Reading Log

• Drama
  
  • Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. “Three Sisters.” Chekhov: The Essential Plays. Trans. Heim, Michael Henry.

The last couple weeks I’ve been immersed in work-related stuff and haven’t managed to read much. My wife and I went to see a local production of the single-act play, “The Interview,” by Peter Swet, and we will be going to see Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” this next weekend. Local and inexpensive productions.

Sisters touched a nerve—hope for the future despite the endless fading of future into present. How dangerous and pointless it is to look to some vaguely defined future happiness just waiting “over there.” If we approach life that way, it will never fail to disappoint.

Something else on my mind, something that is expressed very well by Harold Bloom in his Preface to How to Read and Why:

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

The difficulty of communicating at a personal level is constantly on my mind. If lucky you learn to communicate with your spouse, and with—at most—a couple friends. Beyond that is a fog of half-measures, tentative approaches, and well-intentioned dishonesty. Perhaps it is no wonder that we make alliances over trivialities—they are rarely to be found in what is most important.

Reading Log

• Drama
  
  • Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011–10–23)
• Essays
  • Chesterton, G. K. “The Real Dr. Johnson” (2010-10-23)
• Literary Criticism
  
  • Bloom, Harold. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (2011–10–23)
  • Chesterton, G. K. “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (2011-10-23)
  • Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (2011–09–12)
• Novels
  
  • Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels (2011–10–15)
• Poetry
  
  • Heaney, Seamus. The Spirit Level (2011–08–30)

Just a listing of what I’ve finished since the last log. In the middle of too many books that I may not finish right now to list them all. And I'm increasingly turning to paper and pen to keep track of things that are not—as this is not—of any public interest.

Reading Log: Inflatable (to the tune of “Unforgettable”)

• Essays
  • Bloom, Harold. “Tomasso Landolfi,” from How to Read and Why (2011–07–03)
• Mythology
  • Davies, Sioned, trans. The Mabinogion. (Currently Reading)
• Novels
  • Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (Currently Reading)
• Short Stories
  • Landolfi, Tommaso. “Gogol’s Wife,” from Gogol’s Wife & Other Stories (2011–07–03)

“Gogol’s Wife”

Tommaso Landolfi’s story is written as a chapter of a biography on the famous Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. In this chapter, the author explores the delicate matter of Gogol’s “wife.” It turns out that she is not a woman, but a balloon. A titilling conceit for horny teen-age boys of all ages, Landolfi develops the story into a humorous, but ultimately sad and disturbing fictionalization of Gogol’s self-destruction. The humorous satire is vibrant from beginning to end, while the sense of tragedy subtly builds beneath the surface. The ultimate effect is a potent sense of the pointlessness of Golgol’s demise.

“Gogol’s Wife” is reminiscent of Gogol stories such as “The Overcoat” and, far more, “The Nose.” The story is humorously absurd, tragic, and strangely touching. It is both a tribute to Gogol the writer and a scathing satire of Gogol the man.

The Bloom on Gogol’s Wife

Harold Bloom’s essay on Tomasso Landolfi, and specifically “Gogol’s Wife,” in How to Read and Why is little more than a summary of the story, but it is this essay which first made me aware of Landolfi, and for this I am appreciative.

The Mabinogion

Thanks to Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple, I have picked up a new translation of The Mabinogion in anticipation of reading John Cowper Powys’s, Porius. (Quickly say “John Cowper Powys’s, Porius,” five times.) I won’t be in time to catch the group read of Porius, however, there are links a-plenty to help with my read when I get to it. See these:

• Notes for a potential reading of John Cowper Powys’s PORIUS in 2011
• PORIUS 2: Further Investigations Into the Myth of the Birth of the hero

Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple

English Translation: The Literary Salon of the People for the People

American Translation: The Literary Salon of the Purple Prose for the Purple Prose

Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple is a LibraryThing group made up of a disparate bunch of folks who are both fun-loving and highly literate. If you disdain fun and pleasure yourself with effete condescension you may like to check out a different group—Literary Snobs. For a bunch of self-proclaimed literary snobs, they aren’t all that snobby… just more curmudgeonly than Le Salon.

Paradise Lost, Book I; etc.

I won’t promise this to be short. I don’t expect it to be long. As I type this, my head feels plagued by a sticky, snotty Beelzebub, and my lungs are wracked by infernal flames.

The imperial “We” have read Book I of Paradise Lost—hence the chthonic body imagery—as well as several more sections of Religio Medici and part of the first chapter of A Map of Misreading.

The Western Canon: Why have it? Why read it?

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime’s rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively. One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify. The inevitable analogue is the erotic one. If you are Don Giovanni and Leporello keeps the list, one brief encounter will suffice.1

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1. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. 29. Print. ↩