Trying to Summarize the Last 10-15 Years or So of Reading

The "read all of the classics of literature" goal I set for myself at age 15 is essentially done. There are some holes and Italy remains a weak spot. Herodotus, Lucretius, Chaucer, The Scarlet Letter, and a general recognition that I should be more familiar with pre-1900 English poetry, a thing I am absolutely not going to get on right away. I have read only two of the four classic William Faulkner novels and 1.5 of the classic three by Edith Wharton, but these are nits. There is still more to read, but nothing truly embarrassing.

For a long time my reading was dominated my themes or tastes--reading through modern Spanish-language literature, modern Japanese literature, that weird period where I realized I hadn't read a book by a white English-speaking man for six months and then just ran it out for another year. The four-five-six book system makes things a little more intentional and methodical. Thus I have been working through German and Austrian literature for over a year or so. There's been a lot of coverage but not a lot I really love, though a lot of it comes close.

A distinct Spanish-language phase that ran from 2009-2015 or so. Soldiers of Salamis easily the best of this group. A general distaste for El Boom: I did not entirely enjoy Vargas Llosa, Cortazar or Garcia Marquez (or Allende), or enjoyed them in the way I enjoy Thomas Mann: obvious genius and skill that does not speak to me personally usually through too thorough commitment to the scheme. Spanish-language poetry a tough field; Mexican poetry tends to do pretty well in translation, but whatever it is in Ruben Dario, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda et al is lost on me. All minor Spanish-language writers are great, however; regardless of genre, their books punch at or above their weight no matter length or complexity, and you are like as not to find a work of real genius. (I don't even like the genre of Our Share of Night but it doesn't even matter, the book was great.)

The Spanish phase was replaced by Japanese literature with A True Novel, which everyone compared to Wuthering Heights but to me felt more like A Hero of Our Time. From there to Natsume Soseki, especially I Am A Cat but all others. Haiku was, alas, not as much of a hit as I wanted. We eventually ended up in feminist postwar fiction and genre, especially crime (especially especially feminist crime, a fascinating genre, go read Out). Breasts and Eggs. Territory of Light. Another high-value literature, but very slow in translation, especially since there is somewhat lighter fare that sells better and gets translated more readily.

Which I suppose leaves German-language literature as the current phase. I continue to read it because I do see something of myself and the more esoteric ways of my family in it, but I have to admit there's not really any classics here. Anniversaries is closest, but it's still hard to disentangle how I feel about it from the year of my life I spent reading it. Post-reunification literature has not entirely made it past Die Wende, and I suppose I can't blame them: it must've been awesome to be young in Berlin in, say, 1992. (It was not awesome to be young in Michigan in 1992, but I didn't expect it to be, so.) 20th century German literature has an obvious central gravitational pull, and though my appetite for exile-or-staying-or-surviving-or-thriving is higher than average, a lot of these works have narrative problems because events are what they are: you will probably not escape. If you do escape, you will probably have a bad time. If you stay, you will absolutely have a bad time, even if you never lifted a finger to help the Nazis. 

Classical German literature is also a bit of an issue: there's Goethe and then a bunch of dramatists and poets. The poets work in what feels to me like a high classical and romantic metier that is difficult to read at any length (I am having the same problem with Milton and Paradise Lost at this exact moment.) Goethe is weird and interesting, though it was disappointing to learn that he was, charitably, and even by the standards of the time, a dirtbag, not unlike my hated Rousseau. 

I ran through British 20th century literature for quite awhile--Powell a particular favorite, and Elizabeth Taylor still; Pym did not interest me enough to try more; Elizabeth Bowen did, but I foundered on the (excellent) short stories. The Transit of Venus and especially The Great Fire were and remain favorites. Everything Persephone Books publishes is worth it, and the care they put into their editions is amazing, but the cost eventually became prohibitive. Heat Lightning and The Shuttle and The Fortnight in September, the best beach book ever. Girl, Woman, Other. It remains a reliable source of perfectly solid novels of all kinds.

Lagos and Nigeria ran hot for a few years, but it was hard to get a reliable read on what was really good coming out of Western Africa, a sort of version of the Japan problem.

And America, well... it has become clear to me that modernism and romanticism and the sheer dreaminess of the American Dream touched something in American letters from Whitman through World War I, but by the time Hemingway converted to Catholicism, it was over, and never to return. My Átonia and An American Tragedy are unspeakably beautiful. Modern, post-1990 literature is fine and sometimes great, but I wouldn't hang my hat on it.

I may have come around on LeGuin, but I won't be reading Earthsea. Philip K. Dick works best as a treatment writer for movie premises. Pynchon is very weird, and not in a good way.

I like Sally Rooney's novels. 

Home Thoughts from Home

Phoebe:

Life can feel like these cycles of getting up, scrambling to get children out the door, scrambling to get 9-7 worth of work done in 9-4, then picking children up and coming home and they want dinner but also snacks that have to be prepared during dinner prep and also the older one has homework and I’m not quite sure if we’re doing the homework right nor where her little sister is meant to be during it that won’t distract her, and then I serve whichever disappointing home-cooked dinner and then it’s bedtime routine and then the rest of the workday happens and looking at practical and impractical stuff that can be ordered online but typically ordering none of it then I go to sleep. 

 

1. I should begin by saying that this is a lot like my life, and I am similarly pretty happy with it, although baffled in many of the same ways. I had a staycation where my wife and kids went away for a weekend and it was... fine. I saw movies I would not have otherwise and ate slightly differently than I would if they were around, but otherwise it was sort of blah. But when it's the first week of a new school year in July, or I'm facing down the endless monotony of three weeks off around Christmas, it becomes very clear the extent to which days are carbon copies of each other, and it does wear on you. 

2. In my last year of teaching I was at Chicago, and was advising one of my freshmen who didn't like Chicago and had been accepted to Duke the year before. She wanted to transfer. I wrote her a letter of recommendation and told her what I knew about the student experience. She was accepted, and then began a serious campaign to get me to tell her what to do. I declined that request*, but did try to point her in the direction of the idea that the decision mattered a lot less than she thought it would. 

If she stayed at Chicago, she'd incorporate into her self-narrative the belief that she is a person who can tough it out when things are difficult; if she left she'd be the sort of person who doesn't allow herself to be miserable but takes active steps to make her life better. And at a certain point of remove, it would cease to matter what she had decided--she'd end up pretty much the same person either way. (She acquired a boyfriend while deliberating; she stayed. No better or worse than any other reason to make the same decision.)

3. The central thesis here would be the one from Javier Marias' A Heart So White: at a certain point, doing or not doing, deciding one way or another, all eventually bend back into the same stream because you can outrun neither yourself nor the global circumstances in which you take part. I knew my wife for many years before we started dating; we were in and out of relationships at different times and always friendly with each other. Our relationship happened when it happened, but there's a real element of "of course it was going to work out" looking backwards. And nothing that we fretted about has really ended up mattering that much. Even our frantic 2nd trimester decision to move worked out just fine (we have A Pretty Good House, But With Some Drawbacks; same as every other house), so long as you don't ask me to move again for another ten years.

4. I was perhaps prepared for this by listening to a lot of Yo La Tengo: a long, successful relationship is falling asleep with the Mets game on, doing the dishes, remembering an argument you once had but that everyone moved past. It's pretty boring. The feelings move slower, at a lower register. You don't get the fireworks of being 16 and crushing on someone, you don't get the misery of a relationship that needs to die but won't. You get, say, a child pulling the pencil out of your hand because they can do the rest of the math homework on their own, or an older child pulling the "Do you need a hug? No? Well, I need a hug" to help a younger one feel better when they're having a bad day. Or a spouse just glad to talk to you at the end of the day (a non-talker who loves to talk to you, specifically, is such a winning feeling). 

5.  I have remembered this bit of ee cummings for 25 years:

i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudites
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,

and whittles life to eternity

6. And one other note: it is mildly beneficial to be a good-ish father in the eyes of society and the workplace. You really do have to only gesture to the minimum and people will eat that garbage up. But I have also found that actually being interested in parenting them is read by lots of others as weird: I partake in no hoary gender clichés, I try to know their interests, thoughts, and general emotional landscape. Even among the relatively evolved dads in my social set, this is a bit unusual, and quite often treated as such. It's not a complaint, exactly: my kids' school knows to call me first (only took three years), parents of their friends learn that I am the one who organizes the schedule, etc etc. But it is an annoyance.

 

* Here in the sanctity of the web where only God, four people, and AI scrapers will see: based on what I knew of her as a student and a person, she should've gone to Duke. But also it didn't really matter. 

Currently Reading, Somehow We Have Almost Completely Turned Over Again Edition

Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I read this for the first time at the single weirdest reading time in my life: the summer after I completed my dissertation, while living on ~no money and waiting to move to Princeton. I did not like it then, and was especially hostile to the non-story chapters. 

This time, it's pretty undeniably charming. There's some humor and no particular hurry to get anywhere, just to leave and to go. In that way, it's pretty American. (It is, of course, odd to think of this as being written in almost the same world as Balzac and Dickens, and Baudelaire.)

 

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
A fabled writerly trope, observed in the wild: a new female character whose introductory paragraphs includes an extensive description of her breasts. She later stands naked in front of a mirror and contemplates her breasts for an extended period of time. I would abandon the book, but I am... 1000 pages into it (only 300 into volume 2) and have less than 100 pages of completed material left. How far I will make it into the unorganized chapters and unfinished notes is yet to be determined, but the novel has become less interesting once it went from "novel of ideas about the fall of the Austrian empire" to "weird sexual hangups of early 20th century Austrians".

 

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
I am now in the very long (~150) Baudelaire section. When it was on general Parisian topics, it was easy to see the thrust of it all, and all of the pieces fit in neatly: the transition from Revolutionary Paris to modern/20th century Paris by way of glass and steel, hence the arcades, to department stores and Haussmann, and on through Zola and modernity. But I don't quite see what the thesis on Baudelaire is intended to be: he's a transitional figure from say Hugo to the Symbolists and Decadents as well as modern French verse, sure. He's a flaneur, an observer of the dark heart of modernity, and in his willingness to be unsparing he gives a better picture of the decay than Haussmann. But there's Zola, and Dreyfus, and Proust, and it seems pretty easy to form a picture of French modernity that doesn't involve him at all, or can work around him.

This is perhaps good context to say that I've made several attempts at Baudelaire over the years and simply don't get it: some of the poems are good, but the hit rate isn't high. Unlike other languages, I don't know French well enough to follow the translations, and it does seem quite possible that something vital is lost by midcentury American squishes who don't want to directly translate what they consider to be vulgar. But I just don't see it. 

 

Horace, Odes
I like wine, too, but c'mon.

 

Herta Müller, The Appointment
I was indifferent to cold on this one to begin, but as it gradually became clear that (spoiler alert) the main character was going to miss her appointment with the secret police, possibly on purpose, I warmed up to it. I do think the pacing and some of the thematic concerns were a touch overdone--if you've read one narrative about the depredations of communism in Romania, you've read them all--but I didn't dislike it.

They're Writing Songs of Myself, But Not For Me

Montaigne, Essays
Over the years, I've read a few of his essays ("On Cannibals" comes up a lot in early modern contexts); there was sometimes a clever argument, but I was never really moved to dig further. Well, in the spirit of all things coming due to those who read extensively, I gave the complete essays a shot, and promptly abandoned them after I.14. 

I accept as a matter of historical importance that people continuously try to make compatible things that are not, at first glance, compatible with each other. I've even taken a scholarly interest in them, from time to time: what was my dissertation if not trying to merge liberal Protestantism with moral universalism, historical-textual (and therefore Biblical) criticism, and a rejection of natural law? I can see how that would be of no interest to most people, but it was of great interest to me, because I wanted to found my moral judgments on the grounds that were important to me, and wouldn't you know it but someone else had done the same thing 400 years earlier.

But these overlaps are not really interesting, most of the time. How is Aristotle compatible with Islam, Judaism, or Catholicism? The developments of Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas are all watershed moments in Western thought, but I don't believe in Aristotle's science, or Islam, Judaism, or Catholicism. So they can really only be of academic interest to me, which is to say, if I am not motivated by a specific question (or teaching, a different type of intellectual exercise), I can't really bring myself to care much.

(cf. also last week's post on Ovid, and the failure to integrate Egyptian deities or anticipate Rome's collapse: it's interesting to me because it's an artistically interesting failure. I don't really feel compelled to have a view on Isis as a god or Cleopatra, so.)

Montaigne is devoted almost exclusively to a similar project: reconciling Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism with Stoicism. It's hard to imagine two views I am troubled by less, either on their own or in combination. If they can be reconciled, so much the worse for both. Which leads one back to the question that frames a lot of my own non-fiction reading these days as an ex-academic: "why would I bother reading a book about viewpoints I don't like in a style that's not my favorite, when there's no hope of being convinced by anything I couldn't get from other, preferable sources?"  

Frankenstein? More like Frankenmeh.

Pan's Labyrinth, dir. Guillermo del Toro
Frankenstein
(why not?) Pacific Rim

Pan's Labyrinth is a movie that is a classic in the sense of being exactly, and only, what the director wanted it to be. I don't even know that I have much to say about it, except that it is not really a horror-adjacent movie (the horror only involves the humans). It has the ring of a fairy tale, not accidentally. It exists in close relation to lots of other stories but is not exactly like any of them. 

Frankenstein is perhaps an idea del Toro sat with for too long, which he's too close to. It is almost a good movie. But the addition of the rich financier changes what it is that Victor sets out to do: in the book, the sense I got was that it remains unclear to him whether any of his experimentation will actually work. He rejects the monster in part because he never contemplated what might happen if he succeeded and that he might not be happy with the success. In the movie, the financier shifts the question: it is no longer really a question of whether the experiments will be successful--that's what the money is for--and Victor finds himself with something that will not immediately bend to his will, so much the worse for the monster. And so much of Victor's actions, and the monster's self-understanding come to mean different things. The ending really just makes no sense given all of what came before.

Pacific Rim is, well, a good reminder that life cannot be composed only from asking deep questions about the nature of humanity and belonging: sometimes you gotta get the visceral thrill of big machines fighting monsters. 

Currently Reading, Roman Poetry edition

Metamorphoses, Ovid
Eclogues, Virgil
Odes, Horace

The loudest voices for 'classical culture' or 'the Western Tradition' have usually spent the least time engaging with it. I know someone has not really read the Iliad if they do not mention the catalogue of the ships, everybody's least favorite part that stops the narrative propulsion of Book I dead in its tracks. There's a sense, usually false, that there's something nobler or better in old things just because they're old. Ovid attempts to fold Egyptian gods into Roman myth while simultaneously denigrating Cleopatra and the weird icky foreignness of Egypt, how dare those people think they could control Rome? Even the people who know each other and are friendly--Horace and Virgil, as an example--are often enough writing to completely contrary purposes for different reasons. As I approach 35 years of reading in the canon I become more convinced than ever that it is only the effort to make a canon that allows one to exist, not unlike making a sandcastle: just enough to hold them together provided you don't stress any of the connections too much.

More pointedly:

My edition of Ovid from the library is a midcentury Signet Classic edition, where the translator includes a half-page precis of each book with many contemporary allusions to work now mostly unknown; whether this indicates the shortsightedness of the translator or the general decline in educational standards is left as an exercise to the reader. But the one insightful thing he points on, on Book XV, is that the political aims of the Metamorphoses fail: all cannot be integrated into the Roman ideal; Augustus is praised for the peace he brings, but as we know, the subsequent fall of Rome begins with his death. In this way it's not unlike Plato, except one wonders how much the failure of the poetic project's political aims is intentional.

Virgil's Eclogues are superior to the Aeneid as a subject of interest, unless you want to read about people being killed in gruesome ways, and yet they are clearly a minor and inferior work of art. The tone, though, is interesting--conversational in a way Roman poetry is not usually represented as being.

Horace is great, but one can only read so many "hey man, it's gonna be okay, just try to take things as they come" poems in a row. 

Blaming the algorithm

At some point, years ago now, recommendation algorithms (YouTube especially) switched from recommending things similar to what you were already listening to and instead now recommend what you already have listened to. So listening to "The Rubberband Man" no longer suggests songs like it, by different musicians, but instead a mix of completely unrelated things you have listened to recently and perhaps a few other songs by the same artist. If your music taste is capacious enough and you have enough sources to recommend new things otherwise (I do) this is a minor issue. But it's really annoying, and it makes it hard to find genuinely new music: I am trapped in a prison of my own preferences, and Alphabet would prefer that I never make it out. (They'd also probably prefer I don't use ublock origin and could serve me ads.)

Worse, though, is that occasionally YT will tempt me with a button: "generate new recommendations different than you normally get". Friends, it is 100% racist, base right wing slop, every time; there is never any music. "You recently listened to Fela Kuti. Perhaps you'd like an hour-long talking head video about how people from Africa are genetically inferior?" Perhaps not.