Important Books (Part 1)

 

There are a few principal works of modern literature that we need to read simply because they are both so luminescent in their stories and so well crafted in their structure. These are books that you will leave on the bookshelf next to your desk and, every so often, when you are in a reflective and quiet moment, when you are wondering about the underpinnings of western thought and western literature, they will call to you and demand that you open them at random and sink into their worlds. I have twenty-three such volumes next to my desk. Here, in part one of my list, are my favorite four.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The books are Justine, Balthazar, Mount Olive, and Clea (I think that’s the correct order). The fact that most people have never even heard of Durrell is a crime against the humanist tradition in western literature. Once you have read the Quartet you will want to return to it every few years to flavor its richness and its characters and walk with them through the streets of an Alexandria that has been swept away by the winds of twentieth century change.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. This is mostly an excellent translation of his Ficciones. Next to Durrell, Borges is one of the finest writers I have ever read. The cadence of his prose is somewhat diminished in translation, but you would never know it unless you read something like The Secret Miracle or The Garden of Forking Paths in Spanish.

An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro (who also wrote The Remains of the Day, which I personally think sucks). Ishiguro recently wrote The Unconsoled which is sitting here on my desk. I love this book BUT it is soooo much like something by Kafka (especially The Castle) that I have a hard time not thinking that the protagonist of The Unconsoled is simply K in disguise!!!

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Here is an absolutely wonderful, but mostly undiscovered, book that has had vast and systemic influence among writers from Ray Bradbury to John Steinbeck. It tells the story of life in a small turn of the twentieth century Ohio town from the POV of a young reporter as he prepares to board a train and begin his own life. Told in episodic narratives, carefully weaving together tragedy, humor, angst, and a sense of universal failure, the fabric of the novel emerges from the individual stories and how they touch the lives of characters introduced in past and future chapters.

Duane Keiser

 

While I was working on my new photographic web log, I discovered the following web log:

http://www.duanekeiser.blogspot.com

Created and maintained by Duane Keiser, an artist with an interesting style as well as a wonderful way with subtle colors and shading. I would like to suggest that you take a tour of his blog – be sure to browse through his older posts and read his comments (as well as his About Me entry in the blog). This is the kind of production that makes the web log environment such a great way for writers, artists, musicians, mythographers, serial killers and photographers to reach a world wide audience sympathetic to the artistic vision.

The Beginning of the Tuprefolle Stories

A cold October rain pelted the windows. I was curled up on the sofa reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or Remembrance of Things Past. This was a musty, two volume Modern Library edition with a 1936 copyright date. I had bought both volumes many years ago for less than five dollars in a second hand bookstore somewhere in Greenwich Village. The text had been appropriated from Moncrieff and Terrance-Kilmartin’s translation originally published by the Vintage Press. Still, I always thought it was a clear and easy to read translation. I flipped to the end of the Overture to read once more the start of Proust’s great journey back in time; to the taste of that petites madeleine; and to his deep reflection on the enduring meaning of memory.

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And I suddenly had this vision of another explorer of the past, a lone survivor on a planet now given over to ice and carnivorous phytoplankton. A tender of a lighthouse that once guided interstellar starships on their passage through the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy but who now lives alone, its mechanisms slowly giving out after five hundred and thirty seven thousand years. And one night, sitting on the edge of a vast dry cliff whose rim was once the lip of the Chesapeake Bay estuary, the taste of a cool autumn wind, carrying pollen from an ancient and dwindling grove of pear trees reminds him of the warm days strolling through the parks and gardens of Tuprefolle and the children of a simpler biology and simpler machines. And he is once more walking the streets in a clear, damp morning when the smell of the ocean and the cry of sea birds and the voices of quickly parting lovers and the bright orange light of the rising sun mix together in the wakening life of the city. And he is suddenly on the Street of Endeavors, beneath the window of the gyroscope makers, across from a vast spike of black adamantine glass, smooth for a hundred meters until it opened into dozens of tiny, eastward facing portals, windows that captured the brilliance of the mid-morning sun. And there lived Phersefena, the guarded one, whose trust in the tides of time and the love of a single man betrayed her unto death. Or so the stories went. Stories that became folklore, and then fable, and then myth, and then, when all the men and women of the world left, rumors of deeds found among the fragments of a world long abandoned.

But Alvius, who the Last Ones, as they departed, had renamed Al’vee us, You Silly Coward, had forgotten his promise to Phersefena when he found her that morning broken and dying among the cold tidal pools where her body had washed ashore. "Who did this to you?" he asked, holding her in his arms.
"Tell Camoon I am sorry," she whispered.
"Fuck Camoon! Who did this?"
She smiled. "Never again," she said.
"Phersefena!" He smoothed out her crushed face with his shaking hand.
"Kuud’we," she said and spoke not again in this realm of the world.
And Alvius knew that Kuud’we meant Twenty Three. And for a long time it made little sense to him. Until one day, long after the story of Camoon and Phersefena had become a fable among both men and machines, he realized she meant the Ordering rank of intelligent machines. She had meant a very high ranked machine. Perhaps one of the secret guardians, the nameless ones. Nameless, he mused. Who did this? He had asked and she could not speak to him her assassin’s name.

Then Alvius, whose name in those millennia was Phaakron, dedicated himself to finding the murderer of his beloved Phersefena. And for a long time he roamed the secret and forbidden ghettos of the machine world seeking those of the twenty-third rank. And ever so slowly his quest became known and one day he was summoned by the Director and sent away from the city into the far north beyond the last landfalls into the silent cities of the machines where the last breeding factory sits next to the ruins of the fifth tachyon beacon built by the Visitor in the days before he was murdered and his daughters scattered into the wilderness. And when the Visitor died, so with him he took the secrets of the lighthouses, a secret that would not be rediscovered for another two thousand years.

How We Know the Earth is Round

There will be a rare total luna eclipse tomorrow starting around 7pm (PST). If the weather permits you should go outside and watch the shadow of the earth pass across the face of the moon, and remember that it was such a sight that made Eratosthenes of Cyrene, twenty-three hundred years ago, realize that the earth was round!

Go and look and recall the last lines of Dante’s Inferno, E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

An Analysis of Humor

 I found the following brief article in this month’s issue of Scientific American.

According to 55 percent of 350,000 people from 70 countries who participated online in Richard Wiseman’s Laugh Lab experiment (discussed in last month’s column), this is the world’s funniest joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "Okay, now what?"

I will be opening a discussion group on this topic.