of a series of mysteries starring Marcel Proust only looks half as dumb.  The enigmatic stranger with the prosthetic leg, who may be the killer but turns out to be an ally, is Arthur Rimbaud.  Faked his death.  I’m giving that away for free.  I’m  not gonna write any Proust mysteries.  See above – the time is right for your series of Detective Whitman / Inspector Eliot / Special Agent Tzara mysteries.  Do not hesitate.  Either Eliot; both would make terrific detectives.  Tristan Tzara is the Dada Detective – good, right?  Better than Theodor Storm or a pair of meerkats.

Meine Frau read a zoo mystery, Das Schweigen des Lemming (The Silence of the Lemming, 2006) by Stefan Slupetzky, in which Lemming, a security guard at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna investigates the death of a penguin, which maybe sounds a little thin, but it turns out the novel is full of detail about Vienna’s art world, including, for example, the 2003 theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar, which I finally got to see with my own eyes.

At one point – this is all secondhand, since I could not read the book myself – an informant needs to meet with Lemming.  Knowing the detective is a fan of Thomas Bernhard, he suggests they meet in the Kunsthistoriches Museum – “You know where.”  He means in the Tintoretto room, in front of the painting “Man with a White Beard,” the setting of Old Masters (1985).  It had been so long since Lemming read Bernhard’s novel that he has to run to the bookstore to look up which painting is meant, but still, do you see what I am getting at here?

In Vienna, the stature of Thomas Bernhard is so high that in a mystery about the death of a penguin it is assumed that readers are comfortable with casual references to specific elements of Bernhard novels.  We stumbled upon Bernhard frequently, even in the Jewish Museum (Bernhard was not Jewish), where a clip from one of his plays was deployed ironically.  The Vienna-Bernhard phenomenon is unusual.

That Tintoretto room is magnificent.  Like the room with the Cellini, it was closed the last time I was in Vienna.

Well, that’s something.  My post-vacation resolution is to make Wuthering Expectations more breezy and shallow.  Off to a good start.  Tomorrow, I will continue with a book I have read rather than books I have seen but cannot read.

Perhaps the purest ramble I have ever posted - travel plans, reading plans, bad plans

I have to disappear for a few more days – back Thursday.  I had planned to write a book review-like post today, but that’s bad planning, isn’t it?  Nearly a week with some random book review topping Wuthering Expectations.  I should instead feature something that strengthens the brand.  If only I knew what that something was.

The book was Demolishing Nisard (2006) by Eric Chevillard, a short novel full of goofy vitriol and revenge.  The narrator hates a particular critic and blames him for everything wrong in literature, and life – the critic’s life, all life.  Traffic accidents, crime, you name it.  “He uses his phone on trains” (55).  That the critic, Désiré Nisard, has been dead for 120 years, is a minor detail for the narrator.

The best reason not to review the book is that Trevor Mookse Gripes did such a fine job in April, so what is the point.  What does he say – “one of the funniest books I’ve read” – I don’t go that far, but parts are awfully funny.  Vitriolic Thomas Bernhard is funnier.  “The book’s existential conundrum: in hating Nisard, the narrator brings on his own Nisardification” – now that is just right.

The only real point I want to make here is directed at the PR person at Dalkey Archive:  because of Trevor’s review I bought a copy of Demolishing Nisard with my own money, so keep sending him books.  He has generated at least one sale.

The Chevillard novel was part of the recent Frenchification of my reading.  I am going to France in July so I am reading about France, even though the books have nothing to do with where I am going.  Not only am I not going to Jersey, the setting of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, but I am going about as far from it as I can get and still be in France.  And strictly, even loosely, speaking, Jersey is not even in France.  So why I am reading the novel?  General cultural seepage, I guess.  Also, it is awesome, although people uninterested in unusual parts of the world should skip the long introduction, and then also skip much of the rest.

The Francis Steegmuller book Flaubert and Madame Bovary is outstanding but mostly set in Normandy.  I am working up to a Madame Bovary festival.  Flaubert is a sort of household god at Wuthering Expectations, so it should be fun to explain what I mean by that.  Has everyone read Prof. Maitzen’s Flaubert posts?  The second one, Bovary vs. Middlemarch is especially idea-rich.

The Janet Lewis novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, is set near my destination, so it qualifies as more direct research.  Now there’s an idea – I should end with an open-ended question, allowing thoughtful strangers to do my research for me.  I have read that blog posts should end with questions.  How about this one:

What do you recommend I do in Languedoc-Rousillon, which is where I will be?  Eat cassoulet?  Yes.  What else?  And what should I read?

Returned from France but not to Wuthering Expectations, not yet

One must consider the possibility that one does not recover from international flights with the quickness that one did a number of years ago.  It is no coincidence that my Currently Reading list, typically containing six substantial volumes, now features a single P. G. Wodehouse novel.*   I’m back but I’m beat.  Ambitious, or even ordinary, writing will have to wait.  A further complication is a jolly family event, for which I leave tomorrow.  Next Tuesday, that is when I will return in force, or so I hope.

France is, by the way, still nice.  Lyons is nice, Avignon is nice, Burgundy is tres tres jolie.  If I were writing the early modern book blog that I wish someone else would write, Quixote Furioso or whatever it is called, I would concoct lengthy posts about the Duchy of Burgundy and the great Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes (1489+), and the French capture of the papacy, and the works of the 16th century Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, and many other fascinating subjects.  But I do not write that blog.

On this one, I would like to demonstrate the results of my research at the Victor Hugo house in Paris, and to study a statue of the delightfully granny-like Auxerre poet Marie Noël, but that would involve sorting and cleaning my photos, which is exhausting.  Or I could, it seems, plunder French Wikipedia.  In their photo, you can see the dog, but the rabbit and snail are hidden.  C’est tres chouette, non?

I see that many other book bloggers are reading novellas, or close relatives thereof.  Perhaps I should read one as well.  I am afraid, though, that I will be too busy, once my joie de vivre returns, assembling my 19th century Danish paper theater as provided by 50 Watts.

Tuesday, that’s the revised goal.

* Update: As was inevitable, or at least likely, Right Ho, Jeeves has been completed. Onward.

Tickets, money, passport! - away for awhile

That's right, a quote from Absolutely Fabulous, an antique.

I'm away for two weeks, and my schedule after that is chaotic, but I'll write something.  Put up vacation snaps.  Maybe review the in-flight magazine.

No, that's where I differ from Patsy and Eddy:  "Tickets, money, passport, books! Tickets, money, passport, books!"

A vacation, and a book blogging question

I will be wandering the prairie for a few days.  Back, let's say, Tuesday.

Do not forget to contemplate the possibility of reading Anything Ubu.  If you are wondering what goes on in Ubu Roi, Jarry's cover from the program for the first performance should help.

Let's see, that's Papa Ubu on the right, and I think the little fellows on the left are Polish princes.  And then there's a box on wheels, and a burning building, and the moon, and, yes, I have no idea.  No idea at all.

My question:  Has anyone come across theater blogs that are like book blogs, or book blogs that concentrate on plays - meaning, that are not just responding to current performances but are also reading plays, really writing about plays?  Anyone reading through Ionesco or Pinter or Calderón de la Barca or whomever?  If so, please direct me thither.  Thanks.

On Easter break

Wuthering Expectations will take a little Easter holiday break, returning Tuesday.

The woodcut is another by Raoul Dufy, from his and Apollinaire's Bestiary.

Bad beer, fullness of purpose, corpse windbreaks, maple syrup, etc. - Irish short stories, Canadian vacations

Two part post.

1.  Wuthering Expectations is on vacation for a week.  Back next Monday, if I am up to it, once I have licked the maple syrup off my fingers.  Don’t want to get the computer too sticky.

Does that much Quebecois food involve maple syrup – rack of elk in maple syrup glaze, roast chicken in maple syrup sauce, cream of maple syrup soup – or is that just an obsessive tic of the Fodor’s writer?

2. mel u at The Reading Life is spending the week writing about Irish short stories.  He’s already covered Joyce, Beckett and Yeats.  Read along, he suggests.

I read along, a bit, in The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999), ed. Colm Tóibín.  The book itself is irritating - huge and heavier than my cat.  As many pieces are excerpts from novels as separate stories.  I stuck with the stories, these:

George Moore, “Home Sickness”
James Stephens, “A Glass of Beer”
Liam O’Flaherty, “The Hawk”
Seosamh Mac Grianna, “On the Empty Shore”
Flann O’Brien, “The Martyr’s Crown”
Tom Mac Intyre, “Left of the Door”

More than I had planned, although, Moore aside, they are all not just short but tiny stories.  The Tom Mac Intyre is three repetitive paragraphs, more like a prose poem, or a riddle I failed to crack.

O’Brien’s story was a disappointment – Irish Maupassant, smutty ending and all, with The Troubles substituting for the Franco-Prussian War.  Very much not The Third Policeman.

The James Stephens story is hilariously overwrought misanthropy:

On this night life did not seem worth while.  The taste had gone from his mouth; his bock was water vilely coloured; his cigarette was a hot stench.

“The Hawk” should be from the perspective of the hawk, but is not, quite. Raptor-lovers will politely ignore the over-writing:

His brute soul was exalted by the consciousness that he had achieved the fullness of the purpose for which nature had endowed him.

I guess I don’t like hawks that much.  Most of the story is better – cleaner – than that, but yeesh.

George Moore’s contribution was not as good as the excerpt of his memoirs kindly provided by obooki, not nearly, but is still a well-made, well-observed, well-thought out short story.  An Irish immigrant returns home, circa, I don’t know, 1900.  Will he stay, or is it back to the Bowery?  Moore skillfully made me want to stay in Ireland, but perhaps just for a long visit.

Moore was pretty good, but the winner was Seosamh Mac Grianna.  His story is set – no idea when it was written – during the Famine, and is a mix of historically accurate despair and off-the-cuff absurdism.

He gave his back to the wind, and leaned against a rock, the cold corpse serving him for a shield against the sky.

If you happen to read an Irish short story this week, drop mel u a postcard.

Back Monday.

A couple of days off

Back Tuesday, after a mad dash to the Big City. Perhaps by then I will have remembered how to write about 19th century books again.

Have a good weekend. Thanks for all of the thoughtful comments this week. I value the gentle pressure on what I write.

The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Reading Plan

Wuthering Expectations will be on Christmas vacation for a while.  All of next week, and then a little more.  Before I forget, Merry Christmas!

A vacation shoulld allow me to salt away some reading for the long winter, to store some books for future blogging.  I’m not sure it ever works that way.  Last Christmas, and on the plane to and from Morocco, I checked off some solid Humiliations – The Mayor of Casterbridge, a handful of Ibsen plays, The Saga of the Volsungs – and revisited The Warden.  I never wrote about any of them.  So why did I bother?  No, no - thank goodness – I’m not always reading for the dang blog.

I recently started in on Les Misérables, not, with its ludicrous bulk, the most bloggable of books, although please see how C. B. James wisely breaks it into pieces, which is presumably also how one reads it, a word or line at a time, not all at once.  I’m less than a tenth of the way in, and there’s this scene – no, never mind.  Into the freezer.  It’ll still be good when I thaw it out in May.

Joseph Epstein, in “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (from Once around the Block, 1987), advises a worried student to “have some time-tested and officially great book going at all times – Gibbon, perhaps, or Cervantes – alongside which you can read less thumpingly significant books.”  Victor Hugo will fill that slot for the next four or six or eight months, unless I put it aside at some point, which would be wise, if unlikely.  It’s amazing how the Big Books fall into place over time.  Read one or two or three a year, and eventually one feels almost educated, or would, if it were not for all of the other books one has learned about along the way.

Here is Epstein's actual advice to the anxious young reader, nervous about the holes in his education: “to read no junky books, to haunt used-book stores, and to let one book lead him to another… there is no systematic way to go about it, no list, key to the kingdom of the educated.”  The reader will have to decide for herself what “junky” means.  I would add, whatever one is reading, try to read it well.

I read more systematically than Epstein.  I have my lists, list after list, and sometimes follow them.  The Scottish Reading Challenge was meant, in part, to free me from the lists – you decide what I’m reading – although it began with three lists!  Try this, try that.  Read widely, even when reading narrowly.

I’m reading a book right now that was suggested to me a day or two ago by someone about to launch her own Lifetime Reading Plan.  Best of luck!  The book, by the way, is Dear Darkness (2008) by youthful poet Kevin Young, and is sprinkled with poems about food – “Ode to Pork,” “Ode to Grits,” “Ode to Boudin”:

You are the chewing gum
of God. You are the reason
I know that skin
is only that, holds
more than it meets.

Is that “meat” pun excellent or execrable?  A thing I like about this guy is he, like Joseph Epstein, is not afraid to go for the joke.  Private to Lifetime Reader: why did you single out two poets who teach at Emory?

I am not reading Kevin Young to be well read, or to check him off of a list.  Nor – what else am I reading – Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden (more fiction about artists) or John Crowley’s The Translator (fiction about Why Translation Matters).  Hugo, yes, and Dickens’ puzzling Christmas Stories, yes, although they are fascinating in their oddity.  Main entries or supplements to my ongoing Lifetime Reading Plan.  Epstein again:

There is also a danger: once begun, there is no end.  I myself would rather be well-read than dead, but I have a strong hunch about which will come first.

Make your green bean casserole from scratch - Happy Thanksgiving!

Update: the recipe is here.

Since it's Thanksgiving Week, and my mind is elsewhere, Wuthering Expectations will postpone its ponderations about William Thackeray, Emily Dickinson, and, endlessly, Nathaniel Hawthorne for a week.

My heartfelt holiday advice is not to use a can of cream of mushroom soup in your green bean casserole, but to make the sauce from scratch.  You can do it all in one pan.  Everyone will be happier.  Let me know if you want the recipe.  My recipe is France-tested.  Meaning, it was served, and was un triomphe, at a Thanksgiving dinner in France, with French guests.  No, not Parisians, but jolly, friendly Normans.

Make the fried onion topping from scratch, too (separate pan for that).  Shallots fry up more prettily than onions.

Is anybody cooking a truffled turkey for Thanksgiving?  One of those truffled trukey posts has a recipe in the comments.  Man, back in 2007 I knew how to keep it short.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Postscript:  The Library of America blog wrote up my Wilder Little House week.  If you thought I was blowing smoke, but were too polite to say so here, go over there and tell them.  An LOA edition of Wilder is in the works - good.

Produce! Produce!

Eh, not today.

Happy Labor Day!

On vacation. Plus: forthcoming on Wuthering Expectations

Away for a week.  Back Tuesday.

Which will give me four days for Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (1864), hardly enough.  One day overview, one day of Oliphant the Modernist, one day of Oliphant the Postmodernist - then just one day left.  Quick summary:  As Good As Trollope.  Oliphant pulls off some surprising effects in this novel.  One example - there's a character who hates the pattern of a carpet, and this turns out to be a legitimate and necessary part of the workings of the plot.  A delight to see how Oliphant works this out.

Maybe after that, some of Ivan Turgenev's early fiction?  Since they're so short, I can read a bundle of them.

Then it will be time for Herman Melville's Clarel, or pretty close.  I'm reading his first book of poems now, Battle Pieces and Aspect of War, and am shocked - genuinely - to find them completely accessible, not at all obscure, or not particularly so.  Some basic (or basic plus) knowledge of Civil War history is helpful, I suppose.  Maybe I'm all wrong about Clarel.  Maybe it will be a breeze.  Ha ha ha!

I want to spend some time with some of Melville's contemporaries, too.  Mark Twain, for one, but also some other poets.  Emily Dickinson, maybe.  An aged Emerson.  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman?  His poem "The Cricket" is, I am told, the greatest 19th century English poem.  Take that, Jack Keats!  That'll take a week right there to sort out that crazy talk.

Everyone please have a nice week and read some nice books.

Moving Day

For the Amateur Reader, not for Wuthering Expectations.  Posting will be intermittent or non-existent until life becomes less kerfoozled.

Does it feed the little lake below?
     The speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
     How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!

Robert Browning, “By the Fire-side,” Men and Women, 1855. Stanza IX

Wuthering Expectations is on Spring Break

I think I'll be back on Thursday.

In the meantime, here is a Dante Gabriel Rossetti poem (1870) about spring. I recommend not reading it.  It's not very good.  Is it?  This is actually relevant to the Ford Madox Ford novel I'm reading, along with others, as organized by The Reading Life.

Barren Spring

So now the changed year's turning wheel returns
  And as a girl sails balanced in the wind,
  And now before and now again behind
Stoops as it swoops, with cheek that laughs and burns,--
So Spring comes merry towards me now, but earns
  No answering smile from me, whose life is twin'd
  With the dead boughs that winter still must bind,
And whom to-day the Spring no more concerns.

Behold, this crocus is a withering flame;
  This snowdrop, snow; this apple-blossom's part
  To breed the fruit that breeds the serpent's art.
Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them,
Nor gaze till on the year's last lily-stem 
  The white cup shrivels round the golden heart.

Back from Morocco

I'm back from Morocco, if not well-rested than at least well-fed.  First the holiday meals, then two weeks of feasting in Fez and Marrakech.  We're now full and plump, full of snail soup and mint tea, ready for the new semester.  As usual, we came home just as we were beginning to figure a few things out.

On the left, we see a bookshop in the Fez medina.  That's it, the whole store.  The proprietor is presumably chatting with a neighbor who has filled an identical space with tennis shoes or brass lamps or dried fruit.  The books are all in Arabic, as far as I could tell, and are presumably religious or educational.

Ma femme and I went into a Borders today, looking for a calendar.  The selection was dismal, even embarassing.  The puppies and lingerie models I expected, but who wants a World of Warcraft calendar, or one with actors from "The Tudors"?  But I remembered that bookshop in the medina and thought "Long live Borders."  A Borders is a treasure house.  Not for calendars, though.

A bit more rest.  Then, next week, "Scots, wha hae" and all of that nonsense.

Vacation in Morocco

Wuthering Expectations is on vacation in Morocco, returning January 15 or so.  Thanks for all of the help with book recommendations.

I've turned the security setting up a notch, just temporarily.

Santa plus possum - Wuthering Expectations is on Christmas vacation

Wuthering Expectations is on Christmas vacation.  Merry Christmas!

The fellow on the left can be seen in person at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia.  Frankly, he looks a bit creepier seen from the right.  And yes, that is, or may be, a possum in his pocket.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wuthering Expectations has gone to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving. A pie for every one!

Back next week.  Have a good holiday, or nice normal week, depending on who and where you are.