Lady

 

Visible Again

For five bookcases, I moved all of the books on all of the shelves, shifting upper to lower, lower to upper, discarding or adding, and reordering each one, just so that those books would become visible to me once again.

Have you ever noticed how after a while you don't even see the pictures or the art you have hanging on the walls where you spend your time each day, home or office?

Same concept.

Next, maybe, I'll move the pictures and art around.

Story-Hoard

Reading Around

Bookish

Introduction to Poetry

Here are the books:
English 43: Introduction to Poetry
CCSF
Spring 2019

Comfort Before Revising

Notes: Of Reading and Rereading

I read the way most folks listen to music, so there's an awful lot of rereading.  Often, a book deserves a second try or even multiple readings.  Or, I'm not the same man, not the same reader, that I was twenty or thirty years ago.  And, who listens to a great song and never listens again, right?

I have been thinking about the books I have reread again and again, and I think they fall into four or five categories.

No, I'm simpler than that: two or three.

Distraction, direction, and devotion.

I reread to be taken away from current events, current pressures, or I want background "music".

I reread for traction and to carry myself forward, to motivate myself, to pump up or to shake it all loose.

I reread as an act of prayer, as homage to great craft and vision and story.  I reread as a commitment to what the word can do beyond any other media.  I reread to explore and to embrace, to be exposed and to expose myself--all the nerve endings of mind and heart and soul--to story and character and action in the best senses.  I don't really have words myself for what I'm seeking, but it is a sacrament I seek daily, hourly, constantly.  Or, if not sacrament, at least immersion.  I reread to dive deeper, to swim beneath the surface of things, and to drown--if need be--in story.  (I hold my breath well, I must add.)

Background, motivation, and/or concentration.  Exposure.  Immersion.  Perhaps, an addiction?

All joy in various measures.

All fun in multifarious modes.

I read and reread the way most folks listen to music.  The way I listen to music.  The way I'll bet you listen to music.

Why don't you join me, if you don't already?

P.S.  Can something read be both distraction and devotion?
Sometimes, it can.  That's the magic.

Dear Lord Byron . . . .

I've been teaching some books about specific obsessions, and in order for my students to understand that I was not judging or maligning the authors for their obsessions, I made a bit of a joke about understanding obsession myself, about being obsessed.  I mentioned my nine years in graduate school and detailed how I'd not only read and annotated all that Lord Byron had written, published or not published, but also had read and annotated the thirteen volumes of his letters that we have and had read and annotated the letters sent to him and had even started reading and annotating all that Byron himself had read . . . in chronological order.

(And that's not counting the bookcase or two full of literary scholarship on Lord Byron and English Romanticism and European history and heroism I also read and annotated.)

What started out as a joke became a little more serious: I do understand obsession.

I survived mine, but not everyone does.

Literary Vistas

A somewhat random sampling of a few shelves . . . .

Old friends; prime rereading.

Crime novels: Rankin's Rebus and the work of local California writers.

Stalwart friends from childhood: R. E. Howard's pulp adventures.

Dickens on Childhood and Memory and Happiness

"This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater proprietybe said not to have lost the faculty, than to have  acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

"I might have a misgiving that I am 'meandering' in stopping to say this, but that it brings me to remark that I build these conclusions, in part upon my own experience of myself; and if it should appear from
anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics."

--Charles Dickens
-----very early in David Copperfield--

Hungry for Story

Hungry for story
I open the book
To any page
And read again
And again and again
Until I feel full
Only to begin
Again and again
The next day
And the next-next
Each day
Every day
Hungry again.

--MD

A Taste or Two

Work, Work, Work

English 1A: Non-Fiction Emphasis

Casey's The Devil's Teeth;
Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft;
Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano's Flotsametrics and the Floating World;
Greenberg's Four Fish;
and London's The Sea-Wolf.


English 1B: Intro to Literature

Appelbaum's English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology;
Hegi's Floating in My Mother's Palm;
Nunn's Tapping the Source;
O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night;
Shakespeare's Macbeth;
and Shelley's Frankenstein.

Not as Obvious as It Ought to Be

Teach the book on its merits, not on its laurels.

(And by book, I mean anything.  I mean specific books first, of course, the ones by Homer and Melville and Austen and Shakespeare and whomever is popular in the moment, but I certainly mean anything also.)

Goofing with Clay: Mythomarine

Wet clay.

Transformation almost complete --from man to fish --

Merman: body-armored against the cold sea.

Bookend: A nod to Moby Dick.

My Girl Motley

Motley: She'll be twenty on April 1st.

Old School

"Someone . . . reading a book . . . ."

--the voice almost disbelieving, wistful--

Pt. Richmond passerby's observation as I sat at a sidewalk table drinking coffee and reading an old, worn, thick paperback this morning.

This is that book, but I wasn't drinking whiskey then.
Old Friends.

Comfort Comes In Many Guises

Stunt Doubles