What Did You Read Today?

[Pierre Menard]

So something a little different to 'What are you reading now'.

What did you read today? I mean it in a specific way. For example, today I re-read the wonderful Borges essay "The Homeric Versions". It's a brilliant essay on translation, and one of my favourite essays overall. I think it's a wonderful look at the necessity of translation, but also understanding that translation is it's own art form, as well as probing questions of 'authenticity', and the differences between literal and faithful translations, and so on. (Just a quick example, going into greater detail would absolutely be welcomed!)


So that's basically what I mean.

"Today I read chapters 23-28 of Great Expectations and I was particularly struck by…"

'Today I read a poem by so and so and hear it is and this is what I think about, etc, etc"

"I read this essay, that article, that journal entry, etc, etc, etc"


What did you read today, in a more specific sense?

[mona amon]

It's 7.52 AM (January 22) out here, and so far I've only read Pompey's interesting History thread. May have more to report by the end of the day. :)

This is a good idea for a thread.

[mortalterror]

I'm rereading Antigone. I'm noticing a lot of lyrical flair in the choruses.

[Lykren]

Today I only read 20 or so pages of Within a Budding Grove, the section in which he meets and forms a friendship with Robert Saint-de-Loup. As per usual Proust's reflections, this time around on friendship, are engaging and compress a lot of sophisticated thought into extraordinarily efficient sentences (I realize, of course, that they are long sentences, but for the profusion and complexity of the ideas they transmit, I consider them compact). Before I go to bed I'll probably read an essay from Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet. I'm reading one a day, and they're only about five pages long each. In the last one I read she seemed to realize that the point she was making, that the development of the ancient Greek alphabet can be connected to her earlier thoughts on the profound antagonism between desire's existence and its fulfillment, feels a little far-fetched. Nevertheless she pulled the essay off in a way that made me think I will need to re-read it more carefully in the future. I'm looking forward to whatever surprise I'll find tonight.

I'll also soon be re-starting my second read-through (this time with a friend) of Ulysses. My friend is quite a bit more assiduous than I am about picking out details and investigating their literary or historical provenance, which of course is very important with Joyce, so I'm hoping for a very rewarding experience, even more than last time.

Great idea for a thread, Pierre!

[Lykren]

More Proust today, this time the beginning of the last section in Within a Budding Grove, in which he meets, or rather sees, the 'gang' of girls on the beach next to the resort. His description of his fascination with them made it seem as though it was of cosmic significance; the only other scene in the book that I think reached those proportions (though there have been many that come close) is the famous madeleine episode. At first I thought his attraction to them was purely erotic; but as he elaborated it began to seem more and more as though his interest in them was an example par excellence of the universal fascination with unknown lifestyles, moodes, and attitudes and by extension with the unknown in general.

Parts of it (which I don't feel like looking up and quoting to you right now) reminded me quite a lot of some of the points Anne Carson has been making about the 'active' nature of desire, that it is a reaching that is in itself pleasant.

Speaking of which I've continued reading those essays. My feeling now is that the forms she chooses for herself as a poet fit her a little better than the essay form, as her essays feel slightly uncomfortable with the didacticism that seems to be the tradition in the format. Does that make sense?

I haven't re-begun Ulysses yet, and I feel like I may not, for now. Anyway I'm eagerly awaiting responses other than mine to this thread - come on guys! Let's go! What did you read today?

[Pierre Menard]

Great responses so far guys. Very much enjoyed reading them. Lykren, you've made Proust jump up on my list again…I have a hell of a choice between Dante, Sterne, Proust or Rabelais as my next major work after my current reading lot :O


As for today, I read the wonderful poems of Osip Mandelstam. A particularly good one:

"There: the Eucharist, a gold sun,
hung in the air - an instant of splendour.
Here nothing should be heard but the Greek syllables -
the whole world held in the hands like a plain apple.

The solemn height of the holy office; the light
of July in the rotunda under the cupola;
so that we may sigh from full hearts, outside time,
for that little meadow where time does not flow.

And the Eucharist spreads like an eternal noon;
all partake of it, everyone plays and sings,
and in each one's eyes the sacred vessel
brims over with inexhaustible joy."


I also started Shakespeare's Henry IV Pt. 2. The first part is one of my favourite plays, and so far, this one is just as good. Falstaff is truly one of the great characters in literature. As usual the language is sublime, and I still stare in awe at certain paragraphs, with the thought of how incredible it is that Shakespeare always seems to word things the best possible way I could ever hope to imagine.

[NikolaiI]

I read this incredibly lovely poem by Stevenson. . "As One Who Having Wandered..."
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/as_one_who_having_wandered.html

It's a nice poetry page, too, without too much gaudiness - rare and beautiful, those are. :)

[Lykren]

Pierre, I knew nothing (besides the name) about Osip Mandelstam's poetry, and so was surprised to learn that the poem you posted was a translation! The translator did a very good job, I think. I liked the lines 'so that we may sigh from full hearts, outside time,/for that little meadow where time does not flow.' They seemed to me to be the heart of the poem.

The day has just begun for me, but already I've read a fantastic poem (which litnet member blank|verse did me the honor of comparing to one of mine) by Wallace Stevens:

Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

This poem I feel has a different texture, both sonically and in terms of its metaphors, than many of Stevens' poems. It flows quickly, at least in the first eight lines, and then to me it seems as though the narrator becomes physically and spiritually absorbed into the motion they were describing. It's hard to pinpoint this poem, at least on a first reading, but I believe it's evoking the way a particular vibrancy of feeling can turn lines into shadows and liminal spaces into fields of abstract experience.

[ennison]

Today I read the Plath poem "You're" for the first time and found it funny, witty and enjoyable. Quite unlike my usual reaction to Plath.

[Marbles]

I like the idea of the thread.

Today is too early to account for but yesterday I read:

1) 25% of the remaining The Stranger of Albert Camus. Finished it.

2) Two stories from The Mammoth Book of Urban Erotic Confessions. Felt deprived and scandalised.

3) A dozen or so poems of Pablo Neruda for the review I was supposed to write.

4) A longish article of Juan Cole about the developments in the Middle East vis-a-vis the menace of the ISIS.

5) Perused various articles on the death of terrorism-financier King of Saudi Arabia whom the Western press seems to love as a 'moderate reformer'.

[Marcus1]

Read the first chapter (out of four) of Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha. I am mentally exhausted now, which means also that I highly recommend it because I enjoy reading a thought-provoking non-fiction writing. I would complete the rest of the book over the next few days and re-watch her films (Reassemblage, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, The Fourth Dimension). For now, I am ranking her as one of the most influential thinkers I've come across and greatly admire.

[Lykren]

Today I read a brilliant usage of second-person-narration in Anne Carson's essay 'Letters, Letters.' The ideas she discusses are complicated and I can't honestly say I understand them fully, but what I did understand from it was that she was making an analogy between the concept of a love triangle (a theme throughout this book of essays) and what she calls the 'triangulating motion' of letters of the alphabet and the letters we send to each other, the way they each convey both absence and presence, a third person. She does this using examples from various Greek and Latin novels.Near the end she pointed out that letters (alphabet) fit within letters (messages) and that love stories (of the characters) fit within love stories (love of reader for book).

What made it so brilliant for me, at least on this first reading, was her increasing use of the second person; it mirrored the ideas she was analyzing! That is, by addressing the reader, she added a third person to the pair composed of author and subject. The essay ended with this memorable sentence: "As she writes her lover's name on the table, the king's daughter seduces you."

I also read more Proust today, the very significant scene in which he discusses the felt insignificance of his introduction to Albertine, his future lover. His analysis of our messy personalities and their contradictions is illuminating, so that I sometimes feel I'm in the presence of a great teacher, if that makes sense. There was a wonderful description of the still life his dinner composed on the surface of his dining table, but what most struck me was the quote below:

"Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dream and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams."

Marbles, what are your thoughts on The Stranger? I remember enjoying certain of his descriptions as much as any philosophical framework. But I was sixteen when I read it, so that was six years ago now, and I read it too quickly.

Marcus1, Trinh T. Minh-ha sounds fascinating, thanks for bringing her up! Hopefully I will get around to seeing her films (or reading her work) sometime soon.

[talleyrand]

Today I read some German articles about communication, then on medicine. One of them was quite interesting because it explained the fact that people always wait for immediate reactions as well as answers, compared to some years ago. I also read pages to learn the Python language, then some Latin words. Moreover, I read a couple of chapters of the book entitled "Dictionnaire Des Langues", that is written by Claude Hagege. I think I will continue reading the essay called Le Grand Roman De La Mécanique Quantique written by Manjit Kumar tonight.

[Helga]

Today I read Lokasenna in the Edda, again, writing an essay on it. And a few articles about Guðrúnarkviða cause I'm gonna write about that too, women and ergi, that is my thing

[mal4mac]

Read a few more nights of the Arabian Nights, around the 150 mark (in Lyons' wonderful Penguin translation on Kindle) As usual, greatly enjoyed these strange and wonderful tales, that always have you wondering,"what will happen next?" Just completed Iris Murdoch's "The Italian Girl" - another winner from this superb author.

[Clopin]

I read a short book of fairy tales by Tolstoy which was very cute and enjoyable as well as about seventy pages of Notes From Underground.

[AbbeyMadison]

Since last week I read chapters 1-34 of an incredible book called "Lamonga: River of the Seven Spirits," which at first seemed like an action adventure novel set in the rocky mountains of the American west... but it took the most intense turn into the realms of magical realism and philosophy and morphed into an Inception-like "dream within a dream" story that had me riveted to my chair. Absolutely RIVETED.

Reading this book is like reading a map drawn up by some mysterious code or secret language--there are even symbols at the head of every chapter and at the bottom of every page, leading to some kind of meaning that I am drawn to figuring out.

It was given to me by a friend who knows the publisher somehow, and he told me that the book isn't being distributed to the public yet, so I'm feeling special that I'm one of the "first" readers of this epic book. When it's released I'll let you all know. Cloverstone Publishing Company is the name of the distributor so I think you have to contact them to get a copy.

[Lykren]

I read a short book of fairy tales by Tolstoy which was very cute and enjoyable as well as about seventy pages of Notes From Underground.

I didn't realize Tolstoy had written fairy tales! Interesting.

Not today but yesterday I read part of the very long section in Proust in which he observes a reception held in the partially-socially-exiled Mme. Villeparisis's drawing-room. A lot of the details about the Dreyfus affair under discussion I didn't understand the context of - the case was very intricate - but the conversation on the whole is suffused with Proust's wit and charm, always underlined by his sense of his character's vulnerabilities, their weaknesses as people.

I also read Pale Fire - not the novel, just the poem. I thought it was odd that Nabokov decided to accompany his ever-brilliant sense for imagery with rhymes that seems to suggest a steady sense of rhythm that never appears at all. I'm not sure the poem stands well on its own, but it had many interesting facets to it and I'm looking forward to reading the novel as a whole next.

[YesNo]

I'm reading David Wootton's "Galileo". I've got binoculars and I want to see what he saw.

[mal4mac]

Now I'm reading Clive James' "Unreliable Memoirs" - it's really funny, but I'm wondering how reliable he is. Can one kid go through so many mishaps and perform so many pranks? I've got prams wheels and want to do what he did.

[ennison]

I'd say there was a clue in the title Mal. I enjoyed that book a few years back. But I liked most of the stuff that I've read of his, including his poems. Amusing people like James are often very serious at heart.

[Pierre Menard]

The short story "The Cabalist of East Broadway" by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It's not one of his classics, but still an enjoyable little tale of a writer who sees a decrepit old man (a former writer himself) at the same cafeteria every day, and who is emaciated and never says a word. He finds out that this man could be living a better life back in Israel, with friends and family offering to prop him up and publish his writing. The story jumps forward a few years and whilst in Israel, our narrator discovers the man at a conference, talking to the audience about his work, he has a loving wife, his friends pore over him and the narrator and he actually share a conversation for the first time, it's jovial and he seems happy. Fast forward another few years and our narrator enters the cafeteria for the first time in a very long time…only to discover the old man, once again back at his same old table, emaciated, unthinking, staring aimlessly into the distance.

There are some subtle hints and threads that leave you with a few different ways to interpret his coming back and the reasons for it. It's a melancholy little tale, exploring the idea "that man does not live according to reason" (a repeated line in the story).


Anyway, I urge everyone to read Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories. One of the very best short story writers of the 20th century.

[mal4mac]

Isaac Bashevis Singer is wonderful And not just a great short story writer! I've read all the novels by him in my local library and loved them all:

Enemies : a love story
The family Moskat
The slave

I see penguin have published "collected short stories" recently - that now goes to the top of my "must buy" list. I'm also tempted to buy "The Magician of Lublin" - and anything else really (!)

[Lykren]

I've never read Singer, but now he's on my list! That sounds like a great story; I love the line you quoted.

[ennison]

Singer is a great writer. He came from a talented family. I believe both a brother and sister were also writers but I have not read anything by either.

[Lykren]

Today I read:

1

[SPOILER ALERT]

The death scene of ISOLT's narrator's grandmother. I'm a bit overwhelmed right now, but it was interesting how Proust's brand of introspection led him to focus on physical detail as opposed to more traditional philosophical speculation or even lengthy descriptions of internal states. Perhaps that was his way of expressing the ineffability of the moment.

[SPOILER OVER]

2

The middle two sections of the Pale Fire poem for the second time this week, this time after having read Kinbote's foreword. I'm even less convinced of the greatness of the poem itself this time around. It reads more like a parody, albeit one with many clever turns of phrase, of certain modernists. I'm looking forward to the commentary section in the hope that the bizarreness of Kinbote will be further revealed.

3

I've started a good-sized anthology of poems selected from throughout Ezra Pound's oeuvre. The early poems have some flair to them, as in this:

I have sung women in three cities.
But it is all one.
I will sing of the sun.
. . . eh? . . . they mostly had grey eyes,
But it is all one, I will sing of the sun.

In general his medievalism is fun, but not nearly as fine-tuned as I know some of his later work is. So I'm looking forward to the poems getting better as I read along.

[Clopin]

I like the Pale Fire poem a lot in certain parts.

We probably have the same Pound book. I'm quite a fan.

[YesNo]

At the moment, I'm reading Joshua Mehigan's "Accepting the Disaster". It is a collection of poems. Although many of them are metrical and (most important) understandable, I weary of any poem that seems to mope about stuff like industrial jobs where people work. The first poem in the collection, "Here", is what convinced me to try reading the rest. It is a witty sonnet, but I think he misses everything about what he describes.

Regarding Singer, the short story, "Gimpel the Fool", in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction still comes to mind. I read a few more of his stories after reading that one, but that is the story that keeps coming back.

[Vota]

I read two more chapters of "A Farewell To Arms" by Ernest Hemingway. Atm, the main character wants to marry his nurse girlfriend.

[Clopin]

Reread about half of A Confederacy of Dunces because I'm sick and I always like to reread when I'm sick or fatigued. Good book, funny.

[mal4mac]

Finished Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which was wonderful, and Ben Elton's Popcorn, which was OK. (How surprising, a great novelist writes a much better novel than a stand up comedian :).)

[Pierre Menard]

I read the first four books of The Odyssey, which is really enjoyable so far. I don't think I'll ever tire of Dawn being described as rosy-tipped, or rose-fingered, I just love it every time. Homer is the master of metaphor, and already I feel the urge to re-read the Iliad as well.

Otherwise, I've read some more poems from Mandelstam (whom I've really come to like a great deal) and Emily Dickinson. I remember a great post from Stlukes way back when, where he talks about how when he read Dickinson in proper, he came to realise the depiction of her as some spinster and feminist holy grail (a total paraphrase sorry Luke) was all wrong and saw something deeper and more powerful in her, and I've had a similar experience. Dickinson is unlike most poets I have ever read. I feel sometimes she gets passed off like I mentioned, as either some spinster-type lovelorn woman on one hand, and on another, she gets co-opted by those desperate to find feminist readings throughout all her poetry to further their own ends. The truth is, she doesn't fit in to either category, she's just a great poet. Wholly unique and original, she has a stunning ability to say/portray/exude a lot, but with few words. Beautiful, choice words.

I quite liked this one, read just a moment ago:

The Doomed -- regard the Sunrise
With different Delight --
Because -- when next it burns abroad
They doubt to witness it --

The Man -- to die -- tomorrow --
Harks for the Meadow Bird --
Because its Music stirs the Axe
That clamors for his head --

Joyful -- to whom the Sunrise
Precedes Enamored -- Day --
Joyful -- for whom the Meadow Bird
Has ought but Elegy!

[Pierre Menard]

I'm also about to start Harold Bloom's The Western Canon.


I like Bloom. I don't agree with everything he ever says, and he can be completely hyperbolic, but his passion for literature is insurmountable and infectious. I love reading/hearing him talk about his favourite writers, the passion and the energy behind it I find inspiring, and he's helped me discover a number of new writers. Plus, anyone who loves Shakespeare that much always earns my time of day.

[Lykren]

Dickinson is my favorite poet. With her preternatural intensity she reminds me of Bach; only her work is more compressed, and therefore the intensity seems to me even more precisely aimed. I love the way she places words in unusual combinations: 'dazzle gradually,' zero to the bone,' 'are not all facts Dreams' (my italics). These combinations have an element of deadly surprise to them.

Her sense of the passage of time is also unique as far as I can tell. I can rarely place the narrator of one her poems within a particular linear strand of events. Nevertheless a sense of accuracy pervades the text, as though the poet were making a careful, authoritative incision in the surface of time; 'I heard a Fly buzz when I died' being the most famous example of this phenomenon.

The letters of hers I've read are also fantastic. If you're curious (and haven't already read them), Pierre, you might want to take a look at them. Here's a line from one of the Master letters:

"Oh how the sailor strains, when his boat is filling—Oh how the dying tug, till the angel comes. Master—open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired—"

I'm getting close to finishing The Guermantes Way. Most of it is taken up with two dinner parties, which are not so much chances for the guests to display their wit as they are opportunities for the narrator to lament the disillusionment he feels at the lack of said wit. Proust's fascination with names, of places and of people, is quite an important theme, but I'm not sure I fully understand it yet. Clearly ISOLT will repay many rereadings!

[Clopin]

Her letters really are good and I usually hate books of letters or even epistolary novels.

[tonywalt]

i'm reading JM Coetzee's 'diary of a bad year' - he's and excellent writer, nobel prize winner.

[Lykren]

Today I read the first story in Alice Munro's collection 'The Beggar Maid,' entitled 'Royal Beatings.' I enjoyed the plainspoken description of emotional release after savagery in this paragraph:

“Never is a word to which the right is suddenly established. She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them. She will punish them; she will finish them. Encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility.”

Munro's voice is an exciting mixture of simplicity and sophistication. Sometimes she will step back and narrate matter-of-factly, and then at unexpected moments she makes a comment which subtly extracts and renders vivid the idea essential to the passage. I'm very grateful my friend gave me this book!

[mal4mac]

Hamlet, the scene where Polonius is sending someone to spy on his son to make sure he keeps to the straight and narrow in Paris, and Ophelia expresses anxiety that Hamlet has gone barmy because she has rejected his advances - something Polonius advised her to do. Methinks Polonius, the meddlesome old boy, may be heading for a fall...

[Pierre Menard]

@ Clopin and Lykren - I definitely one hundred per cent plan to read Dickinson's letters, they've been on the amazon wish list for a long time now.


Today I was reading some modern American poets (Poets active in the last 50 years). Current poet laureate Charles Wright is a poet I've come to really appreciate lately, he's fantastic. I also really like Anthony Hecht - a poem from him:


SAUL AND DAVID

It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul
Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent,
That squatted within him wheresoever he went
And possessed the soul of Saul.

There was no peace on pillow or on throne.
In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed
Started a joyful rumor that he had died
Unfriended and alone.

The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he
Put aside arrogant ways and condescended
To seek among the flocks where they were tended
By the youngest son of Jesse,

A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon,
Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb
As Michelangelo later imagined him,
Comely even in his frown.

Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings?
Heaven itself delights in ironies such
As this, in which a boy's fingers would touch
Pythagorean strings

And by a modal artistry assemble
The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired
Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord,
And make Saul cease to tremble.

[Pierre Menard]

One from Wright:

"This, too, is an old story, yet
It is not death. Still,

The waters of darkness are in us.
In fact, they are rising,

Are rising toward our eyes.
And will wash against those windows

Until they have stilled, until,
utterly calm, they have cleansed.

And then our lives will take substance,
And rise themselves.

And not like water and not like darkness, but
Like smoke, like prayer.

[Clopin]

Siddhartha. Better than I remembered it being.

[LayedBack]

I read Beowulf today. First time going through the Heaney translation and really enjoyed it as well as all the extras placed in the Norton Critical edition. I've been really into the old Germanic works like that and the Eddas and Norse Sagas lately. I think it was Tolkien that actually got me craving for it this time. I almost want to learn Old English or Old Norse but it might be a bit too much of a commitment for me.

As for Emily Dickinson, I've gained a new appreciation for her lately. Her poetry is absolutely the toughest to really penetrate and understand deeply enough to appreciate out of anyone I've ever read. I really needed some good criticism to help me, and as mentioned its frustrating because a lot of critics are just boring old feminists who project their tired agenda on to her work which has nothing to do with that. Dickinson may have been interested in female rights for all we know, but she wrote as much about that as she did the Civil War, which was pretty much none at all.

It helps to sort of understand her language, just like any other poet. Someone mentioned Bloom's Western Canon, which is something I've been reading and appreciating lately and it was actually Bloom's criticism in that book that first motivated me to give her a more thorough rereading. I like the way he explains her way of "unnaming" and some of the key words and themes of her work. And I do agree that she is one of the most original and intelligent of all poets. I don't think she'll ever be one of my absolute favorites but there is definitely much more there for people who care to really give her the time and effort needed.

[WICKES]

I have three books on the go and have been dipping in and out of each of them. I have to stop doing this and focus on one book at a time. I am reading a book on the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (would make a great film btw), Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando' and Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop'.

[free]

It was yesterday. I went to visit a friend and there I read a science fiction story about an extraterrestrial visiting Earth. It was short and interesting, trying to convey a message that people on Earth cannot live in peace because they must eat other living beings in order to survive.