Botched & Ecstatic

"There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue,..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:55:11 -0700

“There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice. Our judgement lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned—and worse, we named what they did “success,” though they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.
What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?”

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Books Read/Reread March/April

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:18:00 -0700

Dante, Inferno*
Anne Carson, Red Doc>
Louise Gluck, Averno*
Maggie Nelson, Bluets*
Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief
Yoko Ogawa, Revenge
Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein*
Salomon Kroonenberg, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur
Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings
Lafcadio Hearn, Some Chinese Ghosts
Isabelle Eberhardt, The Oblivion Seekers
Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within
Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Shoson Nagahara, Lament in the Night
Lars Iyer, Spurious
Robert Kloss, The Alligators of Abraham
Renata Adler, Speedboat
Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River
Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
Joni Tevis, The Wet Collection
Domenica Ruta, With or Without You
Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary
Thomas de Quincy, The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky*

* = reread

"It’s strange,” he said with a deprecatory smile, “how, ever since I discovered..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:12:43 -0700

““It’s strange,” he said with a deprecatory smile, “how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive. But it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this yo have no proof of who you are, you know.””

- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

"…there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the..."

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:36:10 -0700

““…there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.””

- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

"He calls once more, and this time the wakened owl hisses back in fury. What does he care for human..."

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:11:54 -0700

“He calls once more, and this time the wakened owl hisses back in fury. What does he care for human sorrow? These woods are full of bones. When he takes flight, the dead rise up in his spectacular body.”

- Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River

"We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon..."

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:40:23 -0700

“We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.”

- Charles Lamb

"Above all, messianism’s got nothing to do with mysticism, says W. He can’t abide..."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:41:11 -0700

““Above all, messianism’s got nothing to do with mysticism, says W. He can’t abide mysticism.—‘It’s maths, it’s all about maths!’ He can’t do maths, W. says. This is the great flaw which prevents him really understanding messianism.”

- Lars Iyer, Spurious

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:03:48 -0800

“To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.”

- Teju Cole, Open City

Books Read/Reread, January/February

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:55:00 -0800

Lawrence Durrell, Justine*
Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar*
Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive*
Lawrence Durrell, Clea*
Junius Henderson & Elberta L. Craig, Economic Mammalogy
Mark Derr, How the Wolf Became the Dog
Samuel I. Zeveloff, Raccoons
Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy, Rabid
Geoff Dyer, Zona
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon
Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
Mat Johnson, Pym
H. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica*
Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten*
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees*
Barbara J. Ambros, Bones of Contention
Matias Viegener, 2500 Random Things About Me Too
James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime*
Sean Ferrell, The Man in the Empty Suit
Victoria Braithwaite, Do Fish Feel Pain?
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
Teju Cole, Open City*
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
Grevel Lindop, The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater & Other Essays*
Amy Leach, Things That Are
Lisa O’Donnell, The Death of Bees

* = reread

"He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded towards the specimens..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:00:17 -0800

“He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded towards the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

"Bare reality: what a crook it sometimes is. It steals things, & afterwards has no idea what to..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:19:21 -0800

“Bare reality: what a crook it sometimes is. It steals things, & afterwards has no idea what to do with them. It just seems to spread sorrow for fun.”

- Robert Walser, Jakob Von Gunten

"One is always half mad when one is shy of people."

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 09:53:55 -0800

“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”

- Robert Walser, Jakob Von Gunten

"This mania to perpetuate, to record, to photograph everything! I suppose this must come from the..."

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:03:09 -0800

“This mania to perpetuate, to record, to photograph everything! I suppose this must come from the feeling that you don’t enjoy anything fully, indeed are taking the bloom off it with every breath you draw.”

- Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

lareviewofbooks: The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:53:21 -0800

lareviewofbooks:

The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes amazing essays and reviews every single day of the year. So much, in fact, that you might have missed some of our favorite pieces, which would be a shame because they are, well, amazing.

To make your life a little easier, we’ve just published a collection of eight of our best pieces from 2012. And the only way to get your hands on it is to make a tax-deductible donation to LARB.

Check out this line-up:

Josh Wilker: ‘Measures of American Beauty’

Aimee Bender: ‘The Most Romantic Story Every Told’

Wanda Coleman: ‘Ruminations on Riots’

Michael Kammen: ‘The Insubordinate Historian’

Maria Bustillos: ‘Rising Together’

Erik Morse, Norman Klein, D.J. Waldie, Mark Z. Danielewski, Sid Krofft, Edward Soja, Thom Anderson: ‘Hotel Theory: The History of the Los Angeles Hotel’

Judith Freeman: ‘The Mormon Chronicles’

Colin Dickey: “On the Trail of the Elusive Vampire Squid’

If you donate now you’ll not only get all the essays delivered to the e-reader of your choice, but you’ll help guarantee that 2013’s “best of” collection will be even better. That’s because LARB can’t exist without the support of those who love to read it.

So if you love LARB, please help us stay strong in 2013 and make a tax-deductible donation before the end of the year.

I want the 2012 best of LARB digital edition.

katybudgetbooks: I was originally introduced to this book at...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 10:17:21 -0800

katybudgetbooks:

I was originally introduced to this book at a rep picks lunch at Winter Institute. The rep made it sound really interesting, so I picked up an ARC, but upon returning home, moved it to the end of my TBR shelf. It was every bit as fascinating as the rep made it out to be. You do not have to be Catholic, or even religious, to enjoy this book. It is not meant to convert you or appeal to your already vast religious knowledge. It’s a series of stories about various saints (and some almost saints) from a layman’s perspective. They paint a picture of how we are changed by these people we’ve probably never heard of who did something extraordinary for their time. I was fascinated from beginning to end.

-Anna

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2012

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:49:41 -0800

The world doesn’t need another best of list, but I found myself fairly alienated by most of the lists I read, many of which seem to regurgitate the same dozen or so titles. My list is not based necessarily on works published in 2012, which always struck me as arbitrary (I don’t read based on the publishing cycle); these are the best books I personally read in 2012. Here they are in no particular order.

1. John D’Agata / Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (2012)

I don’t know; one marker of a good book, I think, is that it generates an interesting conversation. A lot of books that keep showing on “best of” lists have none of this; beyond the platitudes in clichés (“I loved this,” “I couldn’t put this down,” etc.), no one really has anything to say about these books. The Lifespan of a Fact is a flawed book, it’s a problematic book, and, in and of itself, it’s far from the best book of the year. But it produced a hell of a conversation, one that was, at least for me, useful and revealing about our relationship to nonfiction and literature.

2. Jan Morris, Hav (2006)

I received this from Riverrun Books’ Paperback to the Future series, in which bookseller Liberty Hardy personally selects a book for you each month. Morris’ Hav, which includes the original 1985, Booker Prize-shortlisted Last Letters from Hav, and a more recent sequel (packaged together by NYRB Classics), is pitch perfect on multiple levels. A faux-travelogue that chronicles an imagined country, it offers an allegory on travel, on nation and culture, on history and on politics, captured by a master travel writer spinning a fantastic tale.

3. Brian Castro, The Bath Fugues (2009)

Castro’s Shanghai Dancing is one of my favorite books of all time, and the only of his currently available in the United States. The Bath Fugues is not quite as powerful as that novel, but it’s still heads above much of what’s being published in America, and with any luck it’ll be available here soon. Ask for it by name.

4. & 5. Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy & Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (2012)

I reviewed both of these books for LA Review of Books (and both were sent to me for free), and may not have otherwise found them if not for my editor, Evan Kindley, who suggested them (though I reviewed other books for them which were far from my favorites this year). These two, however, were excellent, precisely in the fact that they enlarged my sense of our relationship to history and our relationship to human endeavor. My reviews of both are here and here.

6. E. C. Large, Advance of the Fungi (1940)

Some books just jump out at you from the shelf and demand to be bought. So too with E. C. Large’s 1940 history of our attempts to understand fungi and plant disease. It opens with a heartstopping race to understand potato blight by two botanists in an attempt to stave off the Irish Potato Famine, amidst the complete and criminal indifference of the British government. From there it continues for another 500 pages. I’ll admit I haven’t finished it yet; it exhausted me in its scope and ambition. Even only halfway through, I still think it’s the best book I’ve read in awhile; sometimes the mark of a great book is that you can’t take it all in on the first go.

7. Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things (2012)

Many have listed Strayed’s memoir Wild as one of their favorites of the year, but Tiny Beautiful Things is for me clearly superior. While Wild struck me as a well written and engaging memoir, it didn’t really aim to reinvent the do-a-stupid-thing-in-order-to-come-to-grips-with-horrible-thing-in-one’s-past formula. Tiny Beautiful Things, on the other hand, could reasonably be said to have invented its own genre. That’s worth noting.

8. Louise Gluck, Poems, 1962-2012 (2012)

A book to keep close throughout one’s life.

9. Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928)

Another book sent to me to review, and the other book on this list from NYRB Classics. Contemporary with Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned and Lo!, and Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, a maverick history written by an armchair historian that’s vital, evocative, and necessary. If I get that review published, I’ll link to it; in the meantime, read Evan Kindley’s review of it here.

10. Montague Summers, A History of Demonology and Witchcraft (1926)

Wildly problematic, and yet compulsively readable, Summers’ history of witchcraft is a thoroughly researched history which shed light on things long forgotten and offered fresh translations of documents never before seen in English. At the same time, Summers steadfastly maintained that witches were real, and that the Catholic Church was completely correct in executing most of them—if anything, he suggests, they should’ve killed more. A singular book by a singular individual. At some point a long essay I wrote on Summers may see the light.

"Best of all, he told me about his days as a ship dismantler, and how an ocean liner could be broken..."

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:30:40 -0800

“Best of all, he told me about his days as a ship dismantler, and how an ocean liner could be broken down into thousands of unrecognizable pieces in a ‘breaker’s yard.’… It was, he murmured, a dangerous profession, of course. And it was painful to realize that nothing was permanent, not even an ocean liner. ‘Not even the trireme!’ he said, and nudged me. He had been there to help dismantle the Normandie—‘the most beautiful ship ever built’—as it lay charred and half-drowned in the Hudson River in America. ‘But somehow even THAT was beautiful…because in a breaker’s yard you can discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.”

- Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table (71-72)

"World to be stuttered after, in which I’ll have been a guest, a name sweated down from the..."

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:16:37 -0800

“World to be stuttered after,
in which I’ll have been
a guest, a name
sweated down from the wall
where a wound licks up high.”

- Paul Celan

"Some one has said, “Tell me the condition of the churches of a city, and I will tell you the..."

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:15:56 -0800

“Some one has said, “Tell me the condition of the churches of a city, and I will tell you the prosperity of that city.” If this be true of churches, how much more truly can it be said of the pavement!”

- George W Tillson, Street Pavings and Paving Materials: A Manual of City Pavings (1900)

Partial List of Alchemy Book Titles

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:07:00 -0800

(all taken from Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy)

Natural and Secret Things

On Apparatuses and Furnaces

Letter Omega

Book of Secrets

Book of the Secret of Secrets

Book of Mercy

Books of the Balance

Treatise on the Elixir

Book of Clarification

Book of the Remedy

Little Key to the World

The Sum of Perfections

On the Congelation and Gluing-Together of Stones

On the Consideration of the Fifth Essence of All Things

A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery

The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony

Of the Great Stone of the Ancients

My review of Principe’s book can be found here: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1202