The Old Television Set

From Blog Photos

The television had been there for thirty years. You got the sense that if you turned it on, a thirty year old television show would play.

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Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

My plan to read the Sea of Fertility series by Mishima was thwarted.

I did however finish the first book, Spring Snow, The Amber Spyglass, and read a few Borges stories. I excuse my inability to finish the SoF series because I was writing in earnest most of the month for my new novel.

That aside, now that I've read the work, I took the time to read a few non-professional reviews. I do see the political significance of Mishima's work - the time period in which he choses to begin his series - but beyond that is a sort of desperation, frustration, and his personal idea that one must die to prove their point and sacrifice for their ideals.

I am going to finish the SoF series and read Scott-Stokes biography on Mishima - I chose not to read the other way around because I don't want to have too much on my mind as I read.

The work itself is beautifully written (I have the Charles Tuttle edition) and so very moving that in times the sadness that pervades the novel gets its hands on you and I had to stop. What Mishima does try to do he does with the aid of a love story gone wrong and knowing that it can never be righted is a sorrow that lingers with you.

The ending did not tie up all the loose ends, so those who say it's possible to read the books out of order or read one and then stop - I can't yet disagree with them. But since one of the main characters has a novel of his own in the series, I'm suspecting that this might not be possible. It's a lot of reading, but the first book was in itself what I would call a masterpiece.

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Recent Acquisitions

Books bought today:

T.S. Eliot, a Life - Peter Ackroyd
The Custom House of Desire, Half a Century of Surrealist Stories - Translated by J.H. Matthews
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck - Charles Bukowski
The King & The Corpse - Henrich Zimmer (edited by Joseph Campbell)
The History Man - Malcolm Bradbury
Writing, The Story of Alphabets and Scripts - Jean Georges
The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
The Egyptian Book of the Dead - E.A Wallis Budge
Problems of Leninism - Joseph Stalin
The Proper Bostonians - Cleland Amory
The Master and Magarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Literary History of England
Myth & Legend - Thomas Bulfinch
The Light that Failed - Rudyard Kipling

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Apparently, The Grapes of Wrath Could Have Been Longer...

I like so many other addicts, abuse a drug called Facebook because it makes me feel better about myself. I don't have the worst of the many Facebook habits - I don't use FB for eye crack. I am not a Friends junkie. No, my addiction is to the great white dust covered Virtual Bookshelf.

Yes, it makes me feel better to save all the books I've read and to write scathing critiques on Kundera or the recent failure of Murakami and every now and then I get to come across a book I've long forgotten, like the Scarlet Letter. How is that for old school?

But my favorite moment today was clicking past Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and coming across the GOW Cliff's Notes, which is a study guide and seeing the following review:

"interesting story but I felt it could have been a bit longer"

I don't think this was tongue-in-cheek sadly.

Though I nearly wet myself showing the poor reader's review the appropriate amount of comedic appreciation.

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New Year's Reading Resolutions

I've decided I will devote each month of the year to reading either a) books only by a specific author, b) books on a specific subject, or c) one immense work that normally takes a month (i.e. say Ulysses).

The purpose of this is to make notes (I've loads of notebooks that must be put to use!) and see where reading the first author takes me either to another author or to a certain subject. So basically throughout the year I will progress naturally from a starting point.

After much thought, I've decided to start this experiment with Yukio Mishima and more specifically with Mishima's Sea of Fertility, his great masterpiece that is composed of four books: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn,and The Decay of the Angel.

I also plan to read Madame de Sade and a biography on Mishima (by Henry Scott-Stokes) in order to find out what the month of February has in store.

So in short, if you do a search through my archives for Mishima, you can keep track and maybe predict where I might go next.

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More Recent Acquistions

Another good week of book buying...


Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Writings
Leon Uris - Trinity
DH Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent
William Faulkner - The Portable Faulkner (Edited by Cowley), Sound & The Fury
Stendhal - Scarlet and Black
E.N. de C. Andrade - Sir Issac Newton
Arthur Koestler - The Case of the Midwife Toad
Giuseppe di Lampedusa - The Leopard
Michael Tournier - Friday
Francois Rabelais - The Works of Rabelais
The Cid
Paul Verlaine - Selected Poems
Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and 7 Other Stories
Colette - Break of Day, Gigi and the Cat
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Puddin' Head Wilson
Gertrude Stein - 3 Lives
The Journals of Andre Gide: 1889 - 1913, 1914 - 1927, 1928 - 1939, 1939 - 1949
Caesar's War Commentaries
C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain
Willa Cather - A Lost Lady
Lillian Smith - Strange Fruit
John Updike - Problems and Other Stories
Louisa May Alcott - A Long Fatal Love Chase
D.M. Hussey - The Byzantine World
Selected Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Confessions of Saint Augustine
Graham Greene - The Heart of Matter
Balzac - Drole Tales
Douglas R. Hoefstadter - The Praise of the Music of Language
Yusunari Kawabata - The Master of Go
T.E. Lawrence - The Mint
Richard Wright - Native Son
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
Isabel Allende - Of Love and Shadows
Gulot & Lake - The Life of Picasso
Michael Scott - Irish Animal Tales
Morio Kita - The Fall of the House of Nire
E.R. Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrationals
Richard Sullivan - Heirs of the Roman Empire
E.M. Forester - A Passage to India
Henry James - The Bostonians, Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller
Virgil - The Georgics
Morton Smith - The Ancient Greeks
Solomon Katz - The Decline of Rome
Chester G. Starr, Jr. - The Emergence of Rome as Ruler of Western World
Eramus - The Praise of Folly
Plato - The Last Days of Socrates
Huhm - Kut, Korean Shaman Rituals
Paul Gallico - The Small Miracle
Boccacio - On Poetry
Arthur O. Lovejoy - The Great Chain of Being
Bruno Snell - The Discovery of the Mind
Andre Maurois - Lelia, The Life of George Sand
George Gulls - Biography of Mae West
Radclyfee Hall - The Well of Loneliness
Evelyn Waugh - Men at Arms
The Plays of Oscar Wilde

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The Pre-NY's Clean Up

The new year is approaching and so, bored out of my mind I decided to rearrange the books.

I should have taken some photos during the process - when there were books going up the stairs and me up to me cloxters (sp?) in Beckett.

Here is the first snap. One bookshelf uses a heavenly quirky system.

First shelf: The bible under the lost books of the bible and Colin Wilson's The Occult. Random serious thinkers like Emerson,Kahil Gibran, Nietsche, and Rabelais. Complex scientific books, chess strategy books, Philip K. Dick, the letters of Mozard, biographies on Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. A book on art.

Second shelf: Greek mythology, Plato's The Symposium, 3 Volume set of Gibbon's Roman Empire, erotica like Bataille's L'Histoire d'Oeil, Rimbaud, Blake, and Shakespeare.

Third shelf: sadly only three volumes by African authors and then starts the hugenormous American lit section breaking at Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and continuing on the fourth shelf with Miller's Rosy Cruxification. The fourth shelf gets us past Vonnegut and Wharton and ends with Tobias Wolfe.

Fifth shelf: pretty much starts with Beckett and Joyce with a few other Irish authors in between before going into English lit with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy sitting comfortably next to a few volumes of Chesterton.

Sixth shelf continues where the fifth stopped adding Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, and Pound's ABC of Reading. The sixth shelf also gets to bear the burden of my Somerset Maugham obsession. I have a stunning set of his short stories printed by Folio Society which can be a bit hard to get your hands on, a pleuthora of paperbacks including The Moon and Sixpence (my second favorite of his works after The Razor's Edge) and a first addition of his Writer's Notebook, which was a birthday gift from someone extremely sexy to me. I mean dear.

Seventh shelf has a bit of English including my budding collection of Evelyn Waugh. So far I've collected his diaries, the complete collection of his short stories, Put Out More Flags, and A Little Learning.

The rest of the shelf has a mix of European authors such as Hamsun, Kundera, Strindberg, and Sebald.

By the time I was tired and feeling much less motivated. Since I decided to organize by type of literature I still had: Russian, Asian, French, and loads of biographies, oversized books, and odd one offs like a book on Jack the Ripper. Where does one keep the Ripper?

As you can see, I also don't have enough shelf space. In my perfect world, one of the things I would require to be perfect would be bookshelves. They would never be too shallow for bigger books or too deep for littler ones. As you can see the problem with the second bookshelf was that it's far too deep for paperbacks.

The top has the most room, so the most books. Over half the shelf is various Asian literature including (drum roll please)...All the books from Mishima's Sea of Fertility (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)! Soseki, Murakami, and a little known book called The Gay Genius. The little chunk left is stacked with Russian and Latin American/Hispanic Literature, including my new favorite Unamuno and my old favorite Asturias.

The rest of the shelf isn't worth taking about except a few great memoirs (The Words, Jean Paul Sartre and Rodin's On Art and Artists).

Still, I got the job done.

Then I thought, why not further refine the system?

But only for a second. I did go through and pull out books I wanted to remember to read, but I'm not touching a thing otherwise!

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Hot Chocolate & Feeling Like a Kid Again

I had an epiphany not so long ago.

I realized that xyz types of writing didn't seem to be working out for me. I wanted to write literature. Like Proust. I am not a woman of small ambitions.

Once I realized xyz types of writing wasn't working for me, the writer in me refused to give up. Half empty, hell no. If xyz wasn't right for me, that must mean what is right for me is still out there. Yet to be discovered.

But I am guilty of committing the crimes every writer commits and some even with impunity. I realize my biggest crime I don't realize I'm guilty of is, I don't always start what I finish. I tend to get plenty of ideas, but write very very few of them out.

I decided that the latest thing to pop into my head was going to be what I was coming out the gate with. It might have been the right decision. In the past week I've outlined (for the very first time with some actual direction) my entire book. I know it's going to be a series, most likely a trilogy. I'm already on to ideas for the second book.

I've gone a step further than a basic outline. I've pinned down the first chapter. I know what will happen in the second and the third and the last.

I've made drawings of characters. A map of the world as it exists in this story. I'm researching. I'm scouting locations. I'm making the characters come to life in my head.

It's like I'm a kid again. Getting ready to tell myself a story.

That hasn't happened to me in a really long time.

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A Book So Good You'd Eat it, You'd Eat It Up!

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ediblebooks/2008gallery.html

My favorite, though not my favorite book in the lot: The Pelican Beef

Thanks to C-Note for the tip, and also for telling me that the reason why there are so few first editions of Alice in Wonderland is because they've been eaten...

So this post is appropriately, all around well categorized under: Weird.

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Recent Acquisitions

Another day of book buying:

Decadence - Rémy de Gourmont
The Dancing Bear - Peter Dickinson
Cahiers, 1716 - 1755 - Montesquieu
A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
Young Hearts Crying - Richard Yates
House Mother Normal - B.S. Johnson
Essays on Buddhism - Suzuki
A Little Learning - Evelyn Waugh
The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima - Henry Scott-Stokes
Kabuki - Hamamura, Sugawara, Kinoshita, & Minami
Winter's Tales - Isak Dinesen (aka Karin von Blixen)
Abel Sanchez and Other Stories - Miguel de Unamuno
The Japanese - Edwin O. Reischauer
Things Near and Far - Arthur Machen
The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
The Professor of Desire - Philip Roth
The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
World Famous Paintings
The Emperor of the Amazon - Marcio Souza
Letters from a Stoic - Seneca
Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Mediaeval Romances and Legends translated from the French
The Life and Death of the Mayor Caterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
Rodin on Art and Artists - Rodin
Pageant of Japanese Art, 6 Volumes
Mathematics and the Imagination - Kasner and Newman

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It's Oh So Quiet...

I have been writing. In fact, in the new book I've pretty much gotten around to chapter deux. Chapter un was sombre, tragic, someone dies...maybe. I like death in the first chapter. I recommended a book for writers called Hooked about how to get that first chapter to grab a reader. I read the book and somehow since all my first chapters entail either: 1) death, 2)an orgy, 3) sexy bathing, or 4) birth. I often feel this urge to read books and analyse how fucked up the writers were, but I refrain mostly because well, I don't want anyone to analyse me.

Otherwise I've been reading, book hunting, watching films, and other things that generally inspire me. But nothing seems to be working because the Parisian weather is quite crap, and I'm usually so cold I've got the same consistency as a popsicle. If only my laptop had a fireplace, then maybe I'd write more...

For those of you who think about quitting your job to become a writer, there is one very important question you should ask yourself.

Do you mind doing something that can't always be done and as a result frustrates the complete crap out of you?

If you answer is no, make sure you get laid off so you can collect unemployment and get to writing immediately. Also, don't buy too many pairs of shoes because you will probably never make any real money as a writer. Do it because you have to.

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The Thinker's Library

Today at Shakespeare and Co. I found the first of 140 books published between 1929 and 1951 by Watts and Co. London in the "Thinker's Library", "First and Last Things", by HG Wells.

I was amazed to find out this was a bit of collector's object, since it was just lying about not doing much of anything. I was complimented on my choice at the register, but who knew?

You can find oodles of The Thinker's Library books on www.abebooks.co.uk including one I'd really like to get my hands on by Darwin.

For the full list visit your good friend and mine, Wiki at:

I myself am going to see if they come to me. We shall see if I have the patience because usually let's face it, I don't.

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Recent Acquisitions

First and Last Things - HG Wells

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer - Kenneth Patchen

The Iron Heel - Jack London

Baltasar & Blimunda - Jose Saramago

Rilke, A Life - Wolfgang Leppmann

and the ever important work, Indiana Jones and the Cult of the Mummy's Crypt "Find Your Fate #7

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Reunion, Fred Ulhman

I just finished a little book, the aforementioned Reunion, by Fred Ulhman.

In my edition, which I found for only one euro (thank you again Book Off), published by The Harvill Press of London, there is an introduction by Jean d'Ormesson. D'Ormesson sits on the highly regarded Académie Francaise in seat 12.For those of you who are unfamiliar with d'Ormesson, I highly recommend "Du coté de chez Jean".

In his introduction calls Reunion "literary perfection", and says, "Delight and distress mingled in me so powerfully that I found myself smiling through tears that came to my eyes".

The story is very simple. A young lonely Jewish boy and a young lonely German noble going to school together and becoming friends. The friendship is deeply felt by both parties and comes to an end because of the circumstances of 1930's Germany and because this friendship cannot live forever.

I highly recommend this book, so much so that I've included it on my list of Mandatory Reading. Mostly because I refuse to believe that any one who read this book would not add their own tears to d'Ormesson's or my own.

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The Anatomist - Federico Andahazi

I recently bought The Anatomis by Federico Andahazi because it was only 1,00 euro and was a best seller in Latin America. I can't find out anything about the book except a handful of reviews on Amazon that are mostly disappointed, and to be quite frank so was I.

The style reeked of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the wrong ways. It had his style and tone with none of his nuances. The birth of Mona Sofia in Corsica, her kidnapping by pirates, her eventual sale into prostitution first to a caring woman who raised little girls with love to sell their bodies and then washing up along the shores of Venice's most notorious school for whores went too quickly. She strikes out on her own at 15 and stakes her claim on the loins of all of Venice, including Mateo Colombo, who resolves to find his America in order to win her love.

A story about the discovery of the clitoris, that involves the church, the Renaissance, and papal feuding should have had me on the edge of my seat or at least breaking an erotic sweat, but it did neither.

But it did serve as a prime example of who a writer, who does have talent, but not their own style - who has an interesting story, but rushes too quickly; can write a book. Not a great book or a terrible one, but a book nonetheless.

A lot of the mistakes I felt were evident in the book are many of the mistakes I commit in my own writing. But I believe that reading to improve your writing is much like tennis - if you play with someone better than you, you get better and if you're good and play with someone worse, well your skill on the page declines.

But every story has a lesson, and so armed with the knowledge that I can recognize my own mistakes, I shall write. Hopefully better.

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