Skip to main content

The Selection

I went to Blackwells this afternoon to buy a unit of fiction and I found choosing extremely difficult. I am always plagued with the feeling that the same book is being written over and over – a novel during wartime London; a tale of young women vying for the stage in the 1920s; an affair set in the present day; an old man remembering his first sexual experience; a historical romp beaded heavily with elaborate camp; stories of young male vagabonds whose consciousnesses disintegrate while walking the streets at night. Books on shelves – with their bright loopy covers and vibrant letters and bumptious puffs - seem to mean nothing. Perhaps this is a result of not reading contemporary fiction for so long. The hackneyed book news, the schools of fiction, the masters writing classes, review readers, Costa and Orange awards; what do they mean? It took me two trips and at least an hour of choosing and then discarding everything and clinging to Diego Marani’s Finnish Grammar and thinking At Last I Will Buy It. This is my raft. This will save me. And then tossing everything out to buy Andres Newman’s Traveller of the Century. It’s a Pushkin Press book, and was (sort of) endorsed by the late Roberto Bolano. Time will tell. Emily Dickinson needs a male companion.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When the Lights Go Out

Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man is nothing less than a modern masterpiece and, I have no doubt, will turn out to be one of my favorite books of 2010. The novel follows George as he struggles through a single day in 1960’s Los Angeles following the death of his lover. George wakes up, goes to the university where he teaches literature, goes to the gym, has dinner with a friend, gets drunk at a dive bar, swims in the ocean, and arrives at the end. George is “three quarters human,” a machine trying to keep himself alive until it is time not to be. Like an actor, he is absent from humanity. When he looks at his neighbors, at the suburban families, he thinks "They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flash-lamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gordon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinki...

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...