The Library, Thus Far

Pleased to note that, after a few months of spare time (ha!) cataloging, I entered my 2000th book on my LibraryThing listings today. Happy to note that I happened to be cataloging Mr. Nabokov at the time. Only two and a half large bookshelves in my library to go...plus a smaller bookshelf crammed with Modern Library editions and Penguin poetry paperbacks...plus some books in the bedroom...plus some of the better editions of children's books in my son's room...and then I can move on to the 30 odd bankers boxes in the garage....

Ok, so I really have a long way to go....

I also read Reading Judas by Elaine Pagels and Karen King this week. Hopefully, I will write up some notes on this in the next several days.

Alberto Gonzalez

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/27/gonzales/index.html

Long overdue. Ignore the "American Dream" crap - the man used the United States Constitution as toilet paper and has helped make this country reviled around the globe while chipping away at our civil rights. Like his boss, he is an arrogant bastard with no redeeming qualities.

Good riddance.

Accumulated Wisdom

Someone said (paraphrase):

George Bush says God speaks to him and no one bats an eye. But if George Bush said God speaks to him through a hairdryer, we would have a constitutional crisis.

The Things That Make Us Happy Make Us Wise

Today I get to be one of those annoying people who have just “discovered” a book that everyone else already knows is great.

Many years ago, in Austin, Texas, a local thrift store hit upon the idea of having an entire store selling donated books, records, etc. for 1-2 dollars apiece. Although it was usually deserted (which makes me think it must have existed then, as now, only in my dreams), it was the kind of place you could visit for an evening, emerging a couple of hours later with a bag full of rare and eclectic works drawn from the crazy mixed up stacks with only minimal and unhelpful organization (I remember seeing Alcott’s Little Men on a shelf labeled “Sexual Issues”).

The staff rotated between a young punker, a frail old woman, and a physically deformed girl with a pretty face and a sweet smile. This was my home away from home and from it I mined several books from the library of the medievalist Augustus C. Krey (who was apparently married to a well-regarded local author), the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (one of my most powerful talismans), and pristine works of English literature which showed up occasionally, bearing the bookplate, in clear careful handwriting, of one Ginger/Virginia Hall (why had she carefully selected such wonderful books, carefully inserted her bookplate, and then apparently never so much as cracked them open – one doesn’t read a 400 page novel without leaving some sort of evidence – I will never know).

One book which I picked up and pondered several times, never to buy, was an advanced reading copy of a book called Aegypt, by John Crowley. Being interested in ancient history and the occult, it would seem a logical choice for me. Unfortunately, I was a bit of a snob about most contemporary literature and, anyway, the name conjured up for me the repugnant image of Alistair Crowley, the great and overrated con man of 20th century occultism. So on the shelf it stayed to my deep regret.

A few years later I discovered an omnibus of John Crowley. By this time, through repeated handlings of Aegypt, the name was firmly established in my consciousness and I figured that if the guy deserved the Quality Paperback Book Club treatment, then maybe he was ok. The book sat on my shelf for a few more years. It included a long novel called Little, Big, which I vaguely thought had something to do with Alice in Wonderland (there was a character called Daily Alice, and we all now about Alice’s difficulty in obtaining the optimal height for whatever task she was up to on the other side of the looking glass). Well, Alice in Wonderland is a great book, but like Harry Potter and the works of Tolkien, it tends to draw a pretty daffy crowd. And my thinking has always been “why read a book about another book when you can just read the original, which must be better anyway?”

Well, a few weeks ago, despite all odds against it, I picked up Little, Big and started reading the first few pages. It has little or nothing to do with Charles Dodgson’s little girl. The more I read, the more I was hooked (or in the vernacular of the novel, the farther in I went, the bigger it got). I was never one for the fantasy fairyland of Yeats and the Little Blue Book of Fairies by what’s-his-name, but Crowley’s writing is so precise, so evocative of the primeval wood and the tobacco-scented soil, so pleasurable, that it is now on my list of favorite books.

There is a permanence in the mythical, architectural oddity of the Drinkwater mansion: in this mansion there are many rooms, and plenty of queer characters to occupy them. The novel evokes the passage of time, the chain of being that binds all who pass their short time on this ancient earth, seen or unseen. It evokes the swirl of life in this decrepit theatre across the stage of which we all pass before a final bow. For me, the end of the book is long in coming, it seems that Crowley is wrapping it up 100 pages before the end, which makes the ending seem both drawn-out and rushed, but no matter, this tale is not told by an idiot. What it signifies, to me anyway, is that “perfection and end” signified by the greatest of the Major Trumps – nothing less than “The World”.

P.S. Almost forgot the link. Buy a new copy - Mr. Crowley deserves the cash.

Update

Still on hiatus. One item of note is that I've recently begun the long procrastinated project of cataloging my books. Fortunately, I've found a site (Library Thing) that is fun and addictive. At our last move, it was estimated that I have collected approximately 10,000 books (the movers would probably sign an affidavit to that effect), so the process of cataloging will be slow.

I will probably begin annotating my reading on Library Thing. I will likely reserve this blog to talk about books I really like, rather than just daily reading. What I will ultimately do with this blog remains to be seen: I really just came in today to check the plants and make sure nothing is starting to smell.

Mothballed

This blog is going to be mothballed for an indefinite time while I attend to more pressing personal matters. Obviously, my posting has been pretty light and, although I never expected more than minimal readership, I have to admit being somewhat disappointed that there hasn't been much discussion generated by this endeavor, either pertaining to books or to politics (other than a goofy and predictable attack on the good Mr. Vonnegut). At some point, I may get back to it and refocus my attention on the books I really want to discuss. Until then, it's goodbye for now...don't forget to write.

Oh, and speaking of Moth Balls, let's hope that by the time I check in again, our pathetic Democratic leadership develops the intestinal fortitude to confront the war policies of the most despised man in U.S. presidential history. I can dream can't I?

Reading

I have to admit that, bookwise, I’ve been sort of in the doldrums lately. The old question arises – what to read now?

I was all primed for Pynchon’s latest, Against The Day, especially since I really enjoyed Mason and Dixon (itself coming at usual glacial speed after the disappointing Vineland). Maybe it was my state of mind, but rather than another masterpiece along the lines of Gravity’s Rainbow, the new novel seemed like Pynchon was just trotting out his old bag of tricks (silly names, absurd situations, bad puns) without having any real sense that this was a necessary novel. The Webb Traverse plotline is interesting enough, but the “Chums of Chance” are simply grating. I gave up, for the time being, around page 139, and I am someone who almost never gives up a book once I start reading it.

I moved on to Nicholas Basbanes Every Book Its Reader. Basbanes is a journalist who has written about book collectors for years now. He used to have a column in the old Biblio magazine, and now writes for Fine Books and Collecting. His first major book, Among the Gently Mad, was a classic text about book collecting. Unfortunately, it got him started on a series of books about collecting that have lost their punch with each successive iteration. As a confirmed bibliophile, I dutifully read each of them and generally have no quarrel with them, but I pretty much do it out of habit. This latest tome is a series of chapters (which read like expanded magazine pieces) about readers and the books they love. The chapters on Harold Bloom and Elaine Pagels were particularly interesting (Bloom reads at a rate that would put Evelyn Wood to shame), and it’s the kind of book that you can get through really fast. So that’s that.

And now I have moved on to Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s Insatiability, an avante-garde novel first published in Warsaw in 1932. I am a big fan of decadent fiction (one day I should do a piece on the Daedalus series), so I thought this one would be a winner. I’ve almost got the first 100 pages under my belt, but can’t say that I’m fully engaged yet. But it seems to be getting better. Let’s just see how it goes….

Accumulated Wisdom

"Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."
-Peter Ustinov

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

A Woman of Two Worlds

In 1907, at the age of three, Dorothy Eady suffered a bump on the noggin which apparently gave rise to a lifelong belief that she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian temple virgin who had been the secret lover of King Sety I, a pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BC). Not only that, His Royal Highness used to visit her nightly for years, until her death in 1981, for some snuggling and pillow talk.

Jonathan Cott’s The Search for Omm Sety: Reincarnation and Eternal Love is an interesting narrative of Ms. Eady’s life and times. She may have been deluded, but she was nevertheless an avid student of the Middle Kingdom and participated in excavations and researches in her adopted home of Egypt for much of the 20th century. * She decided early on that Egypt was the place for her, and took the initiative to get there and live there, even under the most squalid conditions. There, she acquired the name Omm Sety, indulged her passions, and acted as priestess of the old religion, performing rites to Osiris and Isis in the ruins of the ancient holy city of Abydos.

Cott leaves open the question of whether Dorothy was truly a reincarnation of the temple orphan Bentreshyt, visited nightly by her lover, or a harmless and entertaining eccentric. At the end of his narrative, Cott tags on an unnecessary epilogue in which he consults with various psychologists and parapsychologists to see if he can get a handle on this reincarnation thing. What stands out is that, aside from colorful anecdotes from her acquaintances, pretty much all we know about Dorothy Eady and her early life comes from Dorothy Eady. There is no independent corroboration of her head trauma, her precocious interest and familiarity with ancient Egypt, or her (apparently quite noisy) visitations from Sety I. A skeptic myself, I have nevertheless had some interesting experiences pertaining to the concept of reincarnation, but in the end I tend to see Dorothy as someone who very successfully internalized a narrative of an alternative existence. This doesn’t make her a liar, but it did give her what she longed for – a rich and rewarding life, a dream of a glorified existence, and the hope of eternal love.

* Some of her writings are apparently still in print.

The Ancient Empire

Byzantium: The Early Centuries
by John Julius Norwich

Persons with a casual interest in Roman history might tend to believe that the Empire collapsed and disappeared sometime in the third or fourth centuries A.D. The reality is that the old Empire got a somewhat new lease on life in 330 A.D., when Constantine (called "the Great") transferred his capitol to the far eastern edge of Europe, transforming an obscure port called Byzantium into Constantinople, the New Rome. In this Eastern Roman Empire, the old Latin system changed over time to be overtaken by the native Greek element, but the people and the Emperor never forgot that they were the true and rightful heir to the empire of Augustus. It was only in 1453, scant decades before the voyage of Columbus, that Byzantium reached the end of a long and tired history, falling to the Turks under Sultan Mehmet II. Gibbon might have seen Byzantium as a failure, but it was a failure that lasted over 1000 years, dwarfing in its magnitude the history of the United States and the countries of modern Europe.

The first volume of a trilogy, Norwich's Byzantium: The Early Centuries approaches the Eastern Empire through a narrative history focusing on the personalities of the early rulers, beginning with Constantine and ending in 802 with the death of the Empress Irene. Compared with some of the more infamous Roman Emperors, most of the Byzantines come across as fairly competent and hard working. One had to be, for in those days Byzantium faced numerous threats - from the "barbarian" tribes of Europe and central Asia as well from the Sassanid Empire of Persia. Towards the end of the volume, another threat arises, this time from the obscure reaches of Arabia - the formidable armies of early Islam.

This isn't to say that Byzantium didn't have its share of bloodthirsty megalomaniacs, from Justinian, who (in addition to recovering large portions of the Western Empire through the agency of his superlative general Belisarius as well as instigating a massive building program in the capital) was responsible for the slaughter of 300,000 citizens in the Hippodrome at the climax of the Nika Riots - to the "pathologically cruel" Phocas, who bequeathed to the Empire a legacy of torture and paranoia.

The frustratingly consistent thread running through this history is the endless theological debates on the nature of Christ that caused so much turmoil and wasted energy. Religious advocacy and repression took up much of the energy of the Emperors, making it so difficult to find points of commonality upon which a truly strong state could be built. Religious schism also made more difficult the forging of strong alliances with Western Europe, an issue which will arise again and again in the coming centuries, culminating in the infamous Fourth Crusade, in which Constantinople was sacked by the princes of the West.

Norwich does not spend much time on social and economic history. Little is said of issues such as the Iconoclast controversy, apart from its impact on the policies of the later Emperors of the period under examination. For this, we look to the magisterial works of George Ostrogorsky and A.A. Vasiliev. Still, for a enjoyable introduction to a fascinating and obscure Empire, this work is recommended.

Borges and Vonnegut

I was compelled to read these short books by a respected reader on a Belgian blog. One is a memory of a author in his twilight, another is a memoir/essay by a writer in his eighties. My literary tastes tend more towards Borges than Vonnegut, but I found both books rewarding in their own way.


With Borges by Alberto Manguel

For a few years in the mid-1960’s, Alberto Manguel was a reader for the blind Jorge Luis Borges in his apartment in Buenos Aires. This slim book is a remembrance of those times, “memories of memories.” As a longtime Borges reader, I found the description of his mode of living interesting, and was pleased to see that he shared a fondness for Durer’s The Knight, Death, and the Devil (his print was in his bedroom – mine hangs in my library). Borges lived and breathed reading – the sort of person who could pick up any printed material and find some meaning in it. The apparent simplicity of his works, most of which were quite short, belies their true complexity. I recall reading an analysis of “The Garden of Forking Paths” and being blown away by the layers of meaning in the story, layers that are not apparent in a casual reading. Borges, like Nabokov, demands that the reader read with sharp attention.

My one complaint is that my paperback edition lacks the photographs of other editions. If I had known, I would have opted for a more expensive edition.





A Man Without A County by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut had, apparently, maintained that he was through with writing. One suspects that the sad state of the world in the Bush era compelled him to speak out on the madness that we have all come to accept, the slow death by torture of the earth. “The good Earth” he writes as an epitaph, “we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.” Vonnegut comes perilously close to cranky old man territory, with a fondness for words such as “nowadays” and “damn fool” (as in “damn fool computer). But, hey, as a freethinker and member of Brokaw’s “greatest generation,” he’s entitled. Kurt Vonnegut is a proud humanist, a thoughtful humorist, and a decent soul in a country where such attributes are in short supply.