An experiment in biblio-biography
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| Nicholas Laughlin's Life List An experiment in biblio-biography |
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Thursday, April 24, 2003 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: Nearest Nameless So damn familiar Most of the time, I don't even know you are here. My life, My portion of eternity, A little shiver, As if the chill of the grave Is already Catching up with me-- No matter. Descartes smelled Witches burning While he sat thinking Of a truth so obvious We keep failing to see it. I never knew it either Till today. When I heard a bird shriek: The cat is coming, And I felt myself trembling. About a week ago, reading late at night, I was suddenly perturbed by the agitated cries of a kiskidee, coming perhaps from the garden next door. Kiskidees of course are not nocturnal birds--some small, awful accident must have happened to wake & alarm this one. Like Simic, I heard the bird's shrieks tearing through the silence as ungentle hints of the world's inevitable rupture. posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 11:03 AM Tuesday, April 22, 2003 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. Gradually they're drawn together, then violently, unexpectedly, pulled apart. Were Naipaul still seriously in the business of writing novels today, he might come up with a plot & characters like these. But Phillips handles his men & women with an entirely un-Naipaulian tenderness, & he demonstrates a remarkable narrative imagination in his creation of the schoolteacher, Dorothy Jones, in whose pitch-perfect voice the story begins: England has changed. These days it's difficult to tell who's from around here and who's not. Who belongs and who's a stranger. It's disturbing. It doesn't feel right. I'm 270 pp. in, 40 pp. from the end, & more moved by the story than I expected. No pleasant ending is possible. posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 9:04 AM Sunday, April 20, 2003 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 & 2 of the Essays (McNeillie edition) - started re-reading Pater's Renaissance, currently somewhere near the top of my bedside stack - a little more of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Songbook, by Nick Hornby - Memoir of the Hawk, by James Tate - about a third of What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, by Joseph Roth, trans. Michael Hofmann - On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald; also re-read most of Vertigo, my favourite of Sebald's books - The Romantics, by Pankaj Mishra - much of John Carey's Faber Book of Utopias, a nice fat anthology - Waiting for Snow in Havana, by Carlos Eire (the clear front-runner so far for the 2003 Nicholas Laughlin Book Award for biography or autobiography) - browsed extensively through The Western Isles of Trinidad, by Anthony de Verteuil - Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer - The Pieces from Berlin, by Michael Pye - What I Loved, by Siri Hustveldt - re-read Lytton Strachey's Literary Essays - Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis - re-read most of Death in Venice - Lady Nugent's Journal (ongoing) - Where the Stress Falls, by Susan Sontag - Another Voice, by Auberon Waugh - have been reading a fair amount of Adam Zagajewski again lately - have just been re-reading Rebecca Elson's Responsibility to Awe - have just finished Fred D'Aguiar's new novel, Bethany Bettany - & yesterday all I could bear to read was Keats posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 5:33 PM 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 cover) - thanks to Ian McDonald's kindness, I finally got a copy of A.J. Seymour's Collected Poems, 1937-1989, practically unavailable outside Guyana, & have been reading & re-reading him ever since (read my review here) - browsed extensively through The Anatomy of Bibliomania, by Holbrook Jackson, put it aside for dipping into at leisure, then promptly forgot - most of The Art of Hunger, by Paul Auster - most of Midland, by Kwame Dawes - C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean, and World Revolution, by Farrukh Dhondy (read my review here) - Where the Sea Had an Ending, ed. Brian Dyde - Textermination, by Christine Brooke-Rose - The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde - Mona and Other Tales, by Reinaldo Arenas - most of Travelling Mercies, by Lorna Goodison - the first quarter or so of Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino - Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer - Gould's Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan - The Ambassadors, by Henry James - about half of The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James - rapidly re-read The Tempest after seeing it performed by a theatre troupe visiting from the U.K. - The Elusive Eric Williams, by Ken Boodhoo - The Last Days of St. Pierre, by Ernest Zebrowski, Jr. - Discretion, by Elizabeth Nunez - A Rough Climate, by E.A. Markham (read my review here) - Without End, by Adam Zagajewski - browsed extensively through Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992 while sitting for an oil portrait - re-read much of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae while sitting for the same portrait (it was lying around in the studio) - re-read Caryl Phillips's A New World Order in order to review it (read the review here - Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley - attempted yet again to read Finnegans Wake - Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, by Isadora Tattlin - Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling through Castro's Cuba, by Christopher P. Baker - Sugar and Slate, by Charlotte Williams (read my review here) - Werewolves in Their Youth, by Michael Chabon - barely glanced through Mr. Potter, by Jamaica Kincaid - read & re-read a great deal of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, & Richard Wilbur during April, May, June - browsed extensively through Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy - about three quarters of The Immediate Experience, by Robert Warshow - A Responsibility to Awe, by Rebecca Elson - re-read about half of Persuasion just before leaving for a six-week vacation - Accidents in the Home, by Tessa Hadley - about three quarters of Prague, by Arthur Phillips (who I barely missed meeting in San Francisco last July) - The Flaneur, by Edmund White - London Walking, by Simon Pope (good book to read on an airplane) - The War Against Cliche, by Martin Amis - The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis - The Writer and the World, by V.S. Naipaul (most of the contents of which I'd previously read in Naipaul's earlier books) - re-read About a Boy, by Nick Hornby - nearly a quarter of The Polished Hoe, by Austin Clarke, until one of the lead characters fell asleep from boredom & I put the book aside, lest I follow - much of Pat Ismond's Abandoning Dead Metaphors - Beyond the Front Page: A Caribbean Journalist Remembers, by George R. John - After Nature, by W.G. Sebald - Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons - Salamander, by Thomas Wharton - How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen - Nobody's Perfect, by the divine Anthony Lane, most of the contents of which I'd previously read in the New Yorker - Bloomsbury, by Quentin Bell - about half of the Penguin Classics edition of Jose Marti's Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen - browsed extensively through The Barbadian Rumshop, by Peter Laurie - The Autograph Man, by Zadie Smith (read my review here) - Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (read my review here) - the first nine months or so of Pepys - In Ruins, by Christopher Woodward - After the Dance, by Edwidge Danticat - a few stories from Joe Ashby Porter's Touch Wood - the first volume of Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (I don't own the other seven or eight vols.) - In Praise of Shadows, by Junichiro Tanizaki, trans. Thomas J. Harper - The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes, 1897-1991 (read my review here) posted by Nicholas Laughlin | 5:27 PM |
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