Bibliophile

There was no theme to my reading this week, and I chose my stories more or less on a whim. Aside from my classmate’s story that I had to critique, this is what I read: The week began with “Born of Man and Woman,” an incredibly disturbing story by Richard Matheson. This book was recommended by our friend Eric Kibler. Coincidentally, I read this the day after the three missing Cleveland women were found. There are just enough similarities in setting that an indelible line formed in my mind between the story and the news. I wasn’t able to find the story online at a site that was reliably authorized to reprint, so you’ll need to find this on your own. “Meat, My Husband” by Lydia Davis from Almost No Memory – An odd little story about a marriage. The story begins with the narrator telling us how she learned that her husband’s favorite food was corned beef. “Jack of Coins” by Christopher Rowe at Tor.com – This was recommended to me by Gwenda Bond, author of Blackwood. (She fully disclosed that Christopher Rowe is her husband). Set in a dystopian world, a stranger appears dressed in a band-leader costume. Who is he? Where are we? This story is full of wonderful imagery, and it made me want to learn more. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor. I read this one again for a class assignment, this time focusing on how O’Connor uses dialogue in such a masterful way. “Regeneration at Mukti,” Julia Elliott. In The Pushcart Prize XXXVII (2013 edition), edited by Bill Henderson – There is so much here to admire. We meet our main character at a spa where they administer very unusual skin treatments to those who want to regain their youthful appearance. I came away believing that this place could actually exist. Maybe it does. “Punchline,” by Erin McGraw, also from The Pushcart Prize XXXVII (2013 edition)- A priest has an existential crisis as a result of loss. Not my favorite story, but well crafted. I know this is short and somewhat disjointed, but please know that I am still keeping up on my daily story. Some days it’s all I can do to take in the final words before my eyes close, but short stories have become my nightcap. I can’t imagine most nights without one.

We can’t lose an opportunity to wish Omar Khayyám a happy birthday. He was born on this day in 1048 in Nayshapur, now in modern Iran.  And fortunately, we have Don Share to remind us of the event over at his blog “Squanderman.” As Don notes:  “A brilliant polymath, Khayyám was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renowned during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyam wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, ‘laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.’” Mostly, however, Khayyám is remembered for his Rubáiyát, and in the English language, that means Edward FitzGerald‘s translation: Now the New Year reviving old Desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires, Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires. Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose, And Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows; But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine, And many a Garden by the Water blows … Alright, alright … these are really really tired rhymes.  But keep in mind that FitzGerald was writing in the late Victorian era, when nobody had gotten sick of them yet. To criticize today would be like getting grumpy at the words of Christmas carols.  They have to be taken on their own terms. According to Carol Rumens over at The Guardian: The 101-verse semi-narrative FitzGerald finally assembled is the product of a ruthless editorial job – but how much poorer English poetry would be without it. His endeavour might more generously be termed “transcreation”. Khayyám, an agnostic famed during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer rather than a poet, and his mediator, a nineteenth-century English sceptic who believed that “science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad”, may not meet in a true linguistic union, but there seems to be a “marriage of true minds” nevertheless (and, yes, you’ll note a passing trace of Shakespeare in FitzGerald’s diction). The speaker that emerges with such authority and panache, despite the stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter, has a voice unlike any other in Victorian poetry, and a philosophical sensibility which, while it has been compared to that of Epicurus and Lucretius, is new and distinct. A whole culture must have suddenly seemed within the imaginative reach of the poem’s first audience. “Stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter”?  Who sez?  We must also respectfully disagree with the wise Don Share when he refers to the “jiggered” verse of Edward Fitzgerald.  We’ll grant him the use of that word in the sense of exhausted or shopworn.  Khayyam’s verses had been quoted by cheesy wannabe seducers until the Circes began laughing them out of the room.  But Fitzgerald’s verses would not have become clichés if they had not been so good in the first place. Would we even talk about Khayyam today if it were not for Fitzgerald’s verses. Khayyam is remembered in other ways, as Journalist Kourosh Ziabari reminds us: Tunisia has constructed a set of hotels named after Khayyam. One of the lunar craters has been named in honor of Omar Khayyam. The Omar Khayyam crater is located at 58.0N latitude and 102.1W longitude on the surface of moon. The Outer Main-belt Asteroid 1980 RT2 is also named in honor of Omar Khayyam. The Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader Che Guevara named his son Omar in honor of Khayyam and his work. Omar Pérez López is a Cuban writer and poet. The American clergyman and activist Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Khayyam in his speech Why I oppose war in Vietnam: “It is time for all people of

I failed miserably the first time I participated in the Classics Club Spin. But with summer lingering a mere 4 weeks away (seriously, this school year has flown by), I'm going to have a LOT of reading time! I figured I should get back into the reading spirit by going along with the spin! The rules are simple...I make a list of 20 books off my TBR as candidates for the spin. The Classics Club will "spin" for a number...whatever number is chosen will become the book I read as my spin book! I will have until July 1 to finish the book! I'm dividing my list into categories to make things a bit more interesting. Here we go! 4 Books I DON'T want to Read: 1. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyon 2. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad 3. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells 4. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov 4 Books from my TBR Challenge: 5.Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe 6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 7. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott 8. Remains of the Day by Kazou Ishiguro 4 Chunksters: 9. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (because this would be a good push to finish it) 10. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 12. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 Books I WANT to Read: 13. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins 14. The Return of the Native by Thomas hardy 15. Billy Budd by Herman Melville 16. 1984 by George Orwell 4 Books Matt Chose (based on title): 17. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 18. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells 19. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 20. Belinda by Maria Edgeworth There you you have it! Let me know if you are participating, as well as what books you chose for your list!

On Kubrick, James Naremore (M, 30s, clean cut, black suit, red tie, brown leather shoes, 4 train) http://bit.ly/14sF7P2

The Master Switch, Tim Wu (M, 30s, short hair, cropped beard, wallet in back pocket caused hole in jeans, M train) http://bit.ly/14sDXTE

credit: Eric Staudenmaier I love a good book-lined hallway but I always wonder: would I ever get to where I’m going if I had to pass along one? Or would I just end up distracted by all those beautiful books?

ALB is getting a face lift!  Insites Web Design has created a fun new Word Press theme for us and we hope to get it installed over the weekend. You’ll see a new color scheme, a cool new graphic, and faster load time.  It is a responsive theme, so it will look better on mobile devices, [...]

I am very pleased to announce a special event from The Bookplate Society.Good luck with your bidding.LewTHE BOOKPLATE SOCIETY'S SUMMER AUCTION The Bookplate Society’s members’ auctions, three each year, offer a wide range of material, mostly British 18th and 19th century exlibris, but there are also Continental European and North American items. These sales are not open to non-members. Members either attend in person or bid in advance by email or post. However, the Society is doing something different this summer by holding an entirely web- and email-based auction, which on this occasion is open to non-members.Given that this is a manual system, lacking the software resources of eBay, the auction is being drawn out over ten weekly cycles of bidding, and participants can only submit one set of bids per week. Bidders are encouraged to bid for as many items as possible on the first occasion, because in subsequent weeks there is a restriction on the number of additional bids that can be placed. There is a further bias helping people who bid early, because in the event of equal bids the earlier bidder wins the day. The deadline for the first round of bids is Sunday, 2 June (6pm BST) and this auction ends on Sunday 4 August 2013 (6pm BST).To view the listings, go to www.bookplatesociety.org/WebAuction1.htm , and if you wish to join in the auction you will need to read the notes and write to the auction address. Non-members of the Society must register their details prior to emailing bids.This is an auction in slow-motion (!), but it will nevertheless be interesting to see how it works out. As the notes point out, this is not a commercial venture, but designed to offer bookplate collectors some summertime fun.Lot84Lot # 59Lot 44

This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic. Javier Calvo: The other day I saw a book by Alejandro Zambra on a list of the most anticipated books of 2013 in the United States, and I wanted to ask you this: what do you think of this phenomenon, which to me is one of the most important things that have happened in American publishing in a long time? I’m talking about the attention Spanish-language fiction has been getting since Bolaño. How have you experienced this change as a translator, reader, scout, etc? Mara Faye Lethem: Do you see it as so distinct from the Boom? Because I don’t. Javier Calvo: I do see significant differences from the Boom. To begin with, I think the boom was much more a strategy, and as such it had a center. And when I say strategy, I say it almost in the sense of the British Invasion: we’re going to take over North America. Here, I don’t see too much strategy, and as a matter of fact I don’t see how an editor could hope to get rich on the books of Aira or Zambra. Secondly, the Boom in America was a much more asymmetrical phenomenon, the rich neighbor’s consumption of a series of consumer elements related to exoticism and magic. Look, for example, at the resounding failure as strategies of all the “commercial brands” of exportation of Latin American literature: McOndo, the Crack Movement… In the current case it’s true that Bolaño has been sanctioned by the American world of culture as the “Chosen One” to replace GGM [Gabriel García Márquez] as the Great Novelist in Spanish, but I also see differences: it seems to me that the acceptance of the new literature in Spanish already lacks that aspect of consumption of the poor, the exotic, and the distinct. I believe that now, strangely, it already has a certain aspect of normalcy, acceptance of the two-directional cultural tides that exist between Spanish and English. Although this may perhaps be overly optimistic. Mara Faye Lethem: Well, when they talk about Aira as the new Bolaño, yes, that implies a certain strategy of marketing. I think that the case of Bolaño has been an astounding example of the unpredictability of the editorial world, and the strategy of buying books in other people’s styles is ridiculous, but shows no signs of waning. I suppose people’s lack of vision, as well as their fear, just get bigger and bigger than their risk-taking…. I suppose I see the Boom in another way, as the time when people that thought of themselves as educated had to have read certain authors in translation. Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t see it as cultural colonialism, just as an opportunity to open up the conversation. In the United States, there has always been a very limited interest for literature in translation, but it has existed: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Banana Yoshimoto, etc. And I think that Latin American literature, based on proximity and on actual interest, has always occupied an important place. Always taking into account that it is translated very, very little. I see that editors are still relying a lot on things like the Granta list to make their selections. But yes, I perceive a major recognition of the poverty of a reading culture that places more weight on exportation than importation—yes. Also, I’m seeing more literary agents from the Anglo-Saxon world represent foreign authors. A couple comments: Someone during the presentation raised the point about McOndo and Crack. I don’t really know enough about those movements to say why they never caught on in the U.S., other than to say that they never really made sense to the American marketplace like Boom authors and Bolano have. As far as I know them, they defy a lot of U.S. stereotypes about what Latin American fiction is, which obviously makes them hard to commercialize in the U.S. as Latin American fiction. I’m also curious about this point of Aira being promoted as the new Bolano. While that’s not inconceivable (people grafted Bolano

outside, just now! the color of the sun at 5 AM this morning. this seems to be a scarlet tanager, though I'm not completely sure. but what a bird! what a bird!