tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52822462011-04-21T12:39:26.719-07:00An experiment in biblio-biographyNicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comBlogger81100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-1129493459693183702005-10-16T13:08:00.000-07:002005-10-16T13:10:59.703-07:00

2005 updateGood lord, what have I been reading since the end of March?- about two thirds of Crispin Sartwell's Six Names of Beauty- started re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on an airplane (aloft, I need humour), but once I landed I didn't pick it up again- Nicholas Guppy's Wai-Wai- Nick Laird's To a Fault- started the new Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down, & after twenty or thirty pages

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-1112539767450965972005-04-03T07:48:00.000-07:002005-04-03T07:49:27.450-07:00

I do not think that at the time, aged twelve, I could have guessed something I read much later, in one of Sigmund Freud's studies unless I am much mistaken: an observation that immediately struck me as convincing, suggesting that the deepest secret of music is that it is a gesture warding off paranoia, and we make music to defend ourselves against being overwhelmed by the terrors of reality.--

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-1112305832232150862005-03-31T13:47:00.000-08:002005-03-31T13:50:32.236-08:00

Nearly two years later....These days I seem to read magazines mostly. I subscribe to far too many of them. I've also become the kind of person who starts books & doesn't finish them, through sheer distraction. There is a more or less stable pile of half- or quarter-read books on my bedside table. I refuse to reshelve them because any day now I'm due to take them up again. Then every few months or

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-936635872003-05-02T11:01:00.000-07:002003-05-02T11:01:29.486-07:00

Yesterday, looking for information on Philip Pilgrim's oratorio The Legend of Kaieteur (based on A.J. Seymour's poem), I plucked Andrew Salkey's Georgetown Journal from my office library, & started reading it last night. This is a longish account of Salkey's trip to Guyana in 1970 for the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference--a sort of predecessor to Carifesta, I imagine. Lots of anecdotes

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-931901052003-04-24T11:03:00.000-07:002003-04-24T11:03:52.146-07:00

Yesterday the new Charles Simic arrived--The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems. Weird, improbable, profane little jokes about the world & history & the soul; funny, angry, unaffectedly sorrowful (though less devastatingly beautiful than Adam Zagajewski, who Simic at his best seems to recall). Reading in bed last night, I felt a little start of recognition when I came to this poem:

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-930528732003-04-22T09:04:00.000-07:002003-04-22T09:04:09.113-07:00

At the moment I'm reading Caryl Phillips's new novel, A Distant Shore. Unrelentingly bleak so far--loneliness, boredom, fear, illness, death. The weather is always grey & damp, streets always dirty, passers-by always bitter or rude. Two unhappy people--a retired schoolteacher & an immigrant from an unnamed African country--both trying to escape their pasts, take refuge in a quiet English village.

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-929534492003-04-20T17:33:00.000-07:002003-04-20T17:33:06.246-07:00

2003 thus far: a reconstruction from memory - The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz - The Married Man, by Edmund White - A Box of Matches, by Nicholson Baker - Atonement, by Ian McEwan - most of Poetry and the Age, by Randall Jarrell - most of Finders Keepers, by Seamus Heaney - re-read most of The Waves, & also most of vols. 2, 3, & 4 of Virginia Woolf's Diary, as well as much of vols. 1 &

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5282246.post-929532272003-04-20T17:27:00.000-07:002003-04-20T17:27:21.390-07:00

2002: a (no doubt incomplete) reconstruction from memory - The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch - The Bell, by Iris Murdoch - The Path of Minor Planets, by Andrew Sean Greer - The Breaking of Style, by Helen Vendler - The Quest for Corvo, by A.J.A. Symons - The Gastronomical Me, by M.F.K. Fisher - The Book on the Bookshelf, by Henry Petrowski (I must admit I bought this solely because I liked the

Nicholas Laughlinnoreply@blogger.com