A Bit of Summer Camping

Hard though it may be to believe, my life does not entirely revolve around reading, writing, and publishing (or even rabbits!). And so here's a photo of a recent campsite.

Take Dada Daily for Best Results

"The times are dark and hard, and I know no better means to overcome the chaos of the day than reading about Dadaist appearances.” Rudolf Lothar, “Der Dadaismus.” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 3 October 1918.

50 Classic Short Novels I've Read (or Not)

This morning, waking up early to cough a week or so after I thought I'd shaken a minor unidentified ear-nose-throat virus (it began in my ear), I chanced to see what sort of news my smartphone had to offer. I try to avoid doing this, but like many things in life, it's an addictive practice and admittedly provides me with a fine array of news not just about covid-19 and the ex-president, but about Stonehenge, ancient hominins, camping, fungus-infected ants preserved in amber, and advice columns by at least three different people.

Of late it's been offering up a lot of literary and writer-oriented stuff, and so this morning I found myself devouring a list on Lithub of short novels (under 200 pages) written before 1970.

Now, although I am trying very hard to read fiction by current authors, I'm more the kind of reader who goes for underappreciated gems that have nonetheless passed the test of time. It's no surprise that I'm a historian of modern rather than contemporary art. Anyway, while as the list-maker (Emily Temple) admits, it's sort of a white-male-dominated list, it's still an exciting list and I was thrilled to see so many familiar and new titles.

I'm going to break up the list into what I've read, what I've meant to read (or at least knew of), and what I've never heard of.

Read
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel: The list began with this! I'm stunned. I read this just after graduating from college, when I was interning at an experimental theater and checking out books from the Mill Valley public library. I read a lot that summer, most of it pretty famous (from Joyce's Ulysses to all of Raymond Chandler).
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Not sure how old I was when I read this. High school? Junior high? Grade school?I read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories at least once. Probably ought to read them again.
Italo Calvino, The Cloven Viscount: Ah, what a delight. I discovered Italo Calvino just before starting college, thanks to (of all things) a book review in Time. I really need to reread this. It's been too long. I love Italo Calvino.
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar: Did I read this in high school or in college? I read a fair amount of Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut all around the same time. It's what we did in the 1970s.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice: First read this in 1980, for a class. I read it while sunbathing nude in a meadow, which I put into the pandemic novella I wrote last year because such things belong in fiction. Of course, it could be argued that I should have read it at the beach instead. It's the kind of thing I would read at the beach if I hung out at beaches. Grim, diseased, with long sentences.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Probably read this in high school. The Haunting of Hill House was the Shirley Jackson I read many times as a child, but I read other Shirley Jackson books in high school.
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse: I read this in junior high or high school, probably the latter. My recollection of it is not all that clear; time to reread.
Franz Kafka, The Trial: First read this in high school, when I devoured Kafka.
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: I believe I picked this up in or just after college. Another of those curiously influential books twisting my mind.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: I love Jean Rhys, but this is my least favorite of her books. I've only read it once. I did give my mother a copy since she loved Jane Eyre, but I have no idea what my mother thought of this take on the characters.
Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means: Guessing that I first read this is my twenties, when I read practically every Muriel Spark novel that then existed (and which all, in the library copies, showed Spark in what seemed a bizarrely outdated and extravagant style of hair and makeup). These days I read this and several other Spark novels frequently and do not read certain of the others at all.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: I suppose I must have first read this in high school, back when I was somewhat baffled by the idea of someone's voice sounding like money. Like coins? Like paper money? I wasn't sure.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin: Curiously, this is one I only read quite recently, and enjoyed it. I haven't read all that much Nabokov. I always enjoy The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; I liked Lolita well enough back in my teens or twenties but found it rather horrifying more recently; I was not that wild about Ada.
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange: Read this in college, or possibly high school. I know I saw the movie in college. The invented slang intrigued me.

Meant to Read Someday, or Knew Of, or Read Others by the Author
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men: Never got around to this; read The Red Pony and The Grapes of Wrath.
George Orwell, Animal Farm: Yeah, I know I should. And it almost seems like maybe I did.
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice: I am pretty sure I somehow missed this.
Nella Larsen, Passing: Knew of this because I read Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, which gets discussed in relation to Passing.
Albert Camus, The Stranger: Somehow never got around to it.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening: Started it in high school, apparently got distracted and didn't finish it.
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich: I have no idea why I haven't read any Tolstoy yet. Wait, I did read something he wrote on art, thinking I might assign it to students.
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man: I read an awful lot of Isherwood in high school, but not this one. Saw the movie.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground: Read a lot of Dostoevsky in junior high, but I don't think this was among them. Could be wrong.
Anna Kavan, Ice: I've read other works by Kavan, but never heard of this one.
Jean Toomer, Cane: I've known who Jean Toomer was for ages, but never looked for or run across his books.
Knut Hamsun, Hunger: Ought to read it, haven't yet.
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room: Unsure why I haven't ended up reading any James Baldwin yet.
Willa Cather, O Pioneers! One of those books my mother read growing up that I haven't gotten to yet. I did read at least one Cather short story long ago.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd. Didn't realize this was short. Moby Dick has been on my to-read list.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49: Not sure why I didn't read any Pynchon back in my twenties.
George Eliot, Silas Marner: This always sounded like something that might bore me.
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's: This might be a nice antidote to In Cold Blood, which I've read at least twice. Saw the movie on an airplane shortly before the pandemic, oddly enough.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart: Have heard this is good (I mean, before reading the LitHub list).
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn: Know of the author, haven't yet read him.
Philip K. Dick, Ubik: Read a few others by Dick and mostly enjoyed them; not this one yet.
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart: Read one of her books in my twenties and have never run across any others. The one I read was destroyed by salt water and I'm baffled as to which one it was.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God: Keep meaning to read this...
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome: One of those books that I suspected would be dull and so have not read.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock: Saw the movie, didn't know it was based on a book.
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop: OK, I know I should read Carter's fiction as well as her nonfiction...

Somehow Completely Off My Radar
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
Leonard Gardner, Fat City
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go
Charles Portis, Norwood
Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Readers are invited to add to the list (not doubling up on authors). A quick look at my shelves didn't offer much. I was surprised that my copy of Heinrich Böll's The End of a Mission was slightly over 200 pages, and I forgot to check if it was pre-1970 (it is). Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is just under 200 pages. I lost a lot of books to salt water, long ago.

Search-and-Replace Amusements

It recently dawned on me that by some fluke I had given the same name--Eli--to minor but significant characters in two pretty different novels. I'm not sure what prompted this--I've only met, I think, one Eli in my whole life and I didn't know him well at all. We worked for the same organization decades ago. So I haven't been naming characters in his memory, or with any particular thoughts about him beyond that he was proof of living Americans possessing this name. But I kind of like the name, so it worked well for my character Sara's presumed father in my forthcoming novel In Search of the Magic Theater.

However, the Eli character in the novel I wrote last fall isn't intended to be the same person, so as the name Eli isn't exactly as common as, say, Dave or Ben or Michael, I felt I really had to change this character's name. Not that I would never name another character Eli, but if I do, I want him to be entirely distinct and obviously not the same Eli. After some fretting and briefly considering changing him to Eliott (and I've had at least two friends named some spelling of this name), I settled on Ira. We'll see if that sticks.

I then had to do the search-and-replace, which is always fraught with danger. It's best to be very cautious running search-and-replace. And so here's what I found in searching the full document rather than going to the end where the character Eli actually entered the story...

People in this novel, especially the protagonist, are constantly feeling things. Note that eli in feeling! While the two narrators in In Search of the Magic Theater also have significant feelings, I'd be surprised if the word comes up quite as often in that novel. Their feelings are largely emotional, whereas the protagonist of the other novel experiences quite a few physical sensations as well.

The words religion and religious also came up a lot in my search for Eli. This was quite a surprise as religion doesn't play a particularly large role in the story. But maybe it plays a larger role than I had thought.

Believe and belief were very frequent. Not generally in relation to religion, but my protagonist does have her share of beliefs, and also disbeliefs, and characters say things like "Can you believe it?"

Relief and relieved also crop up a certain amount.

Delightful appears, but much less often.

Elicit, traveling, peeling, reliably, relics, evangelical, candlelight, celibate/celibacy, eligible, likelier/likelihood, canceling, reliance, delivering, and Queen Elizabeth I of England were the other Eli-containing words that appeared, most of them only once except for traveling, celibate/celibacy, and elicit. And no, the novel is not about celibate clergy nor is it set in the English (or any other) Renaissance.

This was kind of fun and enlightening, and very unexpected. And worth giving a try to even in fiction that doesn't need to change an Eli to another name.

Gendered Descriptions of Bodies in Fiction!

There's a very cool visual essay on The Physical Traits that Define Men and Women in Literature over at The Pudding. Erin Davis, with the help of illustrations by Liana Sposto, has run a computer analysis of 2,000 books published between 1008 and 2020 (the majority published after 1900; roughly 35% have at least one female author). Books were selected for cultural relevance and included "New York Times best sellers, Pulitzer Prize nominees and winners, Man Booker shortlisted books and winners, books frequently taught in American high schools and colleges, and books that frequently appear on Best Of lists."

Sad to say, the results show very stereotypical tendencies in terms of gender description. But go take a look, it's much more fun to see how Davis and Sposto have shown the results!

I Begin a Pullover

For the most part, my life during the pandemic is not as different from my normal life as is the case for most people. My teaching suddenly got much more time-consuming (and lower quality, alas), and I no longer get to do any of my work in libraries or cafes. Like most people, I haven't had a haircut. And I've attended two online meetings, bought two take-out pizzas, and occasionally (less often than before) pick up coffee and a pastry to take home. I've also accomplished a little more gardening than is typical for me at this time of year, and have watched two or three genealogy presentations (thank you Legacy for offering free ones this month).

However, being in the house nearly all the time makes one want somewhat more variety in one's amusements!

First, I began a puzzle that was waiting to be given to my mother. She enjoys jigsaw puzzles; I enjoy them too, but rarely do them because I become obsessive once I start one, and spending all day staring at puzzle pieces is not quite my idea of well-spent time. (No criticism of anyone other than myself who does this is intended.) Anyhow, I've nearly completed my mother's puzzle and am suspicious that she may find it too hard. It involves photos of a gazillion different cameras on a white background. Still, if I had let myself get really obsessive with it, I could probably have completed it in two days rather than a week.

With the prospect of lots and lots of grading in my immediate future, the idea of something more tactile and definitely non-computer-related began to draw me. I used to knit a fair amount--when taking BART to work each day, I could get about two hours of knitting done just on public transit. And later I used to make easy scarves while listening to holiday conversation--I'd give them to people later. But it had been more than ten years since I knit anything. I realized that one of my favorite cotton sweaters is missing and another is falling apart (neither was made by me, although they could have been). Clearly I needed to make myself a new spring sweater!

And so, with the help of a colleague, I found a place where I could make an appointment to look at yarn and patterns. I didn't find exactly the kind of pattern I was hoping for (one with an interesting but easy knit-purl design), but I did find a pattern for a simple stockinette stitch pullover with easy knit lace trim. And so it's launched!

The pattern and my gauge swatch...

And a bit of the lace edging for the bottom.